Category: Books

This book collects a handful of Sartre’s stories, including “The Wall”, “The Room”, “Erostratus”, “Intimacy”, and “The Childhood of the Leader”. If you have read a Sartre short story, you have read “The Wall”. It’s the best of this anthology, and in an odd turn of events, the whole thing starts well and progressively gets worse. “The Wall” is a good story, but “The Childhood of the Leader” is a sixty page exercise in Sartrean pontification and excess.

Let’s face it; Sartre is not a writer whose philosophy dribbles out of his writing. His writing exists to prop up his philosophy, kind of like Ayn Rand’s fiction really lays out Objectivism. Ayn Rand had better plots, though. Sartre’s plots are very literary, and the tone of each story is self-consciously literary. Maybe that’s a factor of the translation undertaken by a student or something.

As such, Sartre deals with revolutionaries sentenced to death; a man gone mad and his wife; a man who just decides to kill someone; a wife who married an impotent man but cheats on him; and a guy who grows into an anti-Semitic leader. So these aren’t people I can necessarily relate to, which makes reading a chore. However, in some literary and high-brow fiction threads, that lack of identification and even repugnance throws me out of my bourgeous sentimentality or something. It also make reading Sartre for pure enjoyment impossible.

As I said, the books first two stories are the best. “The Wall”, about condemned insurgents spending their last night together in their cell and facing the Wall tomorrow, is oddly enough the most approachable. The narrator is forced to dwell on dying and dying well in a limited amount of time. It’s almost Hemingwayesque, but with a distinctly Existential twist at the end. “The Room”, on the other hand, is sort of two parts: It starts with the mother of the wife, confined to her room, as she gets a visit from her husband, a very practical man who’s off to go to tell his daughter what he thinks of her tending to her psychotic husband. He then goes and tells her. In the second part, the woman deals with the aftermath of her father’s visit and how she feels about the husband whom she loved. She wonders what his insanity is really like, experientially, and wonders if she’s going a bit mad herself. It’s a very complex tale, where one wonders about whether the father telling her to send her husband off to an institution is completely consistent, since he himself tends to the woman’s mother.

After that, it’s rather basic Existentialist hokum wrapped in stories about unsympathetic people. Worst of the lot, “The Childhood of the Leader” relies on the main character becoming the narrator of Nausea at three years of age, questioning his existence and the existence of things outside himself, before growing up, having an abortive homosexual relationship, and then turning anti-semitic for really no reason other than to wrap up the story.

Interesting if you’re a student of philosophy, but you can get more enjoyable life lessons out of classic English literature or hard-boiled detective novels.

I think I need to read some Camus to rinse this out of my head.

Well, it’s a Spenser book. A fair plot, although at the beginning of it, I was afraid it was going to recast the plot of one of the Paradise novels. Spenser’s hired as a bodyguard of sorts for a secluded wedding (40 minutes by boat from the coast of Massachussetts, I think he said), a job he doesn’t quite understand, since the rich people have a full security detail. But then The Gray Man recurs, shoots a couple people, and kidnaps the daughter. Someone tries to kill Spenser because he won’t stop investigating. Spenser gets information from recurring characters (Rita Fiore, Ives). Then he makes a deal with the Gray Man, and the book ends. Man, I remember when these sorts of books ended with some sort of justice. Now they end with deals with the bad guys.

At least Parker didn’t call out the Spenser Superfriends team (Bernie Fortunato, Teddy Sapp, Bobby Horse, Chollo, you know, the diverse cast of people like Spenser). Hawk appears, but I don’t count him as part of the SSF because he preceded them. Although, let’s face it, his days of menace are gone. Nobody is afraid of Hawk any more but the stock civilian characters who appear to show fear of Hawk. The police tolerate him, Susan Silverman makes kissy talk with him, and so on.

You know, I cannot think of a Spenser novel I liked beyond 1990. I guess that’s really showing now in these reviews. This one, I got from the BOMC because I had to get something. The next one, I’ll probably get from a book fair.

