Category: Books

This book was written in 1978, back when one could try to write a general political humor book without vitriol toward either side. So it’s amusing in spots, imagining Washington buzzwords as actual animals illustrated by Jeff McNelly of “Shoe” fame.

More than its actual humor content, though, the book provides a sort of insight as a time capsule into 1970s political thought. At the base, not much has changed except that perhaps the underlying tenets of liberal thought have been seriously challenged, leading to the aforementioned vitriol.

The more the differences change, though, the more they remain the same.

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This book is 25 books later into the series than Double Crossfire, and they really must have been churning them out by this time. Much has happened in the Executioner’s world. He’s no longer doing terrorists in Turkey, now he’s freelancing or something and he’s in Southeast Asia, rescuing POWs. It was what all the pulp guys were doing in that era.

Sadly, the quality has declined greatly, and the character has changed. Now, instead of just killing bad guys, he’s also beating a Russian KGB official’s wife together with a chair leg as part of a trap. Not because she was going to squeal, but because she had to die. So it’s lost some of the essence of the character. The plot is movieish and a quick bunch of set pieces.

You want to know what caliber of book this is? At the end, Mack Bolan saves the POWs, who are repatriated through a bureaucratic process. Bolan goes to meet his Khmer guide, Eng, an attractive woman who leads a band of resistance fighters.

She looked up into his eyes. “Will you return to Bangkok with me?” she asked.
Then Bolan read the look. It was longing, plain and simple. He realized now that she liked him more than just a friend.

Oh, have mercy.

I got another later in the Executioner line here to read. I’ll probably hit it sometime next year. And, sadly, I’ll probably pick up more. On the one hand, with a series like this written by the shop writers, the quality is bound to be uneven to say the least. On the plus side, they can’t all be as bad as this, can they?

Stay tuned in 2011 for answers.

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Robert Heinlein is like Ayn Rand with ray guns.

Okay, I said that to cheese off Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand fans, but I think there’s probably some overlap. Heinlein works some political views into his books with paragraph-long statements of philosophy. A lot of authors do this–you can review the list of contemporary crime fiction authors who have cheesed me off with their flippant anti-conservative remarks–but the difference with Heinlein is that you get some building of an argument in those paragraphs, a defense and explanation of the viewpoint instead of just a glib insult. I like it better. Also, it tracks with my viewpoint.

This book collects 800 pages of short stories written over decades that make up the Future History timeline (most of the material; Wikipedia says there are others, and I think Time Enough For Love fits into the story arc). The Future History covers several hundred years, from Earth’s movement to the Road City model (where moving sidewalks built to superhighway size dictate commerce and growth) to the drive to put man on the Moon, the resulting interplanetary colonization and imperialism, the revolts, the rise of a theocracy in America, the revolution against the theocracy, and then the treatment of a subrace of long-lived humans when they are discovered.

The stories themselves are forty to sixty years old, so the space race and human development haven’t proceeded in the fashion depicted, but given that we haven’t gotten far into space yet, much of it could still come truish. For example, Heinlein doesn’t see moon travel as a government program (as it was), but a private endeavor (as it will be). So you have to overlook places where the author projects his expectations into the future that is actually our past and present (and future) that don’t follow along the lines of actual development. If you can get past that, you have a lot of exciting and engaging classic science fiction available to you.

Mostly short stories, but some long novellas and short novels in the mix kept me coming back. I was feeling pretty cocky after Thanksgiving when I’d read 95 books or so, so I thought I’d try to run through this in my drive to 100 books. This took me a month to read, but I’m still in good shape. And Heinlein is good fun. The stories are not hyper-obsessed with science like you get in more modern science fiction along the lines of The Forge of God or the works of Larry Niven, so the focus on story keeps one reading.

I’ve got more Heinlein on my to-read shelves, and that’s a good place to be.

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It must be Year of the Early 1980s Good Morning, America Contributor here at MfBJN. In November, I reported on a book by Erma Bombeck, and now I’ve run through this collection by Mary Ellen Pinkham.

Like the Bombeck book, this book belonged to my mother, although I cannot imagine she used it much as cleaning and cooking were not her bailiwicks. This book is a bit of a time capsule to that middle-of-the-century period where housewives looked for tips and tricks to keep their homes clean and their tables laden within a budget. Personally, I wonder how much the world has changed compared to how much my status has changed when I look at these books. On the one hand, I have moved upward from the housing projects to a nice rural retreat in the 30 years since this book was published. On the other hand, technology and the culture have changed to some degree changed. The first chapter, for example, deals an awful lot with gravy and how to thicken, thin, extend, and otherwise deal with its defects. How many people under the age of 50 cook with gravy in the 21st century? Honestly, I don’t know.

At any rate, it’s a collection of grouped hints, as the title indicates. I don’t think I’ll take too many things away from it as the price of cleaning products has fallen to the point that it’s less expensive to buy a cleaner off the shelf for a dedicated task than it is to buy the precursors listed in the book. Maybe I’m just to bourgeois to think so.

