Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book, the cover informs you, is by the author of Fletch. And it shares the title with the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines film from the middle 1980s. However, this book is not the source for the film. It’s from 1964 and is Mcdonald’s first book; it would be about ten years until Mcdonald started the series that would make him known and about twenty years until the movie Fletch, based on that series, led someone to print his first novel with a tout that this is the guy who wrote Fletch (the book).

At any rate: It’s a simple enough story, sort of. A cold, detached college student watches his roommate and longtime friend commit suicide in their apartment and, only after it’s done, calls campus police. When asked about it, the college student, Tom Betancourt, says his roommate Casey was free. He quits school before they can expel him and goes home to his high class family, such as it is–a father who is never there, traveling on business most of the time, and a needy mother with a longtime affair. Betancourt doesn’t know anything about Casey’s family, as his roommate never talked much about them in their years rooming together at boarding school and college, but Betancourt knows Casey has a sister, and Betancourt hopes to meet her.

So he goes to their summer home community and takes a job at the yacht club under an assumed name. He meets and falls for the girl and meets her parents who are also quite rich but are dysfunctional in their own way, especially after the death of the son. As they fall deeper in love, Betancourt knows he must tell her the truth, and he does, with tragic consequences clumsily foreshadowed earlier in the book.

The narrative punches quite a bit above the plot’s weight, as we’re carried along, trying to figure out something about this main character. He somewhere on the spectrum between Howard Roark of The Fountainhead and Meursault of The Stranger. He’s handsome so that all the girls throw themselves at him, not that he cares, and he’s hyper-competent, but more detached and less driven than the Rand hero. The book hints at things, such as how his childhood might have made him hold everything at arm’s length. The book also hints that the roommate might have killed himself because of an unrequited homosexual attraction to the main character as the main character sort of considers the possibility. But these questions remain unresolved at the end, which is rather abrupt (but not unforeseen, as the foreshadowing was not subtle).

It reminded me a little of Robert B. Parker’s Love and Glory as both feature young men falling in love at college in the olden days, and something of the narrative style, but they’re really not that much alike.

So I was hoping for better as the narrative pulled me along, and the more I think about it, the less I actually liked the book. That’s what pretty good writing in service of a plot lacking will do.

But I liked the Fletch and Flynn books I read in high school (and reread much later).

Well, this book reverts to the mean of Bolan book quality after War Born.

In it, Bolan is told to go to Sudan to rescue some journalists being held by a Libyan puppet government only recently installed via coup. Bolan accompanies a retired general who is going to be an unofficial liason with pro-American rebels seeking to depose the current government. When presented with evidence of a Libyan-sponsored chemical weapons program, Bolan decides to destroy the program and coordinates the rebels’ attack on the existing government in the process.

I mean, it’s got some twisty plot stuff, but it’s handled less than adeptly. The retired general character is just an appendage, a savior in a couple of situations and a wounded person Bolan has to take care of in others. Bolan and the general are inserted by air drop, but the amount of equipment that Bolan comes out with (two different crossbows? Really?) makes one wonder if he has a Bag of Holding. I can’t help wonder if the book was influenced by Ikari Warriors as Bolan hops into a number of piece of Soviet equipment, including an armored human resources carrier and a tank, and operates them immediately.

The book did not encourage me to immediately read another in the series, but it wasn’t bad enough to make me swear them off forever (which is a good thing, as I still have 32 ever-thickening titles in the Executioner series alone remaining on my bookshelves).

I read this book in a single day in a little over an hour of sustained reading time. It is 150 pages of roughly 5″ by 5″ paper containing 9 Native American myths/tales, many of which feature Raven, the trickster god (?).

The stories are whimsical, and the flavor of the Native American/American Indian myths differs from those of the classical Greek myths. They’re more Hiawatha and Brothers Grimm, at least in the fantastic elements but not as bloody.

You could probably read these to your kids without fear of harming their sensibilities, and Disney could probably make them into films without too many changes. So they’ve got that going for them.

Perhaps the theme of this year’s reading will be “Clearing out thin books from the shelves and side tables.” This particular volume is an old “juvenile” book about electronics as you can see from the cover. I say “juvenile” in quotes because books don’t really get classed as “juvenile” any more, do they? It’s “young adult” now. I suspect it’s more to avoid the criminal association that developed from “juvenile” or to make juveniles feel better about themselves (young adults, so let us vote!) than because people using the word in conversation were getting juvenile confused with Juvenal.

But enough about me. About this book.

It’s a bit of an anachronism by now, surely, with its references to Radio Shack or your local electronics store (or to juveniles who might be interested in engineering) and a bit of optimistic wonder about what the future could bring since about forty years of integrated circuits brought us small radios, personal computers, and more (the answer, almost forty years on, is Web sites that exacerbate tensions between political factions and devices that listen in on you to help you with simple things and to better determine your psychology for tech companies’ benefit).

It might also tip a little bit to why the study of electronics might have fallen off a cliff. The basic progression of the book is:

1. Basic chemistry: Electrons and atoms.
2. Power source/circuits.
3. AC/DC.
4. Basic electronic parts: resistors, capacitors, diodes. Complete with diagrams and experiments.
5. Chips and circuit boards with no real diagrams.
6. Magic.

It doesn’t talk much about chip architecture or how electronic devices (even in those days) have a lot of chips that you can’t really do anything with. Well, I guess you can with chip programming things, but tinkering has gotten so much more complicated these days.

Still, I got something out of the book. A reminder about different electronic components, including an explanation of diodes and capacitors that made sense to me. So there’s something to be said about reading children’s books in fields you’re not studied in.

I have many fields in which I wish I had time to dedicate more study (one of the other being music), but, getting and spending, I’ve laid waste my powers. Books like this make me wonder why I didn’t spend more of my youth studying these pursuits since they really are rather simple at the foundational level. I suppose it’s half because my recognition of how much I had to learn in these fields overwhelmed me and made them seem more inscrutible than they are and half because I’m lazy and like to read books.

This book is a little different from some of the coffee table tourism books I’ve read before that focus on a state or city. Instead this book focuses on monuments around the world, from the pyramids in Egypt to the memorials in Washington D.C. The images within it are big and color, generally just one of the mentioned monuments. The text, though, is kinda of bland and vanilla, kinda just talking very generally about monuments and not offering a whole lot of insight into the individual monuments or their construction.

I flagged some items, though.

The Monument to the Third International is another ambitious symbol of national idealism, but, unlike the Statue of Liberty, it was, unfortunately, never realized. The Soviet architect Vladmir Evgrafovic Tatlin (1885-1953) planned the monument in between 1919 and 1920 to house th legislative offices of th new revolutionary government in Leningrad. Tatlin conceived of a gigantic spiral of wood, iron, and glass that would reach the almost inconceivable height of 1,300 feet (396 meters). It was to span the Neva River, and encompass three glass-walled buildings that would revolve at different speeds–one would take a day to complete a turn, one a month, and one a year–while ligh beams projected skyward from the roof. The Monument to the Third International presented a vision of the technological utopia and reshaping of society that Communism promised. Its unprecendented form suggested a break from history and a ne architectural and social order. Had it been achieved, it would have combined the elements of time, movement, energy, and scale in a way never before realized in one monument.

For some reason, the book spends as much time on this incomplete but promised to be glorious Soviet Statue of Totalitarianism as the Statue of Liberty. And since this is a 1997 book, the Statue of Liberty, shot from the harbor, has the World Trade Center towers in the background.

In addition to memorials to soldiers, memorials to war victims are found throughout the world.

The book lists two such memorials: Peace Park in Hiroshima and the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. So saying “throughout the world” is quite a bit of a stretch here. I don’t expect you’d find many such monuments in Saudi Arabia or Iran, but I could be mistaken.

We think of monuments as enduring, everlasting, and permanent–as indeed they are meant to be. But many of the world’s greatest monuments are in peril. During the last fifty years, pollution has devastated the world’s monuments.

You know what has devastated monuments since the book was published? Groups destroying the monuments of the disfavored, whether it’s the Taliban destroying ancient Buddhist statues or American leftists pulling down statues of historical figures who were not 21st century Woke.

So it was a relatively quick browse, a couple nights/hours. I have a large number of coffee table or set picture books like this. Perhaps I’ll focus on them a little more this year to clear some of them out and to bolster my annual numbers.