In a stunning turn of events, this is the second book I’ve read with this title this year. The first, Ed McBain’s Heat, I read in January. The two are not too similar, even though Lupica dabbles in some crime fiction. Because, in a stunning turn of events, this is the second Young Adult novel I’ve read in a couple weeks. Crikey, I must be into my second childhood. What’s with adult authors trying to jump into the YA market? It makes for some confusing times at the book fairs. Is this Hiaasen an adult book, or a green-preaching YA novel? Is this Lupica book one of his adult plots turned into simpler sentences and shrunken to 12-year-olds? What, pray tell, does Robert B. Parker write for young adult fiction–embrace an arbitrary “code” of relativistic, touchy-feely ethics and bone your neighbor’s wife which is okay if it feels good and you don’t feel guilty?

At any rate, this book deals with a 12-year-old Little League superstar pitcher from Cuba whose father has died, but whose 17-year-old brother is working two jobs as they keep the death quiet so they don’t get turned over to family services and split up. Additionally, the kid’s eligibilty is challenged since his birth certificate didn’t make the boat ride from Cuba. It’s a very complicated story, and it works out with an almost deus ex maquina thing, but it’s all right.

For a kid’s book.

I bought this book because I thought it might be a saucy sort of male equivalent of Sex in the City or something. Without a dustjacket, I flipped it open and landed on the first person narrator’s self-description, and that was enough since I had a wallet full of money and a box half full of books at the book fair. I missed the part where it identified him as a high school kid.

So it’s a young adult novel, set in high school. The main character isn’t so good with the girls, so his friends post an online ad for him seeking a prom date, and it gets a lot of response. So he agrees to evaluate 24 girls for in the week before the prom and then to select one for his date. It takes on a little of a reality show feel, and he deals with the unreality and with the reality of his life.

Oh, and he grows and learns something about himself at the end.

Well, then. I frankly missed the YA thing. I went from Hardy Boys in elementary school to hard boiled detective fiction in middle school. I suspect I didn’t miss much, and I used my reading to prepare myself for the grim real world, not the goofy high school world. I’d go on a spurious tangent about how YA books have trained kids to be adolescents in their adulthoods, but frankly, I don’t think enough kids read to have that impact.

When I bought this book, I expected a book in the line of Tom Braden’s Eight is Enough: a collection of anecdotes and incidents about raising a large family, set in a familiar location and with a historical relevance.

Instead, this book is really just a brain dump of parental advice on topics from buying insurance to handling kids’ drug problems. Not what I was looking for at all, really, but it made the book–dare I say it?–very skimmable.

One bit of historical trivia: The book has a whole chapter on 16 in Webster Groves, a documentary about growing up in suburban America that CBS shot in Webster Groves. In true reality television style, the network apparently cut the film to portray its story that suburban American children were being brainwashed into the bourgeoisie. Webster residents at the time were upset with it. So much so that the authors include it and spend a chapter railing against it 23 years later.

I’d tell you where the book is for sale, but you don’t find it anywhere on the Internet. Its existence is proven electronically only that it appears in a photo in this Flickrstream. Given that this book was printed as a limited edition, the photographer is either a Dahlin, a Pepple, or a nearby resident of Webster Groves.

This book collects a number of questions covered in Slate’s “The Explainer” column and groups them by some sort of similarity. It’s better than The Best of Slate as far as collections go, but it’s not “The Straight Dope”.

Worth a buck, I suppose. If you will have any to spare in the upcoming Obama/Pelosi/Reid Bush depression (overtime).

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Back in 1984, the powers that be wanted to widen Elm Avenue, a north-south road that cuts through the middle of Webster Groves, to make it an artery of sorts to handle traffic from Clayton areas to South County. The residents of Elm Avenue banded together to fight it and had a street party to show off their homes which would be lost or have yards cut drastically as part of the plan. This slender volume is a catalog of the homes on Elm Avenue along with the history of each. Not quite Webster Park, but its aim was much lower.

Last year, as part of preparations for the Highway 40 closing, powers that be floated the idea of widening Elm again, 23 years after this book was published. They got a stop light where only stop signs had existed before and a no-left-turn thing instead, fortunately for the big old houses along Elm.

Sorry, no Amazon link for this book; I cannot find any reference of it on the Internet, either, which means I must be making it up.

In case you’re wondering, I finished this book on November 3, a day before the election. I haven’t posted on it because I’ve had other things on my mind, such as the way the world will be to me going forward. Pardon me for the delay.

I was going to entitle this post, or at least sum it up, as encapsulating this book as 50 Horror Stories We, British Editors, Could Anthologize On The Cheap. Because for the first couple of nights wherein I read the book, that’s the sense I got. Fiction, poorly written in a British horror sense. We get a couple of ghost stories, and then a treatise on lycanthropy. Were the stories supposed to be spooky, or what?

After a couple glasses of cheap liquor, though, I got into it. Well, a couple of glasses of cheap liquor and a couple of nights of reading, perhaps interspersed with more compelling fiction. But these stories combine actual events with actual recountings of ghost stories, so if you’re an Angliophile, you can get into it for the flavor of the past told from the recountings. If the spirit, so to speak, moves you, you can wonder, “Did the authors present this as a piece of fiction, or are they recounting an actual event but providing spooky music?”

Thus, I ultimately enjoyed the book more than I thought I would. One has to leave behnd one’s expectation of horror stories, though, particularly if you’re an American reader used to a bit more spookiness in the proceedings.

As you know, I read the sequel, of sorts, to this book earlier this year. So when I found the actual novel upon which the movie True Grit was based, I snapped it up. A two-fer of sorts; I like paperback movie tie-ins/source novels for some reason.

This book is exceptional. The book relies on a double-effect narrator, an elderly spinster recounting her trip into Choctaw country to find the man who shot down her father. At the time, she’s 14 and rather precocious, although let’s not forget that there was a time when 14 was an adult for all intents and purposes. She hires Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn (the John Wayne role) to lead her into the hostile territory to find the man. A Texas Ranger joins them, and together (reluctantly, it must be said–the men don’t want a little girl along) they encounter the bad men.

The voice of the book, through the double-effect narration (telling the story through first person, but with the passage of time), really makes it work. Throughout, the character displays primmishness and vulnerability; she’s not as tough as she’s putting on, but she’s tough enough. Additionally, there are a lot of educational asides and a couple suggestions for Bible reading, but it doesn’t get in the way of the action and the girl’s response to it. Well-played.

I need to read more Westerns, but this does represent the second I’ve read this autumn. As our world and country changes, I’d like to hearken back to a time where it wasn’t how it is now or will be in a couple years.

Well, this book is an interesting piece, very throught-provoking. In it, Ben Smith, a WWII veteran and Japanese prison camp survivor, opts for cryonic (aka cyrogenic) preservation. The first third of the book describes his life until suspension, his philosophical discussions with his peers in the medical field, his friends, and his family. The middle part describes the immediate after-effects, including the lawsuit among his heirs to split up his trust and to unfreeze him to kill him, essentially, to get the money in his trust, and then the direction of society. The third part deals with his revival and nano-repair to the age of 25 and his dealings with his extended and eternally young family, including an infant cloned from his dead wife who will grow to be his wife again.

The book is strongest in the beginning, where the reader can focus on the main character. After that, it gets a little epic and sagaish for pure enjoyment. As it’s not actually cut into chapters, one cannot find a “one more chapter” stopping point and it’s hard to chunk into digestible bits. Additionally, it starts in 1998 and projects history from the top of the dot-com era, full of optimism of eternal growth and whatnot. So when it intercuts news summaries from a year to ground you–which it does with every scene, since sometimes we’re skipping ahead decades, it starts out with corporate news, such as June 15, 2042: Scientists at Eastman Kodak, Compaq’s stock rises, Sun Microsystems this, or 2084, Chrysler introduces. These are already punchlines, as are the invention of “backlinks” by Netscape in something like 2006. Seems to me the trackback made it before then.

Once we get into the future, we’re into LiberalTechnoTopia, where no one lies because everyone has a lie detector implant, where contraceptive implants are mandatory at birth (the United States was the last holdout-yay us!), and where the good Democrats want to offer free cryonics as a human right, but the Republicans want to have a two-strikes and you’re dead law (which they get, and it cleans up society nicely, but that’s mentioned as an aside). Every new development is handled by society in just the perfect way–no human would use it for evil, because humans are inherently good!