I did see a couple of hints (toothpicks in screw holes to tighten the screws and toothpaste in nail holes to cover them before you paint) that my mother passed onto me. I don’t think she got them from the book; I’d wager they were such common knowledge that even my mother knew them. I still use the toothpicks thing, although I can afford filler now for holes before I have my painter come in and paint things in the shade my interior decorator designs for my feng shui. So maybe hints remain relevant for some people beneath me. I do see Heloise still runs in the local rag, after all, but my daily stock reports are not.

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I loved this book. It’s a collection of stories about growing up just southeast of Springfield, Missouri, in the 1930s. The author moves with his family to a small homestead called Bethany Homestead with his family of 7. His father’s a Lutheran minister and a frequent missionary to Africa who really wants to return, but he serves as pastor to a number of churches in the United States. This leaves the wife and her children (10 by the time the book ends) on the little farm, which has some crops and a large orchard not to mention some cattle to tend to. The second oldest boy, John takes an active role in the household.

It’s a strange other country, the past. While some of the landmarks are familiar, the culture is different. For example, the author took a year off between finishing school and deciding whether to pursue further education. Not between high school and college, not between his undergrad years and going onto medical school. Between 8th grade and high school. During this year, his father is preaching in Nebraska and his brother is in high school already, so the 13 year old boy is effectively the man of the house, working outside the home for some extra income and taking care of chores and helping his mother tend the 8 siblings at home. 13! He also recounts travelling to the upper peninsula of Michigan to visit his father (who’s preaching afar again) and, instead of riding in a single Packard laden with his 9 siblings and mother, stays over an extra couple of days in Michigan and hitchhikes home.

I wondered if this sort of collection of stories would fly were I or a peer try to write it about our youths in the 1970s and 1980s, whether they would be interesting enough to draw any attention from seekers of esoterica 50 years from now. You know what? They just might. Some of my stories sound outlandish among my cohort now, only 30 years beyond their occurence. Perhaps in another 30 years they will be exotic enjoyments for readers. If anyone reads in 2040.

At any rate, I liked the book so much I’ll keep my eyes out for the others written by Hult and his immediate family. Also, last night, I returned to the used book store where I bought this book and bought six other memoirs in the same vein from different authors from the Ozarks.

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Well, I threatened to read coffeetable books to make my 100 this year, didn’t I? Of course, I’ve been interspersing them all year so I could have something to flip through during football games, but as we get down to the end of the year, I really expose my dependence on these sorts of books to count. Of course, I also do things like count multiple novel volumes (like this) as one book, so I’d like to confuse you into believing it all works out.

At any rate, this book is a collection of photographs of antique arms from matchlocks to wheellocks to flint locks (and with some percussion guns thrown in at the end). It describes in some text the difference between them and shows examples of them, but it really doesn’t seem to have good diagramming to really make it clear the difference. Either that, or I skipped that particular corner of the page to watch a replay. It’s an interesting glance book to the relatively uninitiated (like me), and it might have some more meaning to someone who is an educated aficionado and know what you’re looking at, you might enjoy a little retrospective trip through the history of firearms that this book offers.

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Apparently, this book came along with one of the films when it was released on DVD. As such, it’s marked NOT FOR RESALE. Note that I am personally not in violation of the law here, I hope, since I merely bought this little book at some book fair or garage sale. Hopefully, I can avoid the affection of the TSA, the BATFE, and the other secretly abbreviated agencies with that disclaimer.

What is the book? It’s a little Marvel Universe lite that focuses on the Fantastic Four. It talks about the members, their enemies, the different eras in the comic books, and the different plot arcs the comics have followed. Unfortunately, since it was bundled with a DVD, it did so in a very small book with freaking tiny print and a lot of italics on a lot of colored backgrounds. That made it very hard to read in places. By “in places,” I mean “on pages.”

That said, when I squinted enough, I got a good flavor of the remembered history eras of the 1960s and early 1970s, the remembered present era of the 1970s and 1980s, and that weird future era of the 1990s and the 2000s. Of course, all references therein are to my contemporaneous reading of comic books. The wild story arcs were much more tolerable and comprehensible when you were reading them issue-by-issue. Of course, in the time I was reading comic books, a lot of the stories stretched two issues. Then they started the longer story arcs over a number of different titles, so you had to buy three or four magazines a month to keep up, and if you missed one, you were lost. And the stories got daft. For example, the Spider-Man Mark of Kane series really turned me off to the Spider-Man titles. I haven’t really read comics since.

But this book makes me think about dipping back in. I have a half long box of comic books I bought in 2007 and a small stack of comics my brother gave me at some time or another. As well as several boxes that my mom didn’t throw out.

Given that I haven’t read any of the other books I bought on September 22, 2007, maybe I will stick to real books for a while yet.

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This is the third book in the previously mentioned Copp series, and it focuses on the seamy side of Hollywood. Copp is hired by a studio head to take some quick pictures of people entering and leaving a business. Immediately after he turns over the film, Copp sees the aftermath of a car bomb in a limosuine–the one the studio head drove. Suddenly, Copp is wanted in connection with the explosion and with a string of deaths of the people depicted in the photographs. Before long, he’s embroiled in a twisting journey through the sleazy underbelly of Hollywood including faked deaths, hidden deaths, marriages of convenience, sexy starlets, and enforcers from the syndicate back east who are bankrolling studios.

