Category: Books

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:

I borrowed this book from the library because Springfield’s book fair season is far shorter than St. Louis’s. Well, that’s not the real reason. While I was at the library last week looking for some beading books to browse and review, I saw this book on the hot books shelf, so I got it (along with Night and Day. The end result is that I’ve read a pile of library books this year, which is not helping me move the books from the To-Read shelves to the Read shelves here at Nogglestead.

This book is one of Sandford’s departures from the Davenport series, although Lucas appears as a supporting character and speaks with a voice that ultimately isn’t true to the Davenport character. But that’s not important, since this is a spin-off series. Instead, all the investigation is done by Virgil Flowers.

The Flowers character isn’t as much a leader/chieftan sort of detective as Davenport has become. Although the politics of the other series plays a part, Flowers gets to go and do more low-level shoe leather detecting. So it’s a throwback. Someday, though, Flowers might get promoted up into the bureaucracy to suffer the same fate as Davenport.

Onto this book’s plot: Flowers investigates the murder of a couple of men who are positioned ritually (in a Sandford novel? Say it ain’t so!). He discovers that the plot leads back to the war in Viet-fucking-Nam, man! A team of Vietnamese intelligence agents are killing guys involved in a construction equipment heist. Flowers has to discover this but finds himself embroiled a little too deeply when he falls for the Vietnamese daughter of a purported 60s radical but possible CIA agent. Did I mention the conspiracy goes to the highest levels of the current administration just as the Republican convention comes to Minneapolis?

The moral universe is ambivalent. The Vietnamese killers are seeking vengeance, so they sort of get a pass at the end. I don’t really get the ritualistic slaughter thing. Seriously, that’s warning the others in the circle of Those Who Need Killing According to The Vietnamese Government Officials to put extra security in place. I wonder if it’s added for tabloidic interest. I can think of reasons to put it in, but those reasons don’t come out in the book, and they require some thought on my part. Ultimately, if I were a crack Vietnamese Intelligence team, I would have just tossed the victims off of different bridges without drawing police attention or the remaining victims’ intention. All other explanations require too much predicting that the plot would unfold as it did and that unknown police investigators would react just so to let the plot go on.

Another thing: this book weighs in at almost 400 pages. Do you, gentle reader, remember when Steven King’s huge volumes weighed in at this? When 400 pages was the mark of an Important Work, not just genre fiction? The contemporary page inflation of thrillers will, mark my words, lead to a revised interest in the classics, where a Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy novel seems light by comparison.

Books mentioned in this review:

I checked this book out the day Mr. Parker died. Checked out. From a library. Because I’ve given up on buying the books with an arbitrary moral universe, where the hero’s code is right because it’s the hero’s code. For example, in this book, a group of swingers plays a part as Jesse Stone investigates them as part of one of the interconnected plotlines. I say one of the, because there are like two subplots aside from the normal Jesse-Jenn and Jesse-therapy and Jesse-all-the-hot-chicks-too thing that pads the books out. One of the subplots is connected to the main plot and features the swingers. The other subplot does not actually connect to the main plot but does tie into the other subplot tangentally.

Throughout the book, Jesse teases Molly Crane for her infidelity that really rankled me in Stranger in Paradise. It’s a joke, banter, and when they really talk about it, they hit upon that they don’t feel bad because sex is good. Infidelity is wrong, but there’s no guilt. Huh. But when Crane and Stone talk about swingers, the moral opprobrium falls upon the willing, if off-kilter, participants of that particular pecadillo.

So swinging: bad, infidelity: okay. Right. Because….

Aw, because Jesse says so.

So aside from the moral torpitude of the universe and the protagonists, we can skip over the plot. It’s an enough story. The book moves along, with its unnecessary asides. The good guys get the bad guys.