So the book, which could have been a very interesting philosophical tome questioning the nature of humanity, the meaning of identity, and a host of other things, ultimately turns into a blended composite of L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach (the Demotopia) with The Metaphysics of Star Trek with a heaping topping from cryonics brochures. The author, a coin dealer of some repute, definitely wants to popularize cryonics. As a matter of fact, he’s willing to let you download this book for free to get the word out.

I think I’ll hold out, since Congress will seize the assets of anyone in suspension come 2010.

This book tops the scales at 388 pages, and, frankly, it made me miss the days of one hundred and fifty page pulp books. Because let’s face it, this book has more akin to those crime thrillers than to more sweeping classical literature that covers more of the human condition and clocks in at a hundred more pages or less.

It’s a disappointing entry in the Prey series. The main plot revolves around an old woman who gets killed and robbed of a few expensive antiques that won’t be missed. It’s a pair of antique dealers doing this, you see, carefully across different states and whatnot. But it unravels when a young black man recognizes that some pieces are missing. I didn’t hesitate to tell you who did it because Sandford tips it pretty early, too, and then you see, via the narrative equivalent of split screen, what the bad guys do while the good guys try to figure it out. Sometimes it works, but given the other evidence, it cumulatively just looks sloppy.

To pad it out, Sandford spends a lot of time on a subplot, a Republican politician who is accused of sleeping with an underage girl. This subplot doesn’t deal with solving the crime, but how, politically, to deal with it. The Prey books have always had an element of this, but the book really throws this in and then combines the two plots as the antiques dealers use this as a red herring to throw Davenport off. When that doesn’t work, many pages later, the subplot doesn’t get mentioned again.

In the review of Phantom Prey, I wondered if sometimes Sandford didn’t know what he was talking about. Another couple bits within this book often sound tinny, as though Sandford didn’t really get into the context of the subcultures he’s writing about. For example, the young black man (I mean, high school student) goes to a hip hop club’s under 18 night on the night of the murder. He’s there with a couple of friends. A hip hop club, you understand. He takes mass transit down, but:

At ten o’clock, the mother of one of the kids picked up the boys in her station wagon and hauled them all back to St. Paul.
“What kind of car?” Lucas asked.
“A Cadillac SUV–I don’t know exactly what they’re called,” Lash said. “It was a couple years old.”

Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but the Cadillac SUV is the obscure Escalade which, as far as I know, a couple of people in the hip hop industry drive. Sure, Sandford intimates that it’s a station wagon, which could mean the vehicle he has in mind is the Cadillac SRX, but the narrator shouldn’t crop that up, and I really think the boy would relate to the Cadillac SUV as either the Escalade or not. Not “I don’t know exactly what they’re called.”

Sadly, I think the series is drooping. Sandford might be phoning these in, and talking for hours while doing so.

This book is another in the Matt Helm series, the fourth (I think).

In it, Helm travels to Mexico, gets some secret information, and then walks into a trap on purpose to get to an agent known as The Cowboy who might be sabotaging a nuclear test. When he gets caught, as planned, Helm turns the tables on his captors and on the woman who has double-crossed him–as planned–even as they’ve fallen in love.

It’s not very complicated, but it’s a 60s paperback adventure. You get a handful of scenes, a female love interest of potentially duplicitious motivation, and then you get a sudden climax with a big explosion. A hundred and fifty pages, and you’re done. Man, I love these paperbacks.

This book takes on a number of media-promulgated myths and explains why most of them are false. As a reasonable, libertarian sort of fellow myself, I already knew most of them. The last chapter of myths covers parenting, and it’s the weakest one. Stossel is a consumer reporter, not necessarily a parenting reporter, so the book ends on a weak note.

Another book that goes along with what I believe, generally, so it didn’t challenge me much. Explaining common sense to someone with some common sense ain’t riveting reading. Sadly, like most political books, only people who agree with it will buy it/acquire it.

Speaking of which, since I just bought a hardback copy, I have a trade paperback to get rid of. Call it if you want it.