The book is a little longer than the first in the series, and it has a lot of characters to keep track of. Unfortunately, Copp works in the dark a lot here and things just seem to happen to him, but it’s a good enough book nevertheless. I’m still keeping my eye out for others in the series.

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In my forthcoming novel, I use the word fuck in a couple of different forms on the first page (and seventeen times throughout the novel according to my aunt and godmother–or maybe that was my first one). This book uses the word tits on the first page. That’s definitely more directly evocative. I think I’ve learned an important writing lesson in it.

As you might now (especially if you at least scan the headlines for the book reports if you don’t outright read them), Don Pendleton started the Executioner series and wrote 38 books in it throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. This book is a departure from it, the beginning of a new series focusing on an ex-cop private eye named Joe Copp. Since he’s free from the constraints, such as they were, of the Harlequin publishing empire and is into the big time, he can talk in more gritty terms. So the book has a different flavor, more akin to the more modern styles of novels. It’s quite a jump, really, like going directly from old John D. MacDonald to Robert Crais, for example. I’d imagine Ed McBain made a similar transition, but it wouldn’t have been as jarring and would have been more graduated.

The book uses the first person narrator as opposed to the third person of the Executioner series, and it works better for the occasional philosophical asides that appear here as well as in the Executioner books. The book is thicker, too, but for the most part the first person narration carries it along.

The plot? Oh, I don’t know, something to do with a dead stripper and a politician who likes strippers and a party palace in Hawaii and connections with the Hawaiian underworld. Pretty standard stuff, but done better than the standard pulp crime fiction novelist.

I was pleased to note that this is part of a series, and I was even more pleased to discover I had bought more than one of these books (at the St. Charles Book Fair? That might be it). I think the series came out in hardcover first. I like it and have grown to like Don Pendleton so much that I’ll snap up his work when I find them, and I will seek out these titles in hardcover just because I want them for my collection. How’s that for an endorsement?

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I read Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story, lord, has it been five years ago already? No wonder I’m feeling old. I was going to go on a bit about how you can hear Paul Harvey’s voice as you read these things if you’re of a certain age and tie it to how people about 40 years old also have a certain affinity for CBS News’ Christopher Glenn’s voice, too, since he used to do the news breaks on Saturday mornings and CBS hourly news on the radio, but jeez, I think I need an old man’s nap before I do.

Although I didn’t like the pacing of the Rest of the Story segments translated to the page, these shorter pieces fit okay. For those of you who don’t know, the For What It’s Worth bits were just shorter segments of Harvey’s News and Comment instead of stand-alone pieces in their own right. The length varies, but the choppier radio broadcast style works better.

The vignettes are amusing. Now that we have Snopes, we know many of them are urban legends recounted, some knowing jokes with the artificial spontenaity of an America’s Funniest Home Videos nut shot (am I old enough that I have to explain that to kids, too?), and some things that might have happened. Just enjoy the stories and don’t build a worldview about them.

Paul Harvey was audio blogs, really. Some linking, little thinking, some wry notes, and some urban legendry. Enjoy them as such, for what it’s worth.

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Just when I get to breezing along these paperback pulp novels, thinking they’re all the same, I run into one that’s not.

Maybe I’ve been running in a particular series (The Executioner), so I get complacent and think that they all read like that, fast and engaging, and then I run into something like this.

Oh, not to sell it short: this book is ripped from contemporary headlines. A Texas oilman wants to kill an Arab leader for his own personal gain! If that doesn’t strike you as the summation of the left’s view of the 21st century, I don’t know what would, aside from that the post-2009 21st century includes RACISM! as the motivating factor for Texas oilmen and their sympathists opposing…. Well, anything.

Except this book takes place ca. 1974, when a CIA agent seeks out a South African son of an SS officer who’s out to kill Muammar al-Gaddafi. Wait a minute, a CIA agent protecting Gaddafi? This just in: I made a dartboard with Gaddafi’s face on it as an art project in middle school. I am now middle-aged. I would say, “WTF?” but that’s how the kids talk these days. Did I say “kids”? I meant “people who think they’re young, but are marketing to kids.”

Sorry, as a middle-aged man, I’m prone to the wandering thoughts that come with age. Where was I?

Oh, yes, this book I read in 2010.

Well, it’s a book that takes its inspiration from the international suspense pulps of the era. Ian Fleming inspired many, which is why the main character has relations with Israeli intelligence and Maltese natives in that way.

However, the book’s pacing really pulls it out of the ranks of pulp or paperback fiction; solid paragraphs and extraneousity slow the book down a great deal. The story is a bit meh. The set pieces are not so much predictable as slow to develop, and the main character’s main job seems to be running to authorities in various locations and asking for their help, which is not what one usually wants in a two-fisted pulp novel.

Apparently, this is part of a series and is the first in the series without the Secret Mission: prefix. So I’ll avoid those with it and try to avoid others in the series without it.

And I’m back to Don Pendleton by now, thank you very much.

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Secret Mission No. 17: The Libyan Contract