But as with all the later Parker books, the psychoanalysis and soul-searching overwhelm it. Funny, in 1991 or so, I saw RBP on the Today Show, and Bryant Gumbel said that some critics thought that Spenser had gotten away from the clue-sniffing sleuth and more into pairing wines with dinner. Oh, for those halycon days where that was perceived as the problem.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book represents my first foray into the history of my new locale, the Springfield area of Missouri. Comparatively speaking, its history extends further back than Webster Groves, Missouri, did. Webster Groves was a proud suburb of St. Louis, and rightfully so: Webster Groves as a suburb extended back over 100 years. But Springfield, as a town and a region, compares something to St. Louis itself and goes back into the early 19th century (I know, St. Louis goes back further, but bear with me here).

This book is a photographic history, which means that it doesn’t present a narrative, but rather a grouping of photographs. As such, it silos up the Springfield story into things like churches, art organizations, government, and so on, and presents some related photos for each category as well as some text talking about how that silo progressed from frontier days into the present day, ca. 1997.

You know what? Those very limitations make it a good primer for the region’s history. It provides some photographs, including some buildings that survive until today, and it provides a selection of interesting tidbits. For example, I now know the original name of the town that would be known as Springfield and I know a story about cobras (the snakes) that indicates cobras appeared on the city seal (although I have no photographic evidence the seal includes or included cobras). Which is enough to make one want to learn more.

Also, a book of pictures coupled with a bit of text is good for perusing during football games (as we’ve previously discussed).

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a collection of interrelated short stories set in a dystopian near future. This future has a rigged societal structure based on employment, with the unemployed sent to live in underground barracks sort of like modern housing projects, but with fewer prospects. Also, corporations run the world.

In this thread, a young boy becomes the smartest man in the world and hears the voice of God in intergalactic static before euthanizing his caretakers; a woman boxer becomes heavyweight champion; a man meets the reclusive head of a megacorporation and beats him at tennis; a private investigator finds that his new lover is the assassin killing his clients’ comrades; a designer gets a promotion that he never dreamed of; whitey creates a virus to kill black people, and a team of black people mutate it so it kills white people.

The stories are stronger in the beginning, when they’re only tangentally connected in that they’re set in the same world. They’re independent and self-contained, so they are stronger. Once the characters start coming together, it weakens. By the time we get to the end, the final culmination of the book seems forced and not satisfying because it seems like Mosley is trying to tie it up neatly.

Given the ending of the book, you might think Mosley’s politics are all leftist and whatnot. Frankly, since the book is dedicated to Danny Glover, I expected at least one full-mouth kiss of a Latin American dictator somewhere. But Mosley’s a bit weaselly. His characters espouse some odd positions, such as the aforementioned man who meets the reclusive leader of the corporation who turns down a job offer where he could make a difference for the human race, provide well for his family, and become something, but chooses instead to remain a radical chasing down conspiracies that keep the black man down or such as the ultimate elimination of the blue-eyed devil in the end. However, throughout, Mosley sprinkles in self-determining heroes, asides praising private property, and the book ends with the white man gone and brutal tribalism rising from the survivors. Mosley’s stories and his themes are more complex than that. They keep me guessing and engaged on a thematic level.

A pretty good book. Starts strong, ends kinda weakly. He’s no John D. MacDonald, but who is?

Books mentioned in this review:

Don’t tell Roy Blount, Jr., this, but I think I remember that he was some sort of humorist. In the middle 1980s. Maybe earlier than that. Since he’s still playing with Dave Barry in the Rock Bottom Remainders and since I checked to see he still has new books coming out, I think Roy Blount, Jr., is still alive.

Although I read some of his work a long time ago whose varied titles I don’t recollect and whose publication titles I don’t remember, this is the first volume of his collected works, circa my sixth grade year, that I have read. It wasn’t bad.

Blount’s works are more essayical than zany Dave Barry’s works, so they’re not slapstick, but they are amusing. Somewhere between Barry and P.J. O’Rourke amusing. However, Blount’s works are more left-leaning in nature, as every educated person from 1980-2000 aspired to. The politics, though, and zingers speaking truth against the conservatives, do not dominate the book. Its humor for the most part speaks to universals which never whisper to Bill Maher or Senator Franken (although the words “Senator Franken” whisper them).

Blount’s framework for the book is not as amusing as the work he collects. Apparently, he’s tasked to write for a women’s magazine to speak to women about what men don’t say to women. So throughout his collected essays, we have italicized bits about men talking about women. Sadly, this schtick detracts from the collected Blount essays within the book, some of which are sort of related to the relationship of men and women.

An amusing read, lighter than Marcus Aurelius, but probably not world-changing. Which puts it on par with Marcus Aurelius.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ve got the Google ads up, loudly, and in a stunning turn of events, they all seem to involve books.

This book collects a large number of Marcus Aurelius’ thoughts about life as a Stoic. Marcus Aurelius, for those of you who don’t know, was Roman Emperor in the middle portion of the Empire. He might sound a little familiar because Joaquin Phoenix killed him in Gladiator.

The book reads like a set of Stoic tweets or fortune cookies. There is no flow to them, really, aside from a couple that seem to follow stream of consciousness style. When my children removed my bookmark from the book, I was quite in a spot, since you really cannot remember where you were based on context, because many of the things are repetitive and restate the same things only slightly differently. So this book took me a while to slog through.

I’m not a fan of Aurelius’ Stoicism; it is a philosophy of emperors and slaves (Aurelius’ mentor, Epicetus, was a slave, and I have his collection to get through sometime but not soon). It urges you to bear up under your life, as its course is determined outside of you, and to do right and live according to the tenets of Stoicism, which seems to include noticing that you’re not in control of your life and it really doesn’t mean much anyway since you will be forgotten.

As this is a Classics Club edition, it also includes other material, including:

• Several chapters of a novel entitled Marius the Epicurean which imagines and presents a fictional but descriptive portrait of Aurelius in his times (and a Christian ceremony at the time).
• Two satires by Lucian that make fun of Stoicism.
• A couple of pieces by Justin, including a dialog discussing his conversion to Christianity and an apology for Christianity (not an “I’m Sorry” kind of apology, but more an explanation of it) written with Aurelius in mind. These bits are very interesting in their own right (and rite) in that they very seriously compare the mysteries of Jesus Christ with various elements and deities in the Roman pantheon, saying these guys you worship did this, why is it so seditious that we believe Christ did this.

Overall, the most I derive out of this book is that I can say I read it. The philosophy within did not inspire me to something more, nor did it add anything to my credos. The pieces by Justin were interesting and helped provide me with some insight into early Christianity. The whole of it helped fill some historical gaps in my knowledge, I suppose, but I prefer Cicero to Marcus Aurelius when it comes to talking about Stoicism. This sort of Stoicism offers me no comfort since I prefer to believe in Free Will.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is not a book about the action figure. Unfortunately.

It’s a 1979 dark novel about power politics and national and bloc-level conflict. However, in this future, although people are still flying Trans World Airlines, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are part of a larger bloc called the Food Bloc which squares off against oil-producing countries (including Great Britain) and the populous countries (such as China and Pakistan). When astronomers discover a habitable planet with three sentient species on it, the three blocs send expeditions and the international tensions continue to rise until a shooting war breaks out on Earth and on the planet Jem.

The book spends about eighty percent of the book introducing a number of characters of the different blocs and the different species, then about fifteen percent of the book killing those characters pretty offhandedly, and then ends with a small epilogue from some six generations later when the survivors on Jem have evolved into a new civilization that incorporates the species from the planet and a whole lot of proto-Gaiaist loving of Mother Jem.

A pretty grim book, and unsatisfying. I think I’ll have to cleanse my science-fiction reading palate with some rocket-jockeying Heinlein.

Books mentioned in this review:

It’s been five years since I read the next volume in the series (The Darwin Awards 3, wherein the numbering went Arabic instead of Roman. You know, what I said about that book also applies to this book, really. It’s a digest of Web site postings. The essays that introduce each chapter still annoyed me.

But five years later, I’m less amused by the anecdotes of creative deaths. Maybe I’m getting older, maybe I’m moping through the first holiday season without my mother, but I’m just not as into the concept as I had been five years ago or when I first sat in my TALXware training session in 1998 and read the site after finishing up an easy exercise in writing an IVR script.

But, to say something nice about it, it’s as good as any other in the series as I’ve read. There’s some faint praise for it.

Books mentioned in this review: