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Given the interaction history of a user with movies/shows as follows:
Title: Cowboy Bebop; Genres: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi, Space; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Naruto; Genres: Action, Comedy, Martial Arts, Shounen, Super Power; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Ghost in the Shell; Genres: Action, Mecha, Police, Psychological, Sci-Fi, Seinen; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Akira; Genres: Action, Adventure, Horror, Military, Sci-Fi, Supernatural; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi; Genres: Adventure, Drama, Supernatural; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Elfen Lied; Genres: Action, Drama, Horror, Psychological, Romance, Seinen, Supernatural; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Howl no Ugoku Shiro; Genres: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy, Romance; Rating: 10.0/10.0
Title: Tonari no Totoro; Genres: Adventure, Comedy, Supernatural; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä; Genres: Adventure, Fantasy; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Hotaru no Haka; Genres: Drama, Historical; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Umi ga Kikoeru; Genres: Drama, Romance, School, Slice of Life; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Death Note; Genres: Mystery, Police, Psychological, Supernatural, Thriller; Rating: 10.0/10.0
Title: Karigurashi no Arrietty; Genres: Fantasy; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Kaze Tachinu; Genres: Drama, Historical, Romance; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Kotonoha no Niwa; Genres: Drama, Psychological, Romance, Slice of Life; Rating: 7.0/10.0 | anime |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Novotel Suites Cannes Centre; City: Cannes French Riviera Cote d Azur Provence Alpes Cote d Az; Review: This hotel is about a 10-minute walk from the Palais des Festivals on a busy street away from the traditional tourist district but that's actually quite nice. The hotel itself is very new-looking (Oct 07) and extremely nicely furnished. I had a very spacious room with a good quality double bed, chaise long, flat-screen TV and large desk. The bathroom was small but had a brilliant walk-in shower and was a bit like a first-class cabin on a ship. The breakfast is good and the coffee great and there's a decent little area for sitting out back. All in all, fantastic value for money. Two drawbacks: one evening, a horrific smell came from the bathroom and actually woke me and my neighbours up it was so bad. The hotel didn't seem to know what caused it. Also, there is only one lift and this causes problems in the mornings and I ended up walking down five flights of stairs to get to breakfast.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: GrandResort; City: Limassol Limassol District; Review: We booked this hotel just 2 weeks before leaving and chose it largely because it was a five-star in a big resort that had OK reviews. First thing to bear in mind is that this hotel is not in Limassol town but about 7 miles out along the coast past Amathus so if you're looking for somewhere you can just tip out of the hotel and straight into the busy bars and restaurants of Limassol, you're likely to be disappointed. Having said that, there are at least four or five decent places to eat and drink just opposite the hotel. The hotel's location just a short drive from the A6 motorway also makes it a brilliant base for exploring the island. Our room was a second-floor sea-view and all rooms appear to have very good views of the pool and sea and some even have fabulous views of the sunset (ours didn't but that didn't worry us). Don't take a mountain view room because all you'll see is a motorway and a dusty hillside. The room was perfectly comfortable if a little small and had just one armchair with tea and coffee making facilities and a well-stocked mini-bar. The bathroom was again quite small but had a good powerful shower and a line for hanging wet swimming costumes. There was a nice balcony with space for two chairs and a coffee table. The main problem was with the mattress - we asked for a double but this was just two singles pushed together and both mattresses were so hard, we woke up with bad backs the next morning. If you get this, complain, because we did get "new" mattresses the next day, although even these felt a little old and saggy. The breakfast buffet is very generous and of a good quality, though not great, and there was always somewhere nice to sit. The hotel's pool is very deep at one end but has a sectioned off area for children and the water was generally very clean and just cool enough to be refreshing. The beach is quite small and right next to the neighbouring hotel's but there's lots of space in the shade of the palm trees and the water was generally very clean without being crystal-clear and blue. There's a good watersports management area by the beach which is not owned by the hotel so you need to pay them in cash. Be warned: we took out the "Super Mable" inflatable two-person ride and it was so powerful, our arms ached for days afterwards! The hotel has several restaurants but they're all so much more expensive than those found opposite, the only time we ate at the hotel was breakfast and a couple of poolside lunches, which weren't very good. Reception were OK without being great. We asked them to book us a taxi to pick us up from the airport and they forgot, for example. All in all, this is a perfectly decent holiday hotel and a great base for those looking for a hassle-free place to stay. If; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Ibis Leiria Fatima; City: Leiria Leiria District Central Portugal; Review: Like most Ibis in the world, it seems, this one looks out onto a really busy road and a couple of petrol stations but is very cheap, very clean and fairly comfortable for the money. There are much more characterful places in Leiria for very reasonable amounts of money, I'm sure, but this did the job for a brief two-night stay and the staff all spoke fluent English and were very helpful.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Quinta Mirabela; City: Funchal Madeira Madeira Islands; Review: This is a very well-located and well-refurbished quinta with good facilities but fairly severe service problems, especially in the restaurant. First impressions are great: trendy lobby area, low lighting, darkwood floors and great views from pretty much everywhere. Our room (on the ground floor) was a good size with a proper king-size bed and fairly large bathroom although it could've been better arranged as one whole corner of the room just had a hatstand and two uncomfortable armchairs in it. The balconies on the ground and first floor look directly over the pool, which is nice but the slight disadvantage is that people swimming tend to nose in your room so we kept our nets closed most of the time during the day. Pool is great for a refreshing swim but as others have noted, it's not in the slightest bit heated so you need to be pretty hot to want to take the plunge. Breakfast is served in the curiously arranged first-floor restaurant (outside terrace but with virtually no views over the mountainside). It does the job but isn't amazing. There is a nice indoor "spa" area consisting of jacuzzi, steam room and sauna, all of which are well-maintained although you do have to ask reception to turn the steam/sauna on for you. My biggest problem was with the service generally: staff are mostly absent when you need them and everywhere from reception to the spa to the poolside bar has a phone with a notice telling you to call the restaurant when you want service. This works OK but is a real pain if all you want is a parasol, beer or towel. As a result, the place has more of a bed-and-breakfast feel to it than a proper five-star hotel (which it claims to be). We ate at the restaurant one evening: never again! Service was terrible, right from having to call a non-English speaking waitress over to plead for our menu through to getting a broken ballpoint pen to sign the check with at the end of the meal. I've never experienced anything like it anywhere. The other major disadvantage is the steep hillside this place is on. Unless you have a hire car (and driving through Funchal is no mean feat), you need to get taxis everywhere who inevitably rip you off. We ended p spending nearly 60 euros a day in cabs until we worked out that by staggering down the hillside to the bus stop, we could get on the cheap local no. 19 bus service into and out of town. This however is not a possibility if you have any kind of mobility problems because of the steep climb back up. Generally: a nice change from the other characterless seafront hotels in Madeira with good enough surroundings but a number of service issues and a difficult location.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Andriani s Guest House; City: Mykonos Town Mykonos Cyclades South Aegean; Review: This has been a favourite of our friends for years so we decided to stay here with them on their honeymoon holiday. Andriani's is a no frills guest house. The rooms are a good size and some (rooms 2 and 3 among them) have lovely views over the bay. Unusually for a little guest house, everything seems to be in working order and the air con is a pleasure to walk back into after a tough walk up the hill from town. Andriani herself makes the most delicious breakfast for you in the morning for just 8€ more and Antonios will pick you up from the airport if you ask when booking. Highly recommended.; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Florida Spa; City: Fuengirola Costa del Sol Province of Malaga Andalucia; Review: Just returned from a weeks stay at this wonderful hotel ... The Florida Spa. My second visit this year. (The first being a fortnight in January) All the staff are AMAZING. So friendly, they can't do enough for you. Maria, the restaurant manager is such a laugh !! She has a wonderful way with people. So kind to the older and less able bodied guests. We had a lovely room on the 8th floor overlooking the pool, with a fab view of the marina ,the town and a truly magnificent view of the surrounding mountains. The room was spotless, cleaned to a very high standard, and replenished everyday with complimentary tea/coffee and toiletries. The beds were so comfortable with lovely soft pillows. All making this another truly happy memorable holiday !!! Thank you to you all !!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Courtyard by Marriott Suzhou; City: Suzhou Jiangsu; Review: Just recently spent 5nights in this excellent hotel. Situated in a central part of Suzhou Industrial Park. Very easy to get around using taxis and subway services. All really friendly staff, can't do enough for you. Momo Cafe for breakfast was great. Nice food, plenty of selection, and the staff are very efficient and friendly. Our room was really lovely, beautifully maintained by housekeeping staff. Had everything you could wish for ... And very comfortable !! Would definitely stay here again. Thank you all; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Le Royal Meridien Shanghai; City: Shanghai; Review: Stayed here for two nights weekend break with family members, on a room only booking. Really good central hotel for shopping and sightseeing. Our room was on the 33rd floor, with wonderful city view overlooking Nanjing Road main shopping area, and the sights of the Bund. Well presented rooms, very comfortable large beds, well stocked mini bar ( if required) Thoroughly enjoyed our stay......Would definitely return here again.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Florida Spa; City: Fuengirola Costa del Sol Province of Malaga Andalucia; Review: Just spent another lovely fortnight at this hotel ... our favourite in Fuengirola ..... Beautiful sea view room kept spotlessly clean, fabulous food, comfortable surroundings.... but what makes this hotel so special is ..... all the superb staff that work so hard everyday !!.... Thankyou to you all 🤗; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jenny s Studios; City: Agios Gordios Corfu Ionian Islands; Review: We've already been staying at Jenny's for a week of our usual fortnight Sept/Oct Agios Gordios holiday so far ....... Don't want this holiday to end .... What a Special place Jenny's is....what a fabulous family.... Labros, Spiros and Sofi Grivas are ....they all can't do enough for you...... along with Marina who helps keep our beautiful little studio (No. 80) IMMACULATE...... it has everything anyone could wish for ...... along with all the little extras that they provide ......attention to detail .... thats what makes it extra special !! Thank you so much ..... to all of you !! 😀; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Apartamentos La Jabega; City: Fuengirola Costa del Sol Province of Malaga Andalucia; Review: We’ve stayed in Fuengirola for many years, booking with Thomson (TUI)...... but ....this is our first time staying here at La Jabega Apartments ... (Booked with Jet2 at full brochure price) We certainly won’t be doing it again .... We’re on the 7th floor ... overlooking the sea with a lovely view .... BUT The apartments are very dated, with drab furniture , and not really very clean. As stated many times previously in other reviews, the “kitchen area” is a joke !! We now find ...6 days into our stay ( of 9 nights) building renovations have commenced on our floor.. eg. Bathrooms being replaced etc. .... 5 rooms in total to the immediate left of us. The banging starts at 10am ... and finishes at 6pm. We twice have made a complaint to the hotel staff about the constant drilling and hammering ... who in total fairness have now offered us a change of room (for the next remaining 3 nights we have left of our holiday ........ BUT ... in view of the renovations being made on this floor .... no-one should have been put into any of the apartments on this particular floor for the amount of noise , dirt , and inconvenience this is making for holidaymakers. In Principal ....., It would have been manners for the La Jabega management to have informed holidaymakers of this pre arranged building work which is being carried out !!! And certainly Jet2 should have been informed ..... after all, who wants to come on holiday to stay in a building site !!!!!; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Florida Spa; City: Fuengirola Costa del Sol Province of Malaga Andalucia; Review: Just back from another lovely relaxing stay ... we’ve had a really fab time yet again ... A room on the 8th floor overlooking the pool (as requested) So beautifully maintained by the housekeeping staff ... most enjoyable food (as always) ... So much selection to choose from each day ... And what wonderful friendly hard working staff all around this hotel ... They’re a credit to the “Hotel Florida Spa” ..... Thankyou All ... we’ll most definitely be back again !!!! ... SOON 😀; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jenny s Studios; City: Agios Gordios Corfu Ionian Islands; Review: This is our second time staying at Jenny’s Studios ... and each time , just by chance staying in Room 80 ... Such a wonderful happy family run this little business .... From the first day to the last day of your holidays ... you are made to feel like part of their family ... Lambros, Spiros,Sofi and Marina .. They work so hard , the rooms are kept so beautifully clean and equipped with everything you could possibly need ... please don’t ever change a thing !!! 😘; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Stella Maris Apartamentos; City: Fuengirola Costa del Sol Province of Malaga Andalucia; Review: Just returned home from a most enjoyable six day stay at the Stella Maris ..... smallish studios but have the benefit of a great sea view from the balcony !! Very clean and well maintained by the housekeeping staff, a well equipped little kitchen dining area ... with kettle, toaster, coffee machine, microwave and cooking facilities etc..... A well equipped small bathroom , with both a small bath and overhead shower (with constant hot water) Very comfortable beds too... Many Thanks to the very pleasant and welcoming reception staff.... Will most definitely return here again !!!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Florida Spa; City: Fuengirola Costa del Sol Province of Malaga Andalucia; Review: Just spent another lovely restful week at the Florida Spa !!! Having also stayed here many times in previous years ... it never ceases to amaze me , the wonderful staff that work in this busy hotel. Everyone is so friendly, helpful and always seem to go about their daily work life so full of “happiness” ...... Yes ... there are areas of “tiredness” around the hotel ...that will need addressing in the very near future, but as with many other clients ... it just keeps drawing us back Year after year ..... and we’ll still return again ... maybe this year ... maybe not until next year ... I just wanted to say ... Thank-you to you all, for all your hard work ... X 😎; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Neverwhere; Author: Neil Gaiman; Genres: young-adult, thriller, crime, paranormal, fiction, fantasy, mystery; Review: OK, I just finished rereading this and have updated my rating to 5 stars. I had it at 3 because I read it so long ago that I could remember liking it, but not how brilliant it actually is. READ IT.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Where's My Cow? (Discworld, #34.5); Author: Terry Pratchett; Genres: young-adult, comics, children, paranormal, graphic, fantasy, fiction; Review: I read this to my son almost every night.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cryptonomicon; Author: Neal Stephenson; Genres: history, fiction, thriller, crime, paranormal, biography, historical fiction, fantasy, mystery; Review: I have had this book and author recommended to me by a number of people, however I couldn't get into it enough after a hundred pages to care to finish it and brought it back to the library.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Backyard Ballistics: Build Potato Cannons, Paper Match Rockets, Cincinnati Fire Kites, Tennis Ball Mortars, and More Dynamite Devices; Author: William Gurstelle; Genres: history, young-adult, children, biography, historical fiction, non-fiction, fiction; Review: I liked the book have only tried one project so far and it was a dud. we will see what happens.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: An Embarrassment of Mangoes: A Caribbean Interlude; Author: Ann Vanderhoof; Genres: history, biography, historical fiction, non-fiction, fiction; Review: The foodies guide to the Caribbean was a fantastic web of culinary and high seas adventure. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting however I am trying a number of the recipes and need to learn to sail.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Yiddish Policemen's Union; Author: Michael Chabon; Genres: history, thriller, crime, paranormal, biography, historical fiction, fiction, fantasy, mystery; Review: Couldn't get into it never finished.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth; Author: James M. Tabor; Genres: history, biography, historical fiction, non-fiction, fiction; Review: CRAZY.... made me want to crawl into holes in the ground :); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Shadow Divers; Author: Robert Kurson; Genres: history, fiction, thriller, comics, crime, graphic, biography, historical fiction, non-fiction, mystery; Review: Amazing story of risk and adventure in the name of discovery.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: I Shall Wear Midnight (Discworld, #38); Author: Terry Pratchett; Genres: young-adult, romance, comics, children, paranormal, graphic, fantasy, fiction; Review: In the interest of full disclosure I won this book though first-reads, however this just prevented me form having to check it out from the library for the two days it took me to read it. Prachett spins another brilliant tale making us look at the world around us in a different light. He deals with many issues that touch our lives in a way that makes you challenge your preconceived notions about the issues that he touches upon. Somehow he does this in a without making it a into the downer that you would expect from a book dealing with issues of domestic violence, death, and other depressing subjects. Actually looking back on it I am sure that most of the time I was reading with a smile on my face as the story progress across pages with Terry's usual laugh out loud writing style.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | goodreads |
Given the interaction history of a user with news articles as follows:
Title: Rams trade Marcus Peters to Ravens for Kenny Young; Abstract: In a surprising and unusual development, a two-time Pro Bowler has been traded from one playoff contender to another. The Rams traded cornerback Marcus Peters to the Ravens. The Ravens are sending second-year linebacker Kenny Young to Los Angeles in the deal, according to Jay Glazer. The move comes as a surprise, as the 26-year-old [more]; Category: sports
Title: Jalen Ramsey trade rumors: Rams acquire cornerback for three draft picks; Abstract: Jalen Ramsey finally got his wish. He will be playing for a Super Bowl contender.; Category: sports
Title: Eagles player upset team missed out on Jalen Ramsey; Abstract: One anonymous Eagles player thought his team should have made a move for new Rams cornerback Jalen Ramsey.; Category: sports
Title: Analysis: Elizabeth Warren growing into front-runner status; Abstract: Warren found herself defending the broad ambition she has laid out to remake the American economy and rebalance the nation's wealth.; Category: news
Title: Biden seeks to fundraise off fact he's running out of money; Abstract: Joe Biden's presidential campaign Friday admitted it is "worried" about its finances after it ended the third quarter of 2019 with far less cash on hand than its top competitors.; Category: news
Title: Yardbarker's NFL Week 7 game-by-game analysis, grades; Abstract: The Eagles were throttled on the road by the Cowboys. In the "Mud Bowl," the unbeaten 49ers shut out the hapless Redskins, and thanks to Lamar Jackson, the Ravens upset the Seahawks in Seattle. Here's Yardbarker's Week 7 whip-around.; Category: sports
Title: Democrats' 2020 race has a new shadow: Hillary Clinton; Abstract: Some Democrats are putting up caution signs for Hillary Clinton as she wades back into presidential politics.; Category: news
Title: How the Rams' blockbuster trade for Jalen Ramsey signals a new NFL; Abstract: Peter King lays out how the Jalen Ramsey blockbuster trade has changed the landscape of the NFL and how teams view fixing roster holes.; Category: sports
Title: Lori Loughlin Is Facing New Charges in the College Admissions Scandal; Abstract: Federal prosecutors brought new charges on Tuesday.; Category: tv
Title: Winners and losers from Game 6 of World Series; Abstract: Incredible pitching from Stephen Strasburg, timely hitting and an 'ump show' define the Nationals' World Series-tying win.; Category: sports
Title: Trying to find the market for J.D. Martinez; Abstract: It's the key to his opt-out decision.; Category: sports
Title: Republicans urge Bevin to provide proof of election fraud or concede; Abstract: A growing number of Republican lawmakers are urging Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a fellow Republican, to either provide evidence of the voting "irregularities" he has alleged or concede Tuesday's election to Gov.-elect Andy Beshear, who defeated him by 5,189 votes.; Category: news
Title: A new Astros sign-stealing clip may explain this 2017 George Springer home run; Abstract: Makes sense now.; Category: sports | mind |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: A Deck of Spells: Hoodoo Playing Card Magic in Rootwork and Conjure; Author: Charles Porterfield; Review: A deck of spells is an excellent book!!! It not only gives you spells by condition, but also spells specific to each card!!! Don't let it's size fool you, this book is packed full if information!!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Luz Y Progreso - A Handbook for Developing Mediums; Author: Sancista Brujo Luis; Review: Luz Y Progreso is a wonderful book detailing Puerto Rican Espiritismo Criollo. Not only is it packed full of information, it is also easy to read. Sancista Brujo Luis break down Espiritismo in detail. A definite must have.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hoodoo Shrines and Altars: Sacred Spaces in Conjure and Rootwork; Author: Visit Amazon's Phoenix LeFae Page; Review: May look small but its packed full of information!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Complete Book of Baths; Author: Original Publications Spiritual Books & Supplies; Review: A wonderful book filled simple baths for many different occasions. Highly recommended!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hoodoo Honey and Sugar Spells: Sweet Love Magic in the Conjure Tradition; Author: Visit Amazon's Deacon Millett Page; Review: A small book. Not a lot of a spell work but with what is in there you can create a honey jar for any purpose. Overall a great book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Black Scriptures: Foundational Rituals of Maergzjiran Magick; Author: Somnus Dreadwood; Review: The black scrioture is an excellent, must have book for any left hand path practitioner. It gives a general overview of the magick of each tower of apotheosis.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Left Hand: The Cabal Grimoire of Walking in Darkness; Author: Somnus Dreadwood; Review: This is an excellent book! A must have!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Vampyre Sanguinomicon: The Lexicon of the Living Vampire; Author: Visit Amazon's Father Sebastiaan Page; Review: A great book for people interested in vampyrism.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Profane Seals: A Compendium of Vile Sigil Magick - Volume I; Author: Somnus Dreadwood; Review: A great grimoire with tons of seals. A must have for any black magician.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rites in the Thirteen Tongues: An Intimate Sojourn Into Maergzjirah; Author: Somnus Dreadwood; Review: This is a great book. Not intended for everyone.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Crosman 12 Gram CO2 Cartridges; Brand: Crosman; Review: $.50 for a cartridge shipped. Now a day, it is very hard to find a brick of .22LR, CO2 air rifle is the way to go. About 4cents a pop.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Caldwell Tackdriver Shooting Rest Bag - Unfilled; Brand: Caldwell; Review: It takes for ever to fill the bag with rice. Buy the filled bag. trust me. Your time is money too.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: KENDA Smoke Type K816 Bicycle Tire - 26 x 2.1; Brand: Kenda; Review: and good price too. I bought this one for a home project. It is very easy to be cut in 4 pieces and attached them on my child powered toy ride with smooth wheels.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: UTG 3.8" ITA Red/Green CQB Dot Sight with Integral Mount; Brand: UTG; Review: They gave me a used one with ugly screw driver making on the sight adjust knobs. However, it already adjusted and held zero well so it took me no time to fine tune it on my pistol with just a few shots. The dot is OK for 10m air gun target. Some time it looks blurry as someone already complained but it is not the scope; It is just my old eyes. I think it will last a long time on my air pistol because this gun has no vibration what so ever. Will buy another one to fool around with my SKS... Just got the second one after testing the first for a week. This time a used one (First one is also a used scope even though I paid for new item)to save some $. Inspected the scope and found it was adjusted all the way to the right and the dot was on and off when tapped on it. No big deal these could be fixed. I increased the battery cap springs then brought the windage back to the center by looking at the internal tube. Mounted it on the IZH46 and fired 8 shots and the POI was adusted and placed on top of the POA. I guessed the first owner did not know how to install it. By the way the dot was so blurry at first but after I put my corrective glasses on I saw a nice little dot and nothing else could be rounder.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sportsman Supply Inc. Shooting Chrony 7000129 Beta Master Chronograph, Blue; Brand: Sportsman Supply Inc.; Review: With ammo shortage and reloading materials keep disappearing and who knows when they are back, owning a Chronny is a right decision. It helps you being busy at the range (looking smart at the same time) so you shoot less and use your ammo smarter. with all the tips I have learned from other reviewers, I have no issues using the Beta Master Chronograph. It works great if you understand the technology and its limitations. At this time, I only set it up to take single reading. I don't need string, calculations, memory, memory recall and other functions. I use Spread Sheet to do all that and it easier to look back to the data. This is how I set up: I put a side the metal rods and the white plastic canopies (These canopies serve as a white back ground increasing the contrast so the electronic sensors can see the bullets flying by easier. I even use black marker to paint the tip of the bullets when lighting is low.) I use wooden sticks and cut out white meat trays instead. Because these materials are cheap and easy to find locally, I am not afraid to frame the bullet fly path smaller with a blue or red markers in front so the sensors never missed a flying by bullet. A muzzle laser device also helps a lot with bullet trajectory confirmation (with rifle on rest and aims at the target.) Bottom line: If this Chronograph fails you, you would never be happy with other because..........you don't know how to use the device.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: NcStar 1X45 T-Style Red Dot Sight / Weaver Base (DTB145); Brand: NcSTAR; Review: I have 2 UTG 30mm red dot sight. They are nice and strong. This sight looks cheap. covers are loosely fitted. Scope mount is flimsy. However, is works fine on my mod. Crossman 2240.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Crosman Premier Hollow Point Pellet .22 cal, 14.3 Gr., 500 count; Brand: Crosman; Review: These are pellets I use for practice since 22LR geting too hard to find and too pricy to buy. What 's wrong with Ameria? When the good old days are going to be back?; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ultimate Arms Gear Tactical 12 Slot Dovetail 3/8" 11mm To Weaver - Picatinny 7/8"; Brand: Ultimate Arms Gear; Review: Odd looking but this is the only thing that work on my Benelli 95E. I have to cut 1.5" middle section away to fit it on my pistol (turn it into 2 piece scope mount). The red dot is installed quit solid on them.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hoppe's No. 9 Tornado Gunsmith's Brush , 12-Gauge Shotgun; Brand: Hoppe's; Review: Perfect.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hoppe's No. 9 Conversion Adapter, Rifle to Shotgun; Brand: Hoppe's; Review: No issue. great product.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bushnell Trophy TRS-25 Red Dot Sight Riflescope, 1x25mm, Black; Brand: Bushnell; Review: In the original review I gave the product 5*, now I give it a 1*. My 1st copy (gold lettering) I bought several years ago and It's been doing great on my .308 battle rifle (former). Hundreds of rounds have been shot at the steel gong at 100 yards and It hasn't fail. More than a year ago, I bought 2 more copies when they were on sale on Amazon planning to put on other rifles but they are hardly used. I did check the sights and found nothing wrong accept the color of the lettering (white). They are still well made and the dots are still sharp and round. A week ago I decided to buy a 2 MOA red dot sight so I can use my 22LR rifle on smaller targets. To be sure it is a 2 MOA red dot sight, I put it next to my 3 TRS-25 sights and for the first time I realized that I did not got what I paid for the TRS-25s both in negative and positive point of view. The issues here are just the sizes of the dots, not thing else. If the 1st TRS-25 (gold lettering) is truly 3 MOA (it is a bit larger than my newly bought AT3 2 MOA red dot sight), then other 2 sights I bought later have the wrong dot sizes. 1 is bigger (could be 4 MOA) and 1 looks smaller (2 MOA). Further inspections lead to the following findings: - my first TRS-25 (gold, 3 MOA) and 1 of the white (4 MOA) TRS-25 have the same front lens coating (amber). All LEDs on the 3 sights are different. - The LED on my AT3 (2 MOA) looks the same as the LED on the 3rd TRS-25 that is white and has 2 MOA dot. These 2 also have the same front lenses. Clearer optic and warmer looking with tiny bit of magnification. Because they are all excellent red dot sights with different sizes for the dots so I will find usage for all 3, but for whom who is looking to buy a TRS-25, be warned. You may not get what you are looking for. I just hate surprises so I give this product 1* and recommend AT3 2 MOA red dot sight. similar but with much better details and features.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: UTG MP5 Bi-directional Picatinny Mount, Low Profile; Brand: UTG; Review: I bought a claw mount for my Cetme year ago. it required skillful gunsmith to mount it. I got it on my gun firmly but experienced a lot of trials and errors. This UTG low profile mount is a great accessory for my C93. Together with Tactical Red Dot sight, they turn my obsolete HK33 clone into something that really joyful to shoot on weekends. It took me less than 15 min to mount the scope. After 60 rounds of Wolf Polyformance, the scope is still held in place and all shot landed a dinner plate at 100 yard off hand. I could not done this with the iron sight. Great produce.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: IRON JIA'S Tactical Red Dot Sight Scope 20mm Weaver Rail Mount with optional Dual High/Low Profile Rail Mounts and quick; Brand: IRON JIA'S; Review: Not the best red dot sight out there but it does hold zero and bright enough for day light even at noon. The one I got, the red dot is sharper than the green dot but I can live with it. Great product for poor weekend warriors.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Monstrum Tactical Low Profile Picatinny Riser Mount (0.5" H x 1.5" L), for Red Dots; Brand: Monstrum Tactical; Review: Low cost and it works. Great product.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Monstrum Tactical 1" Scope Ring Set, Low Profile, with Picatinny/Weaver Rail Mount; Brand: Monstrum Tactical; Review: I haven't mount them yet but they look great and should work fine.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: MAG 500 Qty 1/2" Inch Glass Marble Slingshot Ammo Solid Shot; Brand: MagLite; Review: Good slingshot ammo.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ganzo G728-BK Folding Knife Handle G10 Black Liner Lock 440C; Brand: Ganzo; Review: I buy this solvent more than diet coke nowaday.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Country Bound Silicone Wedding Ring 5 Pack, Premium Quality Wedding-Bands for Active Men, Sports, Gym and Work Comfortable Fit; Brand: Country Bound; Review: Now I can be a husband when I play and work.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Butler Creek Tini-Bikini Pistol Scope Cover; Brand: Butler Creek; Review: work nice on my PSL's scope.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hoppe's No. 9 Synthetic Blend Gun Bore Cleaner, 32-Ounce; Brand: Hoppe's; Review: I buy this solvent more than diet coke nowaday.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lee Precision 30M1 Carbine 3 Die Set; Brand: LEE PRECISION; Review: Very good tools. I am producing cheap and accurate 30 carbine ammo for my M1 carbines.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: UTG Universal Single-rail Rifle Barrel Mount, 5 Slots; Brand: UTG; Review: works great on my M1 carbine holding a red dot sight in place.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Sports_and_Outdoors |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Inter Hotel Nantes Saint Herblain; City: Saint Herblain Nantes Loire Atlantique Pays de la Lo; Review: We booked several rooms for a business trip to St. Herblain. The location was perfect for us, we only had a couple of minutes of a walk. The room was not the cleanest, but for a budget hotel still acceptable. It was quite cold in the room, even with the heating (we had a though spring, so it was a bit chilly for this time of the year). so especially in the bathroom it was a bit chilly. When I arrived the window was open, I closed it, but it was a bit smelly in the room, so I had to open it again. the beds seem tiny to me, and if you are sharing a room, there are not enough sockets next to the bed. But for a budget hotel and one night, it is okay. The only thing to pay attention to is the invoice to pay at the end. my colleague and I had breakfast on the 2nd morning, but we were charged for breakfast at the 1st and 2nd morning. The breakfast buffet is okay, nothing spectacular in terms of food, but at least freshly pressed orange juice. I would stay again for a night, no question.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Nhow Berlin; City: Berlin; Review: The first time I stayed here was for a conference, at first I was a little "scared" of all the bright pink colors, but it clearly makes the hotel very unique and special, I must say, that spending 7 nights there can make you a bit nervous ;) But overall I love the design of the hotel. The rooms are well sized, with a comfortable bed. The breakfast here is superb! they have lots of choices to chose from, they also prepare fresh omelettes, juices, tea, cremant,... this is the perfect way to start the day! I also like their bling bling sugar :) The sauna area is also easy accessible and you can get slippers and bathrobes to really enjoy your stay. And since it is a music themed hotel, you can also borrow a DJ/turntable station or guitars to take to your room. The staff is very friendly and helpful, i can only recommend this hotel!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Eden Montmartre; City: Paris Ile de France; Review: We stayed here for 2 nights in August. When we arrived we were a bit surprised by the size of the room. I guess we were also a bit misled by the pictures here on tripadvisor, but we expected a slightly bigger room than what we got. We arrived in the morning, but were able to deposit our luggage and came back late in the evening. When we got to the room, the light was flickering - besides being not very convenient, it was kind of creepy ;) We mentioned this to the reception, but the issue wasn't fixed during our stay. So do be able to do something in the bedroom (especially see the things in your luggage, we had to take the luggage close to the bathroom door and benefit from that light. it was a bit challenging, especially since there was not very much space, but we managed. The hotel is conveniently located, you have all kinds of restaurants and little shops around, the metro is close-by and also several busses. When looking for a low-cost and nice option in Montmarte, this hotel can definitely be recommended.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Morehampton Townhouse; City: Dublin County Dublin; Review: We were here on a business trip for a trade show at the RDS. The distance to the venue is quite convenient, for this I would book it anytime again. The Hotel itself is quite basic. The rooms had already better times, but everything was clean. My room was facing the main street, so it got a bit noisy - if you have a light sleep, request a room away from the main street. Furthermore it was quite cold in my room. The breakfast was included and offered standard items like toast, jam, coffee and tea and also freshly prepared eggs and a full english or irish breakfast. The staff was very friendly and helpful. Overall a good experience; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Guilin Central Hostel; City: Guilin Guangxi; Review: We had two private rooms booked in this hotel and we are very happy with our experience. The hotel is very well located, you can basically walk everywhere from the hotel. There are many restaurants closely and also a night market. The rooms are decent sized, with a nice bathroom and all amenities needed. The staff was very friendly and helpful. Overall the experience is perfect, with price, location and quality you can book this hotel without any hesitation!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Papaya Paradise Bed and Breakfast; City: Kailua Oahu Hawaii; Review: We stayed in February for one week at Papaya Paradise and had a great time! Jeannette was always very helpful and gave us great tipps and recommendations, and also a tipp on how to save money for getting groceries. We used the kitchen every morning to have a quick breakfast with bagels and toast and the freshly brewed coffee and tea. The only thing that i was missing, was a stove to actually cook in the kitchen. But otherwise we were not missing anything. There are towels provided and also beach games and coolers to take along. we had the room at the end of the house and it was wonderful to wake up in the morning and see the sunrise and the beautiful lush green "mountains". We spent one night in Honolulu and the rest of our holidays here and I would absolutely do it again. Kailua is more residential and more quiet. But we were able to reach any other place by car easily, without worrying about a parking spot or too much traffic. We are very happy that we found this little gem on Oahu and would for sure come back again! Thank you Jeannette and Bob, for your hospitality!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with movies/shows as follows:
Title: Jaws (1975); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ray (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Bourne Supremacy (2004); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Braveheart (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Silence of the Lambs (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ghost (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Napoleon Dynamite (2004); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Finding Nemo (Widescreen) (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Italian Job (2003); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: GoodFellas: Special Edition (1990); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Bourne Identity (2002); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pretty Woman (1990); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Entrapment (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Armageddon (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Extended Edition (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Edition (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pearl Harbor (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ocean's Twelve (2004); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Incredibles (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Monsters (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Forrest Gump (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Million Dollar Baby (2004); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Spider-Man 2 (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Big Fish (2003); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lost in Translation (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Godfather (1972); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Rock (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Aviator (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Troy (2004); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Toy Story (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jurassic Park (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Spider-Man (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Batman (1989); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pretty in Pink (1986); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: Extended Edition (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Notting Hill (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Independence Day (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Con Air (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope (1977); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Fugitive (1993); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Saving Private Ryan (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Terminal (2004); Rating: 2.0/5.0 | netflix |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Author: Visit Amazon's Stieg Larsson Page; Review: Easy of Read: 7 Pace: 6 Psychologically despicable villains. Suspension of belief sometimes hard to accept. Intriguing and for the most part the plot is not cookie cutter. Slow-paced the first 150 pages but it picks up afterwards. In the early parts, the financial and business aspects hooked me in, but afterward it turned into a psycho thriller. A very good mystery book. Read on Kindle. 18+ Graphic depiction of psycho's thoughts and actions that I need to consciously shut out to guard my mind.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership; Author: Visit Amazon's Linda A. Hill Page; Review: Contrary to prior reviews, I find this book a very easy read. The main reason is the immense amount of real-world quotations from the 19 managers being interviewed and tracked over the course of their first year being a manager. The book becomes an engaging account of the travails of these managers with insights to their inner fear and doubts. I find the book even more engaging than many novels! It helps to put on the context hat while reading this. Get into the role of a first line manager or an aspiring one, or if not imagine reading this book as your boss. The second approach will invoke deep thoughts on how things are looking from your boss' side. I can almost guarantee you will not treat him the same after reading. Highly recommended work by Linda Hill, along with her next book, "Being the Boss".; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Corrections; Author: Visit Amazon's Jonathan Franzen Page; Review: Very depressing but it _ought_ to make you feel a bit better about your real-life family situation (however bad you feel it goes sometimes, chances are it can't be near as bad as the Lamberts!) The book is long, but considering I only finish 30% of my readings, the fact I finished it signifies it had meant enough for me to keep on flipping the pages until the end (or is it because now I take the train 3 hours every workday? hmm). Say what you want about the repulsiveness of the characters; I think one thing everyone can agree on is that the characterizations are complexly deep. And anybody who has cultivated deep enough relationships with other family members will find themselves in these pages. Sure, the writing may be over-sentimentalized and the book tethers disproportionately towards the dark side, but I take it to mean that's how Franzen intends it to be, and not as a true reflection of reality. The value of the book to me is this: It gives me an alternate glimpse of how irreparable, lost, and tragic things can be if deterioriatingly left uncorrected. It is a lesson on what not-to-do and what not-to-say. Now, Corrections would be an even much better book if it gives lessons on how-to-do-it-right, but then I'd imagine such a book would be much more difficult to write.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Abraham Lincoln; Author: Visit Amazon's James M. McPherson Page; Review: In the middle of life's busyness as a non-historian, a non-US Citizen even, it is still good for one to be reminded time and time again of great souls, and the lasting deeds they have helped birthed. It is also good for this reminder to be short, to the point, yet weighty and full of mass. This quick 76-page summary serves excellently as such reminder of 1) the triumph of the republic system as the modern world knows it, and 2) the abolition of slavery. I came away finishing the prose inspired, encouraged, informed, and yes, reminded.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia; Author: Visit Amazon's Joe Studwell Page; Review: A book about the rich and famous that really contains a story about South East Asia. Studwell rejects the racial explanation of SEA problems and instead pins most of the blame for the region's underperformance to the lack of political will (or some say conscience) of the political elites of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Yes, the godfathers do steal, bribe, rob, transgress, and exploit, but they do so within a preset legal and executive systemic political players that enable them. All the while, the hundreds millions of regular citizens in poverty earning USD$2 are waiting for a concentrated noble effort to finally come from a new breed of political elites (and the economic elites who will follow) the like never seen before in the region.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Surely You're Joking, Mr.Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character (Counterpoint); Author: RALPH LEIGHTON' 'RICHARD P. FEYNMAN; Review: I knew nothing about Feynman the colorful character when I first leaved the first (digital) page of this delightful book. I closed it being enriched by this Physics professor's tale of his escapades not only in the scientific realm, but even in those realms far away: art, music, education, travel, dating, gambling, nude dancing, and safe cracking. The common threads of late Dr. Feynman's autobiography is his social fearlessness, his hyperactive mind, his uncanny persistence and diligence, and for the most part, his humility. Each of these traits existing on its own in one individual would have already yielded a wonderful persona worthy of knowing, all taken together compound my regret of not knowing him sooner, and resulted in a renewed vigor to develop similar characteristics in my own life journey to a desiredly full, accomplished life.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Orangey the Goldfish (Book 1); Author: Visit Amazon's Eddie Bee Page; Review: We like the goldfish, and would to read more about Orangey. So happy to learn that there more Orangey and Billy books? Yay!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: There Was an Old Pirate Who Swallowed a Fish; Author: Visit Amazon's Jennifer Ward Page; Review: It's good, and it's funny too. It's funny because he ate the ship. - Jonathan, 4 years old. Gave 5 stars.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics; Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas H. Davenport Page; Review: Highly readable and to the point book about developing a quantitative culture within large corporations, it offers a framework of problem framing, variable selection, data gathering, analysis, and presentation, with a focus of solving business problems. A very good reference book in this increasingly necessary field.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Give Up, Gecko!; Author: Visit Amazon's Margaret Read MacDonald Page; Review: I buy many kindle children books in the past 5 months ( must be around 15 by now). got a lot of misses, but this one is definitely a winner. Great high quality graphics, simple prose which is PERFECT for 2-5 years olds ( I have two kids who are within that range). But most important is this gem subtly teaches a strong and important moral about persevering no matter the odds, no matter unlikely, especially in the face of adversaries and adversities. On top of that, the gecko does it in a classy and magnanimous way. Look forward to the next one by the author/illustrator.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Fantastic Flying Books of MR Morris Lessmore. W.E. Joyce; Author: Visit Amazon's William Joyce Page; Review: ... And Morris figures out that books can do something that a human can do: everything. And Morris left his book, and the girl came inside the library, and Morris' book hopped to her. - impressions from Jonathan, a 4 years old.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: More Than A Hobby: How a $600 Start-Up Became America's Home & Craft Superstore; Author: Visit Amazon's David Green Page; Review: Mr. Green is not your ordinary CEO, and Hobby Lobby is not your ordinary retail company. You quickly get this sense from the get go, as he recounted his rise from an unspectacular, exceedingly shy elementary student, to store handyman, store manager, and finally an owner of a $1.4 billion dollars operation. Along the way he nearly picks up everything that would categorize a businessman as a success: spectacular growth, stable family business with family members actively working for the company, and community impact. All except a college degree. Good insights in this book about running a company with strong distinct values of integrity first, and then hard work, while at the same time impacting the community with moves such as putting out Christian ads in newspapers every Christmas and Easter, close on Sundays, closing stores an hour earlier daily for better work/life balance to workers, and generating various community building organizations (I did not know Hobby Lobby is behind Every Tribe Entertainment that produces "End of the Spear"!). Green's business formula is not novel nor complicated, for example for a retailer the size of HL barcodes are still not instituted, and they seem to get by fine without. Refreshing proof that basic, bread-and-butter business common sense, strong principles, and execution can still thrive in today's economy.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Breaking Out: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas; Author: Visit Amazon's John Butman Page; Review: Butman's book is essentially another how-to book. The difference is, and it IS a huge difference, Butman strives to teach others to deliver the optimal how-to's. As much as this sounds like a critique, it actually is a sincere compliment. So many of us actually do have a message, bottled deep inside us. A message that, if somehow can be crystallized, properly defined, passionately lived out, and then unleashed (or broken out), can really make a difference, or dare I reiterate, Change The World. In this sense, Breaking Out is timely. No more the bottleneck of the production and processing of ideas into meaningful human-race-benefiting product lies in limitations in ideas dissemination, cross-pollination, or delivery. The contemporary bottleneck now is the effectiveness of the ideator (what Butman calls the idea entrepreneur). In attempting to relieve this bottleneck, Breaking Out has done its share of changing the world. Brief recap of the content: - start by discovering the one life-defining idea that truly fascinates you, clear definition after struggling and soul-searching is key here - continue accumulating articles, ideas, frameworks, lists around this fascination. This process can, and typically does, take years, most commonly decades - live the idea, even if it means acting the act of Leaving (career, comfortable life pattern. geography, social structure, etc.), in the process weaving a strong personal narrative interwoven into your idea/fascination, giving it legitimacy and weight - attempt to give life to it, i.e. make it respirate (I think animate is the more descriptive term here), through various means involving an audience (direct, indirect, hidden, secret). This among other things is achieved through two penultimate activities: writing (both short and long), and speaking - a practical discussion on how to enact all the above; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Me, Myself & Bob: A True Story About God, Dreams, and Talking Vegetables; Author: Visit Amazon's Phil Vischer Page; Review: This spiritual book disguised as an autobiography book touched me really deep, and is the best book I have read in the past several years. It started off normal enough: a down-to-earth genuine-enough guy recounting his rise from a wide-eyed type-B kid with a dream to change the world, and beyond his imaginations, actually did via his creation: VeggieTales. There is a lot of funny, inspiring, touching moments in the first 200 pages, and I was ready to stamp this book a "nice read" rating by then. After all, Vischer's account up to that point was heart warming enough, insightful enough, and well-paced enough. But boy, the last 50 pages truly made the book. In hindsight, there is only one point in "Me, Myself, and Bob", that truly trumps all other. A point that is so unique that I have never had it told to me, and told to me so masterfully, before. The point is summed up in Vischer's quote of C.S. Lewis: "He who has God plus many things has nothing more than he who has God alone." I have to admit, I have never really understood what Lewis meant with this saying. It turned out it took Vischer's dramatic, yet humble account of the rise and fall of Big Idea to impress on me the true wisdom behind the quote: that life is truly about God, and God alone. The combination of what I learned at business classes and my bible studies sometimes point to profound true revelations, but they sometimes also produce inconsistencies such as the proper value of success, dreams, hard-work, planning, especially in the context of God's plan. I, like Vischer during his Big Idea days, adhere to this mixed-up notion that God wants me to create my dreams and visions (the bigger the better), God favors me more the harder I work and produce (and frowns on me when I am not), and He will surely help me to be wildly successful if I do all the above. Vischer candidly accounted all the things that have gone wrong with his promising enterprise so people like me can learn a valuable though costly lesson: that God is the one who gives dreams (revelations), God is the one with the plan, and God values obedience and our God-seeking heart so much more above someone's net worth, job title, picture-perfect family, etc. And if it takes destroying your dream in order for you to get it, may you, like Vischer, be able to say that the lesson, nay, the God, that you have gained through the whole painful process, is far worth it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Too Many Fairies: A Celtic Tale; Author: Visit Amazon's Margaret Read MacDonald Page; Review: A charming little Celtic tale, about the right attitude to have while working and washing dishes. Tedious work is better than having fairies unendingly do your work in the house!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Epic: The Story God Is Telling And The Role That Is Yours To Play; Author: Visit Amazon's John Eldredge Page; Review: Everone needs to read this at least once. The linking of story arches from beloved contemporary movies (Matrix, Narnia, LotR, Apollo 13, Titanic, Star Wars, Gladiator) with the Greatest Story serves as the great encouraging reminder that gives and reminds of the true meaning of existence! Ending this book is like ending a well-crafted uplifting movie itself; you will be satisfied, you will be freshened up, ready to face the day once more.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Epic: The Story God Is Telling; Author: Visit Amazon's John Eldredge Page; Review: Everone needs to read this at least once. The linking of story arches from beloved contemporary movies (Matrix, Narnia, LotR, Apollo 13, Titanic, Star Wars, Gladiator) with the Greatest Story serves as the great encouraging reminder that gives and reminds of the true meaning of existence! Ending this book is like ending a well-crafted uplifting movie itself; you will be satisfied, you will be freshened up, ready to face the day once more.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time; Author: Visit Amazon's Jeff Sutherland Page; Review: The sooner you read this book, the better. The concepts may seem foreign to 80% of traditional knowledge workers in corporate America, but in 10 years, scrum will be the only acceptable way to manage multi-human projects across industries, disciplines, and geographies. Either we change, or we die.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Executive Warfare: 10 Rules of Engagement for Winning Your War for Success; Author: David D'Alessandro; Review: How come I have never learned about Executive Warfare or D'Alessandro before? This is certainly not the kind of book you'll see recommended as textbook by MBA programs, although it should. D'Alessandro's style is the most direct I have ever read from a business author, and yet not without a lack of humor. On the contrary, the author weaves spectacular stories from the corner offices with an unexpected, colorful and refreshing writing style. It is more than a mere book rich in form either. If I were of the "hard work is your one key to success" mindset, finishing this book cured me from such simplistic thought. D'Alessandro's anecdotes and insights towards the hidden motivation of power players in big organizations are too real and, once explained, too recognizable to nit be admitted as truth. And the truth is this: that there indeed exist a complete underlayer of ultra-competitive political game being played in corporate executive offices, that ignoring and foregoing playing this game will guarantee your career stagnation, and that reading this book will supply you with the indispensable rule book on how to learn and ultimately be proficient in it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Hustler; Author: Visit Amazon's Walter Tevis Page; Review: "The Hustler" is related to the movie by Paul Newman, and later the movie "The Color of Money" with both Newman and Tom Cruise. The book is a surprisingly good classic though, since it opens up the hidden struggle of every man: how should we respond to life challenges? Hidden within every man is the secret desire to win and dominate. If there are docile men out there, it is not because they are born that way, but it is because they have subconsciously developed a losing mentality, complete with the accompanying excuses and rationalization. This book beautifully dissect the psychology behind it, but even more than that, strongly suggests a way out of this negative spiral. A very masculine book; I believe every man should read this, and unloose their shackle of a humdrum life and start living life the way it has always been intended to be: victorious, purposeful, and in full. As a side note, most females will not be able to resonate with the concepts in this book, however, it will give you a fascinating insight into the male's psyche, and might make them better understand what is going on in the minds of their counter-gender.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading; Author: Mortimer J. Adler; Review: If ever there was a book guaranteed to bring immense positive effect to any reader, this book is one of them. As its title suggests, How to Read a Book is a meta survey of the act of reading itself. It is extremely clear, and its division of the four stages of reading is immensely helpful. Although written decades ago, 90% of this book will still remain relevant in guiding its readers on how to not only become a better reader, but also to become more adept in growing the mind. Take this from someone who reads this in 2015! This book even have tests to help identify (and track) which of the 4 stages of reading you currently belong to. Even the list of recommended book alone (sorted in chronological order) almost worth the price of admission. All the classics that made the definitive list (more than 100 of them, from Homer's Iliad to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago) share one thing in common: every subsequent reading will always bring new brain food for our mind to chew on! If there is one criticism that could be made of this book, it is the fact that there is a certain hard prerequisite in relation to the reader's skill and fortitude in order to utilize the book properly. And yet, paradoxically, the only thing required to overcome this barrier is a simple act: determined reading and re-reading of How to Read a Book. Doggedly digesting How to Read a Book is among the best 4 hours I have ever spent!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Purity: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Jonathan Franzen Page; Review: A great book must have moments where you suddenly just need to stop reading, because you just mentally got hit by a truck and have to shake your head and re-orient yourself. And there were more than a few of these moments for me while reading Purity. Moments where I had to take stock of where I was, as a third-person, and process how the hidden parallel between a character's inner thoughts and my own have adversely impacted how I socially function all these years. Some of those sentences are: "But she was fundamentally far shyer than her self-presentation led anyone to imagine, and she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness" "I only called you to warn you a righteous tornado was heading your way. Anabel needs to read Nietzche and get over her thing about good and evil. The only philosopher she ever talks about is Kierkegaard. Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He'd never stop asking, 'Can I do this to you? Is this OK?'" A very powerful thread throughout Purity (although by no means is the only one) is the struggles of the various characters in dealing with their internal moral conflicts. The five main characters have their own unique ways in responding to the offer of moral absolutism: ranging from idealization, corruption, rejection, vacillation, ridicule, to return. The less-than-stellar review of the book in Wall Street Journal correctly mentioned that Franzen tries to explore and dissect this journey into both the light and dark (mostly dark) sides of the call of moral absolutism without bringing religion into the mix. The review faulted him for that. I for one, found immense value in Franzen limiting the response to just five fictional lives, but treated them with such rich and in-depth colorful textures, that it is as if he had allowed me to live those lives, and through living five alternate lifetimes, allow me to critique, evaluate, and ultimately affirm my own life's answer to the challenge of how to response to moral absolutism. After all, this is one of the most deeply personal and highly important question of our post-post-modern age, one that has taxed Purity's characters toward extreme states of mental anguish. To each of the characters, and to each of us readers, the choice and the responsibility will be fully his own, as it should always be.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Math; Author: Visit Amazon's Joseph Mazur Page; Review: Very gentle introduction to math, with straightforward categorization of logic, infinity, and reality that makes sense to the common sense of a non engineering, non math middle age person who wants to learn how to be a good machine learning engineer.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Gabriel's Redemption (Gabriel's Inferno); Author: Visit Amazon's Sylvain Reynard Page; Review: Loved this book was the best of the three just didn't want it to end it could have given us a bit more insight to what happened in the future; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Happy Hour: Racing on the Edge (Volume 1); Author: Visit Amazon's Shey Stahl Page; Review: this whole series is amazing its a wonderful love story between two people that you will never forget all the characters are very memorable and will have you laughing and crying and experiencing every emotion there is please hurry up and write some more books in this series cant wait to read them have read all shey stahls books and they are all wonderful don't listen to all the negative crap they are all amazing books and some of the best money I have ever spent on books; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: One with You (Crossfire); Author: Visit Amazon's Sylvia Day Page; Review: I just finished reading this book today and I loved it ive loved the whole crossfire series and im not sure why there have been so many negative reviews the last book was beautifully written and a very fitting end to Gideon and evas story I think when we read a series we love so much its always sad to read the last page and we always whish the story could go on for ever I think you did a great ending thank you Sylvia day .; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Where Lightning Strikes (Bleeding Stars) (Volume 3); Author: Visit Amazon's A.L. Jackson Page; Review: A fantastic read the first book I have read by this author and I am now going to read the other books in the series Blue you sing my soul; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: American Prince (American Queen) (Volume 2); Author: Visit Amazon's Sierra Simone Page; Review: I loved every word of this book and the whole series was amazing; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition (16GB, White); Brand: Samsung; Review: Very sharp looking picture on this, beats the Ipad in my book. Super fast and very light but a tad bit over-priced. Still its the best tablet with or without the stylus, better than the nexus even.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Fintie Folio Case for Kindle Fire HD 7" (2013 Old Model) - Slim Fit Folio Case with Auto Sleep; Brand: Fintie; Review: Got it for her new kindle. She loves the color purple and she loves this. I was surprised by how well made it was for the price.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ArmorSuit Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7" 2013 Screen Protector Max Coverage MilitaryShield Screen Protector For Amazon Kindle Fire HD; Brand: ArmorSuit; Review: Just like putting on a phone, goes on super easy and looks very nice after air bubble dry up. Fits perfect.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: QVS USB Power Charger & Sync Extension Cable for iPod/iPhone/iPad - USB Extension Cable - 3.' - White (ACX-U1M); Brand: QVS; Review: Works.. Umm feels pretty solid. Its just for power and it states that. It works for power extension. I have it powering two USB fans.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: PNY Turbo 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive - P-FD32GTBOP-GE; Brand: PNY; Review: fast but housing seems cheap and feels like it will break anytime you slide the protective guard back and forth; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Koss UR-20 Home Headphones; Brand: Koss; Review: Junk broke almost instantly trying them on. Made almost entirely out of plastic went to adjust ear pieces on head and mechanism snapped and now useless - returned this junk.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: SanDisk Ultra CZ48 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Transfer Speeds Up To 100MB/s-SDCZ48-032G-UAM46; Brand: SanDisk; Review: slow write speed; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Mediasonic ProBox K32-SU3 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Enclosure - USB 3.0 SuperSpeed, Optimized for UASP; Brand: Mediasonic; Review: Bought 2 refurbs and they work well and connect at usb 3 speeds. Simple design which is easy to put together without even looking at directions. Update: thought i had a bad hard drive glad i didn't toss it! I removed foam from above the sata connector in product and now pc recognizes the drive - but if i move unit at all it errors out. The sata connector in this unit is very touchy with any drive you put in it I recommend looking elsewhere for a better product; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: ideapro USB Bluetooth Adapter, 4.0 Dongle Micro Bluetooth Transmitter, Transfer for Laptop Windows 10 Raspberry Pi, Linux, Stereo; Brand: ideapro; Review: seems to work well. using with rpi 2 with retropie and ps3 controller. edit: it has now started to freeze my system at random and slows/halts loading of programs on rpi.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mount-It! MI-2041L Swivel Full Motion Articulating Tilting TV Wall Mount, Computer Monitor Mount, Corner Bracket for 23; Brand: Mount-It!; Review: Mounted to wall by myself in under 15 minutes and seems very well built. Comes with all necessary hardwarw to mount a variety of TV sizes and comes with an HDMI cable and Level tool. Can move TV with easr and it stays where you leave it Very happy with this TV mount; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Kinivo BTH240 Bluetooth Stereo Headphone Supports Wireless Music Streaming and Hands-Free calling - Red; Brand: Kinivo; Review: Well I bought these in September of 2013 and it is now June of 2018 and these still work great... Speechless that $20 Bluetooth headphones would last this long! (Granted I do not use these everyday but still fantastic!); Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Electronics |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: For use on Ruger LCP; Brand: LaserMax; Review: Great purchase. Anyone with a LCP should have one of these. Highly recommend; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Streamlight 69240 TLR-4 Compact Rail Mounted Tactical Light with Laser Sight - 125 Lumens; Brand: Streamlight; Review: Excellent piece of equipment!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: IMI-Defense Glock Tactical Holster Polymer Roto Level-2 Retention Paddle For Glock 17/19/22/23/25/31/32; Brand: IMI-Defense; Review: Love this holster, but doesn't work/fit Glock 19 Gen4 with TRL-4 light&laser. Probably order a TRL-3 and keep the holster. That's how I roll lol; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Uncle Mike's 88891 Gun Pak Belt Pouch Holster, black, 8; Brand: Uncle Mike's; Review: Always looking for conceal carry options. Had one of these years ago and loved it. Found it again on Amazon. A must buy for conceal carry of sub-compact or 5-shot revolver. Highly recommend this piece of equipment.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Galco AL486 Lite Ankle Holster for Ruger LCP, Right, Black; Brand: Galco; Review: Great holster! Great ankle holster! Warning: remove the battery from your LaserMax before attempting to secure the pistol in the holster the first few times. I ran the battery down and had to replace it. I haven't really tried the pistol in the holster for any extended period yet to see if batery still goes dead or if the holster has stretched enough? Otherwise, it's a great piece of equipment!!!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bianchi Patroltek 8026 Black Open Top Compact Flashlight Holder; Brand: Bianchi; Review: High quality product as you would expect.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bianchi Patroltek 8026 Black Open Top Compact Flashlight Holder; Brand: Bianchi; Review: High quality product as you would expect.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: BLACKHAWK! SERPA CQC Concealment Holster - Matte Finish; Brand: BLACKHAWK!; Review: Good quality. Exactly what I expected.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pearce Grips PG-43 Grip Extension for Glock 43 (2); Brand: ; Review: What can you say? They're perfect on my Glock 43!!!!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Safariland 6285 Level II SLS Retention Duty Holster, 1.50-Inch Belt Drop, Black, STX Tactical, Glock 19, Right Hand; Brand: Safariland; Review: High quality product as you expect from Safariland!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Sports_and_Outdoors |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Champion Double Dry No Show Sock - 6 Pack (CH608); Brand: ; Review: Breathable, cosy, comfortable.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Easy USA Womens Canvas Slip on Shoes Flats; Brand: Easy USA; Review: You get what you pay for. I started to experience some aches in my foot and these have bad arch support and my feet are slightly angled in them, indicating a poor sole. Not for long walks on crummy pavements. Maybe when you're sitting on grass.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Elove Jewelry Tungsten Carbide Steel Lord Rings; Brand: Elove; Review: Got this as a gift. My friend loved it, looks like the real deal.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: COSPLAZA Cosplay Wig Light Purple Long Wavy Curly Anime Show Party Hair; Brand: COSPLAZA; Review: A+ quality, very cute. Makes me wonder what it would feel like to have soft, long fine hair. Jealous of people with hair texture like this. Very adorable and cosplay quality stuff.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: DADAWEN Women's Girl's Summer Beach Flip Flops Pool Shoes; Brand: DADAWEN; Review: Keeps me from stepping on anything cruddy in my apartment. The toilet overflowed today and these saved me. Not complaining. I like these.; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with businesses as follows:
Title: Hello Bistro; City: Beachwood, OH; Review: We have been really enjoying the salads here since Hello Bistro opened ( me-Cobb, wife-Caribbean Shrimp) but we are starting to worry. The salads started to get watery (as if the water used to rinse the lettuce was not drained away.) Recently, the dining room has started to smell like hamburgers. Have the ventilation fans been turned off?
We know that new chain restaurants are best when brand new and the farther away from opening day, the poorer the quality. That said, our hope was that a salad restaurant could keep up the pace. It seems less of a stretch. Who knew ventilation and water would be their downfall?
We're continuing to visit. We're hoping someone realizes the boo boos. If not corrected, we'll end up doing exactly what we do with every other corporate food entity and abandon them when it gets too far off track. Our hope is that this will be a longer run than most.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hello Bistro; City: Beachwood, OH; Review: We have been really enjoying the salads here since Hello Bistro opened ( me-Cobb, wife-Caribbean Shrimp) but we are starting to worry. The salads started to get watery (as if the water used to rinse the lettuce was not drained away.) Recently, the dining room has started to smell like hamburgers. Have the ventilation fans been turned off?
We know that new chain restaurants are best when brand new and the farther away from opening day, the poorer the quality. That said, our hope was that a salad restaurant could keep up the pace. It seems less of a stretch. Who knew ventilation and water would be their downfall?
We're continuing to visit. We're hoping someone realizes the boo boos. If not corrected, we'll end up doing exactly what we do with every other corporate food entity and abandon them when it gets too far off track. Our hope is that this will be a longer run than most.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Hello Bistro; City: Beachwood, OH; Review: We have been really enjoying the salads here since Hello Bistro opened ( me-Cobb, wife-Caribbean Shrimp) but we are starting to worry. The salads started to get watery (as if the water used to rinse the lettuce was not drained away.) Recently, the dining room has started to smell like hamburgers. Have the ventilation fans been turned off?
We know that new chain restaurants are best when brand new and the farther away from opening day, the poorer the quality. That said, our hope was that a salad restaurant could keep up the pace. It seems less of a stretch. Who knew ventilation and water would be their downfall?
We're continuing to visit. We're hoping someone realizes the boo boos. If not corrected, we'll end up doing exactly what we do with every other corporate food entity and abandon them when it gets too far off track. Our hope is that this will be a longer run than most.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Astoria Cafe & Market; City: Cleveland, OH; Review: Time and again, Astoria never disappoints. We were late to this particular restaurant, first sampling it less than a year ago, but since have made up for our loss. Nothing here has been anything less than perfect. Wonderful entrees, great wine options and fun deserts. If you can't figure where to go for lunch or dinner, consider Astoria. You will not be disappointed.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Paris Las Vegas; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: The rehab is finally started, but the odd elements of running this hotel are still holding strong.
An exercise room that opens at 6:00? Really? The management of this hotel should visit virtually any other hotel in America and they will find 24 hour exercise facilities. With so many business people forced to be in this city because of the Convention Center, hotels need to be considerate of the business travelers.
When did "Resort Fees" become an acceptable way to increase the cost without increasing the cost. Despite the fact that the "resort fees" are not optional, they increase the cost of a stay. Unlike airlines who use these fees to falsely lower prices, the "resort fee" at hotels can't be avoided. These should be illegal.
Payment for WiFi access? Again really? Even the cheapest of hotels offer this free.
Las Vegas is now the most expensive city in the country to visit. Free parking is replaced with heavy fees, meals are 25% higher than even New York City and everything you want to do comes at a high cost. The Paris Las Vegas is no exception, even boosting that sting with a reduction of service.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Paris Las Vegas; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: The rehab is finally started, but the odd elements of running this hotel are still holding strong.
An exercise room that opens at 6:00? Really? The management of this hotel should visit virtually any other hotel in America and they will find 24 hour exercise facilities. With so many business people forced to be in this city because of the Convention Center, hotels need to be considerate of the business travelers.
When did "Resort Fees" become an acceptable way to increase the cost without increasing the cost. Despite the fact that the "resort fees" are not optional, they increase the cost of a stay. Unlike airlines who use these fees to falsely lower prices, the "resort fee" at hotels can't be avoided. These should be illegal.
Payment for WiFi access? Again really? Even the cheapest of hotels offer this free.
Las Vegas is now the most expensive city in the country to visit. Free parking is replaced with heavy fees, meals are 25% higher than even New York City and everything you want to do comes at a high cost. The Paris Las Vegas is no exception, even boosting that sting with a reduction of service.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Paris Las Vegas; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: The rehab is finally started, but the odd elements of running this hotel are still holding strong.
An exercise room that opens at 6:00? Really? The management of this hotel should visit virtually any other hotel in America and they will find 24 hour exercise facilities. With so many business people forced to be in this city because of the Convention Center, hotels need to be considerate of the business travelers.
When did "Resort Fees" become an acceptable way to increase the cost without increasing the cost. Despite the fact that the "resort fees" are not optional, they increase the cost of a stay. Unlike airlines who use these fees to falsely lower prices, the "resort fee" at hotels can't be avoided. These should be illegal.
Payment for WiFi access? Again really? Even the cheapest of hotels offer this free.
Las Vegas is now the most expensive city in the country to visit. Free parking is replaced with heavy fees, meals are 25% higher than even New York City and everything you want to do comes at a high cost. The Paris Las Vegas is no exception, even boosting that sting with a reduction of service.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Paris Las Vegas; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: The rehab is finally started, but the odd elements of running this hotel are still holding strong.
An exercise room that opens at 6:00? Really? The management of this hotel should visit virtually any other hotel in America and they will find 24 hour exercise facilities. With so many business people forced to be in this city because of the Convention Center, hotels need to be considerate of the business travelers.
When did "Resort Fees" become an acceptable way to increase the cost without increasing the cost. Despite the fact that the "resort fees" are not optional, they increase the cost of a stay. Unlike airlines who use these fees to falsely lower prices, the "resort fee" at hotels can't be avoided. These should be illegal.
Payment for WiFi access? Again really? Even the cheapest of hotels offer this free.
Las Vegas is now the most expensive city in the country to visit. Free parking is replaced with heavy fees, meals are 25% higher than even New York City and everything you want to do comes at a high cost. The Paris Las Vegas is no exception, even boosting that sting with a reduction of service.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Paris Las Vegas; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: The rehab is finally started, but the odd elements of running this hotel are still holding strong.
An exercise room that opens at 6:00? Really? The management of this hotel should visit virtually any other hotel in America and they will find 24 hour exercise facilities. With so many business people forced to be in this city because of the Convention Center, hotels need to be considerate of the business travelers.
When did "Resort Fees" become an acceptable way to increase the cost without increasing the cost. Despite the fact that the "resort fees" are not optional, they increase the cost of a stay. Unlike airlines who use these fees to falsely lower prices, the "resort fee" at hotels can't be avoided. These should be illegal.
Payment for WiFi access? Again really? Even the cheapest of hotels offer this free.
Las Vegas is now the most expensive city in the country to visit. Free parking is replaced with heavy fees, meals are 25% higher than even New York City and everything you want to do comes at a high cost. The Paris Las Vegas is no exception, even boosting that sting with a reduction of service.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Paris Las Vegas; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: The rehab is finally started, but the odd elements of running this hotel are still holding strong.
An exercise room that opens at 6:00? Really? The management of this hotel should visit virtually any other hotel in America and they will find 24 hour exercise facilities. With so many business people forced to be in this city because of the Convention Center, hotels need to be considerate of the business travelers.
When did "Resort Fees" become an acceptable way to increase the cost without increasing the cost. Despite the fact that the "resort fees" are not optional, they increase the cost of a stay. Unlike airlines who use these fees to falsely lower prices, the "resort fee" at hotels can't be avoided. These should be illegal.
Payment for WiFi access? Again really? Even the cheapest of hotels offer this free.
Las Vegas is now the most expensive city in the country to visit. Free parking is replaced with heavy fees, meals are 25% higher than even New York City and everything you want to do comes at a high cost. The Paris Las Vegas is no exception, even boosting that sting with a reduction of service.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Paris Las Vegas; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: The rehab is finally started, but the odd elements of running this hotel are still holding strong.
An exercise room that opens at 6:00? Really? The management of this hotel should visit virtually any other hotel in America and they will find 24 hour exercise facilities. With so many business people forced to be in this city because of the Convention Center, hotels need to be considerate of the business travelers.
When did "Resort Fees" become an acceptable way to increase the cost without increasing the cost. Despite the fact that the "resort fees" are not optional, they increase the cost of a stay. Unlike airlines who use these fees to falsely lower prices, the "resort fee" at hotels can't be avoided. These should be illegal.
Payment for WiFi access? Again really? Even the cheapest of hotels offer this free.
Las Vegas is now the most expensive city in the country to visit. Free parking is replaced with heavy fees, meals are 25% higher than even New York City and everything you want to do comes at a high cost. The Paris Las Vegas is no exception, even boosting that sting with a reduction of service.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Holsteins; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: I heard that burgers here were the equal of Gordon Ramsey's (which I believe are the best in LV). While they are good, they are just not of the same caliber. The fries were notably more pedestrian than GR's luscious Parmesan version. I did appreciate the beer pairing suggestions and felt my beer worked very nicely with my burger choice.
Burgers are everywhere. There is no need to accept a tertiary version. My vote, pass on the place and eat across the street.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Holsteins; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: I heard that burgers here were the equal of Gordon Ramsey's (which I believe are the best in LV). While they are good, they are just not of the same caliber. The fries were notably more pedestrian than GR's luscious Parmesan version. I did appreciate the beer pairing suggestions and felt my beer worked very nicely with my burger choice.
Burgers are everywhere. There is no need to accept a tertiary version. My vote, pass on the place and eat across the street.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Holsteins; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: I heard that burgers here were the equal of Gordon Ramsey's (which I believe are the best in LV). While they are good, they are just not of the same caliber. The fries were notably more pedestrian than GR's luscious Parmesan version. I did appreciate the beer pairing suggestions and felt my beer worked very nicely with my burger choice.
Burgers are everywhere. There is no need to accept a tertiary version. My vote, pass on the place and eat across the street.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Martorano's; City: Las Vegas, NV; Review: Imagine a tattooed tough guy posing as a a makeup-wearing Chef. This, apparently is the man responsible for the classic food served at Martorano's. This peculiar mix delivers a mixed bag at hefty prices.
We started with the calamari and Tomato Mozzarella. Both were excellent. The Calamari featured a touch of spice and the ringlets were tender and flavorful. The tomato was meaty and held up to the equally dense cheese. The Veal Picatta was tender and not cloying with lemon.
So, why the 3 Stars? Two reasons. Try to find the cost of a meal at Martorano's. Yes, photos are on Yelp, but on no official website. What are they trying to hide? Clearly they know this is an overpriced restaurant. Secondly, over $42 for Veal Picatta? Enough said.
I'm not sure why the Marketing Department behind this place felt a makeup encrusted tough guy was the right "face" behind a brand. The image caused my wife to laugh on previous visits to the city, hence the reason we never visited this place. I finally tried because I was part of a group. I'm glad I tried it, but it is doubtful I will ever return. Like the guy in the photo and the hidden prices, it just seems sleazy. After a visit, I know that to be right.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Trio; City: Cleveland, OH; Review: It is time to overwhelm this restaurant with customers. After multiple visits, we are convinced that today, early 2019, this is the most under appreciated place in Cleveland. Dish after dish, serving after serving, each is memorable. This is a small-plate restaurant and each time we have felt compelled to order "just one more dish!" They are that good.
I might normally recount the highs of each serving. I think I'd run out of superlatives. Suffice to say, whatever you order will be great. We will be returning again and again. Won't you join us?; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Brassica; City: Shaker Heights, OH; Review: So this place is now on our weekend rotation! An assembly line constructs a salad or pita sandwich, but the difference here is the unusual ingredients, most with a Mediterranean flare. Lots of vegetarian options. You could probably make 1000 variations without a repeat. Can't wait to see what's next!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Black Pig; City: Cleveland, OH; Review: Time and again, visit after visit, the Black Pig proves itself to be one of the finest spots to dine in Cleveland.
I've always felt their version of Pork Belly is the gold standard, by which all others should be measured. Beyond that, there is a menu of exciting wonderful foods, each better than the next. My last meal of Pork Collar was crazy good. Not interested in Pork? My wife's fish was equally amazing. Clams? Mixed with chorizo, these were among the best we've had. Try anything, I'm sure it will be great.
Simply put, you cannot get much better than The Black Pig.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: BurgerIM; City: Cleveland, OH; Review: I hadn't expected much here, but was surprised by a reasonably good burger. The fries were unique discs. Again not bad, but a touch dry. The garlic aioli helped. A full bar makes this fast food spot different than the others. Finally, a very helpful and concerned staff made this place worth the visit.; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | yelp |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: The Source Code; Author: William Thau; Review: A ZERO "The Source Code" limps along like a bad comic book story told without pictures. Overflowing with clichs, glaring improbabilities, paper thin characters, and just generally so off the wall stupid, that "no way" becomes ones overriding thought. At least with bad movies, you can get together for a shared hoot, but with an awful book like this you are doomed to just suffer or throw it out. A compleat waste of time and money.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Nexus: Nexus Arc Book 1; Author: Visit Amazon's Ramez Naam Page; Review: Well written Science Fiction. The "Nexus" story line takes us into an interstitial moment of technological time when 'humans' start to develop 'posthuman' abilities. An action packed plot will keep the reader's attention while the author frames our contemplation of the social and political issues that can arise from the extension and enhancement of the human species. The fiction is enhanced made all the more enjoyable by well developed characters and the highly descriptive exotic locals. A good read.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future; Author: Visit Amazon's Mike Resnick Page; Review: "Santiago" is structured as a sequence of episodes, an ouroboros leading towards a surprise cyclic ending. The format allows for interesting but brief development of the minor characters, while we discover more about the major players. There was enough action and plot twisting, keeping me engaged to the end. 'A Myth of the Far Future' sums it up.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Assassin (Max Doerr Book 1) - Kindle edition; Author: Visit Amazon's Jay Deb Page; Review: Just plain bad. Lyrical english as a second language bits like Their vile faces were frozen in his memory like the cereal boxes on grocery store shelves It would be laughable if this wasn't one of the better lines in this clumsy, badly edited collection of words pretending to be a book. An epic fail.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: BENNINGTON P.I. "Bonita" (Volume 1); Author: Visit Amazon's D.W. Ulsterman Page; Review: With a flawed premise that suggests global warming is nothing more than a market manipulation to sell lightbulbs the average reader will have to wade through a considerable amount of ill conceived misinformation to get to the story. The P.I. is an old coot who is somewhat of a hoot, but should be killed off as soon as possible. I tried, but couldn't finish the book and put Ulsterman on my do not bother list. There are better reads out there.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Getaway; Author: Visit Amazon's Tom Barber Page; Review: This story gets off to a faux start, droning in minutia about Chase Manhattan Bank the reader doesnt need to hear. Barbers nagging style of writing, one where he endlessly explains everything with the hope of creating a reality that just isn't there, puts me to sleep. I don't see any point in reading further, the eBook was free, Barber can have it back. Save your time there are more interesting reads out there.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Quantum Lens; Author: Visit Amazon's Douglas E. Richards Page; Review: Somewhere there was a story here but the author gets stuck and rambles on about his personal views on topics which don't advance the story. The story: two guys figure out how to access zero point energy to do awesome stuff and gain super powers, okaay. Both go crazy and the horny female scientist cant save the hero and takes up with his billionaire best bud. Together they decide to pull the trigger dooming both our hero and bad guy to quarkdom. Well I just made up the ending, I got bogged down on the rant about obesity. I gave up, regretting the time Id invested to see what would happen, I just don't care. Off my Kindle, won't bother with his other books.; Rating: 1.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with news articles as follows:
Title: Mac Engel: As long as these results are acceptable, Dallas Cowboys will continue to be losers; Abstract: EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - No one will be fired today, of course, and some of the excuses are valid. But Jason Garrett and his team are losers. Everyone with the Dallas Cowboys is so wealthy and comfortable that they fear nothing, not even losing a game to the 0-4 New York Jets. Winning is the goal, but it's gravy. The Cowboys, the team that was at least better than the worst of the NFL, can no ...; Category: sports
Title: 'Dancing With the Stars': Sean Spicer still dancing with Trump support; Abstract: The former White House spokesman has gone from "Dancing With the Stars" controversy to a power contestant. He explains the smiles and the spray tan.; Category: tv
Title: Pelosi says she and Graham will introduce resolution to block Trump on Syria; Abstract: Senator Lindsey Graham has been trying to dissuade the president from withdrawing all the remaining U.S. troops from Syria; Category: news
Title: 'Serial Stowaway' Marilyn Hartman Held Without Bail After Latest Arrest At O'Hare; Abstract: "Serial stowaway" Marilyn Hartman was ordered held without bail after being arrested again at O'Hare International Airport.; Category: news
Title: Panera Bread worker fired after TikTok exposed frozen mac and cheese; Abstract: On Friday, the poster said on Twitter that she was fired for the video, showing her place a frozen bag of macaroni and cheese into a vat of hot water.; Category: foodanddrink
Title: UFC champ Khabib Nurmagomedov seen training in a freezing river, because of course; Abstract: Khabib Nurmagomedov doesn't mess around.; Category: sports
Title: Demi Lovato Gets New Tattoo in Honor of "Special Angel" Friend After His Death; Abstract: The singer debuted her sentimental new ink on Instagram.; Category: music
Title: Trump faces twin crises as Congress returns; Abstract: ; Category: news
Title: Charles Conwell riddled with guilt, almost quit boxing after knocking Patrick Day into coma; Abstract: ; Category: sports
Title: Cyntoia Brown-Long to Lester Holt on her release from prison: 'There's nothing special about me'; Abstract: In an exclusive interview, her first since being released from prison in August, Brown-Long says there are many women just like her still in prison.; Category: news
Title: Boris Johnson 'on brink of Brexit deal' after border concessions; Abstract: Negotiators understood to have agreed in principle to customs border down Irish Sea; Category: news
Title: Felicity Huffman Is Scheduled to Be Released from Prison on October 27 After Serving 13 Days; Abstract: Felicity Huffman's Release from Prison Set for Oct. 27; Category: news
Title: Black World War I soldier receives recognition decades after death; Abstract: A black World War I soldier was finally recognized for his military service over the weekend, decades after he was buried in an unmarked grave in Indiana.; Category: news
Title: Photos: If you give an animal a pumpkin ...; Abstract: If you give an animal a pumpkin...; Category: news
Title: Sure, it was the Jets, but that was the best performance of the season; Abstract: The Patriots wasted no time against an overmatched opponent, their defense looking title-worthy all on its own.; Category: sports
Title: 'When you're in a hole, stop digging': Clinton lawyer Greg Craig to President Trump; Abstract: Bill Clinton's impeachment lawyer ABC News' "The Investigation" podcast that President Trump's legal strategy to combat his impeachment inquiry is doing "enormous damage"; Category: news
Title: Here's Exactly How to Eat a Vegetarian Keto Diet; Abstract: Not exactly sure how to eat when following a vegetarian keto diet? We have a list of foods to make a meal plan with and extra information about this diet.; Category: health
Title: Watch Jessica Biel Admit She Was NOT a 'Huge' Fan of *NSYNC In HILARIOUS Old Interview; Abstract: Jessica was hilariously confronted by Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday's 'Tonight Show,' with a clip where she admits she was not a 'huge' fan o; Category: video
Title: Bed, Bath and Beyond Pulls 'Blackface Pumpkins From the Shelves; Abstract: The pumpkins were removed from stores after an upstate New York community filed complaints.; Category: lifestyle
Title: Browns' Odell Beckham Jr. said it was his 'dream' to be teammates with Tom Brady; Abstract: Ahead of Sunday's matchup, the receiver talks Patriots, goat-hair cleats, and the expected trash talk from Bill Belichick.; Category: sports
Title: Judge: Brad Pitt, others can be sued over New Orleans homes; Abstract: The Times-Picayune/ The New Orleans Advocate reports Pitt and other foundation directors asked the court to remove them from the lawsuit, saying they weren't personally responsible for the construction.; Category: movies
Title: Lupita Nyong'o Reprises Her 'Us' Character Red to Terrify Fans at Halloween Horror Nights; Abstract: The actress donned her iconic red jumpsuit to freak people out at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Orlando.; Category: movies
Title: Bruce Willis brought Demi Moore to tears after reading her book; Abstract: Demi wasn't sure how her ex would feel about her book until he called her.; Category: movies
Title: Ashley Graham Says She Has a Major Case of Pregnancy Brain But What Is That?; Abstract: It's super common but it's actually not a bad thing.; Category: health
Title: Porsche launches into second story of New Jersey building, killing 2; Abstract: The Porsche went airborne off a median in Toms River, causing it to crash into a red brick building.; Category: news | mind |
Given the interaction history of a user with movies/shows as follows:
Title: Beck; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Music, Shounen, Slice of Life; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: D.C.: Da Capo; Genres: Drama, Harem, Magic, Romance; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Full Metal Panic!; Genres: Action, Comedy, Mecha, Military, Sci-Fi; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu; Genres: Action, Comedy, School; Rating: 10.0/10.0
Title: Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid; Genres: Action, Mecha, Military; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha; Genres: Action, Comedy, Drama, Magic, Super Power; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A's; Genres: Action, Comedy, Drama, Magic, Super Power; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Shuffle!; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Ecchi, Fantasy, Harem, Magic, Romance, School, Seinen; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Mobile Suit Gundam Seed; Genres: Action, Drama, Mecha, Military, Romance, Sci-Fi, Space; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny; Genres: Action, Drama, Mecha, Military, Romance, Sci-Fi, Space; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Mai-HiME; Genres: Action, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Magic, Mecha, Romance, School, Shoujo Ai; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Mai-Otome; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Magic; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Final Approach; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance, Slice of Life; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Kannazuki no Miko; Genres: Drama, Magic, Mecha, Romance, Shoujo Ai, Shounen, Supernatural; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Kimi ga Nozomu Eien; Genres: Drama, Romance, Slice of Life; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Macross Zero; Genres: Adventure, Mecha, Military, Sci-Fi, Shounen; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Samurai Champloo; Genres: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Historical, Samurai, Shounen; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: FLCL; Genres: Action, Comedy, Dementia, Mecha, Parody, Sci-Fi; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Genshiken; Genres: Comedy, Parody, Slice of Life; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Hellsing; Genres: Action, Horror, Seinen, Supernatural, Vampire; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Kiddy Grade; Genres: Action, Ecchi, Mecha, Sci-Fi, Super Power; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: D.C.S.S: Da Capo Second Season; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Harem, Romance, Supernatural; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Shakugan no Shana; Genres: Action, Drama, Fantasy, Romance, School, Supernatural; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex; Genres: Action, Mecha, Military, Police, Sci-Fi, Seinen; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Karin; Genres: Comedy, Romance, School, Shounen, Vampire; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Aria The Animation; Genres: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Shounen, Slice of Life; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Noein: Mou Hitori no Kimi e; Genres: Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi, Slice of Life; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Kage kara Mamoru!; Genres: Comedy, Romance, Shounen; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Tsuki wa Higashi ni Hi wa Nishi ni: Operation Sanctuary; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Harem, Romance, Sci-Fi; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Canvas 2: Niji-iro no Sketch; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance, Slice of Life; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Canvas: Sepia-iro no Motif; Genres: Comedy, Romance, Slice of Life; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG; Genres: Action, Mecha, Military, Mystery, Police, Sci-Fi, Seinen; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Ouran Koukou Host Club; Genres: Comedy, Harem, Romance, School, Shoujo; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Utawarerumono; Genres: Action, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Air Gear; Genres: Action, Comedy, Ecchi, Shounen, Sports; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: The Third: Aoi Hitomi no Shoujo; Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Seinen; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Kamisama Kazoku; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Romance; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Sentou Yousei Yukikaze; Genres: Action, Drama, Military, Psychological, Sci-Fi, Space; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Black Blood Brothers; Genres: Action, Comedy, Fantasy, Shounen, Supernatural, Vampire; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Yamato Nadeshiko Shichihenge♥; Genres: Comedy, Shoujo; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance, School; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Happiness!; Genres: Comedy, Harem, Magic, Romance, School; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Code Geass: Hangyaku no Lelouch; Genres: Action, Mecha, Military, School, Sci-Fi, Super Power; Rating: 10.0/10.0
Title: Kiniro no Corda: Primo Passo; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Harem, Magic, Music, Romance, School, Shoujo; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Mamoru-kun ni Megami no Shukufuku wo!; Genres: Comedy, Romance, School; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Soukou no Strain; Genres: Drama, Ecchi, Mecha, Military, Sci-Fi, Space; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Kaze no Stigma; Genres: Action, Fantasy, Magic, Romance, Shounen; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Reideen; Genres: Action, Mecha, Sci-Fi; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Nodame Cantabile; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Josei, Music, Romance, Slice of Life; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Hitohira; Genres: Drama, Romance, School, Slice of Life; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Genshiken OVA; Genres: Comedy, Parody, Slice of Life; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Shakugan no Shana Movie; Genres: Action, Fantasy, Supernatural; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Claymore; Genres: Action, Adventure, Demons, Fantasy, Shounen, Super Power, Supernatural; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Hidamari Sketch; Genres: Comedy, School, Slice of Life; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight!; Genres: Comedy, School, Slice of Life; Rating: 10.0/10.0
Title: Lucky☆Star; Genres: Comedy, Parody, School, Slice of Life; Rating: 10.0/10.0
Title: Sola; Genres: Drama, Romance, Slice of Life, Supernatural; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann; Genres: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Mecha, Sci-Fi; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Darker than Black: Kuro no Keiyakusha; Genres: Action, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Super Power; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Hayate no Gotoku!; Genres: Action, Comedy, Harem, Parody, Romance; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: True Tears; Genres: Drama, Romance, School; Rating: 5.0/10.0
Title: Doujin Work; Genres: Comedy, Slice of Life; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Clannad; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance, School, Slice of Life, Supernatural; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Zombie-Loan; Genres: Action, Horror, Shounen, Supernatural; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun; Genres: Comedy, Ecchi, Fantasy, Harem; Rating: 5.0/10.0
Title: Genshiken 2; Genres: Comedy, Parody, Slice of Life; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Mobile Suit Gundam 00; Genres: Action, Drama, Mecha, Military, Sci-Fi, Space; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: D.C.II: Da Capo II; Genres: Drama, Ecchi, Romance, School; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei; Genres: Comedy, Parody, School; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Shakugan no Shana II (Second); Genres: Action, Drama, Fantasy, Romance, School, Supernatural; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Code Geass: Hangyaku no Lelouch R2; Genres: Action, Drama, Mecha, Military, Sci-Fi, Super Power; Rating: 10.0/10.0
Title: ef: A Tale of Memories.; Genres: Drama, Mystery, Romance; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Myself; Yourself; Genres: Drama, Romance, School; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Minami-ke; Genres: Comedy, School, Slice of Life; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Kimi ga Aruji de Shitsuji ga Ore de; Genres: Comedy, Ecchi, Harem, Parody, Romance; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Druaga no Tou: The Aegis of Uruk; Genres: Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: H2O: Footprints in the Sand; Genres: Harem, Romance, School; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Wagaya no Oinari-sama.; Genres: Adventure, Fantasy, Shounen, Supernatural; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Candy☆Boy: Side Story For Archive; Genres: Romance, School, Shoujo Ai; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Kemeko Deluxe!; Genres: Action, Comedy, Ecchi, Romance, School, Sci-Fi, Shounen; Rating: 5.0/10.0
Title: Macross F; Genres: Action, Mecha, Military, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi, Space; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Hidamari Sketch x 365; Genres: Comedy, School, Slice of Life; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: D.C.II S.S.: Da Capo II Second Season; Genres: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Harem, Romance; Rating: 5.0/10.0
Title: Mobile Suit Gundam 00 Second Season; Genres: Action, Drama, Mecha, Military, Sci-Fi, Space; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Kannagi; Genres: Comedy, School, Shounen, Supernatural; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Clannad: Mou Hitotsu no Sekai, Tomoyo-hen; Genres: Drama, Romance, School, Slice of Life; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Bounen no Xamdou; Genres: Action, Military, Sci-Fi; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Darker than Black: Kuro no Keiyakusha Special; Genres: Comedy, Parody, Sci-Fi; Rating: 8.0/10.0
Title: Lucky☆Star: Original na Visual to Animation; Genres: Comedy, Parody, School, Slice of Life; Rating: 10.0/10.0
Title: Yozakura Quartet; Genres: Action, Comedy, Magic, Shounen, Super Power, Supernatural; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Hyakko; Genres: Comedy, School, Slice of Life; Rating: 9.0/10.0
Title: Toaru Majutsu no Index; Genres: Action, Magic, Sci-Fi, Super Power; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Akaneiro ni Somaru Saka; Genres: Comedy, Harem, Romance, School; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: ChäoS;HEAd; Genres: Harem, Mystery, Psychological, Sci-Fi, Supernatural; Rating: 6.0/10.0
Title: Casshern Sins; Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama, Psychological, Sci-Fi; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Candy Boy Episode: EX01 - Mirai Yohouzu; Genres: School, Shoujo Ai, Slice of Life; Rating: 7.0/10.0
Title: Hayate no Gotoku!!: Atsu ga Natsuize - Mizugi-hen!; Genres: Action, Comedy, Harem, Parody, Romance; Rating: 9.0/10.0 | anime |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Catchmaster Moth And Pantry Pest Trap (3 packs of 2 traps); Brand: Catchmaster; Review: We've had pantry moths off and on for awhile now. These traps are incredibly powerful. The first time I used the moths were coming to me while I was still setting it up.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dyno Seasonal Solutions St. Nick's Choice Professional Pole for Hanging Lights, 16-Feet; Brand: Dyno Seasonal Solutions; Review: I have the version you had to mount on your own extension pole, but the top design is the same. We have one of these mega-decorated homes every Christmas, and the challenge is always the 20'+ trees in the front yard since there's no good place to set up a ladder - and you wouldn't get me on one any way. I literally don't know what I would do without this tool. It was trial-and-error at first to figure out the best use for all the little clips and hooks; but one is the perfect width to securely lift light-string wire into place, another was good for seating plastic clips holding light balls or giant ornaments. There was definitely a learning curve involved, but I pray ours never breaks since this little gadget is hard to find. But we've been using ours for at least five seasons now.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 2 Pcs. Skeleton Lawn Plastic Flamingo; Brand: Yeslike; Review: My only complaint is I'm terrified someone will steal them! They are the perfect ironic statement on yard kitsch, and probably perfect for someone who wants to make a statement year-round. Ours looked amazing for Halloween! Bravo Creative People who Invented These :D; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pleatco PWK30 Replacement Cartridge for Watkins Hot Spring Spas, 1 Cartridge; Brand: Pleatco; Review: Great fit for my HotSpring Sovereign (early 90's) spa. I bought one to make sure it would fit, but now they increased the price by 33%, so I will hold off on buying more until next year.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Zodiac W20750 Nature2 SPA Stick Mineral Sanitizer (3-Pack); Brand: Zodiac; Review: This is the first time my spa ever turned green and there's no objective way to tell it's working. I bought this item for my spa with ozonator based on the reviews I saw. I'm not very familiar with silver ion technology, and assumed the special tests strips actually tested for the ions in the water, but it turns out you can't really test (outside of a lab) for the presence of silver ions. The strips *only* test for a chlorine or non-chlorine residual, which I found very misleading. There always needs to be a chemical sanitizer residual with this system. I contacted the company to ask how I could know their product was doing anything, and the answer was that I could tell it was working by the clean smell and appearance and great "feel". Very, very subjective. I had actually had all of these wonderful attributes with just the ozonator; even the year my kids got spa rash. Then, for the first time ever in the years I've owned a spa my water turned thick and green. So, I'm going back to the copper ion system that is a bit more expensive, but at least the test strips actually test for what I think they test for.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Zoecon Precor 2000 Plus Premise Spray, 16 oz.; Brand: Wellmark International; Review: We still don't know where they came from since our cats are all indoors, but the infestation struck fast and hard and I was in a blind panic. Then I discovered this stuff; and when I used it in conjunction with spot treatments for our cats, and a couple of Victor Ultimate Flea Traps (very nifty gadgets); and we were flea-free in a couple of weeks. Just a side note: we live in California and one thing we didn't know about fleas and cats here is that the fleas carry worm eggs (tapeworm...?), and we had to deal with de-worming all of our cats soon after the flea problem was solved.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Kempf Compressed Coco Fiber Growing Potting Mix 10-Pound Block, Medium; Brand: Kempf; Review: Magical. A solid brick turns into a several buckets of soil amendment. I was worried at first because it seemed a little fibrous, but it turns into nice particles with just a few fibers. Perfect for planting roses. It's a big block and I needed only part at a time. I tried to hacksaw it, but then found it was compressed into layers, so I took a hammer and flat screwdriver to "peel" off chunks (with a drop-cloth to catch particles). I added water until it looked "right", figuring that overall it would make ~20 gallons (so about a quarter block in a "Homer" bucket). I usually had to add a little more water. Gorgeous and fluffy additive for my terrible California clay soil. I won't use it for seed starting, but I will for propagating and transplanting cuttings.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: FibreDust Coco Coir Block; Brand: FibreDust; Review: Awful stuff. It was okay fro amending clay soil, but when I went to use it in a mix for seed starting I was able to see how much of it was looooong fibers, and lots of clumps. Not sure how this is going to do with my seeds, but I'm back to commercial mixed after this.; Rating: 2.0/5.0 | amazon_Patio_Lawn_and_Garden |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Memories Flamenco Beach Resort; City: Cayo Coco Jardines del Rey Archipelago Ciego de Avila P; Review: First time at Memories Cayo Coco having been to the Melia Peninsula last year. Honest review so for the lovers sorry if you don’t like some of it but it’s our opinion on the resort and we’re all entitled to that. The Good Bits – Mosquitos everywhere – really where?? They absolutely love me but I had one bite the night that we arrived, probably due to not using any spray and not one more. The Staff were just fantastic. I cannot speak highly of the service that we received. Happy people who work incredibly hard, work long hours and who remain polite and helpful even when being treated appallingly by other guests. The pool areas were clean and tidy although a little noisy on occasions. Always plenty of sunbeds which were provided by the pool guys although if you wanted a decent spot you’d have to set your alarm for a bit of towel reserving…. Despite it saying on the web pages that this was frowned upon nothing was done about it. Due to it being the school holidays the kids pool was very quiet so we camped out here, fab for a little dip when it did become too hot but also could sing along to the music as required. The grounds were lovely and the guys worked incredibly hard to keep these looking clean and spruced by Cuban standards. The bar was always busy and I guess the Brits are pretty good at queuing although you didn’t have to wait long even if you used the Diamond Club bar or not. Unfortunately patience and manners were not high on the list of my fellow guests who were less than pleasant to the staff and constantly banged their mugs on the bar to try and gain attention ahead of the queue. Special mention to Janet on the Diamond Club bar who was simply amazing….. remembered our order constantly and pulled together two off the cuff cocktails that we named Janets! Really one in a million with superb customer services skills. Despite some of the previous negative comments I actually found the food incredibly good and I usually struggle as I’m a fussy eater. Yes the pasta and toaster queues were always long but I was happy to wait for my steak, pork, chicken, fish or prawns to be cooked to perfection. Again some of my fellow guests were not and shoved plates at the chef without a please or thank you for the food that they were given. I was sincerely embarrassed by this behaviour. As previously said by another reviewer kids were not controlled and you did see things being picked up with fingers and put down again so I did tend to avoid most of the things kids liked for this reason! 2 plates at a time and drinks seemed to be filled to overflowing only to find half of it left on the table after.. so much waste was left over. It’s all inclusive… there is nothing stopping anyone returning for seconds if they felt the need; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Village Hotel Nottingham; City: Chilwell Nottinghamshire England; Review: Was visiting Nottingham on business so stayed over for two nights... Majority of my stay was first class ie. food from the bar was excellent, staff were very welcoming (especially your lady on reception who helped with the awful check in screens that were situated on the desk top which so high I could hardly reach them, let alone read the writing) and efficient, room was exceptional (219) in that it was huge, clean, tidy and provided all the amenities I needed. A couple of 'issues' - while the room was exceptional there were no plugs! I had a laptop, ipad and phone that all needed charging and there was one phone plug available.. :( On arrival it was obvious there was some sort of function on within the hotel and there was simply no parking for residents! Absolute nightmare. Perhaps there could be some priority parking for your guests? After all, my stay wasn't cheap. On entering and leaving the front entrance you would have to walk through or dodge the large number of smokers who congregated around the bin for their fix. For a spa hotel probably not the best advert and for a non-smoker pretty horrible at any time, let alone leaving for my meeting at 7.30 am. Shame really but wouldn't stop me from coming back next year.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Butlin s Minehead Resort; City: Minehead Somerset England; Review: Visited for the 80s Halloween Ball weekend and had an awesome time. Stayed in a Park View chalet which was simply beautiful and ticked all the boxes for us. Brilliant to have our own book in office which meant we bypassed all the queues at check in time. All staff were approachable and always had a smile on their faces. All bands and music were great and really did take us back in time. Special mention to the SKA band who were simply superb. Great atmosphere, no trouble seen, even with the large amount of people on site which was a bonus. Food was good and drinks were reasonably priced rather than a rip off. You do need to remember that this is a party weekend and therefore it can be noisy at times, although being a short walk away from the main nightlife this didn't affect us too much. The whole area was always spotless the following morning and it was clear that the staff work very hard to make this happen. Fancy dress is not compulsory and it really doesn't matter if you join in or not.... but there was some very brilliant examples on show. Will be back next year...; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Travelodge London Enfield Hotel; City: Enfield Greater London England; Review: Excellent hotel, staff were helpful and friendly. Great to have a bar on the premises. Rooms were clean and tidy. Ground floor room had air con which was far better than the rooms on the higher levels as these were incredibly hot. Would certainly use again.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Holiday Inn Express Norwich; City: Norwich Norfolk East Anglia England; Review: I was a little worried by some of the reviews but having visited not sure what people expect... yes you are next door to the health club... no you are not in the Asda car park (although it was great to have it a short walking distance away).. no the windows don’t open in every room and the air con wasn’t working as there was somecrefurb going on but the hotel had emailed about this as soon as the booking was made. Fans were available in the room and this didn’t impact on our stay. Water was available in the reception area. The rooms were clean and everything for an overnight stay was provided. The beds and pillows were amazing and I had the best night sleep ever in a long while. No disturbances from other guests and thought the hotel was empty on a Saturday night until we got to breakfast and were amazed by how many people were there! Staff were polite and attentive from reception to breakfast waiting staff. Continental breakfast was just what I needed and the help yourself option meant you could do just that. Tables were cleared and cleaned promptly. No moans from us!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fishguard Bay Resort; City: Fishguard Pembrokeshire Wales; Review: Just returned from a three night stay in The Keepers Lodge. It certainly didn’t disappoint. Beautiful lodge, beautifully appointed to the highest level possible. Immaculate inside and the complimentary hamper was a lovely touch. Everything you needed was provided and more. I certainly could’ve lived at the lodge forever. The resort is small and therefore just perfect with peace and quiet. We weren’t really overlooked at all and found it quite private however a new lodge is being installed behind the Keepers and I do fear that this will reduce the privacy to the patio and hot tub which will be a shame. The hot tub was regularly reviewed and was available for use on arrival. Great to have a small shop on site but there is a co-op in Fishguard for a larger shop if required. Chinese and fish and chips available in Fishguard too if you’re adverse to cooking for yourself. The views are simply amazing even when the weather is not the best and even though it was incredibly windy the lodges were so well insulated you really wouldn’t have known. Watching the ferry arriving and departing never got boring! The ladies on reception were always professional, friendly and willing to help. We were simply looking for a relaxing time away but if you’re looking for lots to do, other than the beautiful walks, I would argue that there’s not a lot other than that locally but as I said wasn’t really looking for much to do on this occasion. Really do hope to visit again soon.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hilton Birmingham Metropole Hotel; City: Birmingham West Midlands England; Review: Have been here for two nights at a conference. The room, a deluxe executive room, wasn't bad, although the television picture quality was poor to say the least with a limited amount of channels. You'd get more at a Premier Inn. The food is good although a little pricey as are the drinks, nearly £11.00 for a large glass of wine and £32 for a bottle of rose but I guess I expected that. Plenty of choice at breakfast and all very well cooked and nothing left looking like it had been reheated. Car parking is available on site at a charge and unfortunately when I arrived there was a very large conference on and parking was limited to say the least and had to park miles away and move the car very much later. Wasn't too keen on the fact there was a man repairing a smashed passenger window in the car park and having noted that another review had said that a car had been stolen from the car park it did make me wonder whether I would have a vehicle left in the morning but there's plenty of high end vehicles parked here so concluded mine was quite safe!! The staff are very attentive,without being pushy, polite and very hardworking. Everything is clean and no defects were spotted. The only complaint I had as has been cited by others is the wifi. Having to pay £12.99 per day for a (sub)standard service and even more for a premium service is frankly ridiculous and half the time it had a poor connection and dropped out.. Even at conference rate the cost of B&B is extortionate and have stayed at better hotels for half the cost per night. I'm glad I wasnt paying the bill.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Villa Schuler; City: Taormina Province of Messina Sicily; Review: Having just returned from this amazing hotel after being whisked away by my friends on a surprise trip for my 50th birthday... it is a total pleasure reviewing this hotel. From the time of arrival to the time of departure we were treated like royalty. Every person involved with the hotel go out of their way to ensure your stay is perfect. Rooms are spacious with all the usual trimmings. I struggle to sleep anywhere other than my own bed however the beds and pillows were so comfortable and I had interrupted sleep for three nights. The hotel is extremely clean and tidy with just superb views overlooking the bay and of Mount Etna when eating breakfast on the terrace. The selection was huge and we didnt have to wait long following ordering. The Blood Orange was simply to die for. Plenty of local places to eat (at a range of prices) and only a flight of steps to the main streets of Taormina where you could wander for hours on end and/or take in the sights. Close to the Amiptheatre which has breathtaking views and it was not expensive. The public gardens were simply stunning and worth a stroll through. Nothing is too much trouble at this hotel..and hopefully I will be back sometime soon with my partner. Thank you all for making us feel so welcome for a fabulous few days.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Castle Hotel; City: Ruthin Denbighshire North Wales Wales; Review: The place was packed on a Saturday evening and it did take us a while to find a table. It was obvious the staff were very rushed off their feet but this did not distract away from their service. Food was excellent. Probably the best Wetherspoons I’ve had. Would certainly return again.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: The Hunger Games (Book 1); Author: Visit Amazon's Suzanne Collins Page; Review: Very suspenseful!! The author keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout the book. The characters are so well described and developed that it's like you truly know them. You never know who is really Katniss's friend. A definite must read!!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mockingjay: The Hunger Games; Author: Collins; Review: Very suspenseful!! The author keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout the book. The characters are so well described and developed that it's like you truly know them. You never know who is really Katniss's friend. A definite must read!!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Call of Agon; Author: Visit Amazon's Dean F. Wilson Page; Review: Enjoyed every second of it!! Hated to put it down!!!! I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes sci-fi books.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Her Sanctuary; Author: Visit Amazon's Toni Anderson Page; Review: Fast paced with multiple dialogues! Enjoyed it from beginning to end. Would recommend this book to any avid reader. Thanks; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Soft Place to Fall; Author: Visit Amazon's Barbara Bretton Page; Review: Romantic, witty, sexy, and sweet!!! More than I expected in a romance book. Normally you only get one or two of the adjectives.; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Stant 45849 SuperStat Thermostat - 195 Degrees Fahrenheit; Brand: Stant; Review: Great; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ATP Automotive Graywerks 106001 Engine Intake Manifold; Brand: ATP Automotive; Review: Great product make sure to install PVC valve and parts easily missed; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ACDelco 38006 Professional Idler Pulley; Brand: ACDelco; Review: Good product Make sure right part for correct engine they differ; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ACDelco 6K905 Professional V-Ribbed Serpentine Belt; Brand: ACDelco; Review: Good solid AC Delco part; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dorman 47065HP Elbow Type Heater Hose; Brand: Dorman; Review: If you have replaced as many as I have because Chevy idea of plasic elbows then you need these best thing someone has come out with eliminates leaks and possibly a blown motor if you don't pay attention when the plastic ones start leaking; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: GMB 130-1780 OE Replacement Water Pump with Gasket; Brand: GMB; Review: Worked and as advertised great product fast shipping; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Prime Choice Auto Parts PR65036LR Performance Drilled and Slotted Brake Rotor Pair for Front; Brand: Prime Choice Auto Parts; Review: Great idea; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Automotive |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Sovereign (The Books of Mortals); Author: Visit Amazon's Ted Dekker Page; Review: Great conclusion. Must read. I enjoy Ted Dekker books. I read them when I am traveling. Looking forward to the next one.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Long Story Short: Ten-Minute Devotions to Draw Your Family to God; Author: Visit Amazon's Marty Machowski Page; Review: I bought this devotional for my family to read at the dinner table. Although we haven't finished it yet, we do enjoy the short devotions. Several biblical passages have brought clarity to my kids, and it's been nice to see them learning new things that they can apply to real life situations. It's a great teaching tool for my kids ages 8, and 11. It keeps us connected to eachother and Gods word. It takes about 10-15 minutes, but on occasion we do more than one.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Kicks Collection: Saving the Team; Sabotage Season; Win or Lose; Author: Visit Amazon's Alex Morgan Page; Review: My 9 year old daughter loves soccer and loves these books she got from her Dad! Big Alex Morgan fan too. She goes to bed to read, it's great!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hat Trick (The Kicks); Author: Visit Amazon's Alex Morgan Page; Review: My daughter has read all the other books in The Kicks series and loved them all.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Devotions from the Kitchen Table; Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Nelson Page; Review: These devotional are uplifting and thought provoking. I loved reading before bed and before you knew it, I was finished with it. So I'm on to the next one. I've shared these with my family. A great gift.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: simplehuman 50 Liter / 13 Gallon Semi-Round Kitchen Step Trash Can, Stone Plastic With Secure Slide Lock; Brand: simplehuman; Review: I am really not good with being able to read the size specs online and picture the item. With that said, the item was shorter than I wanted my kitchen trash can to be. Attaching the lid to the base did take a little effort but I was able to get it snapped on. It does seem like the can will hold up a long time; it's durable. I thought it was weird how the lid closed so slow but after reading some other reviews I realized this was one of the features of the trash can. The lid does lock at unwanted times but I haven't use it enough to see it as a problem. I use larger than 13 gallon bags current so I have not experienced any issues with bags not fitting. This item would be great if it were just a little taller. I do love that it fits right were I envisioned it in my kitchen, it's not in the way at all. Overall: This item is good and the description is spot on.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Chicago Cutlery Belmont 16-Piece Block Knife Set; Brand: Chicago Cutlery; Review: The block came damaged with cracks and scraps. The knives look a little cheap. I chose this brand because I currently own a set of Chicago Cutlery knives plus a bloac and they have been great. I've had them for 10 years and was looking to get a new set. I got my first set at walmart. I have not used the new knives yet. I decided that returning the item would be more time than I want to spend so I will keep them, for now at least.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: 3-ring pocket BURGUNDY album for 504 photos - 4"X6"; Brand: Pioneer Photo Albums; Review: I have bought these multiple times and I am still loving them. Great price! Update: Purchased several more of these, still loving them.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Craig Frames 21307201 11 by 14-Inch Picture Frame, Smooth Wrap Finish, 3.015-Inch Wide, Copper and Black; Brand: Craig Frames; Review: I have gotten compliments on this frame that I purchased to frame a photo a friend took oh an ancient statue. The in person color of the frame looks different than the picture. The picture to me looks more like a light beige with gra/silver over tone maybe. The actual in person color looks a tad-bit darker and looks to have more of a gold tone. Even then, I am happy with my purchase. Might I also add that the frame came well packaged, not a scratch on it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Comfify Key Holder - Keys - Wall Mounted Key Hook - Rustic Western Cast Iron Key Hanger; Brand: Comfify; Review: Great buy, great product!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Banana Hook / Hanger (White) -- Under Cabinet Hook to Hang a Bunch of; Brand: Gadjit; Review: Great for what it is used for. Folds where you cant see it until you need it. Holds a bunch of bananas well.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Craig Frames 314GD 20 by 24-Inch Picture Frame, Ornate Finish, 0.75-Inch Wide, Ornate Gold; Brand: Craig Frames; Review: Was not aware that this item came with out a backing for hanging. Instead, you get this wire to install yourself.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Ameriwood Home Parsons Desk with Drawer, Black; Brand: Ameriwood Home; Review: Nice small desk! I use it as a laptop desk for my home. I needed a small desk for a small space and this item fit the bill.; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | amazon_Home_and_Kitchen |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: GDSTIME 8cm 80mm X 80mm X 15mm 12v Brushless Dc Cooling Fan; Brand: GDSTIME; Review: The fan works. Good Price; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sabrent SuperSpeed 2-Slot USB 3.0 Flash Memory Card Reader for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Certain Android Systems - Supports; Brand: Sabrent; Review: Worked just like it was suppose to. Great price; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Scosche MDAKB 1988-05 GM Micro/Delco Antenna Adapter Kit; Male/Female for use with FM Modulator; Brand: Scosche; Review: Worked great to install a new radio; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: [Set of; Brand: GLCON; Review: Worked as expected a nice case; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Super Power Supply® 2 x 2dBi 2.4GHz 5GHz Dual Band WiFi RP-SMA Antenna for Routers Linksys Cisco E2100L WRT160NL TP-Link; Brand: Super Power Supply; Review: Work like it was suppose to; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Auto Antenna for XM Satellite Radio Receivers (Discontinued by Manufacturer); Brand: Belkin; Review: Worked great; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Patriot LX Series 16GB High Speed Micro SDHC Class 10 UHS-I Transfer Speeds For Action Cameras, Phones,; Brand: Patriot; Review: great price; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Monoprice RJ12 6P6C Plug Flat Stranded, 50-Piece/Bag (107270); Brand: Monoprice; Review: Fixed my problem; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Plantronics M165 Marque 2 Ultralight Wireless Bluetooth Headset - Compatible with iPhone, Android, and Other Leading Smartphones; Brand: Plantronics; Review: Good headset; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Besdata PT25_26 Ultra Thin Magnetic Smart Cover for iPad 2, iPad 3 and iPad 4 with Screen; Brand: Besdata; Review: Very cheaply made. Should have know a the price point; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: AmazonBasics 14-Inch Laptop Sleeve - Black; Brand: AmazonBasics; Review: Fits my laptop like a glove; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: OEM Motorola 3 Sizes Replacement Earbuds Tips Ear Gels Bud Cushions and 2 Ear Hooks for Hx550 Hz720 H19txt H17txt; Brand: Motorola; Review: It fit my headset; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sony 32GB Class 10 UHS-1 SDHC up to 70MB/s Memory Card (SF32UY2); Brand: Sony; Review: Great extra storage; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: DVI Male to HDMI Female Adapter Gold Plate; Brand: OKINA; Review: zIt fixed the computer; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Plantronics Voyager Pro HD Wireless Bluetooth Headset - Compatible with iPhone, Android, and Other Leading Smart Devices - Black; Brand: Plantronics; Review: NIce Head set; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: QVS PA-1P Single-Port Power Adaptor with Lighted On/Off Switch, White; Brand: QVS; Review: Neat switch; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Plantronics Voyager Legend Eartip Kit - Non-Retail Packaging - Medium - Black; Brand: Plantronics; Review: Ear buds; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: PipeLine OPTPIPE6FT Premium Optical Cable; Brand: WireLogic; Review: Great product; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Optical Cable Splitter, VIMVIP Toslink Digital Fiber Optical Audio Splitter 2 Way in/out Optical Splitter Adapter(Black); Brand: VIMVIP; Review: Great product; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: JacobsParts Low-Profile Windshield Mount for Tomtom One 125 130 140, XL 325 330 340 350, XXL 530 540 550; Brand: JacobsParts; Review: Just like the ones that came with the GPS; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: TP-LINK TL-WR810N Wireless Wi-Fi Travel Router w/ Access Point/ TV Adapter/Repeater/Hotspot (WISP) Modes, Up to 300Mbps; Brand: TP-LINK; Review: Works well, Lets me connect my TV with a cat 5 Cable; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Plantronics Voyager Legend Charge Cable; Brand: Plantronics; Review: Handy to have a 2nd one on hand. Works fine; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Electronics |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: The Porcelain Hotel; City: Singapore; Review: We booked the executive with wifi for 5 days. But when we arrived and checked, we were shocked to see that it's quite smaller than I thought. So we asked for an upgrade, and they showed me the premiere and the suite room. Premiere is long corridor room, with dual sides of windows and good enough space for a couple. Really interesting room. While the suite is bigger, has a jacuzzi, but requires us to go upstairs for the bed and bathroom. So we picked the premiere and just add 30sgd for each night. It was great! The dual windows gave us a lot of view, and great smell from the restaurant nearby. Contrary to what other reviews I read for this hotel, we didn't get any noise from outside at night. There was only 8 channels on the tv, but we didn't bother because we were out whole day. They clean up really well on the room. For breakfast, go to the people's park ( 5 min walk ). We went there around 8 and some stalls are already open. Then after that just go down to the mrt. Great hotel, and will definitely come back. Pros. Close to MRT Close to chinatown market Close to restaurants Quiet room Clean Cons. No breakfast A small leak of water near the bed; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Royal Surakarta Heritage Solo MGallery Collection; City: Solo Central Java Java; Review: We have never been in solo for quite some time,and we tried to choose someplace close to some of the town's POI.And our pick was right. We ordered the deluxe room.It's spacious for 2 persons and 1 luggage.We got a room close to the elevator at 3rd floor (316).It's close to the swimming pool and gym.But not close enought that the noise from there could go in.Got the window facing the road,nice for morning and night scenery.A great choice for us. There was some minor thing on the floor,but we didn't mind. The breakfast,we like it.There's nasi liwet (awesome),bubur mutiara,soto bandung and some western cuisine. The service,really great and attentive. By walking distance from the hotel,there's nasi liwet bu wongso,sate buntel tambak segaran(15min walk),solo bistro,galabo (street food),keraton(17min walk),pasar klewer (better to go there after visiting keraton,10min walk),churches. By car on short distance(10min drive),there's toko roti orion and serabi notokusumo. Loved this hotel and will be back.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: MesaStila Resort and Spa; City: Magelang Central Java Java; Review: We stayed here for one night on 21st of march after a full day exploring semarang. Arrived on the complex around 4 and got a great service from the staffs and just on time for afternoon tea. Check in was easy and fast. Then we're escorted to the villa ( which was at the end of the complex ). It was great. We love how they arrange the villas, the other villa is more of a 2 storeys villa and the next one is more of a couple's villa with the bedroom as the centerstage. Bathroom was huge with stone bathup and aromateraphy candles already lit on before we got in. We didn't get the chance to go to the restaurant here as we want to explore magelang at night. Breakfast was good, I love the pudding like bread with milk and the other menu as well. We explored the plantation coffee by ourselves as we are being chased by time. Staffs are quite surprised to see us when we got into the Warung Kopi before the time but still served us really good. Checkout was easy. As the complex is huge, we waited on the reception area and they picked our baggages using golf cart. Pro: Staffs are amazing and beatifully represent Indonesian people Views inside the villa and outside are great to relax your mind and body Food is healthy with an attitude. Con: Only a rather small billboard placed outside on the main road just about 500m before ( it would be quite troublesome at night and rainy ) The complex is huge and combines with nature beautifully, but when it rains, it's quite slippery, so better to use shoes when you go outside the villa Tips : Check your room before going to bed. As we encounter a black butterfly, a cricket on the curtains and quite a large frog on the wall :D The security makes a quick help and it's all gone. But what can I say, it's a jungle out there :D really great experience Overall, a great experience :D; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Adma Umalas; City: Kerobokan North Kuta Bali; Review: We booked Adma through groupon which was offering a package for a pool vila which include lunch/dinner and airport transfer.Reservation was fast,we emailed and got a response right away to book the famous Gede Pendet that I read here. They were on a renovation for water system,so some of the floors right next to receptionist were opened and we had to cross a board of wood. No problem here. The gede pendet room is almost at the end,which is nice. It's big with a small pool that you can just lay down in water and watch the clouds go by while drinking their tasty welcome drinks. The room has a big Lcd at the corner which has various movie channel like Hbo ( good for people that just want to spend the rest of the day at room ). The bathroom is an open space, with big shower area. They gave out electric mosquitos killer,which has a really important role for the rest of your stay.As the bathroom connects to the bedroom with a door that has gaps which looks good by the way,but can be a good entry for mosquitos from the bathroom to go in. Be sure to snuck inside the blanket and you'll have a great sleep. Daily breakfast can be chosen from american to continental and indonesian and you can switch each item every day. Try the nasi goreng and mie goreng for a change,they tasted good. Eventhough it's not buffet,but the portion is a lot for us. Pro: Well worth the money if you choose the groupon package. Quiet place to sleep at night. Good viscinity to kerobokan,seminyak and batu belig. Con : Small parking place.Fits around 3 cars. No extra locks from the inside on the front door. No extra locks on the bedroom door. There is a small incident that happen when we stayed.It was around 4pm,we were on the bed,curtains wasn't fully closed. Suddenly,our door at the front was open,so I rushed out from bed to see that it was the front office guy I believe entered our room without knocking to gave out an announcement that there will be a fogging for mosquitos the day after. Now this is what I personally don't like. Imagine having fun in the pool and suddenly the hotel people entered your room. The front door lock that was in the inside can be opened from the outside using the hotel card.So there's no "actual" lock for you to get your privacy, as there was no lock either for the bedroom. Somehow it was the only incident,as after that they knocked and shouted loudly from the outside to bring our dinner and breakfast. I believe Adma can be better villa/hotel but it needs a better privacy for the guest.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Gajahmada Graha Hotel; City: Malang East Java Java; Review: Found this hotel through traveloka.Looks really bizzare from the outside, and with old look room from the picture, we were somehow unsure about this hotel. But reading some of the reviews here, we agreed to take the leap. The parking lot outside is just for 3 cars, but they appear to have a basement, so no worries there. The security was really attentive when you park and go out. The front desk area is quite small, there's a gift shop, snacks and ice cream bar if you need food in the middle of the night. We got the 304 room. It's clean, the view is another room at the opposite building, but it's fine for us. There's quite a selection for tv channel, international and national. AC is cold, hot water is available, all is good. Except a little minor, there's somehow a humming sound near our room which is quite loud and not from our AC or water. The sound was constant, and somehow disappeared around 5 AM, but then it's on again around 6 AM, If you don't like this kind of thing, please choose another room. The breakfast was top of my list for hotel on this budget. You got nasi pecel ( good ), vegetarian koloke ( good ), nasi goreng ( good ), bubur ayam ( good ), dimsum ( okay ), fish ( good ), pudding ( good ), juice ( good ). This hotel is near catholic church ( 5 min driving ) and a traditional cake store ( 1 min walking ) . Will be back again.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: HARRIS Hotel Conventions Gubeng Surabaya; City: Surabaya East Java Java; Review: We stayed on the 23rd of october,got our unique room (1101) with breakfast from tiket.com. They explained beforehand that the unique rooms are the one that facing the swimming pool,which actually good because we just realized it that we won't quite hear the train station on the other side. Pros: -Great staffs -Great bed -Nice welcome drinks -Nice room layout -A lot of choices for breakfast and they're good -A convenience store located just right on pop hotel's lobby ( next to harris's lobby ) -Large LCD at room -Lots of electric socket Cons: -Parking space is quite compact so mind your driving inside here -Some tv channels are not available and somehow there's that weird breaking sound on the speaker which can be annoying when you watch a good movie -Cigarette smell from the sewage system on the bathroom ( our room is non smoking ) -And yes,there still the sewage smell kind of thing on the shower from time to time, so you need to turn the shower first to flush that smell out before you use it Final review: It's a great hotel and for that kind of budget,we expect it to be better.It would be better to fix it before you lose more customers; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Ivory by Ayola; City: Bandung West Java Java; Review: Plus : Nice reception and waiting area Great decor all around Nice room Amazing cappuccino on breakfast Lots of tv channel ( Hbo,fox movies are available ) Quite room for a good sleep They change the main menus on breakfast for each day Minus : Don't put any food/drink that is open on the table. It will be swarmed by ants.We even put "bolen" inside our bag and it's still full of ants the day after. Basement parking area is small.please do extra carefull if you drive Other than that,it's a great hotel near FO.Will recommend it to friends ans family 👍🏻👍🏻; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bess Resort and Waterpark; City: Malang East Java Java; Review: We found this hotel through agoda by chance,and somehow paid it first and then we read some of the reviews here,which aren't really good 🙈 so.. fingers crossed really. The hotel is easy to find,right after Bakpao Telo before the flyover,there's a road on the left with big signs.Go straight ahead enters a housing area. Check in was fast.We booked a quartet room which was the only option on agoda,then they saw our request to join the beds together as we were only two persons.So they offered to change the room into double and on the high floor with better view,so we took it. The guard then escorted us to our room with his motorbike. Parking area is large right in front of each room. Now here comes the scary part,the room.We've read some of the comments about it and ..... we got a nice and clean room 👍 The view was amazing,the room was large and there's hot water on the bathroom. The waterpark is suitable for 20 people,but we didn't try it as we forgot to bring swimwear,from the looks of everyone there,well they got quite a fun. The fishing pond was okay.Didn't see people down there,and the fish are quite small.There's a steep road to get there which really good to burn your calories 😂 Now comes the dinner part.We really didn't want to bother driving outside the complex as it will take some time and also traffic on the main road is usually full at night,so we go and try the hotel restaurant. Great news was that the price on the restaurant is cheaper 5-10% than if you order from the room.We tried bakso (around 20.000) and nasi goreng (around 35.000),both were okay,not that bad like in reviews. And not that long to wait. At night it was quiet and all,really good neighbourhood to relax. Breakfast was quite a lot to choose,and again,with their rates at 420.000 per night,that's quite good for them to give this many choice compare to other hotels in malang. There are 2 joglos outside and can be used to relax and chat,but at night there's no light in there.Too bad.. 😑 Plus: Fair rate compares to other hotel Great view Quiet place for family vacation There were 2 minimarts outside the complex,if you tend to walk probably around 15 minutes Minus: No choice of entertainment at night ( karaoke is available but that's all ) Quite far to get to malang ( 45-50 minutes ); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: MG Suites Maven Semarang; City: Semarang Central Java Java; Review: We booked 2 rooms through trav***** one month prior,and when we got there they asked if we want to upgrade to 601 which was the suite and has 2 rooms with living room and small dining table which was nice so we said okay and there's no extra charge. Now here's the downside.The master bedroom has its own bathroom which had a very distict odor that couldn't be removed with coffee or soap. Maybe the toilet was leaking or something. Breakfast was not that good but quite abundant on choices. The plus side,it is close to a themepark which is good if you have kids.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Sotis Villas; City: Canggu North Kuta Bali; Review: We wanted to stay in canggu to find a different feel,then we found a villa on traveloka with really good price that includes private pool,livingroom and bed. But...only one review on tripadvisor and no review on traveloka which makes it quite a gambling, and we took it for 3 nights. Looking for the hotel is easy using waze,thank god. If you find the jambunami villa,then just go straight again through a small rocky road and then you'll find a complex of villas with sotis logo. We came at 1 and got our early check in ( lucky ). The villa was huge,it's actually 3 bedrooms villa, with a really cheap price on traveloka ( around idr 1,3mil per night ). Check some of my photos below. Plus side : Cctv on parking area Each villa has their own parking area Pool is clean and huge with 170cm depth L sofa on livingroom Dining room for 6 people Microwave Stove Hot cold dispenser Refrigerator Garden seat Joglo Balcony Sundeck Bathup Quiet area Cheap villa for family Minus side: Prepare a 15minutes ahead if you want to go to seminyak or other place,because canggu is really crowded now esp.during 7-8am and 4-5pm. No signage at the road that leads to the villa,can be tricky to find at night. Not much of a variety on breakfast,but it's okay to start your day. Phones are dead,use your cellphone if you need them. Notes: Around 4 am on our first night,our electricity was down and we looked outside,turns out it was only our villa.So we called them and quickly someone came and checked our power line. About 10 minutes it was already on again. Nice 👍🏻 If you're with a family,and have your own ride,then this one is great enough for you. Will be back again.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Batu Villas; City: Batu East Java Java; Review: We booked by phone for cottage 1 and deluxe room. The deluxe room 203 which was rp.295.000 has stains on the ceiling but quiet enough as it overlooks the garden. While the cottage 1 which was rp.495.000 sit right next to the main road,and people keep revving their bikes on the road all night. Not to mention,their insect screen are opened quite wide to let mosquitos into the room. Not to mention as well,there's a cafe nearby with loud music all night. If you're okay and in luck to get better rooms,then yes it's an okay hotel.but if not,you're better off from this one.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Brown Feather Hotel; City: Kerobokan North Kuta Bali; Review: We booked 2 rooms through traveloka for 3nights. It was lovely,and with that kind of price,we'll be back for sure. There's a minimart next to it,so no worries. Breakfast are reasonable,choose american breakfast if you want quantity. The nasi goreng is not bad either 👍🏻 Because it's on a main road, it's best to choose rooms that aren't facing the street. Also,I think it's not that worth it to upgrade it into the rice field view,but if you're interested,take a look then decide if you want it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: HARRIS Hotel Conventions Gubeng Surabaya; City: Surabaya East Java Java; Review: This is our 2nd stay. It was still a nice and budget wise hotel with a nice location in surabaya. We asked for higher room and eventhough they were quite full,we got one on 12th floors. Great view. Breakfast was nice,there's much to choose from and quite surprised with the bubur madura,it was good. Overall,will be back again if we want to just relax and stay in surabaya. Reminder though,if you want a high floor room,ask them if there's an event on the lounge above,as the music can be heard until around 1am i believe.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ascott Waterplace Surabaya; City: Surabaya East Java Java; Review: We always overlooked this hotel because our house are not that far away with it and the fare is quite high. Yesterday we had no plan while we stroll at the mall next to it and around 7pm we decided to just come and ask if they have any available room. They said it was full except the 1 bedroom penthouse which obviously not our choice at that moment. But then they called in the management and somehow they gave the room to us with the price of 1 bedroom executive. That was one major surprise for us,so we gladly take it. Okay now to the overall review from us. Pros: Great landscape view from each of the room ( even bathroom has an amazing view ) Great condition of the room Bed is comfortable (loving the set up to make sure we can rest easily) Ac working great with 3 separate remote Bathroom is spacious,there's another bathroom near entrance for guest Living room 👍🏻 Kitchen is fully functional Parking is quite easy Elevator is connected directly from parking to rooms A minimart opens 24 hour near hotel A mall stands next to the hotel Friendly staffs Cons: Breakfast,like some review here,sadly it was true. The menu was quite basic.It would be nice if they have something catchy that people will look forward again on the next trip (eg. traditional javanase cake maybe? ) No hot water on the shower even when it's turn on for a while Maybe the hotel can provide a doorman standing by at the mall to give us a hand when it's raining? Overall,will we book this hotel again next time? Sure,it's a good hotel with great location for family with kids that just want to spend their day at the mall.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Four Points by Sheraton Surabaya; City: Surabaya East Java Java; Review: We never thought we would love this hotel.We reserved a deluxe room king through traveloka.Check in was smooth.We asked for high floors and quiet as we are with a baby,and they gave us a 21st floor room just right outside the elevator which is convenient for us. It was quiet, we had a nice relaxing night ( no construction noise like on the previous review we read ) The room is quite big,they even got an ironing board. The breakfast is amazing!! Can't help but back and forth to take another one. And also big thumbs up for staffs that greeted us all the way in the hotel until parking and even on the ground floor near the mall entrance. Will definitely stay here again!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pines Garden Hotel; City: Trawas East Java Java; Review: Our first impression is the track into the hotel,it’s quite high and will make you doubt your vehicle’s capability 🤣 even the parking spaces are “unique”. Check in was fast,there’s an elevator. We got our suite room at lv3. The room is big,and we mean BIG. You could ask for 3 or even 5 extra beds inside. There’s no AC,so better to open all the windows and let it all in,no mosquitos 👍🏻 There’s a fridge. A balcony. A bathup ( better not use it,looks old,just use it as a shower ). At night it’s super quiet and you can really enjoy it. Pros Large rooms,even the deluxe can fit 2 extra beds Average price Great Kari Ayam at breakfast section Extra walls at the balcony right and left side to ensure your privacy and noise from surrounding 👍🏻 Housekeeping’s staff is fast, we would like another water heater as ours had some ... well,let’s just say it’s better to ask for another. And they gave it to us not long after the call. Cons No restaurant near the hotel ( soto gondrong pujasera was 10mins with car ) No AC which can be quite hot in the morning and the afternoon The view is not that special,blocked by their own building near the pool. No non smoking area even in the indoor restaurant ( we had trouble surroundes by smokers at breakfast ); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Golden Tulip Holland Resort Batu; City: Batu East Java Java; Review: First of all,we heard some not so good reviews from our friends about this hotel considering the high price. Including the room,struggle to find seats at breakfast and even the food. So we take a leap. We booked premiere king for one night at weekday. So here are our impressions : Exterior : -It’s not that great. Not sure about the walkway to the top of the building which quite dangerous without any railing. -the rooftop for the parking area is not long enough to cover you from the rain. The only option is the drop off area. -There’s no minimart around. -Only a bakso stall at the front of the hotel. -Great staffs to help us carry all the bags. Lobby : -Awesome view! Check out the corner top right side if you came from the lobby. -There’s a holland bakery shop with normal price,you can buy some potato chips as well if you like. -From here you can see there are 2 buildings. So you have the chance to have left view ( good ), facing other building ( not good ) and right view ( best ) -nice glass floor to see below level which is the restaurant Room : -Our room was 6126 and we got the left view. Surprisingly.. it has a superb view 👍🏻👍🏻 see pic for more details -interior and the lighting setup is quite alright -The balcony is not that dirty but just use your slipper to go outside.they have this glass door which is thick enough to give you a nice quiet room 👍🏻 -The bed...not our favourite. -TV,there’s much too choose from,so no worries if you want to spend your day at the room. -bathroom, there’s a nice bathup facing the mountain,but try to close it as you are still facing the other people’s home. -4 bottle of mineral water 👍🏻 nice -AC is functional and a great addon in the afternoon Restaurant : -Dinner was ala carte with reasonable price. We ordered fettucini tuna ( skip that please ) and nasi goreng mawut ( great portion and taste ). Both are in 45k and additional 20% tax, considering hotel restaurant,that’s a bargain. Breakfast : -Amazing choices. We like the fettucini,bakmi goreng,pangsit goreng,beef brisket,ayam madu,cream pastry and so on and so on 👍🏻 -Refilling was fast Overall: It’s the best in batu..for now. Everything is still new and looks clean. For the price tag,we recommend to go on the weekday. Not too full and you can enjoy more of the hotel.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Bene Hotel; City: Kuta Kuta District Bali; Review: For those of you who loves kuta like we do,maybe you should try the bene. Pros: Quiet neighbourhood means relaxing night time Budget friendly even with the breakfast buffet Close to kuta beach and beachwalk Building in great condition Room was clean Towel was clean Staffs were quick to respond Cons: It took us 10 minutes to get to beachwalk Small roads with inconsiderate drivers means you have to be very carefull when walking This hotel will be our number 1 choice if we are travelling with family in kuta area; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Whiz Prime Hotel Basuki Rahmat Malang; City: Malang East Java Java; Review: As far as some reviews here,most of them just 3/4 stars with most comments on lack of this and that. Well, for us, whiz was great! Parking lot was enough for around 15 cars. Check in was fast. The deluxe double room was enough for us and our baby, she can still run around.Bed was amazing to sleep on. AC was cold.A lot of tv channels. Shower was great, hot water was quick. Kettle was clean. There’s quite a lot to chose at breakfast. So considering this is a 3 star hotel,we like it!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Xenios Anastasia Resort Spa; City: Nea Skioni Halkidiki Region Central Macedonia; Review: For sure that was not a 5 star hotel, I was there on August 2016. Staff was cleaning with the with the food on the open area. Food was almost same every day. In order to go to the beach of hotel, you had to jump 2 meters from the place in front of the hotel. The only good thing, was the service of the waiters, from Serbia, and some other countries. Greece has other better places to go. I would not suggest this place for the amount of money we paid.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Life Gallery Hotel; City: Korce Korce County; Review: Reservation in the hotel SHOULD NOT BE ACCEPTED to be booked by a phone call, where you are required to give only Name and Surname, and when you call back to confirm your reservation, you find yourself with no room reserved at all. It should be minimum written email confirmation. It happened to me previous week, and it was not fair at all. All the rest is perfect, quiet, cleaning, modern and very comfortable. Everybody who can go there, will enjoy. Happy to see this kind of investments in Albania.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Llogora Tourist Village; City: Llogara National Park Vlore County; Review: Wonderful nature, very good food, staff could be more smiley! A very good place to stay for one weekend, with friends of family. Located in a perfect place where you can reach the Palace beach in 15 -20 minutes driving.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Altea Beach Lodges; City: Dhermi Vlore County; Review: It used to be good, now is dirty, old furniture from years now, and expensive for the quality it offers. The shower is horrible and consumed to maximum. They used to offer breakfast in the price, now they have removed, and the breakfast is really poor, also food in general. The only good thing is the beach.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Flamingo; City: Korce Korce County; Review: Ridiculous and poor breakfast for a hotel in Korce, a city which is famous for their delicious food. There were very small rooms. We asked for an additional bed for our daughter when we reserved which staff of hotel did not bring, even when we asked again when arrived at hotel. Rooms were clean, but service poor.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Elysium Hotel; City: Dhermi Vlore County; Review: Hotel is located in a hill area nearby the main road. The food at the restaurant of the hotel is good. The service as well is very good at the restaurant. The rooms are spacious, just the service of the hotel should be a bit more attention to the details, which sometimes make difference, for e.g Hotel provides slippers only to deluxe rooms and not to all kind of rooms, which is ridiculous. Also to the balcony doors are missing mosquito nets protectors, which in this village are mandatory. Overall the hotel is very good one comparing to the rest nearby.; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with news articles as follows:
