Musings from Brian J. Noggle

The New York Times threw together this book after Churchill’s death. It rounds up reactions to his death, statements from other world figures, and includes a brief biography of his life.

The biography is a bit weird. The bulk of it, the first chapter, deals with his leadership in Britain before and during World War II. The second chapter of the bio deals with his family’s origin and his early years. The third chapter of it deals with his political life after he lost the Prime Minister position after World War II. A final short chapter includes some of his aphorisms.

I’ve got quite a stack of Churchillenalia, including some of his books, some bios, and letters he exchanged with his wife. So this little paperback might be a gateway into those books. It’s a bit stiff of a read, but it’s respectful. I wonder if the newspaper would be capable of this sort of thing now, but I doubt twenty-first century purchasers of death-commemorative books want prose. Probably just pictures.

But it was worth reading for the summary of his life if nothing else.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up this book after reading A Daughter’s Revenge as a palate cleanser. I’d tried to read it soon after I read Rogue Warrior, but I stalled out. This time, however, it was just what I needed.

This book is a fictional account wherein Marcinko–as a fictional character–uncovers a set of smuggled nuclear weapons parts at an airport in Japan. He uncovers connections with a former Secretary of Defense who might be smuggling banned technology to the North Koreans. The former SecDef says he was investigating the matter himself, and Marcinko is called back to active service to look into the matter. He gets to put a team of SEALs together as Red Cell to test some bases and to look for those who would help the North Korean nuclear program.

The first person narrator voice of the book is coarse and vulgar, full of bravado and bombast. If you don’t mind that sort of thing, it’s an enjoyable read. Unfortunately, some of that takes away from the suspense of the actions, as it seems like they’re just playing video games until they’re ambushed and take some casualties, at which point you realize how little characterization the other people get–they’re only extensions of the narrator. This is consistent, though, with the voice, so I don’t know how hard to knock the book for it.

But I liked it, which is good, as I have others in the series.

As it is an early 1990s book (like The Day After Tomorrow and War in 2020), it takes place in a world I remember, but a world that is different from the one we live in now. The concerns then aren’t the same as the thriller concerns now, so worrying about the North Koreans getting nuclear weapons seems a little like chasing cattle who’ve escaped the barn. Or goats. I hear goats are worse.

But reading these books makes me feel like a reader in the 1950s and 1960s snapping up Alistair MacLean’s World War II thrillers. They were thrillers, sure, but they were safe thrillers set in a world where we know the good guys won. Of course, I read those same MacLean thrillers in the 1980s and 1990s. But I digress.

At any rate, I enjoyed this book and look forward to reading the next.

Books mentioned in this review:

If you have ever said to yourself, "Man, this Zane Grey western is okay, but it really needs some explicit sex scenes in a number of variations!", this book is for you.

This book is the 323 book in the Gunsmith series of westerns, and the first of the twenty-first century men’s adventure novels I’ve read and the first Western men’s adventure novel. I’m not sure which explains the fact that there are more male appendages waved about than pistols. This book is copyright to Robert J. Randisi, and I presume that means he wrote it under the pseudonym. I previously reviewed Randisi’s Blood on the Arch, and I didn’t care for that book, either.

This book is a Western, set in Denver, and aside from a bit of horseback riding in the beginning, there’s no real sense it’s a Western. Someone’s taking potshots at The Gunsmith, the titular hero. This person keeps missing him, and he’s not sure what the message is. When he gets to Denver, he meets the daughter of a man whose death was laid at The Gunsmith’s hands many years ago, and the woman explains that her crack-shot sister is hunting for him. The woman ends up dead, and her death is also laid at the hands of the Gunsmith by the unsavory characters that are trying to do the Gunsmith in and are using the crack-shot daughter as a cat’s paw.

Then, there’s a gunfight. Also, some sex. Pretty much all the characters in the book have things to confess on Sunday. Then, there’s a gunfight. The end.

As I said, it could be a modern detective novel except for the occasional mention of horses. People are always getting into and out of cabs, for crying out loud. That’s no Western.

Yeek. I bought four in this series in Clever last month, and the remaining three are on the collapsed shelf. Perhaps I’ll move them.

When I’m in the mood for another western, perhaps I’ll try the Longarm series, some of which I’ve picked up at Friends of the Christian County Library sales over the years. But I’m almost afraid Longarm is a euphemism now.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ve blogged about Daniel Woodrell twice before reading a book of his. I remarked in 2006 that his works seemed to serve the underbelly as the main course; then, I posted a note about an appearance of his in St. Louis when a high school near-acquaintance contacted me to promote it. Remember, gentle reader, back in the old days, I was in the top thousand blogs in the country, and my mention was worth something. Well, maybe not, and certainly not by 2006. But still.

Now, almost a decade later, I live in the Ozarks, Woodrell’s books have been made into Oscar-worthy films, and I had a small Christmas gift card that turned into a large purchase at Barnes and Noble, including this book. Note for posterity’s sake that this was Christmas 2013, and it only took me a couple of months to read the book. That means something, if only that I have a weird sense of what to read next.

At any rate, this piece is literary fiction, something I’ve avoided of late. Well, not avoided; when it comes time to read, I’ve favored popcorn style fiction in a genre over Literature, which for the most part means classical literature. But, as I often am when I bother to read a good piece of literary fiction or classic literature, I’m taken aback by how engrossing and engaging it is.

This book centers on an actual event, a dance hall explosion in 1928. It has a more modern frame story, wherein a grandson gleans the story from his grandmother, the sister of a victim of the explosion. The story itself is told in flashback, where the sister of the grandmother has a fling with a rich man for whom the grandmother works (hence, her story is the maid’s version).

The book features the modern jump-cut scenes dealing with the maid, her grandson and children and how they fared, the love affair, the rich man who had then lost the daughter, a St. Louis gang member on the run/hiding out but discovered, and a bunch of characters who have chapters because they were affected by the explosion. Unfortunately, this last bit serves mostly as padding–I know, in creative writing classes, we call these “nice little moments,” but they’re a bit short and don’t move the story along. I guess that’s color that you get in literary fiction that you don’t get in pulp paperbacks.

It’s an engaging book, and the writing is florid without being Victorian wallpaper overwhelming the plot and characters. I enjoyed it. I’ll probably pick up Winter’s Bone the next time I see it at a book sale.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book comes from a whole series of books that came out shortly after Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche (which I read five years ago). Think of it as a 1980s response to the shifting in gender roles which has continued to this day. Reactionary–and I don’t mean that perjoratively, only they were reactions to the upcoming prevailing norms) responses like this, tongue-in-cheek but sort of true.

However, this book doesn’t resonate with me because I’m not a girl. I can’t understand, truly, the societal pressures upon women, especially women in the early part of the Reagan years.

The book rather has a bit of a dual nature of its satirical ideal of womanhood. It’s the uber-feminine princess and the hard-charging business woman. You know, fifty percent of this woman:

I didn’t find the book particularly amusing, but I didn’t find the original very funny, either.

I must have been conditioned by the matriarchy or something.

Books mentioned in this review:

I read this book back in college in those heady days twenty years ago when I’d skip my classes in the core requirements (did your humble narrator actually get a D in a university-level class? Yes, yes, he did) to read in the library. That is before this book came upon its fiftieth anniversary edition and back when I might have been a little less skeptical of the book.

This was a very big deal when it came out, and it details the author’s experiment where he darkened his skin with some drugs and UV treatments and passed as a black man in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia in the November and December of 1958 or 1959. This book collects a series of articles he wrote for the magazine Sepia and includes some material about reactions after he published the stories.

As I mentioned, I read this book in college. I then read a collection of Langston Hughes poetry because the title comes from a Hughes poem (“Dream Variation”). That’s what I did in those days when I should be attending a college class: reading a book my high school sociology teacher (Mrs. Hutson) referred to once, and then following the chain. I’d also memorize a Hughes poem ("Dreams") which I would not burst out with during a college class of The Church and Racial Justice when Rebecca W– asserted that whites never learned their culture even though I could. Let’s just say that as a young man, a product of the projects where I was the minority and whatnot, that I thought some about The Race Question when it was a question and not an answer to every political debate.

So, fifty some years after the book’s publication and a pile of years after the first time I read it, I was less impressed.

Not with what Griffith did and maybe not even what he intended, but how he presented it.

As I mentioned, he has included a frame around the actual journey, wherein he talks about his decision to undertake the transformation and the aftermath. In part of the intro, he announces that he’s an expert on race relations. And there’s no reason given. Perhaps, in certain quarters in 1961, people knew him and knew this to be true, but he really should have gone into that.

Additionally, so much of the book is his interior life, his reactions to events, and his moralizing and sermonizing on the Race Question along with telling us how the Negro thinks. Again, there’s no background or source for his expertise or why we should take his word for it–except that he’s darkened his skin and has gone to Louisiana.

The actual events and interactions he includes in the book are sparse and bare-boned. He details the first day pretty concretely, including his association with a shoeshine stand owner and his arrival in New Orleans, his taking of a room, and a political meeting. Then we get a lot of overview about how far he has to walk, the infrequency of places where he can use the facilities, and a bit of concrete interaction with the shoeshine guys. He talks broadly about looking for work, but the concrete details are lacking. Then he goes to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, takes a room, freaks out about being in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, calls up a newspaper friend who picks him up and drives him out of Mississippi. Then he goes to the coast of Mississippi and begins a whirlwind tour of the south in his last couple of weeks.

So he never really settles in anywhere but New Orleans (for about two weeks) at the onset. So overall, the book takes on the flavor of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed or any of the modern journalistic escapades where a journalist parachutes into a different lifestyle for a short period of time and discovers that the experience conforms with his or her preconceived notions, but with a little touch of colorful flair that makes it interesting. It captures more the experience of being a white man passing as a black man in the south moreso than the experience of being a black man in the south.

Also, it could probably have done with a companion study of what his experience would have been travelling through New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and Bangor, Maine while his skin was darkened.

At any rate, it’s an interesting premise, and it’s an interesting book. It took Griffith some galls as big as church bells to do it. However, he could have presented the material more solidly, showing instead of so much telling.

Books mentioned in this review:

I ordered this book based on a theatre review on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Web site.

Before we get into what I think of the book, I’m going to do a little aside about jsonline.com, and maybe Milwaukee in general. I remember when I was in school being amazed and impressed with how many concurrent productions you could catch at the Marcus Center downtown. In the height of the season, there were sometimes three or four different plays running at the same time in different auditoriums in the same building. Basically, it’s a multiplex of drama. Not including the other troupes down in south city or the smaller groups. Man, I went to a bunch of different productions my senior year, and I loved it–and I chastised people who were eager to leave Milwaukee after the university to go places with Culture. I lived in St. Louis, and I volunteered for a theatre group for a while and supported others, but it was nothing like Milwaukee. Of course, it could simply be that the theatre groups are scattered all over St. Louis, where the cultural scene in Milwaukee has a high density downtown.

Several times a week, jsonline.com has a theatre review, where someone puts in the paper–or at least its online version–a review of a local theatre company’s current production. This, too, differs from St. Louis. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and its online equivalent don’t bother with covering its theatre groups. That fell to smaller free newspapers in the region. Of course, I can’t compare it to Springfield, which is far smaller than Milwaukee, nor can I compare it to the Springfield News-Leader, which is essentially four twenty three year olds with Journalism degrees retyping police reports and penning a column a week on their life experiences as journalists.

So I’ve been reading the theatre reviews on jsonline.com, as I said, and it’s made me excited for drama. And I read the review for this play, and I would not mind seeing it performed. So I settled for ordering it and reading it.

It’s a short play–the review mentions it’s an hour long, and that translates into 37 pages including production notes. The story unfolds in a stylized manner, with a man and a woman by a wash tub as they recount their lives together and their memories. Although it’s set in the fifties or sixties and in New Zealand, the themes stand outside the time and place–like it should in good drama and, frankly, art. It’s actually a pretty simple plot–this is a one act, after all–and it has some choreographed scenes that are but stage instruction in printed form.

So I enjoyed it. It, and the ever-present jsonline.com theatre reviews, certainly make me want to go see some drama on stage. After a couple such, I might be inclined to try my hand at writing it again.

Oh, and on a trivia note, this is not the first time I’ve reviewed a book called Skin Tight.

Books mentioned in this review: