Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This John D. MacDonald paperback original, written over 50 years ago, centers on a man working for a construction company whose boss commits suicide with a harpoon gun. The protagonist’s harpoon gun. And it doesn’t look like suicide after all. Circumstances and the individual plots of the individual people have hemmed him in as the suspect, though. But when the woman friend who the protagonist discovers too late he loves is found in a canal, the police have to turn him loose. For vengeance.

I hoped for a bit of bloodshed at the end, but there’s no burst of gun violence. It wouldn’t suit the characters, of course. MacDonald created another interesting little town with its own people, problems, and story. I like MacDonald. A lot. I was recently saddened to realize I will eventually have read all of his books.

I’m reviewing these books out of order; I read this book when I went through a recent sci-fi set including Solaris and Lovelock. So apparently it was not only a sci-fi set, but also a single word title sci-fi set.

This book centers on the return of a human rescued in space by the Haklh’hi. The young man was raised from infancy by the herd-like aliens. As they return him, they behave a little suspiciously, sending him into a civilization that has slipped after global warming and nuclear wars to determine how warlike the survivors remain. Unfortunately, the aliens have only prepared the boy by showing him old television shows, so the reconnaissance fails. And the Haklh’hi plans are not as benign as they’ve let on.

An interesting read, something to keep you puzzling what the final twist will be. At which time, you will say, “But of course.”

This is a very early thriller from a very young (from the book jacket photo) Cornwell. Probably precedes his success with historical novels, but this very book could be a historical novel of sorts since it deals with a veteran of the Falkland Islands War.

A disabled veteran, winner of the Victoria Cross, finds that his boat–the one thing he missed most–has been beached during his absence and stripped of gear. The probably culprit: a roughneck employed by the television personality who purchased the veteran’s father’s home. The guy is drawn into the television man’s circle when the television man wants to produce a documentary about the veteran’s heroism. The whole thing turns complicated when agents of the television man’s former father-in-law look for revenge against the television guy for the accidental death of his wife in a yacht race. The television guy is going to race again and eventually the veteran gets involved.

It’s a convoluted plot with a meandering pace. The book includes a lot of nautical detail, which sort of gummed it up since I was not that interested in it much. Perhaps the historical novels have similar pacing issues except that I’m interested in the details.

It’s clear to see why Cornwell ended up in the genre where he did. Historical novels suit him better than straight ahead thrillers.

As an anonymous commentor said when I reviewed Ben Bova’s book of the same name, the novel Millennium by John Varley, based on the short story “Air Raid” by the same, is better than the film Millennium, based on the short story “Air Raid” by John Varley. You know, he’s right, but it’s a strange odyssey from the short story to each. According to Wikipedia:

We had the first meeting on Millennium in 1979. I ended up writing it six times. There were four different directors, and each time a new director came in I went over the whole thing with him and rewrote it. Each new director had his own ideas, and sometimes you’d gain something from that, but each time something’s always lost in the process, so that by the time it went in front of the cameras, a lot of the vision was lost.

Ergo, the timeline is as follows: In 1977, Varley writes the short story. In 1979, he begins on a screenplay. In 1983, the novel comes out. In 1989, a movie based on a revised screenplay comes out. Based on the special effects, I would have guessed that the movie was closer to the novel than the X-Files’ television debut. But there you go.

An air crash investigator finds some anomalies with the crash. A time traveller from the future leads a team to recover people scheduled to die in air crashes and replace them with semi-living bodies to repopulate the species or something. Their goals intersect and create a paradox. The book interweaves their point of view, whereas the movie retreads the timeline a bit to turn the story from the investigator’s tale to the woman’s testimony.

The book has more depth and detail, as indicated, with the futurists from further in the future and not knowing the source even of the time traveling apparatus that lets them go back. Additionally, the characters are fleshed out, the robot is not a poor C3P0 clone, and there are real questions of free will and manipulation of time. Plus, the woman is harder and more crazy. However, it ends with in a fashion similar to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series, where the Deus ex Machina is not a Machina at all.

An enjoyable read, and it made me watch the film again. You know, I haven’t told you how I came to view the film. In 1996 or so, I had a membership at Blockbuster and was wont to go rent a film or two to pass an idle evening (before I got addicted to reading as heavily as I do now). So I was browsing, and I thought the film’s box and teaser were interesting enough to warrant watching. I was disappointed with the film. Then, in 2007 or so, I was browsing Euclid Records in Webster Groves and found the DVD, and I thought, “Hmm, that looks interesting.” It was only when I started watching it that I realized I’d seen it a decade earlier. Now, with the viewing after reading the book, I’m up to 3. That’s probably more times than Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristopherson have seen it combined.

Sick, I know.

Well, after reading Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon, of course I picked up this book, a novel about Scipio’s adversary which I’d picked up a while back.

The book is an interesting combination of first person narrative with historical fact in that the battles are in the right order makes a pretty compelling read. We get bits from Hannibal’s childhood as the son of Hamilcar Barca and his growth into the leader of the Carthaginian army in Europe. It talks a bit about his disdain for politics and whatnot and intimates at the hard drilling between battles and the preparations that the general had to make.

Unfortunately, the book stalls a bit after the Battle of Cannae; we don’t get much about what Hannibal did in the 15 years he spend in Italy after the battle. The Battle of Zama seems an afterthought. Then the book ends with Hannibal’s death in exile.

The author made this the first of a trilogy; I would have figured out how to do it, but I guess the second are from Scipio’s point of view and the third is simply titled Carthage. The author lets us know how well researched the book is by including quotes in the original Greek throughout. So I’m sure he’s researched it quite a bit, but one cannot take the events in any novel as true. I won’t cite it in a paper.

Pretty good read if you’re into the history of the period and want something more narrative than scholarly.

I liked this book. It involved a lot of aspects of home buying, moving, and whatnot with which I’ve recently been reacquainted. Also, it’s old school Dave Barry, written when he was young, married to his first wife, and before he became a brand. You know how you can tell? Is his name above the title or below it? There you go. As Amazon shows below, this book was later rebadged with his name above the title (Dave Barry’s Homes and Other Black Holes).

Additionally, behold how I make a brief cameo in the book:

Hard to argue with that.

I enjoyed Yakov Smirnoff’s humor back in the old days (those 1980s again) when his America vs. the USSR and incredulous immigrant schtick brought a unique perspective to being an American. This book recreates a bunch of those moments, and since I can remember what that was like, I can still laugh with it. Since I’m seeing the USA of today turn into that USSR of his humor, it’s not humor without sadness.

I know Mr. Smirnoff has continued to work the comedy thing, so I have to wonder how much I’ll enjoy the contemporary Yakov. Since I’m in Springfield, where Professor Smirnoff teaches at MSU and near where he has a theater at Branson, I’ll find out, certainly. I might even run into him on the street someday.

So consider this review a preliminary suck-up.

This isn’t the book for the Kris Kristofferson film of the same name or for the Lance Henrikson television show of the same name. Instead, it’s a book written in 1996 about the state of the world and a close call for a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR except for a lunar rebellion that takes control of the warring sides’ incomplete ABM satellite networks.

It’s a pretty good read, and a strange extrapolation about the turn of the century from 1976. Space travel has really gone well, with waystation space platforms and lunar colonies in place for over a decade by the book’s setting. However, no great push to correct software written about the time of the book. Also, the Soviet Union remains a strong force in the world and the UN is a force for good.

A good science fiction book if you can put yourself into the now alternate-universe where it takes place.

When I read the selected works of Cicero earlier this year, Cicero kept telling me about the Roman age of heroes and of Scipio. So when my beautiful wife and I were killing some time in Patten Books a couple months back, I found this volume for $6. That alone should tell you how far gone I am into my current Roman history sort of phase (for me, 4 books in a couple of months is a pretty determined phase). SIX DOLLARS I spent on this book. And enjoyed it.