Title: This Man's Rattlesnake Bite Is a Warning to Everyone to Take Animal Bites More Seriously; Abstract: You wouldn't think a baby rattlesnake could do so much damage, but Austin McGee knows better after almost losing his finger to one.; Category: lifestyle
Title: 'Game of Thrones': 'Avengers' Elizabeth Olsen forgot awful audition; Abstract: Elizabeth Olsen said she auditioned for Khaleesi from "Game of the Thrones" and the experience was so bad that she forgot she even did it.; Category: movies
Title: NFL winners, losers: Cowboys need to rebound, Patriots keep winning; Abstract: While the Dallas Cowboys need to get back on track, the New England Patriots won Sunday without even playing a game.; Category: sports
Title: 36 Celebs You Won't Recognize from Their Yearbook Photos; Abstract: See what Meryl Streep, Emma Stone and others looked like in their yearbook photos; Category: entertainment
Title: America's Most and Least Educated States; Abstract: The share of adults with at least a bachelor's degree hit an all time high in 2018, according to new data from the U.; Category: finance
Title: Miguel Cervantes' Wife Reveals Daughter, 3, 'Died in My Arms' After Entering Hospice Care; Abstract: Miguel Cervantes' Wife Reveals Daughter 'Died in My Arms' After Hospice Care; Category: tv
Title: Uh-Oh! Carrie Ann Inaba Falls on 'Dancing With the Stars'; Abstract: Uh-Oh! Carrie Ann Inaba Falls on 'Dancing With the Stars'; Category: tv
Title: 'Wheel Of Fortune' Guest Delivers Hilarious, Off The Rails Introduction; Abstract: We'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat: Blair Davis' loveless marriage? On Monday, "Wheel of Fortune" welcomed as a new contestant trucking business owner Blair Davis, who offered a biting introduction for himself. When host Pat Sajak asked the man from Cardiff, California, about his family, Davis plunged into one of the darkest personal summaries the show has likely ever heard. "I've been trapped in a loveless marriage for the last 12 years to an...; Category: tv
Title: Yanks' Hicks gets 1st start since Aug. 3 in Game 3 of ALCS; Abstract: Aaron Hicks returns to the New York Yankees' starting lineup for the first time since Aug. 3 and Giancarlo Stanton remains out for the second straight game when the American League Championship Series resumes with the teams tied 1-all.; Category: sports
Title: High school soccer: Chloe DeLyser sets record for most goals scored; Abstract: Chloe DeLyser, an Ohio State commit, scored her 317th goal Tuesday night, setting a new national record for a high school girls soccer player.; Category: sports
Title: Woman, suspect dead at 'Tarzan' actor Ron Ely's California residence; Abstract: Ron Ely, who portrayed Tarzan in the TV series in the 60s, was not harmed and is alive and well, a sheriff's office spokesman said.; Category: tv
Title: Off to the World Series, these Nationals have proved everyone wrong; Abstract: This unexpected joyride of a season could hold more promise yet.; Category: sports
Title: Trump's 'bombshell' offer to family of British teen killed in car crash: Diplomat's wife is in next room; Abstract: "The bombshell was dropped not soon after we walked in the room: Anne Sacoolas was in the building and was willing to meet with us," Dunn's mother said.; Category: news
Title: Fort Worth shooting: Officers weren't asked to do welfare check. Here's how it changed things; Abstract: When Atatiana Jefferson's neighbor called police, he says he expected them to go check and see if she was OK.; Category: news
Title: Former NFL lineman Justin Bannan arrested for attempted murder; Abstract: Former NFL defensive lineman Justin Bannan is sitting in a Colorado jail, on charges of suspicion of attempted first-degree murder.; Category: sports
Title: 'Tarzan' Actor Ron Ely: Actor's son allegedly killed his mother before deputies shot and killed him, sheriff's office says; Abstract: The son of "Tarzan" actor Ron Ely killed his mother before he was shot and killed by deputies on Tuesday, according to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office.; Category: tv
Title: Flight shaming is gaining traction and could cost airlines billions; Abstract: Consumers are paying more attention to their carbon footprint and it could cost airlines billions of dollars, Citi said in a note to clients Tuesday.; Category: finance
Title: Tim Ryan drops out of presidential race; Abstract: Rep. Tim Ryan announced his decision to end his campaign, stating he would run again for his House seat.; Category: news
Title: Mitch McConnell snubbed by Elijah Cummings' pallbearer in handshake line at U.S. Capitol ceremony; Abstract: A pallbearer appeared to refuse to shake Mitch McConnell's hand as Rep. Elijah Cummings was lying in state at the Capitol.; Category: news
Title: Trump records 'strongly corroborate' sex assault claims, accuser says; Abstract: President Trump's own records "strongly corroborate" the sexual assault accusations of Summer Zervos and belie the president's denials, a new court filing states; Category: news
Title: Judge: Brad Pitt, others can be sued over New Orleans homes; Abstract: The Times-Picayune/ The New Orleans Advocate reports Pitt and other foundation directors asked the court to remove them from the lawsuit, saying they weren't personally responsible for the construction.; Category: movies
Title: Jeff Bezos is set to lose his crown as world's richest person; Abstract: Jeff Bezos is about to relinquish the title of world's richest person to Bill Gates, as Amazon.com Inc. stock tumbled in late trading Thursday.; Category: finance
Title: Former NBA first-round pick Jim Farmer arrested in sex sting operation; Abstract: Farmer, 55, was booked for trafficking a person for a commercial sex act.; Category: sports
Title: The world's largest nuclear power producer is melting down; Abstract: On the shores of the English channel in Normandy, engineers are struggling to fix eight faulty welds at a plant that's supposed to showcase France's savoir faire in nuclear power.; Category: finance
Title: Week 9 winners, losers: Russell Wilson taking lead in MVP race; Adam Gase in trouble; Abstract: Russell Wilson shows that a wide-open MVP race might now have a frontrunner. In New York, meanwhile, Adam Gase's Jets are a mess.; Category: sports
Title: Cause determined in Jessi Combs' fatal speed record crash; Abstract: Occurred at speeds near 550 mph; Category: autos
Title: Man dies after stabbing in Maryland Popeyes; fight over chicken sandwich, sources say; Abstract: A man was fatally stabbed Monday evening while inside a Maryland Popeyes following a fight over a chicken sandwich, a source told Fox News.; Category: news
Title: Air Force airman missing after fall into Gulf of Mexico from C-130 aircraft; Abstract: A U.S. Air Force airman went missing Tuesday after falling from a C-130 aircraft into the Gulf of Mexico, according to reports.; Category: news
Title: Before his execution, a death row inmate told his victim's family he forgives them; Abstract: Charles Rhines, who was convicted of murder in the brutal stabbing of a 22-year-old man in 1992, was executed in South Dakota Monday, the state's attorney general said, after the Supreme Court denied a last-ditch appeal of his case.; Category: news
Title: Roger Stone Lied to Congress After Helping Trump Win, Prosecutor Says; Abstract: Roger Stone wasn't lying to Congress about his contact with WikiLeaks over stolen emails that helped Donald Trump win the presidency, his lawyer told a jury at the start of the longtime Republican operative's criminal trial.; Category: news
Title: Holocaust survivor under guard amid death threats; Abstract: Liliana Segre, 89, is assigned two police officers in Italy after hundreds of anti-Semitic messages.; Category: news
Title: Porsche launches into second story of New Jersey building, killing 2; Abstract: The Porsche went airborne off a median in Toms River, causing it to crash into a red brick building.; Category: news | mind |
Given the interaction history of a user with movies/shows as follows:
Title: American Beauty (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Curly Sue (1991); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Jaws (1975); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dr. Dolittle 2 (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Look Who's Talking Too (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Aliens: Collector's Edition (1986); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Married... with Children: The Most Outrageous Episodes: Vol. 2 (1987); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Beverly Hills Cop (1984); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Lethal Weapon (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: U.S. Marshals (1998); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Osbournes: Season 1 (Uncensored) (2002); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Being John Malkovich (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Spider-Man: The New Animated Series: Season 1 (2003); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Three Men and a Little Lady (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ghost (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Daredevil (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Men in Black II (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: One Good Cop (1991); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bringing Down the House (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Glimmer Man (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Rocky (1976); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Fire Down Below (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Terminator (1984); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Hunt for Red October (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Murder By Numbers (2002); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: ER: Season 1 (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dr. Dolittle (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Pelican Brief (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mrs. Doubtfire (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Taken (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Net (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Simpsons: Season 2 (1990); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The X-Files: Season 5 (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Election (1999); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Frasier: Season 1 (1993); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Passenger 57 (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Adaptation (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Good Girl (2002); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Specialist (1994); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The X-Files: Season 1 (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Men in Black (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Red Heat (1988); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Specimen (1995); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Enough (2002); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Jurassic Park (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Children of the Corn 3: Urban Harvest (1994); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Law & Order: Criminal Intent: The First Year (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Assassins (1995); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Thing (1982); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Season 7 (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: MASH: Season 3 (1974); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Con Air (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Law & Order: Season 1 (1990); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Murder at 1600 (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Look Who's Talking Now (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Game (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: X2: X-Men United (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Parenthood (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Devil's Own (1997); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pay It Forward (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Dogma (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Igby Goes Down (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Drop Dead Fred (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jo Jo Dancer (1986); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Speed (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: He Said (1991); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Perfect Storm (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Domestic Disturbance (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Halloween: H2O (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Lawnmower Man (1992); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Mummy (1999); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Silver Bullet (1985); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Rising Sun (1993); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Mutiny on the Bounty (1935); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: For Your Eyes Only (1981); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Krippendorf's Tribe (1998); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: National Lampoon's Vacation (1983); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Frenzy (1972); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Leprechaun (1993); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Hook (1991); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Recruit (2003); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: American Ninja (1985); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Nick of Time (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Poltergeist (1982); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Nine Months (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Fantasia 2000 (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Nine to Five (1980); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Grumpy Old Men (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Modern Times (1936); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Rosemary's Baby (1968); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: I Want to Live! (1958); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Twilight Zone: Vol. 39 (1960); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Friends: Season 2 (1995); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Urban Cowboy (1980); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Liar Liar (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Twilight Zone: Vol. 41 (1960); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Simpsons: Season 3 (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ricochet (1991); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: On Golden Pond (1981); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Teen Wolf / Teen Wolf Too (Double Feature) (1985); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Father's Little Dividend (1951); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Omen (1976); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Scream 3 (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Giant (1956); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Scream (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Robin and Marian (1976); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Cujo (1983); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Wayne's World (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Ghost Ship (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: When Harry Met Sally (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Born Yesterday (1993); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Braveheart (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hocus Pocus (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Serendipity (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Muppets From Space (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Hustler (1961); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Going My Way / Holiday Inn (1944); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Joe Kidd (1972); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Accidental Tourist (1988); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sleeping Beauty: Special Edition (1959); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Moonstruck (1987); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Thing From Another World (1951); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Three Stooges: Merry Mavericks (1951); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Shadow of Doubt (1998); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Little Nicky (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Dante's Peak (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Scary Movie 2 (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Children of a Lesser God (1986); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Tall Guy (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: 28 Days Later (2002); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Forever Young (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Man Without a Face (1993); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lilies of the Field (1963); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Halloween II (1981); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Death Becomes Her (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Goldfinger (1964); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Commando (1985); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dracula (1931); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Notorious (1946); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: Season 2 (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Stargate (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Sum of All Fears (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Toy (1982); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Matrix: Reloaded (2003); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: End of Days (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hitman (1998); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Finding Nemo (Widescreen) (2003); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Planet of the Apes (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Flintstones (1994); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The King and I (1956); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Jurassic Park III (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Conan the Barbarian (1981); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Sleepy Hollow (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Network (1976); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Disturbing Behavior (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Dawn of the Dead (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Army of Darkness (1993); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mimic (1997); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Lost Weekend (1945); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Timecop (1994); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: House Arrest (1996); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Dressed to Kill (1980); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rain Man (1988); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hard to Kill (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: X-Men: Evolution: Season 2 (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Cannonball Run (1981); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Cobra (1986); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Judge Dredd (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Doc Hollywood (1991); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Vegas Vacation (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Bodyguard (1992); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Mad Love (1995); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Great Outdoors (1988); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Mission: Impossible (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hope Floats (1998); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Nightwatch (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Great Mouse Detective (1986); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Her Alibi (1989); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Mommie Dearest (1981); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Vertical Limit (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Rushmore (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: She Devil (1989); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Friends: Season 4 (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Anna and the King (1999); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Friends: Season 3 (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Soul Man (1986); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Dr. Strangelove (1964); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Time Machine (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Manchurian Candidate (1962); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Best in Show (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Nutty Professor (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Secret of My Success (1987); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Scent of a Woman (1992); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: One Hour Photo (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Medicine Man (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hard Target (1993); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Snatch (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Mummy Returns (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Young Guns (1988); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: V.I. Warshawski (1991); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Oh God! (1977); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: St. Elmo's Fire (1985); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Addams Family Values (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: All the President's Men (1976); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Awakenings (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lost in Space (1998); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Edward Scissorhands (1990); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Crying Game: Collector's Edition (1992); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sister Act (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Baby's Day Out (1994); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lawrence of Arabia (1962); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Gremlins (1984); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Return of the Magnificent Seven (1966); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: A Bug's Life (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: James Dean (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Piranha II: The Spawning (1981); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Ed Gein (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Glass House (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Breakfast Club (1985); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Losin' It (1983); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Twilight Zone: Vol. 22 (1962); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Big Chill (1983); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Internal Affairs (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Armageddon (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Natural Born Killers (1994); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Newton Boys (1998); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Five Easy Pieces (1970); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Langoliers (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Men of Honor (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Fools Rush In (1996); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Romancing the Stone (1984); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Blood Simple (1984); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Watcher (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Phenomenon (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Blade (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Scary Movie (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Rescuers (1977); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fatal Attraction (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Bats (1999); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Africa: The Serengeti: IMAX (1994); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Rebecca (1940); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Road Warrior (1981); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Final Analysis (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: An American Werewolf in London (1981); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Best of Times (1986); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Protocol (1984); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Jack Frost (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hanover Street (1979); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Blood Work (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Junior (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Finding Forrester (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: In the Bedroom (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Beauty and the Beast: Special Edition (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Murder in the First (1995); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Conversation (1974); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Halloween: Resurrection (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Getaway (1994); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: On Deadly Ground (1994); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1987); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Friends: Season 5 (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Eraser (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Sudden Impact (1983); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Mr. Nanny (1993); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Evil Dead (1982); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Catch Me If You Can (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Executive Decision (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Apartment (1960); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Thunderball (1965); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ice Age (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Good (1966); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: Nemesis (2002); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Citizen Kane (1941); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Time to Kill (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Troop Beverly Hills (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Tommyknockers (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: RoboCop (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Terminator 2: Extreme Edition (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Private Benjamin (1980); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hero (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Gung Ho (1986); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Sword in the Stone (1963); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Turner and Hooch (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Batman Returns (1992); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sexy Beast (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Samurai Jack (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Higher Learning (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Elephant Man (1980); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Outer Limits: The Original Series: Season 1 (1963); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Platoon (1986); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: 12 Angry Men (1957); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Sweet Dreams (1985); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Exorcist: Restored Version (1973); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Basic (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Serving Sara (2002); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The 6th Day (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Maximum Overdrive (1986); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 1 (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Into Thin Air: Death on Everest (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Fathers' Day (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Who's Harry Crumb? (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Broken Arrow (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Papillon (1973); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Who: The Kids Are Alright (1979); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Chances Are (1989); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Highlander 4: Endgame (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Crocodile Dundee (1986); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: All About Eve (1950); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Bone Collector (1999); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Final Destination 2 (2003); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Stalag 17 (1953); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: A Clockwork Orange (1971); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Cowboy Way (1994); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Witness for the Prosecution (1957); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: National Security (2003); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Philadelphia Story (1940); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Bless the Child (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season 1 (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hot Shots! (1991); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Tomcats (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: U-571 (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Being There (1979); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Of Mice and Men (1939); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Psycho (1960); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bird on a Wire (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Places in the Heart (1984); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Coming Home (1978); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Outbreak (1995); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Equus (1977); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Monsters (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Last Picture Show (1971); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: White Fang (1991); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Risky Business (1983); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: True Grit (1969); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Frequency (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Wicker Man (1973); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dragnet (1987); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Stepford Wives (1975); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Staying Alive (1983); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Prisoner (1967); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Final Destination (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Swordfish (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Another Stakeout (1993); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dreamcatcher (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: First Contact (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: In the Line of Fire (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Sunset Boulevard (1950); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Oliver & Company (1988); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: White Men Can't Jump (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Shining (1980); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mission: Impossible II (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Sound of Music (1965); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Blown Away (1994); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Kate & Leopold (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Mummy (1959); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: 48 Hrs. (1983); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Cliffhanger (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Outer Limits: The Original Series: Season 2 (1964); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Accused (1988); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Scream 2 (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Better Way to Die (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Surviving the Game (1994); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Weekend at Bernie's 2 (1993); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Mr. Holland's Opus (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Working Girl (1988); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Howling (1980); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Blade 2 (2002); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Scenes of the Crime (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: Insurrection (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Fly / The Fly 2 (1986); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: City Hall (1996); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: In Cold Blood (1967); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Copycat (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hellraiser (1987); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Candyman (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: Generations (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Andromeda Strain (1971); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: X-Men (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Next of Kin (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Carrie (1976); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: You Only Live Twice (1967); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Firefox (1982); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Dog Day Afternoon (1975); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Lost Boys: Special Edition (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season 3 (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Transporter (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Friday the 13th: Part 2 (1981); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Mr. Mom (1983); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Little Giants (1994); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: True Lies (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Terms of Endearment (1983); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Virtuosity (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The General's Daughter (1999); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Black Stallion (1979); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Rocky IV (1985); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Kull the Conqueror (1997); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Client (1994); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Alice in Wonderland (1951); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Out-of-Towners (1970); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Gladiator (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The First Wives Club (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Jerry Maguire (1996); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Iron Eagle (1986); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Mercury Rising (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Cast Away (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Karate Kid Part III / The Next Karate Kid (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: DeepStar Six (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Housesitter (1992); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1983); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Total Recall (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Catch 22 (1970); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Enemy of the State (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Klute (1971); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Tina Turner: Live in Amsterdam (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Crush (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Patriot (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Raising Arizona (1987); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Spider-Man (2002); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Live and Let Die (1973); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Play Misty for Me (1971); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Naked Gun (1988); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Daylight (1996); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Little Big Man (1970); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: South Park: Bigger (1999); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Analyze That (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Batman (1989); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Matrix (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: White Water Summer (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Beetlejuice (1988); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sleepwalkers (1992); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Species (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Dead Poets Society (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Three Amigos (1986); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Norma Rae (1979); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Any Which Way You Can (1980); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: City Slickers (1991); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Witness (1985); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Grease (1978); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Phantoms (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Kangaroo Jack (2003); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: My Girl (1991); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Coal Miner's Daughter: Collector's Edition (1980); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Independence Day (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Firm (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Saving Silverman (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Missing in Action (1984); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Friday the 13th: Part 6: Jason Lives (1986); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Insider (1999); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Friday the 13th (1980); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Firestorm (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Phone Booth (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Born on the Fourth of July (1989); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Skulls (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Christine: Special Edition (1983); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Creepshow 2 (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Running Man (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Arlington Road (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Fair Game (1995); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Land Before Time (1988); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Peacemaker (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Psycho III (1986); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Mask of Zorro (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Blind Date (1987); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Last Boy Scout (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Honeymooners: Classic 39 Episodes (1955); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Tango & Cash (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Someone Like You (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Drugstore Cowboy (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Father of the Bride (1991); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Haunting (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Demolition Man (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Vertigo (1958); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Kindergarten Cop (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Stakeout (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Fugitive (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Twilight Zone: Vol. 8 (1961); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: West Side Story (1961); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Parent Trap (1961); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Fury (1978); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Unforgiven (1992); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Corky Romano (2001); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Hatari! (1962); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: A Few Good Men (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Exorcist (1973); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Scanners (1981); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Show Boat (1951); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Days of Thunder (1990); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Oliver Twist (1948); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fail-Safe (1964); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Halloween (1978); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Always (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: True Crime (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man: IMAX (2000); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Philadelphia (1993); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Saving Private Ryan (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Jungle Book (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Negotiator (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Wes Craven's Summer of Fear (1978); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Spy Who Loved Me (1977); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Peter Pan (1953); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The NeverEnding Story 2: The Next Chapter (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Ghostbusters (1984); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Eye for an Eye (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Days of Wine and Roses (1962); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Scooby-Doo (2002); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Blob (1958); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Death to Smoochy (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dangerous Minds (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Children of the Corn (1984); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Freddy vs. Jason (2003); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: S.W.A.T. (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Heathers (1989); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Addams Family (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Time Bandits (1981); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Mars Attacks! (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Toy Soldiers (1984); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold (1994); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Memento (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Apocalypse Now (1979); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Beethoven (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Child Star: The Shirley Temple Story (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Nixon (1995); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: High Crimes (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Flubber (1997); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Dirty Dancing (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Grosse Pointe Blank (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Swimming with Sharks (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Follow That Bird (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Big Business (1988); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: My Best Friend's Wedding (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Ref (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A League of Their Own (1992); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Witches of Eastwick (1987); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Three Men and a Baby (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Scotland (2002); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Twister (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Chinatown (1974); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ghostbusters 2 (1989); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Office Space (1999); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Batman Forever (1995); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: 12 Monkeys (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Blade Runner (1982); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ruthless People (1986); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Courage Under Fire (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Lord Love a Duck (1966); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Devil's Advocate (1997); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Mighty Ducks (1992); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Full Metal Jacket (1987); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Coneheads (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lilo and Stitch (2002); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Airplane II: The Sequel (1982); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Fan (1981); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Predator 2 (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Marvin's Room (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ernest Goes to Jail (1990); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Lonely Guy (1984); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Poseidon Adventure (1972); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Boyz N the Hood (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Logan's Run (1976); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Faculty (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Creepshow (1982); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fallen (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Shadow (1994); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: 13 Ghosts (1960); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Play it Again (1972); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Training Day (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Krull (1983); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Beautiful Mind (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Summer of '42 (1971); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Marathon Man (1976); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sleepless in Seattle (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Black Adder (1983); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Joy Ride (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The In-Laws (2003); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Sphere (1998); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Clash of the Titans (1981); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Evolution (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Amityville Horror (1979); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Fright Night (1985); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Identity (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Color of Money (1986); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Black Adder Back & Forth (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Paper Moon (1973); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Critters (1986); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Nefertiti Resurrected (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Fistful of Dollars (1964); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Punchline (1988); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Frances (1982); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Silence of the Lambs (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Addicted to Love (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The January Man (1989); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Escape from Alcatraz (1979); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Titanic (1953); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Private Parts (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Nosferatu: Original Version (1929); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Grifters (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Blob (1988); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: All of Me (1984); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: About a Boy (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: In Dreams (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Bananas (1971); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Once Bitten (1985); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy (1955); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Wizard of Oz: Collector's Edition (1939); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lethal Weapon 3 (1992); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Beauty and the Beast (1946); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: War Games (1983); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Flowers in the Attic (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Sting (1973); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: PCU (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Mortal Kombat: The Movie (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Signs (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The First Year (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Battleship Potemkin (1925); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Shadow of the Vampire (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: House of Wax / The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1953); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Erin Brockovich (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Suspect (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Wild Wild West (1999); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Lake Placid (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Black Sunday (1960); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: True Romance (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Glory (1989); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Hills Have Eyes (1977); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Against All Odds (1984); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: House on Haunted Hill (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Postcards from the Edge (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Escape from New York (1981); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Mystery (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Simple Twist of Fate (1994); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Girl (1999); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Right Stuff (1983); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Married... with Children: Season 1 (1987); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Twins (1988); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Salem's Lot (1979); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The X-Files: Season 7 (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Last Starfighter (1984); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Black Adder II (1986); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The X-Files: Season 3 (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Hard Way (1991); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Frankenstein / Bride of Frankenstein: The Legacy Collection (1931); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Stand and Deliver (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: C.H.U.D. (1984); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Fight Club (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: All That Jazz (1979); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: House (1986); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Black Adder IV (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hooper (1978); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Circle of Friends (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Best of Insomniac: Uncensored: Vol. 2 (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Point Break (1991); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Frailty (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Adventures of Priscilla (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rush Hour (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pet Sematary 2 (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Good Morning (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Space Cowboys (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Jagged Edge (1985); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Insomnia (2002); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Roxanne (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rear Window (1954); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hellraiser IV: Bloodline (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Color of Night (1994); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Goodbye Girl (1977); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Popeye (1980); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Oscar (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Best of Friends: Season 4 (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Puppet Masters (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Deep Impact (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The River Wild (1994); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Gone with the Wind: Collector's Edition (1939); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Flies (1963); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: It's Pat: The Movie (1994); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: La Cage aux Folles (1979); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Saturday Night Live: The Best of Steve Martin (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Season 1 (1993); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Great Expectations (1946); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Dick Tracy (1990); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: May (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Annie Hall (1977); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Breakdown (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Butterfield 8 (1960); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Clean and Sober (1988); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Edge (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The X-Files: Season 6 (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Minority Report (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Seven (1995); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Rio Bravo (1959); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Volunteers (1985); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Dawson's Creek: Season 1 (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Barton Fink (1991); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Elmer Gantry (1960); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Soapdish (1991); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Houseguest (1995); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Love Story (1970); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Meteor (1979); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Air America (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Ghost World (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: South Park: Season 2 (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Year of Living Dangerously (1983); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: From Dusk Till Dawn (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bus Stop (1956); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: For a Few Dollars More (1965); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Destry Rides Again (1939); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Prince and the Pauper (1937); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Exorcist 2: The Heretic (1977); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Roswell: Season 1 (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Fiddler on the Roof (1971); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Showgirls (1995); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: A Knight's Tale (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 8MM (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Very Bad Things (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Black Hole (1979); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Lost Souls (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Beavis and Butt-head Do America (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Shallow Hal (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Cheap Detective (1978); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Airheads (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Charlie's Angels: Season 1 (1976); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Big Easy (1987); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Never Talk to Strangers (1995); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Snake Eyes (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: South Park: Season 1 (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Gossip (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Escape to Witch Mountain (1975); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Crocodile Hunter: Croc Files (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Taxi Driver (1976); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Stigmata (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Haunted Honeymoon (1986); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Bullitt (1968); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Hart's War (2002); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Movie (1992); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Patriot (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: An American Tail (1986); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The 'Burbs (1989); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Legend: The Director's Cut (1986); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Friends: Season 1 (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Little Women (1949); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Legal Eagles (1986); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Paint Your Wagon (1969); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dennis Miller: The Raw Feed (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Great Escape (1963); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hairspray (1988); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hamlet (1990); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mildred Pierce (1945); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bruce Lee: Fists of Fury / Chinese Connection (1976); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Hidden (1987); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Cabaret (1972); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Agnes of God (1985); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Toys (1992); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Phantom of the Opera (1925); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Practical Magic (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Phantom of the Opera (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The NeverEnding Story (1984); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Superman II (1980); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Odessa File (1974); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Frasier: Season 2 (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hideaway (1995); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Payback (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Thinner (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Tumbleweeds (1999); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Big Trouble in Little China (1986); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Time Machine (1960); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Prophecy (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Nuts (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Malice (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Ernest Goes to Camp (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: MASH: Season 5 (1976); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Wall Street (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Idle Hands (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Last Action Hero (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Aristocats (1970); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lean on Me (1989); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Much Ado About Nothing (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bull Durham (1988); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Flies (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Air Force One (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Cadillac Man (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Gorky Park (1983); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Tadpole (2002); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dark Blue (2003); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: To Sir (1966); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Virgin Suicides (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Angel: Season 1 (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Crossing Guard (1995); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Season 6 (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: MASH: Season 2 (1973); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: In Like Flint (1967); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hannibal (2001); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Labyrinth (1986); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Field of Dreams (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Eiger Sanction (1975); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Highlander: Season 1 (1992); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: City of Angels (1998); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Near Dark (1987); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Tequila Sunrise (1988); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Hot Rock (1972); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Leaving Las Vegas (1995); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Nothing in Common (1986); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Chill Factor (1999); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The X-Files: Season 8 (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Russia House (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Best of Friends: Season 3 (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Black Sheep (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: MASH: Season 1 (1972); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pecker (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Best of Friends: Vol. 1 (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Amadeus (1984); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Snow White (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1973); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Crouching Tiger (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Phantom (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Monkees: Season 1 (1966); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Wedding Singer (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: GoldenEye (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Muppet Movie (1979); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Fear (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Highlander (1986); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Blast from the Past (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Blow (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bell (1958); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Titanic (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Omega Man (1971); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Donnie Darko (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dimples (1936); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: South Park: Winter Wonderland (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Return to Oz (1985); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Meet the Parents (2000); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Dennis Miller - Live from Washington (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Kalifornia (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Phantasm (1979); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Magnum Force (1973); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Cell (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Vanilla Sky (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Man Show: Season 1: Vol. 2 (1999); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Operation Dumbo Drop (1995); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Prophecy (1979); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Shakespeare in Love (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Tourist Trap (1979); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Red Dragon (2002); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Reservoir Dogs (1992); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Better Off Dead (1985); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The American President (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Under Siege (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Rudy (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: What Women Want (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Marty (1955); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Way We Were (1973); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Starman (1984); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Monty Python: The Life of Python (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Enforcer (1976); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Family Guy: Freakin' Sweet Collection (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Vampires (1998); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season 6 (1992); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: History of the World: Part 1 (1981); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?: Special Edition (1988); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Elizabeth (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Angel: Season 4 (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: American Psycho (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Patch Adams (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Full Monty (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Scorpion King (2002); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Last Supper (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Steel Magnolias (1989); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Overboard (1987); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Tremors (1990); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: U Turn (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Saint (1997); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Seabiscuit (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Simpsons: Season 5 (1993); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Out of Africa (1985); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: My Cousin Vinny (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Tingler (1959); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ladyhawke (1985); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Almost Famous (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Sling Blade (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Red Dawn (1984); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Michael (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Pretty Woman (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Legends of the Fall (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Slayers Next DVD Collection (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Craft (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Absolutely Fabulous: Series 1 (1992); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: 8 1/2 (1963); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Billy Madison (1995); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Whole Nine Yards (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Robin Hood (Disney) (1973); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Princess Bride (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Stand by Me (1986); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Lion in Winter (1968); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Adventures in Babysitting (1987); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The War of the Roses (1989); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Absolutely Fabulous: Absolutely Special (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Silverado (1985); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Apollo 13 (1995); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Willow (1988); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Life Less Ordinary (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Inherit the Wind (1960); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Spawn: The Movie (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Stephen King's Cat's Eye (1985); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Enemy at the Gates (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Mad Max (1979); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Good Will Hunting (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pearl Harbor (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Deliverance (1972); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Batteries Not Included (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: As Good as It Gets (1997); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Antz (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: L.A. Confidential (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Fifth Element (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Die Hard (1988); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: To Wong Foo (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Major League II (1994); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Groundhog Day (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Wag the Dog (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: House on Haunted Hill (1958); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Thin Red Line (1998); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Remains of the Day (1993); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Lovely & Amazing (2002); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Last Emperor (1987); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Four Rooms (1995); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Black Adder III (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Re-Animator (1985); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Apostle (1997); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Far and Away (1992); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Little Women (1994); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Ernest Scared Stupid (1991); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: What Dreams May Come (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Galaxy Quest (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Contact (1997); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Short Circuit (1986); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Rebel Without a Cause: Special Edition (1955); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Them! (1954); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Rock (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Lethal Weapon 2 (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Absolutely Fabulous: Series 4 (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hidalgo (2004); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Enemy Mine (1985); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1991); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Last Tango in Paris (1972); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Swingers (1996); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Player (1992); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Pink Panther (1963); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The X-Files: Season 4 (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Fish Called Wanda (1988); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: South Park: Season 4 (2000); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 7 (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Birds (1963); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Starship Troopers (1997); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Trainspotting: Collector's Edition (1996); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pitch Black (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Lone Star (1996); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Lethal Weapon 4 (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dracula 2000 (2000); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Shawshank Redemption: Special Edition (1994); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Shrek (Full-screen) (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Body Heat (1981); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pet Sematary (1989); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The X-Files: Season 2 (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Glengarry Glen Ross (1992); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dangerous Liaisons (1988); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Jumanji (1995); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Walking Tall (2004); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Three Kings (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: sex (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Big Lebowski (1998); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Creature from the Black Lagoon: Special Edition (1954); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Easy Rider (1969); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Big (1988); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Van Helsing (2004); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Spartacus (1960); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Birdcage (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jeepers Creepers (2001); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Rambo: First Blood: Ultimate Edition (1982); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: K-Pax (2001); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Face/Off (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Maverick (1994); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Chicken Run (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dumbo (1941); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Run Lola Run (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Ring (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Clueless (1995); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Requiem for a Dream (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Varsity Blues (1999); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A River Runs Through It (1992); Rating: 2.0/5.0 | netflix |
Given the interaction history of a user with movies/shows as follows:
Title: Back to the Future (1985); Genres: Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Truth About Cats & Dogs, The (1996); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Casablanca (1942); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: North by Northwest (1959); Genres: Action, Adventure, Mystery, Romance, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997); Genres: Comedy; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Chasing Amy (1997); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Titanic (1997); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Saving Private Ryan (1998); Genres: Action, Drama, War; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Waterworld (1995); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Reservoir Dogs (1992); Genres: Crime, Mystery, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002); Genres: Adventure, Fantasy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Road to Perdition (2002); Genres: Crime, Drama; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986); Genres: Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: 8 Mile (2002); Genres: Drama; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959); Genres: Adventure, Children, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Sister Act (1992); Genres: Comedy, Crime; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998); Genres: Adventure, Comedy, Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993); Genres: Comedy; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Blade Runner (1982); Genres: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964); Genres: Comedy, War; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Genres: Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Clockwork Orange, A (1971); Genres: Crime, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Ghost in the Shell (Kôkaku kidôtai) (1995); Genres: Animation, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982); Genres: Children, Drama, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Akira (1988); Genres: Action, Adventure, Animation, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Time Machine, The (1960); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Matrix, The (1999); Genres: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Donnie Darko (2001); Genres: Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Spider-Man (2002); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Minority Report (2002); Genres: Action, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: City of Lost Children, The (Cité des enfants perdus, La) (1995); Genres: Adventure, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Fifth Element, The (1997); Genres: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mad Max (1979); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Jurassic Park (1993); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Contact (1997); Genres: Drama, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: X-Men (2000); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Men in Black (a.k.a. MIB) (1997); Genres: Action, Comedy, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Cube (1997); Genres: Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Signs (2002); Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Abyss, The (1989); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: First Contact (1996); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: eXistenZ (1999); Genres: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: War of the Worlds, The (1953); Genres: Action, Drama, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Unbreakable (2000); Genres: Drama, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001); Genres: Adventure, Animation, Fantasy, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: X-Files: Fight the Future, The (1998); Genres: Action, Crime, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pitch Black (2000); Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Cell, The (2000); Genres: Drama, Horror, Thriller; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Independence Day (a.k.a. ID4) (1996); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Flight of the Navigator (1986); Genres: Adventure, Children, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, IMAX; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dune (1984); Genres: Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: K-PAX (2001); Genres: Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: Generations (1994); Genres: Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Starship Troopers (1997); Genres: Action, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: Insurrection (1998); Genres: Action, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Stargate (1994); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991); Genres: Action, Mystery, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Thirteenth Floor, The (1999); Genres: Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Mimic (1997); Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Rocketeer, The (1991); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979); Genres: Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Planet of the Apes (2001); Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Deep Impact (1998); Genres: Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek: Nemesis (2002); Genres: Action, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Armageddon (1998); Genres: Action, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hollow Man (2000); Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989); Genres: Action, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Mission to Mars (2000); Genres: Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Deep Blue Sea (1999); Genres: Action, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Astronaut's Wife, The (1999); Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Wing Commander (1999); Genres: Action, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Singin' in the Rain (1952); Genres: Comedy, Musical, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: My Fair Lady (1964); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Musical, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Wizard of Oz, The (1939); Genres: Adventure, Children, Fantasy, Musical; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937); Genres: Animation, Children, Drama, Fantasy, Musical; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Fantasia 2000 (1999); Genres: Animation, Children, Musical, IMAX; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Beauty and the Beast (1991); Genres: Animation, Children, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, IMAX; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: King and I, The (1956); Genres: Drama, Musical, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: American in Paris, An (1951); Genres: Musical, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Meet Me in St. Louis (1944); Genres: Musical; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mary Poppins (1964); Genres: Children, Comedy, Fantasy, Musical; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Blues Brothers, The (1980); Genres: Action, Comedy, Musical; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Moulin Rouge (2001); Genres: Drama, Musical, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Saturday Night Fever (1977); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Oliver! (1968); Genres: Drama, Musical; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lion King, The (1994); Genres: Adventure, Animation, Children, Drama, Musical, IMAX; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Nightmare Before Christmas, The (1993); Genres: Animation, Children, Fantasy, Musical; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Grease (1978); Genres: Comedy, Musical, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953); Genres: Comedy, Musical, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971); Genres: Adventure, Children, Musical; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dirty Dancing (1987); Genres: Drama, Musical, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Muppet Christmas Carol, The (1992); Genres: Children, Comedy, Musical; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Annie (1982); Genres: Children, Musical; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pete's Dragon (1977); Genres: Adventure, Animation, Children, Musical; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: L.A. Confidential (1997); Genres: Crime, Film-Noir, Mystery, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pianist, The (2002); Genres: Drama, War; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962); Genres: Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Memento (2000); Genres: Mystery, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002); Genres: Adventure, Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Silence of the Lambs, The (1991); Genres: Crime, Horror, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Schindler's List (1993); Genres: Drama, War; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975); Genres: Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: American Beauty (1999); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Shakespeare in Love (1998); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Rebecca (1940); Genres: Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) (1998); Genres: Action, Crime; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Princess Bride, The (1987); Genres: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Léon: The Professional (a.k.a. The Professional) (Léon) (1994); Genres: Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Beautiful Mind, A (2001); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Monster's Ball (2001); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Strictly Ballroom (1992); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hours, The (2002); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Jerry Maguire (1996); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Forrest Gump (1994); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance, War; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long) (2000); Genres: Action, Drama, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (2002); Genres: Adventure, Fantasy; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Amelie (Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, Le) (2001); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lantana (2001); Genres: Drama, Mystery, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001); Genres: Adventure, Fantasy; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Billy Elliot (2000); Genres: Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Finding Forrester (2000); Genres: Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: About a Boy (2002); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Best in Show (2000); Genres: Comedy; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mulholland Drive (2001); Genres: Crime, Drama, Film-Noir, Mystery, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Me Myself I (2000); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: High Fidelity (2000); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Girlfight (2000); Genres: Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000); Genres: Adventure, Comedy, Crime; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Snatch (2000); Genres: Comedy, Crime, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Erin Brockovich (2000); Genres: Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Remember the Titans (2000); Genres: Drama; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Pollock (2000); Genres: Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Series 7: The Contenders (2001); Genres: Action, Drama; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Gladiator (2000); Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999); Genres: Crime, Drama; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Chicken Run (2000); Genres: Animation, Children, Comedy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Others, The (2001); Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Chocolat (2000); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Punch-Drunk Love (2002); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bridget Jones's Diary (2001); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Greenfingers (2000); Genres: Comedy, Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (a.k.a. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) (2001); Genres: Adventure, Children, Fantasy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ice Age (2002); Genres: Adventure, Animation, Children, Comedy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Whole Nine Yards, The (2000); Genres: Comedy, Crime; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Changing Lanes (2002); Genres: Drama, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Storytelling (2001); Genres: Comedy, Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Legally Blonde (2001); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Shallow Hal (2001); Genres: Comedy, Fantasy, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Riding in Cars with Boys (2001); Genres: Comedy, Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: What Women Want (2000); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Road Trip (2000); Genres: Comedy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Orange County (2002); Genres: Comedy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Charlie's Angels (2000); Genres: Action, Comedy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: American Psycho (2000); Genres: Crime, Horror, Mystery, Thriller; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Mission: Impossible II (2000); Genres: Action, Adventure, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Titan A.E. (2000); Genres: Action, Adventure, Animation, Children, Sci-Fi; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Legend of Bagger Vance, The (2000); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: What Lies Beneath (2000); Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Charlotte Gray (2001); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002); Genres: Comedy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001); Genres: Adventure, Animation, Children, Comedy; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: America's Sweethearts (2001); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Gone in 60 Seconds (2000); Genres: Action, Crime; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: One Night at McCool's (2001); Genres: Comedy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Skulls, The (2000); Genres: Thriller; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Antitrust (2001); Genres: Crime, Drama, Thriller; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Wedding Planner, The (2001); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mummy Returns, The (2001); Genres: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Thriller; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: How the Grinch Stole Christmas (a.k.a. The Grinch) (2000); Genres: Children, Comedy, Fantasy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Me, Myself & Irene (2000); Genres: Adventure, Comedy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Dude, Where's My Car? (2000); Genres: Comedy, Sci-Fi; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001); Genres: Action, Adventure; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Coyote Ugly (2000); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Joe Dirt (2001); Genres: Adventure, Comedy, Mystery, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Crossroads (2002); Genres: Comedy, Musical, Romance; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971); Genres: Children, Comedy, Fantasy, Musical; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Shrek (2001); Genres: Adventure, Animation, Children, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ladyhawke (1985); Genres: Adventure, Fantasy, Romance; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Dark Crystal, The (1982); Genres: Adventure, Fantasy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: NeverEnding Story, The (1984); Genres: Adventure, Children, Fantasy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Goonies, The (1985); Genres: Action, Adventure, Children, Comedy, Fantasy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Jumanji (1995); Genres: Adventure, Children, Fantasy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Drop Dead Fred (1991); Genres: Comedy, Fantasy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter, The (1990); Genres: Adventure, Children, Fantasy; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: NeverEnding Story III, The (1994); Genres: Adventure, Children, Fantasy; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Usual Suspects, The (1995); Genres: Crime, Mystery, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rear Window (1954); Genres: Mystery, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fargo (1996); Genres: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Vertigo (1958); Genres: Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944); Genres: Comedy, Mystery, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Alien (1979); Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Femme Nikita, La (Nikita) (1990); Genres: Action, Crime, Romance, Thriller; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Green Mile, The (1999); Genres: Crime, Drama; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Sixth Sense, The (1999); Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Life Is Beautiful (La Vita è bella) (1997); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance, War; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Toy Story 2 (1999); Genres: Adventure, Animation, Children, Comedy, Fantasy; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | movielens |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Logitech MX3200 Cordless Desktop Laser (Black); Brand: Logitech; Review: Very comfortable to type on and quiet. The only thing I could find fault with is that the lettering on the keys is very small and light colored. If you don't know the keyboard you need a light close by. Very easy to use the mouse and I love not having to be wired to your tower. I definitely recommend this product!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: CaseCrown Bold Standby Case with Anti Glare Screen Film for Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet - Purple; Brand: CaseCrown; Review: Really like the snug fit around the kindle. Never have to worry about it falling out. Wish the cover was a little sturdier but that wouldn't let you bend it back. The only other thing that would have been a plus would be if there was a place to put a stylus. I bought a separate one but can't attach it anywhere. Overall, I do like this cover over the other ones I have seen. Need more bright colors though!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: nbryte Tablift Tablet Stand for The Bed, Sofa, or Any Uneven Surface; Brand: nbryte; Review: I just received the Tablift for Christmas and love it! For anyone who has trouble with their wrists and hands, this is the best. I've got it across my lap right now sitting in my recliner. Still wish it accommodated my Otter case but with the gift card I got for Amazon I'm going to get a faster case to get in and out of quickly. Also need a plastic cover for the Kindle when using it with the stand. I know the idea has been around for awhile but this one folds up quite small when not in use.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ArmorSuit Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9" Screen Protector Max Coverage MilitaryShield Screen Protector For Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9"; Brand: ArmorSuit; Review: Went on verily well at first but realized a piece of glitter had gotten underneath so I tried lifting the shield up and that's when it went horribly wrong. Once this goes on it is not meant to be lifted for any reason. I followed the instructions on how to reset the shield. It wasn't having any of it. If you get the shield leave it on no matter what. It picked up dust in the air that I didn't know was there. This was $10 down the drain.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: MoKo Case for Amazon All-New Kindle Fire HDX 8.9"; Brand: MoKo; Review: I wish I had bought this case when I orginally got my Kindle. I have a lot of trouble with my neck partly due to using the Kindle. I have a computer table that sits up high when I sit in my chair and the stand on the MoKo case makes it so easy to see the screen and use it. I would wholeheartily suggest everyone use the table and get this case even if you're not having trouble yet.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Electronics |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Gloria Palace Amadores Thalasso Hotel; City: Puerto Rico Gran Canaria Canary Islands; Review: We booked the hotel without checking anything about it so when we arrived we were supprized how large it was, the breakfast restaurant was gigant. A lot of the guest were "all inclusive" guests so this is not a hotel that we would usually book. The rooms were large and clean, had a really nice view of the sea. Breakfast was really good and we had a couple of drinks at the pool bar, tried both their Mojitos and Pina Coladas and they tasted really good. The champagne prices in the bar were also good, a bottle of Mumm was €49 and Dom Perignon €150; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: NH Bratislava Gate One; City: Bratislava Bratislava Region; Review: Good hotel if you are there to work in the area. Clean rooms, friendly staff and good breakfast. There is not much to do in walking distance from the hotel, one big mall and thats all. All restaurants, bars and cafés are closer to the city centre. I had dinner at the hotel once and the food wac good but I wish they had some local dishes on the menue. This was my first time in Slovakia so it's hard to compare the hotel to other hotels in the country but the standard is good if you compare internationally. Not great but good. Unfortunately the hotel staff forgot to book my taxi that I was supposed to take 06AM and I had to wait 20 minutes for it but I guess that can happend everywhere.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Radisson Blu Resort Gran Canaria; City: Arguineguin Mogan Gran Canaria Canary Islands; Review: One of the best hotels I've been at, the rooms are really nice, clean and quite big. The pool area was not crowded like other hotels, there was a lot of space so we could have our own area and tha staff was fantastic, helped us directly with what ever we needed and basically all staff knew when my mothers birthday was so she was congratulated by waiters, reception staff, cleaning staff, basically everyone. They even brought some sparkling wine for all of us during breakfast without us telling them to do so, all these gestures really shows that this is a great hotel to stay at. Will definately stay here again.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sofitel Munich Bayerpost; City: Munich Upper Bavaria Bavaria; Review: We stayed there for three nights and overall we were really happy with the stay but the hotel lacks the final touch to get "Excelent" Stayed in their Luxury room which was really nice and well kept. Breakfast was nice but for some reason all trays with cheese, sausages, ham and so on were really small and I guss that they don't think it looks luxury/nice with huge trays and that's fine but then they need to fill them up, now the trays were empty quite often so we had to wait for refill. For some reasom you also had to ask if you wanter to have some buttre and that's also ok but we had to look for the staff a couple of times just to get some butter. Anoyher problem was their bar in front of the hotel, the tables wer often full with enpty beer glasses and ashtrays. Overall it was a really nice stay but there is room for improvement.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Carlo IV; City: Prague Bohemia; Review: The hotel is nice even if you can see that it has been a couple of years ago it was refurbished. Spa area was nice, the pool could use some more lights and the saunas were out of order. We had a couple of issues with the staff, for breakfast you need to be seated by their staff but there was no one there for quite a while, next problem was when I asked a girl that was working there if they had any sparkling water she looked at the table where they had regular water, juice and so on and answered ”I don’t think so”. Next person I asked got me some sparklng water and the last issue made me really surprised. There was some kind of issue with the coffee machine so one of the staff told me that they would arrange some coffee, when he came with a thermos and strated pouring then he realised that he had not opened the thermos enough so he opened it more and spilled coffee all over the table. He said sorry and run away, I was sure it was to get something to wipe up the coffee with but after a couple of minutes I realized he was not comming back. Nice hotel but it doesn’t really live up to the 5 stars.; Rating: 3.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Philips 40/60/100W Equivalent Soft White (2700K) 3-Way A21 LED Light Bulb; Brand: Philips LED; Review: Wonderful to have 3-way bulbs in lights again. Works wonderfully with nice light color.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mastech MS2115A True RMS DIGITAL DC/AC CLAMP METERS Multimeter Amp Voltage R HZ; Brand: Mastech; Review: Works very well, combines a few tools I carried separately. Love the inrush current measurement. From earlier reviews they seem to have fixed the firmware lockup problem, couldn't induce the same problem in mine.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Philips 433227 10.5 watts LED Bulb, Slim Style Dimmable, 4-pack; Brand: Philips; Review: Very bright. I used this and 5 screw in sockets to transform my Torchere light from halogen to LED. VERY bright and low energy. Also have them in a fan and a slim outdoor light. All work great!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cat CT1000 Pocket COB Light – Brilliantly Bright 175 Lumen COB LED Flood Beam Pocket Work Light, Black/Yellow; Brand: Caterpillar; Review: Works great, still haven't replaced the battery, love the magnetic base. Lots of light.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 3D Illusion Platform Night Lighting Touch Botton 7 Color Change Decor LED Lamp; Brand: Threetoo; Review: Not as 3D as I would like but it's great in the office and lights it up just enough at night. I like the color options.; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | amazon_Tools_and_Home_Improvement |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: 4M Crystal Mining Kit; Brand: 4M; Review: My 5 and 7 year old absolutely loved this. This was a great toy for winter time when you are stuck in the house. They both had to put some muscle into it, but they seemed to really enjoy the challenge. This held their attention for longer then I expected and led to more questions and learning. I would definitely recommend this for any kid with a growing interest in science.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Smithsonian Diggin' Up Dinosaurs T-Rex; Brand: Smithsonian; Review: My daughter was given this for Christmas last year. She had a blast trying to dig out the bones. It could get a little messy, but well worth it as this 'dig' occupied my daughter. She had fun doing it and it kept her away from the television on a few cold winter days.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: GUND Peek-A-Boo Teddy Bear Animated Stuffed Animal Plush, 11.5"; Brand: GUND; Review: I cannot believe I am going to give this 5 stars, but let me tell you why. We first received this toy as a gift and I thought it was simply going to take up space in the toy box like so many other toys. However, my two year old loved this toy and would sit and press the button and play with it longer then any other toy we had. At first I thought it would get old fast and only hold his attention for a short while, but I was wrong. My two year old loved this toy. In fact, I just gave one to my baby niece as a Christmas gift this year.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Schwinn Balance Bike, 12" Wheels, Multiple Colors; Brand: Schwinn; Review: My son started riding this when he was 3 and to be honest, I wish we had bought it for him sooner. It took a few weeks of him trying and me helping him not to get discouraged, but now he now wants to ride this bike everywhere. I read reviews for a ton of different styles/brands of the balance bike and settled on this one based on price, durability and other reviews. This was a great purchase and I would absolutely recommend. My son is rough on toys, scooters, bikes and such, but this held up great through the first year. He was actually upset when we had to put it up for the winter and we are both looking forward to using it again soon in the spring.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Elenco SCL-175B Snap Circuits Lights Electronics Discovery Kit; Brand: Snap Circuits; Review: This was a Christmas gift for my 8 year old and she absolutely loves it. I think she was a little overwhelmed with the directions/instruction book in the beginning, but once she dove in she really enjoyed it. My husband helped her get started and then she played on her own reconfiguring for hours. I like that there are not too many pieces, but the quantity is very manageable allowing for options without being overwhelming. I would also suggest buying the snap circuit battery eliminator to go with these sets. My 6 year old had fun 'assisting' but I think she is a little young to get the full enjoyment out of this toy that my 8 year old has.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Snap Circuits Battery Eliminator; Brand: Snap Circuits; Review: A must have if your child enjoys playing with the snap circuits otherwise you will blow through batteries. Definitely worth the price.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ty Beanie Boos Buddies Leona Blue Leopard Medium Plush; Brand: Ty Beanie Boos Buddies; Review: I have three kids, ages 3, 6, and 8, and all of them love Beanie Boos. This one looks exactly as pictured and my 3 year old has been playing with it since he received it for Christmas.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Nerf Rebelle Agent Bow Blaster Pink Deco; Brand: Nerf; Review: This was fun while it lasted but I do not think I would waste my money on this again. We gave one to each of our daughters, ages 5 & 7 at the time. They really enjoyed playing with it, but it was not good quality. It did not take long for them to get the hang of it. They were able to pull the bow by themselves and release the arrows but it did misfire more times then not and the arrows were easily bent. I suppose this could be a good starter set but it is not very durable. On the plus side, it did not hurt if an arrow hit you!; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Official Nerf Rebelle Secrets & Spies Arrow 3-Dart Refill Pack; Brand: Nerf Rebelle; Review: These are rather cheap and flimsy. Both of my daughters were given the rebel bow for Christmas last year. Neither the bows or the arrows held up very well. I gave this 2 stars because they did have a lot of fun playing with them and shooting them until the arrows bent and the bows broke. We went through several packages in a short amount of time. On the plus side, they do not hurt if you are hit by one. I would not buy these again.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Ty Beanie Boos Cinder The Green Dragon Plush; Brand: Ty Beanie Boos; Review: I have three kids, ages 3, 6, and 8, and all of them love Beanie Boos. This one looks exactly as pictured and my 6 year old has been playing with it since she received it for Christmas.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 4M Crystal Mining Kit; Brand: 4M; Review: My 5 and 7 year old absolutely loved this. This was a great toy for winter time when you are stuck in the house. They both had to put some muscle into it, but they seemed to really enjoy the challenge. This held their attention for longer then I expected and led to more questions and learning. I would definitely recommend this for any kid with a growing interest in science.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ty Beanie Boos Buddy - Midnight The Owl 24cm; Brand: Ty Beanie Boos; Review: I have three kids, ages 3, 6, & 8 and they all love these Beanie Boos. This one is exactly as pictured and was a big hit at Christmas.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: LEGO Elves The Elves' Treetop Hideaway 41075; Brand: LEGO; Review: I have two daughters age 8 and 9 who love Lego Elves. We have all types of Legos from Star Wars to City Builders and they play with the Elves the most. They were able to easily build these themselves without help from a grown up. They leave them built and continue to play with them.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: LEGO Elves Queen Dragon's Rescue 41179 Creative Play Toy for 9- to 12-Year-Olds; Brand: LEGO; Review: My 8 and 9 year old daughters love the Lego Elves. They have hundreds of lego from all different series and they play with the Elves the most. They are able to build by themselves and have played with their lego elves for hours after they are built. They love the ones with the dragons.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: LEGO Elves 41178 The Dragon Sanctuary Building Kit (585 Piece); Brand: LEGO; Review: My 8 and 9 year old daughters love the Lego Elves. They have hundreds of lego from all different series and they play with the Elves the most. They are able to build by themselves and have played with their lego elves for hours after they are built. They love the ones with the dragons.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Toys_and_Games |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Holiday Inn Austin Midtown; City: Austin Texas; Review: Good hotel n accomodations, but it is far awar from center and there is not subway or easy transport. Not feel save to walk around after dark.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Holiday Inn Express Hemel Hempstead; City: Hemel Hempstead Hertfordshire England; Review: Taxi from airport costs around 90 pounds. Arrive by train with lugage is very difficult. Its it a good hotel and good employes but is it NOT a good option if you are a tourist who wantx to visit London once it is far from london. It is a good hotel if you wanna visit Apsley, Hemel Hrmpstead or do something around. There is a supermarket 3min walking from hotel and main train station is 5min by taxi from hotel.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Airporthotel Berlin Adlershof; City: Berlin; Review: Good price. Good hotel. Taxis costs around EUR 15 from airport. Train station is 3min walking and takes around 20min to Berlin center. 10 min to airport. And as a bonus there is a supermarket, Subway store, drugstore, bakery and food crossing the street. I'm from Brazil and had visited some cities at Europe. For sure this was the bes experience I had during this trip. Its is an excellent option to the ones who wnat to visit this wonderful city.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Lecourbe; City: Paris Ile de France; Review: Excellent! I'll always stay here. This was my second trip to Paris and hotel Lecourbe was perfect. 2min walking to subway, drugstore, good food, all around! Simple hotel but confortable and good reception. The room was big comparing to others hotels in Paris. I really recommend this hotel.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Athenaeum Hotel; City: Florence Tuscany; Review: The hotel is good. Free wifi. Good location and good breakfast. But I didn't like Florence at all. Everything is very expensive for nothing.; Rating: 3.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with movies/shows as follows:
Title: The Phantom of the Opera: Special Edition (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mean Girls (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Maburaho (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Yu-Gi-Oh! (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ghost in the Shell (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Miss Congeniality (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: DNAngel (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Yu-Gi-Oh!: Season 3 (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Slayers: The Motion Picture (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Yu-Gi-Oh!: Season 1 (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Yu-Gi-Oh!: Season 2 (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Full Metal Panic FUMOFFU (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Blue Gender (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Nadia: Secret of Blue Water (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bring It On (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Never Been Kissed (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pretear (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bring It On Again (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Breakfast Club (1985); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Android Kikaider (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Full Metal Panic! (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Fushigi Yugi: The Mysterious Play (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cardcaptors (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0 | netflix |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Camp Holiday Resort Recreation Area; City: Samal Island Davao del Norte Province Mindanao; Review: Went with my fiancé and family in Feb 2015.Was a very good time at good price.Food was great,staff was very nice and helpful.Rooms very clean and cleaning staff maintain quality every day.Going back in Sept again for week.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: North Zen Basic Spaces; City: Davao City Davao del Sur Province Mindanao; Review: Disagree with comments on service.Staff is very nice and both times gave them gifts.Security guards are really nice and helpful.Hotel is cheap and rooms are not holiday inn but are great for price.Lots of areas to travel too from location.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pillows Hotel; City: Cebu City Cebu Island Visayas; Review: Sent my wife here when she was visiting the C.F.O office..Great location with lots of local area sites.Room was great and staff friendly..A perfect hotel at a great price..Breakfast was excellent and they also gave my wife a free lunch as i was unable to make it with her.When ever i will be in Cebu it will be Pillows for me.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Holiday Inn Express Singapore Clarke Quay; City: Singapore; Review: With a early arrival in Singapore from Davao at 145am we changed our minds about going to Johor Malyassha after reading about crime there.We went to the hotel early at 9am after waiting for train at airport at 530 and a long walk around because both our phones died.The staff at the hotel let us check in early which was such a pleasure to hear.After losing some luggage in Cebu our funds were limited but staff allowed me to pay cash.They were so understanding and nice. Everything g you want to do or see is so close to hotel or very easy to get too with Chinatown MRT 5min walk away.The trains are very cheap and fast anywhere in the city. The hotel is perfect with the rooftop pool and gym.The breakfast buffet that is included is awesome and great way to start your day.The room are so clean and very well updated. You will not be disappointed in staying here..great place for single,couples and family's. Very quiet at night. I have stayed in alot of Holiday Inn express in Canada but this is by far the best I have ever been too..solid 10!!!thank you to all the staff..class act...; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dayang Beach Resort; City: Davao City Davao del Sur Province Mindanao; Review: The beach is very wonderful and most tourist boats dock next beach over.The staff is wonderful and please. Resteraunt is currently being built and will be an excellent add on.Our hut was small but comfortable with fan.There is no plug ins for phones in hut but you can charge in the store.See some people find this an issue but you only need for pictures..your on holiday.My phone lasted the 2 days I was there..On arrival to beach there was debris floating in current well off shore but only because of the week of rain that happen before we arrived..Don't miss out on this beach..good swimming..sea life and relaxing..; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Secdea Beach Resort; City: Samal Island Davao del Norte Province Mindanao; Review: Enjoyed the resort very much.Had no issues with the internet.Always there to pick you up and take you back to your room location.The staff is very friendly and do a wonderful job.Very clean and well maintained resort.Do not find prices that bad..food was excellent and was served to us on the beach.Had one of the pools to ourselves one night as resort more busy doing weekend.They are off to a very good start here and the future looks bright..I will be back..; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Alexander Del Rossa Womens Solid Color Fleece Robe, 3/4 Length Plush Microfiber Bathrobe; Brand: ; Review: Love this super FLUFFY robe. I'm short, it fits great. It's SOOO FLUFFY. I'm actually scared to wash it, it's going to weigh a ton, not sure if my washer can handle it. It keeps you warm. I ordered BLACK and it's unmistakably black. Sometimes black comes faded or looking blue. This is nice and dark black. It leaves behind no lint and doesn't stain your clothing or anything else.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jacobson Hat Company Fake Beard Hair Strap On Accessory Costume Adult Child Pirate Santa Claus Gnome; Brand: Jacobson Hat Company; Review: You get what you pay for. This beard worked snazzy for our Santa Con outfits. Lasted for a whole night of drinking and I'm glad we opted for the cheaper beards as we lost them by the end of the night. I didn't think it itched at all.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Viva Mexico Men's Mariachi Pistolero Bandido Cowboy Costume Cinco de Mayo T-Shirt; Brand: Viva Mexico; Review: Usually wear a Large. I ordered a large it fit perfect.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Viva Mexico Women's Mexican Mariachi Charro Halloween Costume Fitted T-Shirt; Brand: Viva Mexico; Review: I usually wear a medium but ordered a large based off of the reviews. It fit perfect. The design is amazing. Used it for Mariachi Santa at Santa Con. Big hit!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Black and Gold Mariachi Sombrero; Brand: Love Creative; Review: Great authentic hat. It was a bit big but we have smaller sized heads. No big deal. Wore it all night.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Precision Pet Cozy Comforter; Brand: Precision Pet; Review: I love these beds. I just ordered number 5 for my house. I have several sizes, one that fits in a large crate, one that goes in the dog house, and the rest are just for laying on in different rooms. These are loved by my cats as well as my dogs. I have washed them and they came out like new, being as they are tufted, the stuffing can't all bunch in one place. The bottom is non skid, so it stays in place. They are thicker than alot of pads I have seen for crates and such, which I think makes them more comfy.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Iris Medium Floor Protection Tray for Pet Training Pads; Brand: IRIS USA, Inc.; Review: Before I had this tray, my Morkie was chewing and tearing up her pads. Now she doesn't bother them at all. It holds the pad securely and is very quick and easy to change. As far as cleaning; a quick wipe with an anti-bacterial wipe and its ready to go. Great value for the price.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: IRIS Neat 'n Dry Premium Pet Training Pads, Extra Large, 23.5" x 35.5"; Brand: IRIS USA, Inc.; Review: I have a Morkie that weighs 6 pounds and uses these pads. They absorb great and last through several "wee wees" with no leakage at all. This is the first dog that I have ever pad trained and wouldn't have it any other way now. You have the piece of mind that your dog can potty when you are gone for a long time. I wouldn't use any others.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: IRIS Neat 'n Dry Premium Pet Training Pads, Regular, 17.5" x 23.5"; Brand: IRIS USA, Inc.; Review: I have a Morkie that weighs 6 pounds and uses these pads. They absorb great and last through several "wee wees" with no leakage at all. This is the first dog that I have ever pad trained and wouldn't have it any other way now. You have the piece of mind that your dog can potty when you are gone for a long time. I wouldn't use any others.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ESC Snowflake Snuggler Pet Sweater - Pink; Brand: East Side Collection; Review: Have an 8 lb. Morkie and tried the small/medium first. It was just too large, so got the small, it fits OK, but had to cut the back leg straps off, as they just pulled too much, therefore the rear back tends to ride up toward her waist area. Like another said, it does not stretch. It is thick and stiff, but overall really pretty.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Cat Crib; Brand: Cat Crib; Review: I have 5 cats that will try ANYTHING but this! I put it under a chair where they normally spend a lot of time and not one of them will even try it. I've had it for quite a while now and guess I will give up. They will get into or onto anything else in the house, but for some reason not this. Not sure how sturdy it really feels either. I would,give it zero stars if I could, better to pass this one up.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: SmartyKat Electronic Motion Cat Toys; Brand: SmartyKat; Review: This is the one! I researched all the toys like this and this seemed to be the preferred one and I agree. I did put it on a very cheap plastic small Rubbermaid Lazy Susan, (turn table), because I use it on carpet. Even the dog gets in on the action! It is supervised play and they all love it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Yeowww! Catnip Toy, Yellow Banana; Brand: Yeowww!; Review: Second time I've ordered these for my guys. They absolutely love them. I have 4 cats and they all enjoy these. They bite holes in them, lay on them, and kick them. They are a hit with my bunch.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: DOGGIE DESIGN CHOKE FREE REFLECTIVE STEP IN ULTRA HARNESS RED AMERICAN RIVER; Brand: DOGGIE DESIGN; Review: Very secure harness for my almost 9lb. Maltese/Shih Tzu mix furbaby. I'm able to make it plenty tight so it doesn't slip off. Been using for over a month now and she hasn't pulled out of it even once. It's definitely a keeper.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: YEOWWW! ORGANIC CATNIP TOY VARIETY PACK ? CIGAR & BANANA & RAINBOW ? MADE IN USA; Brand: Yeowww!; Review: Cats have always loved the bananas, so I thought I would try this set. They still really only love the banana. They have paid zero attention to the cigar and rainbow, so from here on out, bananas only.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: DOGGIE DESIGN American River Dog Harness Ombre Collection; Brand: DOGGIE DESIGN; Review: Third one of these I've owned. Easy to put on and can be adjusted to the desired tightness. Dog rarely if ever has been able to get anything but maybe one leg out. A small fits my 8 lb Maltese/Shih Tzu perfectly.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Espree Shampoo & Cologne for Pets; Brand: Espree Animal Products; Review: Smell did not last even 24 hours. Sprayed my freshly groomed dog and the scent didn't last any time.; Rating: 1.0/5.0 | amazon_Pet_Supplies |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Mastering Basic Cheesemaking: The Fun and Fundamentals of Making Cheese at Home; Author: Visit Amazon's Gianaclis Caldwell Page; Review: Clear, easy to understand, terrific primer!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: In the Gravest Extreme: The Role of the Firearm in Personal Protection; Author: Visit Amazon's Massad F. Ayoob Page; Review: Great book, exceeded only by his courses!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Art of Natural Cheesemaking: Using Traditional, Non-Industrial Methods and Raw Ingredients to Make the World's Best Cheeses; Author: Visit Amazon's David Asher Page; Review: Great source for natural procedures; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Family Cow Handbook: A Guide to Keeping a Milk Cow; Author: Visit Amazon's Philip Hasheider Page; Review: Super book for beginners; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Build Your Own Low-Cost Log Home (Garden Way Publishing Classic); Author: Visit Amazon's Roger Hard Page; Review: Excellent, fact-full.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Classic Hewn-Log House: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building and Restoring; Author: Visit Amazon's Charles McRaven Page; Review: What to know before you buy/build.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Complete Jewelry Making Course: Principles, Practice and Techniques: A Beginner's Course for Aspiring Jewelry Makers; Author: Visit Amazon's Jinks McGrath Page; Review: So glad I got this book!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Guide to Gemstone Settings: Styles and Techniques; Author: Visit Amazon's Anastasia Young Page; Review: So glad I got this book!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Jeweler's Directory of; Author: Visit Amazon's Judith Crowe Page; Review: Great reference!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Opal Identification & Value; Author: Paul B. Downing; Review: Wonderful book!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Jeweler's Bench Book; Author: Charles Lewton-Brain; Review: Excellent book!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Opals, Third Edition (Ward, Fred, Gem Book Series) (Fred Ward Gem Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Fred Ward Page; Review: wonderful book!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Handwoven Tape: Understanding and Weaving Early American and Contemporary Tape; Author: Visit Amazon's Susan Faulkner Weaver Page; Review: Fantastic book on handwoven tape! I read it, bought a box tape loom and after 2 weeks am into weaving my 3rd tape. Heartily recommend it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tartans: Their Art and History; Author: Visit Amazon's Ann Sutton Page; Review: Super book; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Complete Book of Tartan, a Heritage Encyclopedia of Over 400 Tartans and the; Author: Iain and Charles Phillips Zaczek; Review: Great book; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tartan: Romancing the Plaid; Author: Visit Amazon's Jeffrey Banks Page; Review: Beautiful book, lots of substance; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Aynetree Guest House; City: Edinburgh Scotland; Review: We had one night's stay at Anne and Brian's very comfortable and welcoming B & B just outside Edinburgh city centre (bus into the city from right from outside the door, takes about 15 mins or so). Very clean rooms, comfortable bed, and a totally knockout breakfast.! Brian was a wealth of infomation about the city and what to see and made us really feel at home. Would definitely stay again. Bob & Luisa, Bromley; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Cornerways Guest House; City: Oxford Oxfordshire England; Review: My husband and I took a short 2 night break to Oxford on May 9 and 10, selected Cornerways from the Tripadvisor sight after seeing the favourable reviews, and found it 100% lived up to the praise it had got. The location is great, a leisurely 20 min stroll into the city centre along the river, or direct frequent bus service if feeling lazy (or felt too full after Carol's wonderful breakfast!). Talking of whom Carol, the owner was so friendly and welcoming, and helpful with local knowledge plus lots of literature on hand re places to visit etc. Our room was very clean and comfortable and very nicely furnished with spotless ensuite facilities, lovely to come back to after a day walking round Oxford. Breakfast in the sunny conservatory overlooking the beautifully tended garden was a real treat too - we were lucky weatherwise but even with inclement weather the whole place had a lovely light and sunny feel to it. We still have some things we want to do in Oxford and the surrounding area as we ran out of time, so will definitely go back and base ourselves at Cornerways, as we know all our needs will be catered for.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Elisa; City: Peschici Province of Foggia Puglia; Review: We decided to incorporate a visit to family ijn Southern Italy with a short stay in Puglia as we hadn't been to that region before. We liked the look of Hotel Elisa on Trip Advisor and booked 3 nights for beginning of September. The hotel was everything we had hoped for - a marvelllous location in a very picturesque part of Puglia - the Gargano promontory. The rooms are very clean and our sea view room with balcony was extremely comfortable. The hotel includes sun beds and umbrella in its room rate,(we paid E60 per night half board - very reasonable we thought) and with the beach not 5 minutes walk away, this was a real bonus as you knew you had a reserved place for your time on the beach each day and no extra cost! We had half board and experienced both lunch and dinner, both of which were superb with local dishes and specialities - the waiting staff also being extemely polite and the service very efficient and helpful. Breakfast was more than ample with a good assortment of savoury and sweet items to choose from. The swimming pool was lovely and tranquil with views of the old town up on the hill above as in our photos. The walk up to the old town is quite a climb but the steps are wide and easy to negotiate (and a good walk was needed after the meals). It was very lively up in the old town, a great place to go for a coffee or drink or another eating place to try, with the typical Italian "passegiata" going on till late. This was a lovely contrast to the ideal little seaside part where the hotel is located in prime position. We would not hesitate to recommend this hotel for anyone thinking of visiting this beautiful part of Puglia, and the hotel owners are most helpful and well deserve to have the returning trade that they obviously have - we ourselves are very keen to revisit Hotel Elisa!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Li Campi; City: Lecce Province of Lecce Puglia; Review: OUr 3 night stay at Li Campi was the second part of a 6 night trip to Puglia - a first visit to this region for us. Firstly, the location is perfect, only a short drive from the wonderful Baroque city of Lecce, also Otranto, Gallipoli and the lovely Salento beaches are within 25 minutes drive, so a perfect combination of sea and countryside within reach. The accommodation at Li Campi is very tasteful, clean and comfortable, the restoration project on the building has been done beautifully and the swimming pool set amid the citrus grove is a lovely place to relax and maybe enjoy some food from the "fast menu" available all day (excellent light lunches/salads etc). The restaurant meals are wonderful, using local regional produce and the range of dishes superb, very fresh and and well presented - all the food we tried was absolutely first class! The breakfasts equally were a treat to look forward to, a range of savoury and sweet items and locally made jams to please any palate and once again well presented and excellent service from the waiting staff. Our overall verdict is of an unforgettable stay in a place of total relaxation and calm, but within a short distance of other things to do and discover in the area. We are thankful to Irina and Sandro for their attention and kindness towards making our stay seem very special, which we are sure is the case for all their guests - we look forward to a return visit in the near future.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Bromley Court Hotel; City: Bromley Greater London England; Review: After having a very enjoyable family lunch during the Christmas break we decided to book the Garden Restaurant for 18 people for a special birthday celebration. We were looked after extremely well, Gio (the restaurant manager) and his staff ensured that everything ran smoothly on the day, we also were able to have an area of the bar set aside to have an after lunch toast and cutting of the birthday cake so our guests could sit and relax to finish off a very nice lunch. Would definitely recommend.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Rodostamo Hotel Spa; City: Corfu Town Corfu Ionian Islands; Review: What lovely place to spend your holiday.Rooms and restaurant first class as was the pool (see pics) Can thoroughly recommend it.Great facilities for all the family. Will be definitely going back in the near future; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright; Author: Visit Amazon's Jean Nathan Page; Review: Jeanne Nathan's Lonely Doll is an affecting biography of a woman in the act of drowning. Dare Wright, model and fashion photographer, was the neglected daughter of a disastrous marriage. Abandoned early by her father --better stated, her mother kicked her father and brother out of the household-- Dare was alternately wooed and ignored by her mother, a successful and extraordinarily ambitious portrait painter. Edie, her mother, never allowed Dare to develop independence, but she was unwilling to devote time and affection to make Dare feel truly wanted. Dare grew into a stunningly beautiful woman who was addicted to self-display. In adulthood, she photographed herself time and again in ball gowns, negligees, and nude. Even nude, there seems to have been no awareness in Dare of the effect of what she offered on display. In her relations with men, she was asexual: a long-distance engaqgement to a RAF pilot collapsed without physical involvement; she rediscovered her devotion to him only after he died unexpectedly in a plane crash. From then on, he wasn't a threat to her. Though men found her attractive, she avoided all future romantic attachments. Dare was deathly afraid of sex: a kiss from a beau was enough to drive her into hysterics. Her only emotional attachments were to her brother Blaine, from whom she had been separated for fourteen years, and her all-devouring mother Edie. In 1957, in her early forties, Dare published the first of seventeen books, The Lonely Doll. She wrote the text for it and illuistrated it with startlingly real photographs of dolls. The heroine was a doll named Edith. Edith looked like Dare in hair, face, kewpie doll lips, and clothing, as well as0 in the doll's sublimated but evident sexuality. (Edith's lace panties show in several photos.) The stories Dare told in this series of children's books, which eventually numbered ten, are stories of loss, of the arrival of family and the threat of losing a family. Several include scenes of spanking (because Edith has been a bad girl). Edith Sr. died in her nineties, after having destroyed Dare's life for sixty-some years. Dare's brother Blair died shortly thereafter, leaving Dare with no prop to sustain an increasingly fragile sense of her own identity and worth. Dare's life and health ran down hill --she abandoned photography and writing, became an alcohol, gave away her hard won family treasures and invited homeless people into her apartment to sleep. The last years of her life were dreadful. Jean Nathan is a sympathetic observer who has used her own life to understand Dare's. Dare's life appears successful but it was profoundly and utterly empty at the core. Nonetheless, Nathan makes you care about this fey bystander who sat out her life but still produced an effecting series of books. Highly recommended. David Keymer Modesto CA; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Truth and Beauty: A Friendship; Author: Visit Amazon's Ann Patchett Page; Review: I just finished reading two affecting books recently about doomed women. Both women were exceptionally talented. Both were in their own ways beautiful or at least alluring in appearance. It sounds funny to say that Lucy Grealy, the subject of Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty, was beautiful --her jaw and mouth were permanently deformed by cancer-- but Lucy was very successful at attracting men. Regardless of the damage done to her face by the repeated failures of reconstructive surgey on her jaw and mouth, she was alluring in looks as well as manner. This memoir --a very good one-- is about novelist Patchett's (Bel Canto, The Patron Saint of Liars, etc.) friendship with Lucy. Although she knew of Lucy in college, their friendship took off when both attended the Writer's Workshop at Iowa State. They stayed close friends until Lucy's early death from a drug overdose. Lucy suffered cancer of the jaw as a young girl. Although she survived the cancer, her lower jaw was destroyed in the process. For the rest of her life, she went through operation after operation to rebuild a working lower jaw and mouth. All of them were painful. All of them ultimately failed. Lucy compensated by living feverishly but not always wisely. She sampled every sensation she could, including drugs, and she took whatever form of love she could from the men she picked up along the way. She produced one striking book --The Autobiography of a Face-- and then died early, most probably of a drug overdose. Patchett makes it clear that it was expensive emotionally to remain friends with Lucy, who was demanding and terribly volatile, but it is clear that the cost was well worth it to her. Lucy shone brightly, though only for a short while, and she was a very good friend. We should all wish for a friend like Patchett was to Lucy Grealy. As always, Patchett writes like a dream. The subject of Jean Nathan's The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright is obviously beautiful, in some of the book's many photographs stunningly so. On the book's cover, she has a string of pearls around her neck. Her blond hair spreads across the grass beneath her naked body. Sea shells cover her eyelids. Exotic indeed! Dare Wright started out as a fashion model and then became a photographer, but her fame rests on a series of children's books she wrote about a Lonely Doll who has two Teddy Bears for friends. She wrote the Lonely Doll books and illustrated them with photographs of a doll who looked amazingly like Dare. Lonely Doll acted out Dare's own desperate loneliness and provided Dare with a fantasy release. At times strikingly beautiful, always exotically alluring, Dare had no trouble attracting men, but she fled from any kind of physical intimacy with them. She drew solace instead from her overbearing mother and from a brother as damaged emotionally as she was. Her mother was a monster of the first order, a talented portrait painter (she once painted Churchill); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: James Beard's American Cookery; Author: Visit Amazon's James Beard Page; Review: As a serious amateur cook, I find nothing more relaxing after a stressful day than to come home, pour myself a glass of wine or a tall bourbon and water, turn on the stereo, and start chopping and slicing vegetables and making sauces. I have lots of cookbooks but I *use* three of them principally --Greene on Greens for vegetables, Marcella Hazan for Italian food (a mainstay in my household) and --above all-- Beard's American Cookery. I will frequently start a meal by putting the three of these books on the table in front of me and starting through the indexes, ingredient by ingredient. (Later comment: I now add two of Jacques Pepin's book to the table as well.) In this book, Beard laid out the history of American cooking, a catholic practice of borrowing the best (and sometines the worst) of all the various ethnic and regional cookeries we have inherited as this nation has grown. The book is laid out intelligently, it's easy to follow, and it allows you as the chef to make choices. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this marvelous, indispensable book. David Keymer Modesto CA; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Two Trains Running; Author: Visit Amazon's Andrew Vachss Page; Review: I've followed Vaccshs's Burke novels since the first one. While I feel the latter ones are not as good as the first, I've enjoyed them all. I approached Two Trains Running, Vacchs's latest novel, and one that does not feature his dark hero Burke, with anticipation. But I do not like Two Trains Running at all. Like Burke, his hero, Walker Dett, is an avenging angel, damaged but deadly. Brought in by a local gang boss to deal with his rivals in an eponymous small midwestern town in 1959, Dett takes on an invading Mafia boss and his hoods and a contingent of Irish IRA. In the background, neo-Nazis and black revolutionaries prepare for war. It ends in a blaze of gore. Dett, as his name presages, walks away for good, leaving behind a woman he loves. As fantastic as all this seems, there is the stuff in it for a good noir crime novel of the type at which Vacchs has excelled. But it doesn't happen in this novel. The plotting is flabby, characterization cursory. Even ambience, one of Vacchs's strengths in previous outings, suffers. The protagonist's past history, which motivates his behavior, is ludicrous. There is an embarrassingly mawkish love story which I won't even bother to describe. I pray Vacchs isn't suffering from John D. MacDonald's disease; there have been signs of it in his recent work. MacDonald ruined his perfectly good action series featuring the beach bum Travis McGee by prosing on his own and other people's character and behavior and the morality of violent action. Vacchs's novels work best when they are lean, quick, violent and nasty. I hope that he goes back to what he has done best. David Keymer Modesto CA; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Peloponnesian War; Author: Donald M. Kagan; Review: Kagan has produced a one-volume epitome of his multi-volume history of the Peloponnesian War and readers should be grateful to him. At almost seven hundred pages, it offers sufficient depth to satisfy the discriminating history lover without requiring detailed prior knowledge of Greek institutions, events or personalities. Kagan's analyses of events are always sage and they occasionally bear relevance to the practices of later ages. As in his short history of Pericles, Kagan writes a vigorous, lucid prose that compels attention and belief. David Keymer Modesto CA; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies; Author: Visit Amazon's Ian Buruma Page; Review: In Occidentialism, Buruma and Margalit have produced an essay which offers a convenient starting point to an examination of why the West, and the United States in particular, is so hated by the rest of the world. They point to the debt anti-westernism owes to late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century German romanticism and to nineteenth-century slavophiliac thinkers: in particular, the despising of reason and calculation in favor of spirit and national character. But, and here they offer something of even greater value, they point out also the ways in which the current jihadism is radically different than earlier, predominantly western thought: it places westerners and western values flatly in the domain of Satan and provides jihadists with a rationale for all-out, no-holds-barred violence against the West. The book is elegantly written from start to finish but much too short, enough too short that it is a serious weakness in an otherwise laudable book. There is little time to develop the ideas they throw out (many of themof great interest) and they rely too heavily on the products of writers and intellectuals like them. I wish Edward Said were still alive to engage in dialogue with the authors of this book: I the joining of the two viewpoints would be fruitful. Still, all in all, this is a book worth getting and keeping. David Keymer Modesto CA; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Incubus Dreams (Anita Blake Vampire Hunter); Author: Visit Amazon's Laurell K. Hamilton Page; Review: The first Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novels were good fun: they offered a somewhat unique farrago of sex, violence and kinky character both living, dead and inbetween, presented in a saucy, flip tone of voice by the indomitable Ms. Blake. Unfortunately, Ms. Hamilton seems to have fallen in love with her character --or, more aptly, with her sex life-- for that is what the latest novel (Incubus Dreams) is all about. If you like long, not terribly well written or conceived sex scenes --some of them sprawl across two or three chapters-- then Dreams may be your cup of tea. But if you seek a well developed plot or lively and convincing action scenes, you'd best look elsewhere. This novel is terribly boring. David Keymer Modesto CA; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265-146BC (Cassell Military Paperbacks); Author: Adrian Goldsworthy; Review: Military history has been slighted in recent years, with the possible exception of John Keegan's insightful books. In part it is because focusing on the role of the military runs counter to the modern bias that social currents determine the nature of wars and not wars the direction of the times. We also embrace a moralistic tendency to believe that violence never really solves anything. But violence has solved many things even in modern times and until we stop resorting to war to resolve inter-state conflicts, the study of war is --or should be-- of importance to us. Goldsworthy has written a solidly researched, lively (well --fairly lively) and measured history of the Punic Wars (265-146 BC). The three wars encompassed a theater of operations that spanned the south of Europe (Spain, Italy), the Mediterranean Sea (Sicily) and northern Africa, and took more than a century to complete. The wars were the formative conflict of the Roman Republic. Goldsworthy argues convincingly that Rome eventually destroyed Carthage for four reasons: (1) unlike other ancient states, Rome refused to concede defeat, no matter how badly or frequently its troops were beaten in battle; (2) the Romans excelled in learning from enemies, borrowing their tactics to defeat them; (3) Rome's allies remained true to Rome, regardless of defeat or victory, more often than was true of Carthage's allies; and (4) Rome possessed resources well beyond those of Carthage, both in men and goods, which made it possible for Rome to fight a multi-decade war regardless of the cost. This is a substantial book, accessible to novice as well as professional. Alas, the days are gone when one could count on school children knowing of the conflict between Carthage and Rome because they'd read about it in their Latin classes, but the story is still well worth telling. David Keymer Modesto CA; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin, The Nine-to-Five Killer, Book 5); Author: Visit Amazon's Loren D. Estleman Page; Review: What a clever book this is! Estleman's novels about "ex"-hitman Peter Macklin are distinguished by a hearty cynicism about human behavior and a black -very black-sense of humor. These books are as good as, though quite different from, the critically Parker novels of "Richard Stark" (Donald Westlake). As to similarities, Estleman's Macklin, like Stark's Parker, is almost devoid of personality except for his radical and persistent scepticism about other people's motivations. Macklin, like Parker, is a survival machine pure and simple with no illusions about what to do to survive. But while Parker is still energetically a player in the game, Macklin hopes to get out, to become as respectable as he already is --by temperament and deliberate strategy-- bland. Parker's femme accepts the truth about Parker's nature; Laurie, Macklin's wife, can't come to grips with the violence that keeps intruding in her new life. In this excellent crime noir novel, Macklin meets Laurie's mother, the mother-in-law from hell, and finds that her boyfriend is a player just like he used to be: he spots for a gang of sociopathic robbers who have eyes on his girlfriend's bookstore. It's no surprise that violence erupts. Estleman, a master of the crime novel, handles it all adeptly, but an added pleasure is the way Estleman blends the comic and the violent. This is a very good book. David Keymer Modesto CA; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists; Author: Visit Amazon's Rachel Cohen Page; Review: Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists 1854-1967 is an exceptional work of literary detection and interpretation. In thirty-six chapters, Cohen narrates a set of encounters of distinguished American literati and artists across the span of 113 years, laying out changes in the preoccupations and sensibilities of American writers and artists in the century that followed the Civil War. Some meetings are brief, even one-time, and peripheral to the protagonists' lives as, for instance, the Henry James, still a child, sitting with his father for a photograph by Matthew Brady, or William Dean Howells' one-time meeting with Walt Whitman, or Richard Avedon's photo shoot of modernists Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. The meeting of James and Brady is also a "might have been" meeting, for Cohen takes a daring chance to capture and describe James's literary and intellectual sensibility on the brink of radical change. Other chapters describe longer standing relationships -Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz, Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore, Hart Crane's disastrous stay in Mexico with Katherine Anne Porter, the complicated father and son relationship of W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, the advance-retreat relationship between Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. This is not a book of strict factual history (although nothing in it runs counter to what can be proved using historical methods) but rather a book of rich historical sensitivity that illuminates a critical period in the maturing of our country's literature and art. It is written with exceptional grace: each chapter can be read separately without loss in pleasure or comprehension. This is a bold venture that deserves a wide readership. The reader who enjoys A Chance Meeting may also enjoy Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A History of Ideas in America (which I am reading right now).; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Right As Rain: A Derek Strange Novel (Derek Strange Novels); Author: George P. Pelecanos; Review: Pelecanos writes about crime -urban crime, in crime-infested Washington DC no less-and no one does it better. His novels are well plotted, the characters are strong, authentic and appealing, and his empathy for people trapped in poverty in racism pours off of the pages. In Right as Rain, he introduces an appealing new protagonist, African-American private eye Derek Strange, strong and cynically aware of the problems facing his people, but also REAL, nothing overblown or false in the characterization of him. Strange is hired by an elderly African-American lady who wants him to clear her dead son, a DC cop, of the allegation that he was killed while involved in criminal activity. The novel features an unusual Odd Couple combination as Strange investigates, then takes on as collaborator in his search for the truth and finally -and hesitantly-becomes friends with the white ex-cop, Terry Quinn, who shot the young man. Quinn left the DC force after the shooting, which he sees as an unfortunate accident. After all, he knows he's not prejudiced. But was it an accident? Neither Quinn nor Strange can forget that white Quinn killed a black cop --because he was black Quinn made assumptions about his actions and intent that he might not have made if his victim had been white. A virtue of this fine novel -a virtue that is common in Pelecanos's writing-is that he doesn't simplify the complicated issue of race in America. I don't know that anyone can be impartial on such a loaded question in our age, but Pelecanos comes close to doing it. This is one of the best popular novels you will read this year.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln; Author: Visit Amazon's Doris Kearns Goodwin Page; Review: Pulitzer winner Goodwin has long demonstrated a feel for biography as a gateway into the past. In Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents, she has found an ideal subject for her attention. He is the more interesting to study because, unlike most presidents, who have sought to surround themselves in their cabinets with safe men who think like they do on important matters, Lincoln chose to build a cabinet out of men whose relationship to the president was problematic, if not downright risky. In 1861, Lincoln persuaded three of his rivals for the Republican nomination -Seward, Chase and Banks-to sit in his cabinet. They owed Lincoln nothing. As a rule, they saw Lincoln as a man of low ability and little promise, president by the accident of geography. Furthermore, some were enemies who would barely talk to each other. Yet, the cabinet did not dissolve in warfare and Lincoln established firm control over executive decisions, much to the surprise of Seward in particular, who had assumed that he, and not the president, would lead this group and be the true decisionmaker in Washington. In short while, Seward and Banks became firm allies of Lincoln; indeed, Seward became Lincoln's fastest friend in the Washington power ranks. When Stanton joined the cabinet as secretary of war, he too was converted to allegiance to Lincoln although he had publicly slighted him years before. The only cabinet member whose loyalty remained suspect was Chase, whose lust for the presidency in 1864 blinded him to his own duplicity as he sought to undermine Lincoln and gain support for his own candidacy. Chase was not above political blackmail: three times, he submitted his resignation to Lincoln and three times Lincoln, who valued Chase's substantial ability to get things done in a key office and who would rather have Chase inside his tent than outside, persuaded him to remain. Chase proffered his resignation for the fourth time in 1864. This time, he had overplayed his hand: Lincoln, who by then had secured renomination by the Republican party, no longer needed Chase and didn't need to fear him, so he accepted his resignation without further discussing it with Chase. When Chase heard, he was shocked, even though he'd asked for it. Lincoln tempered the blow by dismissing Chase's rival in the Cabinet at the same time, maintaining a balance of interests in the group, and when an opening on the Supreme Court became available, he appointed Chase, an act of magnanimity unimaginable in any of Lincoln's successors. Recently, I read a very interesting "moral biography" of Lincoln's early years (up to 1861), Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, by William Lee Miller. Goodwin's fine biography made a good counterpoint to Miller's more limited and focused study. Both made the same point, that Lincoln succeeded as president, and excelled in the role, because he complemented his exceptional political talents and strong intellectual ability with a consistent ethical focus. There has never been another American president with such a strong moral compass as Lincoln and none who heeded it so consistently.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis, and the Road to War; Author: Visit Amazon's Ian Kershaw Page; Review: Kershaw has taken an intriguing topic which is essentially a sidebar to the history of the buildup to, and prosecution of, World War II: why did Lord Londonderry, formerly Britain's Minister of the Air, court the Nazi leaders in the 1930s? Londonderry's visits with Hitler and Goring in Germany and the highly publicized stay of von Ribbentrop at Londonderry's estate put Londonderry and his wife in an untenable position when it became clear that appeasement wasn't working. Why didn't Londonderry see the signs earlier? Kershaw argues convincingly that Londonderry was not blind to Hitler's faults but he saw little choice for a militarily enfeebled Britain but to woo Hitler to the bargaining table with concessions, thus buying the British Isles time to rearm. Unfortunately, Londonderry had neither the intelligence nor the political skills to negotiate in the modern political world, where high office and the attendant deference were no longer automatic prerogatives of high birth. Mired in an increasingly untenable position, and with his public image besmirched, Londonderry dug his own hole deeper and deeper in efforts to exonerate himself, especially in regard to his earlier stewardship of the air force. Until the very end, Londonderry never understood that compromises could not work without the necessary force behind it to punish transgressors. It is interesting to see how little Britain's leaders (Churchill and one or two others excepted) understood the menace that Hitler posed nor how much their own concessions worsened their bargaining (and eventually fighting) position in the struggle to confront a new kind of monster on the European scene.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: So What: The Life of Miles Davis; Author: John Szwed; Review: Yale jazz historian Szwed established his credentials with an excellent biography of jazz eccentric Sun Ra (Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra [1997]). He has now written an engaging biography of the talented trumpeter, Miles Davis. The story of Davis's tormented life and his tumultuous relations with men and women is enough by itself to ensure the book's interest but Szwed brings special strengths to the subject of Miles as artist (which Miles clearly, and above all else, was). At times, Szwed's description of the artistic and creative milieu of Davis's times disrupts the narrative flow of the book, but Szwed's judgments always illuminate: they are especially helpful in understanding an artist like Davis who was keenly attuned to the musical currents -classical, jazz and pop-of his day and whose music often consciously responded to them. Szwed is in addition a perceptive analyst of Davis's music throughout the trumpeter's long career. To me, this is a special strength of this excellent book: Szwed makes clear to me the musical aesthetic that shaped Miles's decisions as he moved further and further away from conventional jazz forms and techniques. If there is a flaw in Szwed's book, it is in the digressions: they break the narrative flow, but they also enrich the reader's understanding of the musical world in which Davis made so many bold and ultimately successful choices. Highly recommended. David Keymer. Modesto CA.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Napoleon: A Political Life; Author: Visit Amazon's Steven Englund Page; Review: Steven Englund's Napoleon: A Political Life (available in paperback from Harvard) is a book that should satisfy both the interested lay reader and the professional historian. It will satisfy the lay person because it tells a fascinating story about one of history's most interesting and influential human beings, and it tells it exceptionally well. In the process, the reader will gain insights into how a topflight scholar advances his or her field of knowledge. It will please academics because Englund presents a nuanced revision of the current myths about Napoleon, who, after two hundred years, still stirs passions among his admirers and detractors as though he were living today. The author focuses on Napoleon's evolving political thought and strategy and how his contemporaries actually responded to him, not how we wished they had responded to him. A virtue is that Englund avoids smoothing out Napoleon's past choices and actions through hindsight: Englund emphasizes that actual history is messy; it doesn't come in tidy packages. The greatest of men, the very few like Napoleon, leave behind an altered world. Englund draws on Christian Meier's masterful biography of Caesar. He frequently compares Napoleon to Caesar, but Napoleon left behind many more permanent structures in France and across Europe thna Caesar did Rome: law code, a system to govern the localities from the center, the Legion of Honor, and in Paris, monuments and buildings and sewer system and roads. People who won't like the book will most likely object to two things. (1) It's not a history primer. Englund assumes the reader is conversant with eighteenth-century history history though not at the level of the professional historian. (2) Englund devotes almost as much time to wars and battles as he does to other issues, both domestic and international. But, especially when discussing Napoleon and his times, Clausewitz was right: war is an extension ofpolitics. Another objection may be that Englund doesn't condemn Napoleon roundly enough. He admires him but sees what disaster his overweening ambition led him to in the end. Highly recommended.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Handling Sin; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Malone Page; Review: Michael Malone, Handling Sin Michael Malone, Uncivil Seasons Michael Malone writes like there is no divide between popular and serious in fiction. He tells good stories; his characters are engaging and real; he has a humane sense of humor. His prose sometimes rollicks and at other times purrs, it is so elegant. Handling Sin is one of the funniest books I have read. A reviewer compared it (rightly so, I think) to John Kennedy Toole's classic comedy of errors and manners, A Confederacy of Dunces. Uncivil Seasons (from which I will quote in a minute) is a mystery and a comedy of manners. In every respect it is engaging. In both books, Malone has created memorable protagonists, who are utterly winning; he surrounds them with a cast of southern grotesques who would be laughable if not so human. Here's Malone's description of a love scene. It's short, pretty and discrete. It feels like new love should feel: "She moved above me like a flower swayed, like white peonies and red poppies and rose mountain laurel swayed; and I was the new shafts of spring earth, and so joined with her that there was no way to tell what was earth growing up, and what was flower." It's like a lyrical passage out of the Old Testament, which is fitting since it's placed in the mouth of a renegade Old South aristocrat, Justin Savile. At another point in the story, a rough-edged cotton mill owner compliments the hero: "I appreciate your paying Joanna [his dead daughter] your respects. I like a man with good manners. Principles, I've got no use for. Ever notice how most of the slime of the world gets flung there by men with principles? Take care now." And then he leaves. That's just good writing!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Uncivil Seasons; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Malone Page; Review: Michael Malone, Handling Sin Michael Malone, Uncivil Seasons Michael Malone writes like there is no divide between popular and serious in fiction. He tells good stories; his characters are engaging and real; he has a humane sense of humor. His prose sometimes rollicks and at other times purrs, it is so elegant. Handling Sin is one of the funniest books I have read. A reviewer compared it (rightly so, I think) to John Kennedy Toole's classic comedy of errors and manners, A Confederacy of Dunces. Uncivil Seasons (from which I will quote in a minute) is a mystery and a comedy of manners. In every respect it is engaging. In both books, Malone has created memorable protagonists, who are utterly winning; he surrounds them with a cast of southern grotesques who would be laughable if not so human. Here's Malone's description of a love scene. It's short, pretty and discrete. It feels like new love should feel: "She moved above me like a flower swayed, like white peonies and red poppies and rose mountain laurel swayed; and I was the new shafts of spring earth, and so joined with her that there was no way to tell what was earth growing up, and what was flower." It's like a lyrical passage out of the Old Testament, which is fitting since it's placed in the mouth of a renegade Old South aristocrat, Justin Savile. At another point in the story, a rough-edged cotton mill owner compliments the hero: "I appreciate your paying Joanna [his dead daughter] your respects. I like a man with good manners. Principles, I've got no use for. Ever notice how most of the slime of the world gets flung there by men with principles? Take care now." And then he leaves. That's just good writing!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Forgetfulness; Author: Visit Amazon's Ward S. Just Page; Review: This weekend, I read and finished two beautiful books, both fiction: Nancy Culpepper, by Bobby Ann Mason, and Forgetfulness, by Ward Just, both published in 2006. Ward Just usually but not always writes about Washington and about the kind of people who decide our lives for us without asking us how we want them decided. I've read three of his earlier novels and his collection of short stories, The Senator Who Loved Balzac. They're all really good. In narrative focus and empathy, Ward Just belongs in a family with three other fine American novelists of life and manners among the privileged: John Updike, Louis Auchincloss and Louis Begley. Just keeps getting better. For the most part, Forgetfulness is set in France, the protagonist an expatriate American, a painter who has done odd jobs for the CIA in the past and still is connected through childhood friends to the agency. In his late fifties, Thomas retire to a secluded valley town in the Pyrenees(?) to paint. He meets and marries Florette, a spirited Frenchwoman, and they live happily together. One evening, while Thomas is talking with two boyhood friends who are visiting for the day, Florette goes hiking in the mountains. She falls, breaks her ankle. She is discovered by four Arab men who are passing through on clandestine business. They carry her part way down the mountain, then leave her in the freezing snow, then slit her throat and disappear. Most of the novel is about Thomas's efforts to come to terms with her absence and the fact of her murder. When the French capture the men who killed Florette, Thomas is permitted to listen in on their interrogation. His part in the interrogation over, Thomas returns home and buries himself in his painting. But eventually, he returns to America after more than twenty(?) years away --France has been taken away from him by his memories. Foprgetfulness is a subtle novel of character. That's nothing new for Just, although he does it exceptionally well each time. Some of his passages take your breath away! But this novel explores new themes, and for the first time in Just's writing --as far as I know-- he addresses a world that includes, indeed is shaped by, terrorism.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Master and Commander; Author: O'Brian Patrick; Review: C. S. Forester, Beat to Quarters. Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander I've begun reading C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels for the fourth or fifth time and I'm enjoying them almost as much as the first time through. Last year, I read about half of Patrick O'Brian's stunning Aubrey-Maturin sea novels for a second time: they didn't lose a thing in the rereading, they're so good. Both authors knew their subject matter thoroughly -naval battle in the age of sail, the sea campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars. Both succeeded admirably in conveying the nature and feel of life at sea in crowded, sometimes ungainly, often elegant wooden sailing vessels that in the heat of battle often became floating coffins for the men who inhabited them. Self-doubting Hornblower and his loyal lieutenant Bush, ebullient Jack Aubrey and his surgeon-spy friend Stephen Maturin are men we easily come to admire, full-fleshed characters. The love stories which form a second melody in many of the books in both series are engrossing; you root for the course of true love, for Hornblower's indomitable Lady Barbara and Jack's virginal and stubbornly maternal Sophie. There are differences. O'Brian is the more consistently superior writer and you laugh more when you read his books. Forester has the annoying habit of telling the reader about changes (largely naval practices) that occur later than the events described rather than, as does O'Brian, simply letting the details of the narration build up a sense of past times in the reader's mind. But Foresterr doesn't indulge himself often and it's a very minor irritation in a splendid narrative that spreads across how eleven novels. The ambition of these writers is abashing. How did they keep narrative focus through eleven (in Forester's case) and eighteen (O'Brian's) books? How did they succeed -and succeed they truly did--in creating real characters who mature from book to book and communicate their humanity as well as their heroism to readers of a time two hundred years later? These are exceptional books.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hannibal; Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Harris Page; Review: For the record, I greatly enjoyed the first two Hannibal Lecter novels (Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs). I read them both twice. I even liked the third novel, Hannibal, self-indulgent though it was. ("A fairy tale in reverse," I called it, where the monster wins and as reward gets to live happily ever after.) But Hannibal Rising is just plain stupid, dull and implausible. Come to think of it, maybe this book will help us. After all, you never know when we will need insight into the motives of another killer-cannibal who, like Hannibal, has descended from eastern European nobility, was forced to live in the woods for three years hiding from German and then Russian soldiers only to see his younger sister cooked and eaten by brutish marauders, and then was raised under the tutelage of a beautiful and cultured Japanese aunt. There must be lots of serial murderers from a background like thta. It's easy to say that Rising is worthless but of course it's not, not to Harris, who has made a pretty penny from the royalties for the book (and film script). It's only the reader who is cheated.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Captain Horatio Hornblower (Beat to Quarters #1); Author: Visit Amazon's C. S. Forester Page; Review: C. S. Forester, Beat to Quarters. Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander I've begun reading C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels for the fourth or fifth time and I'm enjoying them almost as much as the first time through. Last year, I read about half of Patrick O'Brian's stunning Aubrey-Maturin sea novels for a second time: they didn't lose a thing in the rereading, they're so good. Both authors knew their subject matter thoroughly -naval battle in the age of sail, the sea campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars. Both succeeded admirably in conveying the nature and feel of life at sea in crowded, sometimes ungainly, often elegant wooden sailing vessels that in the heat of battle often became floating coffins for the men who inhabited them. Self-doubting Hornblower and his loyal lieutenant Bush, ebullient Jack Aubrey and his surgeon-spy friend Stephen Maturin are men we easily come to admire, full-fleshed characters. The love stories which form a second melody in many of the books in both series are engrossing; you root for the course of true love, for Hornblower's indomitable Lady Barbara and Jack's virginal and stubbornly maternal Sophie. There are differences. O'Brian is the more consistently superior writer and you laugh more when you read his books. Forester has the annoying habit of telling the reader about changes (largely naval practices) that occur later than the events described rather than, as does O'Brian, simply letting the details of the narration build up a sense of past times in the reader's mind. But Foresterr doesn't indulge himself often and it's a very minor irritation in a splendid narrative that spreads across how eleven novels. The ambition of these writers is abashing. How did they keep narrative focus through eleven (in Forester's case) and eighteen (O'Brian's) books? How did they succeed -and succeed they truly did--in creating real characters who mature from book to book and communicate their humanity as well as their heroism to readers of a time two hundred years later? These are exceptional books.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe; Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Cahill Page; Review: Though an engaging writer, Cahill is an appallingly bad historian. He compares the medieval nun Hildegard of Bingen to blues singer Bessie Smith (Hildegard's lyrics display a spiritualized eroticism) and the woman in bondage in The Story of O and refers to Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City in the same passage. ("This was one loose sister," is his characterization of Hildegard.) He compares Dante to James Joyce on the grounds that both were exiles infatuated with their mother cities. He characterizes WWI's Gallipoli as a "confrontation between ... Islam and the West," an appallingly bad summary of a complex military campaign which had little to do with religion and a great deal to do with military matters. Throughout the book, Cahill tramples history into a muddled paste of great figures and exalting moments, ignoring nuance or exception. He concludes with a five-page diatribe against sycophancy and buggery in today's Church. The footnotes don't inform much; the bibliography omits essential scholarship (e.g., R. W. Southern on medieval humanism, Roberto Lopez and Lauro Martines on Renaissance humanism). It is difficult to conceive of an audience that would benefit from reading this silly and superficial book.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction; Author: Visit Amazon's Karl Iagnemma Page; Review: I've been rereading Iagnemma's magical collection of short stories --I loved it the first time I read it. The stories are about scientists, mostly academics, and one pseudo-scientist, a nineteenth-century phrenologist ("The Phrenologist's Dream"). They try to come to grips with love, but their passion proves resistant to categorization or manipulation by numbers. The title story of this fine collection is simply stunning: a failed doctoral student at a technical institute in the cold northern reaches seeks to pin down the love of his free-thinking lover and to write down a universal formula for the complex, unpredictable maneuverings of erotic love. Iagnemma's prose is lucid and at once coldly logical and fierily passionate. His empathic love for his doomed creatures is apparent; it redeems the book from any touch of coldness. Who would have imagined a scientist, a researcher on robots, would write such human, living stories?; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; Author: Visit Amazon's Fernand Braudel Page; Review: You need to have been an apprentice historian in the mid-sixties to appreciate the impact this book had on Europeanists. I was thirty-one years old in 1967. I had taught history in high school for eight years and picked up a master's in history at NYU, and I was starting my Ph. D. program in history at Yale, concentrating on early modern European history, and within that specialty, on medieval and early modern political theory. (Later, when I taught college, my specialty course was on Machiavelli, More, Erasmus and Guicciardini.) Braudel had just published the second edition of his masterpiece. The book had been significantly rewritten and was about a third longer than the original edition. But it was available only in French, which I read well but exceedingly slowly. The first edition --but not the second-- had been translated into Spanish, my preferred second language, so I swotted the Spanish first edition for orals. Reading it in a foreign language, it was too much in a limited amount of time to absorb and integrate with what I already knew about the times. I more or less flubbed the Braudel question in my orals. (In contrast, I did a killer job responding to a question about Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Liturgy.) Later, teaching a winter term course in college, I assigned the by-then-published English translation of Braudel's second edition to my students, giving myself --at long last-- an opportunity to read it in my native tongue. I was floored! The masterful use of maps and graphs to show hitherto unnoticed trends in history, the wealth of illustrative detail, the scope of his view! Of all the masterworks of the first two generations of Annales historians --Bloch and Febvre, Braudel's other works, Le Roy Ladurie, Aries, Duby, etc.-- Mediterranean is still the undisputed masterpiece on early modern European economic and social history.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Joke's Over: Bruised Memories: Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson, and Me; Author: Visit Amazon's Ralph Steadman Page; Review: Dear Larry: If you haven't read it yet, run, don't walk, to your nearest bookstore and buy The Joke'sOver, Ralph Steadman's memoir of his chaotic relationship and wild times with Hunter S. Thompson. It's awesome. I knew Steadman was a genius illustrator but I didn't know he could write so evocatively. And what a great topic! The prose reads like a more controlled, saner version of Thompson's own gonzo spume in Fear and Loathing and his other pieces. You've got to read it. Dave; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Secret History of the World; Author: black-jonathan; Review: This is a history of the world that has been taught down through the ages in certain secret societies. Thus starts this absolute howler of a book, masquerading as an alt-history but really more of a complicated form of wish fulfillment for the author. In history as Booth interprets it, all the important texts direct us to occult meanings. Psalm XIX, studied in conjunction with comparative texts from neighboring cultures . . . describes the marriage of the sun to Venus. The Book of Revelations account of the opening of the seven seals is in fact a way of talking about the enlivening of the seven chakras. In Eschenbachs Parzifal, the jewel dislodged from Lucifers crown signals that humanity would increasingly suffer a loss of vision in the Third Eye, the brow chakra. This is Lump-It History at its very lowest level. You mine history for points of commonality with beliefs you hold a priori and ignore all evidence to the contrary, no matter how persistent it is. Booth asserts that we live in a psychosomatic universe, where we can influence the roll of dice if we wish it hard enough and all chemistry is psycho-chemistry and all biology astrobiology. He claims a lengthy list of supporters for his thesis and acolytes starting in Egypt, India and Greece and ending with FDR and Francis Crick. There is even a nod toward Lenin. This is as silly a book as there ever was.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Dawn Dusk or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy; Author: Yasmina Reza; Review: What a brilliant idea this was! Take Yasmina Reza (`Art'), the best-known playwright in France today, and have her shadow the country's rising political star, Nicolas Sarkozy, in his bid -ultimately successful--for the presidency. The result is not political reporting but a stunningly brilliant portrait of a type of man, homo politicus, as represented by one of its most appealing exemplars. Sarkozy is perpetually in motion, reinventing himself against the backdrop of hangers on and electorate. From their first meeting, she notes Sarkozy's impatience, his thirst for praise (`still waiting, like a child, for the umpteenth approval'). "I feel like I'm watching a little boy," she writes. He can't stand being alone, he sabotages conversations that don't involve him, shuns solitude. He comes alive around people, needs audiences to think and live. Reza's glittering prose show us glimpses of a man whose goal seems to be to outrun his own image in the mirror but who also happens to be one of the most important political figures of our age. Compulsively readable, this book deserves the widest audience. Sarkozy is charming, relentlessly ambitious, unable to sit still, and totally self-absorbed, a man in search of a mirror. But when he finds one, he finds there's still something missing.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: City of Refuge: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Tom Piazza Page; Review: In the best sense of the word, City is an old-fashioned novel. It is rich in plot and characterization, has a strong sense of place and ends in a bitter-sweet but deeply satisfying denouement. When it first appeared, I read Piazza's earlier novel, My Cold War, and found much to admire in it. I'm a jazz buff of fifty years' standing, so I've read Piazza's guide to classic jazz from cover to cover. But City is something else entirely. It is a book with a great heart -you care about its characters. SJ is an African-American carpenter, a Vietnam vet whose sense of trauma is reawakened and deepened by Katrina. His older sister Lucy, wonderfully realized in this novel, is a recovering, occasionally lapsing drug addict and alcoholic; through her travails, she has maintained her ties to her brother and her son, Wesley, and SJ and she have nurtured Wesley into responsible manhood. Craig edits Gumbo, a magazine promoting New Orleans night life and culture. He loves everything about the city but his wife Alice wants him to leave New Orleans, which she finds unsafe: Katrina dramatically ups the stakes between them. These characters develop before your eyes as they respond to the devastation and heartbreak caused by Hurricane Katrina. Piazza is indignant about the decades long neglect of the New Orleans levees and the failure of the authorities - the federal government and Bush as president foremost among them-- to respond early and strongly enough to alleviate the human tragedy of Katrina. This fall offers three exceptional popular novels and City is one of them. (I've reviewed the other two in Library Journal: George Pelecanos:The Turnaround and Dennis Lehane:The Given Day.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Eichmann: His Life and Crimes; Author: Visit Amazon's David Cesarani Page; Review: Cesarani's book is (1) an attempt to come to grips with an enigma, a seemingly bloodless bureaucrat who was responsible for the murder of more than five million people in WWII and (2) a rebuttal and revision of the highly influential thesis of Hannah Arendt that Eichmann was the archetype of a new kind of murderer, a pencil pusher who sent people to their death at the behest of a monolithic state machine (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963). (Stanley Milgram's controversial experiments on obedience to authority (also 1963?) buttressed to Arendt's conclusion. Cesarani presents a much more nuanced view: Eichmann wasn't an unhappy child, wasn't persecuted by or identified with Jews, but he did imbibe the deep anti-Semitism of those around him. His entry into the Party and his drive to succeed, a perverted careerism as it were, eventually blunted all moral sensibilities and he became a moral monster. Quotations from Eichmann and others in this book are telling -and chilling. Of his operations in Hungary, Eichmann claimed that "On principle, I never went to look at anything unless I was ordered to." Eichmann's superior Heinrich Muller stated: "If we had fifty Eichmanns we would have won the war automatically." Eichmann said that when he finally knew the war was lost, "I sensed I would have to live a leaderless, difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult -in brief, a life never known before lay ahead of me." When Eichmann in hiding in Argentina, a neighbor reminisced that he was very good with forms; whenever his mother had official forms to fill out, she would asked Eichmann to help because "he understood how they all worked." Eichmann's son Klaus talked Quick magazine in 1966 about their life in hiding in Argentina: "We learned Spanish at high speed. Father ordered me to learn one hundred words a day, no more, no less. It had to be exactly one hundred words. Our father was very correct, everything had to be just so, everything had to be in exact order." When Eichmann was interrogated before he went on trial, he stated: "I have no regrets at all and I am not eating humble pie at all. ... I must tell you that ... my innermost being refuses to say that we did something wrong. No -I must tell you, in honesty, that if of the 10.3 million Jews shown by [the statistician] Korherr, as we now know, we had killed 10.3 million, then I would be satisfied. I would say, `All right. We have exterminated an enemy.'" One of his jailers observed that as a prisoner, Eichmann "behaved like a scared submissive slave whose one aim was to please his new masters." Denying any active role in the mass murder of Jews and other `defectives', Eichmann said: "Although there is no blood on my hands I shall certainly be convicted of complicity in murder." Of Eichmann's demeanor during his trial, Cesarani writes: "His studied; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice; Author: Visit Amazon's Janet Malcolm Page; Review: Why would I read a book on Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, two writers (well, probably one) I have sedulously avoided reading in the past? Well, first off, the book was on sale -it was half price, more or less- at the Strand Book Store ("Eight miles of Books") in New York City and I went down to the Strand to replenish my book larder. (That's not all I picked up. I left the Strand with a first rate experimental novel by a guy I'd never read before at all -David Markson's This Is a Novel; a novel I hadn't read by Joyce Carol Oates, The Tattooed Girl; David Cesarini's Becoming Eichmann; Paul Fussell's latest reflection on the experience of soldiering in World War II, The Boy's Crusade; a new history of the Trojan War by Barry Schwartz; Philip Roth's Everyman; and a novel written almost exclusively in the first person plural (that means "we") about office life, Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End.) Second, while I don't know much about Stein, I do know she's some kind of genius of the English language. ("Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," she wrote. It works for me. Reading that actually makes me see something about roses I hadn't seen before.) (And I like her characterization of Oakland, California, the town where she grew up: "There's no there there." That's really, really cool.) Third, the few times I tried to read Stein I came up with a big Goose Egg, but I know she's a major writer, though a particularly thorny one, of the modernist variety, a Picasso of prose, so to speak. Fourth, I read the first few sentences of Malcolm's lively study of Stein and I was ... hooked.: "When I read The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book for the first time, Eisenhower was in the white House and Liz Taylor had taken Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds. The book, published in 1954, was given to me by a fellow member of a group of pretentious young persons I ran around with, who had nothing but amused contempt for middlebrow American culture, and whose revolt against the conformity of the time largely took the form of patronizing a furniture store called Design Research and of writing mannered letters to each other modeled on the mannered letters of certain famous literary homosexuals, then not known as such. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book fit right in with our program of callow preciousness; we loved its waspishly magisterial tone, its hauteur and malice....." What emerges from this engaging study is a picture of complicated but mutually beneficial relationship. Gertrude dearly decided that she was a genius, a nonpareil, and that, ergo, everyone around her should cater to her needs. "It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing," she reported in Everybody's Autobiography. Everyone loved Gertrude but very few people really cared for Alice but it was Alice's careful, jealous, fussy caring for Gertrude; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Nothing to Lose (Jack Reacher, No. 12); Author: Visit Amazon's Lee Child Page; Review: This is by far the weakest novel in the Jack Reacher series. Across twelve novels, Reacher has proved to be an extraordinarily appealing action hero: he's beholden to no one, with a morality that is perfectly internalized, and he's big enough and strong enough to kick butt whenever and wherever he needs to. Sure, it's formula fiction, but when it works, it's a pleasure. Until now, it has worked reasonably well to exceptionally well for Lee Childs, with four or five novels (Killing Floor, Die Trying, Tripwire, Echo Burning, One Shot) that are as good as anything in the action genre and the rest have been acceptable diversions. In the latest installment, Jack Reacher is hitchhiking in Colorado when he lands in a town that just plain doesn't want him there. Cops, muscle men, they all try to take him on, but why? Jack is puzzled. Eventually he goes to war against the town. (He always goes to war against the bad guys who oppose him.) But this time, it just isn't interesting. I wish it were.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: This Is Not a Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's David Markson Page; Review: David Markson is a novelist unlike any other American author today, even experimental novelists like Pynchon, Coover, Wallace. He is most like the eighteenth century philosophe Denis Diderot with his plotless but highly diverting short pieces, Rameau's Nephew, D'Alembert's Dream and above all, Jacques the Fatalist. (Those interested in modernism should see Milan Kundera's brilliant dramatization, Jacques and His Master.) Of course, This Is Not a Novel *is* a novel, but not by any conventional measure. Instead, Markson piles on epigrams, eight to ten a page, that slowly and gradually build up and reveal the preoccupations of the eponymous Writer, whose name is never mentioned but who's writing down these reflections --on death, the creative life and other closely intertwined topics. The result is an oblique reflection on what it means to be a writer who is also a human being (a mortal, temporary creature). Nothing is ever direct in this book but it is almost impossible to read it without thumbing down the pages of certain apercus so one can recall them later. Individually the entries are affectless, but collectively they provide a portrait of the artist, and the reader is forced to think about what is entailed in writing this "not ... novel."; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Three Tall Women; Author: Visit Amazon's Edward Albee Page; Review: Three Tall Women is Edward Albee's third play to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It may be the best play that Albee has written. It balances his trademark ambiguity (dialogue and scenes that seem almost realistic but veer slightly off kilter, into a reality that has sharp and painful edges) with a heartbreaking poetry composed 99% of the ordinary language we all use every day. Three women sit in a bedsitting room: a well-off elderly woman, 90, 91, or 92 depending on who's counting, drifts in and out of reality, falls back on the past in repetitive coda, is never very nice and is occasionally outright nasty in the way she treats her companions; a fiftyish caregiver, her sympathy for her charge worn down by the old woman's complaints and pettiness; a twentyish lawyer, sent to persuade the old lady to cash her checks and pay her bills, and repulsed by her constant tirades and close-minded bigotry. The old woman dominates their conversation. It falls back again and again into monologue, the old lady reliving her past. Watching her behavior, seeing her drift in and out dementia is a wrenching experience, especially for a viewer like me who's already several steps along life's path. I won't tell you what happens later in the play but the second act completely transforms the revelations made in the first act and brings the play to a sad but richly lyrical close.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Physicists; Author: Visit Amazon's Friedrich Durrenmatt Page; Review: The Physicists (1962) is difficult to categorize, a conglomeration of conflicting theater genres -mystery, melodrama, farce, morality play. There is an admitted affinity between the theater of Swiss playwright Durrenmatt and the theater of Brecht but Durrenmatt was very much his own man. A common vein runs through much of Durrenmatt's work: to expose hypocrisy, the twistings and turnings that otherwise respectable people go through to justify self-interest in supposedly `moral' terms. This preoccupation is seen clearly in his best known play, The Visit (1956), which premiered in New York with America's foremost acting couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontaine, playing the leads: an elderly woman returns to her hometown and offers fabulous wealth to the town's inhabitants on one condition: that they execute the lover who abandoned her years before, though he is guilty of no offense but having spurned her. It shows also in Durrenmatt's philosophical detective stories, The Judge and His Hangman (1952) and The Pledge (1958), in both of which detecting takes second place to musings on the human condition, and in particular our tendency to pursue self-aggrandizement to the detriment of moral obligation. The Physicists is considered a modern classic in German-speaking countries. Three madmen, all physicists -Sir Isaac Newton, Alfred Einstein and a nonentity named Mobius--inhabit a special wing of a Swiss hospital for the insane. Its proprietor is a hunchbacked psychiatrist, the last of a long line of distinguished but utterly mad financiers and military men. The police have been called in for the second time in two months: one of the physicists (Einstein) has just murdered his nurse. The inspector arrives. The mad man who calls himself Newton sits down with the inspector and tells him in confidence that he's really not Newton, he's Einstein but he doesn't want to make his true identity public because it would upset the other madman who says he's Einstein -and that man is truly insane. Another madman, Mobius emerges from his room and announces in stentorian tones that King Solomon has just appeared to him in all his glory. When Mobius's wife confronts him to tell she's divorced him and married a Bible-thumping missionary who is now going to take her off to the Marianas, it doesn't faze Mobius. When his nurse falls for him, Mobius cautions her that it is too dangerous for her to love him and then suffocates her. Things become more and more complicated. And more. More. There are many comic moments in the play but The Physicists is a serious play about a very serious topic: mutually assured destruction (MAD), and the role scientists played in making MAD possible in the 1950s and early 1960s. Nuclear proliferation was a major issue then: it was, after all, the era of the Cuban missile crisis and the Iron Curtain. But has the urgency of this issue faded with the decades? A quick look at today's world --Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, the threat of pocket bombs-- suggests not. The strengths of the play are its idiosyncratic characters, the plentiful twists and turns of its plot,; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Alphabet Kids - From ADD to Zellweger Syndrome: A Guide to; Author: Visit Amazon's Robbie Woliver Page; Review: Accessibility, clarity and usefulness are the hallmarks of this excellent guide to developmental, neurological and psychological disorders. It is written from the parent's perspective: what do you need to know when addressing the often bewildering disorders that affect your children. The syndromes and disorders are presented in alphabetical order for ease of access. All terms are explained clearly, neither oversimplifying nor leaving them too complicated for the layman to understand. Concerned parents will especially appreciate one feature of this book: each section begins with anecdotal information that personalizes the disorder under discussion. I am not a doctor (well, I am a doctor but my doctorate is in history!) but the sections that address disorders with which I am familiar ring true and the explanations are so clear and the information so well laid out throughout that I feel comfortable recommending this book with no reservations.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Memory Lessons: A Doctor's Story; Author: Visit Amazon's Jerald Winakur Page; Review: Jerald Winakur is the family care doctor we all hope to find: medical school and the idiocies of health insurance reimbursement policy haven't driven out his humanity and wisdom. He embraces the use of modern medical technology when it helps but doesn't think that these procedures and medications obviate the necessity of a human interface between the physician and his patient and the time spent on learning a patient's history, medical and otherwise. By age (his patients have grown older as he has himself) and preference (someone needs to spend time with them), Winakur has become a geriatrician, trained and certified as well in long-term care. Then his own father became old --as Winakur labels it, one of "the old old," in his late eighties and suffering from progressive dementia, Alzheimer's disease. Winakur describes his fight to keep his father at home, although it becomes harder and harder to do so. The old fare better at home than they do when institutionalized: they are less likely to become even more disoriented, even if suffering from dementia, and more likely to remain motivated to live. His father was also, as Winakur convincingly demonstrates, happier: living in familiar surroundings and tended to by people he loved and sometimes still remembered. We learn a lot about Winakur's father in this lovely memoir but even more about the fine, wise, human being named Jerald Winakur.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Plague Ship (The Oregon Files); Author: Visit Amazon's Clive Cussler Page; Review: Some books are dreadfully bad but still fun. This is one of them. It isn't just that the prose is flat in this series of potboilers by Clive Cussler and associates. The story lines are usually predictable, as are the perils that befall its heroes, and the characters never seem more than one-dimensional. But this is formula fiction. What Cussler et al do is what's supposed to be done, although one could wish it was done better at times. The bottom line is that once one starts to read a Cussler thriller, he (or she, but less likely she) will probably read through to the end because Cussler and associates know how to shape a thriller. The gimmick in the Oregon Files series is that somewhere on the world's oceans a disreputable, rust eaten, clapped out aging steamer struggles across the water, but underneath its falling apart faade is housed a state-of-the-art spy ship crewed by ex-CIA operative Juan Cabrillo and a handpicked team of `mercenaries.' They fight to save the western way and humanity (one or both, interchangeably at times). This time, it's a ghost ship: everyone on it except one young woman has died, horribly, of a hemmorhagic plague; someone somewhere is preparing to unleash a crippling plague on humanity unless Cabrillo and crew can stop them. Of course they succeed, but it's fun watching them do it.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Nothing to Be Frightened Of; Author: Visit Amazon's Julian Barnes Page; Review: I've not always liked Barnes's fiction. Staring at the Sun did little for me and Talking It Over was not my cup of tea. I did enjoy A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters. But the book I admired most was his Flaubert's Parrot, a convoluted, sometimes rambling essay on history and writing and Flaubert's life and who knows what else. It was a Diderotian-type essay, than which I can say nothing better. Now Barnes has produced a mate to Parrot, not a match in theme but in approach to writing, and in the quality of his reflections. The theme is the fear of death. Barnes states that he used to be an atheist and is now an agnostic but I can't find the difference between the two in his reflections on life as racing toward (painful, undignified, purposeless and too soon) death. Flaubert wrote (Barnes quotes him): "No sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start to drop off." That's pretty much the theme of much of this exceptionally thoughtful book. The book drips with zingers gently delivered, some from Barnes's own pen, some from others whom he finds sympathetic. Here's Barnes: "Religion tends to authoritarianism as capitalism tends to monopoly." And I love this one from Richard Dawkins: "When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix." Barnes does not rail against those who disagree with him, as have Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in recent books. He's never strident, but neither does he accept false comfort. For Barnes, life simply ends and on a cosmic or even historic scale, our lives are insignificant. They're only significant to us, and that is what is tragic about being a temporarily living, strong feeling human being. I can't stop myself from adding one more passage from Barnes. It doesn't illuminate the book's principal preoccupation. It's more in the nature of a by-blow, an extraneous thought tossed off en passage. But I love it! "Writers need certain stock replies for certain stock questions. When asked What The Novel Does, I tend to answer, `It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.'" Now that's fine writing!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Head and Heart: American Christianities; Author: Visit Amazon's Garry Wills Page; Review: I seem to be on a Garry Wills kick lately, not a bad thing to be on. Wills won two National Book Critics Award and has published numerous books, including translations (most notably of Augustine's Confessions), works of history and political criticism, and books about his own Roman Catholic faith. I had read Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005) and liked it. So when Head and Heart: American Christianities went on sale at Amazon.com for $5.99 instead of the original $29.96, I bought it. It's an interesting and (at least to my neophyte eyes) original history of Christian religion in the United States. Head and Heart is uneven -parts of it are too schematic and would benefit from further fleshing out--but I found it a very helpful book and a pleasure to read. His thesis, that the rationalist strand and the evangelical strand in American religion benefited most in dialogue with each other and that in the era of Karl Rover, dialogue was in scarce supply, helped me to frame my own criticisms of the overly partisan nature of religious debate today. He made a convincing case for the benefit to religion, not solely to the secular state, of the separation of church and state: the church's involvement in politics often has corrupted religion and tends to divert the faithful from attention to issues of salvation and worship.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Champlain's Dream; Author: Visit Amazon's David Hackett Fischer Page; Review: In Champlain's Dream, Fischer, who is University Professor and Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University, manages a most difficult task: he has written a history that should satisfy both lay reader and professional historian. He is able to do that because he is both experienced and gifted. He possesses, and uses, a keen analytical mind. He's widely read and he knows the sources. Above all, he is a masterful story teller, as his previous books, Washington's Crossing (recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for History) and Revere's Ride have demonstrated. But the challenge in Dream is much harder than in either of these two books, where action centered on one great act, or, better, sequence of acts. Dream is about a man's entire life and its geographic focus spans old France and briefly England and the vast expanse of New France that was explored and colonized by Champlain or under his auspices. The book is also about a lost opportunity. If other explorers and colonists had followed Champlain's way with the New World natives, we would have a metis (hybrid) continent of peoples peacefully coexisting and not the sad history of exploitation and broken promises we have left behind us. I do not know of another explorer as attractive or admirable as Samuel de Champlain was, nor one as able and determined as he. Perhaps Las Casas and the first Quaker settlers in Pennsylvania, but certainly no other. I should qualify what I wrote about this book as a work of popular history. Certainly, Fischer writes elegantly and the story he tells is engaging, but the length of the narrative and the depth of the detail of the narrative make its reading a bit daunting at times for the lazy-minded who may be looking for a quick fix on this particular piece of history, and there is no question that at times the narrative lags. Conversely, one of the pleasures of this wonderful book is the amount of information Fischer has crammed in. Numerous appendices (they run from A. to P.) address side issues ranging from Champlain's birth date to his favorite firearm; they should provide the academic with much useful information. There are more than a hundred pages of notes and thirty-some of bibliography. The maps are superb. The illustrations (black and white illustrations scattered throughout the book plus two color spreads) deserve special notice. Fischer has done something I wish more scholars would do: the captions to his illustrations explain how the illustrations relate to the text and point to relevant information in the pictures. I've been a fan of Fischer for quite a while. Back in the Dark Ages (the Seventies) when I still taught history, I used Fischer's collection of essays on historical evidence, Historians' Fallacies, as required reading for my course on historical method, and I reviewed his history of the Price Revolution, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History when it came out in 1996. I loved Revere's Ride, and I loved Washington's Crossing even more. It's good to see what a mature; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Martial's Epigrams: A Selection; Author: Martial; Review: I seem to be on a Garry Wills kick lately, not a bad thing to be on. Wills won two National Book Critics Award and has published numerous books, including translations (most notably of Augustine's Confessions), works of history and political criticism, and books about his own Roman Catholic faith. Recently I ordered three books by Wills including his translation of portions of Martial's Epigrams (2008). I was disappointed in the Epigrams. I don't fault Wills's facility with language: he once taught classical languages (Greek) at Johns Hopkins. Neither do I fault his opting to go for rhyme at the expense of literal translation. But I fault him for modernizing the text when he didn't have to, inserting modern names in verses. Martial doesn't need modernizing. He isn't contemporary except in his preoccupations: Wills notes this in his introduction, which, though short, is helpful in understanding this late Roman poet of scurrility and (usually nasty) gossip. Martial was a moralist of the dirt. His poems, when they work, are like extremely short variants of the Satyricon, than which little in literature is more salacious. Is Wills's translation of Martial worth reading? Definitely yes, if only to gain insight into this most uncommon Roman and the debauched society he excoriated. Is the book completely successful? No. I'd give it a C grade.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music; Author: Visit Amazon's Ben Ratliff Page; Review: Since I'm going to voice concerns about jazz writing in general, let me start by saying that I like this book a lot. I read it in one sitting and I underlined numerous passages to copy. Having said that.... Jazz is my favorite and longest held music, but unlike classical music, it suffers from a dearth of serious, sustained popular critical writing. There are exceptions to this statement, most notably Gunther Schuller's studies of early swing and Ellington. Some jazz musicians, principally composers and arrangers, have written at length on how to construct a jazz piece and do a solo. But most books on jazz today for a lay audience are either biographical or reminiscent in nature (John Szwed on Sun Ra and Miles, Andy Hamilton on Lee Konitz, Laurence Bergreen on Louis Armstrong, Bill Crow's hilarious and fascinating anecdotes about the jazz life) or journals and reviews (Whitney Balliett's Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1951-2000, Gene Lees's and Balliett's essays on various pop and jazz singers, countless collections of interviews). Even Gary Giddins's Visions of Jazz: The First Century, a book I like a great deal, is basically a collection of occasional essays, relieved by a few record reviews (e.g., of Hank Jones and Charlie Haden's Steal Away). Ben Ratliff has been jazz critic at the New York Times since 1996. He knows the jazz scene, he knows his music and he writes sympathetically and perceptively about this elusive American music. This is a good book. I read it in one sitting. I had read it all it four hours after I picked it up and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Nonetheless, I was frustrated that it didn't do more than it does. The hook in this highly readable collection of essays is that Ratliff asked a number of prominent jazz musicians to pick recordings, a maximum of six, to listen to and talk about with him. They didn't have to be jazz recordings. Several weren't: Wayne Shorter wanted to listen to Vaughan Williams, Pat Metheny to Bach and Ornette Coleman to a Jewish cantor recorded in 1916; Maria Schneider chose Martha Argerich's recording of the Ravel piano concerto in G major and Branford Marsalis selected Stravinsky and Wagner). One rule applied: they couldn't select a recording on which they themselves played. One musician, Ornette Coleman, refused to comply with that rule but then, Coleman has seldom followed other people's rules. Ratliff's idea was that in talking about others' music, his artists would reveal much about their own musical history, preferences and ideas. He was right. They did. The result is a set of fascinating interviews with some of the most important and representative artists in jazz today. In addition to the artists mentioned above, they include such luminaries as Bob Brookmeyer, Hank Jones, Dianne Reeves, Branford Marsalis Joshua Redman, Roy Haynes, Paul Motian, and Andrew Hill. It's not a fault of this book to say that I wish he had included some other musicians. I would love to have heard from more musicians who live on the fringes of success; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lark and Termite; Author: Visit Amazon's Jayne Anne Phillips Page; Review: Lark is just on the edge of womanhood, hard working and resolute. She's studying typing at the secretarial school but she's been feeling yearnings she doesn't know how to deal with. Her half-brother Termite is eight. He has water on the brain and there's a hole in his spine that's never closed. He can't walk; he has to be carried around in somebody's arms or placed in a seat Lark rigged up for him in his wagon. He can't see normally and he doesn't say words, although he mouths the words people say to him, sounds but not words. His spastic body betrays him when he tries to use his limbs. His hearing is Termite's glory. He loves sound, blossoms when he hears the train, for instance, echoes people's words, repeats the sound of the words but not the words themselves. Lark loves her brother. She bakes him birthday cakes even when it isn't his birthday. She wheels him down to the railroad tracks in his wagon to listen to the trains passing through. They live with their aunt Nonie. Their parents are dead, their father killed in the first days of the war in Korea, their mother dead by her own hand. Nonie looks after them. Because she's there, Lark is able to stay in school and Termite isn't hidden away in a home for the severely disabled. Nonie has her own problems. She works in a restaurant with Charlie, her lover for twenty some years. She's been married twice but always comes back to Charlie, who can't marry her because he's still afraid of his mother. Notice I haven't talked about story yet. That's because as well developed and compelling as the story is in this exceptional novel, the glory of the book is the patient, loving depiction of two extraordinary children and the grownups -Nonie and the two dead parents--who have shaped their world. The portrayal of Termite is a tour de force: despite his defects, you will grow to envy his boundless capacity for joy as you read about him and share vicariously in his inner life. In her five previous books, Jayne Anne Phillips has demonstrated that she is one of our premiere writers of fiction. Lark and Termite does nothing to damage that reputation.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Steel Remains; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard K. Morgan Page; Review: Richard K. Morgan, The Steel Remains. Del Rey. 409p. $26. Richard K. Morgan cut his eyeteeth on science fiction, creating a remarkable series of sci fi thrillers that starts with Altered Carbon (a NY Times Notable Book and winner of the Philip K. Dick Award) and includes Market Forces, which won the John W. Campbell Award and has been optioned for film adaptation. The most recent is Thirteen, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2008. He also wrote two comic book mini-series featuring Marvel Comics heroine Black Widow. Now he has turned his hand to fantasy, old-style, Conan-the-Barbarian-style fantasy, and a very good hand it is. The Steel Remains is the first book in a projected trilogy featuring Ringil Eskiath, master swordsman and degenerate faggot, and his two partners in adventure, Egar Dragonbane, a steppe nomad, and Archeth, 207 years old and abandoned by her Kiriath brethren when they fled earth because she is a half-breed. None of the three is the conventional hero type, all have been blooded in the wars against the Scaled Folk, barely won by their heroism. Now they are drawn into action again. This time it's against the dwenda, an eldritch race who pop in and out of existence and seem to live in a universe one dimension over from earth. If you've read Morgan's previous books, you know he does action exceedingly well, the violence is explosive and graphically described in his books, he's not afraid of profanity or sex and he likes to tackle provocative social themes (like race). In all these respects, The Steel Remains is no surprise but it's exceedingly well done, a great deal of fun and a welcome addition to the genre. Commentators have compared this novel to the works of Gene Wolfe, Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock, and of course there are echoes of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian, but this book reminds me most of my favorite fantasy stories of all, Fritz Leiber's rollicking tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (1939-82). That's high praise!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bach at Leipzig: A Play; Author: Visit Amazon's Itamar Moses Page; Review: Bach at Leipzig is a kind of pushmepullyou of a play (my hat is off to Doctor Doolittle!), a witty comedy that is half low farce and half comedy of ideas. In 1723, seven musicians descend on the German cathedral city of Leipzig. They are auditioning for the newly vacated post of organist of the Thomaskirchof (St. Thomas's Church) and head of the chapel music school, the Thomasschule. The candidates dance around each other, seeking advantage in a deadly battle of wits and wiles. Two, maybe a third, are noble in birth. Three are base born, one both poor and a bastard. The seventh is Georg Phillip Telemann, widely acclaimed the Greatest Organist in Germany. Can any of the others defeat him? And if he is vanquished, who instead shall win the prize? What follows is a comic fugue: The same Situations appear and reappear, lines are said and resaid, alliances are formed and broken, as the six musicians dance around each other. (Telemann is above such maneuverings.) Then an eighth candidate appears at the last minute. His name is Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach. (To confuse matters further, all of the candidates are named either Johann or Georg. And serendipitously, all the actors but one in this play are named either David or Daniel.) Careening from rapier wit to broad physical comedy, Bach is a constant surprise, a pleasure to watch and listen to. And above the talk and activity, there is the music, the glorious fugues, toccatas and passacaglias of Bach, in later times to be acknowledged the greatest composer in that age of many great composers. I'm acting in this play and it's as much fun to act in as it is to watch.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dingley Falls; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Malone Page; Review: Malone, Michael. Dingley Falls (1980). The Delectable Mountains, or, Entertaining Strangers (1976). One mature novel and one early one-that's what we have here in these lovely novels by Michael Malone. I came to Malone through the back door. I picked up two of his novels -Handling Sin and Uncivil Seasons-- in a used book store. I thought "What have I got to lose?" Then I let them sit for over a year. One night, on a whim, I started reading Handling Sin. Once inside Malone's comic world, bursting with life, joy and intelligence, I was utterly hooked. A month ago, I ordered five more of his novels from Amazon.com. The first two I've read are Dingley Falls and The Delectable Mountains. Dingley Falls (1980) is a beautiful novel, which is at once comic and tragic. When you enter Dingley Falls, you are in a self-contained universe. It's not Pollyanesque, not at all, for dark and tragic things happen there. There's a rape and a killing. Several people die earlier than they should have because a secret government base nearby is experimenting with no controls on biowarfare and deadly pathogens are released from time to time into the neighboring community. Among the wonders of this book is the ease with which Malone spins off an amazing number of real comic grotesques. There is also his abundant love for all his characters, even those who are flawed, even those who are evil. (One of the characters in this book is a repulsive neo-Nazi rapist.) His characters are flawed but they are flawed in human ways: you can love (most of) them once you get past their tics. This book is so life affirming! Bad things happen in it -really bad things occasionally--but they're part of Life's Mixed Bag, the bad coming with an awful lot of good. Malone stated in an interview that he felt that with Dingley Falls he had finally hit his stride. I believe him. I love this book! Entertaining Strangers is Malone's second novel, published in 1976. It is nowhere near as accomplished as Dingley Falls (1980) but is a diverting read nonetheless. It shows Malone's considerable promise as a writer, in particular his skill in juggling a large cast of characters and in depicting humorous grotesques. (There is a crazed, pot-ridden and drunk activist named Spurgeon Debson who outdoes even Hunter S. Thompson, something I never thought I'd say about anyone real or fictitious.) Strangers is narrated in the first person by Devin Donahue, who is just out of college and lacking direction or purpose. It is 1968, a time when many things were screwed up and a lot more people than just Devin were seriously confused. (The narrative starts: "Like the country, I was really fouled up when summer started in 1968.") Devin's older brother has just become engaged to the love of Devin's life. Devin can't handle it. He cops out, heads to Colorado, to serve as set designer for a terminally disorganized summer theater run by his high school flame, Leila, and her not at all; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit; Author: Visit Amazon's Garry Wills Page; Review: When I was newly out of college, my church's minister approached me and asked me to teach the adult class in Sunday School. (This was a Community Church, roughly Episcopalian in its creed.) I said, "Why? You know I'm an atheist." "Because," he said, "they need a Devil's Advocate. I know you respect religion even though you don't believe. But their faith is lazy. They need it challenged. They need to toughen it up. Christians need the challenge of someone who disagrees with them." I'm still an unbeliever but teaching Sunday School that year was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. Gary Wills isn't a Devil's Advocate for Roman Catholics but he's something close to that, a devout believer who still finds the Church, and especially its ruling hierarchy, imperfect reflections of God's will. He is als o arguably the most prominent Catholic lay intellectual writing at present. (His only competitor seems to be Karen Armstrong.) Even when the Church has disappointed him, Wills has not let his faith lapse. His credentials are substantial: a Ph. D. in history, and education and teaching in the classics, and a number of substantial books on American history (on the Gettysburg Address, Henry Adams's history of the United States, Nixon's presidency) and religion (Why I Am a Catholic, What Jesus Means, What Paul Means, a short biography of Augustine) and translations from the Latin (Augustine's Confessions, Martial's epigrams). Like him or not, he's not a lightweight. He's a serious thinker and believer and thus he deserves attention whenever he writes. Having said that, to orthodox conservative Catholics, Papal Sin must seem like a landmine laid down on the road to obedience, so many flaws --fatal flaws, in my judgment-- does he lay bare in the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy and decisionmaking process. This is a book about how past popes made fatal mistakes and current popes and the Vatican have compounded them with subsequent bad judgments. This is the Church that now can't find enough acolytes to populate the seminaries. In interviews, an astonishingly high percentage of priests confess to masturbating, having sex with parishioners or others, homosexual encounters, even pedophilia, and still the Church won't tolerate allowing priests to marry or women or gays to be ordained. The hierarchy has repeatedly found excuses for predatory priests who have abused children in their power, reassiging them to new parishes after flimsy and ineffective therapy, and blaming the victims for the priests' pedophilia as though the young children who have been abused had been the predators, enticing their priests to forbidden sexual acts. The church bans contraception but survey after survey shows that the majority of its practitioners ignore church teachings on the subject., It condemns abortion even in cases of rape and incest and, against the writings of many church fathers , including Aquinas, claims a foetus is a full human being from the moment of fertilization. A pope finally, reluctantly, acknowledges that the Holocaust shouldn't have happened but denies the Church's past history of anti-semitism, as though complicity in the Holocaust; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Time's Witness; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Malone Page; Review: Malone, Michael. Time's Witness. 1989. 541p. $16.00 (pb). ($10.20 from amazon.com) Michael Malone. First Lady. 2001. 500+ p. $24.00 (pb) ($18.72 from amazon.com). The words that pop into my head when I reflect on Malone's wonderful comic novels about life in North Carolina are "generous," "rich" and "humane." Time's Witness (1989) and First Lady (2002) are the second and third crime novels featuring Cuddy Mangum, the super-smart class police chief of Hillston, NC, and his chief of the Homicide Bureau, the Justin Savile V, who descends from a long line of southern aristocrats, with governors, state and federal legislators, and judges in his family line. Cuddy hides his intelligence (but only partly) behind a wisecracking, southern cracker exterior. He is scrupulously honest, and as a consequence, so is his police force, because he keeps them toeing the line and he has resolutely weeded out the crooks who hid behind their badges before he came along. The bad cops, no ex-cops, don't love him for this, and in Time's witness, two of them try to do him in, and three of them are involved in all sorts of crime. Justin, for all his aristocratic lineage and mien, is a warm and passionate man and a doting husband: he can connect with almost anyone, including the petty thieves, drunkards and other reprobates he uses as informants. Both of these novels are first-rate, but if I had to give an edge to one of them, it would be Time's Witness. That's because of its theme (a black veteran wrongly convicted of homicide and slated to be executed, and a white racist conspiracy against all sorts of things, but ultimately to maintain control of the state by the `right kind' of people, all of whom are conveniently white) but also because it tells a haunting love story, with star-crossed lovers (Cuddy and the wife of the liberal aspirant for governorship), and lastly, because it contains what may be the most exciting and funniest account of a jury trial ever, or at least in the last forty years. There are in addition the small excellences which seem effortlessly to grace every one of Malone's exceptional novels: a lovely scene on pp. 167-171 where Cuddy interviews a boy --eleven years old, poor white, and somewhere between nervous and scared-- about an abandoned car he has found; a passage on pp. 414-5 between the warden of the state penitentiary where the condemned man is being held and Cuddy, discussing the death penalty; the moments scattered throughout the book when Cuddy reflects on his doomed love affair with Lee, wife of the governor-to-be, who will never leave her husband because although the marriage is loveless it makes sense politically, and that's what she's been bred to be, the first lady of the state her family made their millions in. Lastly, there are the wonderfully rich characters who people the pages of this wonderfully rich book -Bubba Percy, vulgar, brassy, tasteless and bright, and relentlessly on the make as reporter and then editor of the local newspaper; a variety of very; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: First Lady; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Malone Page; Review: Malone, Michael. Time's Witness. 1989. 541p. $16.00 (pb). ($10.20 from amazon.com) Michael Malone. First Lady. 2001. 500+ p. $24.00 (pb) ($18.72 from amazon.com). The words that pop into my head when I reflect on Malone's wonderful comic novels about life in North Carolina are "generous," "rich" and "humane." Time's Witness (1989) and First Lady (2002) are the second and third crime novels featuring Cuddy Mangum, the super-smart class police chief of Hillston, NC, and his chief of the Homicide Bureau, the Justin Savile V, who descends from a long line of southern aristocrats, with governors, state and federal legislators, and judges in his family line. Cuddy hides his intelligence (but only partly) behind a wisecracking, southern cracker exterior. He is scrupulously honest, and as a consequence, so is his police force, because he keeps them toeing the line and he has resolutely weeded out the crooks who hid behind their badges before he came along. The bad cops, no ex-cops, don't love him for this, and in Time's witness, two of them try to do him in, and three of them are involved in all sorts of crime. Justin, for all his aristocratic lineage and mien, is a warm and passionate man and a doting husband: he can connect with almost anyone, including the petty thieves, drunkards and other reprobates he uses as informants. Both of these novels are first-rate, but if I had to give an edge to one of them, it would be Time's Witness. That's because of its theme (a black veteran wrongly convicted of homicide and slated to be executed, and a white racist conspiracy against all sorts of things, but ultimately to maintain control of the state by the `right kind' of people, all of whom are conveniently white) but also because it tells a haunting love story, with star-crossed lovers (Cuddy and the wife of the liberal aspirant for governorship), and lastly, because it contains what may be the most exciting and funniest account of a jury trial ever, or at least in the last forty years. There are in addition the small excellences which seem effortlessly to grace every one of Malone's exceptional novels: a lovely scene on pp. 167-171 where Cuddy interviews a boy --eleven years old, poor white, and somewhere between nervous and scared-- about an abandoned car he has found; a passage on pp. 414-5 between the warden of the state penitentiary where the condemned man is being held and Cuddy, discussing the death penalty; the moments scattered throughout the book when Cuddy reflects on his doomed love affair with Lee, wife of the governor-to-be, who will never leave her husband because although the marriage is loveless it makes sense politically, and that's what she's been bred to be, the first lady of the state her family made their millions in. Lastly, there are the wonderfully rich characters who people the pages of this wonderfully rich book -Bubba Percy, vulgar, brassy, tasteless and bright, and relentlessly on the make as reporter and then editor of the local newspaper; a variety of very; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Foolscap: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Malone Page; Review: After reading seven of Michael Malone's novels in little over a year, and five in the past month and a half, I didn't think that anything he wrote could surprise me, other than that his books are all so good, but Foolscap is a surprise. It's not better than the best of his other novels (Handling Sin, Time's Witness, Dingley Falls) but it goes off in a different direction than any of them, it employs a different narrative strategy and thus sits at a different angle to literal reality. " Facts are cattle," says Dame Winifred Throckmorton, a noted but slightly batty sir Walter Raleigh scholar. "Theory is a bird. One must leap, in order to soar." This lively comic novel about the forging of a last-minute play supposedly written by the Elizabethan Golden Man Raleigh definitely leaps and just as definitely soars. In capsule, the story is of a quiet, mildly depressed and definitely suppressed theatrical scholar, Theo Ryan, and his liberation through prolonged, always exhilarating and almost as often irritating contact with Ford Rexford, perhaps the greatest living writer of plays in the English language. My God, can Malone write -and plot! There are enough memorable characters and incidents in here for a half dozen books, but none better than the irrepressible Dame Winifred and the alcoholic Bad Boy Ford Rexford. ("It's like art, kid," the ghost of Rexford tells Theo, "It's like me. It doesn't have to be real. It just has to be true.") And there at least three or four lesser characters who are just as winning. This is a very generous book and n one benefits more than the reader fortunate enough to sit down with it and savor its pleasures. To top it off, there is an understated but quite wonderful love story in these pages, between Theo and the salty country western singer Rhodora Potts. The book ends in lovely fantasia, Theo's thoughts as he waits for his now-wife Rhodora to go on stage at the Grand Old Opry: he sees all the actors and performers he's known in his life, including his mother (summer stock and musicals) and father (a lesser rock and roll idol, whose one hit, "Do the Duck," still sustains him decades later). "Out from the wings, Theo saw his farther, Benny Ryan, slide tantalizingly onto stage with his arms outflung, offering himself, a dream come true. And the young girls shrieked like Maenads the incantation of his name. "He saw his mother, Lorraine Page, beautiful young, and safe in the light, talking to darkness from a summer-stock stage. "There in shadows in the wings, Theo saw his parents' friends: Sweets, the former child star, and Catherine, the former soaps star; all the former stars, now forgotten, and all the company of players who were never to be star, all of them banded together waiting to go act out life so that people seeing their show could learn -or remember--how life feels. "The players bowed all together there in the shadows of the wings. Theo shouted and whistled as loudly; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Jon Land Page; Review: I'd never read anything by Land before --he is a prolific author--but I intend to now. Strong Enough to Die is quite good. There's nothing revolutionary about it but Land is a mature, accomplished writer of popular fiction who (if this book is his norm) writes a strong, muscular prose that moved the plot along from one danger point to the next. A lot happens in this novel. Caitlin Strong is a fifth-generation Texas Ranger, a notoriously tough, self-sufficient corps, but the first woman from her family to join its ranks. After a bloody shootout that ended in the death of her partner, she pursued vengeance outside the ranks of the Rangers and her guilt led her to resign her post. It is now five years later -2008--and the past comes back to bite her with a vengeance. Her husband, blown up in Iraq, turns out to be alive but so badly tortured that he has retreated into a state something like catatonia -he no longer believes or acts like he's still living. But in his shattered brain he holds the secret to a dark conspiracy that affects all our country and his enemies want him dead. Then Caitlin discovers that Cort Wesley Masters, the cold-blooded killer she had arrested for the shootout in 2004, was the wrong man. He is released from prison when his DNA tests innocent, his strong desire to kill the Ranger who framed him. (He thinks she framed him. She believed him guilty.) He tracks her down, follows her to the sanctuary where her husband is being cared for, and comes upon her just as Caitlin and her husband are under attack by a black force hit team. It takes a lot of adjustment but Cort Wesley and Caitlin eventually become allies and pursue their common nemesis. Two bloody events, separated by five years and half a world (Bahrain and El Paso, Texas), come together in a suitably violent and satisfying denouement. This is a very good book that does everything a thriller should. Caitlin and Cort Wesley are appealing heroes. I hope I come across them again in another book.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ms. Hempel Chronicles; Author: Visit Amazon's Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Page; Review: Walbert, Kate. A Short History of Women. Scribner. 2009. 224p. $24.00. Bynum, Sarah Shun-Lieh. Ms Hempel Chronicles. Harcourt. 2008. 195p. $23.00. I have just finished two extraordinary novels about what it is to be a woman. The one is Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women and the other is Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Ms Hempel Chronicles. Both books are short: Walbert's is 224 pages and Bynum's is even shorter at 195 pages. Both expose their subject's lives episodically: Walbert, snapshots spanning five generations of extraordinary women in one exceptional family, episodes that stretch from 1898 to 2007; Bynum, interlocking and mutually reinforcing glances at the life and experiences of a middle-school teacher -seventh grade, social studies-- who doesn't think she's exceptional at all, from her first year teaching through a time years later when she has left teaching and encounters a former pupil and discovers what effect she had on that girl's life and the life of her classmates. Both books are superb. No, that is the wrong word to use for them. "Superb," accurate though it is, is pallid, too critic-like. These books, and especially Short History, beg for the fan's language: I don't approve of these two books, I love them! Time and again, as I read Walbert's short novel, I thought: "What male (or female) author has ever caught the dilemmas and hang-ups of being male as well as she does with women, and in Walbert's case. Perhaps, from the outside, Raymond Carver's minimalist fiction does it, with stories of men who hurt but are unable to verbalize it; perhaps some of Updike does it --the short stories, not the Rabbit books; my dim memory of reading it years back suggests that Breeze D'J Pancake's one slim volume of posthumously published short stories came close to it, kind of a hyper-extended Hemingway world of inarticulate macho men wondering where it all points in the end. But in general, men, and men authors, don't expose themselves as unselfconsciously and generously as (many) women do -from Jane Austen to today's Alice Munro and Joyce Carol Oates, etc., etc. Suffice it to say that both these books are exceptionally well written with passages that bring your heart up into your throat, they are so good. And the women they describe, for all their angst and unresolved issues, are strong and real. Let me deal with them one at a time. Walbert: moving back and forth across a hundred and nine years, Walbert traces the consequences of a mother's decision -a suffragist--in 1914 to starve herself to death while in prison. Her daughter and (clubfooted) son emigrate to the States. The daughter enrolls at Barnard College in New York City as a scholarship student and ends her life, a spinster, a distinguished chemist but in essential but undefined ways unsatisfied, as though, having striven all her life -what? To meet her mother's high but undefined standards?--to do more she still hasn't accomplished enough to banish the shadow of her mother (now gone seventy-one years) and isn't happy with what she has achieved. It; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Short History of Women: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Kate Walbert Page; Review: Walbert, Kate. A Short History of Women. Scribner. 2009. 224p. $24.00. Bynum, Sarah Shun-Lieh. Ms Hempel Chronicles. Harcourt. 2008. 195p. $23.00. I have just finished two extraordinary novels about what it is to be a woman. The one is Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women and the other is Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Ms Hempel Chronicles. Both books are short: Walbert's is 224 pages and Bynum's is even shorter at 195 pages. Both expose their subject's lives episodically: Walbert, snapshots spanning five generations of extraordinary women in one exceptional family, episodes that stretch from 1898 to 2007; Bynum, interlocking and mutually reinforcing glances at the life and experiences of a middle-school teacher -seventh grade, social studies-- who doesn't think she's exceptional at all, from her first year teaching through a time years later when she has left teaching and encounters a former pupil and discovers what effect she had on that girl's life and the life of her classmates. Both books are superb. No, that is the wrong word to use for them. "Superb," accurate though it is, is pallid, too critic-like. These books, and especially Short History, beg for the fan's language: I don't approve of these two books, I love them! Time and again, as I read Walbert's short novel, I thought: "What male (or female) author has ever caught the dilemmas and hang-ups of being male as well as she does with women, and in Walbert's case. Perhaps, from the outside, Raymond Carver's minimalist fiction does it, with stories of men who hurt but are unable to verbalize it; perhaps some of Updike does it --the short stories, not the Rabbit books; my dim memory of reading it years back suggests that Breeze D'J Pancake's one slim volume of posthumously published short stories came close to it, kind of a hyper-extended Hemingway world of inarticulate macho men wondering where it all points in the end. But in general, men, and men authors, don't expose themselves as unselfconsciously and generously as (many) women do -from Jane Austen to today's Alice Munro and Joyce Carol Oates, etc., etc. Suffice it to say that both these books are exceptionally well written with passages that bring your heart up into your throat, they are so good. And the women they describe, for all their angst and unresolved issues, are strong and real. Let me deal with them one at a time. Walbert: moving back and forth across a hundred and nine years, Walbert traces the consequences of a mother's decision -a suffragist--in 1914 to starve herself to death while in prison. Her daughter and (clubfooted) son emigrate to the States. The daughter enrolls at Barnard College in New York City as a scholarship student and ends her life, a spinster, a distinguished chemist but in essential but undefined ways unsatisfied, as though, having striven all her life -what? To meet her mother's high but undefined standards?--to do more she still hasn't accomplished enough to banish the shadow of her mother (now gone seventy-one years) and isn't happy with what she has achieved. It; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Starship: Rebel (Starship, Book 4); Author: Mike Resnick; Review: This is the first book by Mr. Resnick that I've read and it left me wanting to read the three books before it in the series. Instead of blast and bombast a la John Ringo and friends, Resnick offers a saga of a good man fighting against odds but NOT fighting impossible odds and NOT engaging in wondrous but farfetched deeds of derring-do to win though to success. Three books back, Captain Wilson Cole rebelled against the giant and bellicose Empire when as captain of an Imperial vessel he was ordered to massacre defenseless civilians in order to terrorize them into submission. By book four (this one), he is a successful mercenary with a fleet of approximately fifty ships: his is one of the two largest military forces along the untamed Inner Frontier. When an Imperial captain captures, tortures and murders his closets friend, a three-legged alien named Forrice, and Imperial ships wipe out a planet and two million people because they don't divulge Cole's whereabouts, Wilson goes on a rampage. He knows it is only a matter of time before the Imperials bomb other planets and space stations in an effort to find out where Cole's fleet is so he moves to preemption. What follows is straight old-fashioned space opera, but tempered by a healthy dose of realism. Cole is an appealing (and humane) hero, his colleagues are well-limned, and the action escalates steadily. I came across E. E. Smith's Lensman series when I was thirteen --sixty years ago. I devoured them --I loved the action and the scope and the bold heroism displayed in the books. But I was turned off by the sophomoric way in which everyone talked in those books and the technical parts seemed jerryrigged, even to someone as young and True a Believer as I was then. I moved away from science fiction (a) when I discovered girls and (b) as my reading tastes matured. I've come back (part way) in recent years because there is some truly excellent writing going on in science fiction and fantasy now, and I enjoy escapist fiction just as much as I did as a young man. I intend to read the first three books in this series and I suspect I will get as much pleasure from them as I have from this one. Resnick deserves to stand up with the more mature writers of space opera today. Though I don't find him quite as good a writer as Peter Hamilton, Richard K. Morgan, Alistair Reynolds, or (the most sophisticated writer of the lot) Iain Banks, he's well worth reading.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Flint and Silver: A Prequel to Treasure Island; Author: Visit Amazon's John Drake Page; Review: Prequels, especially to a book like Robert Louis Stevenson's deservedly renowned Treasure Island, are tricky ventures, but this one succeeds in its modest aim. That's because Drake remembered the most important thing in popular fiction: tell a good story. In the process, he explains how Long John Silver became what he is in Treasure Island and how to begin with, the treacherous Captain Flint's treasure got deposited on Treasure Island. Silver is the good guy in this prequel. He doesn't consider himself a common pirate at all, although he is one. He sees himself as a gentleman of fortune. He adheres to the Articles that spell out how one must treat one's shipmates and the people captured en route. Flint, by contrast, is an out and out maniac, a sadist of the first water. But most of the time, he is able -just barely--to cover his madness over with a veneer of civility. Time and again, his golden tongue persuades the (easily duped) pirate crew to follow his lead, to their own detriment, against the more sage advice of Long John. Silver and Flint are allies and friends for the first half of the book. Flint's sickness of soul eventually poisons their relations, forcing Silver into overt opposition to Flint. The least successful part of the book is the subplot dealing with Silver's love for the runaway slave Selena. Selena has run away from her plantation after she killed her master ([...]). Flint possesses her, John wants her. But Flint is impotent: he only pleasures himself by watching through a peephole as she undresses. That's all he can do. Although Long John truly loves her and she loves him, ultimately it doesn't make much difference to the plot. This is a sea adventure and the tale of two strong men in antagonism. The author would have been better advised to leave it at that and do way with the romance completely. A small pleasure of the book is that it resolves some of the elements of its `sequel.' For instance, I know how Long John lost his leg. We are introduced to Blind Pew. And we learn how Long John's parrot attached itself to him. (It was originally Flint's.) This book is a lot of fun.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Do Not Deny Me: Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Jean Thompson Page; Review: The best stories in this collection are quite good though nowhere near in the class of Alice Munro or of any of my other favorites among short story writers --Tobias Woolff, John Updike, Ann Beattie, Mary Gaitskill, Breece D'J. Pancake, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, for instance. The problem is a repeated straining for effect that undercuts the work that Thompson does on character. There are some fantastic character scenes in this collection but very few completely successful stories. An exception is the first story in the collection, "Soldiers...," about a wornout professor and a troubled student, whose problem, partly, is that she's young and sensitive. There is also a superb story about an old man who has had a stroke and is, as a consequence, locked up and tyrannized over by his monstrous wife. The story is excellent until the very end, when it is --not ruined, but diminished-- by a stock story book ending. Thompson has the potential to become a stellar writer --she may already have realized it in her other collections, but she falls short in this one. Still, there is much to applaud in this ccollection, and when she is good, she is very, very good.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Love and Summer; Author: Visit Amazon's William Trevor Page; Review: This is the thirty-second book from the prolific pen of William Trevor. His most recent novel,The Story of Lucy Gault, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary award. Trevor has never -repeat, never--written anything bad, indeed, less than good, and his best novels and short stories are nothing short of marvelous. In Trevor's fictional work, detail exposes and builds the character of his protagonists. As you read him, you slide from imagining how his characters look to a deep empathy with how they feel, and where they stand on their journey through often bewildering, frequently disappointing lives. Joseph Paul Connulty was ...a lanky, weasel-faced man with grey hair brushed straight back and gleaming beneath a regular application of Brylcream. Spectacles dangled on a tape around his neck, falling onto the dark serge of his suit. Two ballpoint pens were clipped into his outside breast pocket. The emblem of the Pioneer movement was prominent on his left lapel. ... his hope had been to become a priest, but the vocation had slipped away from him, lost beneath the weight of his mother's doubt that he would make a success of the religious life. In the end her doubt became his own. "Lost beneath the weight of his mother's doubt...." That is amazing writing! Reading it, you know more about this poor sad man than if Trevor had started out telling you it directly. You know, too, something about the atmosphere in the little Irish town where he lives. It's priest-bound still. Children's aspirations are tied down by their mothers' judgments. Everyone settles for less than they had dreamed of. This fine novel is about a doomed love affair between a nave, almost simple country housewife, who is married to a farmer much older than her whose life is blasted by a dark tragedy from the past, and a feckless artist-manque', a young photographer of no great talent or drive, who happens to cross her path one time on her once-a-week visit to town. Her fascination with him appears first as a welter of remembered details: "She kept seeing him, standing against packets of Bird's jelly in the Cash and Carry, tins of mustard, Saxa salt. As if they meant something, they were stuck in her mind, as if they were more than they could possibly be, and she wondered if they would ever be the same again, if what she'd bought herself would be, the Brown and Polson's cornflour, Rinso." In the end, the young man leaves. She makes a hard choice, but the right one, and life goes on. It was, truly, a summer love, nothing more. This is a compelling story, with characters you care about, a dramatic thrust to the narrative, and stunningly beautiful writing -it has it all. I've read a lot of Trevor's published fiction but nowhere near all of it, and I've never been disappointed.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Exiles in the Garden; Author: Ward Just; Review: This is a novel about living life, not just the dramatic moment. Ward Just is the author of fifteen previous novels, three collections of short stories, a play and two works of non-fiction. His most recent novel was the justly praised Forgetfulness, a novel so good that I bought two copies of it (though by accident). Well into Exiles, Alex gets a letter from his wife, Lucia. She has written from Europe to tell him she is leaving him for good. Swiss-born, she's never felt anchored in Alec's Washington (DC). Now she's met a man, a European intellectual who makes her feel, she writes, as though her life is contained within, tied together by, a "red thread" that gives it shape and meaning. All of Alec's life, he has suffered a delicate malaise of disconnection. He has never felt bound by such a thread. Any novel worth its salt about Washington touches on politics but in this novel, politics sets the stage --is scenery-- setting but not substance. Alec grew up with politics, his father a five-time senator, but Alec has rejected his father's life just as, later on, as a photographer for a Washington-based newspaper (the Post?), he turns down an offer to go to Vietnam to photograph a war he doesn't believe in. Alec may wonder if he has been brave enough in his life, but he has consistently refused to inflate the value of things he doesn't believed in (like the war) and has lived the penalty for his refusal. His life with Lucia began unravelling when foreigners --exiles-- moved in next door to his house. Lucia became a fixture at their nightly soirees and Alec didn't, and the distance in interests and enthusiasms between them drove a wedge between them. Alec loses Lucia. He continues with his life. He leaves the newspaper, he gains transitory fame as a photographer of actors, acting and films. He meets, and becomes a uncommitted but lifetime partner with, a class B film actress. His former life -life with Lucia--intrudes when Lucia discovers that her long lost father, an old-style European revolutionary, is in a nursing home in Washington. Lucia doesn't even remember her father: he deserted her mother and her when she was three. She asks Alec to go meet him. Alec does. He finds himself fascinated by a man who has had no hesitations in making bold choices in his life. Why? What's the difference between the life of an Alec and an Andre (Lucia's father's name)? Just doesn't offer any easy answers in this extraordinary short novel, only a nuanced picture of a man struggling to make sense of his own, not someone else's, life. As always in Ward Just's writing, the book is filled with absolutely on the mark details ("A steward, immaculate in white, served drinks in long glasses to three girls sunning themselves on the foredeck. When the girls raised their hands to receive the drinks, their arms curved like swans' necks. The steward carefully placed a long glass in each and backed away, a priest at; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Elegance of the Hedgehog; Author: Visit Amazon's Muriel Barbery Page; Review: "It's all well and good to have profound thoughts on a regular basis, but I think it's not enough." Thus writes Paloma, the precocious twelve-year-old who is one of the narrators in this delightful, often funny and even more often profound (sorry, Paloma!) novel from French author Muriel Barbery. Paloma keeps a secret journal in which she pours out her discontent with the world that regularly disappoints her. (Actually she keeps two journals. She labels one "Profound Thought" and the other "Journal of the Movement of the World.") The other protagonist is Rene, the concierge in Paloma's building. Rene is a widow, in her mid-fifties. She's almost a caricature of the Paris concierge: squat, ugly, to all appearances hopelessly mundane in her capabilities and myopic in her interests. The people in the building --with the exception of Paloma and one other girl who wants to b a veterinarian and seizes on any opportunity to talk with her about animal ailments-- slide past Rene without seeing her: she is all too obviously all that they're not: unintelligent, uneducated and uncultured. But Paloma and Rene have much in common. Though for quite different reasons, they both have taken to hiding themselves from the world: they assume the world won't accept them as they really are. Rene has a cat that sleeps the day away on the living room couch in her ground floor apartment. The cat is camouflage: all of the concierges in Paris have cats and the cats are always fat and lazy. But Rene's cat is named Leo, after a character in Tolstoy. In the secret life she keeps hidden from her tenants, she dines on fine cuisine instead of cabbage soup, and reads Tolstoy, Kant and Husserl. (After reading Husserl, whom she scorns, she declares that phenomenology is "hard-core autism."). She listens to Mozart, is in love with the Dutch Masters, and once a week, she and a cleaner friend of hers (a duchess in the rough) meet to drink tea and eat patisseries in the back kitchen of her ground floor apartment. Rene is determined not to reveal herself to the outside world, Paloma has decided to commit suicide on her next birthday (her thirteenth) so that her life won't descend into the routine and trivial. Events throw a monkey wrench in both their plans. A new tenant, Kakuro, moves in on the fourth floor. Charming, cultured and decidedly Japanese, Kakuro refuses not to see Rene. He soon becomes friends with Paloma too. Kakuro never condescends, is always considerate, and he's perpetually delighted in what he sees in Rene and Paloma. He sees Rene's intelligence in her eyes, intuits the significance of her cat's name. He sends her a bound copy of War and Peace, as though to say, "I see you. And I like what I see." As if it hadn't been lovely enough until this point, the novel becomes steadily lovelier as Rene, against her fears and inclinations, responds to Kakuro's overtures. Paloma grows from what she sees in Rene and Kakuro: adults needn't disappoint her all of; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Blame: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Michelle Huneven Page; Review: It would have been fatally easy for three-time novelist Huneven to indulge in literary pyrotechnics in Blame but she didn't. The storyline gives her ample opportunity to indulge in melodrama and bathos but Huneven writes instead with a sympathetic but unsentimental eye about the terrible event that derailed Patsy MacLemoore's life and how Patsy grew from it to become kind of a hero, and certainly a figure to be admired. Patsy, a fledgling history professor only six months a Ph. D., wakes one morning to find herself in a holding cell in the Altadena (CA) sheriff's office. She has driven over and killed a mother and young daughter in a drunken stupor. Patsy's been drunk before and she's driving on a suspended license. This time she does serious prison time, two years. She still has a job when she comes out but that's about all she has: she must remake her whole life, starting with her sense of who she is and what she's worth. That's what this book is about: Patsy MacLemoore finding a center to her life and living with it for twenty-some years. Along the way, the small and big events of life happen to her: a young friend dies of AIDS; Patsy marries a man she meets at AA; she flirts with but turns down an attractive teaching colleague; she deals with an aging husband thirty years older than she is and the return of his daughter and her family to live with them. Then a bombshell falls: she learns that she wasn't driving when the women were killed. There was a man was with her; he ran away, left her to bear all the blame. Again, there are choices to be made: about her life and the anger she feels mixed with relief. What have her sacrifices meant? Near the end of the book, Patsy fantasizes this session with her long gone therapist: Why do you think you took on the guilt so readily? Because the circumstances seemed so obvious -she'd been in her driveway, drunk, in situ with the dead and wounded. Because guilt was like the check on the table. Somebody had to pick it up. A quick turn of her head ... and Patsy glimpsed her own anger, a boiling turquoise sea. Enough, she thought, and went back inside. This is good writing: the writer doesn't avoid the emotion inherent in the situation but neither does she use it to induce too-easy tears in the reader's eyes. It is this muted tone that makes this elegant novel affecting and ultimately so satisfying.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cockroach: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Rawi Hage Page; Review: Reading Cockroach, the scarifying new novel by the talented young Canadian author Rawi Hage (he is originally from Lebanon) is a bit like reading Celine (Voyage to the End of Night, 1932), only shifted one continent over to Toronto, Canada, and updated to fit our shiny new century. The plot, such as there is, is about the pilgrimage of an anonymous young Arab migr to Canada who tries to hang himself but fails and now roams the underbelly of his freezing cold adopted city in search of -what? -revenge? satisfaction? Take your pick. Both fit equally well. The plot is just a device to anchor the narrator's string of anecdotes and reflections, as he flicks in and out of reality -he fantasizes himself a cockroach. None of the stories he tells is pretty and definitely none is upbeat. Yet this novel works: it is fascinating to read. Hardcore nostalgie de la boue (nostalgia of the gutter) like this is hard to find and unsettling for the reader to absorb, but there is raw energy and great truthfulness in this artful and affecting book.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Crashed (Skinned, Book 2); Author: Visit Amazon's Robin Wasserman Page; Review: Crashed is the second novel in a proposed trilogy of novels collectively entitled The Skinned Trilogy. The book is targeted for an audience of readers in their late teens but don't let that throw you off stride: the protagonist may be in her late teens herself, as are most of the key players in this book but Crashed reads well as adult or young adult reading. The premise of this book, and the one before it (Skinned) is that technology has made it possible to save, store and revive the memory and personality -your consciousness, self-ness-- and store it in a miniature computer, which then can be implanted in a technologically enhanced body (almost indestructible skull, metal reinforced bones, faster synapsed muscles improved. (If this technology sounds familiar, you have probably read some of the Takeshi Kovacs novels of Richard Morgan [Altered Carbon was the first] where warriors and people in other endangered occupations are routinely rehoused in freshly cloned "sleeves." Much the same thing happens in Crashed.) In Lia Kahn's case, the reason for the changeover was a fatal auto crash six months before. Lia has had difficulty adjusting to the change. Her new body may be superior in many respects but (1) it doesn't look like her -because of cost, she has been rehoused in a standard issue, and is the eleventh in line of her body type; (2) she may possess some new abilities, including the ability to subvocalize her thoughts and transmit them to others like her, but she has also lost two of her five senses (I don't know what other sense she lost but she misses smelling things); and (3) she has lost many of the old flesh-based hormonal responses that made her human. Most seriously, most flesh and blood people -Lia and her associates refer to them as "orgs"--don't see her or her kind as human, just mechanical tricks, talking robots. Even her own family and her old boyfriend couldn't get past the change in her appearance and behavior. Lia fled them and now lives in a community of her own kind. They call themselves "mechs." But the orgs call them "skinners" and there is a movement afoot to repeal their legal status as persons, with even worse things to come lurking in the wings. The world Lia has grown up in is dire. We finally used the bombs. Climate change is a reality now. No one sees clear skies in the daytime or stars at night. Plants and animals have been mutated in order to survive the colder winters and harsh sunlight. The government contracts its security to private firms that ignore the law. The difference in the way the affluent and the disenfranchised live is appalling. (The cities are open war zones, like the worst parts of Detroit only much worse. The average life span of someone living there is thirty-seven years.) Much of this novel is about Lia's adjustment to her new reality. She finds a boyfriend among her fellow mechs, develops new loyalties, and is dragged into the growing conflict between; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Last Night in Twisted River: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's John Irving Page; Review: John Irving writes fresh novels old style, with sweeping narratives and grand themes and appealing and unforgettable characters. This fine novel is no exception but it is exceedingly well crafted, with narrative that moves forward, then back, then forward again, in fits and starts so that you know bad things (good things too, but not as often) are about to happen but you've got time to anticipate them before they happen. It's a very effective way of telling a complicated story of a father who is a cook --a dedicated and competent workman, not an artist-- and his son, who becomes a writer and is an artist. Dominic Baciagalupo cooks for a mining camp in northern New Hampshire and has it off with his Indian Jane, his oversized helper, on the side. The problem is that Jane has a husband, a nasty deputy constable named Carl, whose idea of fun is shooting loggers in the foot when they give him sass. When Dominic's twelve-year-old son Daniel kills Jane by accident, thinking she's a bear and she's attacking his father, Dominic and Danny have to flee at once because if they don't, Carl will probably kill Dominic for sleeping with his wife. They're on the run for forty-six years, taking up roots here, then there, but always on the watch for news of Carl's search for them. Life happens to them in the meantime. Daniel becomes a famous writer, under the nom de plume Danny Angel. He has a son but loses a wife. dominic works in some restaurants, even opens his own a few times. Friends, and the memory of friends, follow in their trail. In the end, this is a novel about accepting life as what it is and not what it's not, or can't be. It's also a novel, a very insightful one, about what goes into making a novelist and about how novelists look at the world around them and make out if dazzling fictions. Which is what this book is --a dazzling fiction, not perfect, but dazzling and heartfelt.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Slammer; Author: Visit Amazon's Allan Guthrie Page; Review: Slammer is a nasty little story about the moral and psychological obliteration -of a newbie prison guard in a Scottish prison for hardcore offenders. From his first week on the job, Nicholas Glass is marked by the guards and the prisoners as an easy mark. Threatened with violence to his wife and young daughter, Glass is coerced into doing a criminal a favor. He's forced to do another and then another. His emotions cycle rapidly through self-deception, then hopelessness and then anger: it's the anger that finally destroys him. Things happen that are more horrible than Glass can tolerate and he's lost forever. Guthrie's spare writing style complements this tale of a claustrophobic world that seems to be populated mainly by grifters. The comparison that comes to mind is to the mindset, though not style, of Jim Thompson's scarifying crime noir shockers from the 40s and early 50s -The Killer Inside Me (1952), Savage Night (1953) and The Grifters (1963). Guthrie is a promising writer.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution; Author: Visit Amazon's Alice Waters Page; Review: We recently bought Alice Waters' newest cookbook, The Art of Simple Food, from Amazon. I haven't cooked a complete recipe from it yet but I've read and used several of the sections of advice: how to mix a salad, different strategies for combining pasta and sauce. It's rather oddly organized. Part I: "Starting from Scratch: Lessons and Foundation Recipes," runs 212 pages, from "How to Get Started" (what utensils and pots and pans you need and how to lay them out) to "Cookies and Cake" (no explanation necessary). Each chapter starts with general advice and then presents some base recipes or exemplary recipes to illustrate the topic just covered. The second part of the book, "At the Table," is more conventionally laid out. It is an abbreviated recipe book, 173 pages long. For three decades, Waters has championed the cause of good cooking in her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. She is a master chef and food preparer and her advice on cooking is usually on the mark. On the back cover of the book, she lists her fundamental guidelines for cooking and eating: Eat locally and sustainably Eat seasonally. Shop at farmers' markets. Plant a garden. Conserve, compost and recycle. Cook simply. Eat together. Remember food is precious. The advice is the best part of this book. The recipes seem almost incidental. This is a good bookprovided you don't expect it to be comprehensive.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Neiman Marcus Taste: Timeless American Recipes; Author: Visit Amazon's Kevin Garvin Page; Review: It's attractive enough to be a coffee table book, but it's not. It's a solid cookbook with good, sometimes simple classic American recipes. To take one section, soups, there are recipes for tomato minestrone, New England fish chowder, cheese and ale soup, turkey soup, plus the best creamed pea soup I've ever tasted, very rich but very, very good: County Mayo Pea Soup. I've tried the recipe for Deviled Pecans -again good--and many of the salad and sandwich recipes deserve trying soon. I don't greatly like chicken drumsticks but, as the author of this attractive cookbook writes, no American cookbook would be complete without a recipe for fried chicken. I'll try it .... Some time. There are recipes for chicken a la king, turkey Tetrazini, creamy rice pudding, some scrumptious looking cookies, a hot tea and whiskey toddy. I'll be cooking my way through this book for a long time. All of the recipes are well laid out, easy to read and follow. The photographs of the finished products make my mouth water. Neiman Marcus's restaurants are known for good food. I can see why after reading this cookbook.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Biba's Taste of Italy: Recipes from the Homes, Trattorie and Restaurants of Emilia-Romagna; Author: Visit Amazon's Biba Caggiano Page; Review: Our favorite restaurant locally is Biba's in Sacramento. I't named after its owner and head chef Biba Caggiano, who is still, after almost forty years, a formidable presence there. The restaurant itself is attractive, the service good but it's the food that makes it exceptional. We lived in Dubai for three years (2001-4) and one of the few cookbooks I took with me when I went there was Biba's Modern Italian Cooking (1992) --I cooked extensively from it. Biba came from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy forty years ago. This book, her latest, I believe, is a cook's tour of the varied and rich cuisine of that region. Like her other books, this one is well laid out. The recipes are always easy to follow. The more complicated recipes may take time to make but the results make it worthwhile. Biba's comments on life and eating in the Emilia-Romagna are refreshing. The only caveat: this book is not, and is not intended to be, a compendium of the essential Italian recipes. There are other cookbooks for that. What it offers is a collection that is varied enough in taste and ingredients to satisfy the most exacting home chef. Does that sound like I like it? Well, I do. A lot. It's fun to read and to use in the kitchen.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The French Laundry Cookbook (The Thomas Keller Library); Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Keller Page; Review: Acting on the premise that one can never own enough cookbooks (the forty or fifty we own makes only a modest cooking library), we added three new cookbooks this year. All are excellent. And the year before, our son gave me a fourth cookbook that's also excellent. Let's start with the classiest. Thomas Keller owns and operates The French Laundry restaurant in Yountville, California. "Cooking is not about convenience, and it's not about shortcuts. Take your time. Move slowly and deliberately, and with great attention," writes Keller in The French Laundry Cookbook, co-authored with food writer Michael Ruhlman (Ruhlman's The Soul of a Chef, 2001, is a really good book about what drives professional chefs to seek perfection). Food writers pretty much agree The French Laundry is either the best restaurant in the world, not just America, or if not Number One in the World, then Number Two or Three. If you want to eat there (as we do some day), you must call for a reservation two months ahead of time on the morning of the first day of the month. Call any later and the restaurant bookings for that coming month are all filled. Keller's inventiveness with foods and his meticulous attention to detail are legendary. They are well documented in this fantastically beautiful book. It includes Keller's recipe for his signature appetizer, Pearls and Oyster, which marries caviar and oysters in a bed of creamy pearl tapioca. There a few -very few- of the 150 recipes in this book that an adventurous chef might try at home -there is an intriguing recipe for gazpacho and one for a lasagne that Keller cooks for the staff meal before the restaurant opens to the public--but most of the recipes are way beyond the capabilities of even the most advance home chef and require expensive, sometimes exotic ingredients. (Keller does a lot with caviar, lobster and foie gras, and where in Modesto do you purchase a pig's head or fresh killed squab?) The desserts sound heavenly but are complicated to make as well. (Doesn't fresh-made banana ice cream with chocolate-banana crepes and chocolate sauce sound good?) But then, The French Laundry Cookbook isn't so much a book to cook from as an inspiration, a work of art, a rollercoaster read. I'm glad we own it but I don't see myself cooking anything from it in the near future ... although there is a recipe involving artichokes that looks good.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Gourmet Rhapsody; Author: Visit Amazon's Muriel Barbery Page; Review: If Barbery's previous novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2008), is like the main course OF an elegant French meal, Rhapsody is a plate of hors d'oeuvres, delicious and quick to go down the throat, but ultimately not enough for a meal. This isn't to say anything is bad about the book, it's delightful, but to admit that it's more a jeu d'esprit, a writer's game, than it is a full fledged work of fiction. In this slim novel, Barbery displays many of the same preoccupations as in Elegance -how people treat each other, what constitutes refinement, appreciation love of fine things (in this book, principally food), the price on person pays for another person's pleasure. And as in the other book, Barbery (or rather, Barbery and her translator, who is really really good) writes fluidly and elegantly and with continuing grace. Rhapsody narrates the dying thoughts of the great gourmand (he thinks he's a gourmet but he's really a gourmand) M. Pierre Arthens, France's premier food critic, as he hunts through memories for the primal food taste. Arthens has been both angel and beast in his life: a self-centered bully who has terrorized and exploited all the people around him but is ultimately redeemed by his pure love of and respect for food. Interspersed with the chapters narrating Arthens' thoughts are short chapters narrating the inner monologues of the people he has misused. The book is very clever, and exceptionally well written, but it all seems a bit ... frail. There isn't much substance in it. But take it as an appetizer, and then you can't go wrong nibbling on it.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Alex &; Author: Irene Pepperberg; Review: Click on YouTube and type in "Alex the Parrot," and there it is: the famous PBS interview of Alan Alda interviewing Alex the parrot and his scientist-trainer Irene M. Pepperberg. In groundbreaking studies of a Grey parrot's reasoning ability (reported in The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots (Harvard, 2000), Dr. Pepperberg proved to scientific standards that a little African Grey parrot, ten inches tall and with a brain the size of a peeled walnut, could not only count but add and subtract , could not only identify objects by color, size and nature (key, spoon, etc.) but identify mixed categories (all the shapes that are green, adding TOGETHER the green cars and green keys, and ignoring the blue keys and blue cars), could differentiate `more' and `less', and developed on its own a concept that was a simplified version of zero. Alex and Me, selected by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year in 2008, is now available in paperback. Get it and read it. It tells her story as much as Alex's: the fight she had to win funding and scientific acceptance. The received wisdom of the day was that animals did not reason; they simply parroted, or read subtle cues from their handlers --the "Clever Hans" syndrome, after a calculating horse in the late 1800s who 'added,' pawing the ground with his foot: it was discovered that his handler unknowingly signaled to him when the right total was reached. And certainly, if an animal could reason, it wouldn't be a bird. Pepperberg reasoned that animal learning experiences were conducted in a most unnatural way, by operant conditioning: starve the rat or pigeon, shove it on a box with no distracting stimuli, reward it if it pressed the right lever and punish it if it didn't. She reasoned that social animals, animals that live in packs or groups, would learn best if communicated with and socialized with. Using an alternative technique called model/rival training, developed by a German scientist Dietmar Todt, Pepperberg and an assistant would model the behavior (and the word and concept) they were trying to teach Alex. Alex would watch them name (out loud) an object that appealed to him (a piece of wood, for instance). When one of them repeated the trainer's word, she was handed the piece of wood and could `play' with it for a minute. Then the trainer and the assistant reversed roles and the assistant asked Dr. Pepperberg to name the object. When she said the right word, the assistant handed the object to her. When she said the wrong word, she was chastised. Greys are the most verbal of all parrots: using a Grey parrot allowed Pepperberg to talk to Alex about what Alex was doing. Alex died suddenly in 2007. He was thirty-=one years old, little over half the lifespan of a healthy Grey. The autopsy showed that he had had an undetected heart arrhythmia. But before he died, Alex, and his two companion Greys in Dr. Pepperberg's lab, showed conclusively that being; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Lacuna: A Novel (P.S.); Author: Visit Amazon's Barbara Kingsolver Page; Review: "Children robbed of love will dwell in magic," Barbara Kingsolver wrote in an earlier novel (Animal Dreams). And that's what happens to Harrison Shepherd, the protagonist of this book. He's shuffled back and forth between the two worlds of his Mexican mother and his American father, never completely fitted to either. His mother snags his father as her passport out of Mexico and into the richer, freer world of the United States in the 20s. She leaves him for a rich Mexican, lured by dreams of marriage that will never happen, and she takes her son with her into virtual captivity in a villa surrounded by verdant jungle in Vera Cruz. Bloodcurdling screams from the depths of the jungle intimidate them by day, until the Mexican tells them, with a sneer, that the screams are only the cries of howler monkeys. The son, Harrison, is left to fend for himself. His mother is too preoccupied with her own situation to pay much attention to him; she needs him only as a mirror to show off how beautiful and alive she is, and the older he gets, the more he menaces her own self-image as perpetually young. She leaves the Mexican for another rich man and they move to Mexico City, where they are carefully hidden from sight in a miniscule apartment on the edge of a slum so that her patron's wife and family never know she exists. Then Harrison is shipped to his father in Washington, D. C. The father doesn't want him, ships him to a military school. Back and forth, back and forth, Harrison goes. He's a child with parents who refuse to be real parents, a child with no true nation. Along the way, he begins to keep a journal and this writing is his lifeline to adulthood. A young adult, he is befriended by the leftist painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and, a little later, he is the cook and then the secretary for Leon Trotsky. He is there when Trotsky is assassinated by a GPU thug. Back in the States again -Asheville, North Carolina- Harrison takes up writing and produces two popular novels of the fall of the Aztec empire. His future looks, if not happy -he is too lonely a man to be happy for long-- at least secure. Then fortune plays one last card and everything falls apart for Harrison. I've read most but not all of Kingsolver's novels and have never read one that wasn't good. She is a writer of considerable authorial gifts and an extraordinarily big heart. Her descriptions of places, people and times can't be beaten, and she cares for her characters. The Lacuna is first-rate fiction. It starts slowly but the momentum builds steadily until, by the middle of the book (when Harrison is living with Rivera and then Trotsky), I couldn't put it down. When the book ended, I wished it would still continue so that I could have sat in on Harrison Shepherd's sometimes sad but most often glorious life a bit longer.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong; Author: Visit Amazon's Terry Teachout Page; Review: Pops isn't just a good biography of Louis Armstrong's full and varied life. It's an exceptionally good biography. It shouldn't replace Laurence Bergreen's excellent Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant life (New York Times Notable Book for 1997) in anyone's library. But Teachout's book complements Bergreen's and it stand on its own as a model of sympathetic, scrupulously researched biographical writing. For those who are interested in him, there is little new that they can learn about the well examined life of this American icon. As soon as popular critics and serious scholars started writing about that uniquely American pop music, jazz, they wrote about Armstrong. They couldn't avoid it because Armstrong, more than any other individual, set the standards and many of the conventions for jazz, in his playing and his singing. (Where would Bing Crosby have been without Louis to imitate?) He wasn't the first great jazz soloist: Sidney Bechet holds that honor by a few years. And Armstrong's seminal group, the Hot Five (later Hot Seven), played outside the recording studio just one time. It was never a working group, never a combo formed to play in the clubs and dance halls where jazz was being forged in the twenties and thirties. Trying to imagine jazz without Armstrong is like trying to imagine modern art without Picasso or the essay form without Montaigne. His contemporaries knew it and admitted it. Even those who were on the outs with him -Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins--knew that Louis was The Man. Red Allen, the trumpeter with (to my mind) the most beautiful sound in jazz, wanted nothing more than to sound like Louis. Jack Teagarden tried to play him on the trombone (and succeeded). Even harbingers of modernity like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, who were offended by what they saw as Armstrong's Uncle Tom antics on stage, admitted that Armstrong was The One. A virtue of Teachout's fine book is to place Armstrong's on-stage antics and off-stage persona in context. Armstrong was by temperament, especially while performing, a sunny person, who enjoyed performing and did not draw a line between clowning and serious music making. (That's not quite accurate. Music making was the thing he cared about most in the world -even over home and his much beloved wife Lucille--and he was deadly serious about his music, but he didn't find it incongruous to perform well, to appeal to the audience. In short, as Teachout eloquently explains, Armstrong, like many performers of his generation, saw himself as an entertainer as well as and complementary to a musician. He wanted to do well in both guises, and did. Teachout also does the reader a favor by his sympathetic and wise assessment of Louis's later performances and recordings, from the 1930s on. This is a body of work that many critics dismiss as the wreckage left over after Louis's artistic vision left him. (Even so savvy a critic as Gunther Schuller dismissed Louis's later work as uninspired.) Teachout does not argue for virtues that aren't there in Louis's often dreary big band recordings from the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Fun with Problems; Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Stone Page; Review: This slim (195 pages) collection of six short stories and one novella packs a punch. They are all -all--stories of separation, about flawed people unable to connect or communicate. In most cases, these people are careening out of control, drawn toward chaos and destruction by alcohol, drugs, their own egoism. It's a kind of negative hubris: doomed not by their strengths or virtue but by exaggerated weakness, a lack of moral energy that draws them deeper and deeper into the abyss. The title story, "Fun with Problems," is cruel and effective. Two people meet in the county jail conference room. One is a middle-aged man, public defender for a felon so damaged by past life that he can't extract himself from the disaster he's making of his life -it'll only get worse. The other is a woman at the tail end of her twenties or in her early thirties. She's an actress wannabee who works as a social worker to pay the bills. She's there to minister to a vicious Alpha Male type who is probably psychotic. Her client's assertive masculinity stirs up waves of antagonism in the public defender. The two professionals leave the jail and he transfers his aggression toward her. They have a few drinks, then a few more, and he's in bed with her, a classic one-nighter. He never calls her again, never tries to make it less tawdry than it was. ("Matthew's life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom.") Months later, he sees her in a bar, "still on the sauce," with an older man. Her boyfriend is a creep: the public defender realizes immediately that he'll take advantage of her and make her feel worse about herself than she already does. He joins them and orders a drink. He makes a toast, a very nasty one, and the story ends. There are few epiphanies in these bleak stories. In "Honeymoon," the shortest story in the collection at four pages, an aging husband on a honeymoon realizes too late what he's lost and how little value his own life has. In "High Wire," one of the best stories in a collection of all good stories, a screenwriter pursues a decades long involvement with a doomed actress. In the process, he throws his own life away. He pulls away -from her and the life he now leads himself-- at the end, but it's probably too late to make much difference. It's a personal epiphany perhaps, but not a big one and not a happy one. (the screenwriter quotes Nelson Algren's advice which must have been intended for people just like him: "Never go to bed with someone who has more problems than you do.") The last story in the collection, "The Archer," is worth the price of the book by itself. It is also, in a strange way, the only one that points a path toward redemption, although there's no concrete evidence that redemption follows. I don't want to say more about the story. It deserves to be read; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Gray Man; Author: Visit Amazon's Mark Greaney Page; Review: Mark Greaney, The Gray Man. Jove. 2009. 456p. (pb) Greaney's Gray Man is a surprisingly good debut novel. It is packed with action and Court Gentry, aka "The Gray Man", is human enough to be interesting. The plot is a classic one. Court Gentry, a.k.a. "The Gray Man," is ex-CIA. There's a `Kill on Sight" order out for him. He now earns his living as a freelance assassin, but he only kills bad guys. He assassinates the brother of a corrupt African dictator (a fanatic who richly deserves death). The dictator vows revenge. A multinational oil firm is negotiating for sole access to the rich oil deposits in the dictator's land. The dictator pressures them: bring me the head of my brother's assassin or the deal is off. The oil firm pressures the Gray Man's employer in turn: lead us to him or we'll rape and kill your grandchildren. Within a day, the hit squads of a dozen nations, from Albania to Indonesia and South Korea, are hunting for Gentry, as are the agents of a private security firm and the CIA. From that point on, there is no cease. First novelist Greaney has a good way with action scenes and his prose --hurrah! hurrah!-- is suitably lean. There's not a lot of detail to the description of Gentry --he's more or less just a killing machine-- but he is an appealing action hero. I found it hard to put this novel down once I'd started it and I wouldn't mind encountering the Gray Man again.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Generation A: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Douglas Coupland Page; Review: Douglas Copeland's novels are not so much finished novels as narrative experiences. The language and imagery is quirky, the plots twist in the most intriguing ways, and the conclusions of the novels aren't in any conventional sense conclusions --rather, things get more and more complicated, and then they just end. The action in his latest mindbender takes place in a world where mankind has finally done it: there's little green left in the world and bees -bees, mind you--and extinct, and them all the foodstuffs that depend on bee pollination. Some people remember the smell of almonds but almonds don't exist in this world. Apples! You can buy an apple on the (semi-)black market but they are small and wizened, as one would expect when each bud has to be hand-pollinated. There's still a lot of corn around, though, and food that has been pumped full of starch and corn syrup to fool us into thinking ourselves properly fed. Zack works a cornfield in backwoods Iowa. His uncle has bought him a luxury combine -airconditioned, computer feeds--and Zack drives around the field in this Hummer of a tractor buck naked, selling a continuous video stream of his nude body to a peeper across the world. Then one day, Zack is stung. By a bee. And so are four other young people spread all across the world -Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Canada, France. It's a media sensation -five people stung by bees! The next thing they know, all five are in isolation: their experiences are being carefully rationed, their diet controlled and their vital signs monitored to discover what it is about them that attracted the bees. At this point, the narrative jumps the tracks. The five wind up on an island in the far north telling stories to each other. Their captor is involved in an obscure corporate plot. To do what? It's not clear to them at first and even when the reason is explained, it doesn't make a lot of sense. But all of this is aside from the point in a novel that is really an extended riff on modern society and the way we savage nature. The point is that, at some point, not too far off in time, nature will savage us back., and it won't be pleasant. Coupland is an acute observer of modern mores and fashions. Some of his images are, well, upsetting even while comical: the girl from New Zealand is stung by the bee when she was in the act of using her cell phone to photograph a sandwich bun that she has placed at her feet; at the same time a friend in Spain, standing on a spot directly opposite the spot on the earth where she is standing, does the same thing. What are they doing? They're shooting a video of a "world sandwich." Julien is France lives his whole life in role-playing games. Harj, from Sri Lanka, works a service desk (in Sri Lanka) for Abercrombie and Fitch after his family is wiped out by a tsunami while attending an; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Recordings: for Jazz; Author: Scott DeVeaux; Review: Jazz scholar Scott DeVeaux and premiere jazz critic Gary Giddins (The Village Voice) compiled this four-CD collection to accompany their advanced level jazz primer, Jazz (2009). At $60.07 from Amazon.com, it's pricey but worth it for the serious jazz listener or student of jazz. I could cavil at some of the choices they made: I would have preferred less pop jazz, for instance. (Nothing against Sinatra or Getz and Byrd's "Samba Dees Days," for instance, but there are other pieces and other musicians I'd like to hear. And while Horace Silver's hard bop quintet deserves to be spotlighted, so do Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers: what about the 1958 quintet -Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Bobby Timmons, etc., what a group!--doing "Moanin'"?) In some cases, I would have preferred different selections by the musicians or different groups being spotlighted. From the twenties, I'd like to have heard one of violinist Joe Venuti and guitarist Eddie Lang's hot jazz groups from Chicago, or maybe Adrian Rollini. And there is a great 30s pickup group with trombonist Jack Teagarden and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. (The same album has another group with clarinetist Peewee Russell playing with James P. Johnson on piano and Zutty Singleton on drums!) On the modern end, I missed hearing a cut by Roscoe Mitchell or the full Art Ensemble of Chicago, ditto the World Saxophone Quartet or ROVA. The jazz-fusion group Weather Report was good, but I feel that John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra blew them out of the water when they were hitting it. But this is small potatoes for a collection that is both generally representative and singularly informative. Most of the cuts on the first CD are stunning: Ghanaian drummers, a black Baptist or Pentecostal choir, killer guitar and vocal by oldtime bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell, a piece by ragtime's little know clarinet virtuoso Henry Sweetman, great King Oliver and Louis, and Louis on his own and with Earl Fatha Hines. The second CD, which takes the music up through the 30s, is equally good. Hell, it's all good! Each of the selections is pegged off an analysis of the performance in DeVeaux's and Giddin's book. The analyses are not uniform in quality -some seem close to trivial--but over all, reading along in the text while listening to the musical cuts will teach the reader/listener a great deal. Hurrah for you, Scott and Gary! Something like this has been needed for a long time.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta; Author: Visit Amazon's Paul Theroux Page; Review: Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta is Paul Theroux's twenty-ninth novel and his forty-third published book. He has long been a distinguished writer, whose forays into travel books have enriched his novel writing with exotic locales and peoples and insight into parts of our character that we might otherwise miss because we've learned to mask them so in our own daily dealings with the people around us. He's long been one of our more interesting authors, with a contrarian sense of the strangeness of this odd creature called man and a pronounced awareness of the existence of the Other, just outside the curtains shielding our cosseted and contained quotidian existence. I remember assigning one of his early books, The Family Arsenal, for a one-time course I taught on (trendy title -it was the seventies!) `The Contemporary Novel and the Consciousness of Loss.' I paired it with Conrad's The Secret Agent, a perfectly logical pairing not only because both novels were about the terrorist's mind but because Theroux is, of any of the writers writing today, the most likely heir of Conrad's mindset and preoccupations, with James's super refined style rafted onto it. (The course flopped, by the way. I never offered it again.) Hand is neither the best nor the worst of Theroux's many books. It tells the story of a failing travel writer, Jerry Delfont, who is stuck in Calcutta and struggling to overcome writer's block, his own `dead hand.' He responds to a letter, gauche and imperious, from an American woman who claims to his fan, asking for his help in clearing up a mystery: an Indian friend of her son woke up in his hotel room to find a dead boy on the carpet. He fled to avoid arrest: the crime has to be cleared up if he is to be free from arrest. Ineluctably, Delfont is drawn in by the woman, a devotee of the cruel goddess Kali and a devotee of tantric yoga and sex. Is she a good woman, as she claims and he at first believes, or is there a darker side to her actions and sayings? Delfont's comings and goings lead him across India, a subcontinent of savage contrasts and brutal indifference to suffering and injustice. The tone is set with a brief incident described on page 5, almost offhandedly: An expat couple leaves its infant child with the child's Indian amah. Walking home one afternoon in a distant neighborhood, they see their nanny panhandling in the traffic, holding an infant -their son--in her arms. The child is "drooling and dazed, ... drugged with opium." This is a twisty sort of novel, with many surprise turns en route. One of the most fascinating is when Delfont receives a request from the famous travel writer, Paul Theroux, for an interview. The result is a tour de force, and one of the sliest, most insidious self-putdowns I've come across in a lifetime of reading novels. It's almost as though, for a few pages (pages 126-137), Theroux encounters Diderot, or Sterne, or one of the other experimentalist; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg; Author: Visit Amazon's Deborah Eisenberg Page; Review: This collection brings together in one volume stories from four previous collections: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986(, Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Eisenberg has a distinguished pedigree: she is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant and has received other awards and fellowships, and is professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia. Her work has been praised by practically every major publication, from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle to Harper's to the Times of London. Critics have described her stories "concentrated bursts of perfection (London Times) and possessing "all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet" (Boston Globe). She's not just good, she's very good. This is my first exposure to her fiction but it won't be my last. As a writer of short fiction, she is the equal or superior of any writer of short fiction today, and I include my longtime favorites Alice Munro and William Trevor. At 980 pages of stories, this compendium is a chunk. The reader who attempts to conquer it through brute force will be doing him or herself a disfavor. Eisenberg's stories deserve time and space between readings so the full shock value isn't attenuated. The sections are, respectively, the four separate collections previously published of her stories. A passage in the first story in this volume, "Flotsam," captures a mood, or an insight, that runs throughout Eisenberg's work: Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction. She writes of disconnected people and troubled loves, above all of the loneliness and emptiness in these people's lives. Her protagonists suffer from a withdrawing from or atrophy of experience. They are drifting, seeking an anchor sometimes, or a jolt of experience at other times to reset their emotional clocks. An experience, sometimes the most mundane and inconsequential experience, shocks them into an awareness of how separated they are from feeling, the people around them, their own past histories or a consciousness of a meaningful future ahead of them. All of the stories in the first collection, Transactions, are first rate. It's hard to pick a best one but the last story in the collection, "Broken Glass," exemplifies them. A young woman, exhausted and disconsolate after the drawn out illness and death of her mother, flees to Mexico to regain her bearings. She rents an upstairs flat in a villa owned by an expatriate American couple, who are older than her but of indeterminate age. Against her wishes, they draw her into their routine of daily meals and nightly party giving: she sees that it is their way of keeping at bay the Demons in their utterly trivial and purposeless lives. After an especially excruciating evening spent with utterly boring people,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Eat the Document: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Dana Spiotta Page; Review: This novel succeeds as a novel both of manners and ideas. Along its course, we are offered a wry and piercing commentary on our postmodern world of slippery meaning and solipsistic pleasure. The skeleton of the plot is simple and classic: doomed lovers driven apart by their own actions, never to reunite. Bobbie DeSoto and Mary Whittaker, protesting the U.S.'s involvement in Viet Nam, plant a bomb in a chemical company executive's home and, by accident, kill a maid who is working there. They flee. They have to separate. They change their names and their hair color and living style and go underground. For thirty years. Switch to the present. The woman, named Louise now, has a son, Jason, who is fifteen. Jason is a pasty-faced couch potato. His chief pleasure in life is collecting and listening to alt vinyls from the 60s and 70s and he sneers at his mother's style of living. In another part of the town, a rootless and propertyless fiftyish man, Nash, runs a counter-culture bookstore. He's so softhearted that he doesn't bust the young people who are ripping off expensive books from his shop -he can't bring himself to act like a cop. Nash meets Miranda, eighteen, at one of the mock protest groups whose meetings take place after hours in his store. These groups, which he encourages, plan grandiose and protest demonstrations but never carry any off. Back and forth, 1970 to 2000 and inbetween, the story goes. We see how much Mary and Nash (who is Bobbie) have given up to stay free ("a swift and steady decrease in possibilities"). On the run, in the seventies, Mary hides out in a women's collective. It's just as exclusivist as the world she has run way from. "Caroline [that's what she called herself then] knew she was onto something, she was learning how things get away from people. How gradually they what? Become the very thing they long to escape.... Why couldn't she have been a radical separatist, at the margins? How different would it have been if she had tried to save herself instead of the whole world? But that was what she was now -a movement of one. The most radical separatist of all. You are moved to save the world, and then you are reduced to organizing everything just to save yourself." Near the end of the book, there is a savagely funny but sad passage. Nash and Miranda pick up a deck of "New Left" playing cards. The cards display pictures of 60s and 70s terrorists, including Bobbie DeSoto, and provide instructions for a game to play using them, things like: Storm the Dean's Office: Watch out -if you put the wrong cards together, there is a sectarian meltdown. The deck sells for $19.95. Anything can be packaged and sold for a profit, even old revolutionaries. Everything works in this carefully wrought, elegant and sardonic comedy of manners.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Parrot and Olivier in America; Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Carey Page; Review: This exceptionally well written and consistently enjoyable novel succeeds both as a novel of manners and a novel of ideas. It's an extended riff on Tocqueville -not that Carey, an author of great discernment, has done anything so crude as to fictionalize Tocqueville's and his friend and associate Beaumont's epoch-making journey to America in 1831, a journey that resulted in the most insightful book about that young republic ever to appear, a book that is still a treasure hoard of insights into our country's mores and foibles even today. No! Rather Carey has created two comic but intensely, consistently human characters, and let them roam over our young country while he marks down their reactions to what they encounter. Olivier is Olivier Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur, born to a centuries-old family of the high nobility in France. Unfortunately, it is a France that no longer exists, and Olivier's loyalty to the new state is suspect. It is safer, more circumspect, for O. to disappear for a while. A fact-finding expedition to the United States, to examine New World prison systems, offers the perfect excuse. O.'s mama' is worried, though. She doesn't want her darling little boy to fall prey to some New World harpy. Parrot -Perroquet -is dragooned into going along as Olivier's secretary and servant, and as O's mother's spy on her son. Parrot is English, and no aristocrat -no, far from it! He knows his birth name -John Larrit--but isn't certain when or where he was born. His father, an itinerant printer who is eventually transported for forgery, quoted Rousseau to his son very early and Parrot starts the journey with nothing but disdain for his noble master. Over time they become more than friends, in a friendship between two men who could not be more different -in their looks, dress, sensibilities and affections, and prejudices. Although Olivier tries to admire America -at one point, he even proposes marriage to an American beauty--he cannot shake his disdain of men's commonness in this raw country and he is fearful of what America will become in little time. For Parrot, America offers a new beginning: his dreadful past counts for nothing in this grand open land. And that is one of the many excellences of this truly exceptional popular novel: Carey uses his two narrators, O. and P., to voice disparate and sometimes conflicting views of the New World, and he doesn't load the case for one view or the other. Because what both men say about the new country they are observing is true: Andrew Jackson's America is raw; money rules all; only the thinnest veneer of culture exists even in the highest ranks of society; and on and on the observations go. Americans then, as now, were a problematic people, hard to encapsulate in one simple truism. Carey, who has won two Booker Prizes in the past, is a consummate word worker. The descriptions in this book are apt and powerful. The captain of the ship that carries O. and P. to the States "was as hard and scrawny; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Devil's Star: A Harry Hole Novel (Harry Hole Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Jo Nesbo Page; Review: Star is the third police procedural featuring detective Harry Hole to be published in the United States. I read Redbird (which I had bought but not read yet) but not the second novel. Star has the strengths of the first novel -a compelling lead character (Hole is hard core alcoholic, determinedly melancholy but absolutely a bulldog when on the scent), trenchant social commentary, an interesting and vaguely foreign milieu (Oslo), and a complicated but intriguing mystery. This novel also brings to a close the secondary story line from the first two novels, involving a corrupt cop and Harry's attempts to nail him. The mystery in this novel in intriguing but actually too complicated -the killer amputates a different finger from each of his victims and leaves a small red diamond star behind at each murder scene. The book succeeds in spite of the Golden Age mystery framework into which the plot has been squeezed. Star succeeds because Harry Hole is a compelling subject and his hunt for the killer grips you on every page. Nesbro is a very good writer.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Pirate Devlin; Author: Visit Amazon's Mark Keating Page; Review: It is already made clear that The Pirate Devlin will be the first in a series of book about a renegade Irishman, who, in the late 1710s, converts under duress from King's sailor (well, King's captain's servant, to be exact) to pirate, and makes good at his new trade. When Seth Toombs, the pirates' captain, is destroyed in battle, Devlin takes over and leads the sometimes cooperative but often refractory crew off to recover a treasure in gold to which only Devlin has the map. In the best thriller tradition, the novel ends with a kicker to set up the next installment -not one but two antagonists are left behind to hunt out and kill him. There are plenty of twists and turns in the plot, several battle scenes, and sufficient skullduggery to keep the reader occupied in this novel, but that's about it. The plot is a bit crowded at times --it's not clear, for instance, why Keating brings the famed pirate Blackbeard onto the scene, unless it's to set the stage for a later book. It's also occasionally difficult to remember who is who on which page. But in general, first-time novelist Keating does what one is supposed to do in this type of novel, which is keep the action moving without time for reflection on the finer points. This is not the best of historical sea story around but it is a more than adequate, and enjoyable read.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Long Way Home (The Homelanders); Author: Visit Amazon's Andrew Klavan Page; Review: Home is the second in a projected series of books entitled The Homelanders. The hero, Charlie West, is an ordinary high school student who goes to sleep innocent and wakes up to find himself the object of a nationwide man hunt. Somehow, he has lost a year out of his life, and during that time, apparently, he has killed, and been convicted of murdering, his best friend. A group of homegrown terrorists called the Homelanders are also pursuing him; from what Charlie has unearthed, they are a network of Islamo-fascists (Charlie's term) who plan to bring down society by a series of violent terrorist assaults. Charlie doesn't know how to get out of the mess he's in: he can't trust anyone because everyone seems either to want him back in jail or dead. In this installment, Charlie makes some progress in discovering who framed him for his friend's murder and he saves his girlfriend (but he can't even remember them becoming close) from death herself. Klavan writes as well in a novel for young adults as he does in his adult thrillers (True Crime, etc.), which is saying a lot: he never condescends to his audience. As to this book, Charlie is a very appealing and believable hero and the plot barrels along from one crisis to another. It's all highly satisfying.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Book of Murdock (Page Murdock Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Loren D. Estleman Page; Review: Loren D. Estleman is a prolific author of mysteries and also westerns, and equally good at both genres. This is his 43rd novel. Not bad! His books never disappoint --they're always fun to read-- but some are better than others. This is not one of the better ones. Murdock is a wonderful character and his narrative voice is fine, but the plot is just thin in this adventure, in which Murdock dons the collar in an attempt to trap a band of bank robbers in the Texas Pan Handle. You won't regret reading this installment of lawman Murdock's adventures, but you probably won't remember it long either.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Spies of the Balkans: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Alan Furst Page; Review: Once again, Alan Furst has fashioned an absolutely first-rate spy thriller --although, as in his other novels, espionage is peripheral to the real thrust of the novel, which is to evoke desperate times and even more desperate men who are practicing the art of survival in the years immediately preceding World War II. If Jean Casson, the hero of Furst's The World at Night (1996) and Red Gold (1999), could have been played in the movies by the great French noir actor Jean Gabin, the hero of this novel, a Greek-Macedonian police official named Costa Zannis, could equally well have been played by Anthony Quinn. Zannis is an eminence gris in the spy-ridden city of Salonika: he settles the difficult cases, where good sense, political savvy and uncommon tact is needed to keep things calm. But in 1940, Greece -and thus Macedonia--is at war with Hitler's Germany and invasion threatens. Zannis is drawn in -at first, to assist German Jews in fleeing Germany and then to help British agents. Through it all, Zannis is wary, sensible, and humane, but above all effective, as he threads his way through one dangerous situation after another. But to talk about this novel as if it were first of all an action thriller is to do it an injustice. Furst is a master at conveying atmosphere, at describing life in a polyglot world, and his novels -including this one--often include sensitive, exquisitely depicted love stories. Everything in this book is good. A point of interest: I've not read all of Furst's books, but I've only missed one and I`ve reviewed four previous ones. Unless my memory errs, Furst shifts perspective more often in this book than in the previous novels I've read, where the perspective remains largely principally the protagonist's. The change doesn't hurt the book at all. It's just different than what I remember from earlier books.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Visit from the Goon Squad; Author: Visit Amazon's Jennifer Egan Page; Review: Seventy-seven pages into Visit, there is an exchange that is emblematic of what goes on in this firecracker of a novel. Scotty, the super-talented guitar player from Bennie's seventies garage band, shows up in Benny's office. Now it's the nineties. Bennie is riding the crest of a wave as a recording impresario. Scotty is worn out, an obvious loser. He smiles, and shows the gaps in his teeth. What he's there for? Bennie asks him. They've been out of touch for twenty years. Scotty says: "I want to know what happened between A and B." That could be the motto for this exceptional novel: it's about expectations unachieved and memories of pasts more glorious, or at least more promising than what the players in this novel have had to settle for today. Sasha, a former flower child but thirty years later married (late), attending classes in college (very late), and with a doctor husband who's kind but always busy and two children, one slightly autistic, remembers "when she was like anyone, with a life that worried and electrified and overwhelmed her." She laments what she's lost over her life so far: "I get to know a lot of people. But it never really lasts." Another character mourns, "I feel like everything is ending." Brilliantly written and plotted, Visit traces the careers of a motley group of young seventies adventurers as they move into middle age (which they find neither as exciting or compelling). The book shifts from one group of characters to another and from time to time without obvious signposts. Egan frequently elides time in the space of a single paragraph: you know not only what happens at the time to the character but what will happen thirty years later. The effect is mildly disorienting but creates moments in which the reader feels, and juxtaposes, emotions felt in two very different parts of the same person's life. The story is told sometimes in the third person, sometimes the first; one stunning chapter is presented wholly in Power Point slides. (Sasha's thirteen-year-old son keeps his journal in Power Point.) This is the first novel by Jennifer Egan that I have read but it will not be the last. She knows her craft and writes exceptionally well. After the first chapters, it's hard to put the book down: you care for the characters. Everything works in this imaginative work of empathy.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: U is for Undertow (A Kinsey Millhone Mystery, Book 21); Author: Sue grafton; Review: After twenty-one novels, Sue Grafton could be excused if she were tired of her feisty P.I. heroine Kinsey Milhone. But if this novel is an indication, she's not. Not at all! Other detective series have flagged in mid-stream -the Spenser series by Robert B. Parker is an example--but Grafton's Kinsey Milhone stories have been consistently good, with lean, energetic prose and story lines that always interest and never seem strained. The latest entry in the series is ambitious: the narration moves back and forth from the present of Kinsey's investigation (1988) to the past that formed it (1967). The focus shifts back and forth among Kinsey (first person narration) and three other players (third person...) as Kinsey pursues an elusive lead to a twenty years' old kidnapping and probable murder of a young girl. The worst people in the novel are not the murderers, who fall into murder by accident and then are frozen in their lives by it like flies in amber, but rather two sixties flower children who justify appallingly self-centered behavior by blaming everything that happens to them on others. As in all of these novels, Kinsey Milhone is an appealing and admirable protagonist -not a superhero nor a Sherlock Holmes but stubbornly independent and an absolute bulldog once she is on the trail of a criminal. Her personal life occupies enough space in the book to make Kinsey more rounded as a character but not so much that it overwhelms the story.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: And Other Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Joseph Epstein Page; Review: I first came across Epstein's writings when he was editor of The American Scholar and published lapidary essays -as funny as they were enlightening--under the nom de plume Aristophanes. Then in 2007, I reviewed two of his books, Friendship and his short biography and assessment of Tocqueville for a journal. Friendship knocked my socks off -again, wise and funny in equal parts, the funny accenting the serious. The Tocqueville book was also good but outshadowed by Hugh Brogan's much larger and more substantial Alexis de Tocqueville (which I also reviewed). I ordered Snobbery from Amazon -read it and liked it but not as much as Friendship. Still good but enough of Epstein for me for the moment. Love Song is the first book of fiction by Epstein that I've read and it is excellent. He shows the same strengths in his fiction as in his non-fiction essays: a dry sense of humor that approaches but never spills over into outright whimsy; sage and skeptical comments about the oftentimes odd, even irrational behavior of that uncommon animal called the human being; the gift of telling a story; and last, and best, a deep affection for his fellow beings, even in the moments when they irritate him most. In short, Epstein is as exceptional a short story writer as he is an essayist. He, wisely I believe, sticks to a subject he knows at first hand: the comings and goings of middle and upper class Jews, mostly of Epstein's age or near it, in his home town, Chicago. The reviewer in Publisher's Weekly found this formula "restrictive." I didn't, but it is true that all of these stories are about the same tribe, pretty much about people of the same age, and people who act, think, and feel pretty much the same way. Still, I found these miniatures affecting and a great deal of fun to read. The title story, ""Love Song...", is a wry, winning story about recognizing who you and aren't, even at the expense of a second try at romance. "Janet Nastalsky and the Pursuit of Art" is a devastating story about a woman's ruthless pursuit of her own art: unaware of her envy of others, she caricatures them and exploits their foibles in her writings, with no sense of balance or human empathy. "Gladrags and Kicks" describes two parents who want only the best for their lumpish daughter, but can't understand it when she follows her own (highly successful) course instead of the one they've laid out for her. In "The Philosopher and the Checkout girl," an aging man who has never taken a risk finally takes one, maybe--on love. "Under New Management" is about the complicated, not so successful relationship of a son and his stepmother: he doesn't resent her so much as resent losing his dad. And "My Brother Eli" is a fine picture of a writer, "one of life's takers," who takes but never gives back. It's told by the brother who has always bailed him out when he's needed it but never got thanks for it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: 69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors; Author: Visit Amazon's Gwyn Morgan Page; Review: 69 A.D. was not the happiest year for the Roman Empire. Nero had committed suicide the previous June, and was succeeded by Galba. But Galba was assassinated on the fifteenth of January. Then came Otho, and Vitellius at the same time, and once Otho had killed himself, Vitellius alone from April on. But from May or June, Vitellius was opposed by Vespasian, who became the fourth emperor that year in December, when Vitellius was captured and murdered on December 20. The principal evidence for these events is the histories of Tacitus, and Morgan, professor of Classics and History at the University of Texas in Austin, is an acknowledged expert on Tacitus. The result is a detailed and complicated ride through the contradictory and often tantalizingly incomplete pages of the commentaries of Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio, and Josephus, among others. It's not an easy ride but it's worth it to get an understanding of a crucial period of the Roman Empire's long history. It is hard to fault Morgan's judgment that the events of 69 A.D. did not show that subsequent emperors feared the legions' disloyalty nor paved the way for the breakdown of government and civil order signaled by the assassination of Commodus in 192 and the nearly fifty years of civil war that began with the assassination of Severus Alexander 43 years later. Morgan argues for the reign of Galba as "the last gasp of the republican aristocracy" (a judgment on Ronald Syme?) and doesn't much mourn its passing. And Vespasian? "He became emperor because he was the last man standing, and he was the last man standing because so few took him seriously beforehand." Though not an easy book to follow, this is very good history, and the period it describes is one few people know enough about.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dead Man's Cell Phone; Author: Visit Amazon's Sarah Ruhl Page; Review: In one of Edward Hopper's most famous paintings (Automat, 1927), a woman sits alone, a cup of coffee on the table in front of her. She is alone, as most of the people in Hopper paintings are, even when others share the landscape with them. (See Nighthawks [1942] and Office at Night [1940].) Dead Man's Cell Phone, by the young playwright (she was born in 1974) Sara Ruhl, conveys much the same mood as Hopper's paintings, though presented in a very different medium and a radically different style. It's a play about disconnectedness -a comedy really, because, for all the seriousness of its theme, the play is really funny. (In some ways, Ruhl is close to Arthur Adamov, the now-forgotten offspring of the absurdist era in playwriting.) The play's protagonist, meek, mousy Jean (described by another character as "a paleish woman, sort of nondescript") becomes alive handing on to people she doesn't know imaginary messages from a dead man she's never met (while he was alive, that is). The characters in Cell Phone all talk past each other, out of their own self-fantasies or from a need to connect. Each presents a different picture of Gordon, the dead man, who, it transpires, was truly awful. The effect is pointillistic. Visual images come and go behind the actors, or people swirling around them, umbrellas on high and cell phones up to their ears. Disparate meetings and the soliloquies of various players coalesce to build a mood of separateness and misunderstanding, which is played out through each character's incomprehension of the other characters' motivations and inner fiber. What is surprising, though, is the humor. In even the most savage passages (the "dead man's" monologue in Act II, for instance), how funny the lines are! A love scene in the making is disrupted by a cell phone ringing and Jean's inability not to answer it. Her wooer Dwight admonishes her: "Life is for the living," he says, but the phone rings again and Jean, of course, answers it again. "When something rings, you have to answer it, don't you?" she queries in another scene. My favorite line? It's from the dead man Gordon. "Life is essentially a giant Brillo pad," he says; our goodness is scrubbed off even as we leave the house in the morning to start the day. "I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life," Ruhl has said. "Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him." It's also a terribly comic opera.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Beautiful Malice: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Rebecca James Page; Review: This seems to be Rebecca James's first novel and as such, it's not bad --save for the ending. It's another "Girlfriend from Hell" novel but the character (and past trauma) of the good girl Katherine are well delineated and the descent of the bad girl Alice from selfishness and narcissism to outright mania is generally well drawn. There is an attractive almost-love story involving Alice's love-besotted good guy boyfriend and her new girl friend Katherine. In time, Katherine becomes uneasy, then upset, then angry with Alice. She finds, as the formula of books like this almost mandates, that bad girl Alice isn't easy at all to shed as a friend. The last third of the novel tests the reader's credulity as Alice destroys the tenuous bond between her boyfriend (whom she dumps) and his father, tries to destroy Katherine as well and ends up causing the death of Katherine's newfound love, a rock drummer who is almost too sweet to believe. In the end, a hidden secret of Alice's is revealed: it supposedly explains why she first befriended and then turned against Katherine. I wish the plot twist worked but it doesn't.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Aurorarama; Author: Visit Amazon's Jean-Christophe Valtat Page; Review: Aurorarama is the first in a projected series of fantasy novels set in New Venice, a fictitious luxury city that is "the pearl of the Arctic." The action takes place in just-post-Victorian times: the city is home to the sybaritic super-rich and their servants and ruthlessly controlled by a sinister Council of Seven and their thug police, the Gentlemen of the Night. Outside the city lurk the last native Inuit, who alternately avoid the city and intrude upon it --to mock it? Exploit its inhabitants? or simply because they don't get it that they've been shamelessly exploited and are still being so? Aurorarama is not so much a novel as a phantasmagoria. It is a nightmare vision expressed in over-the-top eloquence that is vaguely reminiscent of the language of the great Gormenghast fantasy novels of Mervin Peake (Titus Groan, etc.). The Edgar-Allan-Poe-vian plotting and language of this book remind me of how I felt when I first read G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Here's an example, but one has to read enough of this book to be caught up in its style and the propulsion of its plotting to appreciate it fully. Still, here's an example: "New Venice ... was the quintessence of what Mankind was about ... the single-mindedness of surviving at all costs, even if it meant eating up the rotting corpses of your friends, and a certain sense of the grandiloquent gesture and gratuitous ornament." The author's exotic, fin-de-siecle prose style uses extensive similes that sometimes work (on the abrupt departure of a sinister magician: "He heard his steps cascading down the stairs, like an avalanche of poisoned apples, and the door slammed shut.") and sometimes don't ("[N]o one was in the mirror when he looked into it again, except a tired Brentwood [one of the two lead characters] with a Burgundy smoking jacket ... just a waxed pencil short of looking like a second-rate actor in a bad crime movie."). By accident, I received this novel minus the final seventy pages. I liked the book any way -it was really more of a series of dream (and nightmare) images than plot-driven narrative. (I don't mean that there is no plot to it. There is, and it's rather convoluted. But plot is secondary to mood and language in this book.) I have since received and read the missing pages and my earlier judgment stands. The novel doesn't so much conclude as simply stop being written. And the bitter-sweet conclusion opens a door to future installments. In New Venice, new rot sets in as soon as old rot has been eliminated. If it sounds like I like this very odd novel, I do, emphatically. It is fun to read, stimulates the imagination and around the edges, it raises serious, dark questions.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Lewis Page; Review: "The thing that most surprised me about fatherhood the first time around was how long it took before I felt about my child what I was expected to feel. Clutching Quinn after she exited the womb, I was able to generate tenderness and a bit of theoretical affection, but after that, for a good six weeks, the best I could manage was detached amusement. The worst was hatred." Now that's funny! -- hyperbolic, overstated perhaps, but really quite funny. Because in ways it is not polite to emphasize, it's right on the mark about how much at sea --and how harrassed at momemtns-- a new father can feel. It just isn't easy being a new father. The role isn't as defined (and it's nowhere as central as the mother's, and babies don't understand how much change they have brought to their parents' lives --they cry, need food, poop, need diapers changed, or need to be burped, or have colic or some unexplainable but absolutely terrifying ailment that goes away just about the time you get them to the doctor's. No parenting manual prepares one for parenthood. The poor father doesn't even have hormonal help to tide him over the hard first months. Three-time new father Michael Lewis wrote this book inbetween his other books, the ones, as he writes, that paid the bills. Disregard the subtitle: this is not a guide for anything. Rather, it's a loose collection of occasional humorous essays written on the fly while distracted from his other writing (the bill-paying writing, mind you) by the demands of parenting. The essays originally appeared in Slate magazine and are collected under the headings, "Quinn", "Dixie" and "Walker," the names of his three children. Lewis's more outrageous comments may enrage the literal-minded reader, especially if she is a mother, but they're not false observations, just hyperbolically expressed. Nor do they all deal with the newest born: Quinn and then Dixie have an interesting take on how to drive their parents nuts after the newborn arrives. Thus, Dixie (the middle child), anticipating Walker's birth: "Hardly a day has passed in months without melodramatic suffering. One afternoon I collected Dixie from her preschool ... and learned that she'd moped around the playground until a teacher finally asked her what was troubling her. 'When the baby comes, my parents won't love me as much,' she'd said. Asked where she'd gotten that idea from, she said, 'My big sister told me.'" Writes Lewis comment: "I've sometimes felt that we're using the wrong manual to fix an appliance--that say, we're trying to repair a washing machine with the instructions for the lawnmower.... A family is like a stereo system: A stereo system is only as good as its weakest component, and a family is onlys happy as its unhappiest member. Occasionally that is me; more often it is someone else; and so I must remain vigilant, lest the pleasure of my own life be dampened by their unhappiness." This is a funny, not very deep book that will strike a chord in many fathers breasts, though; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality; Author: Visit Amazon's Jonathan Weiner Page; Review: It is no surprise that a book by Jonathan Weiner should be elegantly written and filled with interesting information. Weiner knows his science and he writes like a dream. If I were to place him on a spectrum of successful popular science writing, I'd locate him near Lewis Thomas and Loren Eiseley,. All three are writers with a solid background in the topics they write about but a touch of poetry in the way they express them. (At the other pole would be Matt Ridley, my favorite science writer. He comes across as more analytic than poetic. Or perhaps Helena Cronin, in The Ant and the Peacock.) Having indicated that I admire Mr. Weiner's way of expressing himself in general, I must admit that I didn't enjoy Long for This World anywhere near as much as I did his Pulitzer Prize-winning Darwin's Finches. WorlIt was a book I found interesting in parts but not more than mildly interesting overall. Mr. Wiener always seemed to be moving on to the next topic just when I wanted to learn more about the current one. Still, the subject of the book --man's potential to prolong life, and the current research and controversies in the field-- is an interesting one. And at 74, the topic has some personal appeal to me. I would give the book a high 3-1/2*, which I have rounded up to 4*.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Place of Greater Safety; Author: Visit Amazon's Hilary Mantel Page; Review: This novel is about the making of a monster. Of course, it's about more than that. The book is too rich and full and alive to limit itself to the evolution of one character to the exclusion of the rich world outside but the central thread of this exceptional book is the slow drift of one man's idealism toward the acceptance of tyranny. (At one point, in a heated argument, Danton says to Robespierre, "It's you idealists who make the best tyrants.") There are literally hundreds of characters in this book, but at the heart of it lie the three conspirators, sometime friends and sometimes allies Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre. All three giants. Without Danton, the French Revolution would have died as it began. Desmoulins was its greatest pamphleteer. Robespierre ruled over the Committee of Public Safety, which ordered and stage managed the murder of all enemies the Committee imagined. Danton -gross body, scarred face, nonetheless attractive to women, a charismatic speaker--he was a friend of Desmoulins. Sometime antagonist, sometime collaborator, his relationship with Robespierre was more complex. Desmoulins -erratic, sexually ambivalent- had a genius for making the right friends: his friendship with Robespierre protected him until near the end, when Robespierre, with much hand wringing, abandoned him to public justice and the guillotine. At the beginning, physical violence so disturbs Robespierre that it makes him physically ill. He's ascetic, pinched -Danton makes fun of him as a little monk--he forsakes all private life and pleasure the better to serve the republic. But the republic is a mother who eats her children. By the end, Robespierre coldbloodedly betrays Danton and abandons Desmoulins, signs their arrest warrants and consigning them to the tender mercies of the courts. In the interest of the state, emotions like compassion and friendship must be sacrificed. Justice and truth are unimportant in the face of public security. Soon it's chop, chop, bye bye, no more Danton, no more Desmoulins. It is impossible to say too much positive about this book. It is that good. It is truly exceptional, filled with lightning characterizations of a succession of fascinating characters. Here's Desmoulins: Once paper and ink were to hand, it was useless to appeal to his better nature, to tell him he was wrecking reputations and ruining people's lives. A kind of sweet venom flowed through his veins, smoother than the finest cognac, quicker to make the head spin. And, just as some people crave opium, he craves the opportunity to exercise his fine art of mockery, vituperation and abuse; laudanum might quieten the senses, but a good editorial puts a catch in the throat and a skip in the heartbeat. Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to. And Danton on Robespierre: "He feels something, in his heart, and then he sits down and works out the logic of it, in his head. Then he says the head part came first; and we believe him." Camille's wife, Lucille: "Her emotions now seemed to lie just beneath the surface, scratching at her delicate skin to; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Last Talk with Lola Faye; Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas H. Cook Page; Review: Lucas Page is middle-aged historian who has resigned himself to disappointment --in his writing and teaching but equally in his life. He comes to St. Louis, to the Museum of the West, to lecture on his latest book, Fatal Choices: it's about military decisions with fatal consequences. After the lecture, a dowdy, somewhat rundown fortyish-fiftyish woman approaches him. Her name is Lola Faye Gilroy. Two decades earlier, she had been the "other woman," whose lumpish estranged husband had killed Lucas's father in a jealous rage and then killed himself. Lola Faye wants to talk with him. Reluctantly, Lucas agrees. They go to a hotel cocktail lounge and order pinot noir, a drink with which poor Lola has clearly had no experience. "Are you proud of what you did?" she asks. Gone to Harvard, written books, taught college. Most of all, Lucas had succeeded in leaving Glenville, a sleepy, stuck-in-a-rut town in rural Alabama. But as they talk, it feels as though no one really got away from Glenville, not even Luke. Luke has simply shut down his feelings. The memory of his final months in Glenville has seared his soul: he can no longer open himself to that experience or any other. That's why his scholarship is mediocre. He'd dreamed of writing history that would make the past come alive: the feeling of rifle fire crackling over one's head in the midst of fierce battle, the sore back and limbs of the sharecropper toiling wearily under the hot sun, the constant scrimping and discomfort endured by the first settlers trying to survive in an unforgiving environment. Lucas has become, as he muses, "a strangely shriveled thing." He can no longer stand to feel. Because feeling opens memories. Memory, of course, is what all of Thomas H. Cook's mature novels are about. Tainted memory. His novels involve the solving of puzzles, so I suppose formally they're mystery stories. But the core of any of Cook's evocative novels is memory. They are tales of memory: memory unraveling and being reknit, leading to the reconstituting of some poor soul's consciousness. Cook's mastery of narrative line is amazing. The "plot" in Conversation, such as it is, unfolds in fits and starts; it leaps across time and space, back and forth from the fatal past to the contaminated present. Throughout, Cook dangles questions in front of the reader's eyes to keep the reader's attention across 275 pages of a novel that has relatively little action -or rather, that incessantly recycles the same material, adding new complexities to it but not introducing much other in the way of plot elements. The facts accrete new meaning as they're examined over and over again. Cook's forte is description. He is a master of the telling phrase that captures the deeper meaning of the object or person observed. Early in the book, Lucas watches Lola Faye. He wonders whether she is more than she appears to be: "In some people, these qualities emerge only at intimate moments when, in the soft quiet of a darkened room, one suddenly betrays a depth; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Inside Out: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Barry Eisler Page; Review: Inside Out is a sequel to Fault Line, which also featured black ops soldier Ben Treven. In this installment, Treven's assignment is to find and neutralize (but not kill) a rogue operative who has stolen ninety-two videotapes of the highly illegal torture of suspected terrorists and is blackmailing the U.S. government with the threat of posting them on line. En route, Treven deals with not only the rogue agent, a virtual killing machine (when mercenaries set a trap to capture him, the rogue kills twelve of them and escapes), but also a CIA hit team, White House interference and a sexy but abrasive FBI agent. The action in this thriller is fast and heavy, the tone appropriately cynical. (Horton's control tells him: "Some people play the piano, some people race cars. You destroy enemies. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with it. The country needs men like you....") All in all, this is a satisfying addition to Eisler's corpus of spy thrillers. For those who've read Eisler's earlier novels about CIA operative turned freelance John Rain, there is a hint at the ending of this novel that Rain and Treven will soon meet, whether as adversaries or allies. Eisler knows what he writes about. He spent three years in covert operations with the CIA and currently maintains a blog on civil liberties, torture and the rule of law. He doesn't writer about good guys. He writes about some fairly good guys who are striving not to get dirtier than they already are.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Cryptogram; Author: Visit Amazon's David Mamet Page; Review: The Cryptogram is outstanding. There are only three characters (that's good for Readers' Theater): a mother, a young boy who is waiting for his father to return and take him on a camping trip, and the mother's and father's gay friend who lives in a motel nearby. The father isn't going to return. For the past week, he's been banging someone in the friend's motel room while the friend hung out elsewhere. When the mother finds out that the friend has deceived her, she flips, but the news about her husband isn't really that surprising. At the center of the play is the boy and his reaction to his world crumbling around him. With oblique nudges, Mamet lays bare the young child's feelings --inchoate fears and anxieties-- as he waits for a father who will never return. It's prime Mamet --clipped dialogue, emotions hinted as often as laid out on the table. The play would be fun to do: there's not much action. But where would you get a kid who could make so intense but oblique a role believable? It's a difficult role.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Investigation; Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Weiss Page; Review: I've wanted to direct Peter Weiss's The Investigation since I first read it in translation in the mid-sixties. Weiss is better known for his brilliant Marat/Sade, a reinterpretation of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday as staged by the marquis de Sade with the inmates of the mental asylum at Charenton. It's an awesome play. But The Investigation in its own way is as revolutionary as Marat/Sade. More germane to my concerns, it's fairly easily adaptable to Readers' Theater. The play is presented as a series of eleven "Songs." (They aren't sung songs, but rather prose -talked--songs. It's Brecht-Talk to call them "Songs".) Each song/scene details some aspect of the atrocities committed upon the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Most, perhaps all, of the text of the play is taken verbatim from the transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials (November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946), which tried German war criminals. If the parts in the play were not double-cast, it would require twenty-eight actors (two of them women). The play is also too long: it would have to be shortened. The dialogue is chilling, made even the more so by being presented in so low a key. There's almost no action: witnesses ascend and leave the witness stand, the prosecuting attorney and the defense counsel wrangle before the judge. Some functionaries who collaborated in maintaining the camp system are called as witnesses. All of them deny knowledge of what took place, even of what they could read in account books or see from the windows of their workrooms. The accused are monsters, whether on the stand testifying or simply acting the boor in their seats. The bulk of the witnesses are the former prisoners: a woman forced to work as secretary for a Nazi boss who likes to beat prisoners to death, a political partisan subjected to torture and himself beaten near to death, mothers separated from husbands and children, never to hear of them again. It's great theater. I'm considering it for a local Readers' Theater and I think it would work: the characters can be doubled to keep the cast size in bounds, there's no set to worry about and there's enough overlap to permit cutting. That's essential, because the play is quite long at 313 pages in print but the message cannot be weakened. I have two concerns. The first is the emotional charge the testimony delivers. It's far from cocktail theater. People may experience feelings they'd rather not feel on an afternoon or evening entertainment junket. The second is whether the play is dated now: will its moral urgency seem out of date when expended on an injustice now sixty-five years past; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Cookbook Collector: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Allegra Goodman Page; Review: Reading that an author is "a modern day Jane Austen" can be off putting today. In recent years, there have been too many adaptations and extensions of Miss Austen's classic tale of love and manners. Poor Mr. Darcy! His career post-P&P has been the subject of eight volumes by Sharon Lathan (in one of them, Mr. Darcy is introduced to the Kama Sutra), three each by Marsha Altman, Ola Wegner, Pamela Aidan and Helen Halstead, two each by Linda Bertoll and Lory Lilian, and one by Laura Sanchez. Kara Louise has six, in one of which "the story of Pride and Prejudice [is] seen through the eyes of Darcy's dog, Reggie." Amanda Grange has at least seven retellings of various books from the Austen corpus including Mr. Darcy, Vampire. There are at least three other vampire P&Ps, and two zombie books. But, then, the publishing world now encompasses an Android Karenina, Little Women and Werewolves, and Jane Slayre (in which "the Reed family [are] vampires, Jane Eyre's classmates at Lowood ... zombies, and [Mrs.] Rochester ... something far more dangerous than a madwoman"). Which is to say that I started Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector with a jaundiced eye, just because she had been described that way. I love Jane Austen but I feared that translated into Goodman's prose and today's world, whatever I read would cloy me to death. I didn't stay jaundiced for long. Because Goodman's comedy of manners in the dot-com, post-9/11 world is the real thing. It's funny and moving. Once I got into it, I didn't want to stop and when I was done with it, I felt sad because I wouldn't be involved with these wonderful characters any more. More than anything, it's about how we negotiate our way through the complicated muddle of life today. There is any number of wonderful people in this book and even the ones I don't like -Emily's boyfriend/fiancé Jonathan for instance (basically a shark with feet on him)--are so well delineated that I wanted to know what would happen with him. There are comic tones to many of the characterizations, but none of the characters in this exceptional novel is false -over-drawn or stereotyped. They all could actually exist. It's just that some of them are funny -they're funny the way humans sometimes are. Although they love each other, and spending time together is one of their greatest solaces, the two sisters at the center of the story are polar opposites in many ways. Emily is hyper-organized, super-successful. At 28, she is CEO of a dot.com startup that is just about to go public. If it works, Emily stands to become an instant (mega)millionaire. Her younger sister, though, just seems to drift. She's working on a doctorate in philosophy, but not the analytic kind; rather, the soft squishy kind -she prefers Plato and Hume to Wittgenstein and Heidegger. She's a vegan and an environmental activist and she usually looks like she bought her clothes from the Salvation Army. Emily has an almost-fiancé, but they almost never see each other; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Familiars; Author: Visit Amazon's Adam Jay Epstein Page; Review: The Familiars reads like it was put together with a cookie cutter -take one piece from this story, another from a second tale, etc., etc., until you have a booklength adventure. It is second hand and stale, not fresh like children's stories should be. The book tells the story of three animals who are familiars to wizards in training. Aldwyn is a kitten, Gilbert a tree frog, and Skylar a blue jay. When their young masters are kidnapped by an evil queen, they travel to free them. On the way, they confront menace after menace and in the process, bond as a threesome. It's familiar stuff -the Fellowship of the Rings, Luke Skywalker, C3PO and R2D2, the band of children crusading in Narnia. But it's flaccid. Aldwyn has the fullest fleshed personality (which is no surprise since the story is told from his vantage point). The know-it-all blue jay Skylar is a caricature and Gilbert little more than comic relief, though he redeems himself in the climactic battle. Aldwyn has a secret: familiars have their own special magical powers but Aldwyn doesn't have any so he must fake it. When the final battle comes, though, it turns out -no surprise--that plucky little Adlwyn has his own power: he's a teleport. With the aid of his newfound powers, he saves his master from death. There's nothing terribly wrong with The Familiars. It just isn't very good. Its elements have all been used before, in stories whose plots are more compelling, whose characterization is deeper and truer, and in prose that is both more forceful and much more graceful. (The Familiars has been optioned for film by Sam Raimy and Sony Animation.); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Thirteen Hours; Author: Visit Amazon's Deon Meyer Page; Review: This is the first crime novel I've read by South African author Deon Meyer but it won't be the last. Thirteen Hours is one of those rare thrillers that, started, you don't want to put down until finished. And once done, you wish you could start it anew. The setting (Cape Town, South Africa), plot (it's a police procedural, not a one-man quest) and characters are different than in Lee Childs's action-filled Jack Reacher novels --for one thing, Meyer's hero isn't invincible and Jack Reacher almost is-- but the rush you feel reading is the same. The action of this novel takes place across thirteen hours as a multi-ethnic team of South African police push to solve two very high profile cases. The worst involves a dead American girl, a second one who is missing, on the run from a pack of ruthless killers. The lead detective in this case is a recovering alcoholic, Benny Griessel. Benny is far from the first ex-drunk to feature in a detective novel but he's one of the most convincing: his alcoholism doesn't seem a gimmick, it's part of him. Besides, Benny's a super detective. He's bright and tenacious but in present-day South Africa, with all its racial tensions, he's been sidelined because he's white. Instead of heading cases, he's `mentor' to six colored (means non-black) and black detectives. An excellence of this fine novel is the nuanced picture Meyer provides of cross-race relations in the `new' South Africa. Benny is Afrikaans,; Vusi, the detective he is mentoring, is Xhosa; another detective, Fransman Decker, is `colored' and resents both whites and blacks; and neither Vusi nor Fransman is sure they can work with a woman inspector who is Zulu. (She can also be a pain in the ass but that's irrelevant to their prejudices.) Fransman feels he's discriminated against by both white and black: coloreds represent eight percent of the population and --this is Fransman's view--they are thus ignored in the government's attempts to address racial discrimination. In the process of telling his story, Meyer presents a number of telling pictures of his all to human detectives. The most appealing is of an overweight woman inspector with an affection for KFC chicken. Her station commander describes her (accurately) as "outspoken, principle-driven, stubborn." I hope she appears in subsequent Meyer thrillers because she's too good to throw away on only one book. The premiere virtue of this policier is pacing. From the first page, the reader is gripped by the action. A girl is running. Who's chasing her and why? By page three you know a little more but not enough to answer your questions: she asks a passerby to call the police. "They're going to kill me," she tells her, and runs on, trying to escape her unknown assailants. From that point on, there's never a let up. Son Meyer introduces a second puzzle -- a music industry impresario is found dead in the bedroom with his alcoholic and comatose wife. Benny and his team of mentorees pursue both cases in alternation for three hundred nail-biting; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Skippy Dies: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Paul Murray Page; Review: About a hundred pages into Skippy Dies, I put it down for the evening and, as I walked away from it, realized I missed it already. I'd grown fond of the book. Surely that's an odd emotion to feel for a comic novel, especially a good one as this one is. Comic novels may be funny, but above all, the best ones (Gulliver's Travels, for instance, or Ulysses) are savage: they take no hostages as they narrate the lives and antics of the characters contained inside them. And that's definitely true of Skippy. As a novel goes, it's decidedly unromantic in its take on the over-the-top denizens of a rundown and undistinguished Catholic boys' school in Dublin. But -an odd emotion to feel-- I realized that after a while, I cared about them, not so much what happened to them as that I wanted to know more about them and see what happened to them next. Eccentric these characters might be. But they are human. In a less exaggerated and farcical way, all of us at some time in our lives have been where they are now. Which suggests to me how very good a writer Murray is: he has made us want to inhabit a world made up largely of nave, immature (they give new meaning to the word "immature"!) smelly and sex-crazy fourteen-year-old boys, their female counterparts at the girls' school next door, and the befuddled but in theory more grown up characters who have inherited the daunting task of teaching them anything at all, for, at fourteen, they are virtually unteachable of anything academic. Skippy Dies isn't short of plot. Something is always happening in it. The book is filled with incident and fireworks. And character. Because ultimately this book is about people. Somehow Murray has made us inhabit again that ghastly world of adolescence when boys first begin to notice girls and though they might still be antagonists, somehow want to know them better and impress them. If this book weren't so warm-hearted, it would be terrifying for Murray has no illusions about being young. Terrible things happen in this book and there is no clean and clear redemption for some of his characters. But though his boys and girls are not sweet characters, there is, behind their missteps and gaucheries, an innocence that redeems them and makes the reader want to love them. And love this marvelous book too.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Here; Author: Visit Amazon's Wislawa Szymborska Page; Review: When this slim volume arrived in the noon mail, I put down what I was doing and read it right away. That's how much I enjoy Szymborska's exceptional, soaring yet concrete poetry. It didn't hurt that the translators are Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak: I have admired their work before. These poems seem so colloquial in tone and subject! Is that because of Szymborska, who writes in Polish, a language I don't know, or the translators? I suspect both: Szymbroska writes of a heightened everyday experience (this, plus the beauty and aptness of her choice of images) is what makes her poems immediately accessible. And to be a good translator of poetry is to be a poet in one's own right. These are short poems --the longest runs two and a half pages, most under two pages and a number of them are half a page to a page long. The original, in Polish, is presented on the left hand side, the English translation on the right. Here is a series of poems about all sorts of things --on divorce, on memory, on looking back at oneself as a teenager. There are (short) paeans to Ella Fitzgerald and to Vermeer's astounding painting, Milkmaid. The longest poem is a mock interview with Mme. Atropos, the goddess who cuts the strings of our lifelines and introduces us to Death. The lead poem, 'Here,' catalogs the mundane objects and extraordinary feelings we experience in this material world: "... chairs and sorrows,/scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins,/teacups, dams, and quips...' 'Ignorance works overtime here,' she writes, 'something is always being counted, compared, measured,/from which roots and conclusions are then drawn.' She ends the poem: Life on Earth is quite a bargain. Dreams, for one, don't charge admission. Illusions are costly only when lost. The body has its own installment plan. And as an extra, added feature, you spin on the planets' carousel for free, and with it you hitch a ride on the intergalactic blizzard, with times so dizzying that nothing here on Earth can even tremble. Just take a closer look: the table stands exactly where it stood, the piece of paper still lies where it was spread, through the open window comes a breath of air, the walls reveal no terrifying cracks through which nowhere might extinguish you. Not all of the poems in this collection work. I could have done without "Ella in Heaven" and "Vermeer" --not that they're bad but they feel shallow, as though pretending to more meaning than they actually show. But immediately after these two short poems, there is another, equally short one, entitled "Metaphysics," and she has won me over again. It's been and gone. It's been, so it's gone. In the same irreversible order, for such is the rule of this foregone game. A trite conclusion, not worth writing if it weren't for an unmentionable fact, a fact for ever and ever, for the whole cosmos, as it was was and will be, that something really was until it was gone, even the fact that today you had a; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bad Boy (Inspector Banks Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Robinson Page; Review: This is Peter Robinson's nineteenth crime novel and his twentieth book. Most feature Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, of the Eastvale police department. The Inspector Banks novels are all satisfying and the best of them are quite good. Bad Boy is one of the quite good ones. It starts with Banks away from work. A woman comes to the police station to ask his help in recovering a loaded pistol from her daughter's room. In Banks's absence, former lover and still colleague and ally Annie Cabbot steps in. Things go seriously wrong in the police attempt to recover the gun. An innocent man dies and the police department is under public scrutiny. More seriously, Banks's daughter Tracy becomes involved. A friend of the girl with the gun, she heads off to warn the girl's boyfriend that the police are looking for where the girl got the gun. Tracy's going through a bad time. She got an unsatisfactory Second at the university, is working a nothing job and feels abandoned by her parents, especially good old Dad. She's mucked up her hair, she's got a stud above one eyebrow and another on her lip, and her present mood, her friend's dangerous boyfriend looks appealing. But then things go seriously bad. By the time Banks returns from his vacation, Annie is in the hospital with two gun wounds. Her doctor can't say whether she will survive. Tracy is missing, held hostage by a very, very bad boy named Jaff, who is on the run from not only the police but the homicidal minions of his former boss. It's up to Banks to resolve things and he does in an unpredictable but believable finale. The chase is seen from both sides -Tracy's as Jaff's hostage and Banks as their pursuer- and it keeps your attention every page of the way. I've felt lately that some of Robinson's most recent thrillers lagged a bit but this one is a winner from the first page on. As always, Banks is an appealing hero -a bit of a renegade in the ordered world of a big city police department but he gets results.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Yu Page; Review: HTLSIASFU (the acronym is easier to write than the title) is sui generis, even among science fiction novels. Buried in the midst of the techno-passages and weird made up almost believable terminology is a story. It's about a family lost and remembered, and about accepting life rather than hiding from it to avoid the pains of growing up. Charles Yu lives inside a TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device. TM-31 is a hardly larger than a shower stall but travels back and forth across time. Charles "fix[es] time machines for a living," rescuing distressed time travelers. He shares this device with TAMMY, who, though subject to grand mood swings, is a program, his operating system, not a person at all. TAMMY cries a lot but when her pixel-ated image smiles, it turns Charles on. "I have a thing for my operating system," he confesses. His other companion is a semi-real dog named Ed, who has semi-real fleas and as a consequence bites his own semi-real crotch a lot. Charles also thinks a lot about the Woman [He's] Never Married, whom he's never met, of course, because if he had, maybe they would have married, or at least thought of doing it. Her name -or is it not-name?-- is Marie. Charles's father disappeared years ago. He invented a time machine but when he had his chance to demonstrate it to a Big Gun, it wouldn't work and so he never got credit for the discovery. Charles has parked his mother, who is growing old, in the chronodiegetic (Charles's term) equivalent of a nursing home: she lives inside a one-hour time loop, fixing dinner for her teenage son and inventor husband, over and over and over, for almost forever Charles lives in Minor Universe 31, a universe that was only ninety-some percent finished when they halted construction on it so weird things occasionally happen there. Disappointed with his life, Charles searches through time for his missing father. In the process he finds out some surprising truths about himself. Charles Yu(the author, not the character)'s use of language is virtuosic. I like the passages where he talks about human emotions but uses the techno-talk of time travel. Here's an example, a passage about the dynamics of Charles(the character not the author)'s family: how they (didn`t [or couldn't]) relate to each other: I remember feeling small, unprepared, like I had to help him, feeling like how in the world could I possibly help him. I was angry at him for asking, sorry for him for having to, angry at myself for not being more prepared, for not being the gifted kid he once thought I was, for not being who he had hoped I would be. The house became charged, a field of static potential energy, a kind of vectorless disappointment, a field of invisible isovoltaics, lines with arrowheads pointing in minute directional indicators, a bogglingly complex arrangement of single-point losses, the fine-toothed, fine-pixeled array, the heat map of a thermodynamic system whose ending was already foretold in the current steady state. A passage like this --"a; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester; Author: Visit Amazon's Barbara O'Connor Page; Review: What's not to like in this delightful story written for nine to twelve-year-olds? Owen lives with his parents in his grandfather's house in Carter, Georgia. His dad just lost his job at the hardware store so they moved in with grandpa. There's a cranky live-in nurse, Earlene, who tends to his grandfather, who's had a stroke. Owen has two good friends, Travis and Stumpy. They're typical pre-teen boys, which is to say, loose cannons rocketing around looking for trouble, and all three of them simply hate, loathe, despise, absolutely can't stand Viola, who lives next door to Owen now. Viola's legs are fat, she wears glasses with Coke bottle lenses, but worst of all, she's a snoop and a know-it-all. She keeps poking her nose into the boys' business. No insult seems to discourage her. Let me mention one last person: Owen has a bullfrog -but it's not just any bullfrog. Tooley (that's the bullfrog's name) is the biggest, most beautiful bullfrog in all of Carter, GA, and Owen captured him after days of effort. But Tooley doesn't seem to like being captured. His big globular eyes have lost their gleam, he doesn't hop around as much or as often as he used to. Nowadays, he just generally mopes. Then, late one night, Owen hears a strange noise. It came from the woods behind his grandfather's house, down by the railroad tracks. Owen is convinced that something really big has fallen off of a train, and he's going to find it. Aided by Travis and Stumpy, of course, but Viola keeps butting in. What should he do? He finds the object and then he has even more choices to make because it really is as exciting as he had imagined it would be. In the end, Owen makes two noble choices, one of them brave (favoring Viola over his two boy friends) and everything works out alright. But on the way, there are enough bumps and hitches to make an exciting kind-of-adventure story with an engaging hero. Ordinary things become wonderful when viewed through the prism of a young child.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion; Author: Visit Amazon's Seth Stern Page; Review: Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel. Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Oct. 4, 2010. 653 + xiv p, 16 p bxw photos, notes, index. Even conservatives who hated him admit that Justice William J. Brennan Jr. was an exceptionally effective Supreme Court Justice and that the decisions which he shepherded through to a majority vote on the Court still affect how justice is administered in the United States and the protections afforded to us under the civil liberties clauses in the Bill of Rights. In a thirty-four-year tenure on the Court (1956-90), he succeeded in broadening existing rights and creating new ones (especially under the "right to privacy", which he helped craft behind the scenes) for women, including access to abortion, minorities, homosexuals, the poor and the press. In the process, he became not only the most effective liberal justice to serve on the Supreme Court but also the most hated by his opponents. Indeed, the backlash we see now with the Court's "strict constructionists" can be seen in large part as a reaction to the image of an activist court championed by Brennan and his beloved Chief, Chief Justice Earl Warren. This book was delayed so long in appearing -Brennan had granted Wermiel access to his papers but Wermeil put the unfinished notes aside in the late nineties--that other revelations -by Harry Blackmun, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, etc.--have partly superceded it. Nonetheless, this is the most deliberative and the fairest book yet to appear on Brennan and his achievement as a justice. It is especially valuable for the way it shows how Brennan built coalitions on the Court. It was seldom easy to gain the necessary five votes for the same ruling: justices had their own axes to grind and their own perspectives to put forth in concurring or dissenting opinions. The picture Stern and Wermiel paint of Brennan's private behavior and views is intriguing. Brennan, the Court's champion of press rights, loathed reporters and fled from the press. Brennan was deeply uneasy even thinking about pornographic literature but he led the campaign to liberalize laws concerning pornography. Although off and on again in his devotion to the Catholic Church and personally opposed to the very idea of abortion, he defended women's rights to make their own determinations about their bodies. Though a champion of women's rights on the Court, he once announced he would probably retire if a woman justice were appointed to the Court (he changed his mind late in his tenure on the Court, by which time two women justices -Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg- had been appointed to the bench to sit beside him. And he was late and dilatory in appointing women clerks in his own office, in part, it seems, because he didn't know how he could talk to them. Still, Brennan comes across as a decent man who possessed the uncommon grace to admit his own mistakes and prejudices and even apologize for them. His genuine charm and niceness won over even most of his adversaries on the Court. The one exception; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: To the End of the Land; Author: Visit Amazon's David Grossman Page; Review: I've never written this kind of review because I almost always finish a book I start, especially one I am to review. But even though I think the novel is well written and, once the first section is over, evocative, I couldn't continue with it. My objection to the opening section is symptomatic of my problem with the book as a whole, or rather the two hundred fifty some pages I made it through before I quit for good. The first section of the book sets up what follows, introducing us to the principal characters and the woman's affair with one soldier. (Not the one she marries.) The section is at once too oblique and too detailed. The qualities sound contradictory but they aren't: rather than specify the context and background, Grossman leads off with a distressingly vague conversation among the three in actors in the section --woman, her future husband and her lover -and then, almost dream like, it details the affair of the woman and lover. What happens in the moment is detailed but background has to be picked up on the fly because it's referred to only obliquely. When the book moves to the main portion of the narrative, description of background is more explicit but things are detailed at too much length! It was increasingly painful to read it. I found I was making excuses not to go back to it. I don't object to long novels nor description, but I felt like I was reading a Russian novel --a la Dostoevsky but without the fallen sinners-- and I guess I'm more of a Stendhal or Thackeray (or Joyce) guy. Passage by passage, I found the book admirable. Grossman writes exceedingly well and has a heart. And the place and time he writes about --Israel today and under siege-- is obviously important to our turbulent contemporary world. I especially admired the passages that related the troubled relationship between the Israeli mother and her Arab-Palestinian cab driver. But the bottom line is that I couldn't bring myself to read more in this book, no matter how well written it was passage to passage or in the grandeur of its message.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War; Author: Visit Amazon's Caroline Alexander Page; Review: Alexander, who has written well received popular histories of Shackleton's antarctic expedition (The Endurance) and the ill-fated mutiny on Capt. Bligh's ship (The Bounty), earned her doctorate in the classics, writing on the Iliad, at Columbia University. In this book, which lies closer to popular history than to the strictly academic product, she retells the story of the Iliad while pointing to its salient features, many of which are not at first apparent to a lay reader like me. This means a great deal of telling of the story, with copious quotation followed by commentary on the passages cited. It all points to a mildly, though not exceptionally, different interpretation of the poem's message and biases than I have seen presented before. With the exception of Alexander's translation of Book XIX (the death of Hektor), passages are all from Lattimore's translation. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I don't know, but its one of the major modern translations of the poem, and to quibble with her choice of it seems petty. Alexander's thesis is that the Iliad is sui generis in its approach to war. Homer humanizes the victims more than is common in other epics, making their death in battle less acceptable than it if only fame and glory were the warriors' preoccupations or the poet's focus of attention. Achilles, no less than Hektor, just wants to go home. He disdains the Achaians' own leader, the Mycenaean king Agamemnon, who has shown little capacity for military leadership before the walls of Troy. By taking from Achilles his bounty, the beautiful slave woman Briseis, the king has fatally insulted him so Achilles retires from battle, leaving the Achaians to their own measures to fight off the reinvigorated Trojans Alexander argues that Achilles' response to Agamemnon has echoes in the reactions of modern day warriors to their own war experience: wars carried on for no or flimsy reason, incompetent and self-serving leaders, appalling loss. So far, so good. When she tries to build a case for Achilles' qualities as a military leader, though, she is on much shakier ground. Achilles is too much of a wild animal to make a good leader, no mater how charismatic he can be or how respected he is as a warrior. No sane subordinate would follow him for long, given his tendency to fall into rage or sulk. He just doesn't behave the way a good leader does. Alexander relies heavily on the work of her illustrious predecessors. This isn't a failing: an intelligent writer should do that, indeed often has to do it. I wasn't put off by the copious citation in the body of the text. It didn't bother me to move slowly through the poem, stopping time and again to examine points. Over all, the book helped me understand the Iliad. I thought what she wrote was lively, sensible and insightful.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Anterooms: New Poems and Translations; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Wilbur Page; Review: A new book of poetry by Richard Wilbur is an occasion for celebration. A former poet laureate of the United States, he has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, and is as acclaimed for his elegant and subtle translations of classic French drama (eight Moliere plays, two Racine and two Corneille) and other people's poetry as for his own evocative poems. I have no problems with free, blank or concrete verse, but it is a pleasure to read Wilbur's tightly rhyming verse ("You who in crazy-lensed /Clear water fled your shape, /By choppy shallows flensed /And shaken like a cape, /..."). Recently I used a poem by Wilbur entitled "Mind" as the epigraph for a memory piece I was writing: Mind in its purest play is like some bat That beats about in caverns all alone, Contriving by a kind of senseless wit Not to conclude against a wall of stone. It has no need to falter or explore; Darkly it knows what obstacles are there, And so it may weave and flitter, dip and soar In perfect courses through the blackest air. And has this simile a like perfection? The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save That in the very happiest intellection A graceful error may correct the cave. Simile! That's what Wilbur does so well, blending rhyming prose with eloquent yet simple metaphor to illuminate experience! I'm sure there's another poem of his that I included in a handtyped booklet of poems I gave my wife on her birthday one year. It was about a spider spinning a web. The comparison was between the spider's web, which though seemingly fragile was strong and connecting, and love. I can't find the poem so I can't swear it was by him but it's the type of poem he can write though, and often does. Anterooms contains twenty-two poems long. None is longer than two pages in length. There are a number of translations -an unpublished poem of Verlaine and a poem by Mallarme' ("The Tomb of Edgar Poe"), one by Horace and thirty-seven short rhyming riddles from Symphosius (of whom I'd never heard before). Here's one of his own poems, which combines observation of the things of Nature with a modest but true reflection on the human condition. A Measuring Worm This yellow-striped green Caterpillar, climbing up The steep window screen, Constantly (for lack Of a full set of legs) keeps Humping up his back. It's as if he sent By a sort of semaphore Dark omegas meant To warn of Last Things. Although he doesn't know it, He will soon have wings, And I too don't know Toward what undreamt condition Inch by inch I go. Eloquent and beautiful!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ill Fares the Land; Author: Visit Amazon's Tony Judt Page; Review: The death of Tony Judt, founder and director of NYU's Remarque Institute, on August 6 at the age of sixty-two, was a grievous loss. To start with, he was an exceptional historian. No history of postwar Europe approaches the power, breadth and insight of his Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2006). But what made Judt unique in our fragmented age was an expansive vision of civic obligation: he never stopped asking what was needed to sustain a liberal and equitable democracy. Judt was, in the best sense of the word, a public intellectual, something we sorely need in our present day age of intellectual midgets and moral cowards. Judt was never afraid of controversy when he thought he was telling the truth. Invited to speak before the organization Network 20/20 in 2006, Judt had his invitation canceled at the last minute. The Polish consulate had withdrawn its offer of a venue in response to calls from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, who claimed Mr. Judt was anti-Jewish. (Judt wasn't, but that's another discussion. What Judt was guilty of, and he admitted it, was publicly criticizing the influence the Israel lobby in the U.S. has wielded in discussions of the Palestine question.) Ill Fares the Land appeared in March, less than five months before his death. We won't be receiving more books from Judt. But if you have to go, this wasn't a bad way to end it. Ill Fares is a fitting tribute to the man, displaying his mastery of historical sources, keen analytical insights and ingrained sense of decency. His argument, in brief, is that our society is fragmenting and our citizens losing a sense of common purpose and this is dangerous for all of us, even the self-satisfied and affluent. Societies need centripetal forces to balance the centrifugal forces of unfettered individualism and the market economy. (Does this sound like Tocqueville? That's because it is like Tocqueville. Societies need the glue of common purpose to held them together.) There is a reason today for states to exist. Particularly in this age of economic globalization. Today only the state can resist the pressures of super-wealthy and influential international corporations and agencies, and thus we need the state even more than before. Though his argument is long and complex, Judt manages to make it clear enough and pointed enough to catch the reader's attention. I was especially struck by the graphs in the first chapter ("The Way We Live Now"), where Judt details the rapidly increasing gap between the wealthy and the less affluent in western societies. Correlating income inequality with a number of variables, he shows clearly that greater inequality in income doesn't produce affluence or happiness (or equality or opportunity or justice); rather, it introduces inequities all across the board. On chart after chart, America scores low or lowest among western nations: the greatest income inequality and the least social mobility (a dramatic change that has occurred only in the past forty years), the greatest income inequality among western nations (and Japan) and the highest; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto; Author: Visit Amazon's Joan Reardon Page; Review: A great and lasting friendship was born on March 8, 1952, when a young American housewife living in Paris, Julia Child, wrote a short letter to historian Bernard DeVoto, complimenting him on an occasional piece he had written in Harper's lamenting the absence of good carving knives in the States, where knives seemed all to be made of stainless steel, which would not hold an edge. Mrs. Child included a French knife in her letter -forged carbon steel. Mr. DeVoto was swamped with work at the time so his wife, Avis, wrote back. Avis and Julia are one of the great pairs of friends in modern times. They were both sharp as pins, they were irreverent and opinionated, and, most of all, they both were genuinely interested in the people and things around them. Avis's letters are now released from archive and veteran culinary historian Joan Reardon has done a labor of love, combining Avis's and Julia's letters across the span of almost ten years (1952-61) to tell the story of a lovely friendship and of the growth to maturity of the author of one of the classic cookbooks of modern times. On February 12, 1953, Julia Child wrote her new pen pal, Avis DeVoto, to describe a dinner Julia and her two colleagues in their new Ecole des Trois Gourmandes had attended the night before with famed Parisian gourmand Maurice Curnonsky ("the Prince of Gastronomy"). "At the party," she wrote, "was a dogmatic meatball who considers himself a gourmet but is just a big bag of wind. They were talking about Beurre Blanc, and how it was a mystery, and only a few people could do it, and how it could only be made with white shallots from Lorraine and over a wood fire. Phoo. But that is so damned typical, making a damned mystery out of perfectly simple things just to puff themselves up." She concluded, tongue in cheek, by writing: "I didn't say anything as, being a foreigner, I don't know anything anyway." Two pares later, she's rhapsodizing over the kind of kitchen she'd like to have if she were rich: "I am going to have a kitchen where everything is my height [over six feet], and none of this pigmy [sic.] stuff, and maybe 4 ovens, and 12 burners all in a line, a 3 broilers, and a charcoal grill, and a spit that turns." That's Julia to a T, always unbuttoned in her opinions, wobbly in her spelling, bursting with energy, savoring whatever life offered her. She wasn't yet the world authority on French cooking she would soon become but she already knew where she was heading and she knew how she wanted to get there -every recipe tested, adaptations made to American materials, tastes and equipment, the `secrets' of French cuisine made clear and obvious to even the neophyte cook. (She commented once about another French cookbook that it should spell out what weight hen to buy for coq au vin -a five-pounder, which is what the recipe called for, would be an old hen: it; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Djibouti: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Elmore Leonard Page; Review: Elmore Leonard is the jazz master of action thrillers. His books are prolonged riffs on what's going on in the world of lowlifes: complication on top of complication, exotic characters by the dozen, action that is fast and violent but funny too. Leonard has always had grifters down cold, and man, can he depict a stone killer! In this book, it's a black American sociopath who drifts into Al Qaeda and has a jones on making a Big Bang -he wants to blow up something really BIG! A cool American documentary filmmaker, Dara Barr, comes to Somalia -Djibouti-- to shoot a film about pirates. Whatever she's looking for, she finds it there, with a cast that includes her six foot six, seventy-two-year-old ex-sailor camera man Xavier, a horny billionaire from Texas and his glamor girl girlfriend -or is she fiancée?--the billionaire hasn't decided yet- and a revolving door assemblage of interesting, enjoyable, flamboyant characters. Elmore Leonard has never written a bad book but this is one of his best.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Farlander NUMBERED SIGNED; Author: Visit Amazon's Col Buchanan Page; Review: Col Buchanan. Farlander. TOR. 400p. January 18, 2011. $24.99. Buchanan's debut novel is a good one. No, it's outstanding! This is the best new fantasy novel I've read since Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains (2009). A theocratic empire, the Holy Empire of Mann, is conquering nation after nation in the heart of the civilized world, subjecting them to the rule of its cruel and bloodthirsty priesthood. (Acolyte priests of Mann lust pass through a purification ceremony which involves the shedding all one's moral qualms and slaughtering innocent subjects.) The besieged city of Bar-Khos stands against them but is rapidly losing hope as one after another of its previously impregnable walls fall to the Empire's hordes. To the side of this struggle is a secret order of assassins, the Roshun. The Roshun offer protection to clients against their murder: if a client dies, the Roshun will stop at nothing to kill the client's killer. When the vicious son of the Holy Matriarch of Mann murders a young woman who is under the protection of the Roshun, the Roshun have no choice but to seek his death, although to attempt it is a near certain death sentence. Against this dark and menacing backdrop, the relationship between a Roshun master, named Ash, and his young apprentice, Nico, plays itself out. While Ash and Nico aren't the only characters in this fine book, they're the ones you'll care about most. This is an excellent book with all the action and menace you would want to find in a book of this kind. I strongly recommend it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Truth of the Matter (The Homelanders); Author: Visit Amazon's Andrew Klavan Page; Review: This is what I wrote at the start of my review of the second book in this series, The Long Way Home: Home is the second in a projected series of books entitled The Homelanders. The hero, Charlie West, is an ordinary high school student who goes to sleep innocent and wakes up to find himself the object of a nationwide man hunt. Somehow, he has lost a year out of his life, and during that time, apparently, he has killed, and been convicted of murdering, his best friend. A group of homegrown terrorists called the Homelanders are also pursuing him; from what Charlie has unearthed, they are a network of Islamo-fascists (Charlie's term) who plan to bring down society by a series of violent terrorist assaults. Charlie doesn't know how to get out of the mess he's in: he can't trust anyone because everyone seems either to want him back in jail or dead. I wish I could write that I liked the third book in the series as much as I did the second but I don`t. It's not bad and Charlie confronts new bad guys, or at least new variants of them, but a good deal of this volume is exposition: Charlie finds out what happened to him in his hidden past and has to adjust to deal with new threats. As in the previous book, Klavan writes and plots well, and Charlie is an appealing hero, with values I wish we all had: he is a patriot but not an uncritical one -he just knows what his root values are, and how important it is to defend them. Book Four will conclude the series. It should be a corker but Book Three isn't.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mr. Toppit; Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Elton Page; Review: Mr. Toppit may be an uneven novel but it's a good one. It's well worth the reader's time to follow through this convoluted story of a less than functional family with a tragic past. After failing as a failed film maker, Arthur Hayman, the father of this family, turned to writing children's stories. He wrote four, all about a young ma named Luke Hayseed (Arthur's son is named Luke) who has adventure after adventure in a mythical forest called the Darkwood. Luke's nemesis -although it's not all that clear whether he's ominous or not-- is an enigmatic figure named Mr. Toppit. Only at the end of the fourth book does Mr. Toppit finally appear out of the Darkwood just as the book ends. But Arthur is killed --run over by a truck--before he can write a fifth book. An American tourist in London -Laurie Clow, from Modesto, California (Modesto just happens to be where I live), sees him hit and calls for an ambulance. Arthur dies, and Laurie is the only one left to interpret his last words and wishes. She insinuates herself into his family during the following weeks, to the incomprehension and dismay of Arthur's two children, Luke and Rachel, and his far from perfect wife. Laurie returns to Modesto, and by a fluke finds an occasion to read the Hayseed novels on local radio. The novels, which had sold poorly until then, suddenly become a cult hit nationwide. Laurie gets her own television talk show. The rest of the novel is about the real Luke's -not the Luke in the novel--struggles to confirm who he is. Everyone he meets assumes he should think and behave like the Luke in the novels, but he isn't that Luke, not at all. His sister Rachel has even more profound difficulty coming to terms with her life, post Hayseed success. Why wasn't she included along with Luke in the novels, even as a fictitious character? The closing half of the novel is messy at times but read on in it anyways because you care about Luke and Rachel, and you want to know what happens with the other characters. There are compelling scenes involving the hangers-on in Laurie's TV ensemble -her private nurse is an absolute b-tch. The ending is sad and at once both conclusive and radically inconclusive. How do you get it go both ways at once? It just does. Mr. Elton is a talented writer who deserves attention.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Kismet (Kayankaya); Author: Visit Amazon's Jakob Arjouni Page; Review: Jakob Arjouni. Kismet. trans. Anthea Bell. 255p. Melville House. October, 2010. $15 (pb). This is the fourth detective thriller by German author Jakob Arjouni but it seems to be the second to be translated into English. A third, Happy Birthday, Turk!, is due to appear from Melville House in February. All feature Turkish immigrant detective Kemal Kayankaya. He isn't too fast on his feet or too sharp at detecting and the bad guys beat him occasionally but boy, is he dogged. Once on the trail, he never leaves it. In this installment of the Kayankaya chronicles, he agrees to help an immigrant friend, a restaurateur named Rosario, who is being threatened by two truly weird thugs, who wear painted white faces, sport yellow fright wigs on their heads, and never say a word, just hand over a note to Rosario demanding "protection" money: refuse to pay, and bad things will happen. Kayankaya's intervention makes things worse, and soon Kayankaya, a friend of his and Rosario are all three on the run with a hit squad of Croatian nationalists in hot pursuit. Kayankaya is a delightful character, but more like Parnell Hall's Stanley Hastings than Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, no matter the hype on the jacket cover -a sharp tongue but prone to mishaps. His language is flip, sometimes overly colorful, but fun to read. (A bad guy is described as coming in like "Popeye on coke" -"to see from one end of his shoulders to the other I had to turn my head back and forth slightly, as if watching tennis." Shortly after that, a young immigrant girl with a terrible potty mouth tells him she learned her German by watching porno films in the immigrant hostel where she was housed and reading the novel, The Sperm Huntresses, which was the only books she had at hand.) Not earthshaking but enjoyable, Kismet is a welcome introduction to a private investigator I hope to come across again soon. This is another solid entry from, Melville House. David Keymer. Modesto CA.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Blackbird - Acting Edition; Author: Visit Amazon's David Harrower Page; Review: David Harrower. Blackbird. Faber and Faber. 87+vi pp. 2006. $13 (pb) English playwright Harrower wrote Blackbird in 2005 for an Edinburgh premiere. It opened in London in 2006 and in New York in 2007 and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2007. It's essentially a two-character play, an older man and a younger woman in hot argument. (A voice is heard off stage at one point and for two pages a young girl is on stage with the two of them.) The woman is Una. She's twenty-seven. The man is Ray, although he goes by the name Peter now. He's fifty-five. Fifteen years ago they were lovers. Ray was caught. He was sent to jail. He served his sentence and came out. He has worked hard since then to put his life back in order. He has a woman. She has a daughter. The woman knows about Ray's past but probably not the finer details. She wasn't happy about it but Ray -excuse me, Peter-- is a new man now. Una isn't a new person. She's never been able to get beyond that time when Ray and she were illicit lovers. She's been frozen in that place for fifteen years -by her parents, who blame her for it, by her neighbors who point at her, by her own crippling and complex feelings about the past and about Ray. Then one day, she sees Ray's picture in a magazine, a trade journal. There he is in the photo, smiling at the camera, but his name isn't Ray, it's Peter, Peter Trevelyan, how white bread can you get? She confronts him at his work place. He takes her into the locker room so they can talk alone. They talk non-stop, just the two of them except for a page or two when Ray's new step-daughter comes into the room, for eighty-seven pages, in a glorious language that is at once wholly naturalistic and intensely, elegiacally poetic. They express harrowing sentiments (no pun intended) and exhume old hurts. The play ends without a clear victory or loss for either of them. It's just been a complicated dance --two people with an exceptionally painful joint history to explore but no resolution to it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Siren of the Waters (A Jana Matinova Investigation); Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Genelin Page; Review: Michael Genelin, The Magician's Accomplice (2010). Soho Crime. 336p. $25 ($18.08 through Amazon.com) Michael Genelin. Siren of the Waters (2009). Soho Crime. 304p. $13 ($11.05 through Amazon.com) (pb.) Michael Genelin. Dark Dreams (2009). Soho Crime. 368p. $14 ($11.20 through Amazon.com) (pb.) I came upon the third of these three mysteries (The Magician's Accomplice) while checking out the New Books shelf in my local library. After reading it, I scurried back to take out the first two books. They feature a Slovakian police commander, Jana Matinova, who survived years of suspicion and scrutiny under her country's Communist government and was alienated from her family, but soldiered on and remained that rarity among eastern Europeans, an honest and effective policewoman. At the close of the second book (Dark Dreams) her life becomes brighter when she meets a strong man who loves her as much as she loves him. I don't want to spoil these police mysteries by telling too much about the stories. Suffice it to say, each book involves a series of seemingly unrelated violent deaths, which occur all over the place, not even confined to one country, and which ultimately link together, showing the outline of vast multi-national conspiracies. Jana is tough, determined and intelligent, and she has cultivated unexpected allies in neighboring countries who help (mostly) her to see her way through to a conclusion. She is a very appealing heroine, but not at all soft or sentimental, and as a consequence, she can appear upon first reading to be a bit flat -but she isn't -she's just been burned too often in the past. Besides, in the maze of corruption, confusion and incompetence that is all too familiar in eastern European police work, Jana has to stay focused if she wants to solve anything. The third book is the best crafted of the three. The viewpoint shifted from chapter to chapter in Siren of the Waters, the first of the series: until you knew all the players on the scorecard, the shifts were sometimes vaguely disorienting. Genelin seemed to be trying to stuff too much -Jana's past history as well as present events --into one narrative. The first chapter in the second book, Dark Dreams, grabbed one's attention but didn`t seem to tie in with the narrative that followed. It did, but it took too many pages to learn that. The most recent entry, The Magician's Accomplice, also starts with a seemingly random killing, but soon Jana finds connections between that killing and another killing, of someone close to her heart, and from then on, the connections -and the dangers-- keep piling on. Only a few characters in these books can be taken at face value. Corruption is endemic. The bad guys are very, very bad and they are all too willing to terrorize others into doing their will. It's a dangerous world that Jana Matinova operates in, but also an intriguing one to the reader who abandons himself to the ride.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Magician's Accomplice (A Jana Matinova Investigation); Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Genelin Page; Review: Michael Genelin, The Magician's Accomplice (2010). Soho Crime. 336p. $25 ($18.08 through Amazon.com) Michael Genelin. Siren of the Waters (2009). Soho Crime. 304p. $13 ($11.05 through Amazon.com) (pb.) Michael Genelin. Dark Dreams (2009). Soho Crime. 368p. $14 ($11.20 through Amazon.com) (pb.) I came upon the third of these three mysteries (The Magician's Accomplice) while checking out the New Books shelf in my local library. After reading it, I scurried back to take out the first two books. They feature a Slovakian police commander, Jana Matinova, who survived years of suspicion and scrutiny under her country's Communist government and was alienated from her family, but soldiered on and remained that rarity among eastern Europeans, an honest and effective policewoman. At the close of the second book (Dark Dreams ) her life becomes brighter when she meets a strong man who loves her as much as she loves him. I don't want to spoil these police mysteries by telling too much about the stories. Suffice it to say, each book involves a series of seemingly unrelated violent deaths, which occur all over the place, not even confined to one country, and which ultimately link together, showing the outline of vast multi-national conspiracies. Jana is tough, determined and intelligent, and she has cultivated unexpected allies in neighboring countries who help (mostly) her to see her way through to a conclusion. She is a very appealing heroine, but not at all soft or sentimental, and as a consequence, she can appear upon first reading to be a bit flat -but she isn't -she's just been burned too often in the past. Besides, in the maze of corruption, confusion and incompetence that is all too familiar in eastern European police work, Jana has to stay focused if she wants to solve anything. The third book is the best crafted of the three. The viewpoint shifted from chapter to chapter in Siren of the Waters, the first of the series: until you knew all the players on the scorecard, the shifts were sometimes vaguely disorienting. Genelin seemed to be trying to stuff too much -Jana's past history as well as present events --into one narrative. The first chapter in the second book, Dark Dreams, grabbed one's attention but didn`t seem to tie in with the narrative that followed. It did, but it took too many pages to learn that. The most recent entry, The Magician's Accomplice, also starts with a seemingly random killing, but soon Jana finds connections between that killing and another killing, of someone close to her heart, and from then on, the connections -and the dangers-- keep piling on. Only a few characters in these books can be taken at face value. Corruption is endemic. The bad guys are very, very bad and they are all too willing to terrorize others into doing their will. It's a dangerous world that Jana Matinova operates in, but also an intriguing one to the reader who abandons himself to the ride.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: What Are Intellectuals Good For?; Author: Visit Amazon's George Scialabba Page; Review: George Scialabba is that rarity, a public intellectual who has supported himself out of academia or publishing, preserving his independence from even his colleagues on the Left. He's an old fashioned skeptic and an old-fashioned reformer, by which I mean one who has an unerring nose for sniffing out Hokum on all sides but who persists in thinking there are better ways to do things in this complicated world. His role models are such non-clichéd thinkers of the traditional and New Left as Christopher Lasch and Russell Jacoby and the great, tough feminist critic Vivian Gornick. There are essays about all three in this book, and two about Lasch, who is one of my own particular heroes. He gets along well with Richard Rorty, who is quoted on the back jacket cover, praising Scialabba's earlier book, Divided Mind. He is skeptical about Martha Nussbaum's defense of cultural humanism in her Cultural Humanism (1997). He's not against the ideals she espouses but he finds her methods of inquiry flawed and her conclusions overly general and Pollyanesque. (He characterizes her, not completely fairly, as "a slightly sententious Socrates.") The title of the essay discussing Nussbaum's book is "Pollyanna and Cassandra." Nussbaum is the Pollyanna in the essay; fellow classicists Victor David Hanson and John Heath, who wrote Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (1998) the Cassandras. It is a measure of Scialabba's fair-mindedness that he praises Hanson, a notorious political conservative and a supporter of many causes with which it is difficult to find Scialabba in sympathy, for Hanson's earlier work on the Greek experience, focusing on the countryside rather than the polis. The Greeks, Hanson argued, "first created `agrarianism,' an ideology in which the production of food and, above all, the actual people who own the land and do the farm work, are held to be of supreme social importance." Hanson on the right, like Lasch -and Scialabba--on the left, is disturbed by what Scialabba characterizes as "contemporary cultural weightlessness." Scialabba notes how much Hanson's and Heath's Greece looks like late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America, "the high-water mark of democratic republicanism in modern history." He closes this exemplary critical essay by arguing that we do not have to choose between the cosmopolitan ideal touted by Nussbaum or the agrarian ideal of Hanson and Heath. "The liberal virtues and the republican virtues are both indispensable. But that does not mean they are, at this moment, equally urgent or equally vulnerable. The apparently irresistible thrust of global capitalism threatens the latter virtues far more than the former..." And he goes on to spell out the ways in which that is true. It is difficult to pick out favorite articles in a collection so good as this one. I especially enjoyed his dismantling of the pretentious garbage of Edward Said, who seemed able to transmute any thought at all into colonialist oppression. He has equally devastating criticisms to make of the contradictions in Noam Chomsky's political writings. (Scialabba does not admire fuzzy thinking of an kind.) I; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dark Dreams: A Commander Jana Matinova Investigation; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Genelin Page; Review: Michael Genelin, The Magician's Accomplice (2010). Soho Crime. 336p. $25 ($18.08 through Amazon.com) Michael Genelin. Siren of the Waters (2009). Soho Crime. 304p. $13 ($11.05 through Amazon.com) (pb.) Michael Genelin. Dark Dreams (2009). Soho Crime. 368p. $14 ($11.20 through Amazon.com) (pb.) I came upon the third of these three mysteries (The Magician's Accomplice) while checking out the New Books shelf in my local library. After reading it, I scurried back to take out the first two books. They feature a Slovakian police commander, Jana Matinova, who survived years of suspicion and scrutiny under her country's Communist government and was alienated from her family, but soldiered on and remained that rarity among eastern Europeans, an honest and effective policewoman. At the close of the second book (Dark Dreams) her life becomes brighter when she meets a strong man who loves her as much as she loves him. I don't want to spoil these police mysteries by telling too much about the stories. Suffice it to say, each book involves a series of seemingly unrelated violent deaths, which occur all over the place, not even confined to one country, and which ultimately link together, showing the outline of vast multi-national conspiracies. Jana is tough, determined and intelligent, and she has cultivated unexpected allies in neighboring countries who help (mostly) her to see her way through to a conclusion. She is a very appealing heroine, but not at all soft or sentimental, and as a consequence, she can appear upon first reading to be a bit flat -but she isn't -she's just been burned too often in the past. Besides, in the maze of corruption, confusion and incompetence that is all too familiar in eastern European police work, Jana has to stay focused if she wants to solve anything. The third book is the best crafted of the three. The viewpoint shifted from chapter to chapter in Siren of the Waters, the first of the series: until you knew all the players on the scorecard, the shifts were sometimes vaguely disorienting. Genelin seemed to be trying to stuff too much -Jana's past history as well as present events --into one narrative. The first chapter in the second book, Dark Dreams, grabbed one's attention but didn`t seem to tie in with the narrative that followed. It did, but it took too many pages to learn that. The most recent entry, The Magician's Accomplice, also starts with a seemingly random killing, but soon Jana finds connections between that killing and another killing, of someone close to her heart, and from then on, the connections -and the dangers-- keep piling on. Only a few characters in these books can be taken at face value. Corruption is endemic. The bad guys are very, very bad and they are all too willing to terrorize others into doing their will. It's a dangerous world that Jana Matinova operates in, but also an intriguing one to the reader who abandons himself to the ride.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Box: Tales from the Darkroom; Author: Visit Amazon's Gunter Grass Page; Review: Years ago, I received my only book I was ever to review by the great Latin American novelist (and Nobel Prize winner) Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was entitled The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1986) and it wasn't fiction at all, but rather a brilliantly written piece of early reporting by an already great writer. The Box, which purports to be the latest installment of Grass's autobiography, reads much the same way -close to realism but magical and super-charged. In the case of Grass (another Nobelist), there is an admitted element of non-fiction: the conceit of a magical box camera. It takes pictures of what isn't always there -sometimes the future, other times people's dreams or desires. But this conceit is woven into a cunningly narrated history of Grass's occasionally stormy but usually warm relations with his eight children (by three wives), the ostensible narrators of the tale. The larger than life figure of Grass moved across their lives, shaping what they became but always a bit off to the side. He wasn't always someone they could draw on, wrapped up as he always was in his own rich life -researching, writing, pamphleteering, actively engaged in politics, sometimes just thinking, occasionally tomcatting around. Though a man who loved and still loves his children, he seems to have always been an outsider even in his own family. The Box isn't one of Grass's major works, but this little jewel confirms his status as the major author he clearly has become.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cooking in the Moment: A Year of Seasonal Recipes; Author: Visit Amazon's Andrea Reusing Page; Review: This is the review of this book that I posted in 2011 as an Amazon Vine reviewer. Since then, I have continued to cook using the book and can recommend the recipes for spinach with melting leeks (heavenly) and old fashioned baked beans. I am making skillet cooked green apples and onion slices tonight for a guest. *** What an attractive book! Though young, Ms. Reusing has impressive credentials as a chef. She has been a James Beard nominee and is the owner and head chef of Lantern, named one of Gourmets Top Fifty Restaurants. An advocate for sustainable food, she sits on the board of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems and the Chefs Collaborative. This book is exactly what the title says it will be: a book of seasonal recipes, using meat, fruits and vegetables fresh, in the moment that their flavors peak. As she says, the best starting point for good food is good ingredients. Some of the recipes in this book are easy, some are not! Roast Moulard Duck with Kumquats and Salt-Cured Chiles is more work than I want to take on appealing but not for me. Some ingredients are not available to me, or at least I don't know where I can get them, although Ms. Reusing includes a listing of food sources in the back of her book. I cant candy roaster (a giant pumpkin-sized squash) in California, but Ms. Reusing writes that I can use pumpkin or any large winter squash in its place (Smashed Candy Roaster). Since I don't have my own garden, the same goes for pea greens (Pea Greens in Shrimp, Pea, and Rice Stew,) and I probably won't purchase ume plum vinaigrette just for the one recipe she presents, though it looks delicious (Pea Greens with Ume Plum Vinaigrette and Chive Blossoms). Ramps seem a local green (Wilted Ramps) also out of the question. Its a pity because all these recipes look appealing. But thats one of the attractions of this very good collection of (largely) original recipes. If Ms. Reusing is a foodie, shes a particularly laid back one, who is as willing to praise a recipe with no exotic ingredients and requiring almost no work to make. Because she always remembers that the goal of cooking isn't the process (cooking), its how the dish tastes when its ready. Her recipe for tomato tastings, for instance, simply advises the reader to slice and salt various varieties of tomatoes and then put them aside in a pan to catch the juices for half an hour so the flavor will develop. I cant wait for summer to try that one! Or a recipe she lifted from the Girl Scouts, Bacon and Eggs in a Bag, which requires simply a campfire, a couple of paper bags, four bacon strips and two raw eggs, and two skewers to fasten the paper bags before you put them over the fire. There are equally appealing, and simple to make, recipes for Grilled Broccoli with Parsley, Garlic and Anchovies and Green Beans with Garlic Bread crumbs; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest; Author: Amos oz; Review: Forest is a minor work by a major writer, Israeli author Amos Oz. As you would expect from a writer of Oz's caliber, the book reads well from the start: "Emanuella the Teacher described to the class what a bear looks like, how fish breathe, and the kind of sounds a hyena makes at night. She also hung pictures of animals and birds on the classroom walls. Most of the children made fun of her because they'd never seen an animal in their lives. ... Silently and sadly the village lived its simple life." That passage sets the tone for the book, which describes a town with no, literally no, animals -not a dog or cat, or rat or mole, or fish or butterfly or moth. They all disappeared one night years ago and now it is so long ago that the children of the town think talk of animals is nothing but a fairy tale for them to giggle over. The villagers fear the forest around them, and lock their doors and shutter their windows at night for fear of ... who knows what, but it's bad. Then two children see something in a stream in the woods -a quick glint, something moving through the water. So far the book is near perfect, a sweet, melancholy prose poem about separation from the other creatures who share our earth, our fellow passengers. There is a lovely passage about the relation we should be cultivating with other creatures which ends with these words: "After all, no one here has another boat." The two children -friends--decide to brave the forest to find out where the animals have left, and why. And from this point, alas!, the novel's message becomes muzzy and weaker than it could have been. For as much as the piece has a message, it is that we shouldn't ridicule or shame others, human or animal. The book begs for a stronger message -about sharing spaceship (or just Ship) Earth with other passengers, perhaps. The book ends rather weakly. So what's good and what's not so good? Good is the book's language and much of the imagery, the mood of melancholy that envelops the small town and drowns the villagers' happiness, the depiction of the two children's characters. Less than good is the lack of clarity in the book's message and a certain muzziness of plot.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store; Author: Visit Amazon's Ben Ryder Howe Page; Review: In 2003, Ben Ryder Howe was a struggling, underpaid senior editor (titles were cheap) at the Paris Review. His wife Gab brings in the big money in the family, working countless billable hours as a lawyer. Nine months earlier, they'd moved in with Gab's Korean parents in order to save money to buy a house. Then Gabbie started worrying about Kay's, her mother's, emotional health. Kay, whom Howe characterized as "the Mike Tyson of Korean grandmothers", had always been a dynamo but she was starting to look peaked. Several months later, Ben, Gab and Gab's family buy Kay a convenience store, a deli across the bridge from Staten Island, where they lived, in Brooklyn. Then life really became complicated. They only operated the deli for a few years but while they did, Ben learned things about himself and came to a heightened appreciation of the values of his immigrant, go-getter, survive-anything immigrant in-laws. Howe is a good comic writer. The book is loaded with zingers, like these: On the difference between Ben's upbringing (Plymouth, Mass, Wasp) and Gab's (first generation Korean American): "In America, kids are supposed to antagonize their parents: they're supposed to torture them as teenagers, abandon them in college, then write as memoir in which they blame them for all their unhappiness as adults. But in Korea they serve them forever, without a second thought." (Ben's grandmother once said to him: "You're not supposed to talk about Wasp values. You're just supposed to have them.") On living in Staten Island, "New York City's pariah borough, a place where once-hot trends like Hummers and spitting go to die, a place so forsaken that not even Starbucks would set up a store there, nor even the most enterprising Thai restaurant owner." On his Korean mother-in-law, Kay: "The second she thinks of something, it has to be done, usually by herself. ... Once she got fined by the sanitation department for putting her garbage out too soon." This is a lovely book, infused with gentle humor and wry wit, and featuring character who, no matter how eccentric they appear, are on balance admirable.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The First Clash: The Miraculous Greek Victory at Marathon and Its Impact on Western Civilization; Author: James Lacey; Review: During the Ionian rebellion against Darius I, the king of Persia (499-493 BCE), Athens supported the rebels, earning Darius's undying enmity. With the rebellion ended, Darius determined to bring Athens to heel: he sent envoys to Sparta and Athens, demanding that both cities send him earth and water as tokens of his overlordship. Athens threw the envoys into a pit reserved for condemned prisoners. Sparta threw its envoys into a well and told them to gather the earth and water from the well. Darius, ruler of the greatest empire of his time, stretching from the Indus Valley in the east to the border of Greece in the west, began preparations for war against Athens. The Athenians would learn what it meant to defy the "king of kings." But they didn't. Because Athens won. Indeed, they won on their own, because the promised aid from Sparta arrived after the battle was over. How did 150 thousand Athenians manage to defy 40 million Persian subjects? That is the topic of this fascinating military history. Today, the battle of Marathon (490 BCE) is less famous than the defense of the Spartan 300 at Thermopylae ten years later or the massive battle of Plataea and the great sea battle off the coast of Salamis. All four battles were won by the Greeks, but military historian and ex-career soldier Lacey argues that Marathon was in many respects, the most crucial of all these four victories. For one thing, for the very first time, the Greeks had defeated the seemingly invincible Persian empire. Furthermore, if it had lost at Marathon, Athens would have become a subject state, and Athenians would have been helots (serfs) instead of continuing as free citizens. There might indeed never have been a Greek way of thinking -picture the western world without Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Greek poets, dramatists and historians. There are many virtues to this exemplary history. Lacey's judgment on numerous points of controversy concerning Marathon is informed, sensible, and -a decided virtue in the historian of an event for which much evidence is either missing, ambiguous or dubious-- humble. Lacey admits at many points that he is expressing his own opinion, that contrary views not only exist but sometimes still dominate the historical debate. Another virtue: he is not afraid to disagree, even with perceived wisdom about the battle. For instance, Lacey argues persuasively that the Athenian hoplites were, by the time of Marathon, a seasoned army, arguably equal in training and ferocity to any force of their time, even Sparta's or Persia's. He absolutely demolishes the popular myth of Persia's effeminacy, a myth promoted in its day by Herodotus and in our day by the movie version of the battle of Thermopylae, The 300. Rather, he emphasizes, Darius's history shows a king constantly at war -and almost always winning. The inscription on his tomb shows that Darius saw himself first and foremost as a warrior: "My body is strong. As a fighter of battles, I am a good fighter ... As a horseman, I am a good horseman. As a; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny (A Nightside Book); Author: Visit Amazon's Simon R. Green Page; Review: This is the second most recent in Simon R. Green's Nightside series, about a private Eye, John Taylor, who happens to be Lilith's son and inherited truly serious magical powers as a result. Taylor does his work in the Nightside, an under belly to our world where anything works, from alternate histories to old fashioned magic. To be honest, this is not one of the better books in the series: it seems burdened by two many plot lines from previous ones. Still, I grab every book in this series as soon it comes out and I read them before more serious stuff, even fun stuff, that sits on my shelf of current fiction. I like this series even better than Jim Butcher's Dresden series. This latest novel has some interesting, and disturbing, revelations to deliver about Green's staple crop of Nightside characters, and it's ponderous in tone. But it's still great fun, and I know I'll read Green's upcoming novels as quickly as I can get them. Green's Nightside novels are the equivalent in fantasy writing of Lee Childs's Jack Reacher novels in adventure fiction.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: A Widow's Story: A Memoir. by Joyce Carol Oates; Author: Visit Amazon's Joyce Carol Oates Page; Review: "Widowhood is the punishment for having been a wife." Joyce Carol Oates writes this a third of the way through this memoir of the death of her husband of forty-eight years (and twenty-five days, she notes), Ray Smith. A few weeks before, she had been driving over to the Princeton Medical Center where Ray was hospitalized with pneumonia. She had brought along the thick SundayTimes so they could read it together as was their custom and she brought along his mail -Ray was the editor of the Ontario Review and work had piled up during his illness. Ray sounded good, his voice was strong and calm. (He was always calm.) The doctors had detected a secondary infection that had lodged in his `good' lung, the one uninfected by pneumonia bacteria, but they didn't seem worried, not yet. They were treating it with antibiotics and it seemed only a mater of time until it cleared up. She watched while Ray walked the corridor with the physical therapist -muscles deteriorate when not exercised. She went home that evening and for the first time in days she ate a regular meal and went to sleep, though still concerned about his health at least not as much as previously. The phone rang at midnight -there was a crisis- Ray was in critical condition. By the time she reached the hospital, he was gone, and she had begun the widow's life. Oates has always been a powerful writer: her evocative fiction communicates powerful truths about the most extreme human emotions. Her best works -like We Are the Mulvaneys- place her among the world's premiere writers. But this memoir, which is not fiction, is as powerful as anything she has written. The cumulative effect of her description of small moments is devastating: the nurse tells her she has to clean out Ray's belongings so the bed will be available for use again; she notices that Ray's wristwatch has moved three minutes since she first looked at it; they tell her she can make arrangements for "it," her husband's body, in the morning -her husband has become an "it"!; her cat pees on a pile of documents she has assembled for the visit to Probate Court. Most wrenching of all, she returns home from the hospital to find a message from Ray on the answering machine. He had called when she was already on the way to the hospital. His calm, affectionate, strong voice -he sounds so good- this is the last communication she will have from him. It is Oates's watchful eyes and ears, the sense organs of a masterful novelist, that allowed her to capture and record the long period of despair and disbelief that followed her husband's death, but it is her indomitable heart that captures our attention most. What a lovely book!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: In the Shadow of Swords (Tales of Ciris Sarn); Author: Visit Amazon's Val Gunn Page; Review: Swords is to be the first of a series of fantasy adventure novels featuring master assassin Ciris Sarn. Sarn, whose father was human but whose mother was an elemental, has both human and supernatural powers. His otherworldly heritage is a weakness as well as a strength: he is `jinn-bound' to carry out the commands of the Sultan of Qatana, Raqqas Siwal, but keeps looking for a way out of the curse that binds him against his will. The sultan has delegated his power over Ciris to his son, Malek, and to his counselor, Fajeer Dassai, who has his own plans for control of the sultanate. The novel is set in an alternate world, Arabian in nature and vaguely medieval, a Scheherazadian universe where demons, jinns and magic compete with men's wiles and force of arms for dominance. A man named Hiril Altair -a good man, an innocent man- has discovered a set of secret magical books. Fajeer sends Ciris to kill him and bring back the books to Fajeer. Thus is set in motion the complicated train of events that constitute this story. Soon there are numerous players involved and one danger after another confronts Ciris and the others involved in this saga. Portions of this book are overwritten and there are many awkward or overwritten sentences. This passage for instance --"For Sarn there was no such thing as being too cautious. He checked his weapons and his options"--is clunky. Throughout the tone is vaguely archaic. Usually that works -it fits the story and the time--so it isn't intrusive. Still, sentences like "Someday soon I will revel in spilling your blood" and "Little time will you live in peace. ... Dark are the words I place on you" do provoke a snicker. There is the expected exotica: "The kayal were horrible creatures, demonic fiends that escaped through the veil of the unseen world to prey on the living in the mortal realm of Mir'aj. Were they spawn of the Jnoun? Or demons from the dark abyss?" As long as the plot moves along briskly, though, this language doesn't pose a problem. It's a kind of hyperbole we've grown to expect ever since the fabled stories of H. P. Lovecraft, and it's fun to read. As long as the plot moves along.... Which points to the biggest problem with this novel. Gunn does some things right, indeed better than just right. His action scenes, for instance. He writes good action scenes -they're crisp, exciting, well described. He gets the setting right too, something that is trickier to do than one would think at a glance. There are no obvious archaisms or clunkers in this fantasy thriller. But the novel needs to be simplified. The narrative is too ornate, too complicated, and there are way too many characters introduced along the way, whose paths the poor reader must subsequently try to follow. Above all, the character of Ciris Sarn needs development: Sarn is too much a stock figure and thus not very believable. Sarn also needs to feature more consistently through the narrative. As; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Ubu Roi (Dover Thrift Editions); Author: Visit Amazon's Alfred Jarry Page; Review: I've been rereading some of the classics of absurdist theater -Georg Buchner's Woyzeck, Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and The Lesson, and this play, Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Ubu the King. Reading Ubu again is like reading it new, so fresh and vivid its language and imagery is, so original a play it is, even now, 115 years after its first performance in Paris. A performance run that lasted two days, by the way -one night of dress rehearsal in front of an audience and one of full performance. The audiences at both performances were by all accounts unruly, and it's easy to see why when you read the play. Even by modern standards, it is unbelievably rude and deliberately offensive. But it is also extremely funny and, looking ahead to Dada and Artaud's Theatre of the Violent, definitely influential. If there is a parallel to Jarry's scabrous play, it might be some of the musical works of Erik Satie, a contemporary of Jarry, who turned away from romantic ideals of composition to create musical fragments with whimsical titles -"Four Movements in the Shape of a Pear," "Sketches and Flirtations of an Overweight Bonhomme," "Flabby Preludes for a Dog." Both Jarry and Satie were early surrealists, but Jarry took the cake on offensiveness. Oddly enough, that's one of the great pleasures of this play -its offensiveness, its deliberate and sustained air of vulgarity. Ubu is no play for the faint of heart. The playgoer who tolerate profanity because it is appropriate to the situation will find no excuse for profanity her, because Jarry uses it simply to epater le bourgeois (shock/cock a snook at the middle class). Thus, the repeated use of hardcore profanities that spot the pages of Ubu. The center of the play is Ubu and the play tells of his run for the kingship of Poland. Why Poland? Because Poland didn't exist in Jarry's time. It hadn't for over a hundred years, ever since the respectable rulers of Europe had sliced and diced it into nonexistence in three successive partitions in the eighteenth century. Poland was Nowhere Land and thus fertile ground for Jarry's phantasmagoric imagination. And Ubu himself? He's vulgar -that's taken for granted--but also greedy, vain, cowardly, profane, no scabrous!, and treacherous. Let's see, have I left anything out? Oh, yes! He's also very very funny. It took more than a generation before Ubu Roi gained champions. In the 1920s, the Dadaists and the Surrealists adopted it. In the 50s, it was resurrected again for presentation by Julian Beck's and Judith Malina's influential avant garde Living Theater. We saw Beck/Malina's theater in performance in the late sixties. The climax of the performance was an invitation to come on stage, where we were encouraged to take off our clothes and, if not that, pile onto a huge lump of other spectators so the cowards who had stayed in their seats in the theater could look at us. It was interesting how your perspective changed when you went on stage to play, not a character, but yourself, and yourself; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Winston's War; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Dobbs Page; Review: Michael Dobbs, Winston's War (2002, 2009) and Churchill's Triumph (2005, 2008) A principal advisor for British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and the holder of a Ph. D. in nuclear defense studies, Michael Dobbs knows of what he writes when he takes on British politics. These are two of his series of novels following the career of Winston Churchill from his accession to the prime ministership in 1940 through the momentous meeting of Churchill, Stalin and FDR in Yalta in 1945, which settled the fate of Poland and, by inference, other eastern European countries for decades. The subtitle of the first novel is "A Novel of Conspiracy" and the conspiracies are largely the work of prime minister Neville Chamberlain who came back to England from giving away Czechoslovakia to Hitler and talked about how he had earned England "peace in our time," only to discover within the next year that he hadn't. The second book has as its subtitle "A Novel of Betrayal." The betrayal is FDR's, who was so eager to secure Stalin's approval of the United Nations that he moved away from his wartime ally Churchill and gave away Poland and large parts of China to the crass and ruthless Stalin. There are lapses of style and construction in both novels but they're almost beside the point, so compelling is the story Dobbs tells and so appealing is the larger than life figure of their protagonist.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Winston's War; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Dobbs Page; Review: Michael Dobbs, Winston's War (2002, 2009) and Churchill's Triumph (2005, 2008) A principal advisor for British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and the holder of a Ph. D. in nuclear defense studies, Michael Dobbs knows of what he writes when he takes on British politics. These are two of his series of novels following the career of Winston Churchill from his accession to the prime ministership in 1940 through the momentous meeting of Churchill, Stalin and FDR in Yalta in 1945, which settled the fate of Poland and, by inference, other eastern European countries for decades. The subtitle of the first novel is "A Novel of Conspiracy" and the conspiracies are largely the work of prime minister Neville Chamberlain who came back to England from giving away Czechoslovakia to Hitler and talked about how he had earned England "peace in our time," only to discover within the next year that he hadn't. The second book has as its subtitle "A Novel of Betrayal." The betrayal is FDR's, who was so eager to secure Stalin's approval of the United Nations that he moved away from his wartime ally Churchill and gave away Poland and large parts of China to the crass and ruthless Stalin. There are lapses of style and construction in both novels but they're almost beside the point, so compelling is the story Dobbs tells and so appealing is the larger than life figure of their protagonist.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Deadwood; Author: Visit Amazon's Pete Dexter Page; Review: "If you want to call Deadwood a Western, you might as well call The House of Mirth chick lit," wrote novelist Jonathan Frantzen about this fine novel. Among its characters are Wild Bill Hickock and Annie Oakley, but it's more than a historical novel. It's a first-rate comic novel with memorable characters and a phenomenal feeling for place and time. I loved Paris Trout, for which Dexter won the National Book Award, and I appreciated Spooner, his long and hilarious novel about writer's block, but Deadwood is more balanced than either and infinitely sunnier than Trout.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Three Weissmanns of Westport: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Cathleen Schine Page; Review: Who would have thought that chick lit could be written this well. But then, in her own way wasn't Jane Austen writing chick lit too? Austen, in fact, provides the model and framework for this delightful, warm, funny novel about Betty, a seventy-five-year-old mother who's been dumped by her husband of forty-eight years in favor of a younger model, and the mother's two single daughters, Miranda and Annie. All three have money troubles. Betty's soon-to-be ex has locked her out of her bank accounts and credit cards until the divorce settlement is reached; Miranda ran a highly successful literary agency but was blindsided by three of her authors --memoirists who made up all of their memoirs-- now she's in bankruptcy; and Annie directs a small not-for-profit library that's always running out of money. When a wealthy cousin of Betty's offers her free rent at a small cottage on Long Island, the three of them move in. What follows isn't earth-shaking, just like what happens in a Jane Austen novel isn't earth shaking. But it's warm, engrossing and eminently satisfying. This is a truly pleasurable novel. (A New York Times Notable Novel of the Year); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Good Thief; Author: Visit Amazon's Hannah Tinti Page; Review: This is Tinti's first novel and it is one of the best works of popular fiction I have ever read. It tells the story of a one-handed orphan who is plucked at the late age of twelve from St. Anthony's Orphanage for Boys by a man who claims to be his father but probably isn't. (The time and setting aren't clear but it's late colonial New England.) The boy and his rescuer embark on a string of picaresque adventured that summon up the feeling of excitement and joy I remember from reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Kidnapped when I was a boy (and Treasure Island again as a man). A great and ultimately heartwarming adventure story. They seldom write books like this any more and I wish they would. (A New York Times Notable Novel of the Year); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Informant (Butcher's Boy); Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Perry Page; Review: First there was The Butcher's Boy (1982) and then Sleeping Dogs (1992). In the first book, a professional hit man who changes name as easily as other people change their clothes, takes off against a Mafia boss who decides it's easier to kill him than pay for his latest assignment. By the time it's over, many people are dead -all bad guys --and the mob boss is in prison, framed for a murder he never committed. Butcher's Boy was a killer novel, no pun intended. It didn't make its protagonist appealing. The Butcher's Boy was a stone killer with no connection to ordinary human feelings or aspirations, except to stay alive, but he was so good at what he did and his opponents were so much worse than him that you left the novel satisfied that vengeance of a kind had been done. A subplot in the novel involved the attempts of Justice Department agent Elizabeth Waring to convince her superiors that something more than just routine warfare among mafiosi was going on, that there was an extremely efficient single killer out there causing all this damage. Sleeping Dogs, ten years later, was less successful as a novel but still a good read. A mafia hood stumbles across the Butcher's Boy at an English race track and tries to kill him. The Butcher's Boy was older now, in retirement for ten years and very much in love with the stunningly beautiful English aristocrat at his side when they attacked him, but he speedily puts away the three hoods who try to do him in. Determined to keep out of the limelight, the killer returns to the States and starts up the ladder, killing off all the people above the hood who might know of his existence. Elizabeth Waring appears on the scene again. The Butcher's Boy tolerates her -at least he doesn't try to kill her though she too knows of his existence --but once he's finished killing, he disappears from sight again. Now, nine years later (it's almost cyclical) he's back again. The boss he framed and put in jail for life doesn't forget or forgive. He's put out a contract on the Butcher Boy's head. The novel starts with one killing and escalates. This time, the Butcher's Boy has all of the mafia families out for blood. Elizabeth Waring appears again and enters into an uneasy alliance with the killer. It would be criminal to tell what happens next but it should be obvious that a lot of blood is spread around. As usual, Perry tells a good story. The ending resolves a complicated situation but is a bit of a letdown. An added plus is Perry's depiction of Waring, who is a strong woman much in the line of Perry's other great creation, Jane Whitfield.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Churchill's Triumph; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Dobbs Page; Review: Michael Dobbs, Winston's War (2002, 2009) and Churchill's Triumph (2005, 2008) A principal advisor for British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and the holder of a Ph. D. in nuclear defense studies, Michael Dobbs knows of what he writes when he takes on British politics. These are two of his series of novels following the career of Winston Churchill from his accession to the prime ministership in 1940 through the momentous meeting of Churchill, Stalin and FDR in Yalta in 1945, which settled the fate of Poland and, by inference, other eastern European countries for decades. The subtitle of the first novel is "A Novel of Conspiracy" and the conspiracies are largely the work of prime minister Neville Chamberlain who came back to England from giving away Czechoslovakia to Hitler and talked about how he had earned England "peace in our time," only to discover within the next year that he hadn't. The second book has as its subtitle "A Novel of Betrayal." The betrayal is FDR's, who was so eager to secure Stalin's approval of the United Nations that he moved away from his wartime ally Churchill and gave away Poland and large parts of China to the crass and ruthless Stalin. There are lapses of style and construction in both novels but they're almost beside the point, so compelling is the story Dobbs tells and so appealing is the larger than life figure of their protagonist.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: When Religion Becomes Lethal: The Explosive Mix of Politics and Religion in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Kimball Page; Review: The author of this timely and admirable book is Harvard educated (Ph. D.), a professor of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma, and an ordained Baptist minister. He has spent the past forty years engaged in a multitude of inter-faith ventures, and is one of the few Christian ministers to have talked face to face with the Ayatollah Khomeini and with high level religious and political leaders across the spectrum of Christian, Jewish and Muslim nations. He is familiar at first hand with religious leaders on the religious right as well as the left in this country. He has written widely on the Middle East, Islam, relations among the three people of the Book (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), and on the intersection of religion and politics. He's written five books, including most When Religion Becomes Evil (2008). He knows his stuff. In this, his latest book, he asks the question how much, and at what points, religion and politics can legitimately and safely intersect, and uses the three religions' holy texts to illuminate both where religious radicals gain support for their extreme positions and what these texts have to offer on the question in general. He is, for good reason, concerned about the volatile and potentially lethal intrusion into secular politics of the religious radicals of all three faiths. "Narrowly defined fundamentalist sectarianism coupled with a political agenda pose clear and present dangers in the interdependent world community of the 21st century." Kimball does not see any one of the three faiths holding the monopoly on espousing violence. He condemns America`s image of Islam, and Muslims, as a monolithic bloc of jihadists as simplistic and argues that actions based on this image have done great harm to the chances of reconciliation across the faiths. He holds up the United State's religious settlement as a template for coexistence: The ... relationship between religion and politics in the United States is found in a distinctive, experimental approach that both recognizes the interplay [between faith and government] and judiciously seeks to delineate appropriate boundaries, .... a `wall of separation' between the religious and political spheres. Near the close of his book, Kimball quotes a letter sent by 138 Muslim leaders -muftis, academics, government officials--to pope Benedict after he made his famous speech condemning Muslims in Regensburg in 2006 ("Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman..."). This is what they wrote: Muslims and Christians together make up well over half the world's population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims andf Chris- tians. . . ,. The basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbor. These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity. The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him,. And; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex; Author: Visit Amazon's Oksana Zabuzhko Page; Review: The first sentence in this novel is six words long: "Not today, she says to herself." The rest of the page, 265 words more, is the second. It takes a total of only thirty-three sentences to carry the reader though the first ten pages. That tells you something about the book. It's highly unconventional in its structure and syntax, it's written by a poet, and it reads something close to `stream of consciousness.' Does it work here? Yes, it does, for Zabuzhko has an original voice and she writes of experiences common to more women than we men would like to admit exist. As much as anything, this book is a long letting loose of emotion following a sexually intense but ultimately abusive relationship with a painter named Mykhola. She knew Mykhola was trouble the first time she met him. As he talked to her, setting up his later seduction of her, he casually twisted her fingers back almost to the breaking point, establishing his dominance of her while inflicting gratuitous pain. Later he progressed to verbal abuse and threats and he burned her with cigarettes. Hyper-charged fragments of Zabuzhko's poetry are interspersed throughout the book, providing counterpoint to the story of sexual enthrallment and abuse she is telling: Something has shifted in the world: someone was crying Out my name at night as though from a torture chamber And someone rustled leaves on the porch, Tossed and turned, and could not fall asleep: I was learning the lessons of parting.... Zabuzhko flings out one metaphor after another, writing prose like a poet writes poetry. Some of them work, some don't, but the effect builds up, creating a dense, allusive, emotionally intent portrait of a woman and what has befallen her in a doomed relationship. (Zabuzhko's troubles don't end with the painter. She wants to be seen as a person but repeatedly falls into relationships where she is diminished.) The rush of poetized language she creates is a kind of hyperbolic venting. Some passages fail: overwritten, clunkiy, awkward use of imagery. Why, for instance, on page 15, does "we" transmute into "his or her" twice over, in the same passage, and why use "its own life" when the pronoun signifies not an `it,' but "hundreds of men"? But these are trivial excesses, or errors, in a book that deliberately courts disaster on every page, but by virtue of the poet's clearheaded view of herself and her control of her language, never stops moving forward, and ultimately, creates a wholly original and highly affecting portrait of the complicated creature that was Oksana Zabuzhko in her mid-thirties, when this novel was written. **** SECOND THOUGHTS After reading Roger Brunyate's correspondence with me concerning the book, I began having second thoughts about having assigned the book five stars so I reread large chunks of it. I think Roger is right: it is too uneven to merit five stars. So I have changed my rating to four stars. I still believe it is highly original and it will probably be one of the handful of books; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Nick of Time (Bug Man); Author: Visit Amazon's Tim Downs Page; Review: (3-1/2 Stars out of 5) It's fun following Nick Polchak, the hero of Nick of Time, through this series of serio-comic adventures. Nick is a forensic entomologist -a "bug man" who understands bugs better than he does humans. Much better. He's also a bit obsessional but it works to his benefit on a case because once he's on one he won't get off for anything, not even a little thing like he's supposed to get married at the end of the week and his fiance Alena is expecting him to be around in the meantime. Then suddenly he's gone, disappeared-- she doesn't knows where he is or what he's thinking. Why'd he leave? Is he having cold feet over the impending marriage? Why doesn't he callher like he said he would? Does he still love her?) Alena's a pretty queer bird herself: she's lived for years inside a fenced enclosure on top of a hill with literally dozens of dogs, whom she trusts more than she does humans. She trains these dogs to perform amazingly complicated tasks while Nick digs up bug pupae to solve murders. It's obvious to everyone that it's a marriage just waiting to happen. Nick had left Virginia for Philadelphia for just one day, to attend the monthly meeting of the Vidocq Society, a society of forensic experts dedicated to solving cold case murders. When he finds an old friend dead, he's off on the chase. Numerous complications occur before everything is resolved. It's a very pleasant ride for the reader: there's enough discovering and deciphering of clues to please those who prefer classic detection but interesting enough characters to please those who prefer a more modern take on detection. This is the first "Bug Man" mystery I've read but it won't be the last. Note: Although this book is categorized as "Christian" fiction, it does not have a religious theme (like, say, The Song of Bernadette) nor are the story and characters infused with a religion-derived preoccupation (like almost anything by Flannery O'Connor). It's simply a book about decent people --the good guys are decent, that is--behaving in sensible, though sometimes eccentric, and ethical ways. To label it "Christian" seems misleading.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Before Cain Strikes (An Esme Stuart Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Joshua Corin Page; Review: This is the second police thriller by Corin (the first was While Galileo Preys, Sept. 2010) and it's a good one ---again. Both novels feature a former FBI agent, Esme' Stuart, who was once wunderkind of a special unit dedicated to thinking outside the box to track down and arrest the most elusive serial killers. A good part of the success of the first novel came from its detailing of the complicated and corrosive relations between Esme' and her professor husband, Rafe, who had years before given her an ultimatum -either the Bureau or their family but not both. Esme' stayed with Rafe at the close of the first novel but their relationship was more than problematic -it was corrosive because Rafe blamed her for the violence that had almost befallen their whole family. Esme's an FBI consultant now, back at work but half in and half out of the agency, and Rafe's loutish father, Lester, lives with them and is doing his best to destroy their marriage. And now comes another serial killer to stir things up between husband and wife. But no! This time it's worse! A psychopath named Cain42 has set up a website for other serial killers and serial killer wannabees on which he tutors them on how to get away with it. Cain42 challenges his students to a contest -who can kill the most people in one day- and offers to deliver the prize in person to the winner. Esme' and her FBI partner and mentor Tom have to stop the bloodbath. If, in the process, they can catch Cain all the better. It's a harrowing ride and it doesn't promise to do Esme's marriage much good. A warning: this book contains more overt violence and sadism than the previous novel. Because of this, it is not suitable for young readers, no matter how mature they are. But all in all, this is a highly satisfying thriller that never lets down the tension until the very end.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Reader on Reading; Author: Visit Amazon's Alberto Manguel Page; Review: "When I was eight or nine, my disbelief was not so much suspended as yet unborn, and fiction felt at times more real than everyday fact." (Alberto Manguel) I've been a fan of Manguel since his novel, News from a Foreign Country Came (1991). I've read with pleasure his Dictionary of Imaginary Places (revised, 2000) and with more than pleasure --with unstinting admiration! --his lovely A History of Reading (pb, 1997). Last year I read his With Borges, about the enriching experience of reading books to the blind Argentinian literary master and what Manguel learned from him. In all of these books, Manguel's largeness of spirit and his generous approach to reading books is apparent. So hurrah for him! Now Yale has issued in paperback a splendid collection of short pieces by Manguel, on libraries, on reading, writing, editing.... None of the pieces is long, which, given the richness of citations and allusions in the best of them, is a good thing because they all can be read in one sitting, with time at the end for reflection on what one has just ingested. Manguel's style is in some aspects like Borges -complex reflections on, transmutations of, literary and life themes, infused with of a lifetime filled with reading. Reading Manguel is like talking with an old friend, a terribly bookish friend who loves books but hasn't retreated from the world. "... hasn't retreated from the world..." A good way to describe his writing. The best essay in the book is entitled "Meanwhile, In Another Part of the Forest," and it addresses the question of -the nature of, purpose of-- gay literature today. He quotes Edmund White, from his memoir, A Boy's Own Story ("Since no one is brought up to be gay, the moment [a boy] recognizes the difference he must account for it.") and Camille Paglia ("...their only continuity is through culture, which they have been instrumental in building."). Then Manguel writes: Perhaps the literature of all segregated groups goes through similar stages: apologetic, self-descriptive, and instructive; political and testimonial; iconoclastic and outrageous. If that is the case, then the next stage . . . introduces characters who happen to be gay but whose circumstances are defined well beyond their sexuality which is once again seen as part of a complex and omnivorous world.... ...our desire need not be limited. Heterosexuality and homosexuality were no doubt two of those protean forms, but they are neither exclusive nor impermeable. Like our literary tastes, our sexual affinities need only declare allegiance and define themselves under duress. In the moment of pleasure, we are as indefinable as the moment itself. Perhaps that generous sense of pleasure will ultimately prevail. Another theme in these essays is the subversive nature of good teaching, which teaches pupils to question the very authority about which they are learning. Again, Manguel's own words say it well: There is no such thing as a school for anarchists, and yet, in some sense, every teacher must teach anarchism, must teach the students to question rules and regulations, to seek explanations; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Down the Mysterly River; Author: Visit Amazon's Bill Willingham Page; Review: "Max the Wolf was a wolf in exactly the same way that foothills are made up of real feet and a tiger shark is part tiger, which is to say, not at all. Max was in fact a boy, between twelve and thirteen years old, and entirely human. He was dressed in a Boy Scout uniform." Thus begins the adventures of Max the Wolf, not a wolf at all, as the author clarifies at the beginning of this book, but an earnest, resourceful young Boy Scout, who is prepared for every eventuality and always carries in his pockets his Lost Kit -"a dozen strike-anywhere matches, a candle, a roll of fishing line with two hooks, a few bandages in sterile wrappings, and a needle and thread," with a length of twine wrapped tightly around the outside of the watertight package- and trusty Boy Scout knife. The story Willingham narrates is utterly charming. I use the word "charming" in both senses: what happens in this small scale odyssey is both charming to read and seems, somehow, to have come about through some kind of magical charm, certainly not through any form of ordinary Boy Scout logic. Max finds himself in a forest where the animals, even a tree, talk back to him, and he has no memory how he got there. He gains companions: a badger who boasts a lot but is ferocious in battle, a brown bear who is easily distracted by the prospect of food of any kind, and a foul-tempered old tomcat with one eye missing, raggle-taggle fur and scars decorating his body. Pursuing them are the Blue Cutters, equipped with magical swords that do terrible things to the creatures they are used on. There are a few early passages in the book that struck this reviewer as just on the edge of being cute, perhaps imitative of Tolkien's The Hobbit. But these (minor) blemishes quickly disappear and the narrative builds momentum. What is left is a wholly engrossing story, filled with adventure and with a cast of heroes you come to cheer for. A wholly unanticipated ending wraps everything up with a twist. This is the first children's book written by award-winning graphic novelist Bill Willingham and it's a clear winner. Mark Buckingham's pen and ink drawings add to the book's charm, especially his drawing of McTavish the Monster, the cranky old tomcat who's always looking for a fight. I hope I get the chance to meet Max again. Preferably soon.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller; Author: Visit Amazon's Tracy Daugherty Page; Review: For anyone who wants to know more about that complicated near-great writer Joseph Heller, this book will prove invaluable. It will be of interest too for those who want to know how hard work it can be to write a book. Heller, of course, wrote one of the most highly acclaimed and influential books of the second half of the twentieth century, Catch-22 (1961) about the insane life and stressed out crew of a WWII bomber plane. Its anti-hero Yossarian, whose goal in life was just to stay living, being alive being better than being dead, was appropriated during the Viet Nam era by war protesters and excoriated by the neocons (foremost among them Norman Podhoretz, who had initially praised Catch-22). Years later writer Pete Hamill said: "Joseph Heller . . . did more to debunk the Hemingway myth than any critic." There was nothing exhilarating about war in Heller's book. Heller wasn't a natural stylist. Early, he experimented with naturalism but it didn't fit. Then he wrote some short pieces in the over-dramatized, plot driven style of a popular magazine like the Saturday Evening Post. (He wanted to sell his stories and that's what the magazine bought.) He wrote painfully slowly. For one thing, in his early years, he was working fulltime as an adman on Madison Avenue while writing his own stuff on the side. Writing was hard. On some days, he wrote only one sentence he would keep. Some days, nothing. He wrote down ideas and details about characters, places and scenes on file cards and constantly shuffled them around, looking for the connections. Daugherty, whose biography of his mentor Donald Barthelme, Hiding Man (2009) was selected by the New Yorker as a Notable Book of the Year and the New York Times as an Editor's Choice, has produced in Just One Catch a truly valuable book on an interesting subject. He seems to have read almost everything that came out of the chaotic period when Heller wrote and he provides a detailed and informative account of Heller's life, his friends and associates, how his books were received, even summaries of Heller's key writings. The picture that emerges is of a flawed but deeply human person who persisted in writing even through the distractions of more fame than he ever could have hoped for. It's heady stuff having reporters from the Times and Rolling Stone call you for quotes or ask you to write an Op Ed piece for the next issue, to have your book the subject of university symposia, to be listed as an icon of the age in an upscale ad for sexy lingerie. Heller liked the good life and was a sociable guy, but the message in Daugherty's book is this: still, he wrote. He was a craftsman about writing. Daugherty's academic background -he teaches literature and writing at Oregon State University- comes through, not always for the good, as does his advocacy of Heller. He packs in a good deal of useful information about the times but sometimes overdoes it. (Do we really need; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Emperor of Lies: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Steve Sem-Sandberg Page; Review: Don't be put off by the length of this book (672 pages). Once you start reading it, you won't want to stop. Pick your adjective -it's gripping, lyrical, human, horrifying and tragic, all at once. But whatever it is, it's GOOD -all in capital letters, it's so fine. Emperor, which won a major book prize in Sweden, tells the tale of the Lodz ghetto in Poland and its charismatic head from 1940-44, the 62-year-old Jew Mordecai Chaim Rumkowsky, whom the German conquerors appointed Eldest of the Jews and Chairman of the ruling Council of Elders. It was Rumkowsky's job to keep Lodz trouble free and provide workshops and factories to turn out supplies for the German troops on the Eastern Front. There is another novel about this incident in history, Leslie Epstein's King of the Jews (1979). Anyone who read Sem-Sandberg's novel should get ahold of Epstein's brilliant book as well. Neither one is better than the other. They're just different. Epstein's was a novel of his time, a Catch-22 of a novel in which the humor -almost slapstick at moments- turns before the reader's eyes into absolute an unmitigated horror. Sem-Sandberg's is a novel of irony too, but humor isn't a major element in it. If that makes it seem like Sem-Sandberg's version of events is simply straightforward reporting, it isn't. There are lyrical passages in it that blow the mind, as when a young woman, Rosa, comes down with the flu, or some such ailment, and half-dreams, half-watches awake a phantasmagoria of images of deceit, corruption and abuse. But in both books, the conclusion is the same: the half-good intentions of the Chairman fail before the onslaughts of the absolute evil of the German overlords, and most, if not all, of the people in the ghetto delay and delay in complaining, and when they do complain, do it timidly and subserviently, for fear of things getting worse. The book starts with a typically bureaucratic memorandum from the German authorities establishing a Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland. The signator ends with this chilling pronouncement: Naturally, the establishment of the ghetto is only a temporary measure. I reserve the right to decide when and how the City of Lodz is to be purged of Jews. The ultimate aim must be to burn away this infectious abscess entirely, once and for all." Juxtaposed to this pronouncement is this epigraph, which precedes the narrative portion of the book, from Ecclesiastes: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. The epigraph is chilling because whatever else can be said about Rumkowski --was he a monster of self-interest, power mad and lustful, or was he trying to protect his people and salvage some dignity for them in the worst of all possible worlds?--he seems to have justified the decisions he made and the actions he took, which led to the deaths of thousands and the abuse of almost everyone in the ghetto (only his family and; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Wit: A Play; Author: Visit Amazon's Margaret Edson Page; Review: If poisonous minerals, and if that tree, Whose fruit threw death on else immortall us, If lecherous goats, if serpents envious Cannot be damn'd; Alas; why should I bee? ... That remember them [i.e., his sins], some claime as debt, I think it mercy, if thou wilst forget. W;t is a clever play, starting with its title. For wit is the weapon the great metaphysical poet John Donne used in his sonnets to approach an unapproachable God and the protagonist of this play, Vivian Bearing, Ph. D., is a Donne scholar whose great book is a study of Donne's twelve Holy Sonnets. (The book is entitled Made Cunningly.) And the use of the semicolon in place of an `I' between the first and last letters of the title echoes a remembered conversation between Vivian, still an undergraduate student, and her soon to be mentor, E. M. Ashford, on the importance of punctuation in Donne's poems. And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die. Nothing but a breath -a comma- separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It's a comma, a pause. This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma. (I suppose a comma would have looked wrong in the title typographically, but the use of the comma still carries forward the conceit of only an item of punctuation separating the beginning of something from the end, in this case, Vivian's life.) The play is cunningly put together, essentially a monologue that continues from beginning until near the very end of the play (Vivian's conversation with the audience about her treatment) interspersed with brief scenes of Vivian with her doctor, Vivian with the nurse and with the technicians, Vivian and the research fellow in medical oncology (who once took her course on the sonnets -"you can't get into medical school unless you're well-rounded") and scenes of remembrance Vivian as an undergraduate with her mentor, Vivian teaching). The play ends in a swirl of activity as Vivian's systems fail. So it's In (Vivian monologuing), Out (swirl of activity, interchanges with other characters), In, Out. It happens over and over again, until the final burst of activity, after which it all just . . . ends. One of the most interesting aspects of the play is the way it captures character. Vivian, ill, discovers that the research fellow, just like her in the classroom, cares less for the people he's caring for than the subject he's studying. But, bitterly ill now, Vivian wants him to care for her, needs care. And thus, responds to the decidedly unintellectual advances of her nurse, who at least accepts that it is part of her job to comfort the frightened and ailing. This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint My pilgrimages last mile; and my race Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Back Chamber; Author: Visit Amazon's Donald Hall Page; Review: What I appreciate most in Donald Hall's poems is their concreteness. The images he uses are tangible. They make me feel as if I can reach out and touch them, they resonate in my memory as shared, not separated, experiences. In this, his first collection of poems in a decade, he doesn't let me down. Not all of the poems in this slim volume work but enough do to make it highly satisfying. The book starts with a simply wonderful poem. It's about the connections between objects and memory and the nostalgia that discarding loved objects entails. THE THINGS When I walk in my house I see pictures, bought long ago, framed and hanging --de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore- that I've cherished and stared at for years, yet my eyes keep returning to the masters of the trivial -a white stone perfectly round, tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell, a broken great-grandmother's rocker, a dead dog's toy -valueless, unforgettable detritus that my children will throw away as I did my mother's souvenirs of trips with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens, and bundles of cards from her mother Kate. Almost all of the poems in this volume are short. One -"Creative Writing"--is only two lines long, more a jeu d'esprit than a fully realized poem. Another -"Three Women"--repeats the same seven lines three times, as though to get across its message about the progress of love from initial passion to eventual disappointment. Not all work equally well -"Advent" is a dud, in my opinion-- but the best are starkly simple in their choice of language (which leans toward the conversational) and construction, and deeply evocative. He writes about carnal love ("Love's Progress", "After the Prom"), failed love and love's regrets ("Showtunes", "The Bone Ring", "Ruins", "Conclusion at Union Lake", Bangers and Mash"), old loves and new ones ("Meatloaf"), memories and possessions ("The Things", "Goosefeathers", "Maples"), growing old ("The Week", "Poetry and Ambition" -about being an old poet), the perils of fame (""the Pursuit of Poetry", 2011 ("The Numbers"), memories of his lost wife Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia twelve years ago at the age of 48 (""What We Did", "The Gardener", "Freezes and Junes", "The Offsprings", "Scar Tissue", and "Searching" -the last is about her dog's memories of Jane, now long gone), and regret for a lost friend ("Closing"). There is a multi-part poem entitled "Ric's Progress" which details a man's love life from first marriage through torrid affair to second marriage (which works). It captures the chaos of expectations that derails Ric's life until his eventual acceptance that love is like everything else: give it a chance to work and set reasonable expectations, and you'll be happier. During their folie a deux of friendly endorphins, they each discovered, independent of the other, --and then compared notes, startled to arrive together at the same place at the same time, outside a bedroom-- to be industrious, sober, and monogamous doesn't deny life, as Ric's platitude once had it, but denies lethargy, vomit, and yeast infections. Love is permissible -like; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irene Nemirovsky by her Daughter; Author: Visit Amazon's Elisabeth Gille Page; Review: In January 1945, Elisabeth Gilles, aged seven and a half, was released from the cave in southern France where her younger sister and she had been hiding from the Germans for weeks. They were promptly taken to her grandmother's house in Bordeaux. Mme. Nemirovsky answered the doorbell but refused to open the door and let them in. The young woman who had escorted the girls said: "These are your grand-daughters. They survived the war and I've brought them back to you." The grandmother growled back, "I don't have any grandchildren." "The eldest has pneumonia!" "There are clinics for poor children," was her grandmother's response. At this moment in this half-fantasized, half-remembered novel about the life of her mother, Elisabeth Gilles inserts her own life into the middle of the complicated hate-love relationship between her own mother, the once-famous novelist Irene Demirovsky (Suite Francaise), and Irene's mother, Elisabeth's uncaring and unconcerned grandmother. Irene's approach to her fiction -the cold eye cast on human motives, for instance--is better understood if one looks at Irene's efforts from childhood on to free herself from an aggressively vain, selfish mother. Her mother Mme. Nemirovsky, a monster of self-interest and greed. lives on in this vividly imagined book of "dreamed memories." Gilles was 53 when she published this, her first, novel. She was a successful editor, she had shepherded along a number of major authors, but she had refused to write fiction on her own. Mirador is Gille's attempt to come to terms with her complicated feelings about a woman she barely knew, her mother Irene, who disappeared from her daughter's life when Elisabeth was not even five. Gilles realized that for years she had blocked out memories of her mother. As a little girl, she'd felt abandoned by her. Later, she resented her --she realized her mother had done nothing to protect Elisabeth and her sister from the depradations of the Nazis, who were already exporting and killing French Jews. (Elisabeth and her sister were saved because the booking official, a Frenchman, took pity on them when he saw them and sent them home with the message to their relatives that the girls were to return "the next day." The relatives got the message and hid the girls, who spent the rest of the war, more than two years of it, scuttling from shelter to shelter, with no one to console them or explain things to them.) In Mirador, Elisabeth Gille's was attempting to give meaning to her own scarred past. Why "dreamed memories"? Because much evidence for the early years of her mother's life is lost forever. Because Gilles blocked out many of her own memories. Because the relatives she could have asked about those days died in concentration camps or were too busy trying to save their own lives to pay attention to what happened to other people. Because the one living memory of her mother's early days -her maternal grandmother--was a monster, indifferent to her surviving flesh and blood. Because Gilles needed to write the narrative from inside her mother's head in order to; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Leftovers; Author: Visit Amazon's Tom Perrotta Page; Review: One day, millions of people vanish. One minute, they're there. The next, they're not -without warning or explanation. Can it be the Rapture? But it isn't only saints and True Believers who Depart. ("The Sudden Departure" is how the moment is referred to three years later, when the events of this novel take place.) And what of those who did believe, and had spent their lives readying themselves for God's embrace, and now are left behind? There are global effects -economic disruption, confusion and chaos--but Perotta's intriguing novel focuses instead on what happens three years after the fact in the bucolic, utterly ordinary small city of Mapleton. Everyone has been affected. They still are three years after it all happened. The humdrum daily activities and contacts that used to fill people's lives now seem hollow. Their lives miss some vital spark, overshadowed by the memory of the Departed. Signs of the Departed are present all over -in plaques on walls, monuments erected to the missing. People wear T-shirts with pictures of the Departed on them and an ominous sect of called The Guilty Remnant, whose members dress in white and do not speak in public -ever--and wander around the town daring the denizens of Mapleton to try to move on with their lives. The minister of a Pentecostal church is so offended that he wasn't taken that he leaves the church to publish a scurrilous rag whose sole purpose is to expose dirty truths about those who've Departed. He wants to show that they didn't deserve it. The Leftovers traces the fortunes of two families: the Garveys (husband Kevin and wife Laurie, daughter Jill and son Tom) haven't lost a family member but their daughter Jill had been watching television with her best friend Jennifer when Jennifer was taken, and now the foundations of the Garvey family are steadily crumbling. Nora Durst lost all her family -husband and two small children--and now she spends her days taking marathon bike rides (73 miles one time) and sitting at home watching reruns of SpongeBob, which had been her young son's favorite show. No one seems able to begin anew. And that is one of the things that this intriguing, off-key novel is about: how isolated we are when the props have been knocked out of our world, how much we need our settled safety net to progress through the world with confidence and brio. This novel is a departure for Perrotta, who has written several pitch-perfect satiric comedies about the inadequacies of suburban life. His other books have all been sweet in part -often bitter-sweet-- which has made his message easier to accept Leftovers is much darker -it's comic but not funny--and the ending is jarring, offering the possibility of redemption for a few but not the many, for whom life will continue to be just a vast empty hole. I liked and admired the novel. Like everything Perrotta has published, the dialogue is on the mark and his take on people's behavior spot on. But this book will not be everyone's cup of; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Boxer, Beetle; Author: Visit Amazon's Ned Beauman Page; Review: Few books will be as eccentric among new novels this year as this one and few will be as much fun. The plot ricochets back and forth between 1935-6, when upper crust Hitler-symps temporarily rode high in Merry Old England, and the world of today. The characters range from hyper to bizarre. "Fishy" Broom is a couch potato who suffers from a rare disease that leaves him smelling like rotten fish all the time. He works at home on his computer in order to avoid contact with others and on the side he dabbles in Hitler memorabilia. "Sinner" Roach is a homosexual Jewish boxer with a passion for destroying things; Erskine, an English entomologist with a lech for the boxer -Erskine breeds beetles to prove his crackpot theories about eugenics. There is a cadre of boorish upper class blackshirt wannabees and a young woman who composes music she thinks is atonal but is really plain ugly and -oh, yes! - there's a Welsh assassin who does what assassins do, he kills people. A beetle, from a previously undiscovered breed, plays a prominent role as well. Beauman captures to a tee the ugliness of English upper-class anti-Semitism in the thirties. Erskine's posh compatriots are monsters of boorishness. If they weren't so well off, they'd starve from sheer stupidity; they depend on others to do everything for them, yet think themselves the superior race. It's difficult to describe this unusual offering without making it seem harsher than it is. The picture it paints is harsh but the novel itself is just fun. The plot is cunning; it rips along, taking no prisoners en route. Boxer Beetle could be a comic book thriller if it weren't for the quality of the writing in it. As an example, crack the book to page 105 and read the entomologist Erskine's meditations on "Sinner": as Erskine's craving for "Sinner" rises, his thoughts veer off into a wild phantasmagoria of sex and debasement. This is good writing and not easy to pull off. (In England, it was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award of 2010.) It's hard to put down this novel because you always want to know what happens next in it. Did I like this book? You bet!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Daughter of Smoke & Bone; Author: Visit Amazon's Laini Taylor Page; Review: A young girl, an art student in Prague, has blue hair -indigo blue- and tattoos all over her body, including large tattoos of open eyes etched onto the palms of her hands. Her foster father gives her a new language -she knows fifteen so far--each year on her birthday. She has a bracelet of small stones around her writ -scuppies, she calls them, good only for the granting of small wishes--and if she rubs a scuppy and makes a wish -like making her ex-boyfriend's groin itch while he's posing in the nude for her life drawing class- it vanishes but the wish comes true. Her foster father is Brimstone, the Wishmonger is what he's called, and he's a chimaera, part animal and part human. On his brow sit giant ram's horns -his messenger beast, Kishmish, who "look[s] like an escapee from a Hieronymus Bosch painting," sits on his shoulder. Brimstone's vast eyes are slitted; they glisten like a serpent's. The girl -her name is Karou--earns a living doing small errands for Brimstone, mostly by paying his network of suppliers for the teeth they collect for him. Brimstone uses the pain in the teeth to do magic. But suddenly Karou's life changes. Angels appear all over the world. They put a hand on the doorways that are portals to brimstone's world and a fiery handprint is etched into the door permanently. War is about to break out -anew, but Karou doesn't know about the old wars--between the chimaera and the angels, and this time it will be fought to the death of one side or the other. Then Karou meets an angel. His name is Akiva and he has been bred and raised as a killing machine. His purpose in life is to kill chimaera and all who work for them. But he doesn't kill Karou and here the story takes off. Daughter is only the first in who knows how many books this series will take. For the first half of the book, the author seems unable to do anything wrong. The descriptions are vivid, one adventure follows another in rapid succession, and Karou and Akiva are fully realized inventions. The second half of the book provides the backstory to the first half -where did Karou come from? Why did Akiva hold off killing her? What is Brimstone's role in the events that unfold?--and takes us up to the start of new adventures but not into them. The reader is left impatient for the next installment to arrive so he or she can continue reading. But the second half of the book also slows down the impetus of the narrative. Though not bad, it's nowhere as engrossing as the book had been up to that point. A great deal of romance is woven into the story as well. Some readers will welcome it, some not. On this point, it's a matter of personal preference -certainly it is acceptable to combine fantasy with romance, and Taylor handles the mixture well. Taylor's forte is description. She writes of a battle between chimaera and angels; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch; Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Thwaites Page; Review: In 2008, Thomas Thwaites was trying to decide on a capstone project for his master's degree at the Royal College of Art in London. The project he settled on was building his own toaster. Not from pre-formed parts. Rather, from the ground up. He would dig up his own ore, smelt his own metals, transform pig iron into tempered steel, make his own plastic, mold the parts (404 of them), and then assemble them into a functioning toaster which, he hoped, would be capable of toasting two slices of bread at once and popping them out when done, ready for buttering. This book, a delight to read from start to finish, is the record of his labors, and his partial, though not total, success. It is copiously illustrated so the reader can follow along as Thwaites embarks on his adventures. The chapters parallel the stages of his labor: deconstruction (he reverse engineers [= tears apart] a toaster to see what it's made of); steel, mica, plastic, copper, nickel; and finally, construction. Have you ever smelted iron or tried to convert pig iron into steel? dug up slices of mica from a mountainside to use as insulation? extracted and shaped nickel parts, made copper wires? Thwaites's first attempt at producing steel fails, so he appropriates his mother's microwave: eventually, he is able to convert a lump of pig iron into "a blob of iron about as big as a ten pence coin. A blob that when hit with a hammer doesn't shatter, but squishes as it should!" Plastic poses a particular problem. As his mentor at the Royal College of Mines --Jan Cilliers, an expert on froth flotation (a technique to separate impurities from a mixture of liquid and ore) who holds the Chair of Mineral Processing at the Royal School of Mines in London-- advises him, making plastic from scratch requires complex interactions, much beyond Thwaites's powers to achieve with modest expertise and equipment. Thwaites comes across a recipe for making plastic from hot wet potato flour and decides to try that. He paraphrases the recipe: "Cook [hot potato flour] up in a saucepan with some vinegar and a touch of glycerine and after ten minutes or sop it forms a translucent goo (sort of like a pot of snot)." He gets his plastic but it cracks in use so he decides reluctantly to bend his own rules and simply used melted recycled plastic. The resultant toaster casing is a wonder to behold, an ur-toaster that is suffering from acute vertigo. Plastic icicles drip down the sides, making the casing look like a lopsided home for eskimos. Still, it works. He has created a functioning toaster housing, however unaesthetic it may look. The copper mines in England are all closed -the yield too low for modern industry's needs--so Thwaites bottles up water from the runoff streams outside an old mine. The water in the stream is the most acidic on earth, with a pH of about 2. The only life in it is "extremophiles," those miraculous microbes that live in acid and; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Summertime; Author: Visit Amazon's J. M. Coetzee Page; Review: Expatriate South African Coetzee has been amply recognized for his writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Among other prizes, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 and has won the Booker Prize twice, in 1983 and 1999), been long-listed three more times and shortlisted once for it, the last time in 2009, for this novel, Summertime. Summertime is Coetzee's third work of fictionalized autobiography, following on Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). In it, Coetzee presents a portrait of the young --well, young middle-aged--artist, caught before he has started his rise to fame. The conceit is that Coetzee has died and a biographer wants to write about the missing years in his life, when he returned to South Africa after years abroad in the States and in Australia, and before he had transformed himself into the writer he see in his mature works. Five people remain who remember him from those years and the biographer is meeting with each of them separately to go over his write-up of earlier interviews with them. Four of them are women, one a man. Coetzee had had affairs with two of the women. Neither went anywhere. He pursued a third, who rebuffed him. And the fourth was his cousin Margot, whose feelings for the adult Coetzee, regrettably, were not as warm or admiring as of the young Coetzee. The fifth interviewee, Martin, who team-taught a university course with Coetzee, found him a good but distant colleague and an indifferent teacher. Bookending the transcriptions of these interview sessions, at front and back of the book, are fragments from Coetzee's notebooks, some dated (1972-75) and some not. The portrait that emerges from these data is unsparing, to say the least, desperately, deeply unflattering. Coetzee emerges an uncompleted man. Maybe -it's not proven yet--he can write but success in that realm lies in the unforeseeable future. It is the realm of emotions and feelings that he seems unformed. He doesn't connect. He shares a house with his sixty-three-year-old farther, but neither of them talks to the other or even seems to care for each other. Coetzee's head is filled with ideas and ideals that never quite touch the ground. Nowhere is this clearer than in his dry-as-bones wooing and bedding of a discontented South African housewife, who ultimately finds his approach to lovemaking repellent. I have never seen a writer tear apart illusions about himself as completely, ruthlessly, as Coetzee does in this brilliant book. The picture that emerges isn't wholly surprising, even for someone like me who has read only three of Coetzee's other fictions -the dead J. M. Coetzee in Summertime thinks and acts and lives much like the fictional Elizabeth Costello in the 2003 novel of the same name: both writers -Costello and Coetzee--are preoccupied with the same issues: the moral status of animals (see The Lives of Animals, 1999), literary censorship, sexuality, vegetarianism, belief, language and evil. South African author Rian Malan, who knows him, describes Coetzee in these terms: "Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Homer on Life and Death (Clarendon Press Paperbacks); Author: Visit Amazon's Jasper Griffin Page; Review: For the past year or so, I've been picking around the edges of Homer's two great epics, the Iliad and Odyssey, in my reading, preparatory to taking on Robert Fagles's translations of the two books. Way back --I don't remember when-- I read and enjoyed E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) and Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (1946). I've read Moses I. Finley's The World of Odysseus (1954) and, like many generalists, I've read and admired Erich Auerbach's "Odysseus' Scar," the first chapter in his marvelous Mimesis (1953). This past year, I've read Caroline Alexander's The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War (2010) and Eva T. H. Brann's wonderful Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (2002). Concurrent with reading Griffin, 've been reading James Redfield's Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (1974; rev. ed., 1994 -Redfield is one of the authors whom Griffin refutes). A spur to my interest has been my admiration for poet Christopher Logue's masterful reworking of the Iliad into modern idiom, the best known of which is War Music (2002). I note all of this not to show how much or how widely I've read on this subject but how little I know and how unformed my knowledge of the world and particulars of Homer's poems still is. So when I come across a book that reads like a dream and truly enlightens me about the poems and the poet, I'm thrilled. At the time he wrote this magisterial little book, Jasper Griffin was professor Classical Literature and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Across his scholarly career, he published six books on Greek and Latin poets, edited a few more, and wrote two books on the art of snobbery. What comes across in Griffin's book is the originality of the poet Homer, how he used otherwise conventional language and tropes ("this world of stylized and universally intelligible gestures") to express a consistent and original view of the world, and his talent for emotional expressiveness. Griffin uses the Germanic and Irish (also medieval European) sagas for comparison to point to Homer's lack of interest in the details of fighting. For all the myriad of deaths in the Iliad, it isn't battle that interests the poet so much as the heroic life: the heroes in the poem either quickly are dead or they fight again. There are no portraits of the disabled or marginally wounded because they don't interest the poet. Griffin's analysis of the portrayal of Achilles is brilliant: He [Achilles] reveals his character not only by his actions but also, still more, by his utterances. He produces more similes in his speeches than the other people in the epic, and several of them are striking. He uses a very large number of words which are not used elsewhere in the poem. At times he utters shorter and more staccato speech than anybody else; at other times his speech; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Demi-Monde: Winter: A Novel (The Demi-Monde Saga); Author: Visit Amazon's Rod Rees Page; Review: As an adventure novel, Demi-Monde isn't bad. Crisis succeeds crisis in rapid succession and the reader's attention is always engaged. Once you start the book, you won't want to stop. The premise is interesting. The U.S. military has created a cyber-world to train soldiers to face the challenge of modern-day unconventional warfare. The world, called the Demi-Monde, is divided into different sectors with different ethnic, religious and ideological mixes and the whole thing is maintained by the strongest super-computer ever devised. Soldier-trainees are plugged in and their duplicates sent into the Demi-Monde. It is a world of multitudinous perils, densely populated because over-population ratchets up the tensions between people and groups and seeded with a surplus of men in one sector, of racist neo-Nazi Aryans in another, militant lesbians in a third and Blacks in another, with a permanent minority of Jews to dump the blame on when things are going wrong. The different sectors of this artificial world are ruled by some of the worst (but charismatic) psychopaths in history, including Hitler's henchman, Reinhardt Heydrich, the perverted occultist Aleister Crowley, the French Revolution's Robespierre and Africa's Shaka Zulu: their profiles have been coded onto the mainframe (the computer is called ABBA) and recreated as simulacra -or Dupes (short for "Duplicates") as they are called--in this hell-hole of a self-contained universe. When the American president's daughter is kidnapped into the Demi-Monde, a young African-American jazz singer, Ella, is recruited to rescue her. Ella suits up in her Total Immersion Shroud and off she goes. No surprise, everything that can go wrong does go wrong and Ella is thrown back onto her wits to get out of the Demi-Monde with her skin intact. One last wrinkle: in order to survive, the Dupes, need to ingest human blood at regular intervals --a favorite cocktail is blood, gin and tonic- and the Dupes have discovered that the American soldiers inserted into the realm bleed actual blood. Soon they are capturing the soldiers and hanging them up to drain their blood. They don't kill them, just milk them--the soldiers are the Dupes' blood cows. But so could Ella be if they discover that she too is a Shade (= a real human being, not just a simulacrum). The details of this computer-generated world are clever and fun, the characters sharply defined, and the action non-stop. Demi-Monde is an entertaining read, at least in the short run. What's missing is the feeling of life, of the reality that kicks in in the best thrillers and sci fi novels regardless how outré the world being described. (Think Bladerunner.) Everything about Demi-Monde is mechanical, the analogue of the Resident Evil videogame and movies. The characters, even Ella, are comic book characters, with no or little subtlety in their nature and behavior. The situations they find themselves are ground out with modest concern for organic flow. Demi-Monde is just a videogame set in print. Nothing is resolved at the end; the author has set the scene for an indefinite number of sequels. There'll be an audience for them, but though; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: I Married You for Happiness; Author: Visit Amazon's Lily Tuck Page; Review: Early in their marriage, Philip, a mathematician, asks Nina, his painter wife, how she approaches a painting. Does she know what the painting will look like when she finishes it? "I start with a line, a color," she tells him, "and then I look for something else." Philip is crazed with mathematics: his conversation is peppered with talk of the wondrous behaviors of abstract numbers. That's why he is such a good teacher. "Is it random?" he asks. "Do you just stumble accidentally on whatever it is?" "Sometimes," she says. "But no, not always." "I read somewhere that art is about navigating the space between what you know and what you see," Philip says. "I look for clarity," Nina tells him. Now Philip is dead, suddenly and with no warning. Nina, his wife of forty-three years, sits by his side in their bedroom and thinks back. This book is like those paintings Nina and Philip talked about years before. It is constructed out of memory, Nina's memory of a marriage that has been by and large happy, whatever that means, and that now is ended forever. Her memories, like those most of us would have about such a span of time, are scattered. They jump back and forth between the present (with Philip gone, who will tend to the vegetable garden? Their grown-up daughter Louise isn't home yet, so for Louise Philip is still alive....) and past (they met in a Paris caf, she tried to turn a cold shoulder to him but he wormed his way into her consciousness, did she love him even then?). While Philip was out of town attending lecture, Nina bought an expensive leather shoulder bag. She felt guilty about spending so much money on it so didn't show it to him at when he returned. "Later, she tells herself, she will. Now she never will." Objects bring remembrance: "next to the lacquer jewelry box [in their bedroom], the blue-and-green clay bowl Louise made for them in third grade in which, each evening, Philip places his loose change. The closet doors are shut and only the bathroom door is ajar." His pajama bottoms and a T-shirt hang on a hook in Past blends into present: Past -this is in Paris; they are still courting: "Philip smells faintly of ironed shirts." Present: "He still does." Memories of short-lived past affairs. Jealousy over Philip's possible liaison with a dead young girl, with a beautiful and sophisticated Eurasian woman he met in China. She hears him talking on the phone in his office one day about "Isabelle Theo" and questions him about her. He points to his computer, which is running a sophisticated math package named "Isabelle..." Very little happens in this beautiful and moving account -it is framed in one day and one night, the day Philip dies and the night she spends by his bedside. But of course a great deal happens, only it's located in memory and in her regret for lost opportunities, for moments that will never come again with Philip gone. It is written with; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Black Diamond; Author: Visit Amazon's Martin Walker Page; Review: What's not to like in a crime novel whose hero, Bruno Courreges, police chief of the small French town of St. Denis, uses his spare time to hunt for truffles with his hound, cooks up the most delectable meals, and beds a delightfully independent English woman but still remembers a past liaison with a feisty French police woman? Everyone in St. Denis loves Bruno and so will you when you read about him. He's even more popular than the mayor! This is the third mystery featuring police chief Bruno and his fellow citizens of St. Denis. In exemplary fashion, Bruno untangles three mysteries: there has been a series of attacks on Vietnamese market vendors and the retaliatory firebombing of some large Chinese restaurants; rumor has it that subpar Chinese truffles are being smuggling in and foisted off as the real things, leading to suspicion of grand-scale fraud at the local truffles market and the potential collapse of trust in the local product (a good Perigord black, roughly a kilo in weight, can bring in 300 Euros at sale); and one of Bruno's hunting partners is tortured and murdered, left strung up on a line at his hunting lodge. The solving of these three crimes unveils a fourth, hidden behind them, providing for an unexpectedly satisfactory mystery story. That's what this book is. Satisfactory. In every respect. There is everything one could want in a mystery story in this charming tale, from romance, food and local color to acts of bravery and keen detection. In the end, the good guys win, and the best and bravest among them is Bruno, a character I look forward to meeting again. I haven't read the first two Bruno mysteries yet but I will, as soon as I can get my hands on them. This book is a winner.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Stranger's Child; Author: Visit Amazon's Alan Hollinghurst Page; Review: Alan Hollinghurst won the Man Booker Prize in 2004 for his The Line of Beauty. I haven't read that book, or two more of his previous three novels, but I have read The Swimming Pool Library and I found it stunning. As I find this amazing novel of manners stunning, a novel that spans almost a century and encapsulates a lot, though not all, of England's literary history, or at least the impulse to it, in the twentieth century. This exceptional novel is about lost memories, whether forgotten or consciously buried, and evanescent, eroticized, deeply repressed love. It's not easy an easy book to read. A major character appears 400 pages into it, and another past page 500, and from chapter to chapter, it leaps across time and character. For all that, it is consciously, exquisitely crafted to tell the story of one family and its outliers, and how they influenced and interacted with the world of English letters across the course of the twentieth century. For most of characters in the book, it's about gay love, usually though not always repressed. Not that there aren't any heterosexuals in the book, but from the starting point -the visit of golden boy Cecil Vallant, who loves boys best but will take a flier on any available woman as well- until the end, the novel is seen principally through the perspective of the actions and thoughts of a series of gays. George Sawle brings Cecil home from Cambridge in 1913. Daphne, George's sixteen-year-old sister, is deeply impressionable. She sees Cecil as her first love and Cecil reciprocates even after George and he have made secret but messy love. Cecil is a poet -everyone agrees after he's dead that he was second rate at best. Before he leaves George's and Daphne's home, he scribbles down the first draft of a poem about it, "Two Acres." After Cecil dies (valiantly) in the War, the poem becomes a national favorite. From that point on, the book is about various attempts to retrieve Cecil's muddied past. Everyone has an interest in it: his belligerent, resentful brother, Dudley; Daphne, who in her mid and late life is so constantly muddled with alcohol that she can't remember what happens on any day from mid-afternoon on, and who ties to paper over the truth about her relationship with Cecil; and younger men, prominent among whom is a thrusting would-be biographer, Paul Bryant. Paul eventually publishes a tell-all biography of Cecil that still leaves the truth up in the air. At the very end, almost 550 pages into a 560-page novel, Rob, a young, gay bookseller, has the chance to uncover missing letters that may spell out what happened among these sexually charged young men and women eighty years before but in the end, he finds nothing. There the novel ends, unresolved. I've said how much I admire the novel but let me make it clear that for four hundred pages of it, I found it hard to continue reading. Part of that was my problem --I should have but didn't read; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: There But For The: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Ali Smith Page; Review: This is a most unconventionally structured novel. There But For The entices the reader with parallel narratives. They converge at points but just as often they diverge, and they are told by four quite different parties who only tangentially connect. (Jennifer Egan does something similar in her excellent Visit from the Goon Squad [2010].) The glue binding the narratives together is the odd behavior of a young man, Miles Garth. Who, invited to a dinner party almost by chance, leaves the table in mid-meal, goes upstairs and locks himself in a room. He refuses to leave the room for weeks on end. The party's hostess, who wants him out, finds Anna Hardie's name and phone number on a cell phone he had left behind at the table. She calls Anna but the woman hasn't been in touch with Miles for over twenty years: as teenagers, they'd gone on an international tour together but she hasn't seen or corresponded with him since then. Mark Palmer is gay and in his sixties. He is at the dinner party because he knows the host. On a whim that afternoon, he asked Miles to accompany him but he'd just met Miles that very same day. May Young is old old old, in her eighties, and marooned in a hospital bed. She's stopped talking completely --she doesn't want to give anyone ammunition to justify moving her to a nursing home. Her connection to Miles is tenuous: Miles was friends with her young daughter who died when she was sixteen. Miles keeps turning up on May's doorstep on the anniversary of her daughter's death, but she doesn't want to see him; it just reopens old wounds. And Brooke, who is ten, sits by May's bedside one day because Miles had passed a note under the door of his room asking Brooke to find her and visit her. The four protagonists' narratives follow their own separate trajectories, converging around Miles at different points and then moving on to other moments in the characters' lives. There is a denouement at the end of the book -and it is almost magically lovely -but there is no great moment in the book when all four narratives fold into a common finish. Ms. Smith has crafted radically different voices for the four narrators. The strongest are those of May, the old lady, and Brooke, the precociously verbal young child. Each talks and thinks inside his or her own persona, and the personalities thus created and the voices in which they speak are the greatest discovery in this novel. It's the way the stories are told in this book that makes it exceptional, more than the stories being told.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST; Author: Visit Amazon's Iain Pears Page; Review: What a phenomenal book! I picked up Fingerpost on a whim. I had reviewed Pears's later book, Stone's Fall (2009), a novel which I liked quite a bit but the NY Times reviewer much less so. I had resisted Fingerpost when I fist saw it -thick, crime novel set several centuries back in time. It reminded me too much of The Name of the Rose, a novel I found hard to stomach (Agatha Christie in the Middle Ages). But I'd been impressed, in Stone's Fall, by Pears's ability to meld past history and criminal intent in a compelling puzzle mystery. Fingerpost is another animal altogether. Where Stone's Fall had flaws, Fingerpost has almost none. What an interesting book! It's a murder mystery set in England in 1663, a time when Charles II's reign was still at risk from enthusiasts on both sides. An Oxford don dies of poison. Who killed him and why? A young woman, Sarah Blundy, is accused and sentenced to death by hanging. But did she do it? And if not, why did she confess to the crime? The story is told in four consecutive narratives, each unveiling new complexities as they cycle through the same facts. Fist is Sr. Cola, a Venetian merchant. Second, Jack Prestcott, penurious son of a disgraced royalist, later accused of treason. The third is Dr. Wallis, an Oxford don, cold as ice, who sees false behavior and sedition on every side. Last is the antiquary Anthony Wood, the only one of the four who laments his lies and tries to see through to the truth. The story is not even as it is told. It's hard to maintain narrative tension across four consecutive narratives of the same deeds and characters and across 691 pages. Signore Cola's narrative is compelling. Prestcott's sags a bit and then rebounds as you realize he's insane, utterly over the moon with his morbid suspicions. Wallis's narrative is the slowest to get through -you've read the same narrative twice already, and though Wallis's take on virtually everything is different, the basic facts are not. Then comes the final telling -Wood's--and everything is transformed. This is a very good puzzle mystery, which is also a wonderful novel of character, and elegantly -elegantly!--written. I didn't think I would enjoy it so much but I did.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 420 Characters; Author: Visit Amazon's Lou Beach Page; Review: The reader will either like this book quite a bit or not like it at all. There's no inbetween in it. This is the first book of prose for Beach, who is best known for his illustrations: he has designed album covers for the Neville Brothers, Weather Report, etc., and his illustrations have appeared in Wired, The New Yorker Harper's, The New York Review of Books, and Time. (All this you can discover by reading the book jacket.) These surreal semi-stories first appeared as status updates on a large social network, I assume Facebook, where an entry is limited to 420 characters, including spaces and punctuation. The individual stories -they are stories, however disjointed in logic they appear-- seem nonsensical or vapid depending on how you judge them. In tone and approach, they remind one of John Lennon's 1965 collection of writings and drawings, A Spaniard in the Works. There is an entry near the end of the book that captures the mood of these entries at their best. Like all the rest, it has no title. It just starts. HE SITS IN THE SUN rearranging the past, and tries to keep warm. He knows words, says them, but has forgotten their meaning. They hang all about, sparkling, just out of reach, the crystals on a chandelier he can't light. His memory rings like a wind chime, sounding clear and bright, then dwindles to random jingles and clinks. Neither prose nor poem, this and other entries attempt to exploit the new resource made available to us by vehicles like Facebook and Twitter. I think Beach succeeds, but this book is not everybody's cup of tea. Oh! There are several black and white illustrations in this book which are killers. They're really good, like Max Ernst updated to today.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Dark at the End (Repairman Jack); Author: Visit Amazon's F. Paul Wilson Page; Review: "Don't you feel it's all unraveling?" says Jack's girlfriend Gia to him. "What makes you think it was ever truly raveled?" says Jack back to her. The great thing about a Repairman Jack novel -this is the fifteenth in the series, plus three more have been written about Jack and his friends as teenagers-- is that something is always happening in them. No matter how bad the situation is at the start, you know it'll get worse twenty pages in and worse still in another forty pages, and so on all the way to the end, where the crisis will be resolved but only temporarily and probably not for long. It's been a great run, these tales of an ordinary but extremely competent man (Repairman Jack -he doesn't advertise but if you get his name and call him, he will solve problems for you) who is engaged in a running battle against the unbeatable forces of Evil, personified in the One (it's dangerous to say his real name out loud), the superpowerful representative on earth of the Other. Who is the Other? One of two cosmic entities who play games with worlds like ours. Neither entity cares about us earthlings but the Other feeds off of our pain. The Other's plans for earth, if its agent wins, are horrific, so Jack has to fight the agent. In former times, another agent, Glaecken, stood against the One, but he has lost his immortal status and now is aging, soon to die. His heir is Jack. Everyone who's read any of these addictive novels knows that Jack is supercool, a near nebbish who metamorphosizes into a high voltage action hero when the stakes are high enough. Since youth, he's kept below society's radar screen --no Social Security ID or credit cards, doesn't pay income tax. The government doesn't even know he exists. It's gotten harder to keep anonymous in an age where any building or street corner may have a security camera mounted on the ceiling somewhere and people take pictures with cell phones and immediately upload them onto the Internet, but so far Jack's managed it. Now it's time. The final battle between Jack and his adversary is here. Jack has allies, picked up at various points in the narrative across the previous fourteen books, but the forces of the One seriously over-man him still. So what happens when you get to the fifteenth book in a series, all about the same subject? There's a lot of baggage to dispense with: references to past novels abound in this book and plots intertwine, crossing the boundary lines from one book to the next. How will Jack, who is only mortal, earth-bound, deal with the awesome bad guys, one of them (the One) immortal by any ordinary standard (he can recuperate from almost anything short of a bomb blast), who are lined up against him and working feverishly to wipe out Earth. Judgment Day is here. I won't tell you what happens. Read the book. It's messy -mostly because overcrowded with so many characters and; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Easy Money; Author: Visit Amazon's Jens Lapidus Page; Review: If I may be permitted to invent a word, this is less a policier -a police procedural --than it is a villainier, the same process as seen from the side of the bad guys. While there is a police action in process throughout this crime thriller, it's the villains who get the lion's share of the attention. In successive chapters -1, 2, 3, over again and again up to the end of the book, four hundred eighty pages in--we follow inside the heads of three very different thugs. JW doesn't see himself as a crook at all. He's in college -been making near straight As but his grades start slipping as the narrative proceeds. JW envies the life of his privileged friends; he wants to be rich too. In the meantime, he drives a gypsy cab at night to earn the money he throws away on designer clothing and nights partying at the most chi chi of clubs. When he's offered the chance to get into the C (cocaine) game, he takes it -the profits are enormous. Jorge is originally from Venezuela. A low echelon drug dealer, he was abandoned by his bosses when the police nabbed him. He escapes from prison and all he wants is revenge, plus more money of course. Mrado is the Number Two Man in Stockholm's Yugoslavian Mafia. He bears a grudge against his boss Rado: the profits he earns with his hard work seem to flow heavily to Rado and not at all to him. The cocaine business -organized crime in Stockholm in general- is getting riskier all the time. The police have set up a special operation, Project Nova, to coordinate efforts to bring the criminals down. Soon, Jorge, Mrado and JW are on a collision course with each other as well as with the police. Their life is dangerous and dirty and they can't trust anyone. The story, eloquently translated by Astri von Arbin Ahlander, unfolds in rapid-fire sequence. The prose is muscular, clipped, electric, strongly reminiscent of James Ellroy's no-holds-barred style in his American thrillers. There are no good guys in this high-tension novel. The real question is: will anyone at all make it through unscathed?; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic; Author: Visit Amazon's Tom Holland Page; Review: The brothers Gracchus, Sulla and Marius, Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, Brutus and Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, Cato and Cicero, with side bars for Spartacus, Cinna and Mithridates- they're all here in this short, exceptionally well presented history of Rome from the late days of the Republic through the establishment of Empire by Caesar Augustus. En route through this complicated and fascinating history Holland encapsulates revelatory insights on a variety of facets of Roman life and attitudes -the innate conservatism and pragmatism of Roman citizens toward their polis, Roman views on infancy and childhood and thus on childrearing, the predominance of ambition in shaping the way Roman makers and shakers ruled, the vagaries of the Roman courts, the problems in military recruitment that laid the ground for Sulla's and then Caesar's success. These insights are more than sidebars to Holland's central narrative. (1) They make clear to the reader how different civic and social values were in those far-gone times. (2) They help to explain how and why the Republic fell after five hundred years of continuous success. This book was selected by the London Times as one of the Top Five History Books of the Year and by the Guardian as one of its Books of the Year. It is exemplary popular history, written for the lay reader who wants important events concisely and accurately explained.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin; Author: Visit Amazon's Timothy Snyder Page; Review: "Each of the living bore a name." If there is a theme to this admirable book, that's it. "Each of the living bore a name." That's how Yale history professor Timothy Snyder starts his concluding chapter: "Conclusion: Humanity." Then he names a few: a toddler who imagined he saw wheat in the fields before he died; a Polish Jew who foresaw that he would only be reunited with his beloved wife "under the ground"; an eleven-year-old Russian girl who kept a diary as she starved to death in a besieged Leningrad in 1941; a twelve-year-old Jewish girl, Junita Vishniatskaia, who wrote to her father in Belarus in 1942 and told him about the death pits where Junita and her mother would soon be killed together. " `Farewell forever' was the last line of her last letter to him. `I kiss you, I kiss you.' " I'd never come across professor Snyder's work until I read, for review, his collaborative conversation with Tony Judt, one of my favorite contemporary historians, now, alas, dead, in Thinking the Twentieth Century (due out in February, 2012). I was intrigued by Snyder's comments in that book, by a perspective on twentieth century European history that leaned much more on what had occurred in eastern Europe than the westernized history I'd absorbed in graduate school. Judt obviously admired Snyder's book. I thought, why not?, let's read it. I'm glad I did. Bloodlands isn't easy to read. It talks of horrific deeds, horrible people. But the picture it paints differs from the picture of the Holocaust I learned, both by predating the killing and by moving the largest portion of it eastward. We think we know what happened to the victims in the Second World War but most of our knowledge, Snyder emphasizes, comes from Americans' experience of the western rim of the National Socialist world. There is little awareness of what took place in the true killing grounds of the 1930s and 40s, the zone between Germany and Russia -the Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, etc.- where fourteen million people died as first the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again, and then their puppet states, swept over the area, killing or displacing people for no other reason than that they belonged to the wrong ethnic group. Snyder is uniquely qualified to write this history. There is first of all the breadth and depth of his research: he has read widely in ten languages: German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, French and English. There is also the exemplary clarity of the narrative: a tangled and complicated history, with many parties, has been presented in linear order. Furthermore, Snyder discusses fully both the ideological underpinnings that drove otherwise sane human beings to perform unspeakable deeds and the muddled actions that resulted as they attempted to bring to life despicable beliefs. A final virtue is passion. Snyder narrates the facts neutrally as a good historian should but his indignation breaks through the surface time and again, redeeming the surface dispassion of a horrific narrative. Books like this redeem history; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Mind's Eye; Author: Visit Amazon's Oliver Sacks Page; Review: Oliver Sacks observes like a scientist, thinks like a philosopher, feels like a human being, and writes like an angel. In this collection of essays, parts of which appeared in The New Yorker, he discourses on a number of acute visual disorders. He discusses in succession: posterior cortical atrophy, producing inability to read and difficulty in identifying objects and mapping one's path from one place to the next ("Sight Reading"); aphasia, loss of speech ("Recalled to Life"); alexia, loss of the ability to read ("A Man of Letters"); prosopagnosia, or face-blindness and the accompanying topographical agnosia, navigational difficulties ("Face-Blind"); monocular vision ("Stereo Sue"); blindness ("The Mind's Eye"); and a long essay, partly extracted from Dr. Sacks's personal journal, of his own travails fighting a melanoma that lodged over the cap of the optic nerve in his dominant -i.e., his right- eye "("Persistence of Vision"). Throughout, Sacks's signal virtues as an essayist of uncommon grace and clarity are evident. One of the pleasures in reading Sacks is that while he thinks and proceeds like a scientist -in the final chapter, for instance, he asks: "To what extent are we the authors, the creators, of our own experiences? ... What happens when the visual cortex is no longer limited or constrained by any visual input [i.e., when we become or are born blind]")-- he always puts the human face forward. He writes case studies that evolve into discussions of science and fold back into the patients' human reactions. Another virtue of his studies is that they show how resilient we are as creatures. Wounded, even ravaged, by trauma -a stroke, a cancer--we bounce back, find alternative ways to cope, as does the sixtyish amateur painter who suffers a life-threatening stroke that leaves her paralyzed on one side of her body and no longer to produce any words. Over time, she becomes a master at emotive communication, using her glances and gestures to communicate feelings and desires. She also, in her daughters' judgment, becomes a nicer person, less driven, loved by all the people with whom she interacts, and happy at last in the bosom of her extended family at home and in the care facility. In "Stereo Sue," a woman is operated on as an adult to correct an earlier operation on her wall eyes, and for the first time, is capable of seeing a three-dimensional world in place of flat one. But the scientific literature of the day says that a child loses the capacity to see in stereo if it isn't exercised by the time the child is two and this woman is well into her forties. Nonetheless, she engages in daily exercises to develop her vision and soon, she is seeing in stereo -at, a little bit and momentarily, later more fully, to the point where now she revels in the three-dimensional experiencing of snow flakes falling around her. All told, Dr. Sacks has written another outstanding book. Why should I be surprised? I've read all of his books except for his memoir of childhood, Uncle Tungsten. (I only read half; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Invisible Ones; Author: Visit Amazon's Stef Penney Page; Review: "It feels like two different world, Gypsy and gorjio living side by side but not face to face." That's Ray's observation: he's a private eye who's been hired to find a missing woman, a Gypsy, and all he finds is one dead end after another. The gorgios [non-Gypsies] he talks to don't even notice the Gypsies who live next to them and then move on to another site, perpetual itinerants, and the Gypsies stay distant from non-Gypsies because they don't trust or understand them. Ray's half-Gypsy himself, which is why he was offered the job. The Gypsy father of the missing woman doesn't trust non-Gypsies. Besides, he knows that other Gypsies won't talk to a P.I. who isn't a Gypsy himself. The woman has been missing for seven years but her father is just getting around to worrying about her. No one else Ray talks to seems to think anything untoward happened. Then Ray winds up in a hospital with a major stroke, memory loss, paralysis and the works. Someone has poisoned him but Ray can't remember who did it, much less why it happened. This intriguing novel pursues its narrative forwards (Ray after the stroke) and backwards (what happened beforehand), using two narrators, Ray himself and J.J., a young Gypsy boy who is the nephew of the missing woman's husband. Ray and J.J. both are appealing narrators and they offer differing perspectives on the clash of worlds, Gypsy and gorjio. J.J. for instance cannot imagine living in a house as opposed to a trailer and Ray has lived in houses all his life. It's mokady (unclean) for a Gypsy to have a toilet inside the house and thus unthinkable. Above all, there is the Gypsies' secretiveness, honed on countless slights from the gorjio world. It makes Ray's progress difficult. The virtues in this novel are substantial: its picture of Gypsy life, similar to the life of the rest of us in some ways but in others, irretrievably alien; the author's sympathetic portrayal of Ray and J.J.; the slow unraveling of an intriguing mystery; the appealing kind-of-a-love story. On the other side, the novel has substantial flaws. Ray has a back history which explains his melancholy but it's formulaic, a case of a little too much and a little too obvious. The solution to the case is too extravagant, not quite believable. But this is a book worth reading. For three quarters of the book, the mystery works. Throughout the book, the human relations do. And the picture painted of modern day Gypsy life in rural England is fascinating.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Raylan: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Elmore Leonard Page; Review: Leonard may not be the best writer of fiction alive today -he can't be while Alice Munro and William Trevor are still alive--but he wins hands down the title of best writer of escapist fiction. What is his formula? Take a handful of really Bad Guys --Dangerous Men--some cons and some killers. Throw them together and watch what happens. Leonard is one of the best at scripting action, probably the result of all the movie scripts he's turned out over more than half a century of writing. There is no waste verbiage and he seems almost laconic at times in the sparseness of the prose with which he describes seriously heavy action taking place. He's the best in the business at writing dialogue, the undisputed master of the way Bad Guys converse with each other. At times these guys talk hard, other times loopy, but it always seems right when Leonard writes it. Leonard's novels tend to be episodic -one plot segues into another, on and on--and Raylan is no exception. The story starts off headed one way and then it veers off in another. But everything is tied up tidily by the end and it all makes sense together. This is one of Leonard's better novels, detailing the travails of U. S. deputy marshal Raylan Givens, a homegrown boy from the mine fields of Kentucky who now dispenses federal justice there. It starts with a drug bust. Raylan and his associates break down the door to a motel room in an attempt to nail a mid-level dealer in a drug deal. But the drugs are gone by the time they get there. All that's left is the dealer, who's been dumped half-conscious into the bathtub with ice water around him. He's leaking blood from where his kidneys have been cut out. It looks like someone has graduated from marijuana to bootleg body parts, and Raylan's out to get whoever it is. Adventures follow in rapid succession. Each is wilder than the one previous, culminating in Raylan's relationship with Carol Conlan, VP for a mining company. Raylan and Carol both had fathers who worked in the mines. Raylan's still on the side of the miners in their ongoing dispute with the company although there's not much he can do to help --his job is to enforce the law irrespective of what he feels. Carol went to college and then law school and then joined the company. She's its toughest and most able VP and she's back in Harlan County to screw the miners once again, all for the company's profit margin. Raylan and Carol are both tough. The difference is that Carol is constantly going out of her way to let people know she's tough and Raylan doesn't have to do a thing. People know he's tough anyway, all the way down. There are enough bad guys in this book for three thrillers, including two killers out for Raylan's scalp, and the action is non-stop. Leonard's written a lot of good ones but this is one of the best, in my judgment.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mr. Kill (A Sergeants Sueo and Bascom Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Martin Limon Page; Review: This is the seventh book in Limon's series of mystery thrillers featuring Sergeants George Sueno and Ernie Bascom, who are U.S. Army investigators in Korea in the late 1970s. Like the others, it's excellent. Mr. Kill is a classic police procedural. The detectives -George and Ernie and the Korean detective called "Mr. Kill"--are faced with an urgent problem: they must find the American soldier who raped a Korean mother on a crowded train to Seoul before the perpetrator commits more outrages. Neither Sueno nor Bascom is a Sherlock Holmes so they pursue first one false lead and then another, wasting time while the unidentified criminal commits other crimes and public outrage builds. As good as the detective elements in this book are, though, and it's quite satisfying as a straight detective novel, the novel is even more engrossing for the picture it paints of Korean society and the complicated love-hate relationships between Korean nationals and their American "protectors." It also has sly things to say about military thinking -not the high level of strategy and policy, but the day to day interactions of grunts, non-coms and officers in a rule-bound, rigidly hierarchal organization that is almost paranoid in its desire to avoid blame for the actions of its most aberrant members. Limon was in the U.S. Army for twenty years and spent ten of them in Korea. He clearly knows both his army and the country he was stationed in. There are no negatives to this much above average detective novel. Limon writes exceedingly well. He plots flow and while a lot happens in them, it all seems believable. George Sueno and Ernie Bascom are a great team. The local color (both Army and Korean) is a definite plus. If you haven't read one of Limon's series, this is a good place to start. If you have, you'll want to read this book too. They're addictive.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Forever War; Author: Visit Amazon's Dexter Filkins Page; Review: "We Iraqis," says an Iraqi woman, "We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom." That, in short, is the history of the war to liberate Iraq in the years 2003-2006 as recorded in this remarkable book by New York Times reporter Filkins. Filkins has not attempted to write straightforward chronological history. Rather, he has reworked his journal entries, recorded while he was on the ground there with the troops, into a picture of how Hell developed out of our country's misguided intentions -what was meant to be a liberation quickly became a nightmare, as we were dragged into a war we could not win. From the start, the war turned sour as Iraqis increasingly came to resent the foreign invaders whose presence had been forced on them. The US came with soldiers and diplomats but no one to rebuild a fractured society and polity. It wasn't the kind of war soldiers knew how to win. Soon we weren't winning it in any significant way -our contained victories evaporated as soon as our attention was directed elsewhere. Fanatically anti-American militias multiplied. The killings and kidnappings multiplied. No Iraqi escaped involvement, if only as a victim. "[By 2006,] in places like Dora, Gazaliya and Sadiya, the insurgents had taken to killing the garbagemen. It seemed strange at first that they would do that, kill a man who collected the trash. Then they started killing the bakers. In those places, naturally enough, the garbage piled up in the streets, heaps of it, mountains of it, and there wasn't any bread. Then they started killing the teachers, and the teachers stopped going to the schools. And the children stopped going, of course. So: no bread and no schools and mountains of trash. Ingenious, I guess, if you wanted to stop the functioning of a neighborhood." This is a very human book. Its pages are filled with descriptions of people and conversations with them -young American soldiers, their commanders, Iraqi rebels, allies and enemies, the many who died or were left wounded. The vignettes make concrete what went on, what our soldiers and the Iraqis experienced. One instance: a troop of young jarheads -U.S. Marines-- hunkers down inside Baghdad's Green Zone, unable to go out on patrol in their battle armor until nighttime because it's 120 F outside during the day. While they wait, they watch the television, which is "tuned to a station ... showing music videos. We watched Depeche Mode sing "John the Revelator." The video showed President Bush speaking about Iraq and each time he did a graphic flashed across the screen that said, "Lie, Lie, Lie."" This book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was selected as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Boston Globe and Time magazine. A few years later, Filkins won a Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting on Pakistan and Afghanistan. I know of no war book like this one. It's journalistic, but it's not reporting, at least not as; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Kraken; Author: China Mieville; Review: We are not short of good fantasy writers nowadays, but even among the best, China Mieville stands out -for his strength as a storyteller, his use of words, and -never more than in this bizarre comedy-drama--his skewed sense of what's funny. Kraken starts with the theft of a giant squid, which has disappeared along with the vat it's been preserved in from the research wing of London's Museum of Natural History. Curator Billy Harrow prepared the dead animal initially and it's Billy who discovers the theft. Billy doesn't have a clue what's going on, but soon he is being investigated by members of an obscure unit of the London police, the FSRC (Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit). They suspect that Billy knows something but doesn't yet know what. When Billy returns to work, he finds a man's dead body stuffed in a glass container: the container is smaller than the body is. No one has a clue what is happening but the FSRC suspects why: there's been a run on apocalypse by the sects. "It`s a buyer's market in apocalypse," the head of the unit tells Billy, "What's hot in heresy's Armageddon." Events run speedily downhill. An incredibly creepy pair of villains appears, Goss and Subby, who work for Tattoo, a master criminal who's doesn't have a body. He's just a tattoo of a man's face on the back of another man who's been coerced to carry him. Goss and Subby pressure Billy. When Billy's friend Leon protests, Goss takes a deep breath and swallows him in and Leon's gone for good. Billy escapes from Goss and Subby but where can he go in a world where nothing is quite what it seems and the warring parties possess arcane powers? One adventure follows another, each wilder and slightly more bizarre than the last. (At one point, Billy talks the sea into spying for him. The book comes together in an enjoyable but slapdash ending. I can think of only one other book I know that exhibits the same sensibility as Mieville's --G. K. Chesterton's classic spy story, The Man Who Was Thursday, which was published a hundred and two years before Kraken. The stories the authors tell are worlds apart but there is a commonality of tone and theme that transcends the differences. To start with, both books deal with gods, real or not, who are indifferent to us. One worships them but doesn't implore them - pray to but not for. They don't care about us. Any involvement on their part is the result of whim, not compassion. Then there is the utter strangeness of the quests in these two books. Both protagonists -the anti-anarchist secret policeman Gabriel Syme in Thursday, Billy Harrow in Kraken--uncover one surprise and then another. At each step, reality is rewritten, and then another enigma discovered, waiting to be deciphered in its turn, and it too opens a new reality. Reality -or the meaning of it--subtly shifts time and again, all the way to the end of the book. Mieville's Kraken isn't as tidily written as; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Nathan Englander Page; Review: If you read a lot of short fiction, you'll recognize the reference in Englander's title. It refers back to the title of a classic collection of short fiction by poet-writer Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, published in 1981. Sure! Maybe it's not deliberate but I think it is. And though Carver's and Englander's sensibilities are widely divergent, there is an underlying similarity in approach to writing that unites the two. Englander is witty, ironic and not averse to experimenting with form, where Carver wrote unrelievedly naturalistic prose whose effect was to flatten expressed feelings. Carver's stories are prose poems: they're about feelings suppressed and lives lived wrongly. Englander's stories span a broader spectrum, broad enough that trying to capture it all under one rubric is futile. But both writers eschew description in favor of unstated emotion. In particular, they don't often use adjectives to define and qualify characters, places and scenes. Both men build effect instead from what's said or (more) often not said by the characters in their stories. Some of the stories in this collection are funny, some sober, but all of them contain a stinger buried somewhere in the narrative that turns the comic into edgy and then dark. That's true in the title story, which describes the meeting of a very modern, very secular American Jewish couple with a Hassidic couple visiting from Israel. The wives had gone to a Jewish high school together years before. (The Hassidic wife hadn't been Hassidic then.) For most of the story it seems nothing more than a sly, occasionally belly laugh comical, commentary on cultural dissonance. On the very last page of the story, it changes: one final observation makes the story about feelings much more basic than culture differences. Every story carries a jolt but the way it's packaged and delivered varies. "Sister Hills" tracks the lives of neighboring women on the Israeli frontier; it is unrelievedly dark and its ending outright savage. "Peep Show" is surreal and comic, but underneath the surreal humor, it's about the dislocation involved in abandoning one's heritage in order to fit in better in a secular (non-Jewish) world. It's a very funny story but even humor makes you think in Englander's stories. There's a lovely story -again with dark tones--about two elderly Israelis who have gone through every war from the Big One on. ("Free Fruit for Young Widows"). There's a story about old people at a summer day camp who decide one of the men attending the camp used to work in a Nazi prison. The story is well told but overly obvious compared to the subtle stories that make up most of the collection. ("Camp Sundown") There is an outstanding story entitled "Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother's Side" which is really about how little the narrator knew and how rootless the lack of this knowledge has left him. The story is comparatively modern in form and completely successful, very moving. "The Reader" doesn't completely work -why was it necessary to depersonalize "Author"; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Poison Flower: A Jane Whitefield Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Perry Page; Review: Thomas Perry is one of our best mystery thriller writers as well as one of the more prolific. This is his twentieth novel. Eleven of them are chase novels, a subgenre at which Perry is exceptionally proficient. Four feature a contract killer, "the Butcher's Boy", who is fighting to preserve his anonymity and his life after leaving the business for a stab at respectability. Seven feature Jane Whitfield, whose profession is helping people disappear. Jane's ancestors are Seneca and she draws on Seneca lore to help people disappear who are threatened by bad people who cannot otherwise be stopped from doing harm to them. Perry is a master of the genre. He plots efficiently, never overwrites and the tension never flags. He creates truly BAD, creepy villains. This, the seventh novel featuring Jane Whitfield, is a good one. Like the Butcher's Boy, Jane too has tried to slip back into normal life as the wife of a successful doctor who loves her deeply. But the past keeps slipping back in. In this novel, it causes her serious grief: she orchestrates the escape of a man who has been framed for the murder of his wife but almost at once, she is kidnapped by bad guys who work for the man what framed him. She is shot and tortured, and after the men discover who she is, they put her up for auction. The monsters (all men) whom Jane has outwitted gather to buy her so they can execute their revenge. The pattern is the same in all of Perry's chase novels, whether the protagonist is a reformed hit man or a professional escape artist like Jane. Jane narrowly eludes pursuit but is pursued without pause until finally she turns and pursues -and defeats--her nemesis. It is a testament to Perry's skill as a writer that the chase never grows stale, and Jane continues to grow and deepen as a very human, very strong and admirable protagonist. At one point in the story, her husband, who would like her to give up putting herself at risk by what she does, asks her why she doesn't stop. I thought I could, she says, "[b]ut then one day somebody comes to your door and says, `My brother, who is innocent, is about to be murdered in prison.' You have only two choices [then]. All you can be is the person who decided to keep him alive, or the person who decided not to. For the rest of your life, that's who you'll be. I decided I would be the one who did.'" That's why she does it and that's what makes her such an admirable action heroine. Another attraction of these admirable novels is following Jane as she teaches fugitives how to avoid recapture. "Create a new normal," she counsels them. "You can never go back to being the people you used to be, even for a minute, and you can never drop your guard." The technique by which one recreates oneself in order to elude pursuers is fascinating ---and jolting, because the premise behind; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization; Author: Visit Amazon's Bryan Ward-Perkins Page; Review: Every once in a while, you come across a book on an obscure, or not terribly popular, topic but it's so good it deserves a wider reading audience. (The classic for me was R. W. Bulliett's The Camel and the Wheel, 1975.) This gem is one of them. It traces the chain of events, much of the evidence for which is obscure or missing, that culminated in the fifth century A.D. in the collapse of the western Roman empire and the rise of Germanic kingdoms that replaced it. All historians work from incomplete evidence. Conclusions are always up for revision. If you think the past yields nothing but facts, like schoolchildren typically do, you're in for a rude awakening. If there is one word to characterize the past, it's `elusive." The past is elusive, the more so the further back in time one goes. People of those times thought their own thoughts and pursued their own preoccupations and they weren't necessarily the same as the ones we have and follow. The radical incompleteness of the historical record -and the concomitant elusiveness of past values and meaning -- shapes the historian's trade. There are two touchstones in their business. The first is the evidence, what remains, written or otherwise, left behind by the past. The second is the interpretations of that evidence by prior scholars, not just historians but people working in ancillary fields like literature, anthropology, archaeology, etc. Historians write off other historian's views, accepting or rejecting them, modifying and expanding them in accord with their own reading of the evidence available when they are writing. Nowhere is this truism about the craft of history truer than in the study of ancient history. After a thousand and a half years, and there are holes in the evidence from which to draw conclusions. And since historians are human, they, like the rest of us, are influenced, sometimes without knowing it, by fashion and time. And that is precisely the merit of this sharpened dagger of a book: it takes to task current interpretations of the fall of the western Roman empire and tears them to shreds as reflecting today's fashions more than the hard evidence. It`s a book more about potsherds, farmhouses and churches, and signs of literacy than it is about the Grand Meaning of Rome's fall. In reaction to earlier views of Rome losing out to the barbarians (who, as our ancestors, we wish to see as at least somewhat civilized rather than out and out barbaric), most recent history has argued that rather than there having been a `fall,' the transition from Roman to Germanic rule was more or less peaceful. Besides, the Roman empire exploited its subjects mercilessly so post-Roman rule wasn't so bad by comparison. This landmine of a book shreds these views, showing that they respond more to current notions of who the Good Guys and the Bad were to any actual historical evidence. From the fifth century on, literacy declined dramatically though unevenly across regions, the sophisticated trade and manufacturing network of old Rome collapsed utterly; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hart Crane's Poetry: "Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio"; Author: Visit Amazon's John T. Irwin Page; Review: There is no question that this is a major, and probably revelatory, study of that most difficult twentieth-century American poet, Hart Crane. Irwin wrote his dissertation on Crane forty years ago and he has pursued his study of him ever since, both in articles and in classroom teaching. He clearly knows his subject and he is an energetic and lucid explainer of it. Which is good, because if any early twentieth century American poet is difficult to parse, it's Hart Crane. That's one of the virtues of this exceptional book: Irwin knows everyone Crane has read or cited in his deliberately literate and allusive poetry and he cites chapter and verse from line to line. This will probably be the definitive study of Crane's poetry for a while to come. Irwin claims that Crane's masterwork, the idyllic modernist poem The Bridge, is superior to T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. Not too shabby a claim! I would argue that Irwin makes a convincing case for his argument. Crane's dense, allusive, intensely literary poem attempts to unite past, present and future in American history, and addresses major, still unresolved issues in our history -namely, our exploitation of the land and of the original inhabitants, and the ways in which we have commercialized and thus abased basic issues of soul and heart in our modern age. Irwin's is a good book on a difficult, easily inaccessible topic, the poetry of our most ambitious and complicated poet. (Is Gertrude Stein a competitor? Not really.) Crane wanted to bring all of European literature, from Homer, Ovid, Virgil and Apuleius on, and all of the Roman and Greek myths, in line with modern life. The result is a poem where Pocahontas confronts Columbus and De Soto, Atlantis rises again, and a 1920s store clerk decides between sex with her boss and meeting her boyfriend after work and she goes for her boss. Think of an author that Crane might have read and Crane probably did allude to him (or her). There is no point in this magisterial volume when Irwin's arguments do not make sense. Crane was allusive: he borrowed and blended sources from across western literature to create a new vision of how the New World came to be and what it now was, warts and all. But at points (and here my training as a historian comes in to play) Irwin fudges the line between similarity of theme, content, or language and demonstrable proof that Crane deliberately appropriated specific images or topoi (themes) from something he'd read. There's no question that Irwin understands Crane's poetry but at times, he stretches the bounds of demonstrated causality more than I'm comfortable with as an proof-bound historian. The structure of this book is logical, the explication lucid and convincing. I appreciated the way the section headings laid out the argument to follow. The discussion of The Bridge starts with a lengthy discursus on perspective in western art, Spengler's theories on the same (which Crane read), a discussion of Plato's allegory of the cave and the particular nature of Platonic; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Half-Blood Blues: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Esi Edugyan Page; Review: I wish I liked this novel more but I don't. Edugyan is a talented writer as passages of the book illustrate clearly. The plot seems initially promising: a young jazz trumpeter, Hieronymus Falk, German mother and African father and thus persecuted in Hitler's Germany, is picked up by the S.S. in Paris shortly after France has fallen to the Huns. He disappears into a concentration camp and is presumed dead soon after the war ends. Flash forward 53 years. It is 1992. An independent filmmaker has put together a documentary film entitled "Half-Blood Blues," about Hiero and the mixed German-American jazz band he played in, the Hot Time Swingers. ("Half-Blood Blues" was the last record the Swingers, reduced to four players by, made in Paris before Hiero was picked up and incarcerated.) The story's narrator is Sid who played bass in the band and was with Hiero when the Germans arrested him. Sid and Chip, the band's pyrotechnic drummer, attend a Berlin movie festival as the filmmaker's guests, and the story takes off from there. Sid is the Iago of the story. He is jealous because the woman Sid loves dotes on Hiero and Sid knows he can never ever play anywhere near as well as Hiero does. Resentment leads Sid to one very bad act, but it's not the one the filmmaker thinks Sid did. The narrator, Sid, talks in a dialect close to an American Black of his era but to my ears, not quite on the mark. More seriously, Sid struck me as a stock figure -he signals his actions too clearly, is a bit too predictable and ultimately, doesn't seem real. The drummer Chip has known Sid from childhood. He joined him in the Swingers and later he travels with Sid as Sid quests for atonement. The character of Chip is much better realized and more believable. Chip always wants to come out on top; he never turns down the opportunity to dig at his longtime friend's overstretched nerves with elfin malice. The other figures -Delilah Brown, longtime friend of Louis Armstrong and Sid's love interest; the other players in the band; the great jazz trumpeters Louis Armstrong and Bill Coleman, who also appear in the story-- aren't given enough space and presence to come to life. A mater of personal taste: for me, the passages describing music were consistently off base. I've listened to and read about jazz for 62 years and written occasional reviews of jazz recordings and books. Overly impressionistic writing about this wonderful music almost always misses the boat in my opinion. (I make an exception for Whitney Balliett's essays.) I found the descriptions of jazz music in this book almost embarrassing. In summary, the book had: an interesting premise but only one character fully fleshed and the others programmatic; a protagonist who didn't seem real enough and whose actions (save for one key surprise) seemed to me predictable; descriptions of the music that made me wince and a weak, only partly resolved ending.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Helsinki White (An Inspector Vaara Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's James Thompson Page; Review: Even in the world of Scandinavian crime thrillers, this book stands out for its dark view of the world of policemen and criminals. In 2010 Newsweek picked Finland as the best place in the world to live but the Finland described in this harsh, bleak policier is far from idyllic. Its politicians are uniformly corrupt. With porous frontiers, the trafficking in drugs and women is out of hand. Short on personnel and hampered by the laws, the police can't stop it. Unemployment is rampant and with it, hatred of the foreigners who have entered the country and compete with Finns for jobs. The fastest growing political party in Finland is the True Finns, who are campaigning on a platform of the deportation of non-natives. Behind them lurks the specter of a growing neo-Nazi fringe. Kari Vaala is the only policeman in this increasingly fractured country to have been shot twice in the line of duty. He is close to a national hero as a result. Now Kari is approached by the national chief of police: he wants Kari to head a covert black ops group. It will operate outside the law, robbing criminals and using their money and drugs to finance its further operations. Kari hesitates and the chief reminds him that he's not "some kind of a Good Samaritan in a white hat." He's "a rubber-hose cop, a thug and a killer... You'll do anything to get what you view as justice... You're frustrated because you can't make a difference... With our limited ... resources, we can't possibly make even a dent in the human slavery industry. Picture all those victims and how many ... you could save from abject misery." Kari gives in. He handpicks his team. One member is "a violent nutcase with an IQ of 172," the other an amiable giant of a sociopath. But for a year Kari has suffered terrible headaches. He finally goes in for an examination. The examination discloses a large, aggressive tumor which must be removed at once. The operation is a success but there is an unfortunate side effect: Kari is cancer-free but no longer feels anything inside. He's become a sociopath, maybe temporarily, maybe permanently. He tries to hide his lack of emotion from his wife and his partners in the black ops unit, but it becomes harder when he is called back to investigate two high profile cases: the torture death of an immigrant rights activist and a kidnapping case with racist overtones. Corruption surrounds and contaminates Kari. His boss makes him take a share of the money he has taken from the criminals because otherwise how can the powers that be (who also take a share) trust him? His team engages in one illegal activity after another -blackmail, robbery, threats, torture, killings. His wife is drinking more and more: he has to buy baby formula because her breast milk is contaminated with alcohol. By the time he solves the cases, the damage to his own life and hers may be irreparable. This is a very dark novel but also; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Keep This Quiet! My Relationship with Hunter S. Thompson, Milton Klonsky, and Jan Mensaert; Author: Visit Amazon's Margaret A. Harrell Page; Review: I approached this memoir hoping to like it. Hunter S. Thompson was a brilliant chronicler of his times and an interesting, unique man. He could be -often was-- difficult. He could be paranoid in his distrusts and rages, unwilling to concede to other parties on the things that mattered to him. Most importantly, though, what mattered to him was writing: he wanted to write about what he saw around him and inside him and he wanted to write it his own way. Both in his life and in his writings, Thompson was a fiercely independent man. The prospect of reading new, previously unpublished letters from Thompson excited me too. And I found appealing the whole idea of this book: Margaret Harrell goes to New York fresh out of college. She gets a job at Random House and ends up copy editor of Hunter S. Thompson's first book, Hell's Angels. Hunter even wanted to dedicate the paperback edition to her although it didn't happen. The memoir is the first part of Margaret's projected autobiography. It not only recounts her meeting, subsequent affair with and continuing correspondence with Thompson. The bulk of the book is about her relations with Thompson but she also describes also her friendship with poet Milton Klonsky (a writer so careful with words that he wrote significantly less than his friends hoped he would) and her on again off again involvement with Belgian `poete maudit' Jan Mensaert, whom she eventually married. The sections about Klonsky and Mensaert are thin- and here starts my problem with this book. The content is anemic throughout. New letters from Hunter don't shed new light. At times it's not clear why she includes some of the reminiscences, e.g. of the Chicano lawyer Oscar Acosta, the infamous "Dr. Gonzo" of Thompson's scarifying memoir, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The choice of Helen Titchen Beeth for the preface was unfortunate. (On her website, Beeth describes herself as an "imaginal cell ... bear[ing] witness to the power of the on-line sangha [a Buddhist term] to support and enhance personal evolution.") What are we to make of this comment of Beeth's, for instance? Does it help us to understand the book? "How could these three men be part of the same story, if not through their taste in a woman? In universal philosophical terms, they could be three male graces of the postmodern era: the triptych of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth. Milton representing goodness: mind, ethics; Jan beauty: the introspective, the aesthete; Hunter Truth..." Ah! The New Age! Harrell does it too. She describes her first meeting with Milton Klonsky: "I instantly recognized his presence, and without understanding what had happened, shot into a vibration, magnetized by his words and eyes. I felt something stronger that superseded any ability to feel outside it, huge, welling up, spreading like a widening full-circle ripple, which is what the present does when it incorporated larger amounts of time. [Italics hers.] I descended into a deep pool, a beautiful void or vortex. ... felt absorbed by the largeness, the impact of being; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Flame Alphabet; Author: Visit Amazon's Ben Marcus Page; Review: First it's just Jewish children. Their speech has become toxic to their parents. Then it's children's speech in general. Adults have no resistance to it. When they hear it, their faces harden, they have trouble swallowing, they wither away, bodies in rictus. Then it's speech in general, even written words. It destroys adults, anyone older than seventeen or so. Their bodies collapse on them in ugly, shameful ways. The narrator of this unusual novel -Sam--lives with a wife, Claire, and a teenaged daughter, Esther. Sam and Claire can no longer be around Esther because her talk is killing them slowly. Eventually, the government steps in: it establishes quarantine zones -the children inside, adults outside- and busses the adults to a secret research facility in Rochester, New York, where terrible experiments are conducted to reverse the new plague. Sam and Claire belong to a hidden Jewish sect whose members worship separately, not in congregation. Sam and Claire burrow into a ground hole in the middle of the woods and listen on a closed-circuit wire through an inflatable placenta-like sac called the `listener' to their rabbi's warnings: "Blessed are they who keep his testimonies quiet, who share them not even with themselves. ... How does a person cleanse his way? By saying nothing of his word." Ensconced in the Rochester institute, Sam works to find an alt alphabet with non-toxic letters, or even just one letter that is non-toxic. He uses materials as evanescent as smoke and folds and crinkles his invented letters in attempts to reduce their toxicity when read. Still, they destroy the poor innocents forced to read them in glass-encased isolation booths. Sam is coopted -forced to join-- into a minyan of listeners, ten members of his old sect--they are strangers to each other, and, of course, they never talk any more--in a last attempt to extract meaning from the ghost rabbi's indecipherable utterings. More happens in this strange novel than this but that's for the reader to find out, not me to tell. Besides, although the novel has a narrative line, looping back and forth but generally linear, plot isn't what this novel is about. It's about hallucination. Marcus knows how to write nightmares. That's what this book is -not a post-apocalyptic novel a la McCarthy's The Road but an extended dream, coupling logic and illogic like J. G. Ballard (Concrete Island, The Crystal World, etc.) and Franz Kafka (The Trial, "The Metamorphosis," etc.) did earlier in their remarkable writings about the collapse of meaning. As in Ballard's dreamlike novels, the narrator, Sam, is obsessionally rational in his response to the subversion of everything ordered and explainable in his world. It is best to read this novel as the acting out of some of our worst nightmares, fears and revulsions: parents are alienated from their children, their children reject them in turn, language is a form of attack, there are echoes of the shoah in the quarantining and experimentation of adults in the institute/concentration camp in Rochester, the afflictions that hit adults in response to children's speech resemble MS, Sam; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Inquisitor: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Mark Allen Smith Page; Review: Geiger (that's his only name, just "Geiger") is almost a simulacrum of a man, devoid of past, no connections beyond the man who books his jobs, no apparent emotions beyond his drive to know the truth when people try to hid it. Her has fallen into the perfect job for him, Information Retrieval. He tortures people -for the mob, for the government, it doesn't matter who the client is. Once he gets a Jones (the name he calls his packages), he persuades him to give up whatever it is he's hiding. Sure, Geiger tortures them, but he doesn't kill them and even in torturing them, he's ... economical in his use of violence. What happens to his packages afterwards isn't his business. Geiger has few rules but one of them is this: he doesn't torture children. So when his partner, Harry, unwittingly brings him a twelve-year-old boy to work on, Geiger turns on the boy's captor and runs off with the boy. Soon Geiger, Harry and the boy are all in flight, and the men who chase them will do anything to gain back the boy. As they flee, Geiger changes. He becomes more human, cares for the boy, takes aggressive action against their pursuers. In the process, we learn something of Geiger's past. Who would have thought you could empathize with a torturer? but Geiger is an intriguing creation, all too human as the novel progresses. By and large, this is a satisfactory first novel. Nothing deep, just good fun.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Shame and Necessity; Author: Bernard Williams; Review: The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus once wrote: "A man's character is his fate." (Ethos anthropoi daimon) This quotation could be the epigraph for this book of essays by the distinguished philosopher Bernard Williams, delivered as the fifty-seventh Sather Classical Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley in the spring of 1989. Williams's death in 2003 was much lamented in the profession for Williams had the happy and exceedingly rare ability to express the most complicated thoughts clearly, without unduly reducing them or ignoring possible objections to them in order to make them more easily intelligible. (His colleague at Oxford, Gilbert Ryle, expressed it this way. When you talk to Williams, he said, Williams "understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to the objections, before you've got the end of your sentence.") Williams was primus inter pares in the ability to express his views in a manner pleasing not only to fellow philosophers but to interested laymen. This is not to say that what he wrote was always easy to follow, but it was never harder to follow than the subject matter required for it to be a faithful recounting. Williams didn't shun complexity, which he found meaningful and beautiful. For Williams, complexity was a normal symptom of human living. Grace is not often a quality ascribed to serious philosophical writings, but it applies to Williams's best works, of which this is clearly one. Shame and Necessity is an eloquent, carefully argued defense of the view that the ancient Greeks, whatever their differences in viewpoint from the modern one, did espouse a coherent ethics and that this ethics still has meaning for us today. In the process, he discusses the anthropologists' distinction between shame societies (where individual behavior is motivated by considerations of what others will think of one's actions) and guilt societies (where individual behavior is motivated by a judging voice that is internalized) and rejects it as insufficiently subtle to explain the commonalities and differences between the classical conscience and the modern conscience. Using the evidence of Homer and the tragedians, he absolutely trashes the well known thesis of Bruno Snell (The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, 1946, trans. 1953) which argued that the Homeric Greeks had no concept of self and thus were not in the modern sense self-conscious at all. Many of the other classicists he discusses I've not read, so I can not comment on them, but he also takes to task Martha Nussbaum (The Fragility of Good: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986) and James M. Redfield's Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, 1975), not denying their contribution to the study of Greek ethical thought but by disagreeing with it at points, refining it. (Cf. Williams's short book, Moral Luck, 1981.) Kant, too, receives short shrift: Williams argues that his views distort our interpretation of Greek ethics by predetermining the categories by which we examine it. Of books; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Kaltenburg; Author: Visit Amazon's Marcel Beyer Page; Review: Kaltenburg, by the distinguished German poet and novelist Marcel Beyer (in 2011, the inaugural DAAD Chair in Contemporary Poetics at New York University), is a roman a clef of sorts of the life of Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz, the noted student of animal behavior. It is narrated by Hermann Funk. While a child, he meets Kaltenburg, already famous, in Posen. Hermann's father, a botanist, and Kaltenburg are friends but then, in 1943 --or was it 1944?-- there is a rift and the name of Kaltenburg is never mentioned again in his patents' household. In February 1945, Hermann's family flees to Dresden. Overnight, Hermann's old life is irrevocably lost. There is a firebombing and no trace remains of either parent. Hermann is an orphan. He is taken in by another family, but never accepts them or their children. After the war, Hermann finds his way to the Dresden Institute, newly established by Kaltenburg. The scientist takes him under his wing and there Hermann will remain until decades later, when Kaltenburg abandons Dresden for Leipzig and a newer and bigger institute. Until then, Hermann works with and for the older and much more famous scientist, and this book chronicles their relationship. It is a complicated relationship. It takes Hermann thirty years before he discovers the cause of the schism between his parents and Kaltenburg: his father had just found out that his friend had joined the Nazi party. Kaltenburg claims it was out of fear that he joined but his writings at the time were couched in terms that aped Nazi ideology. Then, too, there is a puzzling oversight in Kaltenburg's vita, published to disprove rumors, spread by a malicious rival of Kaltenburg's, that he conducted experiments on human beings during the War in a Russian POW hospital. Kaltenburg alleges that he wasn't in Posen at all in 1943 but Hermann remembers Kaltenburg's visits to his parents' house. It is a virtue of this extremely well written novel that it doesn't paint this tangled history in black and white. Kaltenburg is neither angel nor monster, but a complicated man trying to negotiate his way through the landmines of partisan politics in an age when fear -fear for one's freedom and one's life--was a legitimate response to the situations one found oneself in. (After the War, Kaltenburg writes a book that is highly criticized on the positive uses of fear in animals and human beings.) Hermann is an interesting creation. The past is no longer a safe place for him. (Nor was it, possibly, for any German of his generation.) He knows so little of his own past, and what he does know he may have made up or misunderstood. The past simply brings him grief -he has lost too much in it. His wife Klara is much the same. When guests reminisce about what it was like before Stalin's death in 1953 and soon after, Klara diverts the conversation to a discussion of Proust. All she `remembers' of that decade is the arrival of the first German translation of Proust and what she felt; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Diving Belles: And Other Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Lucy Wood Page; Review: In most of these fantastic yarns, there is a realistic core buried deep inside but you'll have to dig to find it. But that's the wrong game to play with these intriguing tales of ghosts and mermen, house spirits people and phantom wolves, spirits in the waves and what may be or may not turn out to be a giants' graveyard. Instead, let the prose carry you along, holding belief in suspension. If you do, you'll be hit by Wood's skill in navigating the demarcation line between reality and fantasy, mining both sides for mood. The best story is "Beachcombers." A young boy visits his ailing grandmother. She lives a fragile life in a cave just off the beach, refusing help from anyone. She tells her grandson about the buccas. "This is what he knew about buccas: you can't actually see them; you can only see what they do to other things. So if the sand is whirling around and the waves are white and choppy and your hair is whipped up and around then there is probably a bucca. And if the rain is pushed one way or the other, like curtains." Allusive rather than direct, with less overt use of fantasy than in some of the other stories, "Beachcombers" is a beauty. On the basis of this story alone, Wood has a future ahead of her as a writer. Another lovely story is the last one in the book, about a decaying storyteller who is losing his memory even as he tries to tell tales one last time. In another, a young woman drives to her ex-boyfriend's house to help him but wants to leave right away because she can feel herself turning into stone. It's not the first time this has happened to her and she knows she needs to prepare for her absence from human life. For --days? months?-- she will soon be a stone pillar, one in a circle of stone pillars poised on a hilltop looking out to the sea. Not all of the stories work as well as these four but all show clear marks of talent. The publicist on the book jacket compares the author to Angela Carter and Aimee Bender, two writers whom I admire a great deal. The comparison is right on. But Wood is more than a clone. She could be an original.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Release Me (The Stark Series #1); Author: Visit Amazon's J. Kenner Page; Review: LOVETT, Lyle. Release Me. UMG Recordings. (2012) LL, voc, acoust guit, comp; k.d. lang, Kat Edmondson, Keith Sewell, Luke Bulla, Ray Herndon, voc, fiddle, elect and slide guit, mandolin, p, b, dr, cello, horns & harmony voc. GRIFFITH, Nanci. Intersection. Hell No Records. (2012) NG, voc, acoust guit, comp; var. guit, mandolin, uke, banjo, organ, b, dr, choir, backing voc. It's a good year that has new albums by Texas artists Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. Both are mavericks of sorts. Their music is difficult to classify. Lovett `s negotiates country, blues, jazz and even a little r&b with no sense of strain or disconsonance -all these genres blend together in his songs, performances and albums to make one glorious deeply alive music. Griffith leans more to the country side, but she's folksier than mainstream country and western artists -a lot folksier, closer to, say, Cheryl Wheeler or Kay Campbell, though not really-- and has a fondness for music of the type she calls `folkabilly.' Her live album, Marquee, shows this side of her best, perhaps because she and her band respond to the audience's obvious enthusiasm for the music they're hearing. Listen especially to Griffith's "Listen to the Radio," "The Last Train Home," and her driving rendition of the Townes Van Zandt's kicker, "White Freight Liner (which Lovett plays on his current album). The Lovett album is one of his best. He wrote only two of the fourteen songs, but they're wonderful. "The Girl with the Holiday Smile" is one of Lovett's signature story songs, about meeting a prostitute who's always smiling, always promises a personal Christmas to her customers. "Night's Lullaby" is more subdued; it reminds me of my favorite song by him, "Closing Song," from his very first album as a solo performer, Lyle Lovett (1986). But Lovett has always been good at selecting the right songs by other people for him to sing or his group to play and here he sings songs that range from the traditional (the instrumental opener, "Garfield's Blackberry Blossom", "Release Me," "Keep It Clean," ""One Way Gal," and the Lutheran hymn "Keep Us Steadfast," lyrics by Martin Luther himself, that closes the album) to compositions by artists as varied as Frank Loesser ("Baby, It's Cold Outside" -a great duet with kittenish-voiced Kat Edmonson), Jesse Winchester, Chuck Berry ("Brown Eyed Handsome Man" -transmogrified from an r&b rocker to Texas urban blues), and, very best, Townes Van Zandt ("White Freightliner Blues"). Listeners may miss Lovett's Large Band, with its horn section and its African-American backup singer, but Lovett, always sensitive to the needs of the song he's singing, varies backgrounds on these songs. The pieces don't blend together, either because or mood or tempo or instrumental and vocal background (a problem with the Griffith album). Lovett is above all two things, a consummate storyteller -so many of his songs tell stories!--and a singularly singerly singer. On only one of these songs does Lovett's vocal not coax everything out of the song that it could. The traditional blues "Keep It Clean" is done too fast with; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Next Right Thing: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Dan Barden Page; Review: I picked up this novel on the basis of the advance notices. I felt if Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethen and George Pelecanos like it, it would probably be alright. I read a lot of mystery thrillers. Most, the good ones, quickly retreat into formula. That's what I expected would happen with this book. In short, I was going to read it but I wasn't all that excited about it. Boy, was I wrong! The Next Best Thing is unique and fresh. It`s not only a thriller but a portrait of a difficult man. In other words, it may be about crime and violence but it's definitely not formula fiction. It's a genuine novel about believable though extreme people. Alky Randy Chalmers has been on the wagon for eight years. He was kicked off the force for the use of excessive force while arrest a suspect (he almost beat a Mexican drug dealer to death). That turned out to be a blessing. It led him into Alcoholics Anonymous and he discovered a talent for home design that has paid off for him Big Time. He's a success now but his personal life is still a disaster: his wife hates him and wants to keep his daughter from him, his live-in girlfriend (also an alcoholic) is thinking of leaving, and he still can't control his temper. He hears that his best friend and AA mentor has been found dead of an overdose and he refuses to accept that it was an accident. Dry drunk and raging, he careens from place to place, low life to low life, trying to find out what really happened. If this is a detective story, then Randy is absolutely miserable at it. He couldn't detect his way out of a paper bag. He doesn't so much solve things in this book as create collisions, which eventually produce something like the truth. Most of the people in the book are drunks -some are reformed, some are not. Some of them are hiding things but by the end, everything is out there. As for Randy, his hold on sobriety is still tenuous but he's come to grips with some of his demons, though not all of them. There is a good deal of talk in the book about AA culture. It's all interesting. No one would want to be like Randy but he is a sympathetic character. You grow to care what happens to him. You root for him in his efforts to woo his daughter and applaud his mothering of two younger alcoholics, who carry very heavy baggage. Baggage! I guess that's what's prominent in this book. Everyone in it carries baggage. Figuring out what they're carrying is a step toward enlightenment and coincidentally, the solving of the mystery with which the story began. This is Barden's second novel and it's good.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Shout Her Lovely Name; Author: Visit Amazon's Natalie Serber Page; Review: Keep an eye out for Serber's fiction. It's sharp and amazingly mature for an author so young in her career. She can write! These stories are all about women -mostly about the complicated relationship that is acted out between mother and daughter. Think Alice Munro's stories of Flo and Rose in her 1979 collection, The Beggar Maid. But Serber's stories are more acerbic and reflect the zeitgeist of a different time and locale. The first story, "Shout Her Lovely Name," is a zinger: a mother finds it harder and harder to connect to her teenage daughter, who displays signs of incipient anorexia. The father refuses to see or do a thing about it. It's a story of recurrent anxiety: the mother fears she can no longer control or even influence her daughter, who seems on the path to disaster. The story is a bit abstract --you never learn the names of the mother, father or daughter and the story breaks off at points to insert lists, illustrations, and passages from a fairy tale- but the overall effect is realistic and deeply disturbing. The stories that follow detail the lives of another mother and daughter, Ruby and Nora. Ruby is still in college in "Ruby Jewel". She has come home to visit her alcoholic father and ineffectual mother. "Alone as She Felt All Day" and "Free to a Good Home" detail Ruby's pregnancy, which she hadn't planned on, and tell of the man who rabbits rather than be a father. The rest of the stories are about Ruby and Nora as Nora grows up. In the final story, "Rate My Life", Nora is a full grown woman; she wants to live her own life, make her own mistakes, not replicate her mother's, but she seems already headed close to where Ruby has ended up. The cumulative effect of the stories is chilling: Ruby can't stop intruding, Nora can't stop rebelling, but in the end, what difference does it make what either of them wants? The final story, "Developmental Blah Blah" is a killer. Cassie's life, at forty-seven, is at a dead end: there is no joy in her life any more. Her husband has come to seem a foreigner to her, her two children resident hostiles. And yet she loves all three of them -at least the children, probably the husband too. At one point in the story, Cassie is talking to her therapist. Her visit to him is the bright spot of her week. She sits on the couch and blurts out: "I want . . . to be less vivid." "Go on," he says. "I always have an agenda," she says, "Hold the kids to a standard that I know is best for them, be a good wife, love my husband." She starts to cry. "It sounds exhausting," he says. She nods. "I'm wondering why you feel you have to work so hard." Then she gets around to a concrete grievance. Her husband had brought home Chinese food for all of them. He'd remembered everybody's favorite dishes except hers. "He didn't; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Skios; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Frayn Page; Review: No writer alive does farce better than Michael Frayn. From his first novel, the Tin Men (1965), through the play Noises Off (1982) -one of the best farces written in the past century, through the more recent novel Headlong (1999), Frayn has proven himself a master of comic writing. (Anthony Burgess, no slouch at writing funny himself, called Frayn "the master of what is seriously funny.") Skios is another brainstorm from Frayn's seriously skewed comic head, a comedy of errors in which small misunderstandings multiply and build to a catastrophe so outrageously oversized that it's funny rather than tragic, laugh out loud funny. The framework for the story is classic: two people switch identities -the one on purpose, the other because he's left with no choice- at a high level international seminar. The one man, Oliver, is, if not a con man, then someone notoriously loose with the truth. Always willing to take on a new, potentially more interesting role in life, Oliver takes advantage of a mistake at the airport to assume the persona of Dr. Norman Wilfred, the eminent authority on the scientific organization of science who is to deliver the keynote address at the Fred Toppler Foundation's (what a great name for a foundation!) annual Great European House Party on the Greek island of Skios. Dr. Wilfred, in turn, ends up by mistake at a secluded villa, sans passport, sans clothes and sans working cell phone with one, then another nubile woman who is upset with him. It would be wrong to tell what happens from this starting scenario but rest assured, Dear Reader, at every step, things get, not better, but worse. At last, on page 238, everything combusts. The only novel I know of that is at all like this delightful novel is David Lodge's Changing Places (1975). It, too, was about an exchange of identities (rather, of roles in Lodge's book) and the collisions and explosions that result from it. Both books are ..... hilarious.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Getting Dunn; Author: Visit Amazon's Tom Schreck Page; Review: Getting Dunn is a novel that is better in its parts than in its whole. Its flaws are two: uneven pacing and an implausible resolution. The novel starts with a bang. TJ Dunn is a woman MP stationed in Iraq. Her team is anguished. Only she survives, and while she is still recuperating, she gets word that her fiancé, also a soldier, stationed in Afghanistan, has committed suicide. Then follows a long stretch detailing TJ's recovery in the States, interrupted only occasionally for moments of uncertainty and then menace. These chapters aren't bad -it is interesting to follow TJ in her attempts to come to terms with an overload of trauma, and there are chapters on her sessions with her therapist that sound like the real thing, but `thriller' it's not, and the element of mystery in the calls she gets from an anonymous caller, his voice masked by a distorting device, is strained. It just doesn't feel real. Things do heat up in the final third of the book but too many rabbits are pulled out of the hat at the end to make it seem real. The liner notes say that TJ is following a conspiracy within Army ranks, an attempt to hide heroin trafficking led by someone high up, but by the time it's over, it seems more invented than real. I wish I could write more positively about this book because it does have merits. TJ Dunn is an admirable heroine, disciplined, tough as nails but human. I liked reading about her. The (slow) section about her attempts to come to terms with the blows that hit her in sledgehammer order--losing everyone in her battle team and then, right after, her fiancé's suicide--is interesting reading, just not exciting enough for this kind of mystery thriller. But aside from TJ, and one other character, her fiancé's Army buddy, the characters -and the situations- in this book are cardboard.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Innocent (P.I. Jack Marconi); Author: Visit Amazon's Vincent Zandri Page; Review: Tom Zandri's The Innocent is not without flaws but it's a good though not exceptional thriller, with enough action to keep your blood pulsing and characters who hold your interest. The bad guys are really bad and the good guy is believably good. Let me get rid of what's not so good in this book so I can concentrate on its substantial virtues as a detective thriller. At times, and fortunately not often, Zandri lapses into hard-boiled `tec clichés like these: a receptionist's fingernails are "long and sharp, like stilettos, and painted a glossy black like the finish on a cop cruiser'" a car "move[s] like a bullet shot out of the twilight." The similes are colorful but no one actually talks like that so they sound off. But that's a small blemish in a generally solid mystery novel. The protagonist, "Keeper" Marconi, is the long time warden of a maximum security prison in New York. Keeper has always been a straight arrow, the rare honest guy in a world populated largely by cons, killers and low lifes. When a cop killer escapes, his superiors try to hang it on him: someone must have paid him off to help the con escape. It doesn't take long before everyone is against him -crooked prison guards; his boss, the Commissioner of Corrections; the police; a lone killer; and a gullible and news hungry press. Then the cop killer is found dead -Keeper is blamed for that too. On the run, with few allies and little resources, Keeper has to find a way out quickly or he'll be dead or headed to prison himself -and for an ex-warden, that would simply mean a much slower and more painful death as his old wards got revenge on him. Periodically throughout this narrative, Keeper remembers Attica, where he was held hostage for five days with two of his mates by an out of control prison mob, bent on vengeance. It takes a while, but eventually the two narratives coalesce, and what happened at Attica, though it doesn't explain what has happened since, still enriches it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Thing About Thugs; Author: Visit Amazon's Tabish Khair Page; Review: Thugs reads like a contemporary version of a Wilkie Collins novel, a bizarre tall tale told with the narrative verve of a Charles Dickens. It's great fun, faintly unreal but it catches you up anyway, with its exciting story and engaging, frequently exotic characters. In the 1840, London is an exciting but perilous place, with its fog, filth, dark alleys: ". . . so rife was the air with voices and sounds, the bustle of horses and omnibuses, the ladies and gentlemen trying their best to walk through the milling crowd, the foreigners with their myriad tongues, the country squires riding in from Cumberland or Westmorland, the servants, grooms and lackeys running about, the waiters in the taverns shouting their orders, the potboys, beggars, lascars, hawkers, tinkers, gypsies, that omnipresent West Indian blackie wrapped in his strange garment, made of the rigging and sails of ships, who sang and sold handwritten songs signed `January Monday'.. Who would, who could overhear in the midst of this din?" The gap between the way the rich live (and what they can get away with) and the poor is vast, so vast as to create almost two separate peoples in London, the respectable and everyone else. There are mutterings about a subterranean people called the Mole People, who inhabit the city's tunnels and grottoes and must be placated before you travel across their domain. The villains in the story are repulsive soulless characters and the hero is appealing and out of the ordinary, a supposed ritual killer, a follower of the Indian cult of Thuggee named Amir Ali. Amir has sold a bill of goods to a gullible Englishman about being a reformed Thug in order to flee India. He's not a Thug at all but now, in London, he can't shed his reputation as a cold-blooded killer. Suddenly Londoners are being killed and their heads are being cut off. (In one ghastly but effective image, a killer is described as "work[ing] with the precision and apathy of a man slicing a carrot." He justifies his killings thusly: "If God didn't want `em slaughtered, he wouldn't've made `em sheep.") If Amir can't find and expose the real killers, he'll be blamed for the murders --what else should one expect from a man reared since infancy as a Thug? Amir is helped in his quest by an unlikely army of outcasts. They all have a stake in taking the heat off London's resented immigrant population. Intermixed with this tale of detection is a bitter-sweet love story. In the end, some but not all of the bad guys get their desserts. The ending has a nice twist. In tone and content, Thugs is very much nineteenth century but with a note of self-reflection that is distinctly modern. Halfway through, Amir Ali writes: "Stories, false or true, are difficult to escape from. . . . Especially the stories we tell about ourselves." This is Tabish's first novel but I hope it won't be his last. Brief descriptions throughout the book tell a great deal about his characters' attitudes. One; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Second Person Singular; Author: Sayed Kashua; Review: Second Person Singular is a comedy, but in the original sense of the word -not so much funny, although there is a humorous edge to it, but a book about the ordinary lives of ordinary people. It is, in short, a comedy of manners, and a fine one too. One of its virtues of this finely wrought novel is that it puts before us what it's like being an Arab in Israel's bifurcate state and society. It makes concrete the bumps and bruises Israeli Arabs suffer daily, no matter how high they have managed to rise. A lawyer always dresses up when he goes out because he's learned that guards won't stop him for a security check if he's dressed better than they are. He decided early in his professional life that he had to marry because if he didn't, no Arab woman would step foot in his office and it was the women who usually made first contact with a lawyer when their husband or sons were in trouble: "they had a far better chance of getting through the checkpoints without the proper paperwork." In a restaurant where one of the characters works -an Arab disguising himself as a Jew-- the waitstaff are all Jewish, the kitchen workers Arabs, and the owner treats the Arabs like naughty children. The rehab center at Lifta allotted only one bed to Arab addicts. The elementary schools `graduate' Arabs without worrying about whether they are literate. The traffic light at a busy intersection is weighted to allow Israelis a much longer passage than the Palestinian Arabs whose routes cross it. An Arab schoolboy at a bi-racial school in Israel masquerades as a Jew when he travels by bus so he won't be beaten up. There is an Arab upper class in Israel but the result of these small and large insults to their psyche is that they arrive at adulthood damaged goods, insecure about their identities. Appearance is more important than substance: the flashy car, checking off books read on a list rather than actually reading them, having a six-year-old daughter who already knows what her favorite kind of sushi is, knowing the right names in music (the Rolling Stones, not Fairuz). The story is told as two narratives. They intertwine, or at least connect, but not directly, and that is the irony of it, because the one narrative -about a lawyer who discovers a love letter written by his wife to an unknown Jew--is framed out of a misunderstanding of what occurs in the second narrative. Kashua writes a crisp ironic prose and he's fortunate in his translator. The result is a subtle story of identity, which is sometimes humorous in outlook on life but more often heart-wrenching in its pathos. Kashua is definitely an author to watch for.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Nightworld; Author: Visit Amazon's F. Paul Wilson Page; Review: There are fifteen books in the Repairman Jack series. I've read all of them. I've read one of the novels about young Jack -there are three-- but none of the previous (five) novels in The Adversary cycle. Nightworld supposedly draws together and closes down both The Adversary and the Repairman Jack series. It revises an earlier version of the novel, beefing up Jack's role in it (he is more of a bit player in the earlier version) and referencing the Jack novels that now precede Nightworld in chronology. It's an end of the world novel, the last fight of the Good Guys -Jack, the near-eternal Glaeken, ex-priest Bill, etc. --against the truly Bad Guy, Rasalom, now near-triumphant. I've enjoyed the previous Jack novels obviously, or I wouldn't have stuck with them so long. They weren't equally good and the later novels in the series were becoming encrusted with so much past history (which had to be explained in order to make sense of the current events) that it slowed down and diverted the narrative at times. Still, Jack is an appealing hero and even in the middle of dross, Wilson wrote good action scenes. The earlier Repairman Jack novels are fun. But this one isn't. It's grossly over-inflated, Jack's off camera much of the time, there`s way too much magical/mystical jiggery pokery at play, and past history repeatedly intrudes on the current events. This passage, early in the book (page 22) illustrates what I mean. The a runaway priest, Bill, has just been introduced into the narrative: He'd been moving through a black fog since the deadly events in North Carolina. Three times his world had been all but torn apart. First, the violent death of his old friend and Carol's first husband, Jim Stevens, followed by the bizarre murders in the Hanley mansion and Carol's flight to parts unknown; he'd recovered from that. Then, years later, his parents' death in a fire, Danny Gordon's mutilation and all the horrors that followed, capped by his own flight and years of hiding. He'd dragged himself from that well of despair and was just settling into a different kind of life when he'd had to face Renny Augustino's brutal murder, Lisl's suicide, and the exhumation of Danny Gordon's living corpse. Bill wasn't bouncing back this time. He wasn't sure he had any bounce left. Faced with a passage like that, I'm tempted to shout, "Whoa, dude!" Think of the narrative black boxes it contains: what happened in North Carolina? how and why did Jim Stevens die and, at this point in the novel, who is Carol Stevens? (That's clarified later.) what bizarre murders and what and where is the Hanley mansion and why did Carol flee? what's the story with his parents' death and who was Danny Gordon and what happened to him and why had Bill then fled? who's Renny Augustino and who's Lisl, and what happened to them and what happened with Danny Gordon's corpse? That's a lot to explain, even in brief, but it's all just dropped there -it's inert matter; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Up Jumps the Devil; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Poore Page; Review: Devil is a bagatelle, a delightful trifle, a playful, often sweethearted riff on a serious theme: why don't we treat each other better than we do? why aren't we content being who we are? It's also about knowing that you're going to die some time, which is something the Devil has never known because he's immortal. In 1863, he's moving through Civil War battlefields as assistant to Eggert G. Daughterry, Photographic Artist. They're taking photographs of the dead so people can know what war is like. "People, thought the Devil, need to see war.... Because civilization is going to need war for a little while longer, yet. Like an enema or a transfusion, war purged the old and forced in the new. Maybe one day humans would find a better way to advance, but that day hadn't come." The Devil gets into a discussion with Daughterry. "The trouble with you being immortal," says the photographer, "isn't whether it's your fault or not. It's a matter of understanding people. How can you understand what moves people when you don't understand that the meaning of life is death?... When you are doomed to die, that becomes the main force in your life. You do what you do because you are running out of time.... It's the reason people get married and have kids; we have to replace ourselves." The Devil agrees to become mortal for three days. The battlefield turns out to be Gettysburg. After a series of harrowing adventures, the Devil regains his immortality, determined never to give it up again. But in the process, he has gained an appreciation of how horrible war can be. The novel jigs and jags between past times -like ancient Rome, the American Civil War, an interlude with Pocahontas, a session with Nat Turner, sitting inside JFK's head--and the present, the present defined as the years between 1969 and today. In 1969, the Devil takes on three recruits, the leftovers from a fledgling rock quartet. In return for their souls -which look like, respectively, a butterfly, a stone and frog--he grants the rockers what they each most want: fame, fortune, a chance to change the world. As their dreams play out, helped along by the Devil, the world changes. So do their dreams. By 2005, when the novel ends, the world is indeed a weird place. The proliferation of cable channels has led to dedicated 24-hour channels watching a woman in a coma and full-out war. There's even a Pill Channel. "Faith-based computer games" are big. One is called Revelation Ninja (a strong anti-gay theme), another Abortion Clinic Assassin. People no longer talk about what happened in their own lives. They talk about what they saw on TV last night. Celebrities are everything. They have replaced reality. " `They're not threatening, see, because they don't actually affect people! Celebrities can get arrested, start charities, beat up paparazzi, get drunk and naked in public, and it won't change your life.' ... And so the All-Celebrity News Channel was born." Don't expect literal or straight out linear in this; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The 19th Wife; Author: Visit Amazon's David Ebershoff Page; Review: The 19th Wife offers two narratives in one. They run parallel and deal with a common issue, polygamous marriage, but they're different in style as well as content. The first narrative tells the story of Ann Eliza Young. In 1873, she fled Utah and filed papers for divorce from Brigham Young, the prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Depending on how one counts them, Ann Eliza was the Prophet's nineteenth, or twenty-seventh, or somewhere in the fifties, wife. The exact numbers were kept secret so enemies couldn't use the evidence against Young or against the Church. Ebershoff includes liberal passages -several chapters- from Ann Eliza's autobiography (The 19th Wife Featuring, One Lady's Account of Plural Marriage and Its Woes, Being the Chronicle of Personal Experience of Ann Eliza Young -19th and Rebel Wife of the Leader of the Utah Saints and Prophet of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young, Written By Herself, 1875), as well as testimony from her brother Gilbert who also apostasized, her father Chauncey Webb's autobiography, Brigham Young's prison diaries, newspaper articles, even an entry from Wikipedia. Interwoven with this testimony is the correspondence sixty years later of Ann's son with a professor and a summary of a master's thesis on Ann Eliza written by a young Brigham Young University student sixty years after that. The story that is told is all the more startling because, constrained as it is by historical evidence, most of what is said has to be accurate. The second narrative is told, in the present, by Jordan Scott, a young man who has been thrown out of a polygamous cult. He hasn't seen his mother or siblings since that day. Now he learns that his mother has been arrested for killing his father. (I can't find the reference but I think she was his twelfth wife. Oh, she's also his father's niece and cousin and he married her when she was fourteen.) Jordan knows his mother couldn't have done it but all the evidence points to her. He returns to the town of his birth to discover what really happened. It isn't pretty. What I've written so far makes it look like the novel is a hatchet job on Mormonism, or at least Mormonism the way it was until Brigham Young died, but it's not that narrow. Some of the polygamists -from the 1870s and from today-- feel conflicted by their practices. Ebershoff understands how faith, the tenets one grew up with and have never questioned, condition our outlook toward the future. Some of the bad guys in this story are awfully bad but not all of them are -some are just confused -and some are unable, because of their beliefs, to change. There is also a sweet love story involving Jordan, who's gay, and a man he meets on his travels and finds he cares for, almost in spite of the man's Pollyannesque temperament. I read Wife for the history in it, but enjoyed it for the story (stories). It enriched my admittedly limited understanding of the consequences of polygamous marriages. (Bad for; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Imperial Spain: 1469-1716; Author: J. H. Elliott; Review: Ages past, when I was studying for my doctorate in history, my specialization was early modern Europe. I was writing on Spanish political ideas in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries --roughly the span of time encompassing the reigns of Enrique IV of Castile (1454-74) and Ferdinand and Isabella (1474-1504, -1516). Needless to say, I read EVERYTHING, everything I could get my hands on pertaining to that time and realm. Nothing came close to Elliott's survey in helping me to understand the period. I read everything Elliott published until I left the field many years later. All of it was brilliant and most of it brilliantly written as well as researched. Elliott is a lucid and forceful narrator and a master explainer of complicated things. Spanish history, especially the fifteenth century, is extraordinarily complicated, with many actors and subplots going on at any one moment. To complicate it more, Spanish archives are not the best organized in the world: documents that might help elucidate key episodes are missing, perhaps lost forever. Two of Elliott's best books, The Revolt of the Catalans and The Count-Duke of Olivares, highlight this problem: Elliott's ability to work around missing documents is exemplary. Imperial Spain is not easy to read. It's extraordinarily compact for so big a subject --covering almost two and a half centuries of history-- and much was still not known about many of the phenomena he discussed in the book. But he succeeded --brilliantly, I might add- in combining narrative (a forward line, with actors and events serving as historical signposts along the way) with analysis of structure (Elliott does Annales history as well as any of the great Annalistes, like Fernand Braudel, Lucien Febvre and March Bloch). It might have made the book more manageable if it had been broken down into smaller units but in my own study and research, I would have been lost without it. My solution to the complexity of the story it told? I read it over and over, taking more notes each time, until I reached the point where I couldn't read it any more because whenever I started a paragraph, my mind took off on a tangent of its own, tracing connections beyond the printed page.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure; Author: Visit Amazon's Henry Petroski Page; Review: Petrosky (professor of civil engineering and history, Duke University) has produced another winner in this handsomely produced book from Belknap/Harvard. (The book jacket is particularly handsome, as well as to the point.) Petrosky is that rare bird, an engineer who writes about his subject in a way that not only practitioners but lay people can appreciate. He's not a great stylist but his prose is lucid and he always says something worth saying. Across several books, the author has pursued the same two central preoccupations: (1) the history of engineering and industrial design and (2) failure analysis and its relevance to the advancement of the discipline. On history, The Pencil (1990) is particularly fascinating, but so are his essays on the evolution of the pencil, paper clip and silverware in The Evolution of Useful Things (1992). Engineers of Dreams (1995) celebrates American bridge builders. A later book, The Toothpick (2007), uses a humble household implement to explore the complicated interaction between societal demands and engineering design challenges in the creation of a new or improved product. This present book revisits the preoccupations of his 1985 book, To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. But there's enough new in it -plus Petrosky has seventeen more years of experience to draw upon--to make it worthwhile, even for someone like me (not an engineer) who has bought many though not all of Petrosky's books and read them avidly. Essentially, Petrosky's message is that engineering is a self-correcting discipline but as new solutions arise, engineers grow complacent as a result of success. They start pushing the boundaries -lowering the safety factor, shaving costs, cutting back on inspection--and eventually create a new failure . . . from which subsequent students learn a lesson and make corrections, and so on and so on, ad infinitum. Petrosky has repeatedly demonstrated how much he likes bridges, but bridges are a useful kind of construction to make the points he makes about how his discipline advances out of analyzing its excesses. Failure is more than useful in engineering: it creates the conditions for new advances and new enlightenment, new. "Galloping Gertie" -the Tacoma Narrows bridge that shook itself to pieces shortly after it opened for traffic in November, 1940--is an example. With the completion of the George Washington Bridge in 1931, the esthetics of bridge building morphed across the country: everyone wanted to build bridges that were slim, graceful and extended. The Tacoma Straits bridge was an unanticipated consequence of that trend. With only two traffic lanes, the new bridge was too narrow to dampen cross-wide vibrations engendered in it by winds and the steady flow of traffic across it. Even before the bridge opened it had acquired its nickname. On particularly windy days, commuters waiting in line to cross the bridge could see cars ahead of them rise and then dip with the bridge's undulations. Then came a 42-hmile-an-hour wind. The bridge's central span collapsed, all 2,800 feet of it. No one was killed, fortunately, but they could have been. Out of that failure came a; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Battleborn; Author: Visit Amazon's Claire Vaye Watkins Page; Review: Boy, can this woman write! Not every story in this collection is perfect but all of them are good, some in parts, but most all the way through, and the best of them are brilliant, revelatory and scarifying, glimpses into aspects of life that most ordinary folk never see or think of. All of the stories take place in the far West, a land that is still far rawer than most places in our citified, surfaced-civilized nation. The first story, "Ghosts, Cowboys," takes multiple stabs at presenting a history of a place, then devolves into the tale of a woman whose father, her mother told her before she died, was Charles Manson's "number one procurer." There's a plot to the story but it's more about how one lives with such an awful heritage. In "The Last Thing We Need," a man writes to someone he's never met. He knows of him only because he came across the man's wallet, a packet of letters, and two unfilled prescriptions with an address on them, left behind as rubbish. He doesn't even know if the man still lives there but that's not why he writes: he's killed a drifter in an aborted convenience store robbery and he cant's get his head around what he's done and he hopes a complete stranger can help him but he knows he can't. "I've tried, Duane Moser," he writes, "But I can't picture you at 4077 Pincay Drive. I can't see you in Henderson, period, out in the suburbs, on a cul-de-sac, in one of those prefab houses with the stucco and the garage gaping off the front like a mouth. I can't see you standing like a bug under those streetlights the color of antibacterial soap. . . . I can't see you behind a fence." Note the combination of ordinary language with images as striking as they are spare -"the garage gaping off the front like a mouth", "standing like a bug under those streetlights the color of antibacterial soap". As I said, this woman can write. Here is the start of the third story, "Rondine al Nido." "She will be thirty when she walks out on a man who in the end, she'll decide, didn't love her enough, though he in fact did love her, but his love wrenched something inside him, and this caused him to hurt her." This sentence -and the story that follows--catches something of the complicated, often tortured nature of human beings' love lives, which seldom go according to plan. It makes you want to read on, which is the mark of a master storyteller. "Who can say why we offer the parts of ourselves we do, and when," she writes. Many of the characters -indeed most of them--are not pleasant or appealing people. They've been twisted by life into awkward growths, hanging on as trees do sometimes on the fringes of the desert, surviving at high cost but surviving nonetheless. Not all the stories work. "Virginia City," for instance, is overwritten. There are good passages in it but it reads as; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Pimp's Notes: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Giorgio Faletti Page; Review: This is Italian author Faletti `s fourth crime thriller to be translated into English. It is, with reservations, a good one, a crime noir novel with a complicated plot and the requisite amount of violence. The protagonist is a pimp named Bravo. He doesn't reveal his real name or the true story of his past until the very end, and he's definitely not a nice man. Still, you find yourself rooting for him if only because he -and almost no one else -- has opted out of the incredibly corrupt society that was Italy at the tail end of the 70s, when justice was for sale to the highest bidder and high government officials, the police and the Mafia worked together as partners in fleecing the general public. (I know --he's a pimp, but he's unwilling to escalate his corruption. He's for sale for only limited ends.) It's a very cynical novel, but if you know anything about Italian history in that period, the cynicism is well deserved. The book is all twists. What seems true on one page quickly gains other and nastier meanings a few more pages in. By the end of the novel, Bravo is being sought by Milan's gangsters and the police and the radical terrorist group, the Red Brigade, who has kidnapped and are threatening to execute (they did execute) the former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Bravo wants to stand aside from these greater violences. (Early in the book, he declares: "I don't win and I don't lose. I've always been the spectator who minds his own business.") But in a world of carnivores like the one he lives in, everyone is meat; there are no bystanders. Bravo has something the bad guys want. Soon he's drawn in, then he's set up to be the fall guy for multiple murders. The only one he can trust is himself. At one point, half way through the book, Bravo is brought in front of a gang boss who is almost certainly trying to decide whether to let Bravo live or not. The boss pressures him to do a service for him. At first, Bravo demurs. The thug gives him a piece of advice: "In the world we live in you can't always sit out every dance." That sentence could serve the motto for this twisty tale of crime, deceit and more crime yet. That's what good about this decidedly above average crime novel -the plotting and the action, characterization and ambience. What's bad is Faletti's style, which imitates the worst clichs of noir fiction. He indulges in hyperbole, at times to the point of being laughable. A late night gambler has "a pair of dark bags under his eyes the size of a B cup: he wears them like a trademark." A car takes off in a screech of tires, "leaving ten thousand lire worth of rubber on the asphalt and the sound of money spent reverberating in the air." Of the mysterious and beautiful Carla: "Her eyes are made of the blond wood from the Tree of; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Bartender's Tale; Author: Visit Amazon's Ivan Doig Page; Review: This novel is so good I wish it were two hundred pages longer. In every respect, it is a triumph of the art of story telling, proving how much is still be gained from simply telling a good story well, no frills, with characters you care about, a setting just enough out of the ordinary to pique the reader's interest, and lots of action, told in everyday language spiced with vivid metaphor. It's coming of age story. Rusty, who is about to turn twelve, an age when life changes anyway for a young boy, lives alone with his bartender father, Tom, who owns and operates the Medicine Lodge in Gros Ventre, Montana. There is enough plot in this book to carry three novels. None of it seems shoved in: it's just an expansive tale. Everything fits. The language is extraordinary -Rusty's narration decades later, and his memory of how folks talked back then--it's salty, full of the particularity of place and time. And it's not showboating: this is how people actually talked in Gros Ventre, Montana, in 1960, before all of America was linked and our perceptions and attitudes homogenized by television and internet. And as bursting with plots as this book is, it's just the things that happened one summer, admittedly a summer where more happened than usual, but just one summer anyway. The master narrative is straightforward. Rusty has enjoyed Tom for the past six years without having to share his attention. He doesn't want that to change, but suddenly he is confronted with one change after another in rapid succession. He makes a friend -a girl, not something he looks forward to at his young age- and she turns out to be his soul mate. A woman, a taxi dancer who had some kind of relationship with Tom, it's not clear what, twenty years earlier at a bar he owned in a different town, shows up with her daughter Francine in tow. She claims Tom is Francine's father. She wants him to teach her daughter how to tend a bar. From there on, things heat up. Even the subplots are fascinating. A young man from back East goes fishing and comes back infested with ticks. They've pick the ticks off his naked body and Tom heads off to the doctor's with him for a checkup. Francine, who has been underwhelmed by Gros Ventre's social life up until then, mutters to Rusty: "This burg isn't as dull as it looks." And there's a gem of a scene where Tom teaches Francine how to draw a proper mug of beer and shows her exactly how to scoot it down the bar to the customer. Doig is just good at telling stories, able to extract the natural drama of life's small and large happenings. Another thing he's good at is describing. His similes seem wholly natural but they surprise. This is Rusty narrating his father's reaction to the news that Francine is his daughter: "His brow bunched with so many furrows it looked like it was made of wicker." Rusty's describing Francine:; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans; Author: Visit Amazon's Lawrence N. Powell Page; Review: I wasn't sure I was going to post a review of City when I first got it. The author is a longtime friend. I wasn't so much worried about favoring the book too highly as that I might find parts of it objectionable and would find it difficult to tell my friend that. I needn't have worried. The book is excellent. The story it tells is a fascinating one, and especially relevant post-Katrina, with naysayers second-guessing the merit in restoring a city so vulnerable to the elements as New Orleans is. One of the (many) things I admire about this book is Larry's passion for his city, a passion that doesn't compromise his ability to view its history objectively.! Good history doesn't have to be dry. It can be passionate as long as it's faithful to the record, and this book is. New Orleans's history was complicated from the start. The settlement shouldn't have been built where it was in the first place - on a site with limited commercial or agricultural merit, founded on unstable soil, and subject to heat, disease, floods, rain, and torrential hurricanes. There were more sensible places to found a city. It was founded -confirmed--where it was almost by trick. At every stage of its growth (up to 1814, where the story ends) there have been dramatic changes, volte-faces, as the city changed hands -first French, then Spanish, finally American. It had a society that was unique in the world, a tri-partite blend of white, African slave, and free men of color (gens de couleur libres). Some of the most interesting portions of this book deal with the tensions and accommodations made between blacks and whites in this culturally fertile frontier society. Throughout the book, Powell gracefully balances narrative and analysis. An added bonus is his sense of humor, which makes the narrative more human and actually more understandable at points. I liked the way Powell phrased this sentence, commenting on the rapidity with which passionately held positions changed face in the city. "Reopening the slave trade [post-1804] was one of those hypercontroversial subjects, until it no longer was." "Until it no longer was"! That's well said! The packaging of the book is worth noting. It is very handsomely packaged indeed, as are most books published by Harvard these days. The dust jacket is handsome, featuring a detail from an early map of the region. Everything about the book speaks of quality -starting, of course, with the text.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry,; Author: Visit Amazon's Jack McCallum Page; Review: 1992 was the first year that pro players from the NBA were allowed to participate in the Olympics, and what a team it was, with Michael Jordan, Magic, Bird, Charles Barkley, Ewing, Karl Malone, Chris Mullin, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, John Stockton, and the one college boy on the team, Duke University's Golden Boy, Christian Laettner, who was included as a token! McCallum, who covered the NBA for Sports Illustrated at the time, and was in both Monte Carlo for the practice sessions and Barcelona for the actual Olympic Games, is a good choice for the subject. He knows the subject at first hand and knows the players involved. Indeed, the best parts of the book are those where he covers them individually, what they were like then, what they are like now and what they think, reflecting back on those days. The flattest part of the narrative deals with the actual Olympic games, no doubt because they were, from start to finish, blowouts. The Dream Team defeated its rivals by an average of 43.75 points. It is interesting also to read how it came about that professional basketball players were allowed into the Olympics, whose myth had always been that only amateurs competed though everyone knew those "amateurs" were often extravagantly rewarded by their home countries for participating. Not just the Olympics Committee and officials but the heads of FIBA (Federation Internationale de Basketball), which controlled amateur basketball world wide were unhappy to see their support tainted by letting the rich boys in, and both FIBA and the Olympics feared an NBA takeover of the sport, even at the Olympics level. The story of how all this was turned around is quite intriguing, and it's not a story I knew anything about before I read McCallum's book. Equally engrossing is the intriguing that went on to select the team. Once the pros were in on it, selecting ac college coach for the team didn't make sense. Chuck Daly, of the Detroit Pistons, were selected instead. Chuck was a good choice not just because he was a winning coach. Everybody liked him, and that was important, especially the first time the NBA athletes would be involved as players. By far the most interesting part of the story is how super-star Isiah Thomas lost his chance to be on the team. I won't spoil it for the potential reader by telling what happened. Suffice it to say, Thomas managed to ease himself out not only of the first ten selected but even the eleventh, final NBA selectee. (John Stockton was selected instead.) McCallum has something to say about the impact this team, and its dominating performance in the Olympics, had on the subsequent history of the sport. BY 2011, he notes, there were 86 international players from forty countries playing in the NBA and four of the first seven draft picks that year were from other countries: Turkey, Lithuania, Serbia, and Congo. This may be Sports History Lite, but it's GOOD History Lite, and great fun to read. Anecdotes abound: I read every; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: John Saturnall's Feast; Author: Visit Amazon's Lawrence Norfolk Page; Review: This fine book is cunningly put together. It uses the conceits of seventeen-century writing to tell the story of a love affair that should have had no chance of succeeding -between an orphan boy (his mother was reputed to be a witch) who becomes a master cook and the daughter of the highborn lord in whose household he toils. The chapters are prefaced by recipes from John's recipe book: they tie in obliquely with the narrative, which stretches from the early 1620s, when John is introduced to the Bucknall household and first meets Lady Lucretia (she hates him because he has unwittingly insulted her), to the 1680s, by which time Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan interregnum is only memory and Lucretia is left alone as mistress of Bucknall manor striving to save it from ruin. John and Lucretia aren't perfect creatures. Both, especially Lucretia, possess the usual assortment of twists and quirks that humans have. But their love story is so well told -and so lovely- that this alone is a reason to read on. Then add the other players, fleshed outin loving and hilarious prose. There is Sir William, dark in mourning more than a dozen years after the death of his wife giving birth to Lucretia. And there's the kitchen crew at Buckland manor -Master Cook Scovell, for instance, who gentles and nurtures John in the kitchen, early recognizing his potential as a cook. He tells John, "You will work with me, John Saturnall. Every true cook carries a feast inside him." I cook, and that sentence strikes a chord in me. It's true. Good cooks do carry not yet realized feasts inside them, waiting to be made, eaten and savored. Later Scovell counsels him: "A cook stands apart. Even in the feast he stands alone." Like many a good meal, this book is a banquet not intended for everyone. It takes a hundred pages before the narrative starts to heat up. (Seventeenth century texts often wander into their point well along the way so perhaps this novel is simply being true to its historical source.) From that point on, though, action, characterization and description combine to rivet the readers's attention in a satisfying adventure with several unexpected changes of pace. The characterizations are often sly and funny. There is, for instance, Lucretia's fianc-to-be, a distant cousin from a branch of the family her father secretly loathes but is now wooing because he needs a male heir. When she first meets her intended, she tries to think the best of him: "his chin was not so weak," she reflects, "concealed in shadow." Unfortunately, he never gets any better than that. There are mouth-watering descriptions of food: "drop-apples ... replaced by golden-skinned Pearmains, then damsons that arrived in bracken-lined baskets. Gooseberries and raspberries came from Motte's fruit cages. Mazzards and bigaroons [varieties of cherries] followed. John and Philip pitted the fat cherries, peeled apricots and eased the stones out of plums. They tweaked the tiny stalks from strawberries, chopped last season's dried quinces for soaking and sliced greengages into translucent panes."; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Flowers at Midnight; Author: Visit Amazon's Nick Sweet Page; Review: This thriller about a bunch of louts, layabouts and lowlifes is raw and full of life. It's a surprisingly good read, provided you're not a delicate type on matters of violence or sex. It's kind of like Mickey Spillane but without a Mike Hammer. The one police detective involved doesn't solve much. He just muddles along always missing out. He's there for comic relief as much as for anything. Flowers offers constant high action, violence alternating with regular dollops of sex -- usually twisted--and characters who are as twisted as they are entertaining. There's a plot to it although the plot is almost beside the point: it's a noir picaresque novel, about a kind of life style and the persons who lead it. The story line starts with an exotic dancer who is realizing the sexual fantasy of an MP likely to be selected as Prime Minister at the next election. What he doesn't know is that she's photographed it. Soon, he's being blackmailed for the photographs, but by then the blackmailers are headed in different directions and he's blackmailed not by one blackmailer but by two. That's when things start to go wrong, and once they do, all hell breaks loose. The dancer's husband --she'd happily never see him again-- is released early from prison because he's grassed on his partners in a high profile bank robbery. They took three million pounds from the bank. It's never been recovered. His partners aren't happy: it was he who hid the money before they were caught and with him out of prison way before them, they suspect the money'll be gone by the time they're out. So they escape from prison and set off after him, with mayhem on their minds. Everyone's sleazy in this novel, with the exception of the policeman and his maybe-love, including the PM, whose brother, ex-MI5, fixes things for him . Soon, the bodies are falling on all sides. Flowers is not perfect, even for its genre. The writing is a bit ragged at times and some of the plot transitions don't transish as smoothly as they should. But for all that, it's good reading and its raw energy is refreshing. I, for one, hope Sweet writes more thrillers soon. He's got talent.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Working Theory of Love: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Scott Hutchins Page; Review: This first novel is as good as they come. The story is an interesting one, and decidedly offbeat. You quickly care for the lead character, a young man --well, thirtyish-- who has come out of the Marriage from Hell and has been, to say the least, emotionally scarred by the experience. He's afraid to get on with his life and doesn't even know it: he won't commit to anything except his safe, buttoned down, isolated routine. He works for a startup firm that's attempting to come up with a computer program that will allow the computer to beat the Turing test: successfully fool a human into thinking it's human too when they talk together. They've keyboarded a southern doctors' journals into the machine to help make it human. The doctor's dead now -suicide--but he was the young man's father. Soon the young man finds himself talking to a computer program he knows isn't his father but who, sometimes, sounds awfully like him. And as he very tentatively makes steps toward commitment again, to a lovely young woman who has her own issues, his father is the only one he can turn to for advice. The plot twists in this marvelous novel are unexpected. The love story is satisfying. It rings true. You meet the young man's ex-wife too, and she is a real human being, surprisingly generous now that they're no longer married to each other -you like her, and you like him for not bearing a grudge against her for the sin of their both being too young to stay together. The young man, his girlfriend, his ex -they all grow up a bit in this novel, which is both mildly experimental (especially the sections involving the computer program) and resolutely old-fashioned. Hutchins is a Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford and teaches there. If he continues to write books as good as this one, we'll be hearing about him for a long while.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Finch Page; Review: FINCH, Charles. The September Society. Minotaur Books. 2009. 320p. $13.99 (pb) CLEVERLY, Barbara. Tug of War. Delta. 2007. 289p. $15 (pb) Whether written in the Golden Age of mystery writing or after, puzzle mysteries have never been my Cup of Tea. There are some I like -the first appearance of Hercules Poirot in Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), almost all of the marvelously skewed Inspector Appleby mysteries of Oxford don Michael Innes, and of course, though often mediocre as puzzles, the delightful Archie Goodwin-Nero Wolfe mysteries of Rex Stout. But in all of those (Innes, sometimes an exception), it wasn't the puzzle that I enjoyed as much as the wit and humor. And when an author came along who wasn't as witty, or not as naturally witty -for instance, R. Austin Freeman or Dorothy Sayers or S. S. Van Dine, I often cringed as I read. Puzzle mysteries can be boring. I make it a point, though, to look at them periodically to see if I'm missing anything. And sometimes I am, as in the case of these two superior old-styled mysteries. Both feature series heroes. Charles Lenox is the detective in September Society. He lives in London, ca. 1866, and though a dedicated detective, he's an amateur detective -not in the sense of working like an amateur but in the sense that he works not for pay but for the pleasure of the hunt. In this thriller, the second in a series of four so far, Lenox is called upon by a widow mother to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her son from his Oxford digs. Left behind in her son's room is a dead cat and an odd assortment of trinkets. Has the son left a message behind in these scattered oddments? There's a code to be broken, people to be interviewed (not all of them are what they seem), and soon an actual dead body. The puzzle isn't as puzzling as it should be: a preamble chapter describes a murder twenty years before and you just know it has something to do with what's happening now. The deciphering of clues is also a bit too fancy but not any more exotic than, say, in any of thirty or forty Agatha Christie books. Still, it isn't for the mystery you should read this book. Two things make the book special --it is indeed special--the characters and the loving description of a style of living and of places long gone but still charming. In addition to Lenox, a most appealing man, there is his next door neighbor and best friend Lady Jane Grey. Their relationship as they edge closer and closer to declaring their love for each other is wonderful. There are other appealing characters too -Lenox's resourceful valet Graham and Lenox's associate, doctor McConnell, who loves his young and flighty wife but is having troubles in his marriage just now. I thoroughly enjoyed September Society. I intend to read the other three Charles Lenox novels soon. ***** Scotland Yard inspector Joe Sandilands is the detective in the; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Tug of War: A Joe Sandilands Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's Barbara Cleverly Page; Review: FINCH, Charles. The September Society. Minotaur Books. 2009. 320p. $13.99 (pb) CLEVERLY, Barbara. Tug of War. Delta. 2007. 289p. $15 (pb) Whether written in the Golden Age of mystery writing or after, puzzle mysteries have never been my Cup of Tea. There are some I like -the first appearance of Hercules Poirot in Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), almost all of the marvelously skewed Inspector Appleby mysteries of Oxford don Michael Innes, and of course, though often mediocre as puzzles, the delightful Archie Goodwin-Nero Wolfe mysteries of Rex Stout. But in all of those (Innes, sometimes an exception), it wasn't the puzzle that I enjoyed as much as the wit and humor. And when an author came along who wasn't as witty, or not as naturally witty -for instance, R. Austin Freeman or Dorothy Sayers or S. S. Van Dine, I often cringed as I read. Puzzle mysteries can be boring. I make it a point, though, to look at them periodically to see if I'm missing anything. And sometimes I am, as in the case of these two superior old-styled mysteries. Both feature series heroes. Charles Lenox is the detective in September Society. He lives in London, ca. 1866, and though a dedicated detective, he's an amateur detective -not in the sense of working like an amateur but in the sense that he works not for pay but for the pleasure of the hunt. In this thriller, the second in a series of four so far, Lenox is called upon by a widow mother to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her son from his Oxford digs. Left behind in her son's room is a dead cat and an odd assortment of trinkets. Has the son left a message behind in these scattered oddments? There's a code to be broken, people to be interviewed (not all of them are what they seem), and soon an actual dead body. The puzzle isn't as puzzling as it should be: a preamble chapter describes a murder twenty years before and you just know it has something to do with what's happening now. The deciphering of clues is also a bit too fancy but not any more exotic than, say, in any of thirty or forty Agatha Christie books. Still, it isn't for the mystery you should read this book. Two things make the book special --it is indeed special--the characters and the loving description of a style of living and of places long gone but still charming. In addition to Lenox, a most appealing man, there is his next door neighbor and best friend Lady Jane Grey. Their relationship as they edge closer and closer to declaring their love for each other is wonderful. There are other appealing characters too -Lenox's resourceful valet Graham and Lenox's associate, doctor McConnell, who loves his young and flighty wife but is having troubles in his marriage just now. I thoroughly enjoyed September Society. I intend to read the other three Charles Lenox novels soon. ***** Scotland Yard inspector Joe Sandilands is the detective in the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Midnight; Author: Visit Amazon's Stephen Leather Page; Review: Midnight is a surprisingly good action novel, part detective story and part supernatural thriller. It's the second book in a trilogy, the Nightingale Trilogy. I didn't read the first book but I plan to read it soon. In the earlier book, Nightfall (2012), former police investigator, now private eye Jack Nightingale learned that he was adopted. His real father, now dead, was a Satanist who sold Jack's soul to the Devil at Jack's birth and then handed Jack over to step-parents. Jack succeeds in freeing his soul but that's just the start of his troubles. In Midnight, Jack is hunting for his half-sister. They've been separated since birth, and their Satanist father bargained away her soul too in return for powers of some sort. People are dying all around Jack. The first dead woman he encounters, hanging over a staircase, speaks to him and says: "Your sister is going to hell, Jack Nightingale," a message that is repeated overand again throughout the book. The story that follows is twisted and dark but it works. What Leather has done is write a really good hardboiled PI story that's also a supernatural thriller. The villains are really creepy and Jack is lucky to stay alive, especially as one devil, with whom he negotiates a deal, has unpleasant surprises in store for him. Jack's a sympathetic hero. He has no super powers. He's just tenacious, a veritable bulldog when he gets his teeth into something. In this instance, it's saving his sister from eternal damnation though he's never even met her. There is a surprise there, too, and a juicy one. I won't say anything about it --part of the pleasure of this high-energy book is the surprises. The final third of the trilogy, Nightmare, is due out in November. I'm ordering it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Dead Man Vol 3: The Beast Within, Fire & Ice, and Carnival of Death; Author: Visit Amazon's Lee Goldberg Page; Review: The three short novels in this collection are by different authors --James Daniels, "The Beast Within"; Jude Hardin, "Fire and Ice"; Bill Crider, "Carnival of Death." Other than the presence of the Dead Man, Matt Cahill, and his nemesis, Mr. Dark, there's not a lot in common across the stories. Cahill wanders from place to place trying to get away from death but always finds himself in the middle of new chaos. Cahill is really just Matt Bolan, the Executioner of the famous hack thriller series, in drag. He almost died in a horrific accident -frozen in snow and ice for three months and then revived. Ever since, when people turn evil, he sees it on their faces - corruption, rot, maggots and all- and everywhere he goes, people turn evil, pushed into it by the mysterious Mr. Dark too, a Loki-like demon who loves seeing guts and gore spattered all around him. So those are the constants of the series: a wandering hero, a supernatural antagonist who loves destruction and twists people's minds, and a steady supply of blood and gore. There are plots but they're neither subtle nor even necessary: all that is needed is a setup scene, and the killing begins, graphically described. I don't like this book at all. The plotting is elementary, characterization hackneyed, and the emphasis on gore gratuitous. I would hate to give this book to a young boy already nursing feelings of inferiority and thoughts of revenge. It could prove incendiary.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Big Maria; Author: Visit Amazon's Johnny Shaw Page; Review: I reviewed Johnny Shaw's first novel, Dove Season (2011), for a journal and liked it a lot. I wrote that it was a "coming of age novel noir." Well, Big Maria is just as enjoyable. Again, a search is at the center of things. This time, the Good Guys are searching for a missing mine: it's been sealed up for over a hundred years but there's gold cached inside it somewhere, just waiting for someone to find it. The Good Guys are three California losers, but all that's going to change once they get the gold. Harry Schmittberger is a smelly (almost obscenely smelly) fat drunk: all his life people have made fun of his name, changing just a few letters to make it obscene, and he wants it to stop. Ricky McBride was a bus driver until he drove his bus off a mountain ledge and killed six people. Now he's just a drunk -with a withered arm from the accident. Frank Pacheco is just old and dying. Cancer has a bite on him: he wants one last fling before he heads off into the final darkness. Those are the heroes of this book -a fat drunk, a one-armed gimp, a dying old geezer. Together they will search for that mine, find the gold, and change their lives. Well, that's the way the script is supposed to run. But there are a few obstacles in the way that have to be overcome first. For one thing, they have to find the map that tells where the mine is. The map was left in Frank's grandmother's house a century ago. But the entire town was flooded over when they built the Imperial Dam in 1942. The town, the house and the map are at the bottom of the reservoir. Second, once they get the map, there's a desert and a mountain range to cross in order to reach the mine, and the U.S. Army now uses the area, which has DO NOT ENTIRE signs all over, to test its bombs, shells and mines. Oh, and they run army maneuvers there -they have even built a faux Arabian town for use in maneuvers. And the boys are being pursued by a definitely unfriendly meth dealer (the author of a How To book on cooking your own meth which is available on line through Amazon). He's gotten wind of the gold and he wants it for himself. There's Frank's daughter too, and his marijuana=-addled nephews: she's meaner than the meth dealer and she wants him to come home NOW. Well, you get the point --it all gets worse before it gets better. Read the book to see how. If you've read any of the late Donald Westlake's novels about the perpetually jinxed master thief Dortmundee, all this may sound familiar to you. Like those books, this is a comic caper: a cast of colorful characters follow an intricately plotted plan to obtain a treasure, but no point of their plan works right, everything gets complicated until it all blows up in their faces. Like; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Double Game; Author: Visit Amazon's Dan Fesperman Page; Review: The Double Game captures the play aspect of the spy business as well as any spy thriller I have read. the sneaky plot revolves around the progressive entanglement of the narrator, Bill Cage, a thirty-something PR hack and former reporter, in the spy game. Bill's father had served as a minor diplomat, posted to many of the classic spy novel settings -Vienna, Prague... -in the 1960s through `80s. Bill, a one-parent child, was there with him most of the time. His father collected spy novels. Bill shared his enthusiasm. All that ended when the Berlin Wall came down. Neither Bill nor his father could build up much enthusiasm for the very different spy stories that followed. Their world had ended. Thirty years after, Bill goes to a funeral. A State department employee, a colleague of his father, rumored to be CIA, has died. He overhears a conversation and it stirs up memories. Soon after an envelope is poked through the drop slot of his residence in Georgetown. There's no stamp or address on it. Inside is a message, typed on a single sheet of paper of a kind he recognizes at once. It's an expensive paper made in Germany decades ago: he has a box of it in his study. He looks closer at the message. He's sure it's been typed on his old Royal typewriter. He used it in his reporting days and he keeps it locked away upstairs. There are the same irregularities in the type face, the i's slightly raised, the upper chamber of each e filled in with ink. The message directs him to a book -a classic spy novel. It instructs him to use a book code and go to a dead drop, both standard items of spy tradecraft. Bill is led a merry chase: first one old book, then another, all from his or his father's libraries, a rendezvous with an old love, scary people shadowing him and then threatening him. It turns serious -there are two killings, an attempted abduction. What kind of mess has he gotten himself into? He learns new things about his father's activities in those long past days. His father, still living abroad but retired now, offers help. But can he trust him? And who is his spymaster, the shadowy entity feeding him clues in rapid succession? Why is he doing this? It's quite tricky but compelling. This isn't a novel you want to set down, to return to later or maybe not. You want to find what happens, from one page to the next. The central conceit -evolving a new spy story through reference to old spy stories--is strained at times but this unusual thriller holds together until near the end when the unreality of it finally becomes too much. Still, I enjoyed this novel and count the hours spent reading it time profitably spent.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Devil in Silver: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Victor LaValle Page; Review: Think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets Rosemary's Baby. No, the Devil doesn't have a baby in this one, and the novel's hero, Pepper, isn't a vegetable at the end, like McMurphy was in Cuckoo's. But this quirky novel has the creepy air of a supernatural thriller and it conveys, extraordinarily effectively, what it feels like to be on the receiving end of treatment in a run down, under-funded public sanitarium for the terminally insane. Pepper, who has anger management issues, as they say in the trade, is committed to a mental hospital simply because it's end of the shift for the cops who arrest him -if they booked him for public disorder, they would have had to stay on duty until the paperwork was done and he was committed to a jail cell but if they drop him off at the mental ward for 72-hoursw observation, it's the shrinks who are responsible for him. An ill-timed display of hostility and Pepper is put in restraints and fed pills -Haldol and lithium, diazepam. He loses track of a month and now he is a veteran of the institution. But people disappear in there. The rumor is that when the ward was opened, it already had a resident and the resident comes out from time to time when it's hungry and eats people. The Devil in Silver works as both horror story and as a depiction of what it's like to live in a mental ward. There's a brief love affair, Pepper makes friends. Good things happen in the book as well as bad. All in all, this is not only a gripping read, but one that will leave you feeling good .... not about mental wards but about .... human resilience perhaps?; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Kings of Midnight (Crissa Stone Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Wallace Stroby Page; Review: DISHER, Garry. Port Vila Blues. Soho Crime. 1995; reissued 2012. 237p. $25.95. STROBY, Wallace. Kings of Midnight. Minotaur. 2012. 266p. $24.99. Here are two taut thrillers, in the tradition of "Richard Stark's" (aka Donald Westlake's) inimitable series about the master criminal Parker. Neither features a character anywhere near as coldblooded as Parker. The thing about Parker is that he seems devoid of affect, almost a Frankenstein monster ,. He has no normal life to him. But though a sociopath, he only kills as a last resort -it's not that killing bothers him but it complicates things. Aussie author Disher's Wyatt and American author Stroby's Crissa Stone are of the same ilk as Parker, just more human seeming. They're both loners. Neither trusts anyone as far as they can throw them. They plan their capers well -no whizbang genius stuff in these novels, just well executed heists. But Wyatt and Crissa are screwed because they have to rely on other criminals to get what they want and the people they depend on are untrustworthy, driven by greed and devoid of any kind of fellow feeling. Their hair trigger tempers can get everyone in trouble, as in Kings of Midnight. Port Vila Blues starts with a home robbery and progresses to a successful bank break-in. By the end of the novel, Wyatt is being pursued by an undercover cop, a crooked judge and bent, even homicidal cops. The casualty rate goes steadily up until a satisfyingly bloody finale. Crissa's problems in Kings of Midnight are even more complicated. A simple heist -she and two partners steal an ATM--goes south when her two partners get into it and shoot each other. Crissa is left with two dead men and a bag full of money. She goes on the lam, looking for a new connection -both for jobs and to launder the cash she already has. A former mobster, Benny Roth, is running from his former associates. They're convinced he knows where the stash from a five million dollar heist is hidden. They'll do anything to get it back. Benny and Crissa connect and the violence escalates. Violence goes with the territory in novels like these. Both authors are good story tellers and they've created believable characters. I hope I never meet anyone like Wyatt or Crissa but I rooted for them. You know, there are bad guys and there are bad guys. Wyatt and Crissa are the good bad guys, not the bad bad ones.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Port Vila Blues (A Wyatt Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Garry Disher Page; Review: DISHER, Garry. Port Vila Blues. Soho Crime. 1995; reissued 2012. 237p. $25.95. STROBY, Wallace. Kings of Midnight. Minotaur. 2012. 266p. $24.99. Here are two taut thrillers, in the tradition of "Richard Stark's" (aka Donald Westlake's) inimitable series about the master criminal Parker. Neither features a character anywhere near as coldblooded as Parker. The thing about Parker is that he seems devoid of affect, almost a Frankenstein monster ,. He has no normal life to him. But though a sociopath, he only kills as a last resort -it's not that killing bothers him but it complicates things. Aussie author Disher's Wyatt and American author Stroby's Crissa Stone are of the same ilk as Parker, just more human seeming. They're both loners. Neither trusts anyone as far as they can throw them. They plan their capers well -no whizbang genius stuff in these novels, just well executed heists. But Wyatt and Crissa are screwed because they have to rely on other criminals to get what they want and the people they depend on are untrustworthy, driven by greed and devoid of any kind of fellow feeling. Their hair trigger tempers can get everyone in trouble, as in Kings of Midnight. Port Vila Blues starts with a home robbery and progresses to a successful bank break-in. By the end of the novel, Wyatt is being pursued by an undercover cop, a crooked judge and bent, even homicidal cops. The casualty rate goes steadily up until a satisfyingly bloody finale. Crissa's problems in Kings of Midnight are even more complicated. A simple heist -she and two partners steal an ATM--goes south when her two partners get into it and shoot each other. Crissa is left with two dead men and a bag full of money. She goes on the lam, looking for a new connection -both for jobs and to launder the cash she already has. A former mobster, Benny Roth, is running from his former associates. They're convinced he knows where the stash from a five million dollar heist is hidden. They'll do anything to get it back. Benny and Crissa connect and the violence escalates. Violence goes with the territory in novels like these. Both authors are good story tellers and they've created believable characters. I hope I never meet anyone like Wyatt or Crissa but I rooted for them. You know, there are bad guys and there are bad guys. Wyatt and Crissa are the good bad guys, not the bad bad ones.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Fleet Street Murders (Charles Lenox Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Finch Page; Review: As good as The September Society was, this book is better. detective, Charles Lenox, is a jewel a of a man, humane, decent and alert, withs\ a positive genius for relationships. His romance with Lady Jane Grey, his longtime best friend but at last fiancée, is appropriate, warm and lovely. Even in the class-bound society of 1866, England, Charles's relationship with his omnicompetent -but-knows-his-place valet Graham is a model of such loyalties and friendships. Then there is his friend, the sometimes not so sober Scots doctor Thomas McConnell, a decent man who is slowly growing into his marriage, and Charles's disciple, the aristocratic rake John Dallington, who apprentices himself to Charles because he wants to make something of his dissolute-until-then life. Finch is a generous plotter: all of these characters and more play roles in this engrossing puzzle mystery about the murders of two Fleet Street journalists. As in the previous two installments of this thoroughly engaging series, amateur detective Charles saves the day for a hidebound (though still very young) Scotland Yard. Charles's task is complicate his time because concurrently, he is running for parliament in a by-election in the small city of Stirrington (15,000 people). Everything about this outstanding series is right: a good mystery, an attractive hero, a lovely and believable romance, and the small details that make a past century believable. Then there is Finch's prose, a supple creature that makes real the air of a bygone time. Look at this one-sentence description of the mayor of Stirrington, newly arrived to host a debate between Liberal Party candidate Charles and the unscrupulous candidate of the Conservatives. Years of diligent work at the dinner table had earned him a shape more akin to a small building than to any of his fellow men. That sentence is both funny and loving, which is a very good combination in my opinion. I wish Charles Lenox a long career in both parliament and in solving crimes. I'll be there to cheer him on.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Prosperous Friends; Author: Visit Amazon's Christine Schutt Page; Review: This stunning short novel is about the rapid disintegration of a marriage that should never have happened. Both parties to it -pretty boy writer Ned and kind of pretty but desperately unfulfilled Isabel-- are basically unattractive types: the husband is a taker and a user, the wife seems doomed to dissatisfaction, starting with the disillusionment of their sex life. Their marriage is already unraveling when they become entangled with an older couple who seem to have what they've never gotten: a relationship, however incomplete it may be in many respects, that allows them to move forward through life together. The older man, Clive, is a successful painter, a serial adulterer and a roaring egoist, but his wife, a poet, has found a way to make it work between them, where the young couple just scar each other terribly before moving on to separate, who knows what kind of, lives. The prose in this novel is luminous. Schutt uses alliteration repeatedly, creating waves of sound that just beg to be declaimed like the best poetry or an epic: "Might they not be released and made green again at some greater god's touch?" "g - g- g..." The final paragraph in the book floats forward on cushions of alternating front-end "p"s, "w"s, "c"s and "ch"s, "s"s and "sh"s: "For eating rather than feeding his guests, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus lost his eye. Pious mortals who stick to the code fare better. Like the poor old couple --what were their names?- who offered all of what they had for the comfort of gods in disguise: the best chair, their last chicken, the cask of wine now sour but the gods make it sweeter.... etc., etc. [ending:] So it is that in dying they have only enough time to cry: 'Farewell, dear companion,' before they turn into trees, a linden and an oak, sprung from one trunk." This is a book where the small touches are as telling as the narrative line. Schutt captures in two sentences what an old woman's hand looks like to her. She describes the nature that surrounds her characters in Maine -a nature that the poet notices (she writes about it), her painter husband only notices when some aspect of it engages his painterly eye and Ned and Isabel and Sarah, the painter's daughter, cruise through oblivious. The story is told at a slant, the narrator outside events, so that passages slide obliquely into place as you read them, unclear at the start but then acquiring context and significance. There are no waste words in this book. The story is almost wholly about five characters. (The fifth is the painter's awkward and unhappy middle-aged daughter, who feels rejected by him. And she's right about that.) Only the painter's wife emerges as an attractive human being, but that's alright: Schutt reminds us that even the most self-involved people can feel and hurt. It's a really good book. I hope lots of people try it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals (P.S.); Author: Visit Amazon's Hal Herzog Page; Review: BIRKHEAD, Tim. Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird. Walker. 2012. 266 + xxii p, illus., bibliog., index. $25. MARZLUFF, John, and ANGELL, Tony. Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans. Free Press. 2012. 289 + xiv p., illus., bibliog., index. $25. HERZOG, Hal. Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals. HarperCollins. 2010. 226 + viii p. $25.99. Good science writing is hard to beat. It's crisp, provides you with new insights into the physical world, and if the writer is good, opens up new worlds to you. Two of these three books -by Birkhead and Marzluff and Angell-- satisfy me on this level. The third -by Herzog-- does not. The two books on birds were part of a larger packet of books I bought from Amazon to satisfy my curiosity about these animals I can't ignore but know little about. I had read one book by Berndt Heinrich, a brilliant animal ethologist, on ravens so I bought three more (one on ravens, one -a classic--on bumblebees, and one autobiographical), which I have yet to read. These two books got caught up in the web of that buying spree. I[m just as interested in our attitudes toward animals -why are some okay to eat and others not? why do some repulse us and others not at all?--so I was looking for books on that topic too, and Herzog's popped up, along with a book by one of my favorite quirky historians, R. W. Bulliett, Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers (2005). This digression is simply to establish that I have a serious, though not scholarly, interest in the topics of animal capabilities and personalities and on how we perceive and relate to different kinds of animals. Birhkead's book on bird senses, and Marzluff's and Angell's on the capabilities and behavior of crows both satisfy me. The information is provides succinctly, the writing is crisp, both Birkhead and Marzluff (Angell is the illustrator) convey their passion about their subjects, and what they write about is fascinating. Both include a good deal of hard scientific information, not surprising given how much their field of studies has been enriched by the use of modern brain mapping techniques, but the hard stuff doesn't overwhelm the lay read (me). Rather, it gives what they write elsewhere credibility. The illustrations in both books are superb, and highly informative, a model of animal science illustrating. Birkhead especially is generous in detailing the contributions of past and other present day scientists in advancing knowledge in his field. Neither author claims too much for what is currently known. And if I haven't said it before, the prose in both of these books is admirably crisp. I bought the book by Hal Herzog because (1) I found the topic fascinating and (2) both Stephen Pinker and Irene Pepperberg, scientists whose books I have enjoyed, praised it. I'll be blunt. I didn't like the book. It's fuzzy where it should be hard, and; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird; Author: Tim Birkhead; Review: BIRKHEAD, Tim. Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird. Walker. 2012. 266 + xxii p, illus., bibliog., index. $25. MARZLUFF, John, and ANGELL, Tony. Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans. Free Press. 2012. 289 + xiv p., illus., bibliog., index. $25. HERZOG, Hal. Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals. HarperCollins. 2010. 226 + viii p. $25.99. Good science writing is hard to beat. It's crisp, provides you with new insights into the physical world, and if the writer is good, opens up new worlds to you. Two of these three books -by Birkhead and Marzluff and Angell-- satisfy me on this level. The third -by Herzog-- does not. The two books on birds were part of a larger packet of books I bought from Amazon to satisfy my curiosity about these animals I can't ignore but know little about. I had read one book by Berndt Heinrich, a brilliant animal ethologist, on ravens so I bought three more (one on ravens, one -a classic--on bumblebees, and one autobiographical), which I have yet to read. These two books got caught up in the web of that buying spree. I[m just as interested in our attitudes toward animals -why are some okay to eat and others not? why do some repulse us and others not at all?--so I was looking for books on that topic too, and Herzog's popped up, along with a book by one of my favorite quirky historians, R. W. Bulliett, Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers (2005). This digression is simply to establish that I have a serious, though not scholarly, interest in the topics of animal capabilities and personalities and on how we perceive and relate to different kinds of animals. Birhkead's book on bird senses, and Marzluff's and Angell's on the capabilities and behavior of crows both satisfy me. The information is provides succinctly, the writing is crisp, both Birkhead and Marzluff (Angell is the illustrator) convey their passion about their subjects, and what they write about is fascinating. Both include a good deal of hard scientific information, not surprising given how much their field of studies has been enriched by the use of modern brain mapping techniques, but the hard stuff doesn't overwhelm the lay read (me). Rather, it gives what they write elsewhere credibility. The illustrations in both books are superb, and highly informative, a model of animal science illustrating. Birkhead especially is generous in detailing the contributions of past and other present day scientists in advancing knowledge in his field. Neither author claims too much for what is currently known. And if I haven't said it before, the prose in both of these books is admirably crisp. I bought the book by Hal Herzog because (1) I found the topic fascinating and (2) both Stephen Pinker and Irene Pepperberg, scientists whose books I have enjoyed, praised it. I'll be blunt. I didn't like the book. It's fuzzy where it should be hard, and; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans; Author: John Marzluff Ph.D.; Review: BIRKHEAD, Tim. Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird. Walker. 2012. 266 + xxii p, illus., bibliog., index. $25. MARZLUFF, John, and ANGELL, Tony. Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans. Free Press. 2012. 289 + xiv p., illus., bibliog., index. $25. HERZOG, Hal. Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals. HarperCollins. 2010. 226 + viii p. $25.99. Good science writing is hard to beat. It's crisp, provides you with new insights into the physical world, and if the writer is good, opens up new worlds to you. Two of these three books -by Birkhead and Marzluff and Angell-- satisfy me on this level. The third -by Herzog-- does not. The two books on birds were part of a larger packet of books I bought from Amazon to satisfy my curiosity about these animals I can't ignore but know little about. I had read one book by Berndt Heinrich, a brilliant animal ethologist, on ravens so I bought three more (one on ravens, one -a classic--on bumblebees, and one autobiographical), which I have yet to read. These two books got caught up in the web of that buying spree. I[m just as interested in our attitudes toward animals -why are some okay to eat and others not? why do some repulse us and others not at all?--so I was looking for books on that topic too, and Herzog's popped up, along with a book by one of my favorite quirky historians, R. W. Bulliett, Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers (2005). This digression is simply to establish that I have a serious, though not scholarly, interest in the topics of animal capabilities and personalities and on how we perceive and relate to different kinds of animals. Birhkead's book on bird senses, and Marzluff's and Angell's on the capabilities and behavior of crows both satisfy me. The information is provides succinctly, the writing is crisp, both Birkhead and Marzluff (Angell is the illustrator) convey their passion about their subjects, and what they write about is fascinating. Both include a good deal of hard scientific information, not surprising given how much their field of studies has been enriched by the use of modern brain mapping techniques, but the hard stuff doesn't overwhelm the lay read (me). Rather, it gives what they write elsewhere credibility. The illustrations in both books are superb, and highly informative, a model of animal science illustrating. Birkhead especially is generous in detailing the contributions of past and other present day scientists in advancing knowledge in his field. Neither author claims too much for what is currently known. And if I haven't said it before, the prose in both of these books is admirably crisp. I bought the book by Hal Herzog because (1) I found the topic fascinating and (2) both Stephen Pinker and Irene Pepperberg, scientists whose books I have enjoyed, praised it. I'll be blunt. I didn't like the book. It's fuzzy where it should be hard, and; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ancient Light (Vintage International); Author: Visit Amazon's John Banville Page; Review: "Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother." That`s the first sentence in this sometimes sad, sometimes elegiac, deeply sensitive, slow moving exploration of a man's psyche, and the effects on it of the past. Alexander Cleave was a famous actor until the time he froze on stage, forgetting lines and character, and ending forever his stage career. Years later, now sixty-five, he is approached to do his first movie, playing a Paul De Man-type character in an indie film, opposite a famous movie star. She has her own troubles, which draw him in. Cleave also lives in the past --two different pasts, the one, ten years past, when his mentally troubled daughter Cass threw herself over a cliff and killed herself, the other the remembrance of fifteen, when he engaged in a passionate love affair with the mother of his best friend. Cleave lives his current life with regret - for a failed career, his lost (doomed, really) daughter, his one true love affair which happened when he was too young to know what to do about it until it was over. Anyone who has read previous novels by Banville knows that he is a consummate describer, given to slow, leisurely explorations of the outer landscape that matches up with or feeds the inner world of his protagonists. Ancient Light is no exception. Talking of the behavior of Cleave and his wife after the sudden death of their daughter, he writes: "We seized on what might be signs, the vaguest portents, wisps of intimation. Coincidences were not now what they might have been heretofore, mere wrinkles in in the otherwise blandly plausible surface of reality, but parts of a code, large and urgent, a kind of desperate semaphoring form the other side that, maddeningly, we were unable to read. How we would begin to listen now, all else suspended, when, in company, we overheard people speaking of having been bereaved, how breathlessly we hung on their words, how hungrily we scanned their faces, looking to see if they really believed their lost one not entirely lost. Certain dispositions of supposedly chance objects would strike us with a runic force. In particular, those great flocks of birds, starlings, I think they are, that gather out over the sea on certain days, amoebically swooping and swirling, switching directions in perfect, instantaneous co-ordination, seemed to be inscribing on the sky a series of ideograms directed exclusively at us but too swiftly and fluidly sketched for us to interpret. All this illegibility was a torment to us." This really is amazing writing. Long swooping sentences, the commas following in rapid succession, separating image after image, thought after thought, building up the feeling of their lost-ness. If you want novels that are speedy to read, Banville isn't your man. But if you want a novel that unfolds slowly and leisurely and eloquently points toward a complex emotional state or past history, he's the guy for you. At one point, Cleave characterizes himself -he's remembering his love affair at fifteen -as; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses; Author: Visit Amazon's Daniel Chamovitz Page; Review: The best two popular science books I've read this year are Tim Birkhead's Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird (Walker, 2012) and Daniel Chamovitz's What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (Scientific American, 2012). Both are models of good popular science. The authors are eminent in their fields: Birkhead teaches and does field study in and around New Zealand, Chamovitz directs the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University. They provide solid and up to date information on cutting edge subjects; they write crisply and succinctly; they are generous in acknowledging the work of fellow scientists. (Darwin emerges -again--as a giant for his pioneering work in plant science.) Chamovitz's summary of the work in plant biology should put to rest forever the notion that plants thrive on Mozart and wilt under a dose of Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsies, because, as he attests, the one sense plants do not have is hearing. But plants do bend toward light, Venus flytraps snap shut on bugs that land on their leaves and exceed a certain length (which means there is more meat in them), and leaves curl when touched, sense certain smells and react to them, and reorient themselves toward up and down when turned. Plants are not intelligent, Chamovitz cautions, but they are aware. Both books are a pleasure to read and the conclusions reached are intriguing.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Borribles; Author: Michael De Larrabeiti; Review: I must have first read The Borribles when our son Jeremy was seven or eight. My memories are hazy but I do remember I loved it and the two sequels to it, The Borribles Go for Broke (1981) and The Borribles Across the Dark Metropolis (1986). I just read the first volume in the trilogy again and I admired it just as much. It may be adventure for the pre-teen but it's awfully good adventure regardless of one's age. The publisher says it's for "Ages 13 and up" but I think it's perfect for a bright nine or ten-year-old. and I may even try it on our super-articulate seven-going-on-eight-year-old grandson when he visits in December. The Borribles are descended from children who have run away -from their parents, from the schools, from authority in London. The only difference between the way an ordinary child looks and a Borrible is their ears. Borribles' ears grow long and pointy, and if they're caught and their ears are snipped back to normal size, they revert to being boys -captive, subservient, dull , normal boys again -how unexciting! Borribles live around the edges of city life. They live in abandoned buildings and snitch food to eat from open air fruit and vegetable stalls. They spend a lot of their time avoiding getting caught because once you're a Borrible, nothing is more horrifying than the thought of stopping being one. The Borribles' enemies are the Rumbles, giant rat-like creatures who can't pronounce the letter "r" (they say "w" instead) and live in burrows beneath the streets of London. When a Rumble is caught in Borrible territory, the word is out -the Rumbles are planning to invade. Thus starts the Great Rumble Hunt, which is the subject of this book. Eight Borribles are assembled, one from each of the eight tribes of Borribledom, to infiltrate Rumbledom and kill its leaders. Borribles don't get named until they've done a great deed so the eight Borribles are sent off on this mad crusade are psyched up. At last, they can win their own names. One adventure after another follows. There are heroes , there are villains. There is trickery and deceit, even betrayal. There are long drawn out battles, lovingly detailed in the describing. Not all the Borribles return and not all is as it seems. But what an adventure it has been for them all. What surprised me was how exciting it was to read this book --even for me, at seventy-six. The Borribles is ... epic.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Designing Information: Human Factors and Common Sense in Information Design; Author: Visit Amazon's Joel Katz Page; Review: This fine book, half textbook and half just fun to read, will sit on my bookshelf next to Edwin Tufte's classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983), Tom Kelley's The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm (2001), and Henry Petroski's The Evolution of Everyday Things: How Everyday Artifacts -from Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers -Came to Be as They Are (1994). That's how good this book is, even for the non-designer like me. The layout of the book is itself a model of what Katz preaches, from the eminently logical placement of the page tabs (they're in color, a different one for each chapter, and they move down the page as the book progresses from start to finish) to the presentation of alternative solutions (which include his students' solutions to problems posed to them), to graphic design problems, to the minimization of extraneous text on each page. Katz has a robust sense of humor which he deploys to make points that might otherwise be lost to view. Thus he quotes Miss Piggy on one page (p. 79): "Never eat more than you can lift." The quotation is both funny and illuminating because he is talking about information overload there. (The two other highlighted passages on the page are a quotation from Bruno Martin - "Data-rich is often information-poor."--and Katz's own question of the reader: ""Would you rather have your audience read all of less or none of more?" This stimulating and rich book is a credit to its publisher, Wiley. They must have assumed there was a market for it. I don't see how there couldn't be, it is so useful. Its attractiveness is just a side benefit of Katz's lively mind.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rough Men; Author: Visit Amazon's Aric Davis Page; Review: Thomas and Mercer (T&M) publishers deserve praise for presenting promising but still little known mystery writers to the reading public. The books I've read from them have been uneven in quality but always interesting to read. It is exciting to see new talents emerge! Davis's Rough Men is one of the better entries from T&M. The back cover references Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) and Andrew Vachss as antecedents. I wouldn't agree on Vachss but Stark certainly fits. There's the same tightness in the writing, the gritty feeling to the description, and the good guys - or the closest to good guys a novel of mostly bad guys can provide--are bad dudes themselves, brutal in action and laconic in feelings. The protagonist Will Daniels is a writer who used to be -for all too many years- a truly bad guy. He's spent time in jail but now he's out of that business. His son grew up during his father's bad years. As an adult, he is worse than his father ever was -at least his father never killed anyone but killing doesn't seem to phase the son. When the son is killed -murdered- in the aftermath of a bank robbery that went south, with many people dead, Will feels responsible: it's another time he has failed his son. The police can't find the killer, can't even discover why he was murdered, so Will calls a dangerous ally from his own dark past, and with his estranged brother and his gangster friend-from-the-past, sets off on a killing spree of their own. This is a much truncated version of a novel that deserves more than this. Because it is really a novel of character: how does one get to be a Will Daniels, what burdens do you carry with you when you attempt to shed that life, and what deadly habits still lie buried in you ready to reappear when you need to act yourself. It should be clear that I liked this book. It's modest and true and -another virtue--seldom overwritten. (I marked one passage of slightly Purple Prose -on page 10.) If Davis continues to write books like this one, I, for one, will read them with pleasure.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology; Author: Visit Amazon's Bernd Heinrich Page; Review: \I first became aware of biologist Bernd Heinrich through one of his two books on ravens (The Ravens in Winter, 1991). This summer I picked up this book, a memoir of Heinrich's and his father's lives and a reflection on science, along with his seminal book on how bumblebees regulate temperature flow and conserve heat in their bodies (Bumblebee Economics, 1976) and his second book on the raven (Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds). I'm sure I've read something by him on wolf behavior but I can't find anything in his bibliography - -maybe dementia's onset, shadow memories? Let me say at the start, I like to read about field study and animal ethology, so I'm biased in favor of this kind of book. But by any standard, Snoring Bird is exceptional, an intensely lyrical, unsparingly personal look at what it means -what it feels like- to be a scientist in our complicated, often tense last century. It is also an exceptional account of fatherhood and childhood: how a talented child negotiates the path to independent adulthood both nurtured by and opposed by by a strong-willed, inflexible father who happens to be in roughly the same field of study as the son. Heinrich doesn't cheat in describing his father, who was both admirable and reprehensible on many levels -his relations with women, his single-minded devotion to his work (he captured and catalogued ichneumon wasps, he was the world expert on Asian and some African ichneumons), the difficulties he had dealing with authorities, his ambivalence toward his son, his near-rapturous enthusiasm for raw nature, which his son inherited. Heinrich notes what he felt his father did wrong with him -for instance, abandoning his sister and him to a foster school for years while he hunted wasps overseas with one of his `wives'. But he also notes what he did right and he understands the trauma his father went through growing up in Poland before the First World War, having to negotiate his way past Nazis, German-hating Poles, the threat of Russia after World War II, the difficulty an old=-fashioned animal catcher faced getting work in post-war America. Heinrich's assessment of his father comes out in balance more favorable than unfavorable, admiring and loving. Heinrich's assessment of himself is equally balanced. Driven in different ways than his father, he failed in two marriages before finding happiness in a third. The most lyrical passages in the book detail his near-rapturous encounters with nature, his love of the wilderness. The narrative of how he became a scientist, and succeeded at after false starts, is as good as any description of a scientist's education that I have read. Threaded throughout the text are Heinrich's own drawings, from childhood up, of birds, beetles, wasps, his father's Maine farm, and photographs and maps. This truly is an extraordinary book. People will turn away from it because it's about scientists' lives, but it's not really: it's about being human and having a father, who was human too.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Moon Underfoot (A Jake Crosby Thriller); Author: Visit Amazon's Bobby Cole Page; Review: Moon Underfoot is another good thriller from Thomas & Mercer, who have done the reading public a service by issuing a long string of good to exceptional mysteries and thrillers by authors who aren't yet household names but some day may be. Moon Underfoot is the follow-up to Cole's debut novel, The Dummy Line. That novel ended with Jake Crosby rescuing his daughter and himself from a gang of vicious backwoods drug runners and in the process killing two of them. But he didn't get their boss, "Moon Pie" Daniels, and now Daniels is coming for him. That's one strain in this novel: how Jake strikes back. But it's only one of a bunch of tangled narratives. In another, three old men and an old woman, after a lifetime of following the straight and narrow, embark on a life of crime, but not to enrich themselves, rather for charity (of sorts). In a third, the Mississippi Drug Task Force makes a beeline on the Gulf Coast drug king, a vicious beast named Tam Nguyen. There's more. Members of a South of the Border drug cartel, the Tennessee Mexicans, chase after a million dollars that's been stolen from them. A woman struggles to free herself from an abusive boyfriend. And "Moon Pie's" half-brother, Levi, wants to break loose from the life of crime that "Moon Pie" has dragged him into. I like the combination of sudden violence and broad humor that results from throwing all these colorful characters and events into the mixer in this delightful, never-let-up action thriller.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dickens; Author: Visit Amazon's Simon Callow Page; Review: Simon Callow's extraordinary short biography of Charles Dickens deserves every bit of praise it has received. It not only expands our knowledge of Dickens, it helps us to get inside him -a complex, deeply human (Chesterton wrote sympathetically of "the mixed substance called Dickens"), and above all admirable man as well as writer. Callow recites Dickens's mother's statement -a vivacious woman-- that she'd been out dancing all night the day before he was born but notes that research has shown that the ball took place four days before Charles's birth, not the night before, "which only goes to show," Callow writes, "what a spoilsport diligent research can be." Asides like this liven up an already lively account. Another aside, on. p. 248, could only have been written by an accomplished actor like Callow. Describing Dickens's amateur acting gigs and his highly professional public readings, Callow writes: "[I]t is a kind of acting for which we no longer have any use . . . He and most of his contemporaries saw it as an essential part of the actor's job to be memorable, and these points were what people remembered: not their interpretations of roles, a word that would have seemed bewildering to a Victorian theatre-goer, if not actually impertinent. Acting, Dickens and his contemporaries believed, was the art of gesture, no more and no less." Callow's admiration for Dickens as a writer and a mensch, enrich his narrative of this exceptional man's exceptional life. This is a sensitive account. It should not be a surprise that an actor, one who has acted the role of Dickens in dramatized readings of his works, should offer insights into the amazing extent to which theater and theatricality set the tone for many of Dickens's writings. "Literature was his wife, the theatre his mistress, and to the very end he was tempted to leave the one for the other." The tale of his last days, struggling through his fabulously successful public readings, the physical energy in which he had taken pride in fleeing him, struggling with one more novel, Drood, is moving and dramatic. Even fading away, Dickens was memorably sociable: "right to the end, it is Dickens's laughter that people remembered," notes Callow. Here was Dickens's advice to his son Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, aka "Plorn," when Plorn was leaving to join his brother in Australia: "Never take a mean advantage of anyone in a transaction, and never be hard on people who are in your power. Try to do to others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down by our savior than that you should." Did Dickens always live up to his own advice? Surely not in his treatment of his wife Catherine, who had borne him ten children and whom he discarded when he was done with her, never to speak to her again. But not just as a writer but as a committed human being. Dickens did,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Watch: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya Page; Review: I received this novel from Amazon Vine for review early in the summer. I read the first section, then skipped to the last pages, and decided I didn`t want to read it, at least not then. I made a big mistake. I didn't know what I was missing. I had expected a single voiced account of war in the Afghanistan, presented as a reworking of Sophocles's great tragedy, Antigone, but what I missed, and found when I picked up the book again, was a multi-voiced, deeply lyrical, intensely moving account of our country's latest tragedy abroad, the misconceived and poorly executed war in Afghanistan. The heroes in this book are on both sides: a young Pashtun woman, left legless in a US bomber raid on her village, wants only to bury her brother, dead after a raid on an American frontier outpost; the beleaguered and disturbed American soldiers increasingly doubt the effectiveness and rightness of what they're doing in this strange, hostile country. The story is told from the perspective of one voice after another: the girl (Antigone), an increasingly weary but originally idealistic lieutenant, who had studied classics at Vassar (Lieutenant), a deeply human medic who has had it with this war (Medic), the camp's new interpreter, whose family was wiped out by the Taliban, leaving him intolerant of nuances toward his enemies (Ismene), a newby second lieutenant (Second Lieutenant), the career top sergeant (First Sergeant), excepts from the (now dead) first lieutenant's journal (Lieutenant's Journal), ending with a long passage from the disturbingly narrow perspective of the captain (Captain). The central dilemma in the book is how to treat the Pashtun woman. Her brother's dead boy is slated to be shipped back to central headquarters for examination and broadcasting on Afghani television as a lesson of the futility of fighting the government, but he's not Taliban and probably attacked in reprisal for American drone killings. The interpreter scolds the girl: "You have displeased the lieutenant!" "Why have I displeased him? I speak the truth," she says. "This is war. People die. It's what happens." I strain to keep calm. I say: "You killed my family from the air. But for you, my mother, my grandmother, my sister Fawzia, my sister-in-law, and my little brother Yunns would all be alive. ... This isn't war but the slaughter of innocents. I know what war means. ... But no man here would stoop to deliberately killing women and children. He'd be purged from society and subjected to lifelong contempt." That's one side. And here's the other. The captain, a blunt instrument on moral matters, remembers a conversation with the now dead first lieutenant. They were discussing the war in Afghanistan and the lieutenant compared it to Creon's Greece: Captain. It's the age of Creon. `Cept that he's here, there, and everywhere. He's the government and the corporations and everything else that matters, and he's totally faceless. He's a machine, a system, he has his own logic, and once you're part of that, it really doesn't matter if you're a grunt or a general:; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe; Author: George Dyson; Review: Cathedral is an elegant and engaging account of a difficult, at times almost arcane, subject, one that is terribly important to our understanding of our collective future -the origins, evolution and future of the digital computer -how did we get here and where are we headed now? This is the ur-story of digital computing, Starting with work done at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and radiating across the nation in the 1940s and early 50s. It is a tale of big personalities and expansive ideas, skewed at points by the intrusions of the military and the operations of national and academic politics. There are several big names in the story -Einstein and Oppenheimer, for two--but the Big Four who emerge in this fascinating narrative are John von Neumann, Julian Bigelow, Stanislaw Ulam, and Alan Turing. Von Neumann, Ulam and Turing were all mathematicians but of very different temperaments and approaches, and among them they came up with the theory for digital processing, but Bigelow was the practical genius who could make the machines that would do what Turing had theorized a machine could do and Neumann wanted from them. The variety of complex calculatory problems tackled in the early days of ENIAC's and other computers' operations is mindboggling: modeling climate and predicting weather, calculating where to drop bombs and artillery and how to best avoid anti-aircraft flack, cryptanalysis (especially Great Britain's cracking of the German Enigma code), calculating the effect of an atomic bomb explosion and later a hydrogen bomb explosion, tackling questions of computer-generated `evolution", and, later, the evolution of search engines and cloud computing. There is a brilliant discussion on pp. 277- approx. 290 comparing the digital coding of early machines and the present evolution away from linear reasoning on computers to analog: sloppy, non-linear, statistically directed searching, much like human minds work. Writes Dyson: " The notion that [today] one particular computer resides in one particular location at one time is obsolete." And he speculates on the future of computing. "Most processors, most of the time, are waiting for instructions. . . . The global computer [made possible by the internet], for all its powers, is perhaps the least efficient machine that humans have ever built. There is a thin veneer of instructions, and then there is a dark, empty 99.9 percent. ... The transition to virtual machines (optimizing the allocation of processing cycles) and to cloud computing (optimizing storage allocation) marks the beginning of a transformation into a landscape where otherwise wasted resources are being put to use. Codes are becoming multicellular, while the boundaries between individual processors and individual memories grown indistinct." Dyson's speculations about the future of computing may be right or they may be wrong. It is hard to nail down a terrain that is changing so dynamically and so fast. But if I'm to read speculation, I `d rather have it come from someone like Dyson, who is both knowledgeable and alert to possibilities. This is a brilliant book, and though a slow read at times, a very enjoyable as well as; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Twelve (Passage); Author: Visit Amazon's Justin Cronin Page; Review: I reviewed The Passage, the first novel in Cronin's projected vampire trilogy, when it came out. I gave it a Starred Review, the journal's equivalent of Amazon's Five Stars, and the book was picked as one of the best books of the year. I liked the book a lot. It was a different twist on the vampire story. A lot happened in it and there were lots of characters, but yet the narrative felt lean and I didn't find it difficult to follow what happened. The narrative propelled the reader forward and could Cronin write! I was looking forward to this book but was disappointed in it. It's everything the first book wasn't. The narrative is complicated -but it was in the first book too. This time, Cronin is manipulating events and characters across three separate time periods, at the time of the viral attack, 79 years later, and a century later. I don't think it works. Almost all the way through, I found myself referring to the list of characters in the back of the book where in The Passage, I quickly sorted them out and could simply read on. The narrative seems clotted, as though it's clogged up. There's too much cross-referencing for me. And it seems padded, especially toward the end, which I found neither compelling nor convincing. There are still passages I enjoyed but I did not enjoy the novel as a whole, and I had wanted to enjoy it very much when I started it.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Archy and Mehitabel; Author: Visit Amazon's Don Marquis Page; Review: MARQUIS, Don. archy and mehitabel. Doubleday (Anchor). 1916-1930; reissued 1973, 1990. 193p. $8.95. (pb) archyology: the long lost tales of archy and mehitabel. UPNE. Republished in 2009. 120p. $14. (pb) archyology ii (the final dig): the long lost tales of archy and mehitabel. Bloodaxe. 2000. 124p. $13.80 (pb) expression is the need of my soul i was once a vers libre poet but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach it has given me a new outlook on life Thus wrote archy the cockroach in his fist communiqu to newsman and soon to be friend Don Marquis. The time was 1916. The US wasn't even involved in World War I and Prohibition was yet to come. Marquis was a columnist and reporter for the New York Sun but he was also a frustrated poet. His way out was to write columns in blank verse about Archy, a free verse poet reborn as a cockroach, and archy's raggle taggle alleycat friend mehitabel, who claimed to have been Cleopatra in a former life. His columns had been supposedly written by archy, one letter at a time. archy would climb to the top of Marquis's typewriter, then throw himself head first at the key he wanted to hit. He couldn't print capitals because he didn`t have the strength or reach to work the shift bar and a letter at the same time. Thus everything he wrote was in lower case with no punctuation.) archy's missals to his reporter friend are as enjoyable to read now as they were when they first appeared between 1916-1930. The political and social commentary that surfaces in some of them is dated now. It's the pieces about archy and mehitabel -a strange friendship--that are timeless. How can you not like a creature who writes: "i see things from the underside now/ thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket boss/ but your glue is getting so stale/ i cant eat it"? And mehitabel's devil-may-care approach to life (which usually treats her badly)? "i have had my ups and downs/ but wotthehell wotthehell/ yesterday scepters and crowns/ fried oysters and velvet gowns/ and today i herd with bums/ but wotthehell wotthehell..." archy and mehitabel was made into a not very good musical called Shinbone Alley. Carol Channing sang mehitabel's role on the short version recording of it. Channing was probably as good as you could get for mehitabel but unfortunately, the vehicle was inferior. For the true stuff, you still have to go these three collections of Marquis's columns. (The archyology books are only for fanatics -they're collections of the leftover pieces that somehow had not made it into he original collection.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Archyology : The Long Lost Tales of Archy and Mehitabel; Author: don marquis; Review: MARQUIS, Don. archy and mehitabel. Doubleday (Anchor). 1916-1930; reissued 1973, 1990. 193p. $8.95. (pb) archyology: the long lost tales of archy and mehitabel. UPNE. Republished in 2009. 120p. $14. (pb) archyology ii (the final dig): the long lost tales of archy and mehitabel. Bloodaxe. 2000. 124p. $13.80 (pb) expression is the need of my soul i was once a vers libre poet but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach it has given me a new outlook on life Thus wrote archy the cockroach in his fist communiqu to newsman and soon to be friend Don Marquis. The time was 1916. The US wasn't even involved in World War I and Prohibition was yet to come. Marquis was a columnist and reporter for the New York Sun but he was also a frustrated poet. His way out was to write columns in blank verse about Archy, a free verse poet reborn as a cockroach, and archy's raggle taggle alleycat friend mehitabel, who claimed to have been Cleopatra in a former life. His columns had been supposedly written by archy, one letter at a time. archy would climb to the top of Marquis's typewriter, then throw himself head first at the key he wanted to hit. He couldn't print capitals because he didn`t have the strength or reach to work the shift bar and a letter at the same time. Thus everything he wrote was in lower case with no punctuation.) archy's missals to his reporter friend are as enjoyable to read now as they were when they first appeared between 1916-1930. The political and social commentary that surfaces in some of them is dated now. It's the pieces about archy and mehitabel -a strange friendship--that are timeless. How can you not like a creature who writes: "i see things from the underside now/ thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket boss/ but your glue is getting so stale/ i cant eat it"? And mehitabel's devil-may-care approach to life (which usually treats her badly)? "i have had my ups and downs/ but wotthehell wotthehell/ yesterday scepters and crowns/ fried oysters and velvet gowns/ and today i herd with bums/ but wotthehell wotthehell..." archy and mehitabel was made into a not very good musical called Shinbone Alley. Carol Channing sang mehitabel's role on the short version recording of it. Channing was probably as good as you could get for mehitabel but unfortunately, the vehicle was inferior. For the true stuff, you still have to go these three collections of Marquis's columns. (The archyology books are only for fanatics -they're collections of the leftover pieces that somehow had not made it into he original collection.); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists; Author: Visit Amazon's Rachel Cohen Page; Review: Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists 1854-1967 is an exceptional work of literary detection and interpretation. In thirty-six chapters, Cohen narrates a set of encounters of distinguished American literati and artists across the span of 113 years, laying out changes in the preoccupations and sensibilities of American writers and artists in the century that followed the Civil War. Some meetings are brief, even one-time, and peripheral to the protagonists' lives as, for instance, the Henry James, still a child, sitting with his father for a photograph by Matthew Brady, or William Dean Howells' one-time meeting with Walt Whitman, or Richard Avedon's photo shoot of modernists Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. The meeting of James and Brady is also a "might have been" meeting, for Cohen takes a daring chance to capture and describe James's literary and intellectual sensibility on the brink of radical change. Other chapters describe longer standing relationships -Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz, Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore, Hart Crane's disastrous stay in Mexico with Katherine Anne Porter, the complicated father and son relationship of W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, the advance-retreat relationship between Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. This is not a book of strict factual history (although nothing in it runs counter to what can be proved using historical methods) but rather a book of rich historical sensitivity that illuminates a critical period in the maturing of our country's literature and art. It is written with exceptional grace: each chapter can be read separately without loss in pleasure or comprehension. This is a bold venture that deserves a wide readership. The reader who enjoys A Chance Meeting may also enjoy Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A History of Ideas in America.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Third Bullet (Bob Lee Swagger); Author: Visit Amazon's Stephen Hunter Page; Review: This is the eighth (seventh?) novel by Hunter featuring master sniper Bob Lee Swagger and then ninth involving his family. I've reviewed two of these novels previously, I, Sniper (2009) for Amazon Vine and Dirty White Boys (1994) for a journal. The previous novel in this series, I, Sniper, was thin -fun, but less believable than the best of these novels had been. With this book, Hunter is back to form. There is no one who writes about shooters with the authority and grace that Hunter displays in this engrossing series. His experience as a film critic (Pulitzer Prize winner) and novelist (five novels before the first Swagger novel) give an authority to his writing that moves the reader along. Like early Dick Francis or today's Lee Child, when a new Swagger book by Stephen Hunter comes along, I put down my other reading and dig right in and I don't pit the book down until I'm done with it. About I, Sniper, the previous book in this series, I wrote: "The Swagger novels lean toward complicated back and forth chronology and complicated plot lines, all of which is resolved at the end in a burst of satisfying violence. Hunter's an economical writer, who neither glories in blood and carnage nor ignores describing it when moves his storyline along. Swagger is a fine character. He may not be book educated but he's whip smart in his own environment, as a hunter. He makes smart, even tricky, choices about shooting that in this book ... save his life against long odds. Although by nature a loner, even reclusive, he's also a born leader, with an instinctive feel for making those around trust him." In this latest addition to the series, Swagger is sixty-six. He has a wife, daughters, a ranch and pretty much everything he needs. He doesn't need more violence. But violence finds him anyways. A woman accosts him, gets into his skin. He agrees to talk to her. She tells him a tale of her dead husband, asks Bob Lee to check on whether he was assassinated rather than just killed in a random hit and run. Her husband wrote books. His next one was supposed to be on the Kennedy assassination. And thus starts one of the most thorough, well researched and ingenious reexaminations of the tragic events of November 23, 1963, that one could have imagined. Only this time, instead of a conspiracy nut, it's Bob Lee who's investigating, and nobody knows guns like Bob Lee does. The question that puzzles Bob Lee surfaces early. The first two bullets fired at the Kennedy vehicle remained intact upon impact. Why then, did the third bullet explode? The working out of that and other questions is careful and methodical, just like Bob Lee always is. Violence -extreme violence--intrudes en route, and Bob Lee has to handle it. The result is a thoroughly satisfying novel of action and deduction that leads to a startling conclusion. Is Bob Lee's conclusion right? I don't know. But it's certainly convincing.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science; Author: Visit Amazon's Keith Frankish Page; Review: I'm neither a philosopher nor computer scientist nor any variety of neuroscientist. I am however interested in advances in hg field of cognitive science and this book looks like a useful reference tool (which, in fact, it turns out to be). Level of abstraction is the important consideration in a book like this: is it accessible to non-scientist readers or does it oversimplify complicated matters? The Cambridge Handbook succeeds very well on this count. It is definitely not an easy book to read. It bears slow and careful attention, with time between topics to reflect and absorb what has gone before, but a lay reader of either philosophy or other facets of cognitive science will be able to follow the argument and benefit from the concise summaries of complicated topics which it provides. The chapters are written by experts who are for the most part prominent in their fields of study. Many are philosophers but an anthropologist is included as are a quantitative analyst, a neuroscientist and a computer scientist, and several psychologists represented among the authors, each writing on their own area of expertise and research. Only one of them have I read before -Ray Jackendorf on language acquisition and use. It was interesting for me to read these articles because most of my reading has been about either computer simulation or applied brain research. Although I was aware that philosophy was part of the mix of disciplines adding to our understanding of cognitive issues, I knew little of what philosophers had written on these themes. As to its layout, the book is presented in three sections: foundations (historical overview and core themes; separate entries on the representational theory of the mind and cognitive architectures -the latter is especially helpful); aspects of cognition (from perception through emotion and consciousness); and research programs. The articles run roughly twenty pages each and are organized by headings and subheadings for easy reference. Each includes a bibliography of the references used in the article and suggestions for further reading. They seem to this reader to be scrupulously fair in presenting different views in their fields: it's quite helpful for an amateur like me who is trying to keep up with a field of vast importance for us but one which is also highly technical and rapidly changing. One theme that runs through several of the entries in the hope that sometime in the not too distant future, a unifying theory will be found to bridge rule-derived and connectionist theories of, for instance, language acquisition, and to bring closer the insights yielded by computer simulations and the study of the brain.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age; Author: Visit Amazon's Jonathon Keats Page; Review: Keats's short book on forged art is an essay on art and authenticity and modern art and modern angst, wrapped around chapters on six modern artists who have forged art for various reasons. It comes across as more of a sandwich than a composed meal. Keats presents six cases studies. All are interesting. Three of the forgers involved are relatively famous, even to an art-gossip neophyte like me. Han van Meegeren, on trial in the postwar Netherlands for collaborating with Goering in looting his country's art treasures, defended himself by outing himself as a forger. Eric Hebbern set out deliberately to show how flimsy art experts' attributions of authenticity can be. And Tom Keating almost seems not to have cared if he were caught, so sloppy was his work, nor did he (or so he alleged) make much money off his transparently detectable forgeries. He ended his career with his own television show, in which he taught young artists how to achieve the effects he'd used in forging other people's paintings. The stories are told unpretentiously but they make their points. Keats's hand is heavier in the essays that bracket the case studies. Phrases like "deconstructing celebrity" and "the mantle of anxiety" today make me shudder, even as I know what the author is saying with them. Most of the time in this otherwise attractive little book, I find them overkill. Keats writes about the anonymous appropriation artist/gangster artist Banksey, who, in 2004, managed to sneak into the Louvre and post his own Mona Lisa on the wall: a mockup of the original with a yellow blank smiley face where her face should have been. The painting was discovered within minutes and promptly removed. Keats comments: "However, the anxieties it elicited cannot so easily be effaced. Where does culture belong? What can art express?" Oh, come on! Not everything elicits cosmic angst, even in the world of High Art. This is puffery. Regardless of any ideological intent on the part of the street artist Banksey, this seems more of a media incident than a portent of cracks appearing in the epistructure of modern art, where anxiety leaks in and poisons all talk of authenticity. Then within a paragraph, Keats is talking about other appropriations of the Mona Lisa: from Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. and Picabia's Tableau Dada in 1919 to Andy Warhol's 1960 Thirty Are Better Than One. From this point on I found the essay enlightening. He discusses the intent and accomplishments of a number of appropriation artists (`appropriation artists' appropriate other artists' work and don't try to hide it -the purpose of their art is to comment on the nature of the artistic enterprise itself). Conceptual artist Michael Mandiberg confessed: "A lot of conceptual art is an inside joke, and a lot of these jokes are one-liners." Somehow that doesn't seem enough for art to be. So, a so-so book as a whole with interesting parts as well as less worthy ones. The essays on the forgers are slim but enjoyable. The bracketing essays on modern art, anxiety, etc., don't make it; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See; Author: Visit Amazon's Juliann Garey Page; Review: The story in this fascinating first novel is told in bits and pieces by a man undergoing electroshock therapy for bipolar disorder. We hear it in jumbled order but increasing dread, for the protagonist, an exceptionally successful Hollywood executive named Greyson Todd, falls apart before our very eyes as we read. Confined at last, after ten years of profligacy and wrong decisions in a New York psychiatric ward, Todd is being given twelve electroshock treatments. Thirty seconds each. Zap, zap. Out go the bad thoughts, in come good ones. After each one, remembrances and regrets swirl through his mind. The treatments continue and he loses more and more memory, more of whom he is. He may be calmer, though that hasn't been tested yet, but he's diminished. "Once I was music," he muses. "Now I am just noise." Todd was good at what he did in Hollywood. Early in his career he brokered a movie that won multiple Oscars. From then on, he was a hot commodity. People are expected to be a bit crazy in Hollywood -sometimes craziness gives the buzz you need to succeed- so his growingly apparent idiosyncrasies didn't matter -not as long as he brought in the money. But after twenty years of faking normality, Todd got to where his wife and daughter seemed like strangers and the personality he took to work each day a suit of clothes he put on for work and took off when he got home. One night he gives up his life, just split, leaves his family with enough money to survive while he takes off, living anonymously elsewhere sans obligation or medication. The ten years that follow are a horror show -he gets into fights, lies and seduces, indulges all his sexual desires and finally tries suicide, sitting at a table in a bar in Kampala and stabbing the veins in his wrist with a fish fork until the blood pour out all over the table. As damaged as Todd was before he took off on poisoned odyssey, it's chilling to see what happens to him afterwards. By the end we are watching a man disappear within his own skull. There is no resolution in this book, just ending.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Frances and Bernard; Author: Visit Amazon's Carlene Bauer Page; Review: This short novel is as good as fiction gets and astonishingly accomplished for an author who appears as young as Ms. Bauer does. Frances and Bernard meet at a writers' colony in the summer of 1957. Frances doesn't much like what she sees of Bernard there -he's too big in all his gestures and he postures too much, plus he may be a ladies' man, too much for her austere tastes. Furthermore, Bernard doesn't seem to notice her there, which miffs her. But both recognize something in the other that they don't see in their fellow writers -they are talented. With work, they may both turn out be true writers in time. Who can tell? The presence of Frances, quietly but assertively introvert, emotions locked inside her, and intensely and visibly Catholic, piques Bernard. He is a recent convert to Catholicism. The Real Thing, someone like Frances, intrigues him. So he writes her afterwards, asks her to be his friend through the mail. "Will you talk to me in letters?" he writes, and concludes his first letter to her by asking: "I wanted to ask you this question when we had lunch [at the colony]:Who is the Holy Spirit to you?" Thus starts a three-year exchange of letters, during which they write of all sorts of things, but especially about religion -Gilson, Maritain, Augustine and Paul, the Gospels, Simone Weil... - and the progress of their own writing. (By the end of the novel, each has several books out, Frances's short and long fiction, Bernard's, T. S. Eliot-like poetry. Their friendship grows. Then it transmogrifies into love -carnal and intense. Then the love fails them and there is a final, sad exchange of not-so-frequent, then very-seldom letters before they go off on their separate life tracks. The whole novel is told in letters -Bernard writes to Frances and Frances writes back to him, Frances writes to her friend Claire about Bernard and Bernard writes to his sometime roommate Ted about Frances, Frances writes a nun to seek counsel on how to handle her unanticipated and unexpectedly physical love for Bernard which threatens to overwhelm her anticipated life as a solitary writer. As a rule, epistolary novels don't work -they tend to come across as artificial- but this one is rock solid all the way through, it seems as natural a form for this content as breathing. I didn't grow up in the milieu that Frances (middle-class Philadelphia Irish) and Bernard (Boston and Harvard) did but I grew up at the same time. I was 21 in 1957, when the action in this novel starts, and 30 when it ends, and I am amazed at how accurate Bauer's presentation is of that wholly different time! This is a novel that shines in its details as well as its overall dramatic arc. You quickly grow to admire and then cherish Frances. You love Bernard too but your affection for him is mingled with pity because the other side of his brilliance is mental illness: he periodically slips into mania and has to be hospitalized.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Hell Page; Review: "I wanted to have a life of adventure. I didn't want anybody telling me what to do. I knew this was the most important thing and that all would be lost if I pretended otherwise like grown-ups did. " (Richard Hell reflecting on his childhood) If you lived in that restricted universe that was the New York rock scene from 1969-1980, you'd know the name Richard Hell. With prep school friend TomVerlaine he formed the Neon Boys in 1969. (Both of their last names were made up. Hell was born Richard Meyers and Verlaine was Tom Miller but, but how can you become a rockstar with names like those?) In 1974, Neon Boys transmuted to Television. Then Hell left the group -there was a terminal disagreement with his old buddy Verlaine--and joined up with New York Dolls players Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders to form the Heartbreakers. And then, a year later, in 1976, Hell came into his own with the group that for a short while blazed across the avant garde Rock scene in New York like a flaming meteor, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. The band released two albums and played in an auteur-like but pretty rotten movie named after one of the group's most famous songs, Blank Generation. (Another of his songs was entitled "Love Comes in Spurts.") The group fell apart as Hell became increasingly addicted to hard drugs. Hell eventually got off the drugs -partly by leaving music. He came out of retirement briefly in the 1990s in a group called Dim Stars, which featured Voidoids' guitar player Robert Quine, two refugees from Sonic Youth and one from a group called Gumball. But mostly now he writes. He doesn't sugarcoat his past life in this intriguing book and he doesn't pretend to be a genius musician when he wasn't. Rock and roll, he says, is an attitude, one particularly well suited to disaffected sixteen-year-olds or older if they're emotionally arrested like he felt he was. "What excited me in music [was] being fast, aggressive, and scornful, but complicated and full of feelings." That's a good description of Hell himself. (About the Neon Boys, he writes: "We wanted to be stark and torn up, the way the world was.") The most lyrical passages in this book are about the thrill of producing music and playing it for an audience. (".. the hilarious, incomparable intoxication of materializing into being these previously nonexistent patterns of sound and meaning and physical motion.") Rock and roll is the only art form at which teenagers are not only capable of excelling but that actually requires that one be a teenager, more or less, to practice it at all. ... Punk ... explicitly asserts and demonstrates that the music is not about virtuosity. Rock and roll is about natural grace, about style and instinct. ... You don't have to play guitar well or, by any conventional standard, sing well to make great rock and roll; you just have to have it, have to be able to recognize it, have to get it.... It's all; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Spree (Codename: Chandler); Author: Visit Amazon's J.A. Konrath Page; Review: This book is so over the top, it's fun. It's pure escapism and written to formula but, again, who cares as long as it's a good ride. A superspy, Chandler, has been betrayed by the agency that trained her, an agency so dark and secret that even its parent agency, Homeland Security, doesn't know what it does. The agency has captured her sister Fleming: they plan to torture to extract a secret that will lead to Really Bad Things Happening. Fleming is being held captive in a black site in Baraboo, Wisconsin but Chandler's going to get her out. Against them is a third sister, who has been warped into a psychotic killer. And above it all is an inept and hopelessly corrupt president, who knows that Chandler and Fleming have saved the nation (in a previous installment, Flee) but wants them both dead anyway just to keep things under wraps. When a friend wants to help her, Chandler explains to her why she won't take on any help from civilians: "These guys don't play around. They are the baddest of the bad., and they have unlimited power and an unlimited budget. They start wars and kill millions." Chandler does pick up an associate en route, Tequila. He's a former gymnast who "took on the whole Chicago mob and won. He's not crazy, and he's not a psycho, but he's unaffected by guilt or remorse and does what is needed. ... Always in control, a pure sociopath." She pays him. He fights for her. The book is really like an old time movie serial, where each episode ended in a cliffhanger that had to be resolved at the start of the next episode, only to be succeeded by still another ..... The story is filled with action and all sorts of esoteric martial arts and weapon lingo is thrown in, like this fight, earlier in the book, Chandler against an invincible S&M sociopath killer named Rochester: "I moved fast, stepping close and swinging the nightstick at his heads using a hapkido dan bong technique." (He counters her and raises One.) "I fell into a tae kwon do back stance ... (He does it again) ... I switched my stance to wing chun... muay thai ... It wasn't capoeira. It wasn't kray maga. It wasn't pradal serey or Kwang Do or any type of kung fu I'd ever see. ... I got up fast, keeping my hands on the floor and lashing out with my right heel in a meia-lue de compass." All ends well, more or less, with Fleming free and the two good sisters holding the bad sister captive. But this is a series, and there's a third book in the works, so you know something even worse is coming down the pike. It's mind candy, but it's fun, so enjoy it.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: News from Heaven: The Bakerton Stories (P.S.); Author: Visit Amazon's Jennifer Haigh Page; Review: "... the fact of growing old in a small town: you know everyone's whole story, and everyone, like it or not, knows yours." For generations, Bakerton was a company town, with company houses, all alike, three rooms up and three rooms down. In almost every family there was someone who worked in the mines. They never thought the jobs would end. But then there was a cave-in in Baker Twelve and then the big mine, Baker Eleven, closed down. Tapped out, the company said, though no one who worked there believes them. Now the young have fled and older ones live on meager pensions and low paying jobs, whatever helps them to survive. Hope's gone. The town looks like a place that's been left behind: "The town lay before them in a deep valley, settled there like sediment: the main street with its one traffic light, the rows of company houses, narrow and square -some brick-cased now, or disguised with porches and aluminum siding, bit at this distance you could see how alike they all were. From a few chimneys came streams of dark smoke; most had coal furnaces still. The snow had an established look -dirty at the edges, crusted over with ice. ... Empty storefronts lined the main street. Above the abandoned train station, a punk with a spray can had defaced the old sign BAKERTON COAL *B"LIGHTS THE WORLD. ... The Commercial Hotel ... had burned down years ago, and no one had bothered to rebuild it. More and more, Bakerton looked like what it had always been, a town of churches and bars." Characters overlap in this collection of short stories in an affecting way, because the reader sees the effects of the passage of time on these people who live so close together in this increasingly dysfunctional town. A young Polish girl takes a job in New York, comes home in disgrace. Fifty-some years later, her son and his second wife come back to Bakerton to celebrate his parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary. He feels just as much a failure as his mother must have way back then -his first marriage a flop, two sons lost to him, and now a pregnant wife again. Somehow the visit saves him: he's got another shot at doing it right. (There is a lovely scene in the story where the parents dance a polka at their anniversary celebration. All the other people leave the dance floor, and they look almost young again, dancing there alone.) (Some of the characters in these stories--Joyce Hauser (nee Novak), her sister Dorothy, and he school principal husband Ed-- appeared in the author's earlier book, Baker Towers.) There are many discoveries in this lovely book, some of them big, most not. The narrative is straightforward and plain but somehow lyrical, at times elegiac, low-keyed but heartfelt. By the book's close, you've met some of the characters often enough that they seem old acquaintances.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief; Author: Visit Amazon's Lawrence Wright Page; Review: The most telling chapter in this scarifying account of the origins and rise of Scientology is the second last one ("Tommy")., which recounts a meeting with Tommy Davis, on and off again public spokesman for Scientology, who is the offspring of Scientologist parents (his mother is actress Anne Archer) and entered the `church' early in his teens. The second half of the chapter recounts Wright's meeting with Davis in the office of the New Yorker magazine, which was preparing to publish Wright's profile of a prominent Hollywood director-writer (Paul Haggis) who had left the church. Davis showed up with Jessica Feshbach, also a spokesperson for the church, four lawyers, and "Forty-eight three-ring binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet, to respond to the 971 questions the [fact] checkers had posed. The binders were labeled according to categories, such as "Disappearance of L. Ron Hubbard [the founder of Scientology]," "Tom Cruise," "Gold Base", and "Haggis's Involvement in Scientology." Davis emphasized that the church had gone to extraordinary lengths to prepare for this meeting. "Frankly, the only thing I can think that compares would be the presentation we made in the early 1990s to the IRS." Davis ruled out any discussion of the church confidential scripture (although most of it is available on line if you search hard enough). He compared it to "insisting that a Jew eat pork." He attacked the credibility of Wright's sources for the article, calling them "bitter apostates ... They make up stories." Wright asked how these people had moved up into positions of influence and power in the church if they were so reprehensible. "They weren't like that when they were in those positions." But isn't Scientology supposed to "clear" people of such behavior? It doesn't seem to be working if people at the highest levels of spiritual attainment are actually liars, adulterers, etc., as you allege. They moved on the allegations of physical and psychological abuse that had been levied against the church by numerous ex-members. Davis said only the apostates say that and "[t]hey're a pack of sanctimonious liars." (On p. 345, Wright footnotes eleven people who said they'd been physically assaulted by David Miscavige, head of the church. Twenty-two others attested to having witnessed such abuse and a twenty-third confirmed it but was afraid to have his name printed.) Davis admitted to Miscavige's having forced people to play musical chairs, with the penalty being exile from the church, but pooh-poohed its significance and cruelty. Miscavige was just making a point about how disruptive changes were to the church's internal organization. The Scientology delegation objected to inquiries into Miscavige's lifestyle, which is lavish especially compared to how little money is spent on maintaining ordinary Base workers. (Earlier in the book, Wright writes that $300 to $20,000 a week was being spent on feeding Miscavige and his wife and guests, while ordinary Gold Base workers ate on seventy-five cents a day, less than is spent to feed inmates in California's prisons.) Davis said he knew where Miscavige's missing wife was but would tell where. (She; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald; Author: Therese Anne Fowler; Review: "I don't want to live, I want to love first and live incidentally." (Zelda Fitzgerald) If ever two people shouldn't have met, it's F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre. Charming but immature and undisciplined, Zelda was used to being taken care of, pampered. As Scott's wife, she tuned out discussion of any serious subject -like Scott's perilous finances or the talk of a new poet-playwright on Broadway named Eugene O'Neill. Unless it concerned her directly, she ignored what went on outside her own life. That's not to say she was to blame for Fitzgerald's failure to recognize his own genius. Scott destroyed himself. He didn't need any help. But Zelda was the wrong person and they married in the wrong age -when wives were supposed to want nothing more than to be ornaments for their men- and whether she acquiesced in it or not, their lifestyle was utterly destructive. To start with, they drank so much! And whether they had money or not, they spent it. And Scott was narcissistic and so insecure and he thought that the first thing he needed to do to become THE great American writer was to publicize him. Then there was Hemingway. Hemingway fascinated the more established Fitzgerald. It flattered Scott to promote Hemingway to his own publisher, Scribner's. When Hemingway's' first book (his second published) came out from Scribner's, Scott expected gratitude, but what he got was what many people both before and after got from Hemingway -resentment deepening into disdain and then outright rejection. Papa had no interest in someone who could no longer help him advance himself. Fowler's interpretation of the deep antipathy between Zelda and Ernest isn't something you will find explained in the writings of either of them but Fowler's recreation of it marches well with what is known of Hemingway in general and explains why Zelda loathed him so much. He earns it in this book. Fowler has written an affecting, powerful account of the sad life of a woman who had talent -no one knows quite how much but she was no lightweight--but whose life was out of joint from early on in one of the least fortunate marriages on record. It's difficult to read a chapter without wanting to continue on to the next chapter right away, and then the next and the next. All through it, you anticipate the train wreck to follow, not just because you know it was a wreck because everybody's heard about Scott and Zelda but because in this book, narrated by Zelda, Zelda knows it too but she can't find a way to change it. As long as Scott is in the picture, the prose crackles and you are confronted with one vivid scene after another. But Scott died before Zelda and by then, anyway, she was in an asylum more than out of one, and he was in Hollywood, drinking and whoring his life away. The final pages of the book, after Scott has died, and leading up to Zelda's own early, tragic death, are muted. It's as though the real; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Robert B. Parker's Fool Me Twice: A Jesse Stone Novel (Jesse Stone Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Brandman Page; Review: SANDFORD, John. Mad River (A Virgil Flowers Novel). Putnam. 2012. 400p. $27.95. (4-1/2*) BRANDMAN, Michael. Robert B. Parker's Fool Me Twice (A Jesse Stone Novel). Putnam. 2012. 275p. $25.95. (2-1/2*) Two series novels, one by the successor to the original author, the late lamented Robert B. Parker, the other by the original. In both, the prose is crisp, the lead characters are appealing and the action moves smoothly. Sandford's works where Brandman's is lame. Why? This is Brandman's second Jesse Stone novel and he collaborated with Parker on television and movie versions of the series (in which Tom Selleck played Stone). He's got the externals of Parker's series down cold. Stone was formerly in LA Homicide but is now the police chief of a small, mostly affluent Boston exurb. He's a good cop but also a decent human being, who doesn't mind p***ing off the elected officials who hired him and cares about the people who live in the town. The narrative style is laid back, almost laconic. No one except Stone really comes to life as a character but that's okay. The real problem is plotting. This book juggles three stories: Stone's efforts to redeem a young woman who on the surface is nothing but an over-rich, over-indulged, unappreciative brat but whom Stone is convinced is begging for someone to help her; the arrival of a movie company in town and the threat of a meth-smoking soon-to-be ex to kill his Hollywood star wife; and an investigation into the causes of a mysterious increase in town water rates. The first tale produces some interesting confrontations between Stone and the young girls' snotty parents but the young girl's redemption works out too smoothly. The second tale also is resolved in much too cursory a matter. And the third story has cartoonish protagonists and a denouement that is all to convenient but allows the story to end. All in all, not a good book. (Much like Ace Atkin's taking up of Parker's Spenser novels, which also disappoints.) The Sandford book is something else. Like Parker, Pultizer Prize-winning ex-reporter Sandford has written multiple novels featuring different series characters. (He seems to have abandoned good guy-criminal-con man Kidd, alas! They were good!) Virgil Flowers started as a character in Sandford's series of novels about super-detective Lucas Tanner, but Flowers was such an attractive character that he just seems to have spun off into his own series of thrillers. Tanner's still there but in the background, rooting for and smoothing the way for the less politically sensitive Flowers. This firecracker of a crime novel starts with two killings. Three dropout losers enter a house to rob it and their scumbag leader shoots a woman. On the way out, he kills another man just to steal his car. More murders occur, but now seemingly more to repay grudges than for any other reason. Then the plot thickens. Why did the killer shoot his first victim? How did he find the one window leading into the house that wasn't locked? Where did he get the wad of cash; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mad River (A Virgil Flowers Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's John Sandford Page; Review: SANDFORD, John. Mad River (A Virgil Flowers Novel). Putnam. 2012. 400p. $27.95. (4-1/2*) BRANDMAN, Michael. Robert B. Parker's Fool Me Twice (A Jesse Stone Novel). Putnam. 2012. 275p. $25.95. (2-1/2*) Two series novels, one by the successor to the original author, the late lamented Robert B. Parker, the other by the original. In both, the prose is crisp, the lead characters are appealing and the action moves smoothly. Sandford's works and Brandman's is lame. Why? This is Brandman's second Jesse Stone novel and he collaborated with Parker on television and movie versions of the series (in which Tom Selleck played Stone). He's got the externals of Parker's series down cold. Stone was formerly in LA Homicide but is now the police chief of a small, mostly affluent Boston exurb. He's a good cop but also a decent human being, who doesn't mind p***ing off the elected officials who hired him and cares about the people who live in the town. The narrative style is laid back, almost laconic. No one except Stone really comes to life as a character but that's okay. The real problem is plotting. This book juggles three stories: Stone's efforts to redeem a young woman who on the surface is nothing but an over-rich, over-indulged, unappreciative brat but whom Stone is convinced is begging for someone to help her; the arrival of a movie company in town and the threat of a meth-smoking soon-to-be ex to kill his Hollywood star wife; and an investigation into the causes of a mysterious increase in town water rates. The first tale produces some interesting confrontations between Stone and the young girls' snotty parents but the young girl's redemption works out too smoothly. The second tale also is resolved in much too cursory a matter. And the third story has cartoonish protagonists and a denouement that is all to convenient but allows the story to end. All in all, not a good book. (Much like Ace Atkin's taking up of Parker's Spenser novels, which also disappoints.) The Sandford book is something else. Like Parker, Pultizer Prize-winning ex-reporter Sandford has written multiple novels featuring different series characters. (He seems to have abandoned good guy-criminal-con man Kidd, alas! They were good!) Virgil Flowers started as a character in Sandford's series of novels about super-detective Lucas Tanner, but Flowers was such an attractive character that he just seems to have spun off into his own series of thrillers. Tanner's still there but in the background, rooting for and smoothing the way for the less politically sensitive Flowers. This firecracker of a crime novel starts with two killings. Three dropout losers enter a house to rob it and their scumbag leader shoots a woman. On the way out, he kills another man just to steal his car. More murders occur, but now seemingly more to repay grudges than for any other reason. Then the plot thickens. Why did the killer shoot his first victim? How did he find the one window leading into the house that wasn't locked? Where did he get the wad of cash; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Strange Images of Death (A Detective Joe Sandilands Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Barbara Cleverly Page; Review: This is the third of Barbara Cleverly's Joe Sandilands mystery that I've read. All three have been excellent but this one is probably the best. There are several others to read, including some set in India under the Empire, so I've got pleasant days ahead for me. For those who aren't familiar with the series, Sandilands is Scotland Yard detective, brought in with the august title of Commander following the Great War to deal with a smarter, tougher brand of criminals. The three novels I have read all deal with the post-War period. The events in Images occur in the summer of 1926. Joe is on vacation, touring the south of France with the teenage daughter of a friend of his. Joe is to drop off the girl -her name is Dorcas--at an ancient chateau on the Riviera where her artist father is staying for the summer. The place is an impromptu artists' colony right now -with painters, a photographer, a `Russian' ballet company and its coterie, all under the benign tutelage of the bachelor lord who owns the place. Unfortunately -or fortunately, depending on how you look at it--things go wrong as soon as Joe and Dorcas arrive. The one-night stay and then goodbye and good luck to Dorcas turn into a prolonged stay while Joe helps the French police to sort out what is happening there. Or who has done it. Before Joe's and Dorcas's arrival, it was the destruction of a several hundred years old funerary statue, the reclining figure of the young lady of the manor, Alienore. Another indignity occurs and tension mounts. Then a small boy, the cook's grandchild, goes missing. He's eventually discovered, locked in the mausoleum, but there's a dead woman in there as well and her body has been spread out on Lady Alienore's casket, dressed, coiffed and made up to look like Alienore's effigy had before it was destroyed. She's dead, a dagger in her heart. The French police are called in and Joe has to interact with Commissaire Jacquemin, the pouter pigeon star of the Parisian police force whose job it is to solve the case. The complications and perplexities multiply. The high maintenance artists who inhabit the chateau now rub against each other and sparks inevitably fly. In the end, Joe solves the case but is careful to ensure that Jacquemin emerges with the glory. Joe is an appealing hero. He's smart, and definitely up to date on the methods of detection, but he doesn't pretend to be a Sherlock Holmes. He's just an intelligent and perceptive ex-soldier, and a real bulldog once he gets his teeth into something. He possesses a pleasing personality, impeccable social skills, and a sense of humor. His ego doesn't get in the way of his work. He's not modest about what he is, but he doesn't boast -it's not `done,' at least not for men in his social stratum in 1920s England. The other characters are well limned. The writing is graceful. Cleverly is a first rate describer -adept at evoking scenes but not overdoing; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert; Author: Visit Amazon's Roger Ebert Page; Review: My one complaint about this meaty collection of four-star reviews is a greedy one. I wish there were more. I wish he had started publishing reviews earlier so that some of the great movies I remember from my young adulthood (which, by age, starts six years before his). He frequently cites these movies in this volume but oh, what I would give to read written reviews by him of slightly earlier movies like Seven Samurai, Dr. Strangelove, Smiles of a Summer Night, A Hard Day's Night, or uneven-but-not-stinker films of that period like Mondo Cane or The Tenth Victim. But forty years of reviews? Hey! That's not bad! Obviously, what I'm trying to say is that I enjoyed this collection immensely. I find nothing really wrong with it at all. I don't always agree with Ebert's take on a film but over all, I find him a reliable guide. More important, he is intelligent and passionate and always has something interesting to say. Some people will use this book as a reference book. I probably will at times. (Just like I do with the various editions of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, which I find invariably fascinating.) Others, including me, will read these reviews primarily for interest and pleasure. They'll find a lot of both in it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Godforsaken Idaho; Author: Visit Amazon's Shawn Vestal Page; Review: These radically skewed stories tell of the decay of traditional values- values of work and bearing, and behind them the decay of the Mormon faith that drives their characters. The best of them -and they are all good- are deeply unsettling. In "About As Fast As This Car Will Go," a man riffs on the lessons he learns from his criminal father. None are about striving or staying the course. "Finish your school," his Aunt Fay counsels him, but his father's counsel appeals more: "Look for cash. Things that are small and valuable. Jewelry. Some kind of knives. Binoculars." The story ends with the intimation of violence but not the actual narrating of it. It's a story of character development, but delivered obliquely. In "Families Are Forever," a young man visits his girlfriend's family. He loves her but can't for the life of him stop embroidering the truth, even when he's with her. He has squandered the money they'd saved to repay money he'd mooched from her father the last time around and he doesn't know how he's going to get around it -instead, he borrows more money. All the way through the story he lies. He hasn't gotten around to asking her to marry him but he tells her father they're engaged because he wants so desperately to please him. In the end, he's committed another outrage against honesty and ordinary decency but she says she'll marry him any way. He muses: There are times when your groove and the groove of all things just line up and become the same groove. Nothing that happens has to be real, and anything is possible. That was that. We didn't say much as we drove the rest of the way home. That is a brilliant ending to a story that is ambiguous throughout. It is all the more unsettling in being told about a Mormon family, with its established routines and deep moral certainties. If there's one thing Vestal's brilliantly rendered characters aren't, it's morally certain. The other stories in this outstanding collection are equally effective. The first, "The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death," is a first hand report on the Mormon heaven, which has some surprises for its residents, not least that it's boring. The residents appear in heaven looking exactly like they did at death and they are served only foods they ate while alive. "If you try to take a bit e of someone else's food, it vanishes as your teeth descend." "Pocket Dog" is a profound picture of alienation and self-loathing, and the title story is almost as despairing a one. "Winter Elders" is a nightmare story about a loner's encounter with two Mormon missionaries. The final story, "Diviner," is more conventional in tone but its subject, the life and character of Joseph Smith when he was still a con man and not a divine, is explosive. Throughout this firecracker of a book, Vestal navigates treacherous terrain with great facility. Godforsaken Idaho is not a book to divert oneself with. For the most part, its subjects are; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Andalucian Friend: A Novel; Author: Alexander Soderberg; Review: This first novel by a Swedish screenwriter is fast, furious, complicated, and good. Its cast of characters is long. There is one unexpected turn in the plot after another, and the characters, though sometimes stereotypes, are well delineated -they come across as persons. Not always appealing persons --more of them that not are criminals, or if not technically criminal, then bullying, probably corrupt cops. Sophie, on whom most of this chaos falls, is an attractive widow, mother of a fifteen-year-old, and a nurse. She meets a patient at her hospital -Hector Guzman--and finds she likes him more than she's sure she should at first. After all, he is a patient. He's there with a broken leg -a hit and run accident. When he gets out of the hospital, he starts wooing her. He's a very appealing man, and she's lonely, and the face he presents to her is all good at first. Then, almost through the cracks of their relationship, and her encounters with his family and associates, a different picture emerges. As it should, because Hector, together with his father, is head of a crime ring. Hector's gang is at war with another gang. And the war is heating up rapidly. Sophie is smart and morally upright but given the fix she's gotten herself entangled in, she's got no choice but to go with the flow. No matter how she looks at it, she's in the middle. Hector and his Spaniards are on the one side. A ferocious German-Russian mob is facing off against them. And there are the cops, who are trying to nail Hector and are led by Gunilla, a fiercely careerist cop who will do anything, literally anything -even up to sanctioning the framing of Sophie's son for a `rape' charge--if it will force pressure Sophie to cooperate in her investigation. Lastly there's Lars, a wild card on the police force, who is sliding into drug addiction and has a thing about Sophie. He's supposed to shadow her but he sneaks into her house at night so he can stare at her sleeping and he takes a pair of her panties with him one time when he's rummaging through her house while she's gone. The prose throughout is crisp and unsentimental, propelling the narrative along. There is very black humor in some of the descriptive passages, like this one describing Lars drugging up in his bathroom after a nighttime foray to spy on Sophie: "He went into the bathroom, and loaded up with a perfect combination consisting of a powerful dose of morphine, up the a**, a cocktail of benzo for his stomach, and Lyrica to swim through his nervous system. He was calm, cool, and clear. He leaned closer to his reflection, the coating on his teeth looked like recently shed snakeskin." Now that's funny. But it's creepy too, and `creepy' is as good an adjective as you can get for Lars, visibly disintegrating, emotionally and mentally, by this point in the story. I like the sly way Soderberg slips in humor: the effect is to distance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Hard Bounce; Author: Visit Amazon's Todd Robinson Page; Review: This is Todd Robinson's first full-length novel, but he has written several pieces in the same sub-genre, what he has labeled (after the magazine he edits) "thuglit." If you're in doubt what thuglit is, some of Elmore Leonard comes close to it, but the detectives in Robinson's entry are closer to thugs themselves. The two-man detective team in this exhilarating debut are Boo and Junior. They grew up together in an orphanage. Both had tragic early lives and nothing since in their lives has been all that good either, although they count avoiding rape in the orphanage as a triumph of sorts. They're big and bulky -470 pounds between them, and Junior carries close to ten K in tats on his body. Now they run a security business, 4DC ("Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"), mostly acting as bouncers and doormen at some of the scuzzier Boston nightspots. Boo has a serious anger management problem. It pokes up in the first pages of the novel when two Yahoos crash the club they're policing. Boo doesn't just stop them. He almost kills one of them. The one guy has transgressed the boundaries Boo has set up in his head between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. (There's more involved but the heart of it is that the guy is driving drunk and has his kids in the back seat, and they trust Daddy to bring them home safe. Boo can't tolerate that the guy -he calls him the "Mullet" because of his awful hairdo-- he's ready to snuff the guy until Junior pulls him off him. Then Boo and Junior are hired to find a missing teenager. Her father is a rising politician in Boston. He doesn't need a missing daughter. It's not what Boo and Junior do but the money is good so why not? From that point on, everything goes to pieces. They find the girl. It's not 100% clear but she's probably being abused by a porn, maybe snuff, filmmaker. Getting the back doesn't end things and Boo, Junior, and a number of their sleazy associates are drawn into one bad situation after another. Boo and Junior are not your conventional PI associates. Every time you make an assumption about them, they break it by their actions and words. To start with, they're both a lot smarter than they appear. But they're all -especially Boo- emotion and not rational calculation. Once Boo is headed somewhere, that's it. Calculations of personal safety or gain don't count. Only doing what Boo has decided is right. Time and again, Junior, tattooed and far from the appearance of a solid citizen, ends up the voice of reason in their partnership, but Boo usually doesn't listen to him. This is detection on steroids. No thinking man. No murder by exotic poisons and no locked room mystery. It's both hard to figure out who did what bad when, although there are surprises in that respect, and Boo's and Junior's detecting efforts are more of a matter of `let's try it and see what happens' than in any calculated strategy.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Antagonist; Author: Visit Amazon's Lynn Coady Page; Review: Antagonist is in some respects very good, in others not bad but awkward. The protagonist, a giant ox of a man, in college he played hockey of course, named Gordon Rankin, Jr., aka "Rank." Rank is an alt-Job but also a Behemoth. At fifteen he's bigger and stronger than grown men but inside, he's still a kid. His stepfather hires him at his soft cone place but uses him to scare off troublemakers. That's where Rank's run of awfully bad luck really starts (unless you count whom he got as a stepfather). Rank gets into a faceoff with an eighteen-year-old wise guy and leaves him lying on the pavement with a near fatal concussion. He's saved from imprisonment by a social worker. The social worker also coaches hockey and Rank turns out to be a natural at it. Hockey gets him to college, with a scholarship, no less. In college, he discovers he's got a brain but everyone around him still sees him as "Rank," the man monster who chugs brews, crushes beer cans or worse, and generally acts out the role of class clown and brute. His world finally crashes -he quits the hockey team, loses his scholarship, leaves college and goes home after one final catastrophic night, determined to make as small a profile of himself as he can in an effort to avoid causing more bad things to happen. Then a college buddy writes a book. In its pages, Rank finds himself described, with painstaking accuracy. Disclosures he'd made only to this friend are laid bare. He feels betrayed so he sends him an email. Thus starts the one-sided `correspondence' that constitutes this book. It's all Rank, writing as impulse hits him and, amidst rants, laying out the backstory of his sad life. What does the author do well in this ambitious and only partly successful novel? She captures with great fidelity and tone of the life and preoccupations -insecurities especially--of college age boys, especially the ones more obviously riding on waves of testosterone. She makes us care about Rank, for all of his unattractive acts and traits. The book is often witty. And in her characterization of Gordy, Rank's unwittingly obnoxious stepfather, she has created a strong comic character. All that is to the good. What works less well? The epistolary structure, for one thing, and that Rank is the only one who speaks. I like the idea of Rank's history gradually revealing itself, I found the telling of it in this novel both convoluted and slow. I'm not opposed to the slow unveiling of truth but the rest of what rank writes about seems relatively jejune. Lastly, she has Rank write in the first person "I" in some chapters, in the third person "Rank" in others, and I couldn't figure out a strong reason why. Whatever the reason, I didn't find it improved things. Still and all, this is a worthy effort by a talented author.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and; Author: Eric Kandel; Review: In this richLY rewarding book, Nobel laureate Eric Kandel (2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) attempts to draw together two widely disparate disciplines, the visual arts and brain science. That he succeeds as well as he does is a tribute to the wide reading he has done -in neuroscience, of course, but also psychology and physiology, philosophy, history and philosophy of art (he doesn't do badly in history either)--and his openness to new ideas. Using the art world and science world of turn of the century Vienna, and focusing on the three extraordinary artists who among them forged Austrian Expressionism -Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), and Egon Schiele (1890-1918) - asks three questions: *Does art have universal functions and features? *If so, how are they arrived at and perceived? *Are our responses to art always personal or are there general biological mechanisms within us that condition them? Kokoschka called himself a "psychological tin can opener." He wanted to paint his subjects' inner reality. Just as Viennese writer Alfred Schnitzler invented the interior monologue, "stream of consciousness," to gain access to the inner thoughts and mood swings of his characters, so Kokoschka and Schiele especially, devised new artistic techniques to look behind the mask of a person's public persona. While they add little new to our understanding of their works, Kandel's comments on why they worked are sensible and, more important yet, given the eventual aim of the book (the book's arc) they provide a bridge to the later discussion of how in fact the brain processes visual information and, briefly, a discussion of "the brain as a creativity machine." The discussion that follows occupies almost two-thirds of the book. After a relatively short (40 pp) discussion of the cognitive psychology of perception, it concentrates on how the brain receives, stores and organizes information, and the implications of this for the visual arts. Parts of what follows is heavy going but plodding through it familiarizes the reader for some very interesting comments. I don't intend to summarize them, but I will give one example. Discussing the dominant role of line in art, Kandel observes: "Artists have always realized that objects are defined by their shapes, which in turn derive from their edges. [But] In the actual world, there is no such thing as an outline: objects end and backgrounds begin without any clear line distinguishing the boundaries. Yet the viewer has no difficulty in perceiving a line drawing as representing a hand, a person, or a house. The fact that this sort of shorthand works so effortlessly tells us a lot about how our visual processing system works. ... [O]ur brain cells are excellent ... at reading lines and contours as edges. ... Each moment that our eyes are open, orientation cells in the primary visual cortex are constructing the elements of line drawings in the scene before us." A book that ranges this widely forces the writer to move outside his or her chosen field of expertise quite regularly. There are risks in doing it but the payoff can be; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Man Without Breath: A Bernie Gunther Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Philip Kerr Page; Review: Since the start of this series nine books ago, Kerr has produced one standout book after another, crime thrillers that live up to the highest standards of hardboiled detective novels but add more because of the milieu in which they are set, which is for the most part Nazi Germany. Like his fictional predecessors Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Bernie Gunther is a detective, a snoop, a bloodhound for truth. He is a hard man trying to stay moral -at least a bit moral- in a world and a profession that doesn't reward moral behavior all that much, populated with bad men who have no compunction about cutting (moral) corners. One of the ways he stays moral is by cracking wise: his flippant attitude toward authority and toward high-flown ideals masks his own inner seriousness. He doesn't like the world he lives in at all, and the constant compromises he has to make simply to survive in it make him queasy, but that's the hand he's been dealt so he has to play it -or give up on the one pursuit that still makes moral sense to him, the pursuit of messy, unpleasant, unsavory truths: who did what bad thing to whom, and why? He's a bulldog for the truth, even at risk to his own skin. ("Some people collect stamps, others like postcards or autographs. Me, I collect trivial questions. Why this? Why that?... The answers are a lot harder to track down.") This latest episode of the Bernie Gunther saga is set in Smolensk, Poland, on the Western front of an already doomed German Army campaign into Russia, in the spring of 1943. Bernie has escaped from the clutches of Heydrich (assassinated the spring before) and now works for the War Crimes Bureau of the Wehrmacht, an odd entity attached to the German Army that pursued out of date ideals of justice in the midst of the new craziness of Nazi Germany, pursuing, trying and punishing German soldiers who failed to uphold old standards of soldierly behavior in the midst of war -condemning soldiers to death for individual acts of rape or murder while S.S. squads murdered thousands of Jews and Poles and other undesirables exempt from the law. Here's Bernie on the bizarre situation in which he now finds himself: "I'm from Berlin and it's known that we have a strange sense of humor. By the winter of 1943, you found your laughs where you could, and I don't know how else to describe a situation in which you can have an army corporal hanged for the rape and murder of a Russian peasant girl in one village that's only a few miles from another village where an SS special action group has just murdered twenty-five thousand men, women, and children. I expect the Greeks have a word for that kind of comedy, and if I'd paid a little more attention to my classics master in school I might have known what that word was." The Bureau is asked to investigate a supposed mass grave in Poland: potential evidence; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ready Player One; Author: Visit Amazon's Ernest Cline Page; Review: It's hard to imagine a book that is more fun than this one. It's like an odd-man-out video game, the most imaginative player-against-challenges adventure imaginable. In essence, this is the plot: Wade Watts lives in near-poverty in the drab and rundown world of 2044. Our fecklessness and abuse of nature has left our descendants short of resources of all kinds. The only bright spot in this future world is OASIS, a virtual universe of innumerable habitats created initially by a hermit-like gamer nerd, James Halliday, who when he dies, has left a challenge for everyone who uses OASIS. (That means almost everyone. It costs virtually nothing to gain access to OASIS, and the real world is so harsh, so everyone flocks there. Wade even attends school on an OASIS world.) In his last will and testament, broadcast across this virtual universe, Halliday bequeaths his colossal fortune, and ownership of OASIS, to the gamester who solves three challenges (they turn out to involve playing and winning three classic videogames), find three `keys' (the keys lead the player to the next clue) and, at the end, find and open Halliday's "Easter Egg" (in which the prize, his inheritance, is hidden). Here is the message Halliday posted as the first clue. It's appropriately Dungeons and Dragons-ish: Three hidden keys open three secret gates Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits And those with the skill to survive these straits Will reach The End where the prize waits Wade has read everything Halliday wrote, played all the games he played until he has mastered most of them, and he has immersed himself in the pop culture of movies, songs, TV shows, and fantasy and sci fi books Halliday adored. But Wade's dirt poor. He's never been able to earn enough credits when gaming on OASIS worlds to buy himself the serious powers and weapons he will need to embark on a major Quest like this one. Then Wade cracks the first challenge. He's the first gamester to succeed. (They call themselves "gunters," truncated from "egg hunters.") He finds the first key, solves the first riddle. In the process he acquires both (virtual) wealth and fame. Soon he is in a life and death struggle with tens of thousands of other gunters, all of whom want the prize that lies at the end of the rainbow. Not all of them are as ethical as Wade. The worst are the Sixers, thousands of gamesters who have signed on with the giant corporation, IOI. IOI's goal is to commercialize OASIS completely: inheriting Halliday's fortune includes half of the voting stock in Gregarious Games, the parent corporation for OASIS. (After Hallidays' message goes viral, IOI creates an "Oology Division" -"oology" being originally defined as "the science of studying birds' eggs.) Along the way, Wade acquires friends, four loner gunters who cooperate sometimes, compete at others. One of them is a girl, Art3mis. At least he thinks she's a girl -he's never met her in the flesh, only her avatar. He has a crush on her. The Sixers up; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bear is Broken (Leo Maxwell); Author: Visit Amazon's Lachlan Smith Page; Review: Bear is the first novel by an attorney, formerly a Stegner Fellow at Stanford with an MFA from Cornell. It's worth nothing that because it explains something about the book he has written: he knows about law and is currently practicing it; he spent a fair amount of time learning how to write. The result is a novel that, though unsuccessful in certain critical ways, is ambitious and laudable, and engrossing to read. It tells the story of Leo Maxwell, six days a lawyer when his older brother, Teddy, is gunned down right in front of him. They're eating lunch in a restaurant, then there is Teddy, lying on the floor, blood pouring out and a hole in his head. For a long time, it's not certain that Teddy will live, and during that time, Leo realizes that if he wants Teddy's shooter caught, he needs to find him himself -the police despise Teddy: they see him as a corrupt defense lawyer who will use any method open to him to win a case, so why should they look too hard for his killer? The further Leo continues his investigation, the murkier it becomes. It may tie in with a murder shortly before and with another subsequently and possibly with the murder of Teddy's and Leo's mother two decades earlier. It's not clear how good a lawyer Leo is -he's too young at the business to tell--and he isn't much of a detective. But he's dogged and he's all that Teddy's got, so ahead he goes, with one surmise after another as to who murdered or shot whom, and why. The weaknesses in the novel are two: an overcomplicated plot and (Leo aside) thin characters. The plot seems overly labyrinthine as Leo looks into the complicated, emotionally charged and sexually twisted past of a family of San Francisco Brahmins. Leo's love-ish affair with the daughter of the family amidst all this confusion isn't all that convincing, largely because she doesn't convince as a character, and the revelation scene at the end, where everything comes together and we finally know who did what when for what reasons, seems contrived. Still, I admire this novel. The weaknesses in the novel are a result of writerly ambition. Smith could have written a smaller, more contained novel, using the hundreds of lawyer crime novels that are out there to serve as his model. (The book he did write -in its subtheme of the emotionally damaged daughter of an old blood family -echoes Raymond Chandler a bit. )But what Smith has done is to write and more challenging kind of novel: a novel of character. He has talent so I hope he continues in that vein.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Lady in the Van (Faber Plays); Author: Visit Amazon's Alan Bennett Page; Review: The Lady in the Van is about the playwright's divided life, for which all real experience is grist for the writerly mill. It's about living gay and closeted in suburbia (the suburbs of London) in an age when coming out could get you arrested. It's about coming to terms with your own Mum, about having boors for neighbors, who don't know when to leave you alone. It's about a disturbed woman's mania and grief, and becoming friends of a sort with her -at least, a concerned neighbor--though she was chronically ungrateful and encroaching, but when her health fails after she has driven him near mad with her impossible demands for years, he doesn't want her to change, he wants her to stay like she is, mad but indomitable to the end. Pick as many from the list above as you want and that's what The Lady in the Van is about. It's based on actual events. In 1974, a woman who lived in her van pulled it up Alan Bennett's driveway. She was only supposed to stay for a few days, while she decided where to move next, but she ended up staying for fifteen years and was both a demanding tenant -can you be a tenant if you never pay rent?-- and clearly insane. She also stinks. Continence is arguably a problem with her and her van has no toilet. (Excuse me! -lav.) Bennett wrote about his struggles with the mad Miss Shepherd, first in memoir form and then as a play. Maggie Smith played her in the play's premier in London. Lady is exceptionally rich in humor and wit but pathos is never far away as we follow Mr. Bennett's fifteen-year struggle with the peremptory and out-of-touch neighbor he has acquired seemingly by accident and clearly against his wishes. The play is also about what how writers use experience. Bennett separates himself into two characters in the play: Bennett I, the Bennett-on-the-spot, who actually participates in the events that unfold, and Bennett II, the reflecting Bennett, the writer-after-the-fact. In the play, the two Bennetts engage in conversation with each other, second-guessing each other's motives, commenting on the people and activities they observe, and discussing how much and under what circumstances a playwright can bend facts to improve a story. It makes for brilliant dialogue and keeps the mind just as engaged in the play as one's humor glands (wherever they are located). There are surprises in the play -a thuggish gentleman appears out of nowhere and starts banging on Miss Shepherd's van door seeking to pry some money from her. He claims her name isn't Miss Shepherd at all. Miss Shepherd grows angry when Bennett I plays piano music in his study. Why? What's the backstory for this poor lady? It plays as brilliant theater. Do you want laughs? It will provoke plenty, all the way from tiny little titters to great big belly laughs. Want to empathize with the characters on stage? You will. The more you learn about Miss Shepherd, the more you will treasure her. Want to; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Little Known Facts: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Christine Sneed Page; Review: Sneed follows up her award winning of short stories, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry (2011), with a novel that is itself composed wholly of short stories, offering different perspectives on what it's like to live with or near a Hollywood mega-star. We see the star, Renn Ivins, kind of a cross between Robert Redford and Harrison Ford in his star appeal, through the lenses of a disaffected and angry son; an over-achiever daughter (she's in medical residency now); his two ex-wives (the second one tells all in her memoir, This Isn't Gold -the French version is sadder: the title is Some of My Regrets); his new, thirty years' younger girlfriend; his son's girlfriend, who has a deep crush on Renn; and a wannabe scriptwriter who wants to interview him. Renn narrates one chapter: happiness has eluded him and he doesn't know why; he can't find a way past the tensions that divide him from his son. Sneed captures the magnetic pull true superstars exert on other, more ordinary people. Their presence makes normality, ordinariness, seem small. Even without meaning to, just by being there, Renn makes his son feel that he can't match up to him, so why should he try? Most of the chapters are about fixation -erotic, romantic. Son Will is fixated on Elise, his father's co-star and current girlfriend. Danielle, Will's girlfriend, would leave Will in a minute if Renn beckoned. Anna, the daughter, is in training to be a doctor, but could blow it if people find out she's having an affair with one of the attending doctors. To make it worse, he's married. There's no real sign he plans to leave his wife, whatever he says when they're together. Elise isn't sure she loves Renn. She keeps thinking of Will, but knows Renn has more to offer. Renn's first wife, Lucy, has yet to find a man to replace him, although fifteen years after the divorce, she no longer longs for him. In the end, she does find someone but she still fears for the future of her son and daughter and ex-husband. And she wonders what went wrong with them all. "What I wanted [she muses] was a Hollywood ending. Every single day, I wanted a Hollywood ending with its hero who saves the people he loves from their worst fears ... There are countless ways to be unhappy, so many more, it seems to me, than ways to be happy, which could be one of the reasons happiness is so elusive. If there are ten million ways to be miserable, there are maybe a million ways to be the opposite, if we're lucky. "The choices we make and the choices we allow to be made for us: these are the raw materials that compose our lives. Some days it feels to ma as if I am stepping out of a dark theater into the brilliant sun of early afternoon -for a few moments I can't see anything, and when my ghostly surroundings start to reclaim a more corporeal form, I; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Redeemer; Author: Visit Amazon's Jo Nesbo Page; Review: Redeemer is the latest in Norwegian author Nesbo's series of detective procedurals featuring police detective Harry Hole. Hole is an alcoholic, always teetering on the verge of relapse, and a natural contrarian, who insists on going his own way instead of following established procedure. He's a natural bloodhound who trusts his instincts to tell him things about cases before the established evidence appears. It works for him and has made him something of a legend among certain elements in the police, but he's a constant irritation to the people above him, and usually only a step away from losing his job. He rocks the boat way too much. This police thriller -it's excellent, as are all of the Harry Hole mysteries--is about a botched assassination. A Salvation Army officer is assassinated in a public square shortly before Christmas, but as the investigation proceeds, it appears the killer killed the wrong man. When the killer finds out, he starts a frantic search to repair his mistake. Incident after incident piles on, leading to a prolonged and fascinating manhunt -or, rather, two hunts, the killer for his victim and Harry and his associates for the killer. In the course of the narrative of the killer's search, Nesbo fills in the backplot to the killer's story. The ending adds a final twist to an already unpredictable murder story. Stories in this series tend to start slowly. Nesbo likes to set the scene in detail before the central story kicks in. But once the main thread starts, it's hard to put the book down. Like other Scandinavian crime writers, Nesbo mixes social criticism into the storyline with an occasionally heavy hand but for the most part the social commentary fits well, in part because Harry himself is critical most of the time, and skeptical of the benefits his wonderful society showers on its citizens. Harry isn't a bleeding heart but his sympathies are much more with the downtrodden than the affluent. Continuing story line is a concern in a long lasting series like this one. Harry still has a girlfriend -maybe--it's not clear, but references to her, and their troubled relationship, dot the text. In the previous novel, Harry had finally caught up with corrupt cop Tom Waaler, who died in struggle with Harry. But as Harry says to his friend on the police force, Beate, "It's not over. Where there's a prince [i.e. Waaler], there's a king." So that story, too, continues in this novel. The overarching narrative is compelling enough to carry these subplots along but they do not strengthen the book. Still, it's a minor weakness in an otherwise strong entry in a strong series, one of the best being written today.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press); Author: Visit Amazon's Christof Koch Page; Review: I like scientists' memoirs and I am fascinated by the emerging research in cognitive studies and the discussion among scholars on the topic of consciousness, so I was predisposed to enjoy this book before it arrived. Having said that, and admitting that I did indeed enjoy it, the experience was a mixed bag. Koch's discussion of his groundbreaking work with Francis Crick and others is well described, and Koch enunciates his own, occasionally idiosyncratic views on the nature of consciousness as a physical phenomenon lucidly and reasonably compellingly. He is generous in relating the accomplishments of other workers in the field and he doesn't inflate (or deflate) the importance of his own, and Crick's, research. And I agree with him that science is our pathway to understanding the workings of consciousness, no matter how long it takes to get there. He's a good apostle for science in this book. I appreciated reading about his own life. I'm not a scientist. I was a historian for several years and then moved into senior level administrative work -dean, VP- in two colleges and a university. Since retiring, I've hung out with my wife, and acted, written and cooked, end of story. But science fascinates me. It's a path I could have but didn't take. Besides, there is so much good science writing available now, written by topnotch researchers and theorists, and aimed at the intelligent lay reader (which I hope is me). My historian's background still lies inside me, though. I want to know about the people who do the science, what moves them in their work and outside of it. Thus I appreciate Koch's openness about his life, not just the good parts but the messy ones too. When he writes about a life crisis in his forties, realizing for the first time that he is actually going to die some time, I empathize with him. I'm 76. I turn 77 a week and a half from now. I know that no matter how good my life seems now, the clock is ticking, and relatively speaking, there's not all that much time left on it. So when Koch writes of subsequent crises in his personal life, I know where he's coming from, and his talking about them humanizes him for me. He's not just a Work Machine. He's a person. Then why do I have reservations about this book? I think it's simple: Koch is an indifferent writer. He effuses too often. There's a fuzziness -not when he's describing the science of cognitive studies--but when he discusses the larger philosophical implications of it -from Descartes and Leibniz to Karl Popper, David Chalmers, and other modern theorists. For instance, he makes an offhanded comment about Douglas Hofstadter's theories on consciousness -the strange loop theory (I Am a Strange Loop, 2008)--but never elaborates on it. This book would have been stronger if, like other first-rate scientists trying to popularize their abstruse work, he had engaged more heartily in debate in the pages of his book. All told, I'm glad I bought and read the book,; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: I Want To Show You More; Author: Visit Amazon's Jamie Quatro Page; Review: Quattro is a talented writer but I found this collection of short stories (they range in length from two pages to twenty-five pages) uninvolving and repetitive over the long haul. The constant themes are religion and sex, guilt and abandonment -Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden, Pharaoh and his army drowned in the Red Sea, Herod eaten up by worms." Over the short haul, just a few stories and these the best of this collection, her authorial preoccupations work. "Sinkhole" starts with a startling sentence: "When the camp director introduces God, he reminds us the man is just an actor." The actor's been brought in to introduce the young campers to different versions of God, so they can sort out what is real about the Divinity and what not. Another story that works is "Georgia the Whole Time," about a woman who hasn't suffered in her life, but because of that feels deprived. "My first boss out of college ... once told me You lead as charmed life. I thought: But where do I go form here." Her biggest resentment of her parents is that they didn't show here the world was full of suffering. They covered it by talking of love instead. There isn't much love in these stories, more regret for the lack of it and for the pallidness of ordinary love. The ways out of this trap are extreme: phone sex, retreat into (Pentecostal?) religiosity. At times it feels like Flannery O'Connor stories for married persons -some of the same preoccupations, the twisted lives of the central characters, the deforming, overwhelming force of punishing Old Testament religion. I'm not crazy about these stories, but they have force. And the best of them are very good.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Cold City: A Repairman Jack Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's F. Paul Wilson Page; Review: If you enjoyed the Repairman Jack novels (as I have), you'll want to read this latest novel, but be warned: it doesn't end, it just stops, to be continued in volume two of RJ: The Early Years. Indeed, only one of the several storylines in this current book comes to an end, or at least I think it's the end, it's hard to tell in a tangled story like this. This is the first of three novels detailing how Jack, aged twenty-one and a recent college dropout, moves to New York and starts the process of becoming Repairman Jack, the all too human superhero who avoids the limelight at all costs (he doesn't even have a Social Security card -or not a real one- and he stays away from banks) and practices a variety of sneaky but useful skills to trip up the bad guys. Only one of Jack's later friends is here: Abe, the covert gun seller. But along the way, he acquires a useful pair of allies in a pair of Jewish lads who hate, just hate, white slavers, and show their displeasure by mowing them down with machine guns. As in the later (written earlier) Repairman Jack novels, there's a lot of action, multiple plot lines crossing and intercrossing and generally mucking things up for Jack, who has to resolve all these matters for the good. Let's see, there's a group of Nuyorquenos out for Jack's blood, bootleg cigarette running, a white slavery ring that `s tied in with a scheme that involves a number of unhappy Arabs and a couple of white dudes who would have fit well into Nazi Germany but are really working for the Order (shades of the later novels), hoping to bring about chaos and prepare Earth for the coming of the One (more shades...). It's messy at times, and not terribly elegantly written, but you read on any way because you want to know what happens next, because Jack makes a good hero, even before he has developed his full skill set. I felt cheated that this novel ended so abruptly with so many plot lines unresolved. But I'll be back for the next installment, you bet.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Bossypants; Author: Visit Amazon's Tina Fey Page; Review: It's near impossible to laugh at Tina Fey but oh so easy to laugh along with her. She's funny. She's sly. Her humor is intelligent and witty, and in her own clunky way, she's ultra-hip. This collection of short pieces is largely autobiographical, but autobiography as a comedy routine. ("I never went to summer camp," she writes, "as I was neither underprivileged nor Jewish nor extremely Christian nor obese.") She's a great storyteller but her best lines are typically delivered as throwaways, seemingly casual (but carefully planted) asides. "Gay people don't actually try to convert people. That's Jehovah's Witnesses you`re thinking of." "Being chubby for a while ... is a natural phase of life and nothing to be ashamed of. Like puberty or slowly turning into a Republican." "You have to remember that actors are human beings. Which is hard sometimes because they look so much better than human beings." Even serious observations are delivered flippantly, like this one, on why she enjoyed working in the Second City company: "The rules of improvisation appealed to me not only as a way of creating comedy, but as a worldview. Studying improvisation literally changed my life. It set me on a career path toward Saturday Night Live. It changed the way I looked at the world, and it's where I met my husband. What has your cult done for you lately?" She is at her most serious in discussing what it's like trying to make it as a woman in a world resoundingly tilted toward males: "This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. `You're up for a promotion. If they go with a woman, it'll be between you and Barbara.' Don't be fooled. You're not in competition other women. You're in competition with everyone." She observes (correctly) that different rules apply to male comics and female comics just as they do to male politicians and female politicians. "There was an assumption that I was personally attacking Sarah Palin by impersonating her on TV. No one ever said it was "mean" when Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford falling down all the time. No one ever accused Dana Carvey or Darrell Hammond or Dan Ackroyd of "going too far" in their political impressions. You see what I `m getting at here. I am not mean and Mrs. Palin is not fragile. To imply otherwise is a disservice to us both." Many Republicans probably disapprove of Ms. Fey because she doesn't hide her liberalism but her treatment of Sen. McCain (whom she liked) and Gov. Palin (she had a more ambivalent reaction toward her but found positive qualities in her too) in this book is generally respectful and it doesn't seem skewed. "I am not mean and Mrs. Palin is not fragile. To imply otherwise is a disservice to us both." These sentences are the key to her treatment of Sarah Palin during Governor Palin's run for the vice presidency in; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Accounting; Author: Visit Amazon's William Lashner Page; Review: Jon Willing screwed his life up forever one night when he was young: he and his buddies Augie and Ben stole a huge cache of drug money. They weren`t caught but the need to keep what he had done secret and never put himself on display has stunted Jon's growth and fatally alienated him from his wife and children. Now, twenty-five years down the line, someone has connected the dots and is after Jon for the money he took. How does he know? Because when he calls Augie in Vegas to see how he's doing, which he does once a week, no one answers. A trip to Vegas explains why. Augie is dead in his house, his body mutilated. And two big guys are approaching the front door looking for Jon. That's the start of a hell-for-leather chase thriller. For the first half of the book, it's Jon being pursued. Then he decides to turn the tables and it gets worse. By the end of the book, he's involved with drug runners, a renegade motorcycle band led by a grossly overweight woman out for vengeance, and a truly scary debt collector with an army of thugs to back him up. The story is well told, the characters are a little over the edge but believable, and the action is non-stop. All in all, a respectable page-turner that deserves an audience. Nothing deep happens in here but it's fun.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence; Author: Visit Amazon's Joseph J. Ellis Page; Review: This slim book (182 pages of text plus notes, acknowledgements and index) possesses all the qualities one has come to expect in a historical study by Joe Ellis: mastery of the sources, an eminently pleasing and smooth prose style, and above all, ease and grace in explaining. Ellis is a masterful explainer. He keeps both ends of the historical spectrum in sight while writing history, summarizing and analyzing the larger scale dynamics that move events along and the disparate thoughts and actions of the individual actors. In this book, that means, among others, Washington and Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Dickinson, the Howes, and Clinton. Ellis's observations throughout are sage and wise. He doesn't underrate the role played by individuals in history but doesn't inflate it either. He`s a very reliable guide to the times, events and actors about whom he writes. The summer in question is the summer of 1776. It's an extensive `summer.' It starts in May with the Continental Congress's passage of Adams's resolution calling for the colonies to draft constitutions and discard their colonial charters of governance. That was passed on May 12. Three days later, the Congress passed a preface to the resolution, also drafted by Adams, enumerating its grievances against the King. (Adams always felt that this was the original declaration of independence, not the later one signed in July.) The `summer' ended, or rather petered out, sometime in October, with the evacuation of Washington's troops from Manhattan, accomplished by October 24. Between these two dates, May 12 and October 24, changes took place, both military and political, that shaped the course of the long hard bloody war for independence. Ellis's narrative shuttles back and forth between the Continental Army and the Continental Congress. The protagonists on both sides are far from omniscient. Washington was perpetually frustrated by the miserable condition of his army. After the British landing and a crushing defeat, he seemed at a loss for what to do next, confused and ineffective. He was, besides, deeply flawed as a strategist: he committed his troops in a hopeless cause too long. (On the other hand, Ellis writes, Washington's evacuation of his troops from Brooklyn Heights on August 29-30 was "one of the most brilliant tactical withdrawals in the annals of military history.) Fortunately for the Continentals, Howe was worse. Ellis observes, in one of many mots justes in this book, that both generals, Washington and Howe, pursued the wrong strategy for their own army but the right one for the other man's army. Washington wasn't as cautious as he should have been, given the condition of his troops and the inequity in the size of the armies, and Howe threw away his advantage by delaying in following up on it. In Congress, not even the hyper-energetic John Adams was able to control the flow of events. Cannier than Adams, and also older, Franklin gauged the sentiment of his peers before acting. Rather than waste his political capital in futile argument, he concentrated his efforts on nudging events along in the direction he wanted them to take.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: State of Wonder; Author: Visit Amazon's Ann Patchett Page; Review: So fine a novel is Ann Patchett's State of Wonder that it is difficult for me to over-praise it. What is it you look for in a book like this? Plot? She plots like a whiz, spinning out plot effortlessly, a story line that is byzantine and surprising. Interesting characters? There are enough in this novel for four books. Central are the two doctors, pharmacologist Marina Singh and medical researcher Annicke Swenson. Swenson, prickly and dedicated, is off in the depths of the Amazon doing cutting edge research. She hasn't been heard of for months, and she's secretive to the point of obsession about sharing the results of her research with even the pharmaceutical company that pays for her work. The company's CEO sends Marina to Brazil to find her, to get an update on what she has been doing. (The story is told through Marina's perspective of Marina.) Singh and Swenson have a past history together although Annicke doesn't realize it at first. They are both strong, admirable women. They have their own quirks and opinions, very different from each other's. Their clash, and their gradual coming together, is one of the pleasures in a book that to me is all pleasure. Many other characters are fully realized. Drs. Saturn and Thomas Nkomo and Budi all see it as their sacred trust to shield Dr. Swenson and her research from the (in their eyes) rapacious drug company that is paying for her work. A bohemian couple, the Bovenders -Barbara is a writer who never seems to write and when her husband Jackie is asked what he does for a living, he answers, "I surf"--protect her privacy too: the scenes with the Bovenders are gloriously funny. Milton is a gentle giant of a man who arranges for whatever has to be done on Dr. Swenson's rare excursions back into civilization, and Easter is the child Dr. Swenson never had: an Ariel-like character, his deafness lends an immediacy and innocence to his involvement with the two doctors. There are a missing scientist, Anders, and his wife Karen; there's Mr. Fox, the drug company CEO and Marina's covert lover, who sends her south to find out what is happening with the research program his company is funding. And there are the Lakashi, restricted to a swath of rain forest, their closest neighbors a fierce tribe of headhunters. Individual Lakashi blend together but their composite presence is strong and definite in this book. Something is going on with them that urgently needs explanation: Lakashi women never stop menstruating and they bear children well into their seventies. Throw in to the brew * a battle to the death with a sixteen-foot-long anaconda; * hallucinogenic mushrooms; * an emergency C-section operation conducted with none of the modern hospital conveniences; * a Svengali-like mentor, now deceased, who was a world class mycologist (expert on exotic mushrooms); and * more bugs, plants, rain and dirt than one can ever imagine. Mix all ingredients well, and you have a novel that is filled with life and rich in plot, character,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Kill List; Author: Visit Amazon's Frederick Forsyth Page; Review: Forsyth came to fame in 1971 with The Day of the Jackal, a gripping thriller about the search for an anonymous contract killer who had been paid to assassinate French president Charles De Gaulle. He deserved the fame he got for the book because it really was good! That was his second book and first novel. Since then, a string of others has followed of exceptionally high quality. So here we are , seventeen books and fourteen novels later,and here is The Kill List, which is another knockout spy thriller by Forsyth. You don't read Forsyth novels for lush description or depth of the character development. Basically, you read them for plot. Forsyth is a pro at laying out exciting but credible high action narratives, based on the most recent of events and thus exceedingly relevant. He's an info wonk who knows and can explicate, without excess verbiage, the details that lend credence to his sometimes exceedingly complicated stories: in this current one, the technology of modern long distance spying, the ins and outs of politics (national and international), what to do if you forced to negotiate with Somali pirates, how to carry off a successful high risk "black op" while keeping it well below the radar screen. Forsyth is a bare bones, no nonsense kind of writer who tells you only as much about his protagonists as you need in order to understand what they're doing and why they did it. He's not all that interested in local color but a fair amount of it still appears in his novels any way because his plots move across colorful and often dangerous terrains. Kill List is about the hunt for an Arab terrorist, named the "Preacher," who has been inciting young Muslims in the United States and Britain to commit random individual acts of terrorism. (There have been seven killings in the States and four in Great Britain.) The Preacher has learned from his predecessors, who made the mistake of letting themselves become visible and thus reachable. As a consequence, the Preacher operates solely over the Internet with his face masked. He has no apparent contact with disciples. He doesn't even use a cell phone because its signal can be isolated by high flying satellite spy planes and subsequent calls traced. After a series of assassinations in the States, provoked by the Preacher's rantings against the West, the Preacher's name is placed on a super secret, eminently deniable Kill List, which is composed solely of enemies deemed so dangerous to our country that their deaths have been authorized ahead of time, with no questions asked. The agency responsible for dealing them bears the innocuous name of Technical Operations Support Activity (TOSA) but its operations are decidedly lethal. The number two man in TOSA is Army colonel Kit Carson. Then one of the Preacher's acolytes kills Kit's father, a retired general. Kit takes it personally. Finding and eliminating the Preacher becomes his main priority. Henceforth, Kit is usually referred to as "Tracker," which is what he is and does as he moves from; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Memories of a Marriage: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Louis Begley Page; Review: Philip, in his seventies, runs into Lucy, whom he had known roughly fifty years before. She was a heller back then always up for fun and known to be generous with her sexual favors. (Philip and she wound up in bed one night but there were no return visits.) Fifty years ago, she had introduced him to Thomas Snow, a Harvard graduate like Philip but from the wrong side of the tracks, a "townie" with all that implied in the hyper socially conscious fifties. She'd married Thomas and had a child. Then they'd divorced. It had been a bitter separation. Even before the divorce, Thomas had begun to make a name for himself in international banking. He later remarried, apparently happily. He was now long dead now, in an unfortunate accident. Philip hadn't seen Lucy for decade, until her ran into her at the ballet. She pushes him to see her again. They're both single -he's a widower, she's been divorced for decades --and they have a past together, although long buried by now. `Again' becomes `again again' and so on, and, at Lucy's urging, they talk at great length about her long dead marriage to Thomas, the townie investment banker. She insists that he was a "monster" but Philip doesn't remember him that way at all. Philip's an author. People --their relationships with each other-- intrigue him. Besides, what has happened to the Lucy he remembers. She used to be funny, full of life, up for anything. Now she's sharp tongued and all closed in. What caused the change in her? Was it Thomas? And why is her impression of Thomas so different from his? He has to find an answer to these questions. When in doubt, he does what novelists always do: they ask questions of people. He compares what people say with what he hears from other people. The parties involved in this conversation, which extends across months, live in a circumscribed circle. They are the privileged few, mostly Harvard grads plus Lucy who graduated from Radcliffe (barely, there was a scandal). With some exceptions, they marry within their own circle, belong to the same clubs, eat at the same restaurants, play golf or tennis or go swimming together. It's a circumscribed, tight, almost claustrophobic world, and what emerges in this fine novel, alongside the personal story of Lucy and Thomas, is a picture of that world. Begley is an accomplished novelist, who has earned his share of kudos and awards for past books. This book does not diminish his credit at all. Another reviewer compared it to the works of A. R. Gurney, but Gurney's focus is more the middle and upper middle classes of East Coast society. A more apt comparison is with the novels of Louis Auchincloss, which treat of the upper classes and those who toil in the world of finance and related fields.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Caravaggio; Author: Visit Amazon's John T. Spike Page; Review: LAMBERT, Gilles. Caravaggio. Taschen. 2010. 96p, lots and lots of illus. $14.99. HOWGATE, Sarah. Lucian Freud: Painting People, introd. Martin Gayford, apprec'n David Hockney. Yale. 2012. 96p, 68 color and 13 bxw illus. $15 (pb). Art books don't have to be expensive to be good. As proof, you could do worse than look at these two books which I bought recently. Both are on painters who are technically adept but emotionally -and thus esthetically--disturbing, but both in interesting ways. The monograph on Caravaggio was originally published in 2007 but was reissued to celebrate Taschen's twenty-fifth anniversary. Taschen can't be praised highly enough as an art press. Since its start, the press has published reasonable priced monographs, copiously illustrated, on a variety of artists, from Michelangelo to Basquiat. This is the first volume I've purchased from Taschen but I have my eye on several others already: Vermeer, Dix, Schiele... The book is big enough -at almost 12 inches by 9.5--to permit good-sized reproductions of whole paintings and drawings, as well as telling details of some of the paintings. There's a rich selection of paintings to look at, including many works by other painters whose paintings either influenced Caravaggio or who were in turn influenced by him. The text lays out the artist's strengths, also why his work was ignored for so many centuries. (The great art critic Bernard Berenson had serious reservations about his work.) Although he gained fame (and then lost it) during his own lifetime, he was by temperament an outlaw, truly perverse and willful beyond measure. He burned his way through patrons as though they'd never end, but eventually they did, and he died, miserably, on a beach far from the sites of his triumphs. One of the virtues of this excellent collection is that it shows you both what he did superbly well as a painter -he was, for instance, a master of lighting and shadow, who influenced painters who succeeded him all across Europe, and he was a superb portraitist. But the characters in his portraits are often louche, perverse, and his prostitutes look a little too much like prostitutes even when portraying saintly icons like the Virgin Mary. His placement of focus in some of his religious paintings is idiosyncratic but to our tastes, brilliant -for instance, his painting, The Conversion of St. Paul (1601), which is more horse than saint, to the point where the saint seems almost incidental. And his portrayals of young men are near obscene in their puffy softness and sexual allure. But it all works. His art is truly beautiful. It's just his vision of beauty, not the conventional one of his time or place. *** The Lucian Freud book covers work from seven decades, back to the early 40s and extending up to his death in 2011. In amongst the art works are numerous photographs, of Freud's family, his studio, his models (including the outsized Sue Tilley who served as model for his Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995). It's interesting to see the changes in his style over time. In the fifties,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lucian Freud: Painting People; Author: Sarah Howgate; Review: LAMBERT, Gilles. Caravaggio. Taschen. 2010. 96p, lots and lots of illus. $14.99. HOWGATE, Sarah. Lucian Freud: Painting People, introd. Martin Gayford, apprec'n David Hockney. Yale. 2012. 96p, 68 color and 13 bxw illus. $15 (pb). Art books don't have to be expensive to be good. As proof, you could do worse than look at these two books which I bought recently. Both are on painters who are technically adept but emotionally -and thus esthetically--disturbing, but both in interesting ways. The monograph on Caravaggio was originally published in 2007 but was reissued to celebrate Taschen's twenty-fifth anniversary. Taschen can't be praised highly enough as an art press. Since its start, the press has published reasonable priced monographs, copiously illustrated, on a variety of artists, from Michelangelo to Basquiat. This is the first volume I've purchased from Taschen but I have my eye on several others already: Vermeer, Dix, Schiele... The book is big enough -at almost 12 inches by 9.5 inches --to permit good-sized reproductions of whole paintings and drawings, as well as telling details of some of the paintings. There's a rich selection of paintings to look at, including many works by other painters whose paintings either influenced Caravaggio or who were in turn influenced by him. The text lays out the artist's strengths, also why his work was ignored for so many centuries. (The great art critic Bernard Berenson had serious reservations about his work.) Although he gained fame (and then lost it) during his own lifetime, he was by temperament an outlaw, truly perverse and willful beyond measure. He burned his way through patrons as though they'd never end, but eventually they did, and he died, miserably, on a beach far from the sites of his triumphs. One of the virtues of this excellent collection is that it shows you both what he did superbly well as a painter -he was, for instance, a master of lighting and shadow, who influenced painters who succeeded him all across Europe, and he was a superb portraitist. But the characters in his portraits are often louche, perverse, and his prostitutes look a little too much like prostitutes even when portraying saintly icons like the Virgin Mary. His placement of focus in some of his religious paintings is idiosyncratic but to our tastes, brilliant -for instance, his painting, The Conversion of St. Paul (1601), which is more horse than saint, to the point where the saint seems almost incidental. And his portrayals of young men are near obscene in their puffy softness and sexual allure. But it all works. His art is truly beautiful. It's just his vision of beauty, not the conventional one of his time or place. The Lucian Freud book covers work from seven decades, back to the early 40s and extending up to his death in 2011. In amongst the art works are numerous photographs, of Freud's family, his studio, his models (including the outsized Sue Tilley who served as model for his Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995). It's interesting to see the changes in his style over time. In the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War; Author: Paul Kennedy; Review: Kennedy, professor of history and director of international security studies at Yale, is a distinguished scholar one of whose specialties has become the analysis of how one succeeds or fails in war situations. Parts of this book were tried out in a grand course on strategy and analysis he taught at Yale. Kennedy looks at five strategic problems that had to be confronted if the Allies were to convert the near or actual crisis of 1942-43 and win the Second Word War: convoys had to make it safely across the Atlantic, safe from the German submarine Wolf Packs; the Allies had to take command of the air from the Luftwaffe (and Japanese air force); German blitzkrieg tactics had to be blunted and stopped; the Allies had to find a way to land and take command of an enemy shore, an almost insuperable task; and lastly, the United States had to find an effective way to overcome "the tyranny of distance" in the Pacific -overcoming limitations of fuel and bomb load to take the attack to Japan. In each section, Kennedy analyzes the p roblems faced, the approaches used to address them, and shows, not that any one great technical innovation or tactical solution solved the problem. Rather, incremental improvements -"tweakings"--gradually improved matters and led to success. In as closing chapter, he addresses the question of why the Allies succeeded in addressing the problems and the Germans and Japanese high commands did not. Drawing on Peter Drucker's magisterial writings on organization and innovation, he argues that the West, and particularly the British and American High Commands and chief executives (FDR and Churchill both deserve praise) were particularly receptive to new approaches and the suggestions of middle level personnel. In matters as complicated as these, he argues, that's how you gain a decisive advantage, not by refusing to improve. And Muddle is part of the process just because what you are attempting is (1) new and (2) complicated. This is a very good book, and it is written with force and clarity. An exemplary study by a master of historical analysis. (Henry Petrosky (To Forgive Design, Harvard, 2012) would like this book.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage; Author: Visit Amazon's Jeffrey Frank Page; Review: The political marriage of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon was uneasy from the start. Ike was the universally revered war hero and Nixon the visibly striving, not terribly comfortable with himself striver from California, who'd won his senate seat in a campaign memorable for its nastiness -nastiness which Nixon endorsed and pushed. Nixon had been instrumental in the conviction of Russian spy Alger Hiss and was by 1952 the darling of the anti-Red wing of the Republican Party. Eisenhower was pushed to take him as running mate to blunt the force of conservative currents in his own party. As late as the Checkers affair, though, Eisenhower was willing, almost eager, to jettison his running mate. When it was revealed that Nixon had received cash contributions from well-wishers in his state, Eisenhower didn't defend him. He left it to Nixon to get out of the mess on his own, which Nixon did in an oily television address which emphasized that Pat Nixon didn't wear a fur coat but rather "a good Republican cloth coat" and although his family's cocker spaniel Checkers was a gift from a supporter, he didn't intend to give it back no matter what. Gag! Vomit! Gulp! The two got along better by'56, but Eisenhower was contemplating dumping Nixon from the ticket. Nixon, the much better politician in times like this, did an end run around Ike and pretty much forced Ike to endorse him for a second run. Never through their eight years in yoke together, did Ike invite Nixon to his own house. By the time Nixon ran for president in '68, relations had improved, but always, until the bitter end, Ike was elusive in praise for his junior colleague. Nixon emerges as a more sympathetic character in this book than I would have expected, but also driven and damaged, able but flawed at the same time. Every talent he had was matched by an equally glaring flaw. Eisenhower is the one who looks small in this book. I remember the criticism of him as a `part-time president,' who seemed to spend as much time playing golf or hanging out with cronies as he did attending to the business of being president. But what comes out in this book is how devious and self-centered he was at times, and particularly in relation to Nixon. In wartime, Ike had been a hero. In peacetime, much of his behavior is hard to excuse. Over all, this is an interesting look at one specific aspect of the era and two complicated and neither very transparent personalities who worked in yoke for eight years and then by the trickery of time, were yoked together for another ten plus years because of a family marriage (Ike's grandson, Dick's daughter) and politics.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's George Johnson Page; Review: If it's possible to call `poetic' a discussion of the current state of our knowledge about the brutal nemesis cancer, science writer Johnson has done it. In the course of explaining what we know and don't know about cancer -its genesis, nature and treatment- he weaves in affecting narrative of his wife Nancy's battle against particularly devastating form of uterine cancer that, by the time it was caught, had already migrated to the lymph nodes in one of her groins. Her chances of survival were 15 percent but she survived, although the marriage eventually did not and ended seventeen years later. In the final chapter of the book, Johnson recounts another personal story, of his younger brother Joe and his unsuccessful battle against a squamous cell cancer in his jaw, which spread to multiple sources in his body: eventually chemotherapy and radiation therapy weakened his body so much they couldn't be continued. This is an exceedingly well-written book. It makes its complicated and technical information understandable even to non-scientists. Johnson asks all the right questions: Is cancer a new, i.e. `modern,' phenomenon or has it been around since before man came along on this planet? What are the sources of cancer today? Is it largely caused by environmental contaminants as was argued so vehemently in the 70s? (90% was one estimate.) How much do diet, size and age affect its occurrence, and what kinds of cancer attack what kinds of people most often? What treatments work, how effectively and why? What is the cutting edge of cancer research now? Is it likely that we'll find a Golden Key to unlock the eradication or control of cancer? Along the way, Johnson nuggets of information that enliven what might otherwise have been a dry discourse on a scary subject. These tidbits, too, help us to understand this disease's workings. Why, for instance, did seventeenth-century nuns in Italy seem to suffer from a higher incidence of breast cancer than other women? The likely answer: by foreswearing sexual intercourse, pregnancy and birth, they went through more menstrual cycles than their lay counterparts. Each menstrual cycle is, Johnson writes, "a roll of the dice, an opportunity for copying errors [in the uterus and mammary glands] that might result in a neoplasm [cancer]." The most likely external causes of cancer, he concludes, are not the consumption of particular foods or exposure to particular contaminants but rather obesity and inactivity. Add smoking and the excessive consumption of alcohol and you have, to the best of present day knowledge, identified the most prevalent influences that cause cancer today.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Year Zero: A History of 1945; Author: Visit Amazon's Ian Buruma Page; Review: "History ... is littered with dreams of starting afresh." The first chapters of this remarkable study attempt to capture people's responses to the end to years of living in Hell. Buruma has personal insight into the topic. His young Dutch father was captured by the Germans and forced to work in wartime Germany. At the end of the war, he was nearly executed by accident as a collaborator although he wasn't one. He wended his way home through a bombed out Europe, only to find when he got back that everything had changed while he was gone. No one wanted to hear his story. They had had enough of that sort of stuff. Lucien Febvre, co-founder of the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales in 1929, argued that the history of sensibility (histoire de sensibilite') was just as important to our understanding of the past as the economic and social history that was more standard fare in that groundbreaking journal. We are feeling animals, he argued, and thus how the events of a time make us feel sits deeply in us. This short book by Ian Buruma (Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College; author of thirteen previous books) is proof that Febvre was right. There are other books on the aftermath of the Second World War which portray the devastation, unresolved antagonisms and mixed feelings caused by the destructiveness of that long, devastating war (wars?) -- Keith Lowe's Savage Continent (2012) and parts of Timothy Snyder's chilling Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2012) are recent entries, and for Europe, Tony Judt's magisterial Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2006) can't be bettered, but no work of history that I know of that captures so well, and elegantly, the emotions that drove the survivors of that hellish conflict. Nor do I know of another book that spans the Western and Asian conflicts so neatly. The section of the book which I enjoyed the most addresses such issues as guilt, humiliation and exultation; sex and prostitution; the complicated feelings women had when confronted by conquering healthy soldiers who looked so much better and could offer so much more than their own defeated, malnourished, unattractive men; racism (the persistence of anti-Semitism, attitudes toward African-American soldiers in both Europe and Japan, the enflaming of racial and national enmities in Asia and Eastern Europe); new opportunities for women and their resistance to being shoved back into a box; greed and revenge; the refusal of subject peoples to slide back into the routines of the old colonialism, regardless of the efforts of the colonial powers to contain them; and "the desire to retrieve a sense of normality," which at times led to the ignoring of inconsistencies in attitudes and behavior and to the undervaluing of potential troubles for the future. It's a heady but jolting ride. The latter half of the book addresses efforts to assess and punish war guilt (concerns about economic recovery trumped concerns about justice in most cases) and to reestablish order locally and internationally, no small task in a; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914; Author: Visit Amazon's Christopher Clark Page; Review: EMMERSON, Charles. 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. Public Affairs. 2013. 528 + xvi pp, illus., selected bibliog., notes, index. $30. CLARK, Christopher The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. HarperCollins. 2013. 697 + xxxii pp, illus., maps, notes, index. $29.99. In the space of the months --Emmerson's book in March and Collins's in May-- we have two exceptional works of history, appealing to both scholars and lay readers, that mount a serious critique of popular interpretations of the origins of World War I. Both, directly rather than obliquely, are critiques of the popular (and outstanding) works of Barbara Tuchman -Emmerson takes on her The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1966) and Clark the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Guns of August (1962). Both are substantial works, by historians who are exceptionally widely read. They write like angles and spread their nets wide to capture evidence and te3lling examples to support of their arguments. And both point in the same direction: that regardless of mounting world and regional tensions at the start of the 1910s, there was substantial reason to assume that the tensions could be controlled, and if not completely controlled, that the result would simply be another of the regional conflicts that had become endemic from the late 1900s on. Emmerson's informative and charming book is a Baedecker tour of the world in 1913: not just what was the state of affairs and of mind in the world's capitals -London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna and St. Petersburg--but in places like Winnipeg and Melbourne, Durban and Bombay, Tehran and Jerusalem, Peking and Shanghai and Tokyo. The result is a quite different picture of the world, not of one on the brink of ineluctable world war but a world going on with its business, with a reasonable hope of continued peace, and certainly not the world conflagration that was the First World War. (An example, in 12913, the three cousins -the Russian tsar, the German emperor and the British king--met in Berlin for the wedding of the Kaiser's daughter, princess Victoria Louise, and prince Ernst of August of Cumberland. "When great potentates who are near relatives can meet in public and give full rein to their natural affection," opined the London newspaper, the Daily Graphic, "it is always legitimate to assume the political horizon is clear.") The message in Clark's magisterial history of the origins of the Great War, a book that will shape the contours of discussion for a generation to come, complements Emmerson's picture but is both more focused and more nuanced. In the introduction to his long and detailed account of what actually happened step by step and actor by actor, in the buildup to this tragic catastrophe, Clark argues that (1) the July Crisis if 1914, the month preceding actual war, was "the most complex [event] of modern times, perhaps of any time so far," and (2) that it is best approached not by asking why it happened but rather how. "Questions of why and how are; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War; Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Emmerson Page; Review: EMMERSON, Charles. 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. Public Affairs. 2013. 528 + xvi pp, illus., selected bibliog., notes, index. $30. CLARK, Christopher The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. HarperCollins. 2013. 697 + xxxii pp, illus., maps, notes, index. $29.99. In the space of the months, Emmerson's book in March and Collins's in May, we have two exceptional works of history, appealing to both scholars and lay readers, that mount a serious critique of popular interpretations of the origins of World War I. Both, directly rather than obliquely, are critiques of the popular (and outstanding) works of Barbara Tuchman -Emmerson takes on her The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1966) and Clark the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Guns of August (1962). Both are substantial works, by historians who are exceptionally widely read. They write like angles and spread their nets wide to capture evidence and te3lling examples to support of their arguments. And both point in the same direction: that regardless of mounting world and regional tensions at the start of the 1910s, there was substantial reason to assume that the tensions could be controlled, and if not completely controlled, that the result would simply be another of the regional conflicts that had become endemic from the late 1900s on. Emmerson's informative and charming book is a Baedecker tour of the world in 1913: not just what was the state of affairs and of mind in the world's capitals -London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna and St. Petersburg--but in places like Winnipeg and Melbourne, Durban and Bombay, Tehran and Jerusalem, Peking and Shanghai and Tokyo. The result is a quite different picture of the world, not of one on the brink of ineluctable world war but a world going on with its business, with a reasonable hope of continued peace, and certainly not the world conflagration that was the First World War. (An example, in 12913, the three cousins -the Russian tsar, the German emperor and the British king--met in Berlin for the wedding of the Kaiser's daughter, princess Victoria Louise, and prince Ernst of August of Cumberland. "When great potentates who are near relatives can meet in public and give full rein to their natural affection," opined the London newspaper, the Daily Graphic, "it is always legitimate to assume the political horizon is clear.") The message in Clark's magisterial history of the origins of the Great War, a book that will shape the contours of discussion for a generation to come, complements Emmerson's picture but is both more focused and more nuanced. In the introduct6ion to his long and detailed account of what actually happened step by step and actor by actor, in the buildup to this tragic catastrophe, Clark argues that (1) the July Crisis if 1914, the month preceding actual war, was "the most complex [event] of modern times, perhaps of any time so far," and (2) that it is best approached not by asking why it happened but rather how. "Questions of why and how are; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Odyssey of Homer; Author: Visit Amazon's Homer Page; Review: "In peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons." "Much sweeter is anger than honey. It drips down into the hearts Of men and it swells there like smoke...." These two passages, the first from Herodotus, the second from the Iliad itself (18: 102-103), could serve as epigrams for this long rewarding account of a slice of time -thirty-eight days-- in the ten years' war between the Achaeans (Greeks) and the Trojans. The Iliad is arguably the most important poem ever written. (E.g., Powell argues that the Greek alphabet was developed specifically so that the poem's auditors could write it down. The earlier Phoenician alphabet had no markers for vowels, good enough to record market or official transactions but not to capture and memorialize the delicate play of sounds and meanings in a poem as intensely verbal as Homer's.) The poem is about rage and honor, and rage (menis) is the poem's first word. Achilles is the main figure on the Greek side although he elects to sit out the first days of battle, and the poem ends with Achilles killing the Trojan hero Hector. There's the poem in a nutshell, but it doesn't hint at why the poem is such a consummate work of art. For a long time, the narrative proceeds in zigzags. Some of what is told seems digression. There is the famous listing of the Achaeans' (= Greeks') ships, and a whole book (10) about a minor character named Dolon, and another that details the elaborate celebrations -races and contests among the Greeks--to commemorate Patroklos, Achilles's bosom companion, who has died in battle. Powell is both a classics scholar and a poet, and distinguished in both capacities. His goal in translating the Iliad --after 131 prior attempts, do we need another translation?-- is "to communicate in a lean direct manner what the Greek [i.e., of the poem] really says, to put into English how Homer in Greek might have sounded to a contemporary." The result is a translation that seems distinctly less formal than others I have read (in part, not whole) and also, most of the time, more direct and thus forceful. Some of the colloquialisms he choose seem incongruous, out of place, at first -e.g., Diomedes calls Paris "goldie locks" and "girlie-peeper"- (11: 409), Menelaos calls out to Antilochos that he's "driving like a nut case" (23:416)--but over all, the colloquial, occasionally breezy quality of Powell's prose fits -with the poem's content but even more, with the audience to whom the poet spoke. Some comments: 1. War is never sugar-coated in this poem. The deaths men die are ugly and the dead are "more beloved / of buzzards than of their own wives." (11: 169-170) So speaking, Diomedes cast [his spear]. Athena guided the missile onto Pandaros' nose next to the eye and it pierced his white teeth. The unyielding bronze cut the tongue off at the root and the point came out beside the lower part of the chin. Pandaros tumbled from the car. His armor clanged about him -bright, flashing- and the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sweet Thunder (Thorndike Press Large Print Core); Author: Visit Amazon's Ivan Doig Page; Review: This is the third book to chronicle the sometimes intentionally (but usually unintentionally) complicated and picaresque life of itinerant teacher and word worker Morrie Morgan. At the close of Work Song (2010), Morrie had married his landlady, Grace, and the two had left Butte for a honeymoon abroad. There is a surprise in store for them on their return. Sandy Sandison, Morrie's eccentric former boss at the Butte public library, has left Morrie his house, a grand mansion in Butte that Sandy, now a widow, finds too big for him. They return to Butte to find that Sandy has installed himself in the house as their border. Morrie finds too that the house eats up money at a ferocious rate: he needs to find a job just to pay for it. He's roped into writing editorials for the Thunder (Morrie came up with the name), a fledgling newspaper that is the only public organ in Butte to stand up to the Anaconda Mining Company, which still has a stranglehold over both Butte and the state of Montana. Complications ensue. They always do around Morrie. Someone tries to shoot him. Grace gets fed up with his lies and leaves him for good. Anaconda brings in a hired gun from Chicago, an ace reporter with no scruples (his nickname is "Cutthroat" Cartwright, and his nom de plume is "Cutlass) to counter Morrie's editorials in the Thunder. A gang of bootleggers mistake Morrie for their boss. Sandy Sandison dresses up in kilts for the library's annual Robert Burns costume party. Anaconda closes down the mines in order to break the union. It all evens out in the end but it's a bumpy ride getting there. That's a Good Thing -it makes for a diverting read. There are a few new characters in this book but for the most part, it's the same comfortable cast as in Work Song, which is decidedly a Good Thing. Morrie's a Good Thing too. It's impossible not to like him. Reading about his mishaps is fun of the First Water and the complicated, sometimes rocky relationship of Morrie and Grace is handled with gusto but also respect. Grace is a masterful creation. Ivan Doig is a complete novelist. He tells good stories and limns attractive characters. While we read his stories primarily for pleasure, in the process we learn a lot about the times and places he memorializes. Action, high drama, a first rate love story and regular doses of humor -what more could you want from a book?; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tomorrow City; Author: Visit Amazon's Kirk Kjeldsen Page; Review: This action thriller about a man whose past catches up to him is the first novel by Kjeldsen, who lives in Shanghai but teaches in the cinema program at Virginia Commonwealth University. For the most part it works. There is a vivid sense of place, especially in the Shanghai sections. The protagonist is well delineated. As for action, the narrative seldom slows down and the action scenes are effective. There are a few rhapsodic passages about Shanghai that I could have done without and there is an ongoing and unconvincing dialogue between the protagonist and the ghost of a former mate, who tries to warn him off his present course of action, but these interruptions are few and blessedly short. Even in these passages Kjeldsen shows a gift for language that serves him throughout the book. It starts in New York. Ex-con Brendan Lavin takes part in a botched armored truck robbery. Four people are left dead from it and Lavin flees. He runs all the way to Shanghai, the "tomorrow city" of the title, where the bulk of the action takes place twelve years later. By then, Lavin has started a new family and opened his own bakery. Then his past companions catch up with him. They offer him a choice: take part in another robbery or they'll kill his wife and daughter and turn him over to the Shanghai police. The rest of the novel is about the robbery -another bloodbath--and Lavin's attempts to free his family and himself from his vengeful mates. Lavin's a fighter but no super hero. The bad guys are all that bad guys should be in a novel like this but they too are not super-villains. The heists, both of them, the one in New York and the one in Shanghai, are cockups from the start. There's a lot of blood and a lot of violence but it's all believable. The book is prefaced by a line from e. e. cummings: "tomorrow is our permanent address and there they'll scarcely find us." His past associates found Brendan, but the poet's line is a fitting epigram for this compact novel of criminal violence.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Broken Places (A Quinn Colson Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Ace Atkins Page; Review: Ace Atkins is one of the best writers of escapist fiction living so it's no surprise that his latest book is good. The Broken Places is the third action thriller to recount the adventures of ex-Ranger, now-sheriff, Quinn Colson. The first two books -The Ranger and The Lost Ones--were excellent and so is this latest one. Tibbebah County, Mississippi, is a rough place, with more than its share of dangerous men. Convicted murderer Jamey Dixon has just been pardoned by the governor. He was born again in prison. His talk now is all about Jesus and he's opened a church nearby. Quinn's sister, Caddy is his woman now, and Quinn doesn't like it. He doesn't think Dixon's changed and he doesn't want Caddy and her five-year-old son Jason around him. Then three convicts escape from nearby Parchman prison. Two of them, real hard cases, are looking for the money from an armored car robbery they'd conducted before going to prison: they'd rolled the car into a pond and been picked up for another robbery before they could get back to get the money out of it. They think Dixon has taken the money and they want it back. Wounds are inflicted, people die. It just keeps getting more and more complicated. Colson is an exemplary hero, cut from the same cloth as Elmore Leonard's Raylan Givens in the television series Justified: he is afraid of no one in his pursuit of justice. The people in Tibbebah get their groceries at the local Piggly-Wiggly, stop in at Sonic for a meal. Truckers stop outside town to get their ashes hauled in the back rooms of the strip joint attached to the gas stop. The strip joint's owner is Johnny Stagg, Tibbebah's crime boss. He's wired -the past and present governor's phone numbers are on fast dial on his cell phone. He's a treacherous enemy, Quinn's longtime adversary. When Stagg gets dragged into this mess, the stakes get higher. Throw in a killer tornado and you've got the ingredients for a high-voltage, never-let-down-your-hair thriller . . . which Ace delivers.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Adelle Waldman Page; Review: Waldman's debut novel is poised and sharp and both funny and poignant. It narrates the confusing and never quite satisfying love life of a young writer (his first novel comes out soon and he got a six figure advance for it). It starts with a chance meeting with a former girlfriend: when she got pregnant -a broken condom-- he paid for the abortion, even held her hand while she waited in the clinic, but then speedily drifted away, never to connect with her again. He tries to pass her off with pleasantries but she sees there's no connection. "You're an a**hole," she says, and leaves him. He really kind of is. But he really kind of isn't, too. He tries to be ethical in his relations with women, just so long as it doesn't entail too much effort. (Involvement = effort for Nate.) The real problem is ambivalence. He starts out hot in a relationship but quickly cools down. He misses his privacy, aloneness, a space where he doesn't have to consider others except as distant objects. He is quick to notice flaws in his significant other of the moment. The "product of a postfeminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education, he had learned all about male privilege. Moreover he was in possession of a functional and frankly rather clamorous conscience." His writing shows that: he is writing an essay on how "we get other people to do things we're too morally thin-skinned to do ourselves. ... Conscience is [our] ultimate luxury." Elisa, Juliet, Kristen -all his girlfriends to date have been temporary. But now he's met Hannah and, almost against his will, he digs being around her. She's smart. Witty some times. They have views in common but she doesn't mind telling him when she thinks he's wrong. She contradicts all his preconceived notions about how women think and what they are interested in. That's during the courtship phase. But then he starts chafing at being tied down, confined The more he chafes, the farther away from her he pulls. She notices his coolness and tries to woo him back -there're sexy undergarments and bedclothes and rough stuff in bed, she's over-concerned for his feelings. But the bloom is off the rose for Nate. He notices Hannah's long hairs in the bathroom sink and is irritated. One evening, she wears a thin-strapped tank top when they go out and he notices that, attractive as she is, "the skin underneath [her arms] jiggled as little bit, like as much older woman's. ... He felt bad for noticing and worse for being a little repelled." When she goes to the ladies' room, he notices that "the jeans she wore made her bottom half look bigger than her top half" and wonders why she hadn't noticed it herself. Waldman's dissection of Nate's inner thoughts is right on the mark. If we're honest about it, most men will admit they've had moments like Nate's, when infatuation disappears and disaffection nudges our consciousness, looking for an excuse to surface. But the lucky ones have; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Finch Page; Review: Here they are, old friends again -amateur detective Charles Lenox, now member of Parliament, and his lovely wife Lady Jane; their good friends Toto and Thomas; Charles's former servant and now his political secretary, the hard working, perspicacious Graham; the former roué, now detective Lord Dallington; even Inspector Jenkins of Scotland Yard. They're all here, settled in a few more years but appealing as ever. Charles and Jane have a baby now, two-year-old Sophia. Charles is a bit embarrassed how much of his time he wants to spend with her. ("After a lifetime of polite boredom when confronted with children, he had finally found one whose companionship seemed a delight.") Charles is rising in statute in Parliament. He's a junior Lord of the Treasury, but not always sure it's worth it. It's important work but he misses detecting. His blood rises when his former protégé Dallington asks Charles to take his place at a meeting with a mysterious client. He needs to be in a certain place at a certain time; there's a forty-five minute window of time to meet. The client hasn't given Dallington his name, only how to recognize him -look for the person carrying a black and white striped umbrella. Charles goes to the rendezvous. Things turn belly up. From then on, it's catch-up, all carried out in the interstices of Charles's increasingly busy parliamentary schedule -a critically important Factory Act is on the floor, which , if passed, will protect children and women from abuse. The main story line of this period thriller, set in London, 1875, is twisty -a little too twisty at points but that's common for Finch's enjoyable but not always plausible mystery stories. The plot, which eventually involves the queen, seem too coincidental at times and there are too many turns of plot, not always completely credible. To complicate matters further, two subordinate mysteries are supplied involving the private lives of two people very close to Charles. But you don't read a Charles Lenox novel primarily for the mysteries, although they're fun to read. You read for the characters, the author's mastery of historical ambience, and for a certain sunniness of tone that spreads out from Charles and Lady Jane --delightful characters both!-- in ever-widening circles to their friends and associates around them. One reads these books as well for the little touches. Finch is a consummate stylist. His descriptions of even the most minor characters are, as an English colleague of mine used to say, "spot on." Thus, Dallington's landlady is described as"a redoubtable and highly proper personage in her twenty-fifth month of mourning for her husband, only a little black crepe around her shoulders." That's brilliant! You know even before you read on what kind of a woman the lady is, and just how respectable this very respectable widow can be! There are the sly allusions to the Golden Age of detective novels. Like Sherlock Holmes, Charles deduces where the anonymous writer of the note to Dallington lives from information on the note about the place and time of the meeting, and; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; Author: Bill Ayers; Review: This book deserves to be read without a kneejerk response. Some people will be turned off in advance because of what they've heard (mostly false or overblown) about the author's violent past, others still by his yet radical (but not violent) rhetoric. But when did it become un-American to be radical? And what's wrong about being skeptical of the ways in which big government, big business and the media twist the truth to their own needs, assuming we're too placid to ferret out their lies? You don't have to agree with Ayers's positions -I don't on many matters- but he deserves a hearing, as a genuine and authentic voice for reform. The genesis for writing the present book was the resurfacing of claims that Ayers was an "unrepentant terrorist," first picked up in the Clinton-Obama debate of May 2007, when George Stephanopoulos (who has long ties with the Clintons) raised the question of Obama's supposedly "friendly" relationship with Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn (she once occupied the Number 1 slot on Hoover's Most Wanted List.) Hilary, in one of her least noble and most vicious moments, went to attack against Obama. Soon Fox News's Sean Hannity rose to the charge and then a flood of commentators and bloggers stirred the soup. It was, as Ayers categorized it, the old game of "guilt by association," a new McCarthyism sanctioned and encouraged by a more bellicose and intolerant Right, soon to be led by Senator McCain and Governor Palin. In this book, Ayers repeats the position he took in his earlier Fugitive Days. When I reviewed that book in 2001 I wrote the following, which applies here too: "His memoir is a breath of fresh air in this self-absorbed age. Ayers discusses his reservations about the use of violence to achieve an end to violence (reservations he held then as well), but he is unrepentant in believing that America was the aggressor against North Vietnam and that right-minded people have an obligation to resist unjust wars." Public Enemy is a passionate but fairly messy book. Ayers writes too much: sometimes the flood of details crowds out his larger message. His prose is sometimes close to mawkish, but Ayers's passion blazes out throughout the book. His wife and he spent eleven years under cover, before surrendering themselves voluntarily to the authorities. While in hiding, they moved on with their lives, made something of them. By 2007, Dohrn was teaching law in Chicago and Ayers was a very distinguished professor of education, with a passion for improving the education of young children. ("Revolutionaries want to change the world," he writes, "and teachers, it turns out, want to change the world too.") As to the charge that he, or Bernardine, ever killed or maimed anyone when they were "domestic terrorists", Ayer denies the charge: "We crossed lines of legality to be sure, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense, but it was restrained [i.e. from acts of violence against people as opposed to buildings, etc.], and those are the simple, straightforward facts." It's clear that; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Panopticon: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Jenni Fagan Page; Review: This is Jenni Fagan's first novel but you wouldn't know it by reading it. Her voice is both original and sure. There are no false starts and no excess in this dark yet at the same time hopeful novel about the awful life of Anais Hendricks, age fifteen, four hundred offenses on register against her and about to be charged with battering a policewoman into an irreversible coma. She's been assigned to the Panopticon, an odd old building where all the cells look past open doors at all the other cells so no one is ever unobserved, never. It's used now as a holding home for chronic young offenders. Anais's life has just been awful, simply awful. She doesn't remember her mother, who was a prostitute and also paranoid-schizophrenic. A batty old man who was in the mental institution with her says she came in on the back of a cat and she could fly. One of Anais's social workers worries that Anais will become schizophrenic also when she's older, but how can Anais tell, given the number ands variety of drugs she ingests daily to make her reality palatable? Her best friends in the Panopticon are a pair of lesbian lovers. Tash is in the business: she's prostituting herself nightly to earn enough money that Isla and she can move into their own flat. Isla cuts herself. She's HIV positive and she gave the disease to her two little children in her blood, and it drives her mad with guilt and grief. Horrible things happen to the two of them before the novel is over, but before it does you see these two misfits, and all -well, most--of Anais's companions in this kind of yes, kind of not prison, as real human beings. They have dreams (though little chance of realizing them). They're playful and quarrelsome and opinionated, and their japes are fun to read about. They'd be normal people if they'd ever been given a chance, but they've all been handed lemons in life's lottery, and no one more than Anais. And that's what is so moving about this book. Because Anais is a literary creation of the first water, a Holden Caulfield for the modern welfare state age, where so many are left behind under the wheels of the bus. Anais has dreams, She has drive. She is canny and smart and lovable, but you know her life is a trainwreck. How will she ever get out of it, no matter how special she is inside herself? Anais is the narrator, and she talks a jagged Scots language that is alive and sparkling. This is indeed an exceptional novel and Anais is a lovely character.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Never Go Back: A Jack Reacher Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Lee Child Page; Review: Never Go Back isn't the best Jack Reacher thriller but it isn't the worst either. Fourteen novels into the series, some of Reacher's tics are becoming too noticeable -in this novel, his fascination with numbers and his use of the coin flip metaphor for making a choice in a situation where the odds can't be calculated. And the ending of this novel, though it makes sense, is a bit flat. But other than those, Never Go Back is a perfectly enjoyable action thriller and Reacher an intriguing hero. In a retrospective preface to the paperback reissue of the first Reacher novel, Killing Floor, 1997, Child tells how he decided what Reacher would look like and what skills he would have: he would be oversized big, muscled and fit and rough looking, so that any ordinary man would take a look at him and walk away, possessed of all sorts of knowledge acquired in thirteen years in the Military Police, aggressive -certainly not slow to take matters to attack when a potential threat looms--and utterly lacking "the remorse gene. It just wasn't there." (Quote from The Hard Way, 2006) Fourteen novels in, Reacher is still an interesting character, more than just an attack machine, a man with complicated tastes in some areas though drastically simplified in others, and determined to lead his life his own way. Reacher would scorn most survivalists as dogmatists, but I suspect survivalists would find him a very appealing hero, perhaps matched only by Stephen Hunter's sniper hero, Bob Lee Swagger. One of the things Child has done consistently since his first novel is to set the scene for explosive violence in the very first chapter. Once you've read the first chapter of a Reacher novel, it's hard not to continue, and this novel is no exception. (Child is one of the few authors whose novels I read from start to finish as soon as I get them. Dick Francis was another, also Donald Westlake writing as `Richard Stark" and Robert Crais's Joe Pike novels for a long time Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels. There are mystery and action thrillers who are their equals but they draw me in from the first page and I can't put them down until I'm done with them.) In this novel, it's an encounter with two fit young men, obviously military from their botched brutal haircuts, who come to `persuade' Reacher to leave town. Push comes to shove, and Reacher demolishes both in a scene of precise and controlled violence, graphically told. There's a little too much revealed wisdom about attack strategies and what they do to the human body. It's extraneous to the central flow of action. But who cares? I read it any way and enjoyed those passages as well as the action scene, and two and a half hours, finally put down the book, having read it from start to finish without a break. I haven't talked about plot yet, because plot is the lesser partner in all of the novels in this series. Not that Child doesn't plot well.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Beyond Judgment (Brainrush); Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Bard Page; Review: This is the third Brainrush thriller -all feature Jake Bronson, ex-Air Force pilot, who has emerged from a terminal illness with his brain (and heart) changed. If not a superman, he's certainly a Super(ior)man. This time he doesn't know who he is. He emerges from a coma amnesiac -doesn't remember his native language, only speaks Italian now. Very Bad Guys want him, his family and friends rally to protect him, and all Heck breaks loose as a result. The bad guys belong to a secret society named Caeli Regere -it's been around for over a millennium-- and they don't want good things for us. The head baddy's number one aide is a German who says things like "Jawohl, Mein Herr," when he's given an order to do something nasty. Behind the Caeli Regere lie aliens who've been observing us for centuries and now are deciding whether to eliminate us or admit us to the ranks of civilized creaturedom. Hidden pyramids erupt from the core of the earth. "Judgment Day is upon us, Mr. Bronson," says the head baddy, "The planet balances on the brink, and all we need to do is tip the scales.... Everything is in motion. Nobody can stop it. Certainly not you." (The event will be "cataclysmic.") The countdown to Doomsday gets down to the final few minutes. Both good guys and bad guys possess a superfluity of advanced weapons, with exotic names and capabilities. Jake's family includes an adopted son who used to be an Afghan terrorist but since has been converted and now is a gifted linguist due to a brain transplant he's received. (Jake doesn't have a new brain but does have a new heart, transplanted into his body I don't know when.) Jake's biological son looks like he's autistic but definitely isn't, or, at least, is autistic in a way no other autistic kid I've ever heard of has shown himself to be. The book abounds in serendipitous discoveries. Racing down a mountain on skis, Jake's buddy conveniently finds an "HK G36 assault rifle" in the snow, dropped by a baddy in the heat of a pitched gunfight. Later, just when they need it, Jake's people find a workbench in the maintenance shed where they're hiding temporarily: there's an untapped twenty-four-pack of bottled water sitting on a bench so they can sooth their thirst and freshen up before they have to get dirty again. Rounds from a superspeed automatic weapon conveniently pass between Jake's legs as he launches himself at a bad guy. When he needs them, Jake calls on friends who come equipped with a plane, super-high-tech spy drones, a full strength tac team with fresh off the line never before used weapons, and a luxury yacht with "three VIP suites, ten guest cabins and a variety of salons and dining areas." And when Jake connects with his woman, the Purple Prose and New Wave gibberish flows: "His eyes didn't soften until they settled on hers. He gripped her shoulders. The connection was instantaneous. He was in her mind; she was in his. ...; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Paris Architect; Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Belfoure Page; Review: Architect Lucien Bernard, young enough to see his future in front of him but old enough to be frustrated by his lack of signal success in his chosen profession, walks down the rue La Boettie. It is 1942. The Germans have occupied Paris for two years. A man runs past him. Lucien doesn't pay attention. It's better not to in these parlous times but he does notice that the man wears the same scent, L'Eau d'Arnay, that he does. Then there's a loud crack and the man falls dead on the pavement. Drops of his blood spatter Lucien's suit. It's his one good suit and he's on the way to a meeting with a perspective client. Work is scarce in German-occupied Paris: he badly needs this commission. A German officer appears with two German soldiers. The German occupiers are notoriously volatile in situations like this: Lucien fears for his life. "He's not my friend," he blurts out in an effort to establish distance from the dead man. The officer grins. "This ****'s no one's friend anymore," he says. All is well. Indeed he asks Lucien for the name of his tailor: he admires the cut of his suit. Lucien moves on and the Germans clean up their mess. Another Jew dead on the streets of Pairs. It's not that uncommon a sight any more. Soon after, Lucien is offered a commission to create a secret hiding place for a Jew, no one he knows. He's going to be paid a lot of money and he's promised the opportunity to design an entire factory. The commissions are linked -no hiding place, no factory. Driven by ambition, he acquiesces. Other things happen, not all good. Soon, Lucien can't avoid confrontation with what is happening in his poor country. This is the story of the making of a hero, an unlikely one because he hadn't thought he'd care about Jews, particularly not at risk to his own life. By the end of this heartening novel, he does care very much, at least about a few of them. He cares enough to risk his life for them. At a time in France's history when it was perilous to embrace any principle except acquiescence, a man discovers that he's more decent than he thought he was. The author of this fine novel is himself an architect, and although he has published books before, they have been on architecture, not fiction. He uses his background to effect: architecture, how architects think and what they value, are central to the plot. There's nothing revolutionary about this novel, but it's well written and a pleasure to read.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Flying Blind: One Man's Adventures Battling Buckthorn, Making Peace with Authority, and Creating a Home for Endangered Bats; Author: Visit Amazon's Don Mitchell Page; Review: This is a book about how once started on a path, a person finds that one decision leads to another, and that one to another still, until one finds oneself doing very different things than one had thought he would be doing. It's also about the virtues of serendipitous thinking, and about making a living out of a small wooded farm in Vermont (the author had taught writing for twenty-five years at Middlebury College), about the author's stormy relationship with his father and how he eventually worked his way out of it, about how childhood stuttering may have prepared him to become a writer as an adult, and -oh, yes!-- it's about combatting glossy buckthorn and garlic mustard plants and felling (some) trees to create a safe zone on his farm for an endangered species of North American bats. Lastly, all through the book, it's about the complicated love-hate relationship between the anti-establishment author and the government authorities who are paying him (though not as much as he'd wish) o create this haven. "Bottom line: to the extent that an organization came across as authoritarian, there had to be some skeletons lurking in tis closet. Something to feel bad about. Something to cover up." In the end, he comes to terms, more or less, with their intrusions. The difference, in his judgment, is between authority wielded simply because one has the power to order someone around and authority wielded because one has some expert knowledge that will actually help the person on the receiving end of one's ministrations. He concludes with this observation: "Befriending bats had been a means to figure out, against all odds, where in the world I actually was. ... to participate ... in the wild party that keeps going on around us. What I mean, perhaps, is that I'd learned to fly less blindly." This is a joyous and frequently funny memoir that is surprisingly interesting and enjoyable to read.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Report from the Interior; Author: Visit Amazon's Paul Auster Page; Review: Auster is an interesting person and a good writer so almost anything he produces is of interest to the serious reader, but Report is one of his lesser, or less effective, efforts. A report on his childhood through early twenties, it is divided into four sections. The first reminisces on his first years, up to around ten years of age. By the very nature of one's memory of the early times in one's life, it is episodic and fragmented, but interesting nonetheless. Having gone through a similar effort in writing down my own memories of those years, I know how difficult it is to capture the feeling one had then, but Auster does it well. The next segment deals with his early to mid-teens and is less successful though no less enjoyable. Much of this segment of Auster's ongoing memoir project is a summary of the plots of movies that affected him as a youth -George Pal's War of the Worlds, Richard Matheson's script for The Incredible Shrinking Man, and best of all, I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, dark, dark melodrama from the early 30s starring Paul Muni as a man wrongfully sentenced to ten years in hell. The third segment is the weakest. Auster uses the occasion of receiving copies of his letters to his ex-wife to review his early adulthood, the period when he was forming the literary person he would later become. It's interesting to read but, like many `literary'-minded young adults, Auster at that stage (1) overwrote and (2) was often emotionally indulgent. It's interesting, of value, because Auster is a man we should know more about but it is not of itself all that interesting, too often just a young man over-emoting. There is a fourth section of photos: they relate to the written text but are not all that enlightening or absorbing. Still, even with these reservations, this is a book worth reading. It's just not as well crafted as, say, The Invention of Solitude or his Winter Journals. Hey! I'll read almost anything by Auster. I know of few modern day writers who interest me as much.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two; Author: Visit Amazon's Catherynne M. Valente Page; Review: I ordered this book for review after reading of the success of the previous two volumes in the series. The first, The Girl Who Circumnavigated..., won the Andre Norton award for children's fantasy. The second, The Girl Who Fell Beneath..., was a Time magazine Best Book of 2012. I thought at first that I'd made a mistake but I left the book enjoying it, though tepidly. It's weak. The book's one strong point is imagery. This passage is particularly lovely: "The dark air wrapped her head like cold wool. Even when she spoke, the sound seemed to fall apart as soon as it left her lips. The starlight shone down as strong as party lanterns." And she writes lots of passages just as lyrical and playful. She's very good with words. But the images are piled on too heavily -embroidery more than substance. I suspect most young people 10-14 would prefer a stronger narrative and better fleshed out characters. The book is twee -too much of the time sugary, insubstantial, more fireworks than solid body. September is an adequate heroine but her companions --the Marid Saturday, the giant but rapidly dwindling Ell the Wyverary, the partly alive Model A Ford Aroostook-- don't make it as full-fledged characters. I'm not trying to compare them to characters in realistic fiction but rather to the characters in a book like Alice in Wonderland, whose characters aren't realistic but are, for the purpose of the novel, real, like the characters in this novel are not. Many of the characters in this book are simply place markers. You could exchange one exotic for another with no disruption to the narrative. Leaving aside September and maybe Ell, they're gestural and little more. I won't reveal the ending except to say that I found it weak. I love fantasy, but not when it's cloying as, unfortunately, this book is.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Sexual Perversity in Chicago and the Duck Variations; Author: David Mamet; Review: Here in one volume are two critically acclaimed plays by one of our national treasures, playwright David Mamet. Perversity (1974) won the Obie for the best off-Broadway play of its year. It's good, really good but Variations (1972) is, in my view, even better. Perversity centers around the relationship of two pairs, one male (Danny and Bernard) and the other female (Deborah and Joan). Danny and Deborah become a couple. Bernard and Joan set out to tear it down. They succeed and by the end, Danny and Deborah are back with their mates, all possibility of love between them lost, lost, lost. The play is presented as a series of short scenes with blackouts in between. The dialogue is what would come to be seen as vintage Mamet -spare, colloquial, and oblique, especially when talking about things of the heart or soul. There's a lot of profanity, which fits, especially the characters of Bernard (misogynistic and opportunistic toward women) and Joan (equally negative about men and a user). Variations is a little gem, arguably one of the best American plays of the last half of the twentieth century. It employs the same minimalistic style of conversing used in Perversity, but not pointed any place. In Perversity, all the random, sometimes scabrous talk leads to the demolition of Danny and Deborah's love affair. You can see the four characters' future lying ahead of them: self-absorbed, even solipsistic, turned off of deeper relationships and users all. The two old men in Variations just talk. They could be in a Beckett play, probably Waiting for Godot (1953), if Beckett had been a minimalist realist, writing in Chicago at the start of the `70s. Like Didi and Gogo in Beckett's play, Emil and George, Eastern European types, end up as they start the play, sitting on a park bench looking out of the lake, still talking, talking, talking about the same things. And again like the lead characters in Beckett's play, both character have definite character, but it's almost the same one. You could change roles in mid play and the audience would probably not notice the difference. The play is composed in fourteen short scenes, `variations,' none long and some quite short (three to seven minutes max.?). Emil and George talk, sometimes bloviate, on a variety of topics. Somewhere in each scene, ducks become the topic of conversation. It is a very humorous play but, though there are funny lines, the humor mostly bubbles up from George's and Emil's characters. We have all known old men like them: they sit around a table at a donut shop or a MacDonald's and talk on and on, enjoying each other's companionship but talking like megalomaniacs, vying for the position of authority on whatever topic is introduced. Sometimes they know what they're talking about but just as often they don't. Even then, they act like they know even though they don't. There's nothing malicious in them. They're just human. And growing old. And that's this play: human, funny, cunningly fitted together, from start to end.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Graveyard Book; Author: Visit Amazon's Neil Gaiman Page; Review: Better late than never, I just read Neil Gaimans extraordinary childrens book, The Graveyard Book, which won the Newberry Award in 2009. At the start of the book, its unusual hero, Nobody Owens, is still a baby. With the assistance of a stuffed Teddy bear he climbs up on, he climbs out of his crib, scoots down the stairs on his rear end (leaving his diapers behind him), and toddles down the street to a graveyard, while behind him, a cold killer known only as Jack finishes off his mother and father and older sibling (you are never told its sex). But its not them that Jack wants, its the baby. The baby enters the cemetery, assisted by several ghosts, who then debate whether to keep him. Mr. and Mrs. Owens, a lovely old pair of ghosts, elect to adopt him, and since no one knows his name and certainly not the infantthey name him Owens, Nobody Owens, Bod for short. And so Bod begins life in the graveyard, his parents three hundred years dead ghosts, an enigmatic not dead not alive character named Silas his guardian. One adventure follows him as he grows from toddler to young boy and older boy and at last almost adult. He meets all sorts of characters, living and dead (mostly dead), including a werewolf named Mrs. Lupescu, is trapped and almost inducted into a family of grave ghouls, makes friends with a dead young witch named Liza and a young living girl named Scarlett, who cant be allowed to remember him afterwards. There is a lovely chapter (Dance Macabre) in the middle of the book about one special night when all the living and the dead in his town meet to dance together -its magical. The novel is a set of related short stories following Bods path as he grows up. It ends with a satisfying resolution to the murders that started it when Bod finally confronts Jack and his equally bloodthirsty associates. Then there is Bod, grown up now and eager to explore the world of the living, where possibilities aren't set and lives haven't ended already. He says goodbye to his family and friends in the graveyard, to his guardian Silas, and heads out. As he leaves, he hears a voice in his head, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, saying I am so proud of you, son. The book ends with this lovely sentence: But between now and then [i.e. his own death], there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Death of the Black-Haired Girl; Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Stone Page; Review: There are no kings, queens, princes or princesses in Death of a Black-Haired Girl, no highborn types at all, but still it is a tragedy. In this case, the protagonists are ordinary people -a professor, the young woman who is his student, and the young woman's father. The professor isn't a bad man but he coasts through life without much thought about the consequences of his actions and this time, he's gotten himself in trouble. He's had an affair with a student -a bright, impetuous, not terribly disciplined young woman who reminds him of what it's like to be young and passionate--and now he needs to get out of the affair. She doesn't want out and she winds up outside his house, yelling taunts to his wife and him. He comes out to reason with her. She gets even angrier with him. She pulls away, runs -or is shoved? It's not clear--into the road, and is hit by a car. Fatally. And this is where the tragedy begins. As in the tragedies of old, events concatenate in effects. By the end of the book, the lives of the professor and his wife and of the young girl's father are fatally changed. No dramatic deaths or pyrotechnic confrontations ensue, but the people most affected by the death don't return to their lives unchanged. Around this story, baldly told, Stone gracefully weaves other stories -of a former nun, sometimes revolutionary in South America, now a low-tier counselor at the posh New England college where the professor teaches, of the dead student's actress roommate and her trials with her religious zealot ex-husband, and bits of pieces of the stories of the other actors in this drama. Early in the book, the student, Maud, drops off her class essay for the professor, Brookman, to read. It's on Marlowe's Faustus and she has zeroed in on one passage in it: Faustus has asked Mephistopheles "how he manages to wander about tempting obsessed intellectuals while doing time in hell." "Why this is hell," says the Diabolus, "nor am I out of it." That response could be the hallmark for this book, because it's about people making their own hells, whether they intended to or not. Stone is an acute observer of ambience and societal trends. The college where Bookman teaches is a prestigious one but it is under attack from the decaying city around it. Gates, formerly unlocked and open to all, are now double and triple locked. Only the safe are allowed in but even they aren't always safe. As to the city outside: ... the small children in the old wooden tenements that Norman Rockwell liked to people with his folk didn't know jump-rope rhymes anymore, couldn't play stickball or hopscotch or choose up sides going one potato two potato. In summer the basketball courts were empty. Grandma weighs ninety pounds, she's on crack, mom's a slave or turning tricks at interstate rest areas, adolescent dad's working on his prison tats or wearing curlers for his roomie. All the graffiti is black. Some might have thought; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Invisible Code: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's Christopher Fowler Page; Review: This, the tenth Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery to appear in print, is the first Ive read but it won't be the last. (The Memory of Blood, 2012, was the most recent.) So good a mystery is this book that Ive already ordered all of the past mysteries I can get from my local library. Theyre billed as Bryant and May mysteries, after the two sharpest minds in the Unit, but this book at least is almost all Bryant and very little May, who serves principally as his older, more eccentric partners foil in unraveling a tricky mystery that starts out almost a non-crime and steadily grows until by the end, the detectives are racing against the clock to foil a multi-partied conspiracy that threatens the nations wellbeing. The Invisible Code is proof positive that old-style Golden Age puzzle mysteries can still be constructed and will be enjoyed by readers. Bryant is an elderly codger who refuses to be put out to pasture. His transparently false teeth click distractingly and he sheds detritus wherever he walks. (The Crime Scene Manager for the unit hates to see Bryant appear at murder scenes because he contaminates the evidence. He relates the story of how one time he was busy cataloguing brown droppings that appeared all over the room in which a murder had occurred. Belatedly he realizes that Bryant is moving around the room with a cup of cocoa in his hands and scattering drops of liquid everywhere. Later in the book, May describes Bryants sartorial style as Post-war Care Home Jumble Sale and describes the way Bryants brain works as a sort of intelligent threshing machine. It chews up bits of information and spits them back out in a different order. They should pickle it when you die.) Everyone hates the Unit because they make the other crime fighters look bad by solving unsolvable crimes and the others cant. This time, Bryant and May are given the opportunity to insure the Units continued existence when they are asked to look into the erratic behavior of a highly placed and influential bureaucrats wife. Separately, a woman is found dead in a church with no apparent cause of death and though its not the Units charge to look into deaths in London, Bryant wants to. More deaths follow. Things grow curiouser and curiouser before anything is resolved, and there is a last minute rush to resolve a heinous crime. On the way, they pick up a white witch and then a not-so white witch to help them resolve the case and Bryant delves into the history of thirteenth-century England but won't tell any of his colleagues why. (On the white witch, Maggie Armitage, the author comments: What she lacked in logic she made up for in a kind of deranged effervescence that sometimes shed light into penumbral corners.) Like the classic Golden Age detective mysteries, crime is an arcane business here: nobody dies during a smash and grab; there are no deaths by anything so mundane as bludgeoning. But though the links in the chain from; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Death's Dark Abyss; Author: Visit Amazon's Massimo Carlotto Page; Review: I wrote about the protagonist in Carlottos At the End of a Dull Day (2013) that Richard Starks Parker might have looked like him if hed grown up in a country as corrupt as Italy. It was hard stuff but good. All that applies to this hard, vicious thriller with bells on. Carlotto doesnt write detective novels. He writes crime novels, perhaps for good reason: he was imprisoned for seven years until he received a presidential pardon in 2003. Since then, hes turned out a string of gut-wrenching novels of bad men driven by circumstances to become even worse Deaths Dark Abyss has two narrators, and the action shifts hands back and forth between the two as the novel progresses. Raffaello is a hard core thug. A robbery goes bad and he ends up killing an eight-year-old boy and the boys mother. Hes served fifteen years of a for-life sentence but he has cancer now and he wants to get out. Silvanos been serving a sentence for fifteen years too: hes the father and husband of the two people Raffaello killed and theres never a day he doesnt want revenge. Raffaello has never given up the name of his partner in the robbery. Silvano supports Raffaellos release from prison: he still hates him but he hopes if Raffaello is out, he can find out who his partner was and mete out his own revenge on him. What follows is dark, jolting and mean. Silvano ends up as bad as Raffaello. Raffaello never changes. This is a very good but very noir novel, about a bad guy who remains one, unrepentant, and kind of good guy who becomes almost as bad because he lets himself go in revenge.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Serpent's Tooth: A Longmire Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's Craig Johnson Page; Review: All of Craig Johnsons Walt Longmire mysteries are good but this one is especially good. As always, you care about the characters the mixed crew who work to maintain law and order in Absaroka County, Wyoming. Again as always, the tone of the story violence and bad guys and all- is warm and human, and the action satisfies. Sheriff Longmire is a wonderful creation: hes been around long enough to gain a sense of balance in the chaotic life of criminal-catching. Hes got a sense of humor. Hes isn't above whacking a bad guy across the head just to remind him that you don't mouth off to the Law and that whether he can prove you guilty or not, he knows you are and he will not evergive up on nailing you. His second-in-command, Victoria Moretti (aka Vic), features in this installment of the Longmire saga, as does his best friend Henry Standing Bear though less so than in the previous novels. This is a family saga as much as anything Walt and his officers hanging together in the face of danger. They care about each other. The action starts when Walt picks up a Mormon lost boy who has been exiled by his Mormon sect. Walt decides to help the boy find his long missing mother. Soon Walt is face to face with a 400-pound Mormon polygamist, his gun-wielding sons --there is so much intermarriage that most share the same last name- an old gent who claims to be 200 years old and blessed by Joseph Smith himself, a knife-happy Mexican and some possible CIA castoffs who seem now to be running a scam of their own. The plot is complicated but only because what it describes is complicated. Walt has to figure it out on his own --hes not a Thinking Machine a la Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot and he doesnt have a playbook to help him out. In short, the plots not phony complicated, its real life complicated. Through it all, Walt moves ahead, one step at a time, never doubting his own moral compass. Hes a wonderfrul action hero, all the more so because he doesnt seem phony. Another virtue of this fine acction thriller: Johnson does adult love well. Vic and Walt are mature, idiosyncratic, full-fleshed characters and their growing relationship reflects this as well as how much theyve grown to care for each other not just love, also like and respect and trust.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present; Author: Visit Amazon's Max Boot Page; Review: "Guerrilla warfare is as old as mankind. Conventional warfare is, by contrast, a relatively recent invention," writes Max Boot (Senior Fellow, National Security Studies, Council on Foreign Relations; The Savage Wars of Peace and War Made New). Boot has written what may be the first comprehensive history of guerrilla and terrorist warfare, from classical times (Romans vs. Jews, the Peloponnesian War, Alexander the great in Central Asia, the Maccabees, etc.) to modern times (the Russians in Afghanistan, the Lebanon civil war, Al Qaeda). En route, he discusses such instances as the American Revolution and the Haitian war of independence, the Spanish Peninsular war against Napoleon's generals, the Greek war of independence, Garibaldi, John Brown's raid, the Ku Kluxers, the north American tribes retrograde actions against the American government, Britain and the Pashtuns, the Boer War, anarchist and nihilist attacks, the Irish war of independence, Tito's Yugoslavia, Mao's march to power, the Huks in the Philippines, Algeria, Viet Nam, Cuba, and the `children of `68" (the Baader Meinhoff gang, the Symbionese Liberation army, etc.). In other words, he truly tries to be comprehensive. On the good side, this means that when he generalizes, it is from a large and generally reliable base of data. (The book includes an appendix summarizing data from 1975 to the present in a comprehensive Invisible Armies database, summarizing who were the combatants, how long the struggle lasted, and who won.) And this thoroughness lends credibility to his observations. On the negative side, it means that you are presented with snapshots rather than full narratives. (The narrative and analysis stretches 580 pages and 64 chapters plus prologue, epilogue and a summary of the implications for future wars against guerrilla or terrorist groups.) With all the examples he presents, his conclusions seem almost inevitable. Guerrilla warfare and even more terrorism are techniques of the weak, but they can't be defeated by conventional troop maneuvers. Both modes of warring usually fail eventually unless the insurgents are supported by powerful allies outside their own ranks. The victory of the American colonies over England and of Greece over the Turks are examples. Manipulation of public opinion -vide, Castro--has become an increasingly important weapon for rebels. If you want to defeat them, you need to win over the populace: fighting guerrillas or terrorist forces requires you to be in for the long haul and to spend as much time wooing the locals as it does fighting the bad guys. This is a good book but because Boot spreads himself so thin in it, not a deep book. Nonetheless, it's fascinating reading and, I suspect, invaluable in determining how to combat new kinds of warriors in our present age.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Studying Comics and Graphic Novels; Author: Visit Amazon's Karin Kukkonen Page; Review: I wish I liked this book more than I do, which is not much at all. Given the popularity of graphic novels and other forms of comics today, it is probably not at all a bad idea to have a textbook that can help students understand how to get the most out of reading them. Unfortunately, this is not the book. Though old by now (published in 1994), Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is a much wiser choice, especially for novice scholars (college students). Kukkonen is a postdoctoral research fellow at St. John's College, Oxford. This is her second book on reading comics to come out this year. The other, from University of Nebraska Press, is Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013). I suspect there is considerable overlap between the books, with Contemporary Comics Storytelling written for a scholarly audience and this book as a classroom textbook for courses on reading comics. Both books espouse a cognitive approach to reading comics, but Kukkonen doesn't spell out clearly enough what makes a cognitive approach unique or especially helpful in the reading. But even stating that the book employs a cognitive approach points to a serious deficiency in this book. The language employed in it promises a grander structure, and more profound insights, than the book actually delivers. In the introductory chapter, she promises "a guided tour of six approaches to comics: semiology, narratology, cognitive approaches, history, cultural studies and gender studies, and psychoanalysis." Yet most of the conclusions she reaches could have been reached without any of that: and for the most part, they're mundane. They don't need a fancy superstructure. Kukkonen probably knows a great deal about comics, but her knowledge doesn't yield much here for the fledgling student of the medium. And the inflated language she uses gets in the way. Just throw the terms "homodiegetic" and "heterodiegetic" at a college sophomore and see what reaction you get. Each chapter concludes with suggestions for a class activity, a short (300-500 words) writing assignment and longer essay. But the suggestions are lame, soft pitches to a hardball hitter. I do not see that they would either stretch the student's capacities or lead a student to greater knowledge of the subject. Kukkonen's book fails as a textbook, especially for novices in the field. It draws on postmodernist icons like Freud, Lacan, Barthes and Eco, and buzzwords like postmodernism and gestalt without establishing a clear enough reason that they should be applied or that they produce insights different than could be achieved without them. The prose is turgid, the ideas unremarkable, and the teaching aids flaccid. To top it off, the comics illustrations are relatively few and don't convey at all the incredible richness of the field -just a few examples: why not show a R. Crumb cartoon sequence, rather than merely talk about them? I know she says she restricts the study to English language comics but since she mentions Asterix le Gaulois, why not also Tin Tin? And it would have been nice to see at least a reference to the creators; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Widow File (A Dani Britton Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's S.G. Redling Page; Review: As a mystery thriller, The Widow File is pretty much of a washout but the heroine is great. Dani works for Rasmund, a top secret security firm. Rasmund never advertises its services. If you don't know what they are, you don't deserve to employ them anyway. Rasmund has been hired to find out who is smuggling out industrial secrets in a high tech corporation with a large government contract. Three kinds of investigators are being used on this project. Dani and two others are Paint: they're data analysts. Danis specialty is pattern recognition: shes a whiz at figuring out people from the trash they leave behind. Then there are two Faces combinations of con men and undercover agents, who dress up, talk fancy and weasel their way into the firm under investigation, winkling out more secrets. And as a last resort if all else fails, there are Stringers contract agents called in to do the nasty stuff, up to and including assassination. Then the project they are engaged on is suddenly closed down. The three Paint are told to scrub their computers of all trace of investigation and Dani is ordered to bag all her evidence for collection at Rasmunds office center. Dani gets hung up in traffic and shows up late. Shes entering the building when she hears a sound shes stored away in her memory among a million other useless factsits the sound of silenced guns. She hears screams a few cubicles away from hers. Something bad is happening and if she doesnt get out of there, she knows wholl be the next target for the guns. From that point on, the novel is a chase thriller, with superbright/sane/perceptive Dani fleeing (with a colleague, the one other apparent survivor of the massacre), then trying to find out what is going on and how to stop it, and a driven, quirky contract killer pursuing her. If all the characters in the novel were as appealing as Dani, it would be a much better book. Most, including her colleague and the assassin, are cutout figures. In one case, a key figure who appears halfway through the book and plays a major role thereafter in the unfolding of the plot, behavior and motivation are not only thin, they are unconvincing. In general, thats the problem with the book too. The plot doesnt hold up if you look at it closely. No one except Dani seems terribly real, and only Dani is appealing enough to follow what happens to her. It could have been an intriguing book (no pun intended) a protagonist who is bright but has few of the survival skills to save her from a well-trained and relentless pursuer, and behind it all a vast, murky conspiracy. But as matter stands, File is close to a mess.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Out on a Limb: What Black Bears Have Taught Me about Intelligence and Intuition; Author: Visit Amazon's Benjamin Kilham Page; Review: Ethologists like Ben Kilham (Among the Bears, 2003) are at a disadvantage in the world of science: they observe their animals in nature rather than the lab. Severely dyslexic, Kilham was denied admission to a doctoral program. That too made his work suspect. But hes raised 27 orphan bears from infancy and been friends to one bear, Squirty, for fourteen years now. He even discovered a sensory organ in black bears, the Kilham organ, which helps them to determine which plants are safe to eat. In straightforward prose, Kilham sets forth what hes learned from more than twenty years of working with bears. They aren't the loners they're pictured as: they inhabit a complicated world of reciprocal social arrangements with other bears that allow them to browse other bears territories when food is scarce in their own. They read mood and intent and know what behavior is permissible and they discipline other bears (Kilham too) who transgress. Kilham speculates on the relevance of what hes learned to early human development and sees bears behavior as a possible analog to ours. Anyone who enjoys reading Temple Grandin, June Goodall, Frans De Waal, Bernd Heidrich, or Marc Hauser will enjoy this book too. Kilham is a worthy member of a small but increasingly vocal confraternity of scientists who watch as often as they count.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Wives of Los Alamos; Author: ; Review: This book is not for everyone. In large part, it depends on the reader's tolerance for the first person plural voice. The entire novel is written as "we", not "I." Names poke through but only as parts of a collective that is the Los Alamos wives en masse. Their husbands were the scientists and engineers and technical workers who created the atomic bomb: the wives moved with their husbands and children into the contained, freshly built community that was Los Alamos. Everything about the town had to be kept secret from the outside world. When they arrived, the wives had to surrender their cameras (and some of the cameras could not be found when it was time for them to leave). If they were foreigners, or had foreign-sounding names, their very names were Americanized: Mrs. Fermi became Mrs. Farmer, Mrs. Mueller Mrs. Miller. Families lived in nearly identical box houses or in trailers until more houses were built. The more children they had, the bigger the house they got. All around was the Army. Even though their own families didn't live or act like soldiers, they lived within the confines of a soldierly world. By the time groceries reached the base, the milk was always half sour, the vegetables limp. Dust flew everywhere. But the worst was the requirement of secrecy surrounding the men's jobs: they couldn't talk about them even with their wives and after a while, some husbands and wives found it hard to think of anything to talk about together. Some women got jobs but they were drastically under-used: Ph. Ds worked as typists and lab assistants or taught high school science. The wives envied the few women scientists on the project who they could talk with their husbands when the men's wives didn't even know what their husbands worked on. Pregnancies mushroomed but some marriages frayed in this goldfish environment. Husbands and wives strayed. A boy drowned. Women formed bonds with their servants. They bought native jewelry and rugs and formed a square dance circle. After the war, rumors of wife-swapping and wild drinking at Los Alamos proliferated in the sensationalist press. But for the most part, life went on as usual for these women --life as coping-- adjusting to the strains of living in a contained community where every wife knew every other wife but no one knew anything about what their husbands were doing. When they left after the war, they still had to contend with what had happened there. Sometimes it came back to bite them when their children couldn't understand or forgive what had been done. As I wrote at the start, many readers will not like this novel. It doesn't have the dramatic tension that a novel written in the first or third person singular would have. Rather, it's a bit like Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood, with voices rising and sinking out of a collective sea, only it's a novel this time and not a play, and the voices are waking voices, not sleeping. I like it quite a bit, but that doesn't; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Leaving the Sea: Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Ben Marcus Page; Review: If you read The Flame Novel when it came out last year, you have some idea what to expect from Ben Marcus's prose. The stories in this collection, ranging in length from five pages to forty-some, are brilliantly written but also jarringly isolating in their effect on the reader. He's not an author to read if you want to feel good. That's not a criticism, it's an observation because other authors have had and do have the same effect -from Kafka through Dennis Cooper to Gary Lutz. Marcus writes exceptional experimental fiction but it's very dark -you need to know that when you go into it. But if you approach it with an open mind, you will leave knowing you have read a set of exceptional stories. It's as though he writes nightmares. And like in a nightmare, there's seeming logic but no real sequence to what happens and like being in a nightmare also, there's no getting out of it. You're trapped inside. Marcus's approach varies from piece to piece -that's what it means to be experimental--but his fallback stance is distancing and observational, like a cultural anthropologist or ethologist of human, not animal, behavior, but reporting on odd variants of human behavior that -fortunately for us--don't exist in the real world (but yet echo true like distorted shadows that remind us of their sources). As a writer, Marcus possesses brilliant language resources and writes stunning images. A man notices the trees around him "looming in his periphery but not surrounding him, clusters of green growth like clouds of algae bursting in the air." A story about love which is like a Hieronymus Bosch painting filtered through Freud contains the statement: "We fantasized about a place where we could be wet and boneless, where no one would dare attribute a feeling to us." Bones constrain and oppress in this surreal piece. In another story, written as an interview, a child fights against becoming a not-child. It's chilling. Brilliant flights of words capture subterranean fears, which are emotional truths we don't often admit to ourselves, in strange images, strained gestures, obsessional thinking, like this passage, from "The Dark Arts", which is one of the longest and best pieces in the book: "She hardly spoke. Maybe they hadn't fought and maybe they weren't still, in some quiet, effortlessly Zen way, fighting right now. One day, people would swab each other with animosity sticks, and there'd be no way to hide it. Just as you could be tested for cancer, you could be tested for fury. Your anger would show, or your resentment, your detachment, your ambivalence, your reduced sexual attraction, no matter what you said or did. Your mood would be a chemical fact and if you lied about it then, poor, poor you." In the midst of these resolutely modernist stories, there is one ("What Have You Done") that is basically realistic narrative. It's about a middle-aged man who's never been able to convince his parents that he isn't still what he was when he was young and angry and still living; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe; Author: Visit Amazon's David I. Kertzer Page; Review: Drawing on the reports of Mussolinis many undercover agents in and around the Pope and on Vatican records now made public, Kertzer (anthropology, Brown Univ.; The Popes Against the Jews: The Vaticans Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, 2002) has written a book about the inner workings of the Vatican during Mussolinis reign that is all the more jolting because presented in so understated a manner. Kertzers step by step narration of the often troubled but mutually self-serving relationship between the arch-conservative Pius XI (1922-39) and Italys charismatic dictator, Benito Mussolini (1922-43, d. 1945), and the slow accretion of documentary evidence, is the opposite of sensationalist but all the more damning of the papacy nonetheless. Neither party to this near-marriage liked the other but both benefitted too greatly from the alliance to seek a divorce. Until the very end, that is Pius was drafting a papal encyclical attacking the Fascists racism as he neared death but he died before he could deliver it and his associates in the Vatican, including Eugenio Pacelli, the Vaticans secretary of state, buried it. The contents of the draft didn't surface until during the papacy of John XXIII, twenty years later. Pacelli succeeded Pius XI as pope and took the name Pius XII, a signal to outsiders that he would be a staunch adversary of all forms of modernity. Favorably disposed to Italys Fascist government, he would publicly criticize Mussolinis Nazi allies. A French cardinal predicted he will be a conciliator and he was correct. Just two days after his election, the new pope met with the German ambassador: he reiterated his fondness for the German people and assured the ambassador that he he understood that different countries adopted different forms of government, and it was not the popes role to judge what systems other countries chose. One revelation in this devastating study is the profound depth of antagonism felt in the Vatican against any form of modernism: they opposed democracy of any kind, were worried about the threat of Communism, and fulminated against the liberal-Masonic-Jewish-Protestant alliance that they felt contaminated the modern world. These beliefs led basically decent men to behave in indecent ways. They were so concerned not to lose influence over the Italian dictator and not alienate the wildman Hitler that they forgot to serve as good shepherds and good moral role models for their flocks. (Not all were all that decent either. Camillo Caccia, the prefect of the papal household and a longtime associate of Pius XI, was a notorious pederast, yet he organized the popes schedule and determined who got to speak to him.) Kertzer doesnt comment on it but one subtext of this scholarly study is how easily power can subvert morality in otherwise well intentioned human beings. As to the public addresses and writings reported in this book, some of the ideas expressed in them are so slimy as to leave a foul taste in ones mouth.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (Intercrime); Author: Visit Amazon's Arne Dahl Page; Review: The devil is here, ladies and gentlemen, and even if we catch him, no exorcism will be able to drive out he brought with him. So speaks the head of a special unit of the Swedish National Crime Police set up to address violent crimes of an international character. This time its a serial killer, perhaps Swedens first, who has tortured and murdered a noted Swedish literary critic in a janitors closet in Newark Airport and used his vacated seat to fly into Stockholm. The Swedish police get a passport photo of him just too late to stop at the airport and all they have now is supposition: he has almost certainly flown to Stockholm to kill someone (or ones) and he is highly proficient in torture: he uses a specialized technique that allows him to shut off the victims screams while he inflicts unbearable pain in his raw nerve endings. All of his victims have died in agony. Oh, yes, one other thing: it looks like he was almost caught twenty years ago he was called the Kentucky Killer back then-- but he died in a car chase, only to reappear soon after and kill and torture some more. Then, quiet, until as year and a half ago, when the killing rampage began again. The literary critic in the janitors closet? His twenty-fourth known victim. What follows, as the Swedish unit scrambles to catch up, is a mixture of Keystone Kops mishaps and high caliber police work. Although detectives Paul Hjelm and Kerstin Holm are highlighted, the search is truly a collaborative effort, in the best traditions of the police procedural mystery. Theres enough humor and enough tension to please the most jaded mystery enthusiast. This is a Scandinavian crime thriller so there is a good amount of social criticism dispensed en route, and there are real surprises in store before the case ends. (I won't say whether it is solved or not. Youll have to read the book to find out the answer to that.) This book is a good one.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Nostalgia: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Dennis McFarland Page; Review: I feel grateful for the chance to review this wonderful novel, which may be the best book written on the Civil War since Cranes The Red Badge of Courage. It certainly is up there among the best. The perspective moves from one time to another inside the head of a young man who has been traumatized in combat during the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. Summerfield is nineteen years old, a keen baseballer whos been looking forward to college and then a profession and domesticity, but then he enlists, almost by impulse. Theres a reason: his sister and he are recent orphans and hes started to find himself attracted to his sister. He needs to get away from her. Battle proves different certainly, less noblethan he had ever anticipated. The officers and soldiers on his aside don't appear all that warrior-ly and dead Rebs don't look all that different from his own companions. The noise and the smoke, the chaos and mayhem of war create a nonstop assault on the senses. He sees companions fall right beside him: he cant save anyone. Live men turn into dead meat at the drop of a hat. The battles site inside a deep forest-- is chaos too the trees are so densely packed that you cant see the enemy until they're upon you and its all too easy to lose ones sense of direction. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth goes the narrative: Summerfield at home, Summerfield in battle or preparing to go to battle, Summerfield recuperating in an Army hospital in Washington. Hes made his way there after being abandoned by his commander and he is so traumatized by what he has seen and felt that he can neither talk nor write his name. He meets a gentleman named Walt there, an unofficial hospital visitor who takes a liking to him. Later, you learn that the visitor is Walt Whitman, but nothing special is made of the connection, its just who Walt is, like Summerfield is wasa baseballer. The book closes with Summerfield at home again but trauma still eats him up inside. Throughout, one is impressed with the evocativeness of McFarlands prose and the warmth and humanity of his vision. Like Walt the poet, McFarland sees into a humans soul. The book is true to its object: to make us feel what happens to this sensitive young man in the hell of battle.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Little Failure: A Memoir; Author: Visit Amazon's Gary Shteyngart Page; Review: This is either the saddest funny memoir I have ever read or the funniest sad one. Estimates of the number of Russians who died in World War II vary the number Shteyngart uses is 23 million, roughly fifteen percent of the countrys citizens, but at that large a scale what difference does a million or two more or less make? The Second World War was horrific for everyone but for no one more than the Russians and Shteyngarts parents grew up in that milieu. That experience, and the legendary Russian capacity for arguing, melancholy and paranoia shaped his parents personalities. Little Igor (he was renamed Gary in the States so as not to look foreign) was raised in a warzone of his own. It was called home. When he was little, his father called him Soplyak (Snotty) and his mother called him Failurchka (Littler Failure). Where do you go from that? Years later, when Gary informed his mother that he had enrolled in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Iowa, the most prestigious creative writing program in the country, she asked: What kind of profession is this, writer? You want to be this? No matter how adult Gary had become, it continued. He brought his girlfriend home to meet his parents --he later married her. His father, seventy by then,, took her out to his vegetable garden. He handed her the biggest cucumber in the garden and said to her: Here is something to remember me by. I am big. My son is small. His fathers motto: He who doesnt hit doesnt love. That Shteyngart survived sane and reasonably human in all this chaos is what makes this memoir special. It is, ultimately, a success story, triumph over adversity. Some of the steps along the way are ugly, but his whole life is a Good Thing, and it supplied him with a rich lode to mine as a writer. Then there is the humor. Shteyngart made his experiences anything! into jokes he probably had to. He is really, really funny. A few examples: He describes himself, a several weeks premature newborn baby: I am long and skinny and look a bit like a dachshund in human form, except that I have a fantastically large head. Well done! the orderlies tell my mother. Youve given birth to a good muzhik. On the decay of the Soviet Union at the end of the seventies: Unbeknownst to me, the Soviet Union is falling apart. The grain harvests have been terrible; there is hardly enough grain to feed the masses or keep them fully drunk. What hits the reader in that description is two sensations at once for that last sentence is as funny as it is bitter. At a parent-teacher conference, the teacher tells Garys father: Gary is very smart. We hear he reads Dostoevsky in the original. Phh, says Papa. Only Chekhov. When he goes to Oberlin, he runs into a student dining co-op that doesnt allow the use of honey because it exploits the labor of bees. His judgment:; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Coincidence: A Novel (P.S.); Author: J. W. Ironmonger; Review: Azalea Ives is found abandoned in a seaside amusement park on June 21, Midsummers Day,1982. Shes three years old. A year later, they find the body of her mother, raped and murdered on that day a year earlier. But no one makes the connection with the little girl at that time. Azalea is adopted by a pair of missionaries, the Folleys, and they take her to Africa with them. On Midsummers Day, 1992, in Uganda, the Folleys hospital-school is taken over by Joseph Konys cult-like Lords Resistance Army: Azalea escapes but her adoptive parents are killed. Twenty years later, Azalea is back in England, with a third last name, Lewis. She knows by now what happened to her mother. She knows too that her mothers father --surname Yves, not Ives- was swept to sea and drowned on Midsummers Day, 1962. Hunting for her father, she runs into three possible candidates. Two are blind. The third had drowned at sea on . Midsummers Day, 2002. Azalea is obsessed with coincidence. She knows inside herself that these events, which separately seem random, have connections. She feels that there is a direction, an order to her life. It will all come to fruition on Midsummers Day 2012, which is coming up soon. Now starts the interesting part. (Not that the part isn't interesting too but alone it would just be a Wonder Show. The next makes it a romance and a good one too.) Alazea learns of a man, Thomas Post, a philosopher at the University of London (where she works too more coincidence) and when she meets him, they realize they had met before (more coincidence). Thomas, who is a bit of a dry stick, is known as the Coincidence Man. His specialty is calculating the odds of unlikely sequences of events happening and using his mathematics to show that they are still coincidence, not hidden order. I seem to be afflicted by coincidences, Dr. Post, says Azalea when they meet in his office. Thus begins a most unusual love story Azalea resisting emotional entanglement, Thomas wanting it desperately because he is awkward and because hes never been good with people like Azalea is ideas and numbers are his things. They pursue coincidence, disagree over its cause, and eventually their differences separate them. Azalea disappears, off to Africa again after twenty years separation, to lay to rest the demons that haunt her. What will Thomas do? The story moves on from there. Read the book and youll find out what happens. En route, if you're like me, you will grow to care what happens to emotionally ingrown Thomas and glorious Azalea. At the end, Thomas has to make a choice. Its all very satisfying. (Note: Kony and his army are real: at the time of the writing of this novel, Kony was the seventh most wanted criminal in the world. When you read about him, it makes you wonder who could be worse.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel (Philip Marlowe Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Benjamin Black Page; Review: Blond is a so-so mystery written in a style that has seen it day, which is now long past. The snappy remarks are still there, and the trademark poetic descriptions, but theyve not worn well, and some of them are painfully contrived. A martini arrives at Marlowes table: its cold and just a little oily, and it tripped happily over [his] teeth with a silvery tinkle. Eucalyptus trees are like a crowd of accusers staring at me silently as he climbs in his car. (Its an Olds, of course details are critical in period writing.) This kind of language wasn't hackneyed when Chandler pioneered it but its a clich now. Benjamin Black captures the style and outlook of his P.I. hero. Slightly tarnished, often dented, Marlowe is no super man. But hes still the guardian angel of lost causes and beautiful women in stress. An attractive upper class woman hires him to find a lover whos gone missing. The mans been declared dead, killed in a hit and run accident long before, but she swears she saw him walking around live in San Francisco. the seemingly straightforward case -find the man- quickly grows complicates. Marlowe gets in trouble with some very bad men: he gets mussed up but perseveres. The bodies pile up. The ending is barely believable. Black (nom de plume of John Banville) is too good a writer for the novel to be a complete dud but it definitely falls flat. Maybe its time for Marlowe to retire for good.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Cockroaches: The Second Inspector Harry Hole Novel (Harry Hole Series); Author: Jo Nesbo; Review: Just released in English, Cockroaches is the second crime novel starring Norwegian detective Harry Hole. For those, like me, who have become addicted to the series -there are now ten novels in the series-- it comes after The Bat and just before Redbreast, and it's just as compelling a read as the others. Harry is a wreck of a man, all the time an out and out drunk or teetering on the edge of alcoholism. But he knows his job backwards and forwards and once he gets his teeth into a case, he never ever lets go. This time Harry has been sent to Thailand. The Norwegian ambassador has been found dead in a Bangkok brothel, an antique dagger sticking out of his chest. Harry's job is to smother the bad news at the source: scandal would reflect badly on the current prime minister. But once Harry gets there, he smells a rat and from then on, all bets are off. What follows is engrossing from start to finish. Harry remains one of the most interesting and appealing figures in modern crime fiction. He doesn't look like it at first but he's a mensch. Look past his manifold flaws and you see rock bottom integrity. The exotic setting in this episode is a plus as are the on-the-mark depictions of a number of interesting characters, some helpful to Harry, some a menace to his life. The murderer's machinations are unnecessarily convoluted but that's not a serious weakness. Plotting has never been the strength of Nesbo's series. Character is.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Three Brothers: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Ackroyd Page; Review: There are three brothers, each born one year apart and all on the same day, 8 May. Harry, the eldest, doesnt care for anyone except Harry. He leaves the house as soon as he can and finds a job in journalism. Unburdened by conscience or concern for others, he moves up step by step to editor of a London newspaper. Hes aided in his rise by marrying the frigid daughter of the publishing mogul who owns the newspaper and dictates its editorial policies: Sir Martin uses the paper to attack enemies and hide his own transgressions. Daniel, the middle one, makes it the university. He eventually teaches there -literature. He wants to make a name for himself as a scholar but doesnt really have much to say. Hes gay but in the closet. Sam, the youngest, is a loner. He drifts around, for a long time jobless, then lands a job collecting rents for a London bad guy who is on again off again antagonist and occasional cautious partner with Sir Martin. There is a side character, a London butterfly named Sparkler. Sparkler introduces Daniel to the louche culture of the city and eventually is involved in all three brothers lives. The three brothers don't connect with each other. Each has reacted in a different way to early abandonment by their mother (she pops up in the novel part way through and plays a role in what later transpires later). Their father is a gray, pallid presence. Sam lives with him until his death but the two strivers, Harry and Daniel, are ashamed of him and ignore his existence. For all the difference in their three lives, fate and events conspire to bring the three brothers together: they are involved in common events, with catastrophic results for two of them. Not surprisingly for a novel by Ackroyd, who has written elsewhere about the influence of place on psyche, the city of London and particular places therein exert repeated but subtle influence on the characters in this novel, and again not uncommon for Ackroyd, all three of the brothers at one time or another see things that probably aren't there. Ive read a lot of Ackroyds work, both fiction and nonfiction. Brothers is a good book its not my favorite piece of fiction by him, but it is fast-paced and perceptive. The brothers are a bit too much types rather than real people but that may be a natural consequence of writing so concise a novel that covers such a range of behaviors and events.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Soliloquy: What Dreams Will Come and the Nightmares That Follow; Author: Visit Amazon's Hannibal Adofo Page; Review: The first two-thirds, maybe longer, of this Young Adult novel are quite good. The ending is a mess, filled with ominous events and very large, super-human baddies, including a (the) Leviathan. Its supposed to be scary but isn't and in the process of rolling out his Wonder Show, the author shortchanges the novels real strength, which is its portrayal of an exceptional young woman named Soliloquy Soliloquy Adams. Yes, Soliloquy has unusual powers but thats not what appeals. Its her intelligence, her indomitable will, her clear-headed understanding of how hard it is for an inner city girl to make it out of there. Soliloquy truly loves her mother. That may sound old-fashioned today but its really nice. They seldom have time to spend together tough because when Soliloquys awake, her mother isnt, and vice versa --the mother, a single parent, has to work double shifts in a hospital to make ends meet. One of the reasons their life is so hard is that Soliloquy attends a decidedly upper-class high school an hours ride from their apartment in the city. Its an experiment on the schools part: can a poor girl from the ghetto (or near it) make it in a school of preppie over-achievers. She can but its not easy. A spoiled rich girl mocks her in class and her rich father gives so much money to the school that when an incident happens involving Soliloquy and the rich brat, the principal takes the other girls side. Soliloquy gets beaten up in the ladies room. Good things happen too she makes a friend, meets a boy. The author does a good job of letting you see these events through Soliloquys eyes she may be super-smart but shes still sixteen. Weird things happen. A menacing stranger dressed all in black confronts Soliloquy in a diner. I know what you are, he tells her. (Not who, what.) She faints. He disappears. She starts to display talents powers- shes never had before and doesnt know how to control. This part of the story the author also handles well as an author, Adofo may still be rough around the edges but hes talented. The ending doesnt work, mostly because the author over-reaches. The result is a mismatch: a start that captures the readers attention and sympathies, a middle that succeeds in building tension, but a free-for-all ending that doesnt seem real. Still, theres enough good in this first novel that Adofo deserves to be praised. If he continues to grow, he may be a writer to watch. Thats an if, not a certainty, but I, for one, am glad I read this book, regardless of my reservations about it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Cairo Affair: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Olen Steinhauer Page; Review: In 2011, two days after the uprising in Libya against the regime of Muammar Ghadafi, CIA analyst Jibril Aziz learns that five influential Libyan exiles, have disappeared -- kidnapped from London, Brussels, Paris and New York. He goes to his supervisor and says, Theyre doing it. The wheels of fate start grinding and over the course of this book, most of the unfortunates who find themselves caught in its gears are chewed up and spit out, if still alive, the worse for wear. Whats it? Stumbler, a secret plan, devised two years before to use men like the ones who have just vanished to lead the revolt against the Libyan dictator, but under the thumbs of America. The plan was supposed to have been dropped but here it is again. Is the CIA behind it? Aziz heads back into the field to talk to his contacts in Libya. En route, he stops off in Hungary to talk to an old contact, Emmett Kohl, who is posted now to the U.S. consuls office in Budapest but used to be in Cairo. Afterwards, Emmett and his wife Sophie meet for dinner. The dinner turns sour Emmett knows she was unfaithful in Cairo. But before their dispute can be resolved, a stranger East European, prison tattoos up and down his armsshows up at their table and shoots Emmett chest, facehes dead. Thus starts a complicated novel a novel of one surprise after anothertold by master spy novelist Olen Steinhauer. In this book, everyone lies to everyone else, or at least conceals necessary truths. (Sophie confronts her old lover in Cairo and he apologizes to her for concealing facts. I made a mistake, and Im sorry. But Im telling you now: I won't do it again. The narrators comments? That, perhaps, was the biggest lie.) The cumulative effect of all this deceit theres a fair amount of violence too- is jolting, but its also absolutely engrossing. Steinhauer is a master at conveying mood in a phrase, hes good at rendering character and he handles the most complicated narratives with absolute control. As complicated as the plot of this book is at points, and its quite complicated, it never spins out of hand and the readers interest in what is happening never flags. Once you start the book, you will not want to put it down. The narrative stretches from the early 1990s and a disintegrating, increasingly violent Yugoslavia, rent by bad memories and ethnic hatreds, to 2011 and the short-lived hope of the Arab Spring. But this isn't a book about hopes. One character, a contract soldier hired by the U.S. to do its heavy work in Egypt, muses: There could be no new world because the people who filled it would be the same ones as yesterday. Hes right. The world thats described here has little room for idealism and most hopes die as soon as they are birthed. If I were to try to summarize its theme in a phrase it would be this: its a novel about the concatenating effects of betrayal across; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cooking Slow: Recipes for Slowing Down and Cooking More; Author: Visit Amazon's Andrew Schloss Page; Review: I like to cook but am not an amateur chef. Still, I like to cook. So when I find a cookbook that looks interesting, I at least consider acquiring it. Thus this book, which I bought in anticipation of cooking for Christmas 2013. To date (February 5, 2014), I have tried four recipes and loved them all. I have several others lined up to try soon. It is tricky to predict success solely on the basis of success with a sampling of a cookbook's recipes but the omens are good. I made posole, a Mexican stew containing pork shoulder cubes, lots of shrimp, hominy, peppers, onions, garlic, and tomatoes. It cooked in the oven at 200 degrees for six hours and it was exquisite! -subtle yet earthy, a bonanza of good tastes that, because of the slow low temperature cooking, still were distinct. I've made the posole twice now, once for us, once for guests, and both times it has been a hit. The first time, I substituted garbanzo beans for hominy, and it tastes fine. The second time I used the traditional hominy (posole). I have also prepared prime rib and mac and cheese using this book, and they were both better than I have achieved using other methods -a lot better. The mac and cheese was amazing. After hours of slow cooking in the oven, the kitchen smells heavenly and the taste is wonderful. It was even better than my wife's time honored recipe. I think she's going to convert to new techniques the next time she makes hers. The author's comments throughout this book make sense -about the effects of temperature and moisture on the end product, about c0ooking in general. They resonate with me on several levels and by now I'm not a novice. The book is intelligently laid out, with attractive visual presentations of dishes, well explained recipes and intelligent sidebars on variant recipes and other matters. I have a list of recipes yet to try. It includes a cheesecake that cooks in the oven overnight for eight to ten hours at 175 degrees and ends up, so the book says, creamy even at the edge, never cracked and never dry because never over-baked. There are carrots slow baked on top of coffee beans (three hours at 225 degrees), a turkey chili that looks to die for (eight hours at 200 degrees), a duck ragu with cherries over fettucine (the ragu cooks in the oven for seven hours at 250 degrees), borscht (6-1/2 hours, on the counter top at the lowest possible simmer), and fettucine with lamb Bolognese (250 degrees in an oven for six hours). I will be using this book for a long, long time --and for good reason. Because cooking slowly makes sense: both in terms of the nutrients saved and the flavors amplified and made more intense and savory.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Graveyard of Memories (A John Rain Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Barry Eisler Page; Review: From the start, eight novels back, Barry Eislers spy thrillers about the good guy assassin-for-hire John Rain have been a success both with readers and critics, and deservedly so. As everyone knows who has read one of these novels, John Rain is the son of a Japanese father and an American Caucasian mother and raised in Japan until he was eight and then in the States. In neither place did he fit in: schoolmates in his early years scorned him as neither Japanese nor American, and American seemed alien after eight years of immersion in Japanese culture. He ended up in the armed services, a deadly sniper and dirty tricks man in Vietnam, then drifted into contract work for the CIA and finally, somehow, a freelance hired killer. Rain is a sympathetic character and a complicated one. In all of the books, characterization, ambience and narrative action flow smoothly. The Rain books are very good popular fiction. Graveyard of Memories fills in the somehow question: how did Rain move from being a low level courier for a CIA station head in Tokyo, to becoming one of the deadliest, least predictable hit men in modern fiction? The story that is told here is as good as the others and it fills in an important gap in the overall saga. Its set in 1972. Rain has been demobbed from the service and is living in Tokyo, scuffling for a living as a part-time bagman for the CIA. Aside from his penchant for violence and some training in the martial arts, he has few marketable skills there are few jobs available in the civilized world for someone whose chief qualification is that he used to be a master a sniper. The work he does now pays adequately but it leads nowhere. Then everything goes south. A scuffle with some thugs who turn out to be yakuza, a contract on Rains head, and deeper and messier involvement with his CIA handler. In the midst of the escalating action, described without waste in crisp, exciting prose, Rain meets Sayaka, a young Korean woman in a wheelchair. Henceforth, nestled in the middle of the action story is a touching, tastefully told, deeply erotic love story. How is Rain to resolve his difficulties with the yakuza and his CIA handler and still pursue his relationship with the lovely Sayaka? Can Sayaka and he make it as a couple? In the process, we see John grow. Even before he accepts his new necessarily solitary life, he learns lessons: the importance of blending in, of being seen as less than you are so enemies underestimate you; learning to accept nothing at face value; the self-discipline and hard work he must put in every day if he is to survive in his new no-mistakes-allowed the story impeccably.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Solo: A James Bond Novel (James Bond Novels (Paperback)); Author: Visit Amazon's William Boyd Page; Review: Solo may be the most elegant story written yet about super-spy James Bond (martini shaken not stirred) but that makes sense because as he has proved in numerous other novels, William Boyd is an elegant writer and a true storyteller. (My favorites among his more serious novels are An Ice-Cream War (1983) and Brazzaville Beach (1990). He always writes well and always tells a good story. Having praised him as a writer, let me faintly damn his current effort. Its a piece of fluff but thats what I expected it to be. After all, the Bond stories are all thrillers about an iconic spy who, no matter how refined his tastes may seem, is at heart nothing more than a hired thug. And this is the what is it, fifty-first novel about Bond? Ian Fleming wrote twelve, Kingsley Amis sixteen more, Raymond Benson twelve, Sebastian Faulks and Jeffery Deaver one apiece, and now Boyd. In addition, Charlie Higson produced five young Bond novels and Stephen Cole has announced another soon to be published, and Samantha Weinberg penned three about Miss Moneypenny, M.s fabled secretary. As to films, 23 came out from Eon Productions and another two were separately produced, from Dr. No in 1962 to Skyfall in 2012. Thats 25 movies out in a fifty-year run and still coming and 51 novels in sixty yearsnot a bad for record for fiction thats written solely for diversion! The problem for Boyd, as good as he is as a writer, is that Bond is too defined by now. We know his tics, know how he approaches an assignment, know pretty much what the sentences and paragraphs in a Bond story will look like. His villains and his women are predictable, as are the settings the villains need to be cruel and a bit devious, the women all hotties who succumb to Bond with little persuasion, the settings well, exotic. And by now, it all looks a bit old, especially when compared to stories now being written about other, more up to date spies and assassins, by writers like Barry Eisler and Oren Steinhauser, to name just two. Spy stories run hotter and meaner now, with less coasting between action. But thats not Bond so Boyd doesnt write it that way and if you want ta Bond story written now, its hard to think of a better match for it than Boyd because he is such a good writer. The story? Its 1969. Bond has just turned 45. Hes sent to Africa to persuade a seceded province to give up its hopeless war against the mother country, Zanzarim. He succeeds in his mission but is caught, shot and left for dead. But this is Bond. Her doesnt die. And after he has recuperated (M. brings a half-bottle of prime Scotch into his hospital bedroom to help his healing), he goes solo to exact his revenge. The ending is a little more cynical about the Good Guys than in many of the earlier novels, but, hey, these are the 2010s, aren't they, and we are all; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Contractors (A Jon Cantrell Thriller); Author: Visit Amazon's Harry Hunsicker Page; Review: Hunsickers action thriller about two Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) contractors on the run is simply an old-fashioned chase/hunt novel. Theres nothing new in its approach but its good. Hunsicker knows how to do this kind of story-telling. This is his fourth novel and hes been shortlisted for both Shamus and Thriller awards.. He writes story, thats what he does her, and he melds it with memorable characters and a setting that pretty much invites trouble to happen. Its a fast read, mostly because you won't want to hard to put the book down once youve picked it up. Joe Cantrell, busted from the police for a fight with a callous FBI agent, works now as a contract agent for the DEA. His turf is one of the worst in the country, drug-ridden Dallas, TX. Cantrells got a partner named Piper, and shes got issues too. They follow a tip to warehouse to confiscate a shipment of drugs but everything goes south when they break in to make the arrest. In no time at all, they're on the run. Theres a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) order out on them and they're fleeing not just the local cops but the Feds and drug cartel killers. The only way they can get out of this mess is to take another commission: to deliver a witness against the cartel to a sleepy town in south Texas. But this is a crime thriller. You cant trust anybody, even the ones on your side. By the time the novel ends, there have been a number of surprises and double-crosses and a lot of people, mostly bad, are dead. Almost nobody is clean, all the way up the food chain to the U.S. Senate.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Silken Prey; Author: Visit Amazon's John Sandford Page; Review: It's a pleasure to report that Silken Prey, John Sandfords latest novel about supercop Lucas Davenport, who works for Minnesotas Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, is a good one. Its a return to form after Sandfords rather weak last novel Mad River, which featured Davenports associate detective Virgil Flowers. A political fixer disappears. The governor asks Lucas to investigate an allegation that a U.S. Senator, running for reelection and in the lead, has been set up just before the election by the discovery of child porn on his computer. The two cases run together. Davenport discovers very bad things happening in high politics. Throughout the book, the action flows, the characters are well delineated and engaging (the good guys at least), and the tone is right, amused skepticism about the gap between what people in high places say they want and what they actually want and will do to get it. A small pleasure, for those like me who have read all 34 of Sandfords crime thrillers is the reappearance in this novel of the thief/computer whiz/and for-real painter Kidd and his larcenous spouse Lu Ellen, who last appeared in a book of Sandfords in 2003. Though Silken Prey is the twenty-fourth novel to feature Lucas Davenport, its still crisp.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Robert B. Parker's Bull River (A Cole and Hitch Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Knott Page; Review: Robert Parkers Bull River is an authorized continuation of Parkers deservedly popular series of Westerns about territorial marshal and ace gunslinger Virgil Cole and his equally deadly but more meditative deputy Everett Hitch. Its almost certainly set in the 1880s because the first book in the series was set in 1882. Parker wrote four Virgil Cole novels before his death in 2010: this is the second continuation by Knott, who wrote the script for the film Appaloosa, based on the first book in the series. (It was a good movie.) In this episode, Virgil and Everett hunt down a bank robber whos run off with all the banks money and the bankers wife. Its not clear whether he seduced her or forced her to go with him. The pursuit leads Virgil and Everett to Mexico --Vera Cruz-- where they must deal with not only the bank robber but a federal police lieutenant who is every bit as rapacious as the man they are hunting and has a troop of armed soldiers to back him up. The prose zips along and Virgil and Everett are appealing characters, as are the minor characters who appear and disappear in these pages, and the narration (told by Everett) has the feel of the Old West. But it feels old, where Parkers original four books did not. With so much that goes right in this book, where does the problem lie? I suspect its a matter of respecting the original texts too much. Virgil and Everett seem mummified now, no longer living and vivid. The mummification process isn't as noticeable as it is in Ace Atkins continuation of Parkers Spenser novels but its there. (When he writes his own series, Atkins is a fine writer.) Maybe its time to put Virgil and Everett to rest for good.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Dark City: Repairman Jack: The Early Years; Author: Visit Amazon's F. Paul Wilson Page; Review: I loved the first Repairman Jack novels. (This is the twenty-first.) They were over the top but Jack was an appealing, self-crafted fix-it kind of guy, an American mercenary who helped people in need, operating strictly below the radar: he only took cash, he had no credit cards or bank account, never declared his income or paid taxes, didn't even have a Social Security number. The bad guys were not only legion from the dogmen Rakoshi to the members of the Order, set on creating chaos in the world in order to allow the Other back to destroy it, all part of a vast cosmic game --but they had exotic powers and were so vicious that it was fun seeing how time after time Jack managed to thwart them just for the moment, not for good, because each novel left an opening for the next one to follow. The pleasure in reading a Repairman Jack adventure was akin to the pleasure in watching a familiar TV show: you wanted to see what happened next it was nothing more complicated than that. Besides, the Repairman Jack novels had momentum. They charged along. The novels about Repairman Jacks adult life are done now sixteen of them, ending in Armageddon. In addition, there are now three Teen novels and now The Early Years, a trilogy about young adult Jack of which Dark City is the second. Nothing is resolved definitively in this installment: the story just goes on. Its 1991. Jack is twenty-two, and still discovering what kind of creature he will be a loner and a doer, not just a reactor. There are Arabs in New York. The minions of evil Order are trying to manipulate these would be jihadists, who are uniformly incompetent but also vicious, as a means to maximize the chaos the Orders Master badly wants. Wilson juggles three subplots in this installment: Jack needs to get a bunch of vengeful Dominican Republicans off his back, he wants to secure his favorite bar for his friend Julio, and he deals with a con man whos been ripping off old ladies savings. At the end of the book, the Arabs are still there and the Order is still plotting, and a new surprise is on the way. Theres enough plot in this book, enough action too, to make it exciting but it isnt. Its dull as a plank --Jihadists, con man, the Order or not. Theres too much back plot by now: everything that unrolls in the novels about the mature Jack has to be prefigured in the books about the young Jack. Theres the mysterious woman with the dog, who --kind of-- aids Jack when he needs it. Theres Jacks best friend, Abe, who sells guns below the table, loves junk food and is fat, fat, fat. And so on. By now, the Repairman Jack franchise is sinking under the weight of its own superstructure.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Reflections on Judging; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard A. Posner Page; Review: Judge Posner () starts many of the chapters in this book with quotations. None capture what the book is about better than very first, on page one, a well know quotation from Albert Einstein: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. For one of the themes of this mature work by an influential judge and scholar of the law is how judging, and the law, have become more complicated than they need to be or is good for them today. Posner concludes this exceptionally rich and helpful book by saying: Federal judges are falling behind. The problem is not caseload; it is case complexity. Judges aren't coping well with the increased complexity, mainly but not only scientific and technological, of modern society. We judges are not inhabiting this new world comfortably. Rather than try to understand the world outside our books and traditions, we (most of us anyway) burrow deeper into as complex world of our own making. As if to validate Cokes claim that law is a species of artificial reason. Legal formalism is tightening its grip on the judiciary at as time when legal realism has never been more needful. We are complexifying the judicial process when we should be simplifying it, and neglecting the unavoidable complexities pressing in on us from outside the legal culture when we should be embracing and overcoming them. This is a book about three things principally: 1. An analysis of the flawed nature of legal formalism (as argued for by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) and a call for a more modest but also more honest and flexible (and thus useful) approach to judging that he calls legal realism. 2. A vigorous and eloquent argument for simple clear writing, and, as a corollary, for judges to write the first drafts of their own opinions rather than foisting them on their law clerks, whose experience in the practical world is less than their own, and whose intervention so early in the drafting process often hides from the judge his or her own errors in reasoning and gaps in understanding of a case. Posners heroes among federal judges are Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Cardozo, both at some time in their careers Supreme Court justices, and Appellate Court judge Henry Friendly. Of Holmes, William Popkin writes: his language is direct, unadorned, and without artifice, neither magisterial nor professional. He uses language shared by a community that includes both the judicial author and the public audience. (Holmes once said that a judges opinions didn't have to be heavy in order to be weighty.) Of his own writing (Posner drafts all his own opinions) Posner affirms:My main reason for trying to write clearly (and I do try I am not a naturally clear writer) is that unless I reduce the case to its simplest possible terms I cant be confident that I actually understand it and that my decision is right, or at least sensible (often one cant be sure what the correct outcome is). 3. A set of detailed recommendations for how judges can; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World (Hinges of History); Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Cahill Page; Review: Cahill is a charming writer but a misleading one, who in the interest of promoting himself and enticing the reader, trivializes and misrepresents the past. This is not the first book in which Cahill has misrepresented a complicated and alien past as something easy to assimilates and, well, you know, kind of fun. There is something terribly wrong in this type of oversimplifying complicated phenomena. I reviewed this book for a journal when it came out and wrote: In the sixth volume of his Hinges of History series, Cahill takes on the Renaissance and Reformation and mangles them as badly as he did the Middle Ages in his earlier Mysteries of the Middle Ages (2008). He tries to make history accessible through the gratuitous anachronism: comparing something old with something contemporaneous and thus familiar: Columbus, a completely self-made man, is likened to a character in a David Mamet drama. Francis of Assisi, meet Bernie Madoff. Historians both amateur and professional will cringe. Cahill does have things to say --on Catholic theology and sensibilities, Italian Renaissance art for instance- but even here, his views are hackneyed. Whats missing in this mish-mash of the past? Theres little on Machiavelli, or Renaissance science or the mundane changes in Italian business practices that Elizabeth Eisenstein and others argue paved the way for a new, more mathematical mind-set. But this is High History, leaping from mountain peak to mountain peak, with little interest in what went on in the valleys between. this book is too idiosyncratic to deserve attention from the serious lover of history.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Harvey (Acting Edition for Theater Productions); Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Chase Page; Review: This was the first play I directed. I was 24. It was 1960. A year or two later, I would direct Mary Chase's Mrs. McThing --it was magical but nowhere as much as Harvey. It's 53+ years later and I remember almost everything so but it as clear as day --the actors, the staging and set, and also, because music is important to me, the music I used along with it --in this case, Elwood P. Dowd's sister's recital off stage. I used Jonathan and Darlene Edwards's off-kilter rendition of "You're Blas'." Jonathan was Paul Weston, Darlene his wife Jo Stafford, and he played and she sang deliberately off-key, but not so much that you could immediately label it as wrong, rather, a slow PRESENCE. There's nothing modernist or revolutionary at all about this play but it is one of the purest theatrical experiences I have had in (now) fifty-five years of acting, directing and writing about theater. Theater is supposed to be magic. This play truly is.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two; Author: Visit Amazon's Todd S. Purdum Page; Review: A seasoned journalist like Purdum (Vanity Fair, Politico, NY Times) is a good choice to write a book on a topic like this. He knows how to dig up facts and he uses them to tell a rousing story -of how our country finally got off its collective rear end and did something to actualize the words in the constitution about equal rights under the law, but also how hard and long a struggle it was to get it done, and how many players from diverse backgrounds and viewpoints were involved in accomplishing it. The story has its dramatic arc ---accelerated protest and the pressure it placed on President and Congress, for action; a bipartisan coalition to pass a Civil Rights bill with teeth; the long, hard fight to pass a bill through a Congress without its being diluted out of existence; the welter of delaying actions in both houses but above all in the Senate. Some of the heroes are people we don't usually think of and just as much Republicans as Democrats. A conservative Congressman from Ohio, Bill McCulloch (R-Ohio), was largely responsible for the crafting and eventual passage of a strong Civil Rights Bill through the House of Representatives. Charles Weltner was the only Congressman from Georgia to vote for the Civil Rights Bill of 1964: two years later, he left Congress rather than sign a loyalty oath to Georgia's segregationist governor. There's even evangelist Billy Graham, whose service for 35 thousand blacks and whites was held in Birmingham, Alabama, as the debate over the Civil Rights Bill was being waged in Congress -Purdum notes the lobbying efforts of the churches in this historic fight. The details of the interplay among the most public actors in this intense drama is fascinating. JFK supported civil rights reform, as did his brother Bobbie, but he was reluctant to push for it at the cost of the rest of his foreign and domestic program. JFK attempted to keep the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his followers at arm's length, suspicious of King's involvement in Communist activities (we owe J. Edgar Hoover for that bit of poison) and because he feared backlash if he was seen as too close to a man conservatives saw as too radical. Not just King but most black civil rights leaders were discontented with what they saw as the glacial progress of the draft Civil Rights bill through Congress. At several junctures, the threat of escalating violence pushes cautious politicians to action. And at times, it even seems to have freed political leaders to follow their consciences. House minority leader Charlie Halleck (Republican-Indiana) later said: "Hell, I didn't do it for political advantage. The colored votes in my district didn't amount to a bottle of cold pee....[My opponents] couldn't understand that once in a while a guy does something because it's right." And when black leaders asked Lyndon Johnson why they could trust him after a long record of support for segregationist measures when he was in the Senate, he quoted the old (black AND white) hymn:; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Gandhi Before India; Author: Visit Amazon's Ramachandra Guha Page; Review: Guha (Makers of Modern India, 2013, and India After Gandhi, 2008) has written a solid, workman-like biography of Gandhi in the years before he returned to India, for good. (He was forty-five by then, well on the way to his adult life.) The book focuses on his years in South Africa from 1893 to 1914 and the evolution of the thoughts and actions that created the human being we call the mahatma Gandhi. It's an amazing story of the triumph of will and moral principle over normal human prejudices. It also introduces other actors than Gandhi's, a surprising number of whom are European. Above all, it lays out (1) how his positions evolved in response to events -in other words, how he was both (an evolving) theorist and a t, who never reached for unrealizable objectives but instead sought compromise over confrontation, and always favored principle over pragmatics (although he was intensely pragmatic in his actions). At the heart of it all is Gandhi's immense moral probity. Here is Gopal Krishna Gokhale, one of the early proponents of Indian `nationalism', on the source of Gandhi's strength: "He is a thoroughly straightforward, honourable and high-minded man and though he may at times appear obstinate and even fanatical, he is really open to conviction.... The bulk of the community there is devoted to Mr Gandhi and any confidence that you may depose in him will not only be amplified by his conduct, but will be repaid tenfold by the gratitude which it will inspire in the community." In a narrative that is admirable in its comprehensiveness but almost bludgeoning in its detail -has Guha ignored any report on Gandhi's activities or the response to them in Africa?-- Guha conveys how Gandhi's position evolved over time. Initially, he disdained and excluded Africa's natives from his coalition but with time recognized their common humanity. A traditionalist Hindu, at first he saw no role for women in his campaign but eventually accepted them, convinced not only by the urgings of Europeans acolytes but by his own wife's actions. But it also conveys the solid rock of faith in men's moral capacity that underlay his ideas from start to finish. If you are not a professional historian, concerned about completeness of sources, you may find this book excessively detailed, but it's accurate and perceptive, and the story it tells is of the emergence of an exceptional human being, one of the few truly great, and truly effective, figures of the twentieth century. There is a reason why people still talk of Gandhi. It's not just because he made possible the formation of one of today's great countries. It's because he taught us a new, and morally acceptable, way of waging combat against oppression and injustice.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Two Soldiers (A Ewert Grens Thriller); Author: Visit Amazon's Anders Roslund Page; Review: This little monster of a book (I use the term as praise) isn't so much a detective novel as it is a crime novel. Theres detection in it and theres a detective, a grizzled veteran of the Stockholm police. With his colleagues, he does some detecting but its no secret to him whos at fault. The detecting consists of finding legal proof to convict them but even more in tracking them down. (The ghetto the suspects live in has eight to ten thousand apartments compacted into a tightly confined space.) Were accustomed to crime novels where the villains are seasoned adult malefactors. The lead bad guy in this book is seasoned for sure but hes barely eighteen years old and no one in his gang, the GHETTO SOLDIERS, is any older. They call each other brutha. They exchange greetings like One love, brother, One love. This is the only love theyve ever known, or at least admitted to knowing, and violence robbing, destroying, killing-- is the only way they know to be seen. They are the forsaken people of Swedish society, doomed as children to lead desperate lives that end young. Twelve-year-olds do the scut work. Their worth to the gang is that if caught while delivering drugs and picking up payments, carrying guns or hiding explosivesthey cant be booked as adult offenders. They have no fathers and they're lost to their uncomprehending mothers and by the time they turn fifteen, they are accomplished, violent, uncaring thugs. They do crime as much to vent their rage as for any practical gain. It is a virtue of this scarifying book that its principally about these lost bad youths and not about older villains or the more respectable elements of society. The young do terrible things in this book: robbery, arson, and murder most disturbing, the needless killing of a woman prison guard who just happened to have been in the wrong place when a hood broke out of prison. Later, they blow up a police station! Then one of its members wants out. His girlfriend is pregnant: it touches him inside in some way he cant explain. His brut has excommunicate him from the gang. They force him to sandpaper his gang tattoo off --it stretches from his knee to his crotch. They take his money, beat him up, threaten his girlfriend. He fears for the baby shes carrying. With no choice left, he finally informs. What happens from then on is little relief to the reader because as vicious and unlikable as the gangs leader is, you still feel for him. Hes never had a chance. None of these youngsters have. And when they're gone, a new group of young thugs will simply move up, to repeat the sins of their ancestors. Two Soldiers is a very good novel which, like most new wave Scandinavian crime fiction, includes biting social commentary in its telling of brutal, brutal events.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War; Author: Visit Amazon's Paul Jankowski Page; Review: In Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War, Jankowski (history, Brandeis; Stavisky: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue and Shades of Indignation: Political Scandals in France, Past and Present) has written not a traditional military history but rather a searching dissection of what drove the armies to fight, how they perceived the combat, and what were the myths that arose from the battle after it was done. If you want a comparison with other works of military history, think of John Keegans groundbreaking book on the perception of war among the soldiers who fought it, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (1983). Jankowskis account is very interesting and it explains a lot about why the generals in command on both sides persisted in bloody warfare roughly 750 thousand were left dead and wounded by the end of itover a site that neither side saw as critical to the war effort- but it does not offer a blow by blow account of battle. But given the nature of the conflict, what would a standard narrative of battle offer us? The ten-month struggle over Verdun was the essence of modern warfare the demise of the offensive myth and the triumph of defense with attackers decimated wherever they tried their one last push, instead a slogging back and forth over the same plots of land, with at the end, neither side winning (although the French claimed to have done so). Both sides, probably after the fact, claimed that the purpose of their sides fighting wasn't so much to win ground as to wear out the other side. The French journalist Gustave Herve said it best: When the enemy has no more men to be massacred, he will stop. The German general Erich von Falkenhayn justified the battle as preemptive: it tied up Allied troops that might otherwise have been deployed elsewhere. He hoped that the battle would draw in British troops farther down the line but it didn't happen. In successive chapters, Jankowski discusses the various traps that drew in and held the armies on both sides: the offensive trap (find an opening and one big assault can tip the balance), the prestige trap (if we pull back, what will it do to morale? our public standing?), the attritional trap (keep at it long enough and the other side but not ourswill wear out). His account of the emotions and sentiments of the soldiers and leaders on both sides, of what held the armies together and threatened to divide them, is brilliant. Throughout, Jankowski is an incisive writer, whose prose occasionally rises to near-poetry, so clean and right it seems. There is, for instance, this paragraph, early in the book, on why the battle lasted so long and accomplished so little: A battle ends when one side imposes its will or the other voluntarily leaves the scene. It becomes endless when advance is impossible but withdrawal unthinkable, when pauses cannot last and truces cannot hold, when the protagonists can neither attain not renounce their goals yet; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration; Author: Visit Amazon's Bernd Heinrich Page; Review: Has Bernd Heinrich ever written a bad book? Not to my knowledge. From his first, groundbreaking, study of temperature control in bumblebees, Bumblebee Economics his studies of raven behavior (Ravens in Winter, 1991; Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds, 2007) on why solitary birds share their food with other solitary birds, to his lovely autobiography cum biography of his father, The Snoring Bird: My Familys Journey through a Century of Biology (2007), everything he writes has been enriched by his blend of scientific rigor and poetic description. (The books I haven't read show how wide-ranging his biological interests run: hes written on how animals prepare to die, running and evolution, the trees in his woods, the wildlife year round in his Maine woods, bird nesting and the invention of monogamy, geese, an owl, and insect physiology and behavior in general. Now he tackles homing: animal migration, nesting and nest-building, and in the process, talks about his own home, which is more the forest surrounding his cabin in Maine than the house itself. He is generous in recognizing and commenting on other scientists. The results of their work, in lab and in the wild, permit him to generalize beyond his own experience, which he relates lovingly. It is the combination of the analytical with the loving and accepting observer of animal ways that makes Heinrich such a good guide. On the way through this interesting and often delightful book, one learns interesting facts about desert ants and tent caterpillar moths, bees, termites, monarch butterflies, grasshoppers, aphids, the ladybird beetle, all sorts of birds (bar-tailed godwits, sand cranes and loons, pigeons, sparrows and thrushes, the sociable weaver), sea turtles, rabbits and beavers, Surinam frogs and spiders. If Heinrich resembles any modern scientist, it is probably the great pioneer, J. Henri Fabre (d. 1923) whose writings on insect behavior were so poetic without loss of scientific rigor that he was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. This is a good summary of many kinds of scientific work. It is infused as well with Henirichs account of his own experiences, not just the scientific studies he has conducted over the years but day-to-day observations of life in his beloved Maine woods.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Vermont Plays: Four Plays; Author: Visit Amazon's Annie Baker Page; Review: The style in Annie Bakers four plays collected here in The Vermont Plays is a kind of hyper-charged, intensely poetic realism. Allied to that, there is affection for the misplaced souls of our time, who still have dreams of their own, however pitiful they may seem to those of us who are better off. The Aliens (2010) is about two exceptionally heavy losers. Jasper seethes with rage because his girlfriend, who is just as much a loser as he is, has just left him. He sees himself as a Kerouac or Bukowski manqu. Hes writing a novel, although he really cant write, and he reads parts of it to his friend, KJ, as they molder their days away sitting on the back patio of a Vermont coffee house. As for KJ, for KJ the Sixties still live, though he probably wasn't even born yet: he laces his tea with shrooms, talks some of the time for no purpose, chills out the rest of the time. And then theres dweeby Evan: he actually works in the coffee house and alternates between fear that hell lose his job if he cant get Jasper and KJ off the patio and fascination with these two aliens who have taken root on the back porch and say and do strange things --because Evan would like to do something strange for a change but his mother won't let him. This is a strange play. Its odd in the choice of characters and how the action hangs together, and the dialogue is elliptical rather than straightforward or narrative. But at heart, The Aliens is a buddy play it explores how friendship can blossom in the most desolate environment. And the dialogue is awesome. Circle Mirror Transformation (2009) is amazing, the best play in a collection of four very good plays. Its also one of the best plays about doing theater that Ive read most plays about the dramatic act quickly fall flat: they seem phony, about the surface business and rivalries of the stage and not about the act of creating or what ones creates for. In this play, five people two men, three women-- meet weekly for an adult drama class. In the class, they do not plays or scenes but improv exercises. The first week, it is counting from one up to six, each person taking the successive number and determining how long to wait before saying it. Later, one person stands in front of the class and plays a classmate, presenting the other persons life story as his (or her) own. This is the only time we see these people, and we see their lives primarily in the context of these abstract theater exercises. But gradually, over the weeks, a sense of their characters and aspirations builds up: we half-see, half-intuit hidden conflicts that exist between member of the group. There is a denouement of sorts but it would be a crime to unveil it. Suffice it to say, this is a superior piece of theater, drama in the best sense of the word. In Nocturama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Correspondence; Author: Visit Amazon's Sigmund Freud Page; Review: This is the first publication of the complete correspondence between Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his sixth, last and arguably most talented child, Anna Freud (1895-1982). It starts with a letter from Freud to his daughter when she was eight. Freud signs it "your old Papa" and it is he who provides fatherly direction in these early letters. He feared for Anna's health -she had a host of minor but recurring health problems. He found her unhappy, impatient and, as he makes clear when he warns her off fellow psychiatrist Ernest Jones, who was looking for a wife, too young and nave to enter into a relationship with a man at that age. (She was nineteen, Jones thirty-five at the time.) "You know, of course, that you are a bit odd," he writes to her on 5 January 1913, and he clearly saw it is as his role and prerogative to give her advice on how best to order her life. Soon there are signs of Anna's maturing -she teaches for a while, she begins translating Jones's works into German and her father's into English, her interest in young children surfaces-- and the balance shifted closer to parity between father and daughter, although Anna was always respectful of her father's senior position in the relationship. Toward the end of his life, as Freud's cancer and the repeated and painful operations to deal with it took place, you can see the start of a shift in their relationship, which eventually led to Anna's becoming her dying father's caregiver. Unfortunately, all correspondence from Anna is missing after 1930 so all we have are the increasingly abbreviated communications of a desperately ill old man. One exception in this later correspondence is a longish letter dated 3 September 1932 (287 SF, on pp. 386-387) in which Freud relates to Anna an unsettling evening spent with fellow analyst Sandor Ferenczi who read a paper out loud to Freud with which Freud vehemently disagreed. ("He has regressed completely to aetiological views, which I held thirty-five years ago and have completely abandoned...") Many of the late communications from Freud are telegrams like this one, dated 20 April 1927 (236 SF, pp. 352-353): "Everything in order cold easter math Robert already back no example for you beating fantasy essay with jeleffe [unsigned]." Even with footnotes, this one is so shortened as to be gnomic. This volume has much to offer the serious student of either of the great psychoanalytic Freuds about the details of their day-by-day life: news about family, friends and colleagues, who visited whom and who was writing what, quite a bit about finances and work assignments. What it does not offer is prolonged discussion of psychoanalytic issues. That's disappointing because here we have two of the giants of psychoanalysis, father and daughter moreover, analyst and analysand, but in their letters they didn't talk about theory or practice much. Nor does it comment in depth on the turbulent theory wars that took place at the time among Freud and his former-but-no-longer acolytes, or the great and devastating social and; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Other Place; Author: Visit Amazon's Sharr White Page; Review: Sharr Whites The Other Place (2011, 2013) starts in St. Thomas, then shuttles back and forth between there and Cape Cod. Juliana, a brilliant scientist in her early fifties, is giving a lecture --actually a sales pitch-- on a revolutionary protein therapy she has developed and patented called Identamyl. She knows her audience. She cracks jokes at them, plays on their prejudices and work habits. Then she notices a girl in a yellow bikini at the back of the audience. She is disconcerted by the young womans presence. Who is she? Why is she there, and why dressed in that incongruous outfit, at a lecture for doctors only? Then, with no noticeable transition other than a change in Julianas voice and a shift in the direction she looks, Juliana is talking to her son-in-law on a cell phone. She wants to talk to her daughter but her daughter won't talk to her. Why not? Whats happened between them to alienate the daughter from Juliana? Julianas husband enters. Juliana says he plans to divorce her, he says he doesnt. It goes back and forth, there are more contradictions between Julianas story and what her husband says happened, there are more sightings of the girl in the bikini --truth becomes more and more muddled as the play progresses. Something, it is clear, is seriously wrong with Juliana, but what? And what has happened in her family, between her daughter and her, between Juliana and her husband? This is a play that lies halfway between mystery and tragedy and succeeds admirably at both.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: PRIMAL Fury (The PRIMAL); Author: Visit Amazon's Jack Silkstone Page; Review: You know you're in trouble when you read a book and your first thought is, Thisd be a lot better as a computer game. Well, thats true of this book, the fourth thriller about an undercover organization called PRIMAL that fights crime and bad guys, using the highest tech weapons and unhampered by most of the legal restraints that affect ordinary police work. In this book, PRIMAL goes after a white slavery ring. The ring recruits its victims in Europe and puts them to work in Japan. Theres a good yakuza group and a bad one and PRIMAL collaborates with the good one to best the bad one, but in the end, it is the PRIMAL operatives who save the day. Theres a mechanical quality to the action in this book and its hyperbolic in its reach. Forget about character development the players in this thriller have as much personality as wooden mannequins. Theres a middling amount of techno-talk about weapons and computersas the novel jumps from crisis to crisis. It keeps your attention while you're reading it. Just don't expect to remember it when you put it down, because essentially its puffed up air.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Last Wild; Author: Visit Amazon's Piers Torday Page; Review: By the end of this lovely Young Adult novel, a boy and a girl are marching toward one of the few cities where humans still survive, hiding from the world outside. They are accompanied by a cockroach (his names General), a stag, a wolf-cub, ninety-nine gray pigeons and one white pigeon, some polecats and various insects, a very small toad and a Harvest mouse that does Dances to celebrate almost anything that happen. (Theres the Corn Is Coming Dance, then the Corn Has Arrived Dance and the Corn Is Really Something Now, You Should Check It out Dance. Theres even a dance to perform while sleeping, the Stationary Dance of Solid Sleep). The hero, Kester, is twelve, going on thirteen. He lives in a world we hope we never to know. First the world grew hot and then came red-eye, a plague that killed every animals that caught it. Kesters mother is dead. He doesnt know where his father is: he was a veterinarian and a distinguished animal scientist but now hes gone. Kester lives in a prison school, the Spectrum Hall Academy for Challenging Children. There are no more animals and no natural foods here. People subsist on artificial food called Formul-A that was created by a giant conglomerate called Factorium. Factorium runs the four cities that are all that remain, supplies all the food to the humans hiding inside and sends out crews to track down and cull all the remaining animals outside they're afraid that the virus might mutate again and infect humans as well as animals. Then Kester hears a voice. And another. The first time only a cockroach was around, the second a spider in a web in the corner of his cell. Birds a flock of pigeonsbursts through a window and tell him to prepare to leave the animals need him, so move quickly. He escapes Spectrum Hall and eludes recapture. The birds carry him to a secret place where he meets other animals. They don't trust human beings why should they after all that we have done to them? but they need him. Because he is the only human being theyve come across who can talk to them. (Inside his head because Kester is mute, hes not talked since he was taken away from his father.) Because though theyd fled to this Eden to avoid the plague, its followed them. If Kester cant find a cure, they're all dead. Thus starts one of the best quests in modern youth fiction, fit to match up to Russell Hobans Ridley Walker, Tolkiens Ring trilogy or C. S. Lewiss Narnia chronicles. This is Tordays first published book but he writes like a seasoned pro. The action moves forward non-stop, with plenty of thrills. Each of the animals, not to mention humans, is delineated as a distinct personality. (Wait till you meet the head bad guy, Captain Skuldiss!) The setting is, well, grim. He sets us up at the end for a sequel. I, for one, look forward to it. Torday is a natural storyteller.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind; Author: Visit Amazon's Matthew M. Hurley Page; Review: This book is an attempt to figure out why we like jokes: why do we perceive things as funny and what evolutionary function does humor have? How did we develop funnybones and what for? The primary, or first, author is Hurley, who wrote it as his doctoral thesis at Tufts under the tutelage of Dennett, a distinguished philosopher of such matters, and Adams, a professor of psychology at Penn State. It's worthwhile book, and in passages even lively, but it bears the mark of a revised dissertation, primarily in its exhaustiveness and in a certain scholarly tone. Numerous jokes are interspersed throughout the book. Some are good, some less good and a few horrible. Most are new but some are as old as the hills. For the most part, they serve an explanatory purpose. Some are apt, particularly this one, which is at the heading of the final chapter: There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who require closure That joke works so well not only because it's funny but because it highlights how our brains work in the presence of incomplete information. We are Closure Machines. We leap to complete things even in the presence of unfinished data. And that's the background for Hurley et al.'s theory of how humor works in the brain and why a sense of humor is there. Humor is, to borrow Stephen Jay Gould's term, a spandrel: a device thrown up during our long evolution to humanhood to serve another purpose and now left over to function on its own. In this case, the original purpose was to provide reward to us as we sifted through belief commitments we had previously made to see if they held up in the light of subsequent knowledge. It's a reward for a time-consuming and sometimes difficult cognitive behavior. In general, it is to our advantage to leap to conclusions even if the information isn't all in yet: we use less computational energy and space doing things that way and move to reaction quicker (which may mean our survival). But we clutter our brains with a lot of wrong knowledge which may need to be weeded out later. Our sense of humor evolved out of the pleasure reaction we got when we took on that work of weeding and it is linked to our awareness of incongruity. Out of that flows a lot of knowledge about the nature of humor and of jokes. I won't go into it but it makes interesting reading. Think of how jokes make you reframe assumptions you make as the joke is being told. Like this one: What did the 0 say to the 8? "Nice belt." Now you see what reframing entails. Part of it is throwing out no longer valid conclusions you tentatively accepted earlier in the joke. Your reward for doing it is the laugh you gave when you finally figured out the joke.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: American Romantic; Author: Ward Just; Review: For a long while, Ward Just has been our most observant chronicler of the preoccupations and lifestyles of the Washington upper crust, filling the same role for that group as have such observant and sensitive chroniclers as John Updike, Louis Begley and Louis Auchincloss for, respectively, New England middle class suburbans, affluent Long Islanders, and New York aristocrats, moneyed or not which is to say, he writes in very good company. The distinguishing characteristics of Justs fiction are two: 1. his detailed knowledge of how Washington society works and 2. a combination of authorial distance and human warmth, which plays out in his love for his flawed, sometimes doomed characters. He is a deeply human writer. The Washington Posts book critic Jonathan Yardley declared American Romantic Justs best novel yet. I don't know if thats true or not I admire his other novels too much to make the comparisonbut it is a very good novel, a true work of art. A young foreign service officer dips his feet into deep waters for the first time in Viet Nam. His ambassador, a wonderfully realized character, sends him on a clandestine mission to talk with the enemy, to see if by chance theres any chance of an accommodation between sides. The meeting fails, the young man barely makes it back to safety, he must kill a man on the way. He meets a woman, one he thinks he could really care for but she leaves. Life goes on: he marries (shes got her own demons but they get along), serves as ambassador at several second rank postings. His past in some dim way stands as a barrier in the way of his doing great things. His wife dies, he retires. Through it all, he believes in what he does in the foreign service but its difficult to count gains. Being an ambassador, as Dean Acheson put it, is searching like a blind man in a dark room for a black cat that isn't there. He muses on his life: "Time retreats. Time advances. Time is discontinuous. Time is always in motion, like the waves of a great sea. And failure is more commanding than success." Failure he knows hes had sometimes. But has he ever had success? This isn't a novel about success or failure however. Its about the quality of a life lived and how the person who lives it accommodates to it. By the end of the book, theres an almost-elegiac quality to it, but a bit sad too. Whether this is Ward Justs best novel ever, I cant say, but it is an exceptional one, of that Im sure.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: In Paradise; Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Matthiessen Page; Review: In Paradise is a difficult novel to review because it's not so much about its plot line as about the complicated and painful memories and feelings events narrated in the book raise in the breast of the protagonist. It is riveting fiction but its intent seems not so much to tell a story as to make the readers think ---and feel--about the events that unfold in it. The plot is stark and simple: Clement Olins, of Polish descent, is an American academic -he's writing a book on Tadeusz Borowski, the talented and tormented Polish writer who wrote This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1949) and two years later, stuck his head in an oven and gassed himself. In the words of one critic, the stories in Borowski's book is about `the morally numbing effect of everyday terror." In the concentration camps, everyone was complicit. It was the only way to survive. In Matthiesen's novel, the last one he wrote before he died, Olin joins a pilgrimage to Auschwitz. He's not quite sure why but it has to do both with his scholarly interest in Borowski -why did he commit suicide just at the point when his life seemed again to mean something?--and his own family history -his mother may have perished in Auschwitz and she may have, may have not, been a Jew. His fellow pilgrims include penitent Germans (their fathers and grandfathers worked there), Poles (how do they feel about Jews even now?), Jews, Christians (including two novice nuns), a Catholic priest and a renegade monk, a few scholars, and one weird, negative, abrasive maybe-Jew named G. Earwig, who, bursting with rage and cynicism, spends his time at the retreat deflating others' self-serving myths and excuses about the place. There is a linear sequence of events but they serve more to open up Olin's mind and feelings about this dreadful place than to move events and people from place 1 to 2 to 3 etc. Olin muses at one point, "even horror becomes wearisome," but it doesn't, not in this hand grenade of a book. Horror, instead, and grief and shame simply find new vessels for expression, as each previous vessel proves inadequate for the experience of the Shoah. In the process, explanation after explanation and expiatory attempt after expiatory attempt go by, but the experience -the raw experience of the Holocaust- defeats them all. This is a book -like Borowski's, like Primo Levi's on the concentration camp experience- that transcends reason. It leaves us without excuse or resolution. It's meant to leave us feeling uncomfortable. If there is one person in this book who rises above guilt, it is the Catholic nun-novitiate Catherine, already in the eye of the Church for having had the effrontery to advocate for a larger role in the Church for women priests. She isn't pretty (probably not), she isn't sexy in any ordinary sense of the word but Olin is enamored of her. With great effort, he pulls back from her. As much as he wants to be with her, he doesn't want; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Would You Kill the Fat Man?: The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong; Author: Visit Amazon's David Edmonds Page; Review: Fat Man isn't a bad book but it isn't anywhere as good as it could have been. It isn't just a matter of length either. Neither Bernard Williams Moral Luck nor Thomas Nagels the View from Nowhere is much longer than this book but both are masterpieces of concision and analysis. This book is more, as one reviewer notes, a work of reportage: here is a classic thought experiment (would you throw a fat man under a runaway trolley if it would save five other people?), here are the variations on it and here is the debate it raised, here is its subsequent history. Edmonds is a gracious stylist and he presents the subject concisely but I didn't leave the book feeling that it had added significantly to my knowledge of the subject or left much of an impression on me. (A caveat: I am not a philosopher but someone who is interested ethics and moral philosophy, which means I have not read systematically in the subject but Im not wholly illiterate in it.); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Shanghai Factor; Author: Visit Amazon's Charles McCarry Page; Review: McCarry has long been one of the best of modern spy writers, acclaimed especially for a series of novels following the career of Paul Christopher. The hallmark of his novels is authenticity. McCarrys far from the only writer of spy fiction to come from the ranks of former spooks (think W. Somerset Maugham, John LeCarre, and Barry Eisler for a few) but hes the best since Maugham at describing the routines of the trade, and the equal of LeCarre at capturing the feeling of being a spy, alone in a world where one trusts no one absolutely and nothing is necessarily what it seems. McCarrys strengths come across clear and strong in this slow building but ultimately exciting and totally engrossing novel of espionage in the Far East. Factor is a word with double meaning but a good one for McCarrys story. The novels protagonist is an American spy who is sent to Shanghai to soak up the language and culture. He winds up working for a Chinese magnate for whom he functions much as Western nations factors did in the early modern era: an agent in business negotiations between the magnate and his Western customers. Factor also means causal agent, but with the nature of the causality not immediately apparent. Again, this is a good description of what happens to the young man. Bewildering things happen to him in Shanghai and later in the States. No one is as he or she seems. It slowly becomes clear why the magnate hired him and its not a pleasant discovery: the magnate has a personal grievance against him. Even the agency the young man works for is mysterious: its called the Headquarters and, whether more powerful than the CIA or not, its a lot more hidden. He follows the path his boss has pointed him towards but what is his bosss agenda and where is he left if exposed? The scenes in Shanghai are beautifully rendered, especially the paranoid feeling of being watched, of the natives reporting on you at every moment. The young agent starts out a trainee, moves up to dangler status (hanging out there, waiting to see if someone on the other side reels you in) and moves finally to the status of penetration agent (double agent). Were paid to be dirty so that the virtuous may be immaculate, his mentor explains to him when he is feeling restive. But are the virtuous ever that immaculate? Maybe as long as they're ignorant of what their secret agents do for them.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Front Page: A Play in Three Acts; Author: Visit Amazon's Ben Hecht Page; Review: This is the review of the play I posted as advertisement for the production of it I'm in starting next week. I understand people who think it reads flat. It does. But it's an example of play that plays better than it reads because it's attuned to certain basic affinities we have for comedy. ***** Its 1928, the Jazz Age, Chicago the Windy City. A bunch of reporters sit in a pressroom playing cards. Theyre waiting for a condemned man to die. One is on a phone, dredging up one more story to spark the pages of his newspaper the next morning. For the most part, they're low lifes. The two things they have in common are a nose for news and a jaundiced eye for anything elected officials tell them. Sex, violence and graft sell for them --the more they can dig out, the better. Theyre the original Show Me crew. One of them complains: why couldn't they execute the condemned man two hours earlier so the news could make the City Edition? Then they hear that the condemned man has escaped. What follows is controlled chaos, with a line of sharp chatter but Keystone Kops comedy too. Everyones a type in this play: the reporters, the conniving editor wholl do anything for a story but pay his reporters what he promised them, the society matron whose son wants to marry god forbid- a female reporter who may be a woman but cant be a lady, the goodhearted lady of the streets, the sheriff and mayor who are as incompetent as they are corrupt (and they're HOPELESSLY corrupt!). Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur had been reporters in Chicago so when they moved to New York to write a play, they drew on their Chicago experience. The play was an instant hit. It went on to the movies, appearing three times in different clothing. In the second version, His Girl Friday, reporter Hildy Johnson became a woman instead of a man, which is what she is tonight in the Prospect production. Why do we find irresistible a play written so long ago? Whats the attraction? It appeals because the playwrights knew how to write comedy. Unlike the pap thats offered up today, true comedy is immortal. We love seeing other people take pratfalls --it reminds us that were fallible without exposing us to the embarrassment of having to fail ourselves. Besides, at heart, reporting is always a comic transaction: reporters make fun of high ideals because the people they meet so often lower them. And when that happens, they're there to let the rest of us know it. Like in The Front Page.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Catch: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Taylor Stevens Page; Review: This is the fourth action thriller to feature Vanessa Michael Munroe, usually called Michael, and able to pass as a man or a woman with a change of clothing and a little makeup. Michaels in Djibouti now and is pressed into serving as an armed guard on a cargo ship bound for Kenya. She neither trusts nor likes her boss, who nurses a grievance against her, and when she sneaks down and takes a look at what they're carrying on the ship, shes worried the hull is loaded with contraband weapons. They are attacked by Piratessomeone tipped them off. Theres a fight and Michael escapes on a small boat with the wounded captain. They make it to the coast of Somalia but the captain is in bad shape. He needs hospitalization, so at least for a few days Michael has to hide out. While shes hiding, she learns something disturbing: the pirates weren't out for the ship their real target was the captainand they're still looking for him. Michaels a player in a very deadly game and she doesnt even know why. Michaels good at killing but she doesnt do it lightly. Still, by the end of this intriguing story, a lot of blood has been spilled. Michael is part Jason Bourne and part Lisbeth Salander. Like them both, shes a killing machine when she needs to be and like them, she has half-buried demons in her past. Like them too, she is very smart. She absorbs new languages almost by osmosis two weeks in a country and she talks if not like a native, at least understandably. In this novel more than in the previous installment (The Doll), Stevens seems to draw on her own past: she was raised in a religious cult and shipped all over the world to beg for the cult; she escaped as an adult by moving to Africa where corruption was endemic and violence never far beneath the surface. [I] lived a double life, she writes. Even as a child, I knew not to talk about what went on. Michael, too, knows it is dangerous to expose herself. She has become, reluctantly, a chameleon. But this chameleon bites back. Theres a lot of action in this book but a lot of intelligence on display too.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Robogenesis; Author: Visit Amazon's Daniel H. Wilson Page; Review: The predecessor to this novel, Robopocalypse, was about a war to the end between humans and the artificial intelligences we had created. A super-brain, Archos-14, had taken control of all the partly and fully intelligent artificial beings heedless humans had created carts, trucks, tractors, domestic robotsand converted them into a slave army of destruction. The morning it happened was a bad day indeed to decide to ride to work in ones robot-driven car, expecting a peaceful journey. Humans quickly wised up every step they took to counter the threat was countered by machines that grew smarter and more lethal with every confrontation. The humans eventually won but only because they were aided by freeborn robots (robots freed from subjection to Archos-14 in a complicated sub-plot) and modified humans, specifically a little girl named Mathilda whose eyes had been excised by robot surgeons and replaced by artificial orbs. Archos-14 was eventually destroyed, his subject robots stopped fighting and the war supposedly- ended. This book is about what happened after. Theres new bad news for humans. Destruction is still going on, new enemies appear another rogue super-brainand, surprise of all surprises, Archos-14 may not be dead after all. To make it worse, some people want to kill off their former allies, the not-quite and not-=at-=all human modifieds, freeborns and parasite dead. The narrative is presented in a string of narratives by different participants in the events: humans, a parasite-infected dead man (think: zombie with will power), a modified human, another human who has been subverted into an agent of a super-brain, freeborn robots, and the new super-brain itself, a more lethal and inimical enemy than Archos-14 had ever been. The line between man and machine is blurring, speculates one of the characters, Where do we all belong? Wilson doesnt give a comforting answer: once you're riding the horse of technological improvement, you cant get off it. All you can do is find how to live with it. In any story as convoluted as this one, there is a fair amount of back-and-forthing between what happened one book back and what happens now, but Wilson is an accomplished enough author to keep the narrative moving ahead crisply. He even manages and this is hard to doto give his robot narrators distinct personae. The new bad guy, Archos-8, is really, really bad and really, really scary. The core of Archos-8 is a super-computer hidden away somewhere out of sight, but its public persona is a giant black steed made up of razored sheaths of ashen metal, coiled and layered and glistening like a millipede. The instruments of mayhem in this fascinating, exciting book are legion: spider tanks and four-legged sprinters like giant praying mantises, stumpers (self-exploding heat-seeking mobile mines), a slow-moving creature that looks like a giant dull metal slug and sends swarms of locust-like biters ahead of itself to herd victims into its giant maw Wilson has a fertile (and interesting) imagination. That, plus his ability to tell a story and tell it well, make this a thoroughly enjoyable however disturbing book to read. A; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Unwitting: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Ellen Feldman Page; Review: On the day that JFK is killed, Nell Benjamin gets a call and her life is turned upside down. Her husband Charlie has been killed, apparently the victim of a random mugging in the Park. She stumbles through the next weeks in a fog. She and Charlie had quarreled the night before: she was mad that he had allowed an acquaintance to make an offensive remark about women. The anger had spilled over into the morning and they hadn't resolved it when he left. Now it never would be resolved. Months pass. Life starts up again. A few years... Then she learns something new about her dear Charlie, a secret exposed on Sixty Minutes. He had lied to her about basic things in his life. ("He is sprawled on the bed, his dark lashes lying like fringes on his sunburned cheeks, his breathing peaceful as a crypt, and I shake him awake to ask him a question. He doesn't even need time to think. The lie comes as quick and easy as a reflex. The lie is who he has become. What does that make me?") Everything she feels about him flip-flops. Then she has to deal with that. This is a grownup novel about how idealism can be subverted by the pressures of living in a complex world of warring nations, where twisting the truth can be made at times to seem the less corrupt of corrupt choices. It is also an exceptionally well written novel -lean, human--with an appealing protagonist, Nell, who is one smart tough cookie. Like the best novels about actually living life, some of the ends are left untied when you're finished --you're left with a feeling of how complicated lives can actually become in the real world.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fourth of July Creek: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Smith Henderson Page; Review: Fourth of July Creek is Henderson's first novel but it reads like he's been writing and publishing fiction for years, so good is it. In summary, it sounds like a horror show. Pete, a falling-apart on-again-off-again-drunk Montana social worker encounters an eleven-year-old wild child and his survivalist father and forges a bond of sorts with them. Pete would like it to become friendship but the father, Jeremiah Pearl, is paranoid, maybe insane: trust beyond the most tentative is impossible between them. No matter how Pete tries to help the Pearls -with food, vitamins and medicines, clothes--Jeremiah sees him as the agent of the occupation, ZOG --for those who don't know, ZOG stands for Zionist Occupational Government, which some survivalists see as the visible manifestation of the Jews' takeover of America. Jeremiah is always waiting for the black helicopters to swoop down on him. Everything he sees or hears is a sign: of the arrival of the antichrist, the impending Apocalypse, the hidden controls a Satanic government and a damned people impose on the few remaining pure. What happens between them is scary. Pete's life away from the Pearls is heartbreaking. His ex-wife is a good time girl who lives on a diet of drugs, alcohol and short-term sex. Her daughter Rachel runs away, partly to escape her mother's "boyfriends," partly just to get free of her mother. Pete searches for her, to no avail. Alternating chapters narrate Pete's story and Rachel's. (She calls herself "Rose" now.) Rachel's is told in the form of an interrogation: a neutral third party voice questions her and she answers. She's had no positive role models in her life except her loving but absent, inarticulate and alcoholic father Pete. She has no money. She has to depend on strangers she meets for food and shelter. She's underage and attractive. So you can figure what happens to her when she "wyoms" (heads out for the open spaces, Wyoming) as she calls it. It's sad. So ... a sad, sometimes scary story on both sides, about broken or nearly broken people living emotionally impoverished lives in an uncaring world. Why, then, is my reaction to this brilliant novel (yes, the word "brilliant" does apply here) that what happens here, awful or not, is ultimately life affirming? Certainly, the quality of the writing helps. This is a very well written work. But at heart, it's because Henderson makes you care about his fictional characters and leaves you hoping their future lives may be better. Will they be? Probably not, but hope is an engine that keeps us all going, and Henderson has found ways to tap into it, even in this most dreadful of tales. This is a very good book by a talented young author, and it deserves a wide audience. It rewards reading. A side bar: I had just finished reading Ivan Doig's The Whistling Season (2006) before I started this book. It is set in Montana too, but in 1909, seventy years before the events of Fourth of July Creek. The world Doig describes is severe -the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lexicon: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Max Barry Page; Review: Lexicon is the most intriguing science fiction novel Ive read since Ernest Clines Ready Player One (2012). Clines novel was about a world where life was so miserable that everyone had retreated into virtual worlds, dropping out only to attend to basic bodily functions. His teenage hero threaded his way through a virtual world confronting great perils and overcoming vast odds to win through. Barrys protagonists, a strangely gifted young man and woman, face similarly challenging menaces but this time from the womans former colleagues, who are able to use words, raw words, to force people to do what they want. Theres a great deal of discussion about what a word is a unit of meaning (semantical)? an abstraction from a class of objects (Platos Forms)? a recipe for a particular neurochemical reactions (thats what they are in this book!)? A group of word wizards who call themselves the Poets have discovered how to move the forcing power of words beyond persuasion to compulsion: say the right words and you control the person you say them to. The Poets have given up their own names and they make efforts to hide their likes and dislikes so other Poets cant get a handle on controlling them. One of them, a street con artist named Emily, becomes Woolf (Virginia, of course) but rebels against the impersonality of it all and goes rogue. The head of the Poets, Yeats, pursues her. Both are seeking a missing base word, a written symbol so powerful it takes over a persons mind and will: this one has already caused the deaths of three thousand people in a backwater Australian town and Emily/Woolfs the one who set it loose. The action starts with a bang on page one and continues without letup until the end. On the way theres a great deal of chatter about language and its influence on human behavior, but it all fits into the story, and besides, its interesting to read. What more could one want from a book like this a first-rate action thriller and a novel of ideas, attractively packaged. This book is a winner. Its been evident for quite some time that there is a good deal of first rate writing being done in the fantasy fields Ursula K. LeGuin, William Gibson, Jonathan Lethem, etc. This book is a worthy addition to the oeuvre.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Last Werewolf; Author: Visit Amazon's Glen Duncan Page; Review: "Two nights ago I [ate] a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist I make no apology and ask no forgiveness. Im a man. Im a monster. A cocktail of contraries. I didn't ask to become a were wolf but once it happened I got used to it pretty quickly. You surprise yourself." Werewolf is a fireworks novel about the last werewolf, Jake Marlowe, bitten 167 years ago and now over two hundred years old. For some reason a mutation in the gene?werewolves no longer reproduce successfully. A counter-werewolf organization, WOCOP (World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena) has just killed the second last werewolf in the world, and Jake is in their sights. He doesnt know if he cares. Hes tired of living. He has no ties except to the seventy-year-old man who is his helper. Hes experienced everything worth experiencing (except love) time and time again and hes consumed by bloodlust once each month when the full moon rises. Then he meets a woman, Tallula, and smells her wolfishness on her. Life takes on new meaning. He doesnt want to die not now when hes got Tallula! But WOCOP is well funded. It has spies everywhere and Jake is running out of places to hide. Nor is WOCOP the only adversary. There are vampires out there. Werewolves and vampires are natural enemies but now they don't want to kill him now, they want to capture him and bleed him of his blood in controlled doses because Jakes blood may make them less vulnerable to sunlight. (They wither on exposure to the sun.) When Tallula becomes pregnant something that supposedly couldn't happenJake and she take off and the chase is on. Werewolf is written with great panache. Its been evident for quite some time that there is a good deal of first rate writing being done in the fantasy fields Ursula K. LeGuin, William Gibson, Jonathan Lethem, etc. This book is a worthy addition to the oeuvre. (I started the first sequel to this book, Tallula Rising, and did not enjoy it.); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Keep Your Friends Close; Author: ; Review: Keep Your Friends Close is a psychological thriller about a supposed friend who takes advantage of a wifes absence from her house to seduce the wifes husband and paint her as emotionally unhinged. Everything Natty does to repair the rift with her husband, Sean Eve diverts into further evidence that Natty is behaving like a mad woman. In the meantime, evidence surfaces that Eve has done this before. Shes a predator, a very dangerous one. Its an interesting premise but unfortunately, not well delivered. The novel presents a set of stock characters who are neither very interesting nor attractive. They behave in ways that I don't find believable. The husband is totally seduced away from his wife of sixteen years in the space of two weeks while Nattys absent tending their daughter in the hospital? And how did manipulative Eve manage to convince Natty for years that shes truly her best friend? The novel ends unconvincingly. The resolution depends on what is really only a deus ex machina (a contrived and unexpected twist of events that conveniently solves all difficulties). But frankly, I wasn't involved enough with any of the characters by then, and certainly not with Natty and Sean, to care what happened. And I like psychological thrillers!; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Sniper's Honor: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Stephen Hunter Page; Review: If theres anything Stephen Hunter, ex-film critic for the Washington Post and Pulitzer-Prize winner, knows, its guns. Well, battles too how quickly plans and strategy come unraveled, how important terrain is in understanding how a confrontation plays out, and how messy and awful and real death is when its not cosmeticized on a movie screen. Thats part of the appeal of Hunters ex-sniper hero, Bob Lee Swagger, who has a credited 87 kills in but actually had 391 in Viet Nam, and who, though long since retired from the Marines because of a hip wound, has been pulled into his former life time after time, sometimes as consultant but more often as shooter, with lethal results for his enemies. By and large, theyve been good stories but over the last few books, theyve slowly petered out in quality and interest. Then came Hunters last novel, The Third Bullet, with Bob Lee looking at the JFK assassination from the point of view of a sniper, and things seemed to looking up. Now come this novel. Bob Lee is helping a reporter to suss out the story of Mili Petrova, a famous Russian sniper from World War II. All mention of her disappears around the middle of 1944 she seems to have been airbrushed from the historical records in both Russia and Germany. The story progresses in alternating narratives: Mila and the Ukraine in 1944, Bob Lee and the reporter tracking down the story in the present. The closer they get to the truth, the more they seem at risk: if they cant be dissuaded, someone wants to kill them. A good deal of what happens revolves around Bob Lees gut knowledge of what a sniper will do and why in a given situation. There is a lot of technical knowledge dispensed in these pages and most of it is interesting even for someone whos not a gun nut (that includes me) but it threatens at time almost to overwhelm the story telling. In the end, the story, like the character Bob Lee himself, seems tired. Maybe its time to put Bob Lee out to pasture. Hunter is a good writer. He should be able to find something else to write about.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: A Better World (The Brilliance Trilogy); Author: Visit Amazon's Marcus Sakey Page; Review: When I reviewed the first volume in this series, Brilliance last year, I characterized it as a novel that is both a thriller and a respectable book of ideas. Sos this book. Brilliance ended with a plot exposed and an American president deposed. In the second volume, its hero Cooper no longer works for the Department of Analysis and Response, the Homeland Security agency that hunts down subversive abnorms to imprison or kill them and imprisons high level brilliant children to condition them using aggressive aversion therapy. But hes still with the government. Hes now the sole voice of moderation among the new presidents counselors, the rest of whom are hawkish on the abnorm problem. The problem is that though Cooper did right in exposing the former presidents attempt to frame the abnorm leader John Smith for a murder he didn't do, it now appears that Smith planned his own exoneration and the weakening of the presidency so he could do far worse things. The world is falling apart. A warnorms against brilliantsseems near. And John Smith wants it to happen. What can Cooper and his handful of allies do to prevent the end of the world as we know it? Series novels like this are notoriously tricky to pull off. There is inevitably a slacking of tension in the second part, preparatory to everything being resolved (you hope!) in subsequent installment. But thats not true in this explosive speculative action thriller. This is very good storytelling. I hate to over-use the word, but its brilliant. Of its kind, I haven't seen anything this good since Peter Hamiltons sci fi blockbuster Nights Dawn trilogy (1996-1999).; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London; Author: Visit Amazon's Judith Flanders Page; Review: Dickens, that most human of authors, knew his city from one end to another. He incorporated its people, places and activities into work after work. For Dickens, a compulsive walker, London was a place of the mind but as Judith Flanders (The Invention of Murder, 2013) reminds us in this very attractive book, it was also a real place. She reminds us also that Dickensian is a very modern (and gloomy) adjective: in Dickenss own time, the way that people lived was not Dickensian, merely life. That last word is a good descriptor for this book. This is a book about life, how it was lived among both poor and rich in the worlds largest city of its time as it began the complicated transition to modernity. a book, Sketches by Boz (1836). His falling down jape of a novel, The Pickwick Papers was serialized in twenty installments from March 1836 to October 1837 and published in hardcover soon after. In 1870, when Dickens died, the queen empress still had thirty more years to reign. But Victorian is, as Flanders argues, a good word to capture the tone and texture of the city life depicted in this book and captured by Dickens in novel after wonderful novel. Flanderss homage to the man and the city is filled with detail the details of life, from top to bottom, in Dickenss time-- and crowded with lists, glorious lists! --where Londoners ate, where they drank, bought food, gambled and whored This book is a pleasure to read. It is impeccably researched and gracefully written. Its filled with juice. Readers may tire occasionally at plowing through details street name after street name-- but the details make the city concrete. Besides, Flanders doesnt just list. She describes, explains, she is good at capturing and explaining the changes that took place over the course of almost a century in one of the most fascinating and alive places in the world at the time.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Red Sparrow: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Jason Matthews Page; Review: Red Sparrow probably has the most detailed and accurate depiction of the work of undercover agents I have ever read, and I read a lot of these things. This isn't James Bond territory, although the bad guys are just as terrifying and the action just as risky. It's about what professionals do, how they operate on both sides of the divide, Putin's Russia and our America. Red Sparrow is filled with memorable characters. Foremost among them are CIA field operative Nathaniel Nash and SVR [the successor to the KGB] operative Dominika Egorov. Nate and Dominika start out seeking to turn each other. They wind up working together, Dominika a double agent, in an interesting twist on the Star-Crossed Lovers theme. The Bad Guys operate on both sides of the divide but Matthews's allegiances are clear. There is a difference between living in a country where citizens have protections against the government and one where they do not: the SVR thugs in this book are much worse and much scarier than any career-seeking CIA flak. The sex is good in this spy thriller. The violence is even better. Matthews is writing a sequel, following the career of Dominika. I can't wait for it to appear. (I review for a journal and have already asked to review the second novel in this series when it comes out next spring. I've had two people --my wife and her cousin- read this novel and both agrede you can't out it down once you start.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Scott Cheshire Page; Review: There are three different narratorial voices in this extraordinary novel, whose title comes from a passage in Revelations: "When the End comes the blood will be high as the horses' bridles." The first portion is narrated in the third person, the omniscient viewer/narrator: It`s Queens in 1980, the Howard Theater, the Theater of Lights. Elder Brother Kizowski has organized a revival meeting -four thousand people are in attendance--and Josie Laudermilk, twelve years and already a noted Bible scholar, is one of the speakers. But when he stands in front of the congregation, the spirit seizes him out of nowhere: he throws down his prepared notes and speaks extemporaneously, not even knowing himself where his words come from. He predicts, in front of all four thousand, that the End of Days will befall in the Year 2000. The rest of that first section fleshes out Josie's life as a child: his parents are zealots but still he loves them, his classmates think he's a weirdo, his one close friend Izzy just vanishes one day and is never seen again. (Years later, Josie learns that he was probably abducted and murdered.) The long center part of the book -the heart of the book-- is narrated in the first person by Josie himself. It's twenty years later. His world is coming unglued. His mother has died, his marriage has folded, his business is failing, now his father shows signs of dementia. Josie flies east to take care of him. Flitting back and forth between the present (Josie in Queens, Josie and his father back in California) and remembered past (Josie's marriage, his earlier business success and current failure, the collapse of his marriage, his on-again off-again relation with his father, his father's ailments). The tail end of the book is presented in the third person again, but this time it's set in 1801. An ancestor of Josie's, a young boy, meets a Negro. They visit a tent revival, hunting for the boy's father. Things happen. It's difficult to capture what's going on in this section but it's unsettling and somehow it frames the story of Josie and his father two hundred years later and makes a kind of sense out of it. A good way into the book, Josie is talking on the phone with his ex-wife Sarah who is a translator. She translates from Hebrew. She tells Josie that she's reading the Book of Revelations again. "It feels like a peek inside your [she means Josie's] brain. Every book in Hebrew is eaten by this book. It leaves nothing." She says he should read William James. "He says if you want to see the significance of a thing, look at the exaggerations. The perversions of a thing. This is your book," she tells Josie. High as the Horse's Bridles is a puzzling book. It offers no solutions to anything. It's overwritten at times but by and large, the hyperbolic description matches what it describes, which Is hyperbolic and also heart wrenching and scary and heartWARMING too. (This is not a book that goes all; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Uncaged (Singular Menace); Author: Visit Amazon's John Sandford Page; Review: Uncaged is the first in a series of thrillers for teenagers 12 and up by crime novelist John Sandford and newcomer Michele Cook. Sandford is a respected pro, with a Pulitzer Prize from his reporting days and thirty-six crime novels to his credit, including popular series featuring Minnesota detectives Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers. This solid teenage novel should prove of interest to readers of crime thrillers regardless of age. The heroine, Shay, and her older brother Odin are orphans, farmed out to different sets of foster parents. Odin, nearly eighteen, joins a group of radical animal rights activists. (I think Shays seventeen.) The young activists they're sixteen to twenty-three-- hear of unauthorized experimentation on animals held at the large, very secretive Singular Corp. They break in to steal the research records and release the animals. Odins high-level autistic. His autism plays out in two ways: hes an absolute whiz with computers and he cant stand to see animals abused. So when he gets into Singular and catches a glimpse of the terrible things going on there, he freaks. He grabs some flash drives from the head researchers office they're heavily encryptedand takes a research dog with him when he leaves. Someone at Singular been operating on the dog: theres a patch over the dogs eye that seems glued on. Someone high up in Singular is worried by the attack. Singulars media blitz paints the youngsters as dangerous radicals, to be apprehended on sight. Soon, Odin and the dog (why do they want the dog so badly?) are on the run, hunted by paramilitary types who work for Singular (but why does a research organization need mercenaries?). The dog has been operated on and its nature and capabilities artificially enhanced. Odin breaks the encryption on two of the flash drive files and is horrified by what they show. Through all of this, Shay is hunting for her brother. Thats what she does: protects her somewhat clueless older brother. Odin gives Shay the dog (she names him X) and copies of the flash drives shortly before hes captured (abducted) by the bad guys and hidden away. From that point on, its all Shays story, and its an exciting one. I don't know what Cook brought to the mix for this book but Sandfords skill at fashioning narrative is evident throughout. Uncaged is just the start to this series. Theres more to come: this novel doesnt so much end matters as set up space for the sequel. On the evidence of this book, I look forward to it. Long live Shay and Odin and the little band of misfits in this book who help them.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances; Author: Visit Amazon's Ellen Cooney Page; Review: The Mountaintop School is a lovely novel that triumphs over occasional awkwardness of expression to tell an engrossing and uplifting story of a young womans redemption through love of dogs, lots of dogs. The dogs are being trained back to normal lives in a school, actually a sanctuary, for abandoned and abused dogs, and Evie is there to learn to be a dog trainer. Its her last chance to feel that she too hasn't been abandoned, though not so obviously and cruelly as the dogs she soon is caring for. The book has so much heart that it doesnt matter that parts of it, whole chapters, are so clunky. Chapters alternate between straightforward narrative and Evies reflections, presented in alphabet form (this word for A, this for B, etc.), on what she has learned and is feeling at the school. These latter parts seem shoehorned in, as though the author had things to say for which she couldn't find a place in the narrative, so she dropped them here --but there are lovely passages in them about what dogs humans toowant and need out of life. The description of the various dogs, with their own personalities but all needing a second chance; the description of the people Evie meets at the school, a young man, the ex-nuns who operate it, a cantankerous housekeeper who starts out condemning Evie and ends up missing her whenever she doesnt see her. . . Its on the edge of saccharine but somehow doesnt tip over into it. A virtue of this book is that it makes you think about how important dogs are to us and we to them provided we do the relationship right. I liked this book. I don't think it deserves to win a literary prize, but I liked it a lot. But then, I think dogs are important.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Houses of Common; Author: Visit Amazon's Derick William Dalton Page; Review: This debut science fiction novel isn't without merit but its virtues are buried by over-hasty plotting and the novels sophomoric tone. To his credit, novice author Dalton has attempted to write a fast-moving story with non-generic characters, mostly aliens plus a genetically enhanced bonobo. But he moves too fast from character to character and plot line to plot line and the result is close to confusion. An example: the starting line involves an effort to rescue people involved in a bloody internecine war in Ireland: that story pretty much disappears as the novel continues. It isn't easy to craft a complicated novel like this but the best masters of sic fi writers like Iain M. Banks, Alisdair Reynolds, Peter Hamiltonshow that it can be done. Dalton needs to slow down a bit in his next venture and ensure that there is a more unified and coherent narrative line. He needs to craft characters who are real adult people (alien or not), not comic book-like.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: A Colder War: A Novel (Thomas Kell); Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Cumming Page; Review: A mole is spilling the goods on the Middle Eastern operations of the British and American secret services. Two defectors are dead as a result. An MI6 agent of MI6 is too though its not clear if his death was an accident or not. Whatever the case, the timing is too coincidental to ignore. The head of MI6, C, brings disgraced agent Tom Kell out of retirement to find the mole. Shes using him because the dead MI6 agent was her lover --she has to play her cards close to the vest. Besides, she doesnt trust her Cousins in the CIA not to screw it up if they get word and intervene with their big guns and little discretion. The plot premise isn't unique. How many times have we read about the hunt for a mole inside a secret service in the West? But seldom is it done this well, making such a compelling read, as in this gripping spy thriller about Life In The Grey World. Cummings narration moves along with no drop in interest from Kells initial investigations until the final, pulse-stirring chase. The ending is bitter-sweet more bitter than sweet, but that too matches the world Cummings has described: a world where honesty and loyalty have little room to grow but rather, suspicion and betrayal are served up daily with the midday meal. Cummings is a masterful storyteller at both extremes. He is a master of the small details --how do you run a multi-person tail of a suspicious and wily foreign agent? how close dare you get to a suspect before he, or she, suspects you?but of the large picture too, including and this is a definite plusempathy for his hero, who is a flawed but ultimately decent, feeling individual. A Colder War is a really fine specimen of the genre, on a par with the best of John LeCarre, Charles McCarry or Olen Steinhauer, and you cant do any better than that.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's William Lashner Page; Review: Bagmen brings back Victor Carl, half good guy, half schlemiel, this time as a bagman. Victors law practice has never been all that successful --a euphemism for always near disasterbut now its going down the tubes. Trolling for new clients in the courtroom, he runs into Melanie, a classmate from his law school years way back when. Then, Melanie was the do-goodest of all the do-gooders but shes clearly seen the light since then: dressed to the hilt, well-coifed, and sleek, sleek, sleek, she looks like a shark in a suit though a very nice-looking one. She hires Victor to stand in for her in the courtroom, defending a shady gent who does some ill-defined services for her employer (who is also ill-defined). She passes Victor a word, Selma. He shouldnt worry. If the going gets rough, all he has to do is find a way to say that word to the judge and things will change. The case goes steadily south. Victor improvises a speech with the word Selma in it, said not once but several times to ensure the judge registers it, and the judge folds. He doesnt let the plaintiff off scot free but he sends him to rehab, not prison. But the gent is Melanies bagman, and with him out of commission, she needs a new one to pick up and deliver all the money that no one is supposed to know is floating around in pre-election times and into who knows whose hands for who knows what reasons. Soon Victor is mingling with the top pols and aristos in the city. He buys a high-end tux (paid for with Melanies credit card), a pair of trendy looking slippers to go with them, and goes to a high end political event where everybody seems to want a piece of him. Hes the hit of the hour until the police barge in and arrest him on suspicion of murder. One of his payoffs has ended in murder and he may have been the last person to see the woman l alive. The picture that appears in the tabloids the next morning, of Victor being hustled out of the affairs in handcuffs, doesnt enhance his popularity with the influence peddler crowd. From then on, the action accelerates. Not everything that happens is strictly logical but then, this is a comic crime novel, not crime noir. Victor himself is a wonderful creation: if he could keep his mouth shut, even for a while, he might have a future, but he cant, and half of the time what comes out of his mouth is a wise crack. He cant convince people hes a serious player. Besides, hes burdened by a sense of morality, however shaky at times, and thats a handicap in the world in which he's now a player. How can you take seriously a guy in politics whos still bothered by questions of wrong or right? He meets a series of picturesque types. The funniest of all are the members of a bagmen fraternity. (One is a woman, so should; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Motherfucker With the Hat; Author: Visit Amazon's Stephen Adly Guirgis Page; Review: Jackies a druggie, just out of prison. His childhood sweetheart Veronica was supposed to abstain while he was gone but that didn't happen. Besides, shes in to drugs too. Now that hes out, Jackies got a sponsor and a job. He sees a future, wants Veronica in it. Jackies sponsor is a slick-talking, self-interested black dude named Ralph D. (Chris Rock played him in New York.) Ralphs only out for himself. He has a woman too, Victoria and shes not happy Ralph plays around and always lies. Oops, Ralph D. and Veronica, it seems, did it repeatedly while Jackie was away. Then theres Jackies cousin, Julio, who may or may not be gay but is definitely pumped up. Hes willing to apply a little muscle if itll help, his papi (father) Jackie but Jackie doesnt like Julio and he always makes fun of him. Just like Ralph slept with Veronica, maybe is doing it now, Jackie takes aim at Victoria. Everyones pretty p**sed off at each other. Out of this, somehow, comes a comedy. Wrenching or not, what happens among these losers is human, it seems real. The language is so colorful hyperbolic, filled with slang and elision, If you got a quarter for every swear word in this play, or every off-color allusion, you could buy yourself a pretty good meal, but it comes across not as obscene but as human, and, as I wrote above, immensely alive. Plus the characters are alive. Nobody wins, everybody loses in this play, or at best, they stay even, in this play. Their horizons are low and their emotional resources low too. For all that, when they're together on stage, the sparks fly. There are a lot of laughs too. Its hard not to be involved.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington; Author: Visit Amazon's Terry Teachout Page; Review: You have to take Edward Kennedy Ellington for what he was a complicated man who was Americas greatest composerand not for what he wasnt. In many ways he wasn't an attractive man: his constant womanizing, the distance he maintained even from those he seemed close to, his skill at and perseverance in manipulating people, and his grabbing of fame best shared with co-workers and collaborators most notably, Billy Strayhorn, but also Cootie Williams, Johnny Hodges, Juan Tizol who contributed to his musical output. One of the many excellences of Teachouts affectionate but not uncritical biography of this great man is that he doesnt ignore his subjects warts but doesnt make of them more than they deserve to be. Simply put, this is a wonderful book, fully the equal of Teachouts earlier, equally outstanding Pops, his 2010 biography of Americas greatest and most influential jazz artist, Louis Armstrong. Another virtue of this standout book is Teachouts reasoned judgment on Ellingtons (and Strayhorns and the bands) musical production. As in his earlier biography, Teachout brings firsthand understanding of how jazz music is composed and performed to bear on the flood of pieces, suites and musical reviews that Ellington brought out in a long, amazingly productive life. He stresses how important the band was as a source of inspiration to the Duke. Not only did he borrow phrases, even whole melodies, from his sidemen to compose pieces of his own (and often did not credit them to anyone but himself) but he wrote music for particular musicians in his band. He didn't compose in the abstract: the makeup of the band at any particular moment influenced what he wrote then. And that, plus the maestros eventual aging after a grueling life always on the move, explains as much as anything why Ellington well of musical inspiration dried up substantially in Ellingtons last decade Changes in popular taste affected the band: the band recorded the sound track of the movie Mary Poppins (one of Strayhorns pieces on that throwaway album is actually pretty good, Teachout opines) and Ellington dressed mod for the Newport Jazz Festival. But the most important reason that his final products didn't match up to his earlier ones was that his last great soloists were gone: they had either left, like drummer Sammy Woodyard and Clark Terry (Terry, a talented bop trumpeter, feared if he stayed, hed get buried in the Ellington style) or they got ill or died. One exception was with him to the end --Harry Carney, who set the mold for baritone sax playing and whose strong, rich, majestic bari lines underpin so many Ellington performances. Duke rode to and from gig with Carney, but with Ellington gone, Carney mused, Im not going to live much longer. With Duke dead, I have nothing to live for. And he didnt. He died five months after. Throughout, Teachout parses the music Duke and the Duke and Sweepea (Strayhorn) composed and recorded. Teachout, who has played jazz bass, doesnt bash the reader over the head with the depth of his musical knowledge but; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Life Deluxe (Stockholm Noir Trilogy); Author: Visit Amazon's Jens Lapidus Page; Review: Life Deluxe is the closer to Lapidus's trilogy of life in the nether regions of Stockholm. Many of the same characters appear and the same format is used: three stories alternate 1, 2,3, throughout the book until their stories smash together at the end. Every so often en route, Lapidus inserts police reports and newspaper articles to flesh out the narrative. Jorge is out of prison now and looking for a score. He gets it in a carefully researched post office heist. Unfortunately for Jorge and his partners, their execution doesn't match the planner's planning. The result is a comedy of missteps leading to tragedy. Deputy Inspector Martin Hagerstrom is approached to take part in a complicated sting: he leaves the police force under a cloud, takes a job as a prison guard in order to worm his way into the confidence of JW, the money manager for some very bad guys in Sweden. "JW -he's Sweden's Bernie Madoff" -that's how one thug describes JW. (Jorge and JW were lead characters in Lapidus's Easy Money [2009].) Radovan Kranjic is still the Godfather of Stockholm crime but a contract killer is after him. The killer succeeds and Rado's daughter, Natalie, is left in charge of a disintegrating empire. She not only has to shore it back up, she has to find out who contracted for her father's killing. Bad, bad things follow in steady succession. The virtues of this series, and this book, are legion. Lapidus writes a crisp, colloquial prose that mirrors the thought processes of his very different three subjects: Jorge, Martin and Natalie. Jorge's a low life, Natalie's the scion of a criminal family, and Martin -well, his life and proclivities lead him into steadily darkening waters. As is common in Scandinavian crime fiction, there's a fair amount of social commentary but it's laid on lightly and never intrudes on the narrative. The action never flags and the reader never has to engage in leaps of faith to cover gaps in the narrative logic. The ending is explosive. You read this book to see who survives. Again, translator Astri von Arbin Ahlander deserves praise. This could not have been an easy book to translate, but the result is effortless reading.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies; Author: Visit Amazon's Nick Bostrom Page; Review: "The principal reason for humanity's dominant position on Earth is that our brains have a slightly expanded set of faculties compared with other animals." What if that changes? Superintelligence, discusses the possibility that someday --soon or far off? - machines will surpass human beings in intelligence. He concludes that they probably will, conceivably in the not too distant future -as little as forty or fifty years from now. If they do, what will be the consequences for us? Bostrom's conclusion, expressed with crystal-clear logic and in lucid prose, is that we don't know and we should plan for it preemptively. Because when it does happen, we may have no warning. Because, when it does emerge, a super-AI may be indifferent, benevolent or inimical to us and its actions may pay little attention to our needs as a species. Computers can operate faster (constraint = speed of light, not biological wetware) and amass and process larger amounts of data than any biologically grown brain can, and their capabilities can be updated at the drop of a hat where humans' capabilities are set at birth and take decades to develop. Thus the possibility once a threshold is crossed, of machine minds continually upgrading their own minds. We tend to think that the comparison between human intelligence and superintelligent AI would be like comparing average human intelligence to a genius's like Einstein's. A better comparison might be between that of an average human being and a beetle or worm. If this seems grim, that's because it is. The success we've had already in developing machine intelligence and the accelerating pace at which it develops, should lead us to think hard about our future. Think of this book as a wakeup call. Bostrom brings impeccable credentials to this enterprise. He has a background in physics and computational neuroscience as well as philosophy and logic, has authored numerous publications, and has taught at Yale and Oxford. Currently at Oxford, he is a professor of philosophy and the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute and the Program on the Impacts of Future Technology. He is an exceptionally lucid writer and what he writes about is compelling. Note, I did not say he is an easy author to follow. This is difficult stuff and he doesn't cheat on the complexities of what he's describing in order to make the book easier. But the main line of his argument is clear and lucid, and the numerous sidebars (boxed explanations, graphs and charts) make the argument even clearer if one takes the time3 to consider them. Even the footnotes are interesting in this relevant, cogent, exceptionally well presented book on a critically important topic.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Alex; Author: Visit Amazon's Pierre Lemaitre Page; Review: This novel is like a nest of matryoshkas, those Russian nestling dolls where opening one reveals another and beneath that still another, something radically different uncovered at each level. Only this time its crimes and their malefactors that are unveiled. The novel starts with the kidnapping off the streets of Paris of a beautiful woman named Alex Prevost. She is punched in the back, in the stomach and face and tossed into the back of a van, where she is bound and transported to an abandoned building, and there her abductor makes her strip and forces her into a wooden cagea box too small to stand up in or move around in freely. He, calls her a whore, takes pictures of her and tells her hes going to watch her die, and then he hoists the box six feet into the air and leaves her. Thus starts Alexs ordeal. In alternate chapters, we follow the efforts of Paris police commandant Camille Verhoeven and his colleagues to find her and catch her abductor and we observe Alexs efforts to escape the trap in which she finds herself. What happens is startling, jolting, totally unexpected on several levels. One crime morphs into another and then into a third. It is soon obvious that there is more than one malefactor in this tangled maze and eventually, six murders have taken place the author takes pains to show how brutal and callous they are. Throughout the novel, Verhoeven, who is a man with demons of his own to fight --among them, his height: he is preternaturally short and abnormally sensitive to his dwarfishness- doggedly pursues his quarry. But the quarry keeps changing in this tricky, elegant, very very noir crime novel. European reviewers compare it to Hitchcock and Truffaut. Theres some truth in those comparisons for the sensibility here is European, not American. (As I read it, I was reminded a bit of Patrick Susskinds Perfume, about an eighteenth-century monster-killer. There is the same kind of literary elegance to this book.) The English language translation of Alex won the Crime Writers of America International Dagger award for the best crime novel of 2013. Lemaitre won the Prix Goncourt, Frances top literary prize, for his novel of World War I, Au revoir la-haut (2013). This is the first of three novels featuring commandant Verhoeven. I cant wait for the other two to appear in translation.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Plaster City (Jimmy Veeder Fiasco); Author: Visit Amazon's Johnny Shaw Page; Review: Johnny Shaws Dove Season was good, as was his second novel, Big Maria, but if anything, Plaster City, the second Jimmy Veeder novel (the first was Dove Season), is even gooder. The Imperial Valley, as far south as you can get and still be in California, isn't a glamorous place unless you like dust, poverty and your share of lowlifes and illiterates as neighbors. In a neighborhood like this, Jimmy almost looks respectable, especially since he inherited a son, Juan, whom he loves like life itself and a girlfriend, Angie, he really would like to keep if she can put up with him. In short, Jimmy has reformed, or at least as much as hes capable of. He still gets into fights the novel starts with one: a drunken policeman, Ceja Carneros, coldcocks him when he walks into Pinkys Bar & Grill, the toughest bar in Holtville. Its a mistake though: Jimmys friend Bobby Maves, half Swiss, half Mexican, is peeved because Jimmy didn't answer his call, so he told Ceja that Jimmy had taken advantage of Cejas daughter at their junior prom. Ceja doesnt have a daughter and Jimmy didn't do it but Ceja was so drunk when Bobby started talking to him that when Jimmy came in to the bar, he exploded. Thats how the novel starts, with a bar fight over something that never happened. From that point on, it gets serious. Bobbys daughter, Becky, whom he didn't even know he had until she was five years old, has disappeared. Bobby may not be an ideal father hes a drunk, single, erratically employed and prone to random fits of violence -- but hes worried about her. Bad things can happen to unaccompanied sixteen-year-olds in the Imperial Valley. There are some mean dudes out there. Girls don't always come back from their little runaways away from home. Bobby convinces Jimmy to join him in hunting for her. Neither has a clue how to go about it but thats no obstacle: they know from experience that if they thrash around long enough, something, who knows what, will happen. And it does. Things get more and more and more complicated and in the end not much is accomplished. But its a fun ride and Jimmy and Bobby are attractive characters. I wouldnt want either of them as my uncle but they're great fun to read about. Shaws novels are probably the closest you can get today to the loopier novels of the late, much lamented master of crime novels, Elmore Leonard. They are a great deal of fun to read.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Deliverance of Evil (Commissario Balistreri Trilogy); Author: ; Review: The Deliverance of Evil is three things at once a very, very Italian noir novel, dripping with cynicism and angst; a complicated puzzle mystery like the best of the ones from the Golden Age; and one of those peculiar productions from the late Victorian era that combined social commentary with exotic mystery a combination, if you like, of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, though a little heavier on the Dickens. I like all three of these things when they're done well so its not beyond bounds that Id like this novel. Which I do. Very much. The complicated plot spreads across twenty-four years and 557 pages, starting with Italys win in the 1982 World Cu p soccer match and ending the year of its repeat in 2006. A young woman is found dead, brutalized, in 1982. Commissario Michele Ballistreri, the detective in charge, is a young bull of a man with a complicated and dark history. Hes cock sure, works with no hesitation, but ultimately he botches the investigation and he cant get it out of his mind. It bothers him years after. Twenty-four years later, we meet up with him again. It s obvious hes changed. Hes more hesitant, slower and more cautious, though he still kicks the traces occasionally because he doesnt like authority. Hes no longer a womanizer who over-indulges in sex, alcohol, tobacco and caffeine though all four vices still tempt him. Then another death occurs and as the detective and his team investigate, more deaths occur, almost a crescendo of deaths. Soon the detectives are embroiled in a complicated scandal that goes up to the highest levels of Roman society and government. Almost every step Michele takes exposes his team to danger and one of them dies. Michele eventually solves the case (by now, cases)but the path to truth is slow and halting. There is almost too much detail on some of the detecting parts of this novel but theres no denying the force of it over all. Michele is a fine noir hero, appropriately cynical and self-punishing, and the picture this fine book paints of Roman society and mores is first rate. It says something that my attention didn't pall across 557 pages.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Director: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's David Ignatius Page; Review: Washington Post political columnist Ignatius is one of the Good Big Guys of contemporary spy fiction. His Body of Lies was made into a first-rate political thriller directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo Di Caprio. The Increment was a classic dirty hands thriller no one emerges clean from the world of international espionage: the stakes are too high to allow innocence to survive. After eight novels, all critically acclaimed, you would think that Ignatius had fallen into a groove. Predictably by this time in the career of even a very good writer (and Ignatius is a very good writer, a very intelligent one), the writers output has become more of a matter of variations on a theme, not the production of something wholly new. But The Director is new. The style isn't new, nor the patient unraveling of a complex mystery that lies at the heart of almost every good spy thriller. Rather, its the subject. Its about Spying in the Age of Cyber-Space. The CIA is in tatters. Its old director is out on charges of accepting bribes. Its a matter f time until hes =booked into a prison cell for who knows how long a spell. Its CYA time inside the agency. There have been too many failures and theyve been too visible. For those who are still there, trying something different means sticking ones head out, with the risk of getting it lopped off (in agency terms, losing ones job and pension). So no one tries anything. The way theyve done business clearly isn't working any longer but no one has the gumption, or vision, to try to do it another way. Except for the new director, whos an outsider, Graham Weber, fresh from the cyberspace industry. Webers on the job for one week when a Swiss, maybe German, kid in a dirty t-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg to say the agency has been hacked. For proof, he hands over a list of all its agents. Thus, the start of a mole hunt who has betrayed the agency?- but its conducted largely though not exclusively on line. Its a cyberhunt, and in this brave new world of electronic information flow, the hackers hold the power. Weber enlists James Morris, the agencys head computer geek. But its not clear whose side Morris is on, so director Weber is forced to recruit his own cyber-agent to help him find his way through the maze. The way Ignatius leads the reader through a flood of technical information is masterful. What could have been bewildering is clear and what could have proved dull exciting. A third of the way through the book, /Weber gets advice from a very senior official in intelligence, a man who may be Webers friend but may just as possibly be his worst enemy. This is what he tells Weber: The thing you have to remember about this job is that you are not just a manager, but also a magician. And as any professional magician will tell you, every magic trick; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: All the Birds, Singing: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Evie Wyld Page; Review: Harsh and poetical, sparing in its deployment of language, this second novel by one of Grantas Best Young British Novelists, tells the story of Jake Whyte, who tends a flock of sheep on a desolate, craggy island off the coast of Britain. Something, big but who knows what, is killing her sheep, and she wants to find out what it is. Jakes a loner. Her past is as bleak as her present and much more desperate. Burdened with guilt and shame, she is trying to get a grip on her present. The narrative sweeps back and forth between present (in Britain) and past (in Australia). Only slowly do we learn what troubles her. Her story is deeply moving and, at the end, maybe her present will not be as bleak as her past. At least theres hope. All the Birds, Singing is deeply moving, partly because the story itself is moving and partly because Wynd is a wordsmith of the first rank.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Complete Cosmicomics; Author: Visit Amazon's Italo Calvino Page; Review: Calvinos death in 1985 at the age of 63 robbed us of his ages greatest fabulist. I remember writing a friend when he was still alive and telling him that Calvino was a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in ten or twenty years. No one else was quite like him, not even Jorge Luis Borges, who had inspired him to experiment. As wonderful as it is to read Borgess short fictions, there isn't in him in the sunniness, the love of out and out comedy, that one finds in Calvino. Perhaps the writer closest to him in approach and style is Polands Stanislaw Lem, known for kind-of-science-fictionish tales like Solaris (1961), The Cyberiad (1965) and The Futurological Congress (1971). (Among Lems achievements, he produced two books of reviews of books that were never written.) But Calvinos prose style, at least as refracted through the prisms of these three excellent translators, was delicate and nimble in a way that Lem never matched. (Borges did, but in more uniformly somber tones.). Calvino was a Oner. This collection includes all of the stories found in 1965s Cosmicomics (trans. W. Weaver, 1968) and 1967s t zero (trans. by Weaver, 1969) plus eleven more of which I had no previous awareness. By the mid-60s, Calvino had grown ashamed of his earlier realist fiction. He felt that realist fiction had exhausted its imagination. These new tales were his replacement, a way to jump-start his fertile imagination. Asked one time to list influences, Calvino stated: "Cosmicomics are indebted particularly to Leopardi, the Popeye comics, Samuel Beckett, Giordano Bruno, Lewis Carroll, the paintings of Matta and in some cases the works of Landolfini, Immanuel Kant, Borges, and Granvilles engravings. In his very helpful introduction to this collection, translator Martin McLaughlin, adds to that list the philosopher Giorgio Santillana who, in a series of lectures in Turin in 1963 posited that the great cosmological myths were early analogs to modern-day scientific hypotheses. In particular stories, one sees direct reference or similarity to the experimental writing of Raymond Queneau (founder of OULIPO, the mathematico-literary combine to which Calvino and several other experimentalist writers belonged); how stories are presented in comic books; Ursula Andress in She; the Encyclopedia Britannica; Greek myth (a frequent source of inspiration for Calvino); Boschs paintings Zenos arrow that never reaches its endpoint because its frozen in the moment, each moment en passage a separate universe of existence; a Godard car chase movie; Balzac, James Fenimore Cooper, the Count of Monte Cristo, Herodotus, Galileo; plus the scientific theories summarized at the start of each of Qwfwqs tales. Calvino borrows as much as any author Ive known Borges matches him but he always uniquely himself. He didn't write pastiche. His work is startlingly original. It is as exciting to read as it is fun. The interlocutor in twenty-seven out of thirty-four of these tall tales is the cosmic entity Qwfwq, who sometimes rides the waves of emerging galaxies or skips along the parabolas of new suns and planets, at other times is a presence slipping amidst the rocks and; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Your Face in Mine: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Jess Row Page; Review: Row has already made a name for himself as a writer of exceptional short stories (two Pushcart Prizes, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, three stories in The Best American Short Stories collections, and in 2007 [seven years before he published his first novel] one of Grantas Best Young American Novelists. So, although this is his first novel, and in places, it shows, he is hardly a novice author. He sinks in the hook right at the start. Kelly Thorndike, Ph. D. in Chinese literature, recently and tragically widowed and de-fathered (his wife and child went off as bridge and drowned in the river below), returns to his hometown of Baltimore. Baltimore is a presence in this novel: much later Kelly describes it as like a big donut with the middle shot out. Promising young people flee Baltimore at adulthood just like Kelly had. But now hes back, destroyed by the death of the only two people he cared for, and working as program manager of a second-tier public radio station soon to be doomed: NPR is pulling its affiliation. Crossing a parking lot on the way to the grocery store, Kelly is accosted by a black man. Hes well dressed and no threat, but clearly and indubitably black. Kelly, its Martin, he says, and everything clicks. Kelly recognizes him: its Martin, the bass player in his high school thrash band. He hasn't seen him in twenty years. But he was Martin Lipkin back then, and Jewish, in looks as well as ethnic affiliation. Now hes Martin Wilkinson. Black. Martin explains. Hes had racial reassignment surgery. He wants his friend Kelly, who will soon be out of a job anyway, to write his story, tell the world what hes done, why other people should consider it as well. And the story takes off. There are many twists and turns to follow. Kelly, Martin, Martins wife Robin, who doesnt know he was ever white are engrossing characters. There are minor characters but this is principally a book about the relationship among these three characters, even more between Kelly and Martin, and ultimately about whats going on inside Kellys head. Theres a good deal of talking about the rights and wrongs (mostly rights) of what Martin has done. You have to turn the whole logic around, Martin says. Not who are you now, but who would you most like to be? What is the ultimate form of you? Its creepy at times but oddly fascinating. The book insidiously undermines middle class assumptions: the safety net we carry around with us because we were born who we are, our reluctance to consider what it would like to be someone we arent. Row has discovered a way to play with our notions of race and identity (can they ever be separated in America?) in the guise of a fiction. For the most part, it works. Just as story, pure story, its hard to put this book down once youve gotten into it. And for the first three hundred pages, there is no relaxing of focus: everything that happens; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Staff Meals from Chanterelle (Cookbook); Author: Visit Amazon's Melicia Phillips Page; Review: David and Karen Waltuck opened the award-winning French restaurant, Chanterelle in Soho in 1979. It closed its doors in 2009, done in by a bad economy. Melicia Phillips was the sous chef at Chanterelle for four years before moving on to be head chef at the Red Hook Inn (Red Hook, NY) and then chef instructor art the New England Culinary Institute. She has been co-author of a book on cooking duck and author of her own book, Sides. While Chanterelle was open, for thirty years, before the restaurant opened its doors to its customers, the staff wait staff and kitchen staff allsat down to eat dinner together. These are the meals they ate. I just got the cookbook and so have only tried one recipe a great recipe for meat loaf! but the book is a pleasure to read and laid out in a way that is both pleasing to the eye and easy to follow. Ill probably try the recipe for fish and chips next. I know enough about cooking to appreciate what I read, both as to techniques and the actual composing of a meal. If I turn out to be disappointed by it later on as I try more recipes, Ill report it but I doubt that will happen. I suppose theres no urgency in recommending a cookbook that was published fourteen years ago but good is good and people should know it. Staffmeals is a classy, useful book, and like all good cookbooks, fun to read.