Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Yes, I do realize that I’m a book behind on Steyn’s works. I run a little late on political books, since I can only take a couple of them annually. I read enough blogs to get my fix of this sort of material daily, and when you’re reading it daily, the book form seems to be a bit tiresome.

I actually picked this book as the first selection in a shared reading experience a friend of mine in Minnesota suggested. Sort of like a book club, but just the two of us, and over the phone. We were talking about demographics one day, and I remembered I own this book, so I recommended it. He borrowed a copy from the library, and when I called him again, he fumed a bit about it and said he couldn’t read it because… well, because Steyn is that way. Also, my Canadian friend in Minnesota is quite probably not that way, which is to say obnoxiously conservative.

So I read it with an eye toward what it would mean to my friend, who is not a conservative. The thrust of Steyn’s argument lies in three facets: 1) Demography is destiny, 2) Sclerotic, secular, non-reproductive societies have their roots in their cradle-to-grave welfare systems, and 3) A certain worldwide demographic wants to destroy the West and make the world submit to its religion, and its birthrate exceeds that of the West. If you’re reading this blog, you’re familiar with it. In Steyn’s thesis, Western Europe and possibly all of Europe will be overrun by Islamic citizens in the near term, which will destroy those countries as they’ve been known, and of all the West, only America will maintain its civilization since it is barely replenishing its citizenry through things done routinely in seventies science fiction in extraplanetary zoos by human captives on display.

Steyn weaves the three main thrusts of his arguments together instead of building them syllogistically to the conclusion, and he puts barbs into the text. Between those two things, it’s really not going to convince my friend and maybe not many who are yet unconvinced. However, I think the target audience of the book is those who are already convinced and want affirmation or restatement of their beliefs, hopefully so they can go forth thoughtfully and convince others.

Five years after the book, I’m not as gloomy as Steyn was (and is now, given the title of his latest book–After America for those of you who might not know). The sweep of history is broad and long, and its predictors are more often wrong than not. However, the book does crystallize, or should, that our Western traditions and heritage are better than all the others that have been tried and do require some conscious defense thereof. If you merely enjoy liberty without recognizing its sources, someone will quickly take it from you.

Is it super? Well, it’s over 4,850 entries spread over 506 pages, mostly on popular culture with heavy emphasis on films, so it’s big.

Is it trivia? Well, some of it is. A lot of it, though, depends upon phone numbers, house numbers, and license plate numbers of sets in films, sometimes the sort of thing you only glimpsed once. These researchers were thurough, and probably only working from videocassettes or laser discs when they compiled the book.

Is it incredible? Here’s the entry for KITT:

Michael Knight’s (David Hasselhoff) special black Pontiac Trans-Am in the TV series “Knight Rider.” KITT, which stands for Knight Institute Two Thousand, is voiced by William Danielson.

Incredible, as in you cannot believe any of it. Quick, what’s wrong with that entry?

Since it’s from 1984, all of the sports records have been broken since then except for Ivory Crockett’s 100-yard-dash record, which this book fails to mention. What it does rely on, though, is a very, very good knowledge of the author’s or the researchers’ favorite films, which explains why so many entries deal with Time Bandits or Somewhere in Time.

At any rate, it’s something that I kinda flipped through as I was winding down for bed or during sporting events over the course of months. I don’t know how much of it I’ll retain for Trivia Nights (the one item I’ve worked hard to retain is the name of the only singer to chart a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.) It also reminded me of how many interesting old movies I’ve not yet seen, and it assured me that Kate Mulgrew had done something else besides "Alien Lover" (which I have seen in its entirety) before Star Trek:Voyager.

Is it worth reading? If you’re a trivia masochist like I am.

Oh, a churchpeoplewhohomeschooldunit.

Well, it’s not as bad as all that, but you do kind of start keeping score about how many bad guys would be likely to vote Republican, don’t you? In this particular novel, the bad guys are a bunch of people in a free-lovin’ (and “free-lovin'” includes children) religious group out in the hinterlands. Some kid, a gay football star held back from college ball by an injury, kills a farmer at a grain elevator, which in turn leads to a deputy who’s in the free-lovin’ church killing him, who leads to someone killing the deputy to silence him. Virgil Flowers comes to southwest Minnesota to investigate and to romance the lady sheriff in town.

As with Sandford novels, the action jumps between the good guys and the bad guys, so you know whodunit and why very early in the book, and the real puzzle is how the cops will prove it and deal with the political fallout. Frankly, it’s a bit of a narrative cop-out, no pun intended, but it does keep the plot moving along (and the writing of the novel, I’m sure). This book hits a bang-bang climax, but that’s not the climax. Instead, like the book Painted Ladies, we end up with a later ‘climax’ where it comes down to a dysfunctional family resolution wherein the protagonist is present, but really is only a witness to something happening, which is also dissatisfying.

So it’s a disappointing book overall, but it’s paced well. So you might not mind the disappointing elements if you don’t think about them too much or if your taste varies from mine.

Well, now I’ve done gone and finished the series. Since I just took Painted Ladies back to the library, I picked up the last book in the Spenser series. Well, the last Parker wrote. Whether his estate keeps it going or not, this is the end of the series for me.

This book borrows a bit from Early Autumn, as Spenser takes on an apprentice to teach him how to be a man. It also borrows some from Stardust, High Profile, and the other show business plots in that it deals with a movie star (not a television star, not a radio talker, so completely different!), a large movie star, who might have killed a girl during some sexual games (fortunately, most modern audiences won’t know Parker is recycling Fatty Arbuckle). Complications ensue when Spenser not only gets fired for insubordination, but continues to discover that the mob owns this particular movie star as a money laundering device.

It’s recycled, and longtime fans and history buffs will know where it comes from, but it’s still not among the worst of the books involved. Again, Parker doesn’t summon the posse to help him, relying on his new apprentice, a native American. It’s not like Gerry Broz or the zombie version of April Kyle appear. The chapters follow the recently common chapter of action followed by chapter of talking to Susan trope, but at least though she’s a therapist, she’s his girl. So it’s probably worth a read.

Also, given that it’s written in the OE and not the DYB (Dark Years of Bush), there are no gratuitous jibes at Republicans or Bush in this book. It gives me heart that there’s a block of time in which modern detective fiction is written that does not slap at half the country to prove the detective or narrator is a sophisticated thinker.

You know, maybe I will try one of the new guy’s Spenser books. I might like them better than some of Parker’s postings. But I need to get out of the habit of getting books from the library. I have enough books to read now. And as for my Parker collection, as some of you know, I have one of the best Parker collections in Missouri if not the country. I’ve gotten out of the habit of buying the books whether new or used, but I’ll probably fill out the collection from used book fairs and stores as time goes on and through Ebay (for the hardback of Mortal Stakes, the only one from the early ones I lack in hardback). I used to have images of my collection on Geocities, but that’s gone now, obviously. If you’re interested (or, more to the point, if you don’t explicitly stop me), I’ll get those up sometime.

This Rex Stout / Nero Wolfe mystery starts out with a quick twist: Archie is hired by a businessman to follow him to a certain address, but the businessman does not show as scheduled. Instead, police are surrounding the address, as the businessman has been found dead in a construction site across the street. However, the corpse in the hole is not the man who talked to Goodwin. There are more twists in this book in the first thirty pages than you see in many books over the course of 300.

The book cannot sustain the twisting over the long haul, though; we discover that the real businessman, who is the dead businessman, had a love nest at the address where a variety of women came to call. One of them might have had a hand in the murder, and Wolfe and Goodwin investigate. It’s stretched a bit to novel length and relies a little bit on deus ex machina of Wolfe cogitating and using detectives other than the first person narrating Goodwin to set up the big finish, but it’s not a bad novel.

It is a little strange, though, that this book came out in 1960, nine years after The Book of the Crime, but Manhattan feels vastly different between them. In this book, it’s relatively modern, and but barring the lack of smart phones and computers, might be modern day. As a reader, I’m fortunate enough to remember those times, so I can relate to fiction written before 1998.

And as a side note, this novel appears in a three-book-omnibus edition of Wolfe stories. Because I’ve just about given up on hitting 100 books this year.

(See also this previous Rex Stout review, The Father Hunt.)

I had a certain sadness reading this book, the first Spenser novel published after Robert B. Parker’s death. The copyright notice even attributes the copyright to the Estate of Robert B. Parker. Even though I’ve been a bit rough on him in book reports for the better part of a decade now, his early works still meant a lot to me.

An art expert and college professor engages Spenser to guard him while he conducts a ransom-for-old-painting swap. A precise bomb kills the art expert after the swap, while Spenser is still on the job, so Spenser tries to track down the art thieves. In the course of events, he finds himself as the target while investigating an elite ring of mercenaries and art thieves who might be seeking to right art confiscations from World War II.

This book eschews some of the pitfalls of the later books. When he’s the target, Spenser has the chance to summon the rainbow posse of multicultural tough guys from around the country, but he does not. The book mixes in a large number of allusions to classical literature, but it still hits the regular Spenser catch phrases (“Tough, but oh so gentle” and “Pretty to think so” and whatnot). Additionally, the plot is a little forced, particularly the resolution, which takes a ring of the aforementioned international mercenaries out for Spenser and turns in a resolution based on a bad mommy and daddy domestic situation. A couple of the plot elements and set pieces within the book might also have been lifted pretty much wholely from the early works.

So it’s not too bad, but not without its flaws. Knowing that Parker won’t pen any more of them, good or bad, still saddens me, and I’m not sure how I feel about the series continuing without him.

It’s strange; I’ve borrowed a number of the later parts to this series from the library, and this is an ex-library volume that I own, so I kinda felt like I had to be extra careful with it when I read it. Even though, as an ex-library copy, it’s obvious that other people have not been as scrupulous as I. I passed this book a number of times on my shelves, each time a little surprised that I owned one of Sandford’s books that I had yet to read. Finally, the time was right, and I happened to spot it sometime other than I was 300 pages into a 600 page science fiction or high fantasy epic.

It’s an early volume from the series; number four, I think. Davenport has not yet become the political fixer cop he does later, although he does get a glimpse of that lifestyle as he travels to New York to try to hunt a serial killer whom he’d already captured in Minneapolis but who escaped custody. The killer is strung out on drugs and–wait for it–does gruesome things. Seriously. Although he just dumps the bodies and does not pose them ritually, which differentiates him from some of Sandford’s other villains.

As Davenport purportedly is supposed to draw press attention from the actual cops hunting the serial killer, he’s also commissioned as an outsider by a secret intelligence project to find a group of vigilante cops who might be vigilanteing. So there’s another thread here with lots of intrigue.

It’s an okay book, but Sandford does a very, very naughty thing: he withholds a very pertinent bit of information so he can spring it on us as a surprise. The bad guy is crossdressing to get his victims. So we get him all out and about and whatnot, and this pertinent bit is not revealed until an interview with a jailhouse neighbor transvestite reveals that the villain learned how to do it right from him. Then, suddenly, we get passages of the villain dolling himself up and mentions that he’s walking in heels, and so on. I mean, he’s hiding out as live-in help for an elderly woman by wearing drag at all hours, and this is not mentioned until two-thirds of the way through the book. Oh, for Pete’s sake.