So if you’re like me and don’t really know who Scipio was, he’s the guy who beat Hannibal. In Carthage.

Now, if you remember your trivia, Hannibal took elephants over the Alps. Of course, since you remember the Roman empire and not the Carthaginian empire, you probably think it went badly for Hannibal. Not so. He trashed the Romans and then moved into Italy and maintained an army near Rome for 15 years. He might have stayed for another 15 or worked toward actually attacking Rome if it hadn’t been for that meddling kid, Scipio.

Scipio, like Hannibal, was the son of a commander who died in Spain. After some bravery and heroics, he got himself named commander of the Roman forces in Spain and then managed to throw the Romans out of Spain, cross into Africa, and march on Carthage. It was at this point Carthage withdrew Hannibal from Italy and the two met in the Battle of Zama. Wherein Scipio beat the master strategist and earned the title Africanus.

Without Scipio, the author argues, there would have been no later Roman republic and Roman empire. However, he’s forgotten in popular memory now because he didn’t bring bears across the Strait of Gibraltar or some other novelty.

With a subtitle like “Greater than Napoleon” (added to the new edition), you can tell that the author writes approvingly of the subject. Personally, I approve of that narrative type. I’d rather read some swashbuckling account of the person under study than a well-footnoted smug bit where you get as much of the professor’s disdain as anything else.

So the book is a good read and a very good bit of military history, back in an age where men were men, usually from the age of 13 to their deaths at 30.

I read this book pretty soon after Missouri Deathwatch, so it posed stark relief. The professional wordsmith who cranked out this entry kept it pretty fresh and quick moving.

In this book, Nick Carter goes against AXE itself when a Soviet spymaster comes to town and shoots Nick. In the hospital, another attempt is made on Nick after his boss visits. Why does AXE want the Killmaster dead? Nick delves into it, discovering that the Soviet is part of a plot to infiltrate American nuclear facilities as part of a nuclear arms treaty mission. And more. With the help of a sexy reporter, Nick goes against the cops, against AXE, and against the President’s orders to discover the truth and save America. Even if he has to commit treason to do it.

It’s quality paperback pulp from the 1980s with only a couple of repeated stock descriptions of Carter’s arsenal. This series is worth revisiting when I get around to it and after I hit the Friends of the Christian County book fair again. That place is lousy with the pulp.

At first, I thought this book was going to be a mash-up between a pulp paperback thriller and a romance novel. The cover looks violent. The back mentions the title character was trained in a mercenary camp. The first chapter features her infiltrating rebel-held territory for the second night to make a deal with a rebel leader and ends up in a mixed martial arts fight with a couple of mercenaries.

But then it turns completely on that and becomes a bit more of a romance novel. The character changes into a photojournalist at the mercy of her feminine nature and under the protection of the males in the book, even going so far as striking out on her own a couple times to ill effect and the merciful rescue of the handsome mercenary she’s trying to resist.

Also, it ends abruptly.

Maybe it’s a good romance adventure or something, but that genre ain’t my bag, baby, and I was disappointed. In my defense, I picked up the book because Shank (which sounds like the pseudonym on a pulp thriller, so understand one of the reasons I bought a romance novel) lives in the area. The book is a little amateur, or maybe that’s just because I’m not familiar with romance, but on the plus side, it’s not hack work like some of the pulp series books I’ve read recently. Keeping the main character tough as she’s pitched would have made for a better book, but perhaps not one fitting the genre.

Now I better read some Ray Chandler or Andrew Sugar to rinse.

After a couple years of watching the game religiously, I think I have enough insight into how it works to talk football. Okay, I don’t have enough insight into the muscle memory mechanics of it to instruct how to block or how to turn the hips to fool a cornerback, but enough to talk it. As such, this book is really just a little refresher course on it except for the biographies of great past football players at the end. Red Grange, Jim Brown, et al.. This sort of thing makes the book for me because all the hype for the modern players and all the tipping of the hat to these guys, it’s good to learn what they did to make them household names fifty years ago.