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Woman Who Lost Her Soul; Author: Visit Amazon's Bob Shacochis Page; Review: This admirable novel is a long, complicated, painful but ultimately rewarding reflection on the loss of virginity, not just the title character's but everybody's -- and our nation's too. It starts in Haiti in 1986: the US intervenes in support of a revolution overthrowing dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The UN is involved and American Special Forces are there to help the country transition to democracy. But nothing has changed. ("Freedom has made them feral," as one character observes.) Haiti is a place so lawless and blood-filled, that if something bad -awful!--happens to you, as it does to human rights advocate Tom Harrington in the opening pages of the novel, you don't report it to the authorities because if you do, you'd be admitting it happened and you might be the one who suffers for it. Blas and un involved TV reporters flock the capital, seeking footage to relay home to their bored but comfy viewers: an endless stream of seeming-but-not-really news that is part of an "endlessly playing movie called Other People's Problems." (One of the themes of this troubling book is that First World people float on a cushion of security that protects them from the horrors other people in our world know routinely.) In the late 1990s, Harrington returns to Haiti to help a private investigator -only partly private: he may still have ties to the CIA--look into the bloody death of a woman he knew in 1986. Her name then was Jackie Scott but now it appears she used many names and she may or may not have been an undercover agent for some covert agency of the government. She was a photojournalist when Tom first knew her and she was crazy, manipulative always, self-involved, almost vicious at times, as though something was eating her out inside. At the time, he couldn't decide whether he wanted her or hated her. Now her name was Dottie, and she was a mob wife, who may have been assassinated in an attempt to get her sleaze ball husband. But nothing in Haiti is as it seems: her body disappears, flown back post haste to the States in a sealed coffin, accompanied by a Special Services sergeant with whom Tom and Jackie shared history. Why have her remains been flown out so quickly and under the radar screen? From that point on, only 195 pages into a 712-page novel, everything slides South, as we unearth the back history of the troubled, enigmatic woman Jackie/Dottie who lies at the book's center. This is a book about evil people in a violent world, about how the presence of evil regimes and people forces other regimes --America, for instance-- to behave corruptly too in response and how otherwise innocent people are drawn on to commit corrupt acts. Jackie/Dottie feels she has lost her soul, but her father was complicit in the theft --he pimped her out when she was barely seventeen-- and he lost his soul generations before, in Croatia in the closing days of World War II, where he watched partisans behead his father and; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Full Measure: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's T. Jefferson Parker Page; Review: To judge this novel by the comparisons made by guest reviewers is unfair to the author and to this novel. Drop the comparisons to Steinbeck, Chandler and John D. MacDonald and judge the book for what it is and does. Parker is a workmanlike author who in the past has produced a series of often compelling, always readable action novels. Ive read most but not all of them and I believe this is Parkers first attempt to write not a thriller but a family drama. Hes done a pretty good job of it. Patrick, aged 22, comes home after a tour in Afghanistan. His company, Marines, First Division, Third Battalion, Fifth Regiment, has suffered appalling casualties twenty five dead, over two hundred wounded, all in the service of a war Patrick now thinks shouldnt have been fought and cant be won. The adjustment back to life as normal is hard: it isn't just Patricks reaction to unexpected noises, its that in some way, he misses Afghanistan. There, everything meant something. The failure to take the smallest precaution meant the death or maiming of people you knew personally. Life in Fallbrook, California, is mushier, less clear. People are always thanking him for what he did over there but they're uncomfortable when he tries to describe it. Patrick knows he needs to get over Afghanistan but life back home seems less worthwhile somehow. Patrick is glad to see his family but he has come back to Bad Times: the economic downturn has wiped out most of his familys wealth and a flash forest fire has wiped out the avocado grove on which they depend for their livelihood. The banks won't lend his parents the money to make a new start. Then theres his brother Ted, former dopehead, perpetual screwup. Something is seriously going wrong with him. Hes being reeled in by a white supremacist who has just moved back to town with his following of skinhead haters, and Ted becomes fixated on the woman mayor and the perils of big government. A Mexican boy has been run over by a hit-and-run driver but the majority of the town people don't want to spend money to light the crossing where he was hit. An alt music star, locally born, volunteers to hold a concert to raise the money. The mayor signs on, but Ted is oddly disturbed by it and hes bought a gun. Parker has always been a good storyteller. Hes not bad at fleshing out his characters too. And he knows the territory. Southern California is his turf. The result is a solid, not earth-shaking but solid, and enjoyable story.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Full Measure; Author: Visit Amazon's T. Jefferson Parker Page; Review: To judge this novel by the comparisons made by guest reviewers is unfair to the author and to this novel. Drop the comparisons to Steinbeck, Chandler and John D. MacDonald and judge the book for what it is and does. Parker is a workmanlike author who in the past has produced a series of often compelling, always readable action novels. Ive read most but not all of them and I believe this is Parkers first attempt to write not a thriller but a family drama. Hes done a pretty good job of it. Patrick, aged 22, comes home after a tour in Afghanistan. His company, Marines, First Division, Third Battalion, Fifth Regiment, has suffered appalling casualties twenty five dead, over two hundred wounded, all in the service of a war Patrick now thinks shouldnt have been fought and cant be won. The adjustment back to life as normal is hard: it isn't just Patricks reaction to unexpected noises, its that in some way, he misses Afghanistan. There, everything meant something. The failure to take the smallest precaution meant the death or maiming of people you knew personally. Life in Fallbrook, California, is mushier, less clear. People are always thanking him for what he did over there but they're uncomfortable when he tries to describe it. Patrick knows he needs to get over Afghanistan but life back home seems less worthwhile somehow. Patrick is glad to see his family but he has come back to Bad Times: the economic downturn has wiped out most of his familys wealth and a flash forest fire has wiped out the avocado grove on which they depend for their livelihood. The banks won't lend his parents the money to make a new start. Then theres his brother Ted, former dopehead, perpetual screwup. Something is seriously going wrong with him. Hes being reeled in by a white supremacist who has just moved back to town with his following of skinhead haters, and Ted becomes fixated on the woman mayor and the perils of big government. A Mexican boy has been run over by a hit-and-run driver but the majority of the town people don't want to spend money to light the crossing where he was hit. An alt music star, locally born, volunteers to hold a concert to raise the money. The mayor signs on, but Ted is oddly disturbed by it and hes bought a gun. Parker has always been a good storyteller. Hes not bad at fleshing out his characters too. And he knows the territory. Southern California is his turf. The result is a solid, not earth-shaking but solid, and enjoyable story.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Forsaken (A Quinn Colson Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Ace Atkins Page; Review: This is the fourth Quinn Colson action thriller and its as good as the other three, which is saying something. Atkins, author of fifteen books, is the best writer of southern crime fiction extant and one of the very best writers of crime fiction of any kind. In Colson, he has created a complex but believable and likeable- lead character. Quinn has returned home from multiple tours in Afghanistan, to small town Jericho, county seat of Tibbebah County, Mississippi. He runs for and is elected sheriff but everybody on the County Board of Supervisors is either a crook or complicit in the corruption of their peers. The local crime boss, Johnny Stagg heads the Board. Quinn is too straight for his taste: what good to him is a sheriff he cant bribe? Stagg has been working fulltime since the start of the series to destroy him. The action on The Forsaken flows out of the violence that erupted in the previous novel, but you don't have to have read the earlier book to enjoy this one. Its a self-contained unit. Quinn and his deputy, Lillie Virgil, are under investigation for killings that happened in the previous book when they fought back against an ambush and with the help of an anonymous sniper, shot and killed the people attacking them, including a crooked police officer. Now theres the threat of a trial and Staggs involved in all the way, stirring the pot against Quinn and Lillie. Then Quinn is brought information of a miscarriage of justice thirty years before the lynching of a black man. He investigates. There are threats: someone doesnt want the truth exposed. More trouble --the head of a motorcycle gang is being released from prison after twenty years: he has sworn vengeance against Stagg whom he holds responsible for his conviction. (Stagg was.) Everything gets worse, then it folds together into a colossal blowup and, after thats done, one final and wholly unexpected plot twist. A virtue of this first-rate series is that the characters aren't stick figures: not just Stagg and Quinn, but the minor characters, are fleshed out, they're real people. Atkins captures Deep South life and its attitudes in his narration: the people of Tibbebah County are suspicious of change, almost any change, and they're so used to corruption in high places that theyve given up on doing anything about it. And they have a love-hate relationship with guns and violence. Atkins is a master story-spinner, in this respect though not in most like his fellow southerner John Grisham, which is high praise. If, like me, you enjoy action fiction, youll leave this book as happy as a clam. Seldom are books like this as good as this one is.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Personal; Author: Visit Amazon's Lee Child Page; Review: When a new Lee Child novel comes out, I put down whatever Im reading and start in on it right away. Immediately. There are other thriller writers whom I admire more than Child but few I want to read more. (It used to be the same with Dick Franciss racetrack thrillers. They weren't all uniformly good but I couldn't put it down once I got one and couldn't wait to start it.) Jack Reacher, the hero of Childs eighteen action thrillers remains one of the most satisfying heroes in modern crime fiction six foot five, around three hundred pounds in mass, in astonishingly good shape for a man who left military service a good fifteen years earlier and has bummed around the country ever since with no long-term source of income. When hes involved in an investigation, he comes across as almost frighteningly logical in an ex-military-police sort of way (not a Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot way) and hes brutally practical, not distracted by illusions as to whats the right thing to do or how much you can trust other people to be moved by other than self-interest. But by now, Child has shown him in every kind of violent situation hes fought his fights, been under attack from all kinds of threats, met all kinds of villainsand there really isn't much new that Child can bring to the mix of Reacher, detection and violence. In Childs latest book, Reacher has been called back to hunt down a killer, a psycho sniper he tracked down sixteen years ago when he was an MP, arrested, and jailed. But it was a fifteen-year-sentence and the sniper is back on the streets now. Some one just took a long-distance shot 1400 yards- at the president of France and theres a high chance -- one in fourthat he was the sniper of choice. The attempt in France may have only been a trial balloon, to prove the man could still shoot accurately after being locked away for fifteen years. Its uncertain whom he will try to kill next: theres a summit meeting coming up in Britain, with the leaders of the developed world in attendance and democratically elected officials, like our president, don't like to hide behind protective shields because it makes them look weak to electors. Its up to Reacher to find the man before anything bad happens. Why Reacher? Sure. He was a crack investigator but that was fifteen years ago and back then, he had the weight of the whole army behind him. Reacher suspects hes bait. The man has a grudge against him and an ego that won't let him admit that Reacher outwitted him before. Other shooters are involved there are three other possible hit men who could have made the shot against the French presidentand Reacher has to get past some very nasty English crime gangs, one of whom is big enough and strong enough to make Reacher look like a little boy. Eighteen books in, Child is efficient at his skill but though this book is a pleasure; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Cobra; Author: Visit Amazon's Deon Meyer Page; Review: This is the fourth action thriller by South African writer Meyer to feature detective Benny Griessel, a captain in an elite unit of the South African police, the Violent Crimes Unit, aka the Hawks. From the start these books have been good but they have grown steadily better, still action and detection oriented but hinting around the edges at how complicated a society South Africa is, with its volatile blende of peoples and dark history of oppression and misrule. In this book, the Hawks are chasing a contract killer, a deadly opponent whose trademark is an engraving of a cobra on his gun shells. The Cobra has killed four people in one violent outburst but its not primarily for the killings that he is being pursued so intently: a man is missing, they're not even sure who he is, but the Cobra has taken him. The four killings are just collateral damage in a puzzling kidnapping. Meyer has set up the kind of situation he deals with so well: quick, deadly violence, a puzzling mystery as to whats really going on here, and in the middle of it, Benny and his colleagues in the Hawks, running as fast as they can to catch up. Aside from the exotic setting, theres a lot in common here with the best Scandinavian police novels, but Meyer is much less prone to hit the reader over the head with his social commentary. Rather, it leaks out the constant intermingling of Afrikaans and native African words, phrases and slang, the rich characters he describes. But there is in this fine novel very serious social (political?) commentary to be read: Benny, who was a policeman for years for the racist South African regime, is ashamed of his past but now hes fearful the same habits may be creeping back in, secrecy, corruption. There is too the picture Meyer paints, oh so deftly, never hitting you over the had with it, of Bennys multi-racial police group, and especially Mbali Kalena, the over-large black cop with an eating disorder who is Bennys conscience. If you want action efficiently delivered, this book is for you. Engaging characters and exotic setting? Same thing. A real moral dilemma hinted at and discussed? Youve got it again. The book is good.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Until the Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead (A Charles Hayden Novel); Author: S. Thomas Russell; Review: I have read and enjoyed several series of naval adventures set during the wars between Britain and Revolutionary France: C. S. Foresters Horatio Hornblower, Patrick OBrians Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, Dudley Popes Nicholas Ramage come to mind, with others whose names dont. The point is: I like this kind of fiction and am excited when I find another entry worth reading. And this one definitely is, the fourth book featuring Capt. Charles Hayden, now of the Royal Navy frigate HMS Themis. Its good in all respects. (The third, Take, Burn or Destroy, came out this March.) Now Hayden is in Barbados, Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety still rule France, and Spain is still neutral, neither pro-French nor against France. Hayden rescues two Spaniards, castaways in a lifeboat, brothers, Miguel and Angel. Angel turns out to be Angelita and Haydens heart is vulnerable and from that point on, things heat up rapidly. There is a hasty marriage, Angelita and Hayden, then Hayden and his crew are back to sea, where Hayden is put at risk and then abandoned by a brave but foolheartedly vain commander. Hayden fights his way back through great odds but when he returns home, his wife is gone, kidnapped by a renegade Frenchman and her own brother, who loathes Hayden. No surpriseHayden goes in pursuit again. Theres nothing terribly startling about this book. Hayden could be Hornblower could be Aubrey could be Ramage. They all have the same traits energy, a willingness to think outside the box, humanity (they think the men in their crews are people and they don't want to waste them in needless battle), and intelligence. Oh! Horniness too. They notice women. The battle scenes are well crafted, exciting to follow, and filled with nautical knowhow. That said, theres nothing original in this book either. But thats irrelevant: you read a book like this for diversion, and Russell has written a solid naval thriller with engaging characters, lots of action and a bonusa good love story. In short, I liked it but I probably won't remember much about it a month or two from now.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Sather Classical Lectures); Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Beard Page; Review: In the fall of 2008, noted classicist Mary Beard gave the Sather (Classical) Lectures at Berkeley. Those lectures, and five years subsequent thinking over what she said there led to this book, and a fine piece of scholarship it is. Starting from the question, what made Romans laugh, she discusses a range of topics: what is laughter for? And what is humor joking among its most prominent formsfor? Especially what role did joking play in status and power obsessed classical Rome? How transgressive and aggressive was Roman humor and laughter at different times during the imperiate? How much did Roman views on the role of laughter and of humor descend from Greek views and where was it different? In the brilliant penultimate chapter she meditates on an ancient compendium of jokes, the Philogelos (it contains some 265 jokes), and asks: did Rome invent the idea of the joke as an exchangeable commodity? (Almost every other aspect of Roman life was commodified.) Her observations on all these topics are carefully considered, weighed with ambiguity at times as is fitting on the study of texts so distant in time and mores from ours, and corrupted, even lost, in their transmission from scribe to scribe. Indeed, one of the most fascinating lessons of this rich study is how complicated it is to tease meaning from ancient artifacts and thus how provisional any conclusions reached from study must be. There are widely variant texts, missing parts, in some cases only fragments left or even less, just descriptions of the texts in other writers equally fragmentary works. Scribes have made grievous mistakes in transcribing, to the point that whole passages no longer make sense. Words are so badly written down as to be indecipherable. Beard cautions other scholars to move carefully in emending or filling in content in order to make obscure texts clearer: the risk of distortion is great. Some meaning we will just not uncover this far past when the texts were initially composed. This is a sage and very interesting book and for so specialized a topic and approach, one that will probably be read widely in scholarly circles. (Its already been praised in the London Times Literary Section and in the New York Review of Books.) It requires careful attention while reading: the points she makes require detailed analysis of words and passages as well as sometimes extended discussion of other scholars interpretations. As to the secondary literature on her chosen subject, she seems to have read virtually everything, and her grasp of the primary sources is wide, catholic and inventive. She is generous in her judgment of her peers. (Because I had the opportunity to hear him speak a few years back and later to review a book by him, I noted especially her approving treatment of Simon Critchleys work on laughter and joking.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice; Author: Visit Amazon's John A. Nagl Page; Review: West Point and Oxford educated Nagl was a tank commander in the first Gulf War in 1991. The experiences of that war and of a revealing war games experience back in the States afterward, where an Alaskan Nationals Guard unit --Nanooks they called themsimply ignored sound military doctrine and snuck up on the weak side of Nagls entrenched tank battalion (they had literally dug holes to hide their tanks in) and whomped them soundly. Nagl returned to Oxford after that to pursue graduate study. Out of that experience came his first, now fabled, book on counterinsurgency, co-authored with Peter J. Schoomaker, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (2005). After some in the Army (most notably general Petraeus) wised up to the need to change how we fought against a new kind of enemy, one who didn't meet us head on but lurked out of reach until our guard was down and pounced, did their damage and then vanished again, Nagls book, followed by articles elaborating his ideas, became one of the Bibles of counterinsurgency doctrine (and Petraeus was its hero). Nagl returned to active duty in the second Gulf War, as ops officer of a tank battalion assigned to one of the deadliest sections in Iraq, Anbar Province, giving him that rare experience for an academic, the chance to see at first hand how his ideas about counterinsurgency wars played out. Nagls out of the Army now but has had a distinguished career in think tanks, etc., advising on military policy and practice. Knife Fights is intended as both memoir and a plea. The plea is for policy change at the highest levels: stop fighting old wars in old ways; promote proponents of lateral thinking, don't ignore and punish them; the new wars will be twenty percent fighting; eighty percent will be creating new structures and trust with the locals. Nagl pounds the reader hard with this message reiterating in chapter after chapterbut he is an engaging writer, his life an interesting one, and his message is both important and well articulated. If theres a villain in this book, its Donald Rumsfeld, whose reign as Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 Nagl sees as disastrous. Paul Bremer comes in a close second on the Idiot List.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Marlon James Page; Review: Jamaica is a mother who eats her children. If theres a message to this rich, complicated, wholly satisfying novel, thats it. Everyone preys on the poor in Kingston, Jamaica, and the only way out is to prey on others. Thats what almost all the characters in this vast, sprawling saga do they savage their neighbors for their own gain and then they too fall before other more savage, or merely younger, predators. Life is short, harsh, and violent in Kingston. No one leaves the game unmarked. In the ghetto there is no such thing as peace. There is only this fact. Your power to kill me can only be stop by my power to kill you . . .. Who want peace anyway when all that mean is that you still poor? Crime and politics are pretty much the same game in Kingston. The novel starts before the 1976 election campaign. The islands biggest celebrity, Bob Marley, or the Singer as hes referred to throughout the novel, has returned to headline a big Peace Concert. Everyones there. Mick Jagger and the Stones Mick out hunting for black poon. A freelancer for Rolling Stone. (Hes one of the narrators.) Everyone. Some of them want the Singer dead. They almost succeed. (This is historically accurate. There was an almost successful attempt to assassinate Marley before the concert in 1976.) Afterward, theres a bloodbath scourging of the ranks of the conspirators so that the little fish cant spill the beans on the bigger ones. The description of what happens is savage, visceral, jolting. Theres no room for gratitude or kindness in a world this poor, especially when the stakes are high. Time moves on. Its 1978, 1979, the 80s and 1991. More violence, an escalation in drug trafficking, a principal character (the gang lord Josey Wales) moves to the States as the Medellin cartels principal agent in Harlem. No one trusts anyone. Bad things happen, and then worse things. The characters weve gotten to know earlier in the novel vanish, mostly killed. All of this is told in the first hand by a variety of voices: gangbangers and gang lords; a fourteen-year-old illiterate whos just gotten his first gun; louche CIA agents who peddle a simplified version of the Cold War and see nothing wrong with assassination or subornation of local pols and gangs provided it keeps Jamaica democratic; a Rolling Stone freelancer; two women, sisters, one lives, the other doesnt, and the one who survives changes identities twice in order to escape the island. Oh, yes, theres one other narrator: Sir Arthur Jennings, who when he was alive was a prominent local politician in Jamaica but who now dead, comments on other peoples deaths. How did Sir Arthur die? Someone threw him off a balcony in order to stop him raising a stink about politics as usual in Jamaica. (Not that Sir Arthur was clean. He just backed the wrong ticket so now hes dead.) James (professor, Macalester College) was born in Kingston in 1970. He is a master of prose. Much, but not; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Watch Me Go; Author: Visit Amazon's Mark Wisniewski Page; Review: Wisniewski comes with respectable credentials in short story writing, including a Pushcart Prize and a Tobias Wolff Award, but this, his first novel, is disappointing. Two narratives alternate, about Deesh, a black man arrested for one, no two, maybe three murders, all of whites, and Jan, who wants more than anything just to race horses but gets tangled up in more than she anticipated when she falls for a horse trainer whos owes heavy money to the bad guys. At the end of the novel, the two strands join together and Jan has some say in Deeshs future. Wisniewski is not without talent so what is wrong with this book? Its too slow, especially in the chapters where Jan recounts her inner turmoil as she falls for the very sort of man her loser father was and as she sees him turn into the same kind of addict her lovers father (now missing) was. Furthermore, somehow, this narrative never convinced me that it was real, that it could be actual. Theres an air of the artificial to it. Deeshs narrative has the same problem. I leave a good story knowing itll stick in my mind for a good time. I didn't have that feeling about Watch Me Go, but there are enough marks of talent in it that I won't rule out reading another book by Mr. Wisniewski.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Dark Defiles (A Land Fit for Heroes); Author: Visit Amazon's Richard K. Morgan Page; Review: Defiles is the third and final volume in Richard K. Morgan's fantasy trilogy about three heroes' epic battle against the dwenda, alien killing machines who pop in and out of existence and seem determined to enslave human race. Humans defeated the dwenda once before, at dreadful cost, but it appears they are here again. Three battle weary heroes oppose them: Ringil Eskiath, human, master swordsman and gay; Egar Dragonbane, a steppe nomad; and 207-year-old Archeth Indiamaninarmal, half-bred Kiriath-human, who was left behind when the Kiriath earlier abandoned earth. It would be pointless to detail all the twists and turns in the complicated plot line. Suffice it to say, that for much of the book, the heroes are looking for a fabled lost sword, supposedly wielded by the long-dead Dark King, Illwrath Changeling. They don't know if it even exists, don't know where it is if it does exist, and don't know what baggage it comes with if they ever do find it. (Magic comes with a cost in this world.) Morgan is an exceptionally good action writer and his heroes are interesting types. Though redoubtable warriors, Ringil and Egar are middle-aged now. They're thoroughly tired of fighting and strife. They don't get much chance to relax in this book but you can tell they'd like to. Or would they? For what place is there for killing machines when the killing has ended? Morgan is reportedly headed back to science fiction after the completion of this novel. I don't care which direction he goes in, fantasy or sci fi, so long as he continues to write adventure stories of the caliber of this one.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Man V. Nature: Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Diane Cook Page; Review: All of the stories in this collection are good and the best are startling -jolting in impact. It's not a comfortable world that Cook depicts. Rather, she shows us in a range of settings a hyper-real version of the backside of the world most of us do live in day today. For one reason or another, the characters are in crisis; if delineated, the threats are huge, and if not, looming and menacing; nothing good happens. Even in the title story, "Man v. Nature," about three `friends' stranded in a boat, so much that is horrendous has happened by the time a boat shows up to rescue them that it no longer matters. The ending of the story is not so much hopeful as ambiguous. "Ambiguous" -that's a good term for most of these stories. Cook depicts a world where our better impulses are shoved out of the way by baser ones and our control over our lives is precarious. I was especially impressed by the title story and "Meteorologist Dave Santana," about an obsessed neighbor who stalks a local weatherman. But Cook is a writer of talent. All of these stories are good. Just don't expect to feel Warm Prickles while reading them.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Deadline (A Virgil Flowers Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's John Sandford Page; Review: On first encounter, Virgil Flowers, investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, comes across as almost terminally laid back. But he's the one who notices the clues at a crime site that others overlook and the first to suspect a witness who's got a guilty conscience about something. Flowers first appeared as supporting Good Guy in Sandford's deservedly popular Prey series, featuring detective Lucas Tanner. The two fit together well -Lucas had the sharper edge, Flowers was his wisecracking Good Old Boy slash alt-Rock-Band-lover sidekick. He did so well in those books that he graduated to his own series, now seven books thick, which offer a kind of Sandford-Lite version of the slightly darker Prey novels. (There tend to be more comic screwups in the Flowers series and Flowers is just a less dark character than Tanner.) In this installment, Flowers is sidetracked into helping an old friend track down a dognapper (that's not BCA-level crime stuff!) but the dognapping transmogrifies into the murder of a reporter and then a series of murders that mix the two crimes together. The story is fairly lightweight but, like all of the books in this series, fun to read. I like the Prey books better and Sandford's earlier series about the sometimes criminal sometimes detective Kidd, but you know, I read this book as soon as I got it and I didn't put it down until it was over. `Nuff said.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: De Niro: A Life; Author: Visit Amazon's Shawn Levy Page; Review: For readers who like to read about the craft of acting as opposed to the flash of being a star, this "unauthorized" biography of actor Robert De Niro will prove a distinct pleasure. "Unauthorized" here doesn't mean salacious. It just means that De Niro, notably reticent about exposing his life to exposure, refused to be interviewed and didn't give his imprimatur to Levy's book. At least here, "unauthorized" doesn't mean trashy and mean. Fortunately, De Niro donated his past acting notes, used to prep him for past movie roles, and tons of other material to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. (I t took two eighteen-wheelers to transport them.) These plus past interviews (not just De Niro`s but Scorsese's and others' --e.g., early booster Shelley Winters) and intensive viewing of the actors' many, many films provide fallow ground to write about an elusive actor, who, from 1973 (Bang the Drum Slowly, Mean Streets) until 1990-91 (Goodfellas, Awakenings, Cape Fear) provided some of the most memorable film experiences of our age. Certain motifs run throughout: De Niro's view of acting as craft and technique; the importance for him of advance preparation of a role (which has often made making a film with De Niro a slow and laborious process); building a character from the outside in (De Niro's preoccupation with details -dress, mannerisms and behavioral tics). This biography also shows his filial and familial loyalty (to his father and his children, less so but also mother); the path from a complicated childhood (his parent's early separation, his father's ambiguous sexuality, the loving but somewhat disengaged involvement of both of his parents in rearing him); his dogged pursuit of his craft once he had decided upon acting as a career; and his exceptional work ethic. For the most part, Levy's judgments are positive but not adulatory. He clearly thinks De Niro an extraordinary actor but feels he has thrown his prodigious talents way upon less than worthy projects (especially the three Focker movies) across the past two decades. But, against that, he notes -and credits--De Niro's reputable efforts in Wag the Dog (1997), Being Flynn (2012) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012). An additional pleasure in Levy's bio is his comments on individual performances and pictures. Levy came to his current trade from being film critic for The Oregonian -film critic for the leading newspaper in a film-crazy state!- from 1997 to 2012. I don't always agree with his take on particular films and performances, but he's the real thing. Early in his acting life, his teacher Stella Adler declared to her class, "The play is not in the words, it is in you." De Niro took that to heart. Playing Bruce Pearson in the 1973 Bang the Drum Slowly, he had to find a way to communicate to the camera that his character was suffering from the early stages of Hodgkin's Disease. He hit upon the technique of spinning himself around a few times before a shot in order to appeal ill: "it made me dizzy, a very similar thing; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century; Author: David Reynolds Ph.D.; Review: One way to look at this rich, subtle work of history is to say that it's about how hard it is to come to terms with our past and how interpretations change from decade to decade as we strive to make sense not of our past but of our shared present. The early chapters describe how we got into and out of this incredibly destructive war (16 million deaths and 20 million wounded, with the abnormally high percentage of two thirds of all military deaths occurring in battle and not from disease as in previous conflicts). There is a good deal of political and military history in the chapters dealing with the lead up to the Second World War and its prosecution, but then, to the surprise of the reader expecting this book to be a standard history of wars, peace and diplomacy in the twentieth century, the book becomes more and more a study of how subsequent generations have reinterpreted the primal event, the Great War. Poets, filmmakers, and writers take over the front space, not politicians or generals. The book ends with an eloquent reflection on history yet to come: a comparison of the response to the WWI memorial at Thiepval and Maya Lin's wonderful Vietnam Memorial. Comments Reynolds, in the final sentence of this eloquent and thought-provoking book, "When Americans mark the centenary of Maya Lin's etched black stones, will they be any more able to understand?" Than the British, Irish, Aussies, Kiwis, French or Germans or Russians understand the meaning of the first Great War, he means, of course.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hall of Small Mammals: Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Pierce Page; Review: The stories in this collection are all good and the best of them (Shirley Temple Three, The Real Alan Gass, Felix Not Arriving (a reap writing coup!), Videos of People Falling Down and More Soon) are exceptional. The prose throughout is pared down and unsentimental, the authorial tone that of an amused, sometimes empathetic but more often thoroughly neutral recorder of humankinds aspirations and failures, pratfalls and victories. Felix Not Arriving is a killer: a comic has arrived as the voice of a cartoon character hes the voice of Gonuts the Hamster on a childrens television show and he hates ithe travels across country to meet the man whos marrying the mother of his only child; he has trouble fitting in anyway his propensity is to respond to overtures of friendship with insultsand hes desperately ill at ease in this situation. Felix isn't an attractive character but his plight is one we can all empathize with. By the end of the story, you have a little bit feeling for how hard it is can be to be human, fallible and struggling to cope with your own life. Videos is stunning. Across a series of scenes, different people slip, fall or bump into something, usually with trivial consequences, and out of these disparate anecdotes, he weaves a story of connection, how the protagonists lives intersect, with startling results for some and almost none for others. Its a really good story, and original too. More Soon is disturbingI cant say chilling because it doesnt hit a level of realism to seem that, but it is deeply disturbing in an unresolved way. (Many of the stories don't resolve themselves, its an effective approach but you don't necessarily make you feel good as you read them: a creeping unease is more like it). A brother waits at an airport for his brothers body to arrive in a casket but it never gets there. From there, the complications start. Whoo! Its strong! Theres a resurrected mammoth Shirley Temple Three. (How do you deal with a resurrected mammoth, even a dwarfed one?)The woman in The Real Alan Gass dreams a married life with someone shes never met; her boyfriend has to adjust to the completeness of her dreamed life compared to their undreamed actual one --where certainty is harder to obtain and hold. In The Hall of Small mammals, a boyfriend has to deal with the son of a girlfriend he doesnt even think hell stay with. A brother (brain-damaged after a street attack on him) and his sister are trapped in a pantry in Amplexus. The story that follows is only middling successful, but still its disorienting. The one story that doesnt fit in this collection is Saint Poussy, a standard variation on the tale of menace, perhaps supernatural in origin. The story is well crafted but it has a different heft to it than the other stories in the collection, whose disparate tales somehow feel in aggregate like a unified whole.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives; Author: Visit Amazon's Otto Penzler Page; Review: By the early 2000s, Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookstore in New York City, was feeling the pinch of competition from the mega-dealers (Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com). One of his ideas to make money was this: he asked several prestigious and popular mystery writers to write how they came to create their series heroes, tell the inside story of how their heroes came to be as they are: over-sized dont-mess-with-me Jack Reacher; paraplegic ex-police inspector Lincoln Rhyme fanatic about the most insignificant race evidence; the unorthodox courtship and marriage of Faye Kellermans on-again off-again Christian Peter Decker and orthodox Jew Rina Lazarus; how much Colin Dexters Inspector Morse is like his maker and where hes not; and where David Morrells Rambo came from? In all, there are twenty-one essays by twenty-two authors. (Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child collaborated in creating Aloysius X. L. Pendergast.) This is not a complete list but in this volume you will read about Lee Childs Jack Reacher, Michael Connellys Harry Bosch, Robert Craiss Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, Stephen Hunters Bob Lee Swagger, Robert B. Parkers Spenser and Colin Dexters Inspector Morse, John Connollys Charlie Parker, John Harveys Charlie Resnick, Ian Rankins John Rebus, David Morrells Rambo (a good essay), Anne Perrys Victorian duo, Charlotte and Thomas Pitt, Jeffrey Deavers Lincoln Rhyme. In some cases, the authors have opted for faux biographies of their characters instead of writing about how they, the authors, developed the characters. Though interesting enough there is no bad writing in this collectionthese are the least interesting essays in the book, with one exception: I have not read anything by Laura Lippman and her account of her series heroine, Tess Monaghan, persuaded me I have to --soon. As might be expected, the collection tells the reader a good deal about the tortuous process of authorship. Janet Maslin, who reviews crime fiction for the New York Times, listed this book as one of her ten best books for the year and the print reviews are uniformly positive. I heartily recommend it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dead Men's Harvest (Joe Hunter Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Matt Hilton Page; Review: Dead Mans Harvest is the sixth novel in this series of action thrillers featuring ex-government undercover agent Joe Hunt. In this one, he is up against a nemesis from an earlier novel, Tubal Cain, aka the Harvestman, an insane super-killer who likes to mutilate his victims for souvenirs --a thumb, a rib, you have it, which he polishes up and keeps to remind him of the fun hes had. Hunter thought he had killed Cain when they last met but he hadnt Hunters boss and mentor had put Cain in solitary confinement on the off chance he might be able to use him in the future. Bad decision! Cain escapes and hes at it again, leaving the dead and dismembered behind him in a trail of blood and guts. At this point it gets complicated, and it would be unfair to spell out what happens or why. Joe hunts Cain. Cain sets up a trap to lure Joe into his lair. Joe fights back. A lot of people die along the way, both good guys and bad guys. The action is extreme but not beyond the bounds of the possible. The characters are a bit cookie cutter but not upsettingly so: Cain is the most fully realized but he is such a dark and menacing character and such an efficient killing machine that it doesnt seem quite possible that he could exist. But the sketchiness in the characterization and in the description of Joes love interest- doesnt get in the way of this non-stop action, no-holds-barred action thriller. Once I started it, I couldn't put it down, and thats all I really wanted from it. (3-1/2 out of 5 *); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Death in Eden: A Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's Paul J. Heald Page; Review: There a lot of academic mysteries around, mainly because academics write them and academia is the world they know best. But Death in Eden is somewhat unusual in that although the hero is an academic, the murder hes trying to solve doesnt take place on university grounds. Rather, it takes place at a release party for a new porn flick that just might restore porn to mainstream theaters, as it was in the glorious seventies. (Deep Throat! Behind the Green Door!) . Theres Stanley Hopkins in L.A., wife, vidcam recorder and all, to interview a bevy of disturbingly attractive women porn stars. He needs to nail down one remaining chapter in his study of workplace dynamics. His publisher insists it be on a women-dominated industry. Stanleys old college acquaintance, Donald, is now a porn mogul. He invites Stanley to L.A. Stanley brings along his wife Angela to do the filming. She trusts Stanley implicitly but shes not completely sold on the idea of sending Stanley out among these beauties without protection. Back at the university, Stanley has kind of fudged the nature of the project for fear of the administrations paranoia about negative publicity. By the time hes published his book, itll look like a million other boring sociological studies so why disturb them with unpleasant facts ahead of time? Then the star of the new movie, which is entitled Toys in Babeland (porn flicks don't have subtle titles) is murdered and Stanleys old friend Donald is charged with the killing. When Donald asks him to do some investigating for him Donald swears he didn't do itStanley reluctantly agrees. And winds up on television. Which makes his department chair back at BFU uneasy and the president and trustees more than that. Stanleys wife returns home. Stanley gets a new partner, porn star Layla Di Bona (actual name Janet). They wind up on national television and Bobs your uncle. (Following their investigation on television back home, Angela begins to suspect that more than sleuthing is going on between Stanley and Layla.) The story line unravels a bit toward the end but for the most part, the story makes sense and oh my, is it enjoyable. The choice of the porn film industry as the site of the murder is a good one. Its world is so overboard that humor is introduced into the story without strain. A trade journal notice advertises for: a mature brunette for a foot fetish sequence; busty blonde for stripper role (dance experience preferred). One of the film companies, Janus Productions, brags that at Janus you get twice the head. The sex stars have names like Layla DiBona, Jade Delilah (the victim), Ginger Porsche (Queen of the Pearl Necklace), Stiffany Lutz, Chrissie Nubile, Matt Le Hunk, Rock Tower. Donalds Hollywood name is Rick Ramrod. Subtle they're not but the contrast between the respectable world of academia and this over the top world of double entendres and outrageous provocation makes for fun reading. Death in Eden is a thoroughly enjoyable detective thriller which offers the reader many pleasures en route.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's S.G. Redling Page; Review: Redemption Key is the third novel in a series about plight of former data analyst Dani Britton, who escaped assassination as part of a government sanctioned cover up in the first book (The Widow File, 2013) and has been running ever since. Danis past --a gambler father and an emotionally distant motherhas left her dependent on her own instincts about people. Shes a whiz at reading peoples hidden motives. Now shes in the Keys, off the radar screen but still being watched, although she cant prove by which agency or how often. She works in a rundown bar, owned by a kindly elderly dude with a checkered past. Shes the all=purpose employee: cleans the motel rooms he rents out to fishers and carousers, tends bar when needed and cracks jokes with the customers, and sits in with her boss in his occasional meetings with bad guys so he knows whether they're telling the truth to him or not. An assassin, Tom Booker, whose preferred weapon is the knife, is obsessed wit her. She is his one failure and he looks forward to balancing the scales. As happens in this kind of novel, things heat up. Some really bad guys are trying to muscle in on her boss. Dani connects with another piece of her past. Tom still pursues her but his motives are conflicted. Theres nothing profound about this book but its an enjoyable read and Dani remains an appealing heroine.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Flamekeepers; Author: Visit Amazon's J. Gregory Smith Page; Review: The Flamekeepers features ex-SEAL Lukasz Gardocki, who is recruited to infiltrate a cult that may be involved in more nefarious activities than just teaching people survival skills for life after the apocalypse. The characters in this humdrum action thriller are cartoon-thick and the plot has holes you could drive a Humvee through. Thats a shame because some individual scenes in the novel aren't bad. Not bad isn't good, however, and theres little of value in this overheated novel to redeem it.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane CD: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Neil Gaiman Page; Review: This is one of those books -haunting, strange--that doesn't tell you where it's going and then all of a sudden it gets there. Not that that's anything new for Neil Gaiman, whose books have always tended to straddle the line between serious fiction magical-realism-style and straight out fantasy. Although it's billed as a full novel, it isn't really -more a novella, a bit too long to qualify as even a *long* short story but much too short for novel length. Not that that's important either. It's just long enough to do what it sets out to do, which is to remind you of the time in your life when, young, the world was both an exciting place and a scary one, and adults always held the balance of power in deciding things, not little children. A man -never named--returns home for a funeral, finds himself walking down a long forgotten road to a house he hasn't visited since he was a young child. Three generations of Hempstocks -Lettie, her mother and her gran--lived there when he was seven. Lettie was eleven -maybe. Her mother was who knows how old. And old Mrs. Hempstock might have been eighty or a hundred or eight hundred or a thousand. (Age didn't seem to flow for them like it did for ordinary people.) The mother is still there -or is it the grandmother--and he remembers times long past, and forgotten horrors. He got through those times because of the Hempstocks but survival was mixed with heartbreak and tragedy. The rest of the book is the playing out if that story, told with poetic fervor and grace but with, comparatively speaking, very few words. Those who like their characters all nailed down and the action elaborated upon won't like this book, but lovers of poetry and of a certain kind of fantasy will. I did. Gaiman prefaces the story with an epigraph. It's from an interview given by the great children's book illustrator (perhaps the best ever) Maurice Sendak, in conversation with Art Spiegelman, for an article in The New Yorker, September 27, 1963: "I remember my childhood vividly . . . I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them." The best books for grown-up children tell us things we forget about our growing up and so does this book. The little boy is being pursued by a monster in the guise of a woman. He's afraid of her. He doesn't imagine that a monster could ever be afraid of anything but Lettie sets him straight: "Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters. And as for grownups . . . I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." She thought for a moment. Then; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Napoleon: A Life; Author: Visit Amazon's Andrew Roberts Page; Review: I wrote the review in Library Journal that is quoted in the notice for this book. Ordinarily, I wouldn't also post a review on Amazon but this book deserves praise. I'm not an expert on Napoleon, military history or the early 19th century. When I was a practicing historian, my specialty was the fifteenth century. But good is good. The quality of this book, and Roberts's scholarship, are evident, and the book is extremely well written. It goes without saying that the story it tells is compelling. This is one of the best histories of Napoleon that I have come across. As I commented in my LJ review, I especially appreciated the insights Roberts shared from his on-site on-foot examination of the battle sites --all of them. This is a very good book and given its bulk, the price is not exorbitant.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America; Author: Visit Amazon's Jill Leovy Page; Review: Leovy lays out the point of this book very clearly on page xvii of the introduction: "This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic." A prize reporter for the Los AngelesTimes, Leovy elected not to concentrate on high profile killings in her city, mostly white or black on white, and chronicle instead the flood of black on black killings that took part in the poorest and most segregated neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. The nations number one crime victims, she reports, are black men, who represent just 6 percent of the countrys population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered. She argues, quite convincingly, that conventional explanations do not explain this flood of violence half as well as one simple fact. Lack of interest among politicians and police brass, and thus inadequate resources among those pursuing homicide cases in these neighborhoods, has hampered on the spot detective officers from doing their job, which is tracking down and bringing to trial killers. In the absence of an effective public presence, black ghetto males have fallen back on their own efforts to maintain some semblance of order, and that leads to aggravated violence over the smallest causes and the deaths not only of those who have offended the killers but anyone in the neighborhood. She illustrates her point by the story of two street killings: two young black men killed, almost coincidentally. Neither of the dead young men was a gangbanger or even remotely involved with gangs. One was the son of a distinguished police detective, who just happened to be black and who had continued to raise his family in the ghetto against the advice of many of his colleagues. This isn't the corrupt world of L.A. Confidential. The detectives aren't all racists and they're not just paper pushers either, going through the motions in lieu of getting something done. The best of them are driven. Theyve been around the people they serve long enough to see and feel the cost of violence to these people. They want to solve the homicide cases on their docket. But they buck a deeply flawed system. One of themDet. John Skaggsstand out his dogged pursuit of witnesses and his success at solving seemingly hopeless cases. In the process, Leovy doesnt moralize. She explains, providing us with a wealth of information about how homicide detectives the good onesget results and hammering us with accounts of the almost daily murders that take place in South L.A. one for every day and a half of the year. She is scrupulously fair in telling all sides. Another virtue, at least for me, is that she sees that a police detective can still be a hero.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Jaguar's Children; Author: Visit Amazon's John Vaillant Page; Review: "We are sacrificing humans now, just like in the old times." That's Hector, ruminating on his fate: he's stuck with a truckload of illegal immigrants inside a welded shut tank on a truck stranded in the Arizona desert. The coyotes who took their money and promised to smuggle them into the United States have abandoned them and they're dying a slow, painful death. Hector's there with a friend of sorts, Cesar. Cesar's dying. Hector has Cesar's cell phone: reception is too poor to reach his family so he tries to call a woman -someone in the States- whose number is in the cell phone call directory. He can't get sufficient signal strength to finish the call. He's forced to fall back on recording messages. While he talks, he thinks back on the hard, debasing life his family has led. This book is Hector's phone dialogue but even more the free flow dialogue he carries on inside his head as his body slowly and painfully disintegrates. Part of the novel works wonderfully. Hector's simple language has a poetic directness to it and the story he tells is wrenching. (I couldn't read large chunks of this novel at once because Hector's story is so upsetting.) Less convincing is a subplot involving Cesar who is attempting to smuggle a message out of the country. The details of the secret ring true but the incident doesn't fit, has a different tone to it than the rest of the novel, seems too dramatic. This fine book works best when it's most like that classic of Mexican literature, Mariano Azuela's The Underdogs (Los de Abajo), with which it has much in common.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Shari Goldhagen Page; Review: In December, 1992, Adam lived in Florida, near Orlando. He couldn't wait to get out of high school and leave the place for good. But in the meantime hes going to take a girl he has a crush on to a movie, the movie version of the famed Eons & Empires comic books. Sharon lives in Cincinnati. Shes ordinary enough but somehow doesnt quite fit with her giggly, schoolgirlish friends, so when she goes to the move E&E alsoshe goes alone with near disastrous consequences. In Chicago, Phoebe, who everyone in school agrees is knock down gorgeous, wants to go out with nerdish Ollie, whos been helping her with her math and science homework (not that it makes much difference but he also lets her copy from him when they're taking tests in class). They too head to the theater to see E&E, accompanied by Phoebes brother Chase. (Chase isn't going to let anyone take advantage of his older sister.) Adam, Sharon, Phoebe, Ollie Chase too for a while- we will follow their lives over the next two decades, as their lives separate, come together again, and cross and criss cross at different in complicated patterns. So . . . this is a young adult growing up novel. . . . Its something more than that too. The bad guy in the Eons & Empires movie, Captain Rowen, has a machine, the Neutrocon, which moves people across alternate universes. A lot of this book is about decision points --what might have happened if. . . . only if . . . One character becomes a movie star C list but still a starin a television remake of the E&E series. With his head shaved and a fake tattoo on the back of his head, he plays Rowen. Another, his sometime partner, starts out an actress but ends with a life less stressed and quite different than that. The other two, from different cities initially, come together by the end of the book. Maybe, just maybe have a future together . . . if . . . Richard Ford, whos no slouch at fiction writing, calls Goldhagen (Family and Other Accidents, 2006) a fully self-possessed novelist and praises her shrewd intelligence and wit. He hit the nail on the head as far as this book is concerned. Its a thoroughly enjoyable and all of the characters are engaging. The book gives you something to think about too.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Handing One Another Along: Literature and Social Reflection; Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Coles Page; Review: Like Martha Nussbaum's book on teaching ethics using literature, this is a course exercise repackaged as a stand alone book. It's not bad, just not all that impressive. I urge readers to pick this up only if they have already read some of Coles's better known works.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Too Bad to Die: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Francine Mathews Page; Review: Too Bad to Die is smart, well researched and well written, with a gripping story and engaging characters. Most of the characters in this historical spy thriller are real people. The hero is Ian Fleming, and in the English contingent there are Winston and Sarah Churchill, Randolph Churchills swinger wife Pamela. The U.S. ambassador to Russia, multi-millionaire Averill Harriman is there: hes been paying for Pams flat back in London but Pams got a crush on reporter Edward R. Murrow. In addition to Harriman, America is represented by FDR, Harry Hopkins, Clark Kerr and ambassador to England Gil Winant. Chiang Kaishek is there for part of the story with his duplicitous wife May-ling. There are Stalin, Molotov, the loathsome spymaster Lavrenti Beria, Berias son. And around the edges of the story we meet computer genius Alan Turing and Nazi storm trooper Otto Skorzeny. The action begins at the Cairo conference of November 1943 and reaches its climax in Teheran a week later. Historical thrillers are tricky but this one negotiates the turns just right. The actors seem like real people, not stuffed dolls, and the action is nonstop and whizbang. It starts with a coded message. Turing has been monitoring the code traffic among German sources and come across a message about someone called the Fencer. He (we assume its he) has an accomplice named the Kitten. With the aid of a squad of German parachute troopers they intend to attack and kill someone at the Teheran conference but who? uncle Joe? Cousin Winston? FDR? No one knows the Fencers real identity is but Turing informs Fleming that he (she?) is someone inside the Allied camp. The problem is that no one believes Fleming even after hes been attacked and left for dead in a Cairo bazaar: hes known to have an overly fertile imagination. Ian has to go under cover, using the passport of a dead Brit the name on the passport is James Bond so henceforth, for the remainder of this adventure, Fleming is Bond. From then on, Bond/Fleming is on a roll, moving from hair-raising adventure to hair-raising adventure with Bondish panache.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Among Thieves: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's John Clarkson Page; Review: It sounds like there might be some nasty players behind this. Thus speaks James Beck on page 44 of this excellent action thriller. Beck is half good guy, half bad guy, and the bad part is really, really bad! Becks got a nose for trouble and when he smells it, he takes action against it almost at once. Its not always violent action --he has a shrewd head for assessing risk and committing violence, even against equally violent transgressors, draws heat from the authorities. But if he needs to take violent steps, he doesnt hesitate one minute. The action starts out on the first page and doesnt stop until the end of the book. The second sentence in the book ends: Manny wants to kill somebody. Manny is Becks former prison mate, now on parole. He tells Beck that some Suit on Wall Street has take advantage of his niece, Olivia, who was the only member of his family who stuck by him in prison. When she pointed out irregularities in her brokerage firms trading, the man she accused assaulted her, broke two of her fingers and got her fired. She cant get another job because the firm blackballed her. Manny is ready to go ballistic hes all will and emotion, not much calculation-- but he trusts Beck enough to ask his advice. After all, Beck is the one who bailed him out when they got out of prison. Beck had been there for eight years, sentenced for murdering a cop, but his lawyer not only got him out of jail, he filed a lawsuit against the city for wrongful imprisonment and won, netting Beck several million dollars. Beck used it to buy a hundred-year-old saloon in red Hook, a workingmans section of Brooklyn, where he lives with his prison buddies like Manny. No one, absolutely no one, is allowed to mess with them. Beck counsels getting even, not getting anyone dead. They need to show these guys who they're messing with. When they do, the Wall Street guysll back down. The problem is: they dont. Because behind the firm lie shadowy figures stretching up, up, maybe as high as the mob. A small problem becomes bigger, the threat of violence becomes repeated acts of real violence, and soon Beck and his ex-con friends are fighting a war against Russian gangsters, hired mercenary killers and the NYPD. There is nothing derivative about this fine action thriller but it has its antecedents. Like Lee Child, in the early Jack Reacher novels, the action starts on page 1 and never lets up. It just escalates. In the character of Beck, there are echoes of Richard Starks anti-hero Parker and Andrew Vaachss Burke (minus the quasi-mystical tones that surround Burke and his family). There are plenty of unexpected twists in this fully satisfying, bursting at the seams thriller.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Black River; Author: Visit Amazon's S. M. Hulse Page; Review: Its hard to believe this is a debut novel. Thats how assured the writing is. A keen but not dispassionate observer, Hulse writes with restraint but lots of heart. This remarkable novel rings so true that it will stick in your mind when you have finished it. Wes Carver is strong but broken. He used to be able to forget the stresses of his job as correction officer at the state prison in Black River, Montana, because when he stepped outside the gate at the end of his work shift, another life took over he played fiddle, fantastically beautiful and creative fiddle playing, in a country/bluegrass band and had as wife he loved and a stepson, who, however problematic, he loved as well. That was before the prison riot when for thirty-nine hours he was the hostage of a sadistic con who took pleasure in destroying him. He left with cigarette burns up and down one arm and his captors name, B-O-B-B-Y, carved into the other, and nine of his ten fingers and thumbs twisted and broken so badly hed never play again. Hes never dealt with that horror, only buried it beneath his surface stoicism, but it contributed to didn't fully explainhis abandonment of his stepson and move away from Black River with his wife. Now, years later, his wife is dead. Hes back in Black River not only to put her ashes to rest but to testify at the prison hearing to determine whether his tormentor of all those years past should be released from prison he claims to be born again but Wes doesnt believe it. Even if he did believe it, why should God forgive a man who did so much evil when God let him do so much damage to Wes? Coming back, he confronts his stepson also. Thats not easy either. Theres too much yet unsaid between them. And he meets a teenage boy whos drowning in despair the boy needs a lifeline. For a while, it looks like Wes has given him one: a gifted musician, the boy starts to study fiddle playing with Wes but events overrun him. This is a sad novel about forgiveness but not easily, superficially forgiving. It raises hard questions: how do you find peace with a faith you're not sure youve found and a God whos let you down? When should you give up the past in order to embrace a new future? Another small virtues of this uniformly excellent book is Hulses way with description. Hulse is a careful and loving describer, as in this, capturing the smell of pastors office in a small town church: an odor in the air like coffee exhaled from damp mouths. I read that and knew right away what it smelled like in there. She does that over and over again throughout this fine book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Gruesome Playground Injuries; Animals Out of Paper; Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo: Three Plays; Author: Visit Amazon's Rajiv Joseph Page; Review: JOSEPH, Rajiv. Gruesome Playground Injuries; Animals Out of Paper; Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo: Three Plays. Soft Skull Press. 2010. 352p. $15.95. Weve been conducting play readings at our local theater and Im responsible for orchestrating them, so I read a lot of plays looking for ones an audience won't know but will enjoy. These three plays, by young playwright Joseph, were the best I read. My favorite of the three is the newest, Gruesome Playground Injuries (2010), but all three are first rate imaginative blendings of reality and fantasy that expose the hopes and hurts of their characters in powerful imagery and poetic prose. Injuries traces the lives, from eight to thirty-eight, of Doug and Kayleen. Kayleens a self-abuser, Dougs an injury magnet. Theyre sad types but somehow you care about them, especially Doug, who has a goofy sense of adventure to himhow many eight-year-olds do you know who would ride their bike off the edge of a roof in imitation of the daredevil feats of stuntman Evel Knievel? Or climb a telephone pole in the middle of a rain storm, lightning crackling all about him? The plays a bit like Love Letters, A. R. Gurneys famous dialogue play, but a Love Letters written on Qualudes. By the last meeting of these two damaged creatures, you understand the gift their relationship has given them. The trajectory of their lives may be sad but theres something positive about it as well. Animals is a three character play about an origami master who isn't folding paper any more; a high school teacher who is a fan of her work and is falling in love with her; and a young Indian who is a genius with anything dealing with numbers or planes. Theres been a tragic death in the boys family and he has lost interest in school and math. The teacher hopes to spark interest in him by introducing him to the complex planar intricacies of origami paper folding and so persuades the origami master tov take him as a pupil. From that point on, events unfold but not in unexpected directions. The teachers hoped for romance is a casualty of events. The dominating visual image in the play is a giant origami hawk that hangs suspended above the couch in the womans living room. Tiger is the most innovative of the plays though neither of the others is a slouch in that category either. Its set in Baghdad soon after the fall of Sadam. The characters include a couple of GIs, one of whom has a hand bitten off when he stupidly taunts captured tiger in its cage; the tiger, who has been rescued from the Baghdad zoo; the ghosts of Sadams sadistic sons, and several Iraqis, who speak their lines in Arabic, not English. (No translation is provided but the context is sufficient to know what they are talking about.) The tiger is played not as an animal but as a human being, erect in stance and fluent in articulating its tiger-like thoughts. The tiger was played by Robin Williams; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Station Eleven; Author: Visit Amazon's Emily St. John Mandel Page; Review: Wow! There are so many things good about Station Eleven that its hard to decide where to start. Maybe a good place is to talk about the way it yokes past and future, giving equal weight to both. Thats uncommon in post-apocalypse fiction, which most often slights a fuller past in favor of a drastically reduced future, vide Cormac McCarthys The Road or Russell Hobans Ridley Walker. The past is still a living space in Station Eleven. Not only do the people in the future reflect on it, they are tied to it in small and large ways, from the relationships among the people still living to the recurring references to an old graphic novel, Station Eleven, two issues of which one of the survivors still carries with her and whose message shaped the messianic ideas of a creepy cult preacher who takes over a town and its people and is a menace to everyone else still around. The book starts with the description of a production of King Lear. Arthur, the actor playing Lear, collapses on stage. Attempts to revive him fail. He dies. A conceit of this production is to put three young girls on stage before the action starts: they are Lears daughters Regan, Goneril and Cordelia-- but as children playing games while their already aging father watches them. The youngest of the girls is escorted from the stage. She doesnt really understand what has happened, and soon it won't matter, because that very day a deadly flu variant finally hits the States. Within a day, a week, a month, not just here in the States, almost everyone is dead. So dies a world. Soon theres no internet, radio or TV, no phone system, no computers, and no trains, planes, cars, not even gasoline because petrol has a lifespan too before it turns bad. The survivors include the girl who played the child Cordelia when Arthur died. The young man who gave Arthur CPR on stage survives too as do Arthurs son and one of his three wives. But its a new life they lead. Kirsten is now a grownup actress, a member of the Traveling Orchestra, a collective that travels from settlement to settlement performing one night as an orchestra and the next as actors performing Shakespeare. A sign of the altered life she now leads, Kristen has four knives in a row tattooed on one forearm, one for each marauder she has killed. Carter, Arthurs childhood friend and then his lawyer in the old world, lives in an abandoned airport now. It was a regional airport. When the flu hit with devastating thoroughness and speed, it the airport was cordoned off to prevent the flu escaping from the terminal but the flu didn't strike the people in the airport at all and the quarantine stopped others from bringing it and infecting them. The story that Station Eleven tells is complicated, even twisty, with repeated steps back and forth between before and after, and shifts in perspective among a large cast of characters. But it all hangs together; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dark Digital Sky (Dark Pantheon) (Volume 1); Author: Visit Amazon's Carac Allison Page; Review: Digital is a surprisingly good thriller, not just for a self-published novel but for any first effort by a writer of techno-thrillers. A hidden army of ex-vets under the leadership of an enigmatic terrorist who calls himself Jack D. Ripper has set out to bring down America. (Yes, its that Jack D. Ripper. Digital is rife with allusions to pop culture and for the most part they add to the fun.) The hero is an ex-FBI-anti-terrorist squad member who is now a P.I. He calls himself Chalk (his birth name is Chaucer) and drives a souped up Porsche, which, in L.A., doesnt look as out of place as you think. He has a meds problem, pops anti-psychotics and other drugs daily to tamp down his psychoses hes bi-polar, chronically depressed and prone to episodes of manic activity and delusions. He isn't James Bond he cant do the physical stuff- but hes computer-savvy and wired into all sorts of interesting people in the L.A. sub-life. The plot stretches the limits of belief occasionally. I could have done without the references to a magical sword and the secret cabal of mass murderers who lie behind many unsolved murders. But I never felt like abandoning the novel: it zipped along and really was fun.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Stolen Ones (A Stevens and Windermere Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Owen Laukkanen Page; Review: Every once in a while, you come across a detective thriller thats just about perfect and this is one of those times. This is the third novel to feature Kirk Stevens (Minnesota BCA) and Carla Windermere (FBI) but its the first Ive read. It won't be the last. Stolen Ones is very high quality formula fiction, in the class and much the style of John Sandfords novels about Minnesota super cop Lucas Tanner and his laidback semi-hippy partner Virgil Flowers. Youre pretty sure the cops will win in the end but its a nail biter all the way. There are so many bad guys (Eastern European thugs and a truly scary gang boss) that you're afraid some of them will get away. More than that, there are hostages to fortune who must be rescued: young women who have been kidnapped, loaded into a sealed container and shipped across the ocean to sell to very sick men. One is the young sister of a girl who does manage to escape. The novel starts with the escape and escalates into a long, determined search to find her captive sister before its too late. The law enforcement people in this novel are all dedicated and competent. There are no losers or crooks among them, which is a pleasant relief. They perform believable miracles in finding very tiny needles in very large haystacks, gradually piecing together the information they need to track down the white slaver ring. Theres definite chemistry between the lead cops a married, white cop and a sexy, addicted-to-the-chase black FBI agentbut no hanky panky. Thats another thing I admired in the novel: the author didn't add marital strain and incipient romance to beef up a flagging narrative. Stevenss wife, a lawyer for the needy, helps him with the case at one point, and waiting to be dealt with when hes caught the bad guys and rescued the girls, Stevens has to deal with a sixteen-year-old daughter whose hormones have just kicked in big time. The family details in this superior policier are handled with the same level of realism and respect that the rest of plot is.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I've Learned from Reading too Much; Author: Visit Amazon's Samantha Ellis Page; Review: Raised in England, Samantha Ellis is the daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees. Shes best known a playwright but in this delightful slim volume, she writes about the novels no, heroineswho influenced her as she grew up. She claims shes so playful you should take her statements with a grain of saltthat one time she was out with her best friend and they were arguing over whether theyd rather be Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. Samantha has a revelation all her life shed been trying to be Cathy when she should have been striving to be Jane Eyre. And thats the start of a lively survey of books Samantha read as she grew up, and her reactions to the female characters in them as she tries to figure out what she herself is and should be. A book like this could easily be a piece of froth --fun but shallowbut Ellis is such an engaging character, and her takes on the books she reads so honest, that it isnt. Its not a heavy book abut its a serious one, and Ellis is a charming person. You end up rooting for her as she comes to grips with which heroine exactly is she. The answer, as much as there is an answer in an inconclusive search, is Scheherezade. And what a charming answer that is.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Sierra Skullduggery; Author: Visit Amazon's Jerry S. Drake Page; Review: Sierra Skullduggery is a better than average Western with an appealing hero whos married to a feisty and loyal wife who turns out to be pretty heroic herself --you get two heroes for the price of one. Its the 1880s. California. Tom Patterson is a former gunfighter. He was most often on the good guys side but he did enough wrong that he still carries with him the aura of a bad guy. Hes been on the up and up since he married Betty. They own and operate a hauling company now. A puffed up gent tries to hire Tom to kill someone, says when Tom hears who it is he wants killed, hed do it for free. Tom says No. The bad guys try to kidnap Betty and she stands them off. And Tom heads off to find out whats going on. Something smells. In no time, theres a posse hunting for Tom and a price on his head for killing someone he didn't kill two someones, in fact. Tom avoids capture. Betty arrives to help him. Things happen. And in the end? Well, you know it will work out okay. The story is believable and its told in straightforward prose. Theres plenty of action. The good guys don't seem like supermen, just competent, tough good willed guys. The bad guys are sneaky bad. Its not great literature but it is good, wholesome fun.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Laws of Murder: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Finch Page; Review: The Laws of Murder is Finchs ninth murder mystery to feature amateur, now turned professional, detective Charles Lenox. For the most part, the mysteries are set in and around London. The age is Victorias, mid-nineteenth century, with horses instead of cars, and a much more leisurely pace than we are accustomed to today. Lenox is an engaging hero: hes upbeat and resourceful, organized and keenly observant in an era when detecting methods had just begun to be codified. And hes civilized, possessed of independent wealth and respectable provenance. Hes a loving husband too, married to Lady Jane, who for years was his closest friend and is now his wife AND friend, and a doting father to their infant child Sophia. The descriptions of Charless and Janes relationship are one of the many good reasons to read these lovely stories. Slowly, as the series has progressed, Charles has built up a circle of friends and associates who help him in his cases. As this book starts, hes a partner one of four-- in Londons first professional detective agency. The struggles the firm goes through in order to survive in a city unaccustomed to such a creation and in a society whose upper ranks scorn the idea that a gentleman like Charles and a nobleman like his partner and former pupil, Lord Dallington, should engage in commercial transactionsall this adds depth and interest to an already multi-toned and lively story. And there is the description: loving, detailed, on the spot correct for the time and place, and poetic. How can you not admire a passage like this, almost coincidental in its placement, dropped into the middle of a passage detailing a discussion between Lenox and Dallington? Theyre sitting in the meeting room in their firms suite of offices. The housekeeper has just brought in a plate of eggs she worries that his lordship doesnt eat enough, she tries to force feed him whenever hes in the officeand a pot of coffee for the two gentlemen. Its raining outside. [The room] was certainly handsome: painted a light blue, with a long oval table that had been shined to a high brightness with beeswax, and big windows overlooking Chancery Lane. Dozens of raindrops were dawdling down them, moving infinitesimally until one would decide to fall all at once in a split second, as if dashing for a forgotten appointment. A melancholy day outside. But the office, the eggs, the coffee, Mrs. ONeill, even the rain, conspired to make things seem faintly less desolate. Dozens of raindrops were dawdling down them Thats just . . . lovely! The mystery in this case? Two deaths, maybe connected, maybe not. Tantalizingly elusive clues. Leads that don't go anywhere. But in the end, its all resolved. Charles doesnt do it alone but he is the primary player and its his insights that move the case along. In A Beautiful Blue Death, the previous novel in this series, Charles had resigned a seat in parliament in order to go into business as a private eye, but he worried that hed lost; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Making Nice; Author: ; Review: As far as plot goes, this book is about nothing much at all. But it's a great deal about what goes on inside the head of a seeming plod, a young man who destroys things as often as he saves them and is given to fits of rage where in acting out he alienates the very people whose affection he needs. When Alby's frustrated, anything goes. He pops a cork. If something's at hand that he can punch or throw --the microwave, for instance, or a television set, or his sister's face--he punches it or throws it. He's a disaster waiting to happen. Nor does he appear to learn from his behavior -or from people's reactions to it. At the end of this debut novel, he still longs for what he can no longer have, his mother's hands on his hot forehead, telling him everything will be okay. The problem is that she dies early in the novel: when she calls her three children into to her hospital room to say goodbye to them, Alby's called in last and she uses her last few minutes with her son to remind him of the time he threw a book and tell him is that he must never abuse a woman again. Alby's life is a train wreck. His siblings seem to love him but don't understand him and can't get through to him. His father's an insensitive drunk. Desperate for connection, Alby rescues a baby bird and feeds and cares for it in his room. He's sure it'll be a falcon or osprey when it grows up. He`ll train it and he'll be the only person it responds to. But his sister finds a picture of it and it's only a common Northern Cardinal. Then the bird escapes the house and his father runs over it with his car. This sounds like a book to stay away from but it's not. There are people around us like Alby. Normally nobody writes about them because they don't make attractive or engaging protagonists. Maybe Alby has ADHD, who can tell. But whatever the cause, his emotions and reactions need a control switch that he doesn't seem to have. Another reason to read this book is that Sumell is a good writer -the narrative is lively and sometimes humorous, and Alby, warts and all, is an appealing protagonist.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs; Author: Visit Amazon's Mikita Brottman Page; Review: Grisby isn't a memoir of the author's life and love affair with her French bulldog Grisby although in the process of reading the book, you learn a lot about them both. Intelligence-wise, Grisby's not the smartest tool in the toolbox but he's totally accepting and she loves the feeling of his compact, warm body lying across her feet underneath her long skirt when she's at work in her office. She waxes indignant at restaurants that ban him from entering on the specious pretense it's not sanitary: dogs, as a rule, are more sanitary than new babies, she argues, and they have demonstrably better table manners, so why not ban babies too? Yes, I know that's excessive --there are other reasons why babies get a pass when dogs don't-- but I like reading about the owner's tics as well as the animal's in this book and at least she's honest about how she feels. What she has done in this interesting and enjoyable book is to write an abecedary of dogs, from A (the notorious misanthrope Schopenhauer's standard poodle, Atma) to Z (the eighteenth-century literateure Mme. Deshoulieres's spaniel, Zemire). She uses the comments on the dogs highlighted in each chapter as springboards for comments on other dogs, their owners, canine behavior in general, and the psychology of dog-loving. (She thinks you learn as much about the owners as you do about the animals when you watch them.) The result is a book that can be read all at one sitting or sampled and savored like bon bons one at a time (which is what I did). Once again, Esther surprised me with a book I thoroughly enjoyed. Now if someone would only write one about cats!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Will Starling: A Novel; Author: Ian Weir; Review: If you're looking for a book thats filled with wonders and horrors, a thrill a minute, then Will Starling is the book for you. If you're looking for a book that skillfully invokes the history (its set in 1816, a year after Waterloo, and draws on the lurid history of Londons Resurrection Men) and literary conventions of a past time (the Gothic novel, passing references to John Keats), then this is the book for you too. And if you're just looking for an exceptionally well written story, with an appealing and resourceful hero and interesting side characters, both good and bad, then here it is. Will is nineteen, a foundling, whos spent the past five years following his master, military surgeon Alec Comrie, around the battlefields of Europe. He doesnt know who his parents were and until Comrie conscripted him into service, hed never known a master he could trust. The wars over, they're back in London now, Comrie trying to build a practice, Will living by his wits. Comrie not just Comrie, all the aspiring surgeons and doctors of Londonneeded corpses, fresh cadavers they could dissect to learn their trade. Thus the Resurrectionists Doomsday Mengrave robbers who operated outside the law to provide fresh bodies to the medical profession. The less ethical Resurrectionists (none were very ethical) sometimes didn't wait for a body to be dead before claiming it. Thats one strain out of which Weir has fashioned this fantastical tale. The other is Mary Shelleys masterpiece of a man reclaimed from death rebuilt from parts of dead men and jolted back to life by electricity Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818). People go missing. Will pursues them. Time and again, he runs into one of Londons surgical stars, the sinister Dionysus Atherton. Is Atherton trying to make the dead live again? Odd creatures roam the streets at night. One in particular, The Boggle-Eyed Man, terrorizes the neighborhood, but hes not alone. Because theres also s red-eyed Nan, hanged but back again. And by her side is Jemmy Cheese, barely conscious but fiercely protective of his quondam lover Nan. The plot is complicated and lurid, its fizzy with excitement, and when it comes together at the end, its wholly satisfying. This isn't one of those romance novels where everything works out at the end. Its something even better, a non-stop ride through the seamier sections of London, ca. 1816, a clever and wholly successful thriller, which reads like Wilkie Collins out of Dickens. (Will is the narrator for most of the story. He speaks a tongue that is rich and fluent but is filled with peculiar twists --words made up, I assume, or borrowed from street slang now long vanished there is a slantingdicular ceiling, hirpling is used for travelling, young men stop in the street to smugger in in admiration at a woman, a character engages in dolorous mussitations.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bones & All: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Camille DeAngelis Page; Review: On one level, this is a conventional coming of age tale of a young girls growth into womanhood. At sixteen, Maren is abandoned on her birthday by her mother, who leaves her some money and a note saying Im your mother and I love you but I cant do this anymore. Maren has never known her father. She sets off on a quest to find him. On the way she meets people. Enough said for now. On another level, this is a horror tale, and a particularly effective one even though the horrors it narrates mostly occur off camera, so to speak. Because Maren eats people -as the title of the book puts it, Bones & All. It started with her babysitter, who leaned too close to Marens crib and that was it. When Marens mother came home, there was a pile of bones on the carpet next to the crib and baby Maren was covered in blood. She was too small then to swallow the bones but she improved at that with age. Now shes on her own. She knows what she does is awful. But it happens. She doesnt know if there are others like her thats one of the reasons she wants to find her father. She does and on the way she meets other people, including two one old, the other close to her agewho are like her: one eats only dead people, the other only people he hates. She makes discoveries about her family, about herself, about her feelings, and if she doesnt fall in love, she comes close to it. This is not a Happy Ending story. She doesnt change and shes just as alone at the end as at the beginning. But even up to the last sentence, the plot offers surprises. (If you think this review reveals too much of the plot, you are in for a shock when you read the book.) Bones & All is a well written, surprisingly original twist on an old theme, all the creepier because Maren is so sympathetic a character.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Enter Pale Death (A Detective Joe Sandilands Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Barbara Cleverly Page; Review: Eleven novels in, Barbara Cleverly's Joe Sandilands series of period thrillers maintains its quality. Joe is an appealing detective hero, a veteran who wears the visible scars of the Great War on his handsome face, a second son from the Highlands who can sit down to dinner in his evening clothes and rub shoulders with the nobs and hob nob with farmers and servants with equal ease. It's 1933. He has moved up rapidly at Scotland Yard to his current eminence as Assistant Commissioner, but he's not so high up that he can ignore a request from a minister who may well be Joe's boss in the next Cabinet shuffle. Private business (the minister's request) soon mingles with public police business when Joe is drawn in to investigate an accident at the minister's grand Suffolk estate-a crazed horse has mangled and killed the minister's wife--that may mask calculated murder. One puzzle to solve becomes two when Joe is asked to take a look as well at the supposed suicide drowning of a young maid from the same estate twenty-five years earlier. From that point on, the pace moves steadily forward until, at the very end, Joe resolves both cases in classic drawing room explications. As befits a mystery set in 1930s England, there is a wealth of details about the individuals and social groupings involved. His old associate Lily Wentworth, formerly a Police constable and now a freelance investigator for Joe, wears a "suit from Monsieur Worth and perfume from Madame Chanel." Joe sallies forth into the fields of Sussex dressed casually in flannel trousers, a linen shirt and Hermes ascot. Joe and his hosts know their art -a Canaletto hangs on a wall in the minister's mansion and Joe has a Fra Filippo Lippi on the walls of his own back in London. The company assembled for an auction at Sotheby's is composed of "dapper city gents, suits from Savile Row, ties from Jermyn Street, haircuts from Raoul at Trumpers. No, perhaps no dandruff. Raoul didn't permit dandruff." Cleverly has these class and period signs down cold and folds them into her story unobtrusively. Cleverly's novels remain among the best of latter day Golden Age mysteries. She is blessed with a light touch and a good sense of pacing, and her stories, as complicated as they are, resolve satisfactorily, more or less. I say "more or less" because this particular story is unduly complicated and its denouement (two denouements actually) is credible but not likely. But that's a minor criticism in a book otherwise as enjoyable to read as this one. There's even a hint of romance at the end: it will be interesting to see what befalls Assistant Commissioner Sandilands in his next adventure.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Little Book of Plagiarism; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard A. Posner Page; Review: The Little Book of Plagiarism is just that, a wee book --116 pages, 4-1/2 by 6-1/2 inches in size-- on a big subject, plagiarism, written by one of the country's most readable legal scholars, Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. (Posner also teaches at the University of Chicago.) It's an essay rather than a full book and thus, though Posner provides copious examples for his argument, do not expect lengthy discussions of particular cases or legal dilemmas. Rather, Posner uses this essay to lay out the juridical difficulties posed by the notion of plagiarism. They start with defining the offense. Clearly it's a fraudulent theft, but what if the plagiarist does it unintentionally -one can be sued for carelessness too but at what point does inattention to sources become a tortious offense? And what of self-plagiarism? What are the obligations of the writer (or painter or composer) to reveal that he or she has used borrowed material, only in this case from his or her previous works? The range of examples is wide, starting with teenage novelist Kaavya Viswanathan, whose borrowings from a fellow chick lit writer lead to the cancellation of her book contract and the return of the $500,000 advance she'd received, and moving on to acclaimed historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, and a host of others. Harm is the operative issue here: has there been wrongful appropriation of copyrighted (and thus legally protected) material or has the copying deprived others of the hope of gain? Posner always writes well, an incisive and definite prose that challenges the reader without confusing. This little book is not one of his major works but it is a good one and well worth considering.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: F: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Daniel Kehlmann Page; Review: This unusual, even eccentric novel isn't composed of a continuous plot line so much as a set of conjoined stories, linked by past history but not tightly so. There is no apparent reason why the sons who are abandoned by their father in story #1 should have become how they are (their characters) and where they are (their present situations) in stories #2, #3, etc. . . . In the first story an indifferent father who turns out to be an indifferent everything, including writer, which is what he most wants to be, takes his three sons -by two mothers- to a hypnotist's show. Arthur lets himself be hypnotized and after the show ends takes the children home. He drops Martin off with his ex, takes twins Eric and Ivan home with him to his current wife, and then, while they're sleeping, cleans out his joint checking account, leaves a note for wife and sons, and disappears. There is no trace of him for years, until books -very odd books-- start to appear under his name too critical acclaim. The first one, My Name Is No One, is an odd book indeed. It's about a man, referred to as F. (thus the title of this book), and at first reads like an old-style roman de moeurs --think Balzac or Zola. But from the start, there's something not quite right about the narrative: [T]he reader would be enjoying the text were it not for a persistent feeling of somehow being mocked . . . there is a sense that no sentence means merely what it says, that the story is observing its own progress, and that in truth the protagonist is not the central character: the central figure is the reader, who is all to complicit in the unfolding of events. At that point in the book, I thought: it sounds a bit like Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch (1963) with its invitation to the reader to read non-linearly. But that's not the way My Name progresses. F.'s story gradually implodes as discrepancies build up. Then the narrative just breaks off - "without warning, in the middle of s sentence." The second part of the book is a fifty-page-long, convoluted argument that the reader doesn't exist. Then F. appears again, only to have his character dismantled in a few pages -ultimately he is shown to a superfluous man. All three sons receive copies of the book, in brown wrappings with no dedication or details as to who sent it to them. (Although they know.) The book provokes newspaper articles, critical reviews, a cult of followers, suicides... A second book follows: a detective thriller about a detective who despite all efforts doesn't succeed in solving anything. Then a third book appears, a novel in which fate continually branches, leading to more and more narrative paths, most leading to sickness or death. By now, you are reading the second narrative in the book, which is about Martin, the older son. Grown up, he's a priest who doesn't believe, but pretends he does anyway for the wellbeing of; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Tutor: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Andrea Chapin Page; Review: Shakespeare may be our greatest, most truly human writer but it's surprising how little we know about large swaths of his life. A year ago, I received Jude Morgan's wonderful imagining of the Bard's life, The Secret Life of Shakespeare, to review. I concluded my review: ""It's hard to imagine a better historical novel about the Bard than this one." How could I know then that less than a year later I'd be writing about another novel about Will Shakespeare that was just as good, just as rich, and just as humane, another book about the elusive Bard that I feel readers should absolutely read. What is interesting too is how different the pictures of Will are in the two books. This book, The Tutor, is about one year in Will's life, 1592-93, a year about which we know almost nothing other than that at the end of it, Shakespeare produced Venus and Adonis, his last major work of poetry to be published during his lifetime. After that, he concentrated on writing, producing and acting in plays. Chapin's conceit is to imagine that during this fateful year Will took time out from acting in London and his never easy married life with Anne back in Avon to serve as tutor to an English Catholic family in Lufanwal Hall and while there, forge a relationship that was more than friendship and less than love with the thirty-one-year-old and bookish widow who lived there. After the death of her husband, Katharine de L'isle had resigned herself to a life of reading and tending the children -relations--of her family. The death of the family priest, murdered in the woods, leads to her uncle's hiring of Will, whose way with words quickly enchants Katharine. What follows is a dance: Katharine is his perfect reader, Will needs -wants desperately- to improve his verse. He wants to be a great poet, the best England has known, and she sees in him the potential to be it. Together they talk through his verse, her heart (allied to high critical sense) showing where it is false, he milking her for ideas and even more, for her eventual praise. The problem? She falls in love with him, but the Will presented in this novel isn't capable of loving others. His love is his writing. All else is seduction, play, whim and fantasy. The denouement isn't as sad as it might have been, though Will leaves Katharine behind for shallower conquests. Rather, Katharine, one of the loveliest and fullest realized heroines I have come across in recent fiction, finds mature love. After Will. This is a beautiful, beautiful novel, which doesn't stretch the truth of either history nor of human experience. I was trained as a historian. I know. We know too little of Shakespeare's actual past to tell whether Chapin's Will or Morgan's is the correct one, but both are credible, and both are wonderfully fashioned. This is a novel as rich in heart as it is as mind.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Tutor: A Novel - Kindle edition; Author: Visit Amazon's Andrea Chapin Page; Review: Shakespeare may be our greatest, most truly human writer but it's surprising how little we know about large swaths of his life. A year ago, I received Jude Morgan's wonderful imagining of the Bard's life, The Secret Life of Shakespeare, to review. I concluded my review: ""It's hard to imagine a better historical novel about the Bard than this one." How could I know then that less than a year later I'd be writing about another novel about Will Shakespeare that was just as good, just as rich, and just as humane, another book about the elusive Bard that I feel readers should absolutely read. What is interesting too is how different the pictures of Will are in the two books. This book, The Tutor, is about one year in Will's life, 1592-93, a year about which we know almost nothing other than that at the end of it, Shakespeare produced Venus and Adonis, his last major work of poetry to be published during his lifetime. After that, he concentrated on writing, producing and acting in plays. Chapin's conceit is to imagine that during this fateful year Will took time out from acting in London and his never easy married life with Anne back in Avon to serve as tutor to an English Catholic family in Lufanwal Hall and while there, forge a relationship that was more than friendship and less than love with the thirty-one-year-old and bookish widow who lived there. After the death of her husband, Katharine de L'isle had resigned herself to a life of reading and tending the children -relations--of her family. The death of the family priest, murdered in the woods, leads to her uncle's hiring of Will, whose way with words quickly enchants Katharine. What follows is a dance: Katharine is his perfect reader, Will needs -wants desperately- to improve his verse. He wants to be a great poet, the best England has known, and she sees in him the potential to be it. Together they talk through his verse, her heart (allied to high critical sense) showing where it is false, he milking her for ideas and even more, for her eventual praise. The problem? She falls in love with him, but the Will presented in this novel isn't capable of loving others. His love is his writing. All else is seduction, play, whim and fantasy. The denouement isn't as sad as it might have been, though Will leaves Katharine behind for shallower conquests. Rather, Katharine, one of the loveliest and fullest realized heroines I have come across in recent fiction, finds mature love. After Will. This is a beautiful, beautiful novel, which doesn't stretch the truth of either history nor of human experience. I was trained as a historian. I know. We know too little of Shakespeare's actual past to tell whether Chapin's Will or Morgan's is the correct one, but both are credible, and both are wonderfully fashioned. This is a novel as rich in heart as it is as mind.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Friendship of Criminals: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Glinski Page; Review: When the Italian crime boss in Philadelphia is sent to jail for twenty years, a fight for succession breaks out. A young hothead wins. The traditional (and prudent) balance among crime factions in Philadelphia breaks down. The new boss doesnt care about tradition. He thinks the Polish boss is getting old and his territory ready for the taking. The next thing you know its Poles against Italians, with the Russians, Armenians and a vicious motorcycle gang hanging around at the edges, looking to see who will lose and can then be cannibalized, and an undercover FBI agent trying to spin it all in order to make the biggest gang bust in the history of the agency. Theres enough bloodshed in this novel many of the players aren't known for their restraintbut Friendship isn't a blood and spatter novel so much as a novel of wits and intrigue, with the prize going in the end to the sneakiest (but also meanest). Its economy of violence that wins in the end here. You couldn't tell this is a first novel by reading it, so accomplished is it. In this and other respects, it bears comparison with another current novella about gangsters, John Clarksons Among Thieves. (See my review.) Both are first class action novels about really bad guys. In Clarksons novel, though, the bad guys fighting against other bad guys who are so bad, so sleazy, that they make their enemies seem almost good by comparison. In Glinskis book, everyone is bent. Good intentions don't intrude into their calculations. The difference is that some of the sharks who swim in the waters of south Philadelphia are better at staying alive with the other monsters swimming around them, and some arent. As with Darwin, its a drama of the survival of the fittest, acted out before the readers very eyes. The fun is in seeing who makes it out of there.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Children Return: A Bruno, Chief of Police novel (Bruno, Chief of Police Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Martin Walker Page; Review: All of Martin Walkers Bruno, Chief of Police mysteries have been good. So is this one, the seventh in one of the best mystery series around today. In this episode, Bruno, chief of police in the village of St. Denis, in the Dordogne region in southwest France --think wines and truffles-- copes with the threat of Islamic terrorists, jihadists seeking to recapture an autistic youth whom they had dragooned into making bombs for them in Afghanistan but who had escaped. Thats not the only story line in this delightful policier but its the main one, and its a good one, with plenty of scary moments and surprises. The book is both muscular and warm, not a common combination in crime fiction, where menace often detracts from the warm and fuzzy. The action keeps your blood whizzing, the characters and particularly sensible, human and brave Bruno, warm your heart. As always, there is a lot of cooking (and drinking wine) going on. Ive thumbed a couple of Brunos kitchen creations to try myself, they sound so good. So there you have it: bloodthirsty and dangerous bad guys, a hero you care for, and a dollop of romance to perk things up. (After all, Bruno is French!) What else could you want? Another reviewer commented that this is not one of Walkers best mysteries. I disagree. The balance of violence and human interest is just right in this book, and Walker negotiates with aplomb the challenging task of bringing up Brunos past history without overwhelming the new installment. Long live Bruno. I wish hed invite me to dinner some time!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bonita Avenue: A Novel; Author: Peter Buwalda; Review: Bonita Avenue is the debut novel of Dutch journalist, editor and novelist Peter Buwalda. The novel was nominated for eight awards and won four in the Netherlands and was very positively reviewed in the United Kingdom when it came out in English translation. Several reviewers on Amazon disliked the novel and I understand why. But I think they're wrong. Im not claiming that Bonita Avenue is comfortable to read. Its not. The story it tells is lurid and jarring. At times the raw feeling expressed or felt by its characters is draining. There is too the style of narration: the story line shifts back and forth among three (or is it four?) characters (father, daughter, sometime son-in-law, and wayward son) and doubles back and forward in time, moving toward a conclusion that seems almost hyperbolic but, if you think about it, reflects lines of fracture that do exist in even seemingly normal, contented citizens. If there is a meta-theme to the novel, it is that we can carry inside ourselves stress lines that will, in the wrong situation, fatally disrupt our happiness and prosperity. This is a novel about a wrong situation followed by a worse one and so on, in long, dolorous line. At the end of it, the model family we saw at the beginning of the book doesnt exist any more, some people are dead and the rest, with one possible exception, are fatally twisted, leading lives we wouldnt wish on anyone. At the center of it is Siem Sigerius, one-time judo champ, then turned math whiz (winner of the Fields medal, mathematicians equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and now chancellor of a provincial public university in the Netherlands. He lives with his wife and two daughters. The oldest daughter has a boyfriend, Aaron, who acts like he has a crush on Siem he practices judo with the old man, brushes up on jazz to impress him with his hipness, marries his daughter. But it all falls apart, and in lurid, dramatic, almost exaggerated, ways. To tell what happens in this complicated novel would ruin surprise. Even to list the stress points would give away too much. Just read it. If its confusing at first, don't worry. It sorts itself out later on. When you're finished, see if you don't feel, as I did, that what seems extreme at first doesnt any longer not that most people lead lives like these but that we could have, if the world hadnt collaborated to keep us in our comfort zones.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Marauders: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Tom Cooper Page; Review: Louisiana may be our second Florida, the only other state in the Union with such a colorful assortment of whackos and lowlifes as you meet in this thoroughly enjoyable debut novel. Crime happens in it, even a killing, but it's not so much a crime thriller as it is a novel about criminal types. The scariest in the novel are a pair of psychopathic brothers who grow marijuana out in the bayou. They're paranoid about any threat to their crop; woe betide the unfortunate person who stumbles upon it. He's in serious trouble. Then there are two ex-cons, Keystone Kriminals who stumble from catastrophe to catastrophe, each worse than the last. There is a man who hasn't been home in ages because he hates it there but now he's sent back by his oil company bosses to pressure the natives, even his mother, into selling their claims on the damages from the most recent disaster, an oil spill of Biblical proportions, for as little money as possible. He's smarmy, the brothers are scary, the ex-cons are inept. The rest of the people along the bayou are just stuck. How do you make a living from shrimping when even the locals are afraid to eat your fatally tainted product? One man, a one-armed painkiller addict, is delusional if not wholly mad: he pins all his hopes on unearthing pirate Jean Lafitte's legendary gold cache. In the process of searching he runs afoul of the psycho brothers; the result isn't pretty. And there's a young man on a road to nowhere. He saves every penny he can to recondition an old shrimping vessel but what will he do with it when it's fit to sail? The waters he plans to fish in are like Gertrude Stein's Oakland: there's no there there anymore. \ There's a plot to this firecracker novel but the book isn't so much about story (although a lot happens and some of it is violent) as about mood and setting. It's about people too. People who have been royally screwed by the oil corporations that polluted their waters and are now trying to cover up their sins without regard for the people who live there and are trying to earn a living there. Oh, did I mention? The book's funny too, much the way that Elmore Leonard's novels were always funny. It's a humor that arises from acute observation and the accurate reporting of what people say and do in stressful situations.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Delta; Author: Visit Amazon's Tony Park Page; Review: The heroine in this action thriller set in southern Africa is Sonja Kurtz. She's a paid killer. At the start of the novel, she's waiting in ambush to assassinate the president of Namibia in southeastern Africa. Someone has sold her out. The assassination goes wrong and she has to fight her way to safety on her own. En route, she falls in with the star of a live-action television series who's in Africa to film a wildlife special. With their meeting, the novel is set for what happens thereafter. By the end, Sonja proves she's as tough and durable as any male, some good things happened and some very bad guys are vanquished. The novel moves slowly at first but once it picks up momentum, it clips along. The main caper almost but not quite strains credibility with the demands it puts on Sonja but Sonja --and Sam, the TV star--are appealing heroes and once into it, the book holds your attention.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Long Way Down (A Jason Stafford Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Sears Page; Review: I haven't read Black Friday (or was it second?), Michael Sears's first crime thriller about Jason Stafford but if it was as good as this one, I need to. Stafford is a disgraced Wall Street trader. He spent two years in prison and was assessed a whopping big fine which he has no intention of ever paying, and he's barred from ever trading securities again. These days he earns his living as a `fixer,' a market savvy outsider who comes in and helps other market people fix problems before they get out of hand. His last caper led to the murder of his ex-wife but also to Jason discovering something he'd never admitted to himself --he's a father. A father, not just a progenitor -he knew he was that--but a loving, caring, involved parent whose son -he calls him "the Kid" -- is autistic. The Kid doesn't like to be touched. He communicates in odd ways. He gets fixated on things and routines. For instance, he knows more than any young boy should know about certain kinds of cars and now he's started peeing in the water glass in the bathroom because the blue liquid the house keeper used to clean the toilet upset him in some way. Jason will do anything to protect him. That's one of the things that takes this book out of the ordinary: Jason's strongly felt sense of familial love -for the Kid, his wayward and often inscrutable child; for his girlfriend who's almost a fiancée; for his supportive father and his father's long term girlfriend. The sections of the book detailing his interactions with them enrich the picture of Jason without intruding on or overwhelming the action line. As to the narrative line, it's tricky and sometimes confusing, but It's exciting throughout, with lots of high voltage action, and when eventually you learn who the bad guys are and what they've been doing--it's all worth it. Jason is called in to dig out evidence that the head of a biofuel firm didn't engage in inside trading although the Feds are getting ready to indict him for it. Jason's investigation is interrupted by a murder. He digs in deeper. There are three attempts on his life; scary guys are involved. Once Jason realizes he's in danger, his first thought is for his family: he needs to get them out of the way and then lay a false trail so the bad guys dogging him can't find him and he has time to search out what's going on. The ending almost works but it's a bit too tricky and not wholly believable. But what happens before is utterly convincing and very exciting, and the portrait that is painted of Jason is so appealing, that small faults can be forgiven. This is a first rate thriller, unique in its take on crime in the oftentimes sleazy world of high finance.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Essays After Eighty; Author: Visit Amazon's Donald Hall Page; Review: Hall, ex-US Poet Laureate (he wasn't all that impressed with the experience), writes that the impulse to write poetry died out in him some time in his late seventies or early eighties. The last volume of his poems to come out was 2011's The Back Chamber. But the impulse to write has not disappeared. It's simply transmogrified -to essays that are as mixture of reminiscence and terse but evocative, deeply poetic prose. And so we have this book, published when Hall was 85. It's a collection of occasional essays. There are fourteen in all and since the entire collection is 130 pages, clearly they are short -the longest ("Thank You Thank You," about how poetry readings changed the way poems are crafted today, mixed in with personal reminiscences of life on the poetry reading circuit) runs thirteen pages. "Essays After Eighty" runs four. The pleasures, the particular excellences, of Hall's poems-the attention to words, economy of phrasing, the exceptionally apt characterization, and the earthiness, the tied-down-to-existence quality of his word pictures-- carry over to his prose. In "Essays After Eighty", he writes: "Poems are image-bursts from brain-depths, words flavored by buttery long vowels." But now that his "testosterone [has] diminishe[d]" it's paragraphs he writes instead, descriptive and anecdotal: Writing paragraphs, I looked out the window and wrote about what I saw. Snow was falling, later daffodils were bursting. I luxuriated in the paragraph, varieties of fast and slow, rise and fall -improving toward a final fullness. That isn't a perfect paragraph. I wish he had dropped the final phrase ("improving toward a final fullness") because it doesn't have the concreteness, actuality, of the rest of the passage. But over all, it's really good. "Snow was falling, later daffodils were bursting" -two brief descriptive phrases encapsulate his lived in world. We learn things about Hall's writing and living habits here. He revises and revises again and again, partly to cut needless words, partly to find appropriate words. He never liked exercise but now exercises faithfully in order to stay mobile. At night, he doesn't work: it's either baseball (watching the Red Sox, from April to October) or a book. "Sometimes it is Zane Grey, sometimes Agatha Christie, sometimes the Red Sox." The last image in the book is this: he sees a big moose and a smaller one "walking east from Ragged Mountain to drink from Eagle Pond. They walked with dignity under their elegant antlers, as new and as old as the returning eagle [that graced his pond]." I'm 78 myself. In this elegant collection of personal essays, Hall shows something I'm glad to see: age doesn't have to destroy intelligence or creativity, but it may change how it's expressed.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Winter Family: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Clifford Jackman Page; Review: If you want to read about Hell on Earth, The Winter Family isn't a bad place to start. Not at all. There are imperfections in this devastating novel but they pale before sheer force. The Winter Family is the literary equivalent of Sam Peckinpaugh's nihilistic movie, The Wild Bunch. As much as anything else, it's about a world with no redemption. The book follows the career of the desperado Winter family from its birth in Georgia 1864 (a by-blow of Sherman's march to the sea) through Chicago 1872 (a bloody intervention in a disputed election), Phoenix 1881 (the family's aborted pursuit of Geronimo), Oklahoma 1891 (hired to wipe out an Indian settlement) to California 1900 (for this one, you will have to read the book and find out). The leader of the band is Augustus Winter. Here's a description of him as a young man: "The young man, a boy really, . . . was tall and thin and the whitest man Johnson had even seen, with skin like snow and hair like straw, and eyes of pure gold. In the dawn light the boy looked as if he were made of silver, or mist." From the start, he's seriously scary. He quotes the Book of Revelations as defense for butchery but over time, the Bible recedes. All that's left is a rush to violence. He's the perfect nihilistic, a psychopath killer who murders and betrays as though the only motivation is to p*ss in the face of civilized behavior. It's "a new kind madness, as kind of alternate sanity, a different way of reacting and fitting into the world." And it's scary. In the late 1860s, the War over, the Family works for whomever pays them, whether the Klan or its antagonists, no difference. In Chicago, in 1872, they're hired guns brought in to win an election, but they go too far and are forced to run. The same thing is true in 1881 when they're hired as bounty hunters to break the back of Geronimo's revolt. They succeed, more or less, but again they leave as pariahs. In 1889, they're hired by an Oklahoma land baron to eradicate (kill everyone) an Indian village but they change sides. And fail. And with failing, run out of space. The only question from then on is where they can hide. The answer is nowhere. There is a passage in the middle of the book: in order to escape from Chicago with their hides intact, they have to jump aboard a freight train laden with pigs bound for the slaughter house. One of the original members of the family, Jan, wants to leave. Winter doesn't try to stop him but he talks to him about what the world is like: "Everything out there is a lie," Winter said. "Can't you see it? . . . They just pretend. They just talk. `Cause they can`t face this. . . . This is what's real. This is how the meat you eat gets on your plate. This is how everything works. This is a novel about; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Satin Island: A novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Tom McCarthy Page; Review: Avant garde novelist and critic McCarthy is clearly a comer. His book, C, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010 and he won Yale's Windham Campbell Prize in 2013. (The citation reads: "Tom McCarthy constructs strange worlds where we find reflective echoes of our own and meditations on the meaning and making of art.") In a 2007 interview, McCarthy stated that one of the central themes in his work is repetition and duplication, and his 2006 (2008 in English) Tintin and the Secret of Literature draws heavily on postmodernist critical theory, particularly Derrida and Barthes. (Cf. Wikipedia article on McCarthy.) Satin Island is an amazing novel that isn't a novel. Plot, character development, and ambience are secondary in it (tertiary!) to an abstracted, rat-in-the-maze talking in loops and circles about intangibles that become imponderables as the protagonist worries over them: is there a pattern to (1) oil spills, (2) parachute deaths, (3) the way cancer takes over his friend's body, (4) Vanuatuan cargo cults and Christian beliefs in the return of the Messiah (is John Frumm an analogue of Jesus?)? The narrator is an anthropologist. He studies patterns, not objects, and refers to himself as "U" and to the corporation for which he works as "the Company." (Corporations, U writes, are "the primary structure of the modern tribe.") The Company's logo is the Tower of Babel. The Company pays him to apply the insights of post-structuralism to modern society, yielding insights that manufacturers can use to sell their products. ("feeding vanguard theory, almost always from the left side of the spectrum, back into the corporate machine") There are many references to Levi-Strauss, and in a moment of Barthesian playfulness, U points out the similarities in the careers of the anthropologist-explorer L-S and the blue-jeans entrepreneur L-S. If all this makes the book seem unapproachable, it's not. It's approachable and enjoyable. Part of it is the caliber of the close-to-free-flow narration, bouncing from topic to topic and moment to moment with little regard for linear sequencing. Part is the obsessional nature of U's musing. Part is just that McCarthy brings to light truths about our modern world that we glide past most of the time. O rather, given how allusive at the book is, perhaps it doesn't bring these truths to light but just brings them out of darkness. Aside from the lit crit boys and Levi-Strauss's own brilliant writings (particularly Tristes Tropiques, which U references more than once), are there antecedents for this type of fiction writing? The mix of allusiveness and concreteness, the distance stance toward the world observed, the same obsessional quality to the prose, all this reminds me of J. G. Ballard, which is a very good thing. This book could be a new-day The Drowned World (1962) or The Crystal World (1966() or Concrete Island (1974). Those who liked Ballard's creepy books -and I admired them immensely-- will find this book worthwhile too.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Whites: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Price Page; Review: This is the first novel written by Richard Price under the nom de plume Harry Brandt and Im not sure why the use of the alias, other than that he may intend to launch a series of outright crime novels under the name, keeping them separate from his often violence-laden novels of city life and its ofttimes criminal types. Whatever the reason, theres little difference between Prices novels and this new one by Harry Brandt. The characters come from the same milieu New York city lifeand, as in most of Prices books, they're working man types (in this book, cops, ex-cops and one nurse, who is the wife to a cop) more given to being led by their feelings than their minds. The protagonist, Billy Graves, is a NYPD detective: he works the graveyard shift. Twenty years earlier, his career had been derailed when he accidentally shot and killed a ten-year-old boy in a shootout with a lowlife gone insane on angel dust. Sure, the kid was collateral damage but there were serious doubts that Billy wasn't high himself at the time. Back then, Billy was part of a take-no-prisoners anti-crime unit popularly referred to as the Wild Geese. The members of the Wild Geese have all gone separate ways since then a funeral home director, a building super, some still cops-- but there are still ties among them. Each remembers an unsolved murder they presided over as detectives they knew who the killers were but couldn't collect enough evidence to convict them. Now one of the bad guys shows up dead, stabbed and bled to death in a subway station. Then there are more deaths. Its as if someone could it be cops?is cleaning the slates of the Wild Geeses unsolved list. Someone is stalking Billys family too and he doesnt know who or why. As backdrop to the crime, Brandt paints a convincing and often jarring picture of the daily life of a homicide cop. Billys family is his nurse wife Carmen, his senile father (ex-cop) and two boys who fight all the time but are still bonded together as brothers. He loves Carmen but is worried about her: something from before she met Billy drives her into recurrent bouts of depression: periodically and without warning dropp[ing] a black-dog mantle over her so profound that it might be days before she could bring herself to open the bedroom door. Price/Brandt is an old pro at bringing disparate storylines to a coherent and believable conclusion. As in his other novels, the moral issues involved are neither simple nor clean. This isn't Prices best novel but its a good one, and quite readable.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Paper Things; Author: Jennifer Richard Jacobson; Review: Paper Things is a really good book, not just for its targeted audience of Young Adults, but for everyone --adults, kids, whatever. I was in second grade when Mama Died. Thats Ari, now eleven. Before her mother died Daddy was already dead, killed in Iraqshe made Ari and her brother, Gage, seven years older than Ari, promise to stay together no matter what. That was her first request. Her second was that Ari get into Carter, the citys middle school for gifted children, when she was old enough. Now its crunch time. Aris eleven, a fifth-grader in her final year at Eastland Elementary. Until this year, shed seemed on the fast track to Carter. But Gage is eighteen. Theyd been living with Janna. Janna had been friends with their mother but theyd dropped out of touch, but when Mama was dying, she asked Janna to be the guardian of her children. The problem is that Gage and Janna don't get along and Gage cant take it any longer. So Ari and Gage split they leave Jannas apartment, spinning a lie about having a new apartment of their own. For the past few months, theyve been sleeping out in other peoples pads, sometimes in a shelter. Theyre running out of money and they move around so much that Ari cant concentrate on her schoolwork. Sometimes she comes to school now with her hair greasy and her shoes are wearing out. She has no money for school lunches. She hears a group of girls whispering that she smells. It isn't that Gage is unwilling to work. But work usually comes with a hitch: to get a job, you have to have prior experience in the job. How do you get started when all you have is the willingness to work? The sames true about getting an apartment. You need more than the first and last months rent: you need a bank account, which needs a permanent address, and you need a permanent employer as a reference. Paper things refers to Aris favorite pastime: when she wants to get out of her own situation, she plays with the dolls she has cut out of catalogs and carries around in her backpack. Shes got an entire family of them, along with changes of clothing and furniture for their house and little cutout dog. It would be sad if Ari weren't such a positive person: shes bright, shes loving, shes loyal to her friends even when they're not to her, and she doesnt give up, no matter what. She also has a lot of people rooting for her and in the end, that makes a difference. This is a lovely story about an exceptionally resourceful and decent young girl. Ari saves this book from being a tale of subjection and gloom, because she won't let herself think that way about herself. Also lovely are the other people in this book, who give the lie to how cold and isolate it can be to live in a big city. This books a winner.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Atlanta Burns; Author: Visit Amazon's Chuck Wendig Page; Review: At the start, this story seemed comic bookish to me and indeed it was: action and character are a bit though not a lot simplified and the issues at stake are never in any doubt. Its Good versus Bad. But as I read, I grew to like the book more, and mostly because the picture it painted of its protagonist, Atlanta Burns. I cant find the place in the book where it tells how old she is but shes somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, and though shes often uncertain about what she should do next and sometimes outright scared, through it all shes brave and determined. Shes been dealt a lousy hand in life. Her father died who knows when. Her mothers a drifter, worse than useless in a pinch regardless of her kind-of- love for her only daughter. Her mothers most recent boyfriend took advantage of Atlanta until one time, Atlanta waited for him with a shotgun filled with birdshot and let him have it in the crotch. Thats heady stuff for a sixteen-year-old new to a school. Shes got street credit for what she did but all she wants now is to blend in and for once, to seem just a normal kid. Then she comes across three bullies who are enjoying themselves by tormenting a young, almost effeminate Latino. Bullying triggers off complex feelings in Atlanta. She steps in to end to it. Things escalate. Soon shes in a full-blown war with the young hoods and their friends. In the course of resolving that business, she makes friends with another outsider in school, this one oh so flagrantly gay. Thus ends Part One (which originally was published separately). Part Two starts with a death. Is it a suicide or a murder? At first, Atlanta wants nothing to do with it although the dead boy is her new gay friend. (One of the virtues of this book is that Atlanta in no way acts like a super hero.) But the kids at school now seem to realize that shes the go-to girl if someone needs help. Atlanta is drawn into another investigation. A dog has been kidnapped. It finds its way home mangled and dies. The owner wants vengeance and shes willing to pay Atlanta to find out who did this and pay them back. The path leads to a dogfighting ring and White supremacists. Atlanta doesnt know how to move forward but she refuses to back out. You take it from there.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Happy are the Happy; Author: Yasmina Reza; Review: The liner notes cite Arthur Schnitzler's play, La Ronde (circulated privately in 1900 but not performed until 1920) as inspiration for this short, oblique novel about how upper class (for the most part) Parisians relate to each other. Schnitzler exposed scandalous truths about the games the Viennese played on each other in the process of sating their lust. La Ronde is about sexual predation, and the lies and moral ennui that attend it. Reza's book may have been inspired by Schnitzler's scandalous drama, both in form and content, but though sex is part of the baggage in Happy, Reza's novel is about loss and separation more than about conquest. It's about people who live together but no longer connect. Their isolation doesn't make them happy. They want back their illusions but that isn't going to happen. The women come off as more sympathetic in these narratives than the men. That's because the men dominate the world, whether as prosperous breadwinners or predatory Lotharios. Their wives and lovers are stuck with what's left. Thus an elderly wife reflects on her past with a husband who no longer notices or cares how she dresses: "When Ernest was at the height of his career, he'd inspect my appearance. It wasn't that he was being attentive. We went out a lot. I was a decorative element." She concludes with this observation, which isn't pretty but is affecting and very sad: "Women are seduced by frightful men, because frightful men present themselves in masks, as at a costume ball. They arrive with mandolins and party outfits." I don't want to give the impression that this is a depressing book because it isn't. Anyone who has seen Reza's plays or perhaps read her memoir of a campaign tour with Nicolas Sarkozy (Dawn, Dusk or Night, 2007) can attest that her sentences stick with you; her observations of human eccentricities and foibles are keen. There is also a good deal of humor interspersed in these narratives, even scenes of low farce. But the dominant tone is wistful. The title comes from a quotation by Borges: "Happy are the loved ones and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy." Some reviewers seem not to have caught the irony of this statement: it implies that love has nothing to do with happiness --it's just a bent of mind. One of the characters (there are seventeen narrators, and four speak twice) quotes another passage by Borges: "Ya no es magico el mundo. Te han dejado." (The world's not magical anymore. You've been left.) That's what this book is about, being left behind in a no longer magicked world.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star; Author: Paul Fischer; Review: Youd find this book hard to believe if you didn't know it was true. The character of Jong-Il is so bizarre and there are such unexpected twists in it that it reads like escapist fiction. But it isnt. It happened. In 1978, Kim Jong-Il, heir apparent to his father, North Korean Great Leader Kim Il-Sung, had South Koreas leading actress, Choi Eun-Hee, kidnapped while she was visiting Hong Kong: he had her brought to his country as his captive. Soon after, he kidnapped her ex-husband, South Koreas greatest director, Shin Sang-Ok. Shin and Choi were kept under wraps in the North Korean capitol, Pyongyang, for five years while Kims minions attempted to brainwash them into becoming happy and contented North Koreans. They didn't emerge into the public eye until the release of Emissary of No Return, the first of seven movies they made while captive in the Democratic Peoples Republic. Then, at last, three years later in 1986, they escaped while on a trip to Vienna, eluding the chaperones who watched over them constantly and fleeing to the American embassy. They had lost eight years of their lives; they hadnt seen or talked to their children or family for eight long years. The cause of their grief was Jong-Il, who is a case study in the dangers of raising a child with no sense of limits. His official biography reads like a mixture of hype and witchcraft. Called the Dear Leader from young adulthood, he was, the document says, born in Korea in the winter of 1942, except he wasn't actually. The date had been altered to align his birth with his fathers, a harmonious interval of exactly thirty years appearing between the two marvels. When he was born, a new star appeared in the heavens. At three weeks he was walking and at eight talking. As a three-year-old, Jong-Il walked into a classroom that contained a map of the Japanese islands (Japan was North Koreas enemy): he dipped his fingers into an inkpot and smeared black ink over the map. Instantly, typhoons and hurricanes rose, bringing death and destruction to the Japanese mainland. His fathers advice to him when he was just fourteen? Guns are your closest friend. By 1978, the North Korean government was almost bankrupt. Even its friends abroad, China and Russia, were no longer willing to bankroll the struggling country. But Jong-Il was waging another battle at home, more important to his wellbeing: he wanted to consolidate his position as heir to his father. His secret weapon, used even against his brother who was his rival, was the movie. A longtime devotee of movies, Jong-Il headed the nations film bureau. He made sure that all movies produced in North Korea exalted his father, who was portrayed as a combination of Christ, Lenin and Mao. The cult of personality dominated in North Korea and Jong-Il was its most effective practitioner. Perhaps it was from the James Bond movies that Jong-Il loved that he hatched his scheme to abduct talent he needed from other countries in order to boost his; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Kim Jong-Il Production; Author: Paul Fischer; Review: Youd find this book hard to believe if you didn't know it was true. The character of Jong-Il is so bizarre and there are such unexpected twists in it that it reads like escapist fiction. But it isnt. It happened. In 1978, Kim Jong-Il, heir apparent to his father, North Korean Great Leader Kim Il-Sung, had South Koreas leading actress, Choi Eun-Hee, kidnapped while she was visiting Hong Kong: he had her brought to his country as his captive. Soon after, he kidnapped her ex-husband, South Koreas greatest director, Shin Sang-Ok. Shin and Choi were kept under wraps in the North Korean capitol, Pyongyang, for five years while Kims minions attempted to brainwash them into becoming happy and contented North Koreans. They didn't emerge into the public eye until the release of Emissary of No Return, the first of seven movies they made while captive in the Democratic Peoples Republic. Then, at last, three years later in 1986, they escaped while on a trip to Vienna, eluding the chaperones who watched over them constantly and fleeing to the American embassy. They had lost eight years of their lives; they hadnt seen or talked to their children or family for eight long years. The cause of their grief was Jong-Il, who is a case study in the dangers of raising a child with no sense of limits. His official biography reads like a mixture of hype and witchcraft. Called the Dear Leader from young adulthood, he was, the document says, born in Korea in the winter of 1942, except he wasn't actually. The date had been altered to align his birth with his fathers, a harmonious interval of exactly thirty years appearing between the two marvels. When he was born, a new star appeared in the heavens. At three weeks he was walking and at eight talking. As a three-year-old, Jong-Il walked into a classroom that contained a map of the Japanese islands (Japan was North Koreas enemy): he dipped his fingers into an inkpot and smeared black ink over the map. Instantly, typhoons and hurricanes rose, bringing death and destruction to the Japanese mainland. His fathers advice to him when he was just fourteen? Guns are your closest friend. By 1978, the North Korean government was almost bankrupt. Even its friends abroad, China and Russia, were no longer willing to bankroll the struggling country. But Jong-Il was waging another battle at home, more important to his wellbeing: he wanted to consolidate his position as heir to his father. His secret weapon, used even against his brother who was his rival, was the movie. A longtime devotee of movies, Jong-Il headed the nations film bureau. He made sure that all movies produced in North Korea exalted his father, who was portrayed as a combination of Christ, Lenin and Mao. The cult of personality dominated in North Korea and Jong-Il was its most effective practitioner. Perhaps it was from the James Bond movies that Jong-Il loved that he hatched his scheme to abduct talent he needed from other countries in order to boost his; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Basic Law: A Mystery of Cold War Europe; Author: J. Sydney Jones; Review: Basic Law is subtitled a Cold War mystery, but save for the rare flashback, all of the action takes place in 1994, twenty-five years after something happened that ruptured the friendship of a tight knit group of seven young radicals and left one of them behind to rot in a Communist prison in Prague. Only one of the seven remained a firebrand Red Reni, they called herbut twenty-five years on, her influence has waned in German radical circles. Now she has committed suicide. But why? Her one-time lover, Sam Kramer, works now as Viennese correspondent for a middle-of-the-road newspaper. Once he had fire in his belly; now, its all about the paycheck at the end of the month. When hes called to the lawyers office for the reading of Renis will, Sam learns that hes been appointed executor for Renis tell-all memoirs. Its his job to see they get published. But they're gone and no one knows where they went. Many of the people he talks to think she never finished them it was just talk. Mysteries pile on mysteries there may have been a car bombing in Prague in 1969, there are the missing memoirs to be tracked down and vetted for publication, a shadowy someone seems to be trying to shut down Sams inquiries into Renis death. Then a car accident conveniently eliminates a former Stasi (East Germany secret police) agent who may have known something about Renis last actions. Lastly, there is a series of attacks and near-attacks on Sam. Someone wants Sam dead, it seems. Behind Reni's death seems to lurk the resurgence of neo-Nazism in Germany. Kramer lands an interview with the leader of a far Right political party (eight seats in the new German parliament!) and is amazed with how normal the new variety of Nazis are. Thats the scary thing about them: theyve learned how to package themselves. The closer Kramer gets to the truth about Reni, the more the packaging disappears: theres nothing pretty or ordinary about the thugs hes dealing with. They seem determined to shut down his search and his life along with it. Ive not read Joness other historical mysteries they're set in turn of the twentieth century Vienna and Hitlers Germanybut all have received uniformly positive reviews. This book, Basic Law, is crisply written, its filled with action, and there are real mysteries addressed in it. Thats enough for me!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Denton Little's Deathdate (Denton Little Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Lance Rubin Page; Review: The premise of Deathdate doesnt make sense: a breakthrough in DNA testing leads to scientists being able to pinpoint the day youll die and then the US government passes a law requiring you to be death tested. Why? Its not explained, and because its not, much of what happens en route to poor Dentons demise at eighteen, on the night of the senior prom, is underdetermined Im being nice: it doesnt make sense. Then theres the rash that moves up Dentons body the day before he is to die: the explanation for it is thin, thin, thin, but thats true of all of the scientific stuff in this Young Adult fantasy fable about a world where everybody knows when their end comes and the heros (Denton) is due to within the next day and a half. Thats whats weak in Denton Littles Deathdate, but theres a lot that right in it too. First of all, its a neat conceit: you know you're going to die but its up to you how you get there: are you going to be jerk or a saint? Dentons neither but he tends more toward the good side, hero perhaps rather than jerk, but through it all eighteen, with all thats right and wrong with being that old and no older. Rubin has down cold the way young people think and act and his command of sub-twenty dialogue is pretty cool. Denton himself is cool. Knowing hes going to die tomorrow, he still tries to navigate through it. At one point, his dad, whos a nice guy but clueless, has this brief exchange with Denton: Hey, Dent. Having a good night? Under the circumstances, yeah. I guess so. You? Yeah, you know. Its been a little tense in these parts. A little tense in these parts? Maybe thats not high drama but its pretty funny given the onrushing series of catastrophes that befall Denton in his final hours. This isn't a deep book, and some of the connections in it don't quite make sense, but its an enjoyable book. I suspect sixteen to eighteen-year-olders will like it. Denton and his friends and family are cool, Dentons feelings and problems (other than his impending death) are the ones kids his age tend to feel, and while the adventure is hokey its fun to follow. Besides, you have to like a book that has a character whos the Secretary of the US Department of Life Conclusions (acronym USDLC). I won't tell you what happens to Denton but yes, you root for him all the way through.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art; Author: Visit Amazon's Sue Roe Page; Review: 365+xvi p, 22 color illus., notes, bibliog, index. $29.95 This is the history of a decade, 1900-1910, and of the radical changes in what one painted, why one painted and how one painted that produced modernist art that is to say, the grounding art forms of the twentieth century. Its set in Montmartre, where an alternate bohemian lifestyle emerged at the start of the twentieth century that may be seen as a kind of living parade, a brief, dynamic, entertaining drama containing all the seeds of the main show and all the fun of the fair. (The book ends with this sentence.) It isn't the history of these extraordinary artists lives but of one decade in them. Nor is it intended to be a comprehensive disquisition on their utterances about art how one goes about seeing and thinking and capturing ones thoughts and sees on canvas or stone. And although Roe spreads her net wide and treats all she catches in it with equanimitous impartiality, its mainly the story of the two Big Fish, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, who between themselves pretty much defined modernist that is to say, non-representationalart. But along the way a lot of other figures are presented, and dealt with well Braque, Picassos alter ego for a few years; the Fauvists Derain and Vlaminck; Matisses hypercritical and ultimately confining teacher-mentor Paul Signac; the voracious collector Vollard; the admirable Gertrude Stein and her less perceptive brother Leo the portrayal of Steins companion, Alice B. Toklas. (Roe presents her as a more attractive figure than I have grown accustomed to think her. Maybe its because shes still young here.) Then there are Picassos lover-model Fernande Olivier and around the edges Appolinaire (a great poet but less successful as critic), the near-bizarre Max Jacob, Diaghilev, Van Donghen, Marie Laurencin, Modigliani, and behind the moderns, coloring their thinking and producing, the great, the irreplaceable Cezanne. Theres one other partner in this book Montmartre. As much as Roes book has a thesis it is that Montmartre created the milieu in which a new art could appear: the birthing place of modernism. The book isn't as much a work of original scholarship the ideas presented here have been proposed beforeas of intelligent synthesis, explication, and description. And although Matisse and Picasso receive equal billing in the title, and both figures appear regularly in the text, it is Picasso who ultimately dominates, which seems to me a fair judgment of the work of these two at that time: both giants but Picassos the more revolutionary and thus transforming of the two artists, at least for that decade. Roes formulations strike home. She recounts the negative reaction of Andre Derain to Picassos and Braques new cubist art. (This is in 1907.) Derain worried that painting would lose its profundity if constrained by esthetisme hasardeux (dangerous aestheticism). Un tableau ne commence pas par etre une idee. (A picture doesnt begin by being an idea.) Roe does an excellent job capturing the strains and rivalries in this small band of modernists and semi-modernists and how they played; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bitter Creek (The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pr); Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Bowen Page; Review: This is the fifteenth novel in the Gabriel Du Pre series but the first I ve read. Thats my loss. The hero-detective in this delightful book is Gabriel Du Pre. Hes Metis mostly Cree and French, a little English maybe. It doesnt talk about in this book but he used to be a cattle inspector, sometimes even sheriff. Hes retired now, settled down with his Metis girlfriend, Madeleine. He plays fiddle on the side. Hes a demon fiddler, a legend in Montana. Madeleines got a son, Chappie, who lost an eye and a leg in Iraq. He drinks too much. A friend, his lieutenant in Iraq, comes for Chappie. He wants Chappie to accompany him: Chappies slated to receive the Navy Cross. But first they have to get Chappie sober, so off they head to the sweat lodge. And there the mystery begins: because in the sweat lodge they hear voices voices of the deadlong dead, a band of Metis slaughtered in 1910 in a place called Bitter Creek. From that point on, it gets weird. Theres a very old, very frail woman who claims to have been there, the sole survivor of the massacre. There are people who don't want Gabriel and Chappie to look for the dead peoples bones. Theres a death a new one- and then another. One thing after another, things get complicated. In short, yes, this book is a mystery and sufficiently convoluted to keep mystery lovers up late to finish the book and find out what finally happens in it. But more than that, Bitter Creek is about a way of life, of talking and acting. It has a good deal in common with the life-affirming novels of Ivan Doig, which is high praise in my book. As a mystery, it reminds me a bit of Tony Hillermans novels about Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee of the Navajo tribal or, earlier, Arthur Upfields admirable mysteries about the half-European half-aborigine detective Napoleon Bony Bonaparte, who settles cases among the aborigines of southern and southwestern Australia. Two earlier reviewers wrote they were frustrated by carryovers from previous books in the series. I had no problem with this. These are always judgment calls but I felt that Bowen said just enough about Du Pres and his associates past history to inform what was presently taking place. I went to the Internet to learn more about the series but I didn't need to know it to enjoy the book I was holding in my hands. And I loved the way Du Pre talks the idiosyncracies of Metis-English dialect-- and behaves. The book is loaded with local color and filled with colorful characters. We need more books like this. I don't know when Ill get around to it, but Im looking forward to reading more in this exceptional series.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Our Souls at Night (Vintage Contemporaries); Author: Visit Amazon's Kent Haruf Page; Review: Addie Moores husband died years ago. So did Louis Waterss wife. They live in the same town, not far from each other, in the houses they shared with their spouses for decades. They know of each other but were never friends, just neighbors who acted friendly toward each other in passing. Then one evening, just before dark, Addie shows up on Louiss porch. He invites her in and she makes a proposal to him: its one of the oddest hes ever heard but he understands it. She wants him to come over to her house some night and sleep with her. Not for sex. For talk. Comfort. To sleep with someone else for a night, maybe more nights, but not to live with him. Hes lonely too, though hes never admitted it to himself. He does it. Their relationship blossoms. They find they have a lot to talk about: their dead mates, their children, how their marriages worked out (mixed good and not as good), how neither of them wound up making of their lives what they wanted from them. Addies son drops his son Jamie off with grandma while he goes through a rough patch: his wife has left him, his business is folding, and he may go bankrupt. Louis and Addie adjust to Jamie, help him grow. By then the neighborhood knows of their relationship: some approve, some dont. Addie and Louis have learned one of the advantages of growing old. They don't have to care any more what other people think of their behavior. The only opinions that count are their own. Thats liberating after a life of living so other people don't condemn you. Late in the book, Addie asks Louis what he thinks of their arrangement. Ive gotten so I can stand it, he said. It feels normal now. Just normal? Im trying to have some fun with you. I know you are. Tell me the truth. The truth is I like it. I like it a lot. Id miss it if I didn't have it. What about you? I love it, she said. Its better than I had hoped for. Its a kind of mystery. I like the friendship of it. I like the time together. Being here in the dark of the night. The talking. Hearing you breathe next to me if I wake up. I like all that too. Now talk to me. Tell me something I haven't heard yet. I don't want to spoil the ending of this book. It takes an unexpected twist and isn't all happiness. But the overwhelming impression this book leaves in your mind is of simple friendship that moves into love, and of two old people who discover they're still able to learn and grow. Its beautiful. There are no verbal fireworks, no peeking inside characters heads. Everything is observed from the outside. Its simple. Clean. Human. Haruf is like a benevolent grandfather who looks down on his creatures antics without judging them, never condemning. (Note: Haruf was dying when he wrote this. His widow finished the editing.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Map: Collected and Last Poems; Author: Visit Amazon's Wislawa Szymborska Page; Review: Everythings mine but just on loan, nothing for memory to hold, though mine as long as I look. These are the first lines of the short poem, Travel Elegy --37 lines longwhich is about memory, one of Szymborskas recurrent themes. But it is a poets memory, which remembers details and the details reconstruct historic wholes: events, people and places now long gone. It wasn't all she was but Szymborska was one of the preeminent poets of memory in our modern age. Some of her poems have grand historic dimension Starvation Camp Near Jaslo, for instance. Some are closer to our everyday experience, but no less poignant for that because memory is loss, thats all it is, loss remembered but lost still. There are the phrases! Szymborska coined some of the most apt and unforgettable phrases in modern poetry. She calls Rubenss models O fatty dishes of love!, compares them their skinny sisters in medieval illustrations. (Rubens Women) The problem here, of course, is that Im not reading Szymborska, Im reading her translator, Clare Cavanagh. The above phrases probably translate literally, or almost so, from the original Polish, but it gets trickier in some of the rhymed poems, Bodybuilders Contest, for instance, with these two pairings: The king of is he who preens and wrestles with sinews twisted into monstrous pretzels. An audacious pairing wrestles with pretzelsand the last two lines: The mammoth fist he raises as he wins is tribute to the force of vitamins. I admire it but in Polish, what were the rhyming words? Were they wrestles and pretzels, wins and vitamins? Ultimately, it doesnt matter to me but when I read these wonderful poems, so many of which hit home in the subtle appropriateness of their imagery, I need to remember that I am reading the work of two master poets, not one, and the one (the original poet) I am able to enjoy only because of the inventive and empathetic work of the second ((the translator). The poems in this collection date from 1962 to her death in 2012. They are all short. The range is wide: refusing to grow old while admitting one is old, the fleeting nature of water, the interchanges of marriage and relationship, ordinary and exceptional deceits. (On this last topic, read the last poem in the collection, Map!) Throughout the poet displays an acute sensitivity to concrete fact (a hand is twenty-seven bones, thirty-five muscles, around two thousand nerve cells in every tip of all five fingers) combined with the ability to seize on one image or detail and use it to evoke a new (or newly experienced) whole.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Viper Wine: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Hermione Eyre Page; Review: Five pages into this delightful conceit of a novel, the husband of the protagonist, Sir Kenelm Digby, explorer, inventor, hunter after arcane truths, pirate and courtier, falls asleep. He has been thinking on his difficult but much-loved wife, Venetia. The chapter ends with this lovely passage, which melds Sir Kenelms and Venetias time with ours, four centuries beyond: "These and other tactful verbal constructions, euphemisms and put-downs for women from the future crackled like static through Sir Kenelms sleeping mind as it drifted up, up into the darkness above their curtained bed, up, above the brick gables of Gayhurst, up, above the darkened, gaping fields of Buckinghamshire and the badly drawn outline of the British coast, until he could go no further and simply bobbed, like a tethered balloon, while satellites in orbit sallied gently past his ears." The way this passage is framed, the choice and sequencing of images and words, presages how knowledge will be experienced in the rest of the novel. Sir Kenelms and Venetias past and our present, and all the times between, will collide, gently, obliquely, but collide, intermingle. If you, the reader, cant tolerate this type of poetic elision, then don't read this book. But if you can, you will find that over time the sometimes intrusive mentions of the present reinforce and subtly, oh so subtly, illuminate the past. The story told is fairly straightforward: Venetia, long a beauty, is growing older. Shes had children two boys. Even her doting husband admits shes fatter. She fears lines on her face, the slow collapse of her bust. Shes no longer asked to play the virginal beauty in the queens masques, rather to play Arachne, the Spider Queen. "Ripeness, she thought, is but the first sign of rot; there is no rest to be had anywhere on this planet. . . . Ageing . . . happened slowly, and then suddenly, like a huge stock of water drains for a long time, hardly depleted, till the last swills vanish quickly. . . .To my love, my husband, I am like a tree he sits beneath; he does not perceive my leaves a-turning." But Venetia plans to do something about it. Theres a potion, an elixir. Its called Viper Wine and supposedly its made by grinding up what? the skins? flesh? venom?of poisonous vipers, for as snakes shed their skin and emerge with a new skin shiny, smooth and firm, why should not also women? The man who sells it is a charlatan but not to Venetia. She drinks it, feels immeasurably better, although she doesnt notice shes become addicted to some substance in the potion. She hasn't really prettied up, shes just addled. The charlatan suggests a remedy for her frown lines: in a primitive Botox operation, he incises cuts in her cheeks and forehead and injects diluted adder venom into the wounds. Venetia doesnt notice the red scars that now ruin her face. Shes sure she looks beautiful again. What follows is tragedy. Who would ever have suspected that outright vanity, too, could be a fit; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Viper Wine: A Novel - Kindle edition; Author: Visit Amazon's Hermione Eyre Page; Review: Five pages into this delightful conceit of a novel, the husband of the protagonist, Sir Kenelm Digby, explorer, inventor, hunter after arcane truths, pirate and courtier, falls asleep. He has been thinking on his difficult but much-loved wife, Venetia. The chapter ends with this lovely passage, which melds Sir Kenelms and Venetias time with ours, four centuries beyond: "These and other tactful verbal constructions, euphemisms and put-downs for women from the future crackled like static through Sir Kenelms sleeping mind as it drifted up, up into the darkness above their curtained bed, up, above the brick gables of Gayhurst, up, above the darkened, gaping fields of Buckinghamshire and the badly drawn outline of the British coast, until he could go no further and simply bobbed, like a tethered balloon, while satellites in orbit sallied gently past his ears." The way this passage is framed, the choice and sequencing of images and words, presages how knowledge will be experienced in the rest of the novel. Sir Kenelms and Venetias past and our present, and all the times between, will collide, gently, obliquely, but collide, intermingle. If you, the reader, cant tolerate this type of poetic elision, then don't read this book. But if you can, you will find that over time the sometimes intrusive mentions of the present reinforce and subtly, oh so subtly, illuminate the past. The story told is fairly straightforward: Venetia, long a beauty, is growing older. Shes had children two boys. Even her doting husband admits shes fatter. She fears lines on her face, the slow collapse of her bust. Shes no longer asked to play the virginal beauty in the queens masques, rather to play Arachne, the Spider Queen. "Ripeness, she thought, is but the first sign of rot; there is no rest to be had anywhere on this planet. . . . Ageing . . . happened slowly, and then suddenly, like a huge stock of water drains for a long time, hardly depleted, till the last swills vanish quickly. . . .To my love, my husband, I am like a tree he sits beneath; he does not perceive my leaves a-turning." But Venetia plans to do something about it. Theres a potion, an elixir. Its called Viper Wine and supposedly its made by grinding up what? the skins? flesh? venom?of poisonous vipers, for as snakes shed their skin and emerge with a new skin shiny, smooth and firm, why should not also women? The man who sells it is a charlatan but not to Venetia. She drinks it, feels immeasurably better, although she doesnt notice shes become addicted to some substance in the potion. She hasn't really prettied up, shes just addled. The charlatan suggests a remedy for her frown lines: in a primitive Botox operation, he incises cuts in her cheeks and forehead and injects diluted adder venom into the wounds. Venetia doesnt notice the red scars that now ruin her face. Shes sure she looks beautiful again. What follows is tragedy. Who would ever have suspected that outright vanity, too, could be a fit; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Stepdog: A Memoir; Author: Visit Amazon's Mireya Navarro Page; Review: When New York Times reporter Mireya Navarro fell for fellow reporter Jim Sterngold, she knew shed met her match. And she had. She married him knowing she had inherited not just a husband but two stepchildren, who lived half time with Jim and half with their mother. She worried how they would accept her. There were problems but they passed. The real problem wasn't the children. It was Eddie. Eddie was Jims dog, maybe part Australian blueheeler but who can tell, more of a Heinz 57 mix in truth. Eddie was Jims dog. Not hers. And jealous of her. This is Mireyas account of her complicated, most of the time frustrating relationship with stubborn, conniving, unfriendly Eddie, who refused to accept her as a presence in his beloved masters life and made her life miserable with his small slights and obnoxious personal habits: he gobbled up other dogs manure and fought other dogs when she took him for a walk, squeezed between her husband and her when she tried to cozy up to Jim, ignored her around the house and then bounced up, tail a-wagging because Jim had entered the room. This is Mireyas take on the relationship. Her telling of it is interesting enough and I admire her honesty, both about dealing with Eddie but with Jims children --how do you discipline teenagers who aren't yours and whom you see only half of the week any way? And while she reached a rapprochement of sorts with Eddie as he grew old and she writes over and over how much she loves and admires her husband, theres something mean or rather, petty- about her reactions through much of this narrative. The jealousy isn't just Eddies toward her, its hers toward him. Reading about it didn't make me enjoy the account more although it is well written and honest.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Strangled Silence; Author: Visit Amazon's Oisin McGann Page; Review: (For ages 12-17) This isn't your typical Young Adult novel, not even of the dystopic variety. (When did we come up with the phrase Young Adult to characterize teenagers? Theyre not adults, but instead kids on the long stormy path toward adulthood.) The Good Guys don't all win by the end of this dark novel, although theres a ray of hope, and not everybody good ends up safe, unless you think being railroaded into prison is safe. The world depicted in it is frightening. Control of the media, peeking and spying, use of extreme brainwashing techniques to manufacture false truths, discrediting your enemies with media blitzes, it all seems credible in todays world, and its scary. This is a novel about Little Guys against shadowy Big Guys, and the Big definitely win out over the Little in it. By the end, because of the concerted efforts of four people, theres hope that the lies Big Government spreads around may be controverted but its not at all sure whats going to happen. One of the four Little Guys has just been brainwashed, another is recovering from brainwashing, and I won't tell you what happens to the other two because itd spoil the story. At the center is the question of war in far-off Sinnostan, and whether there is a war or is it all a giant hoax to justify the governments control of ordinary citizens like us. Conspiracy theories abound, what seems real is soon seen as not, and the guys in power seem like the real enemies. This dark thriller offers a view of the world that seems real enough to be real, but its a world I hope we never live to see.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Book of Phoenix; Author: Visit Amazon's Nnedi Okorafor Page; Review: The Book of the Phoenix is both a good story and a book of transcendent, poetic beauty. Set some time in our own future, at a time when the waters have reclaimed much of our coast line and were paying the debt for our failure to respect natures limits. Oil is still a big concern and the U.S., like other governments, dances to the tune of the big corporations. The oil fields in Nigeria are protected by killer robots they look like oversized spiders- that react instinctively to tear apart any intruders on the oil fields. Across America, there are seven Towers, raised by a gen tech corporation to hide its hideous experiments on human bodies, suing genetic and cyborg technology. Phoenix is one of their creations, an accelerated kind of human. Though two years old, she looks like a forty-year-old. Her body repairs any injuries to it in minutes. She has eidetic memory and reads at an accelerated pace. Shes never been outside her prison, Tower 7, where her captors experiment on her body without the benefit of any anesthetic. In all essential respects, Phoenix is human: she thinks, she feels, shes even in love with another created creature, Saeed, who eats rust and metal and glass for nourishment instead of normal food. Theyre not supposed to show affection to each other but theyve snatched a few surreptitious kisses when their monitors aren't looking. Then one day Saeed kills himself. Its deliberate. He eats an apple apples, any normal human food, is poison to him. In her quest to find out why, Phoenix escapes the Tower and flees to Africa, the land of her forefathers. Her abusers pursuethey see her only as a humanized weaponbut Phoenix wins through. In the process, she learns a great deal about herself and her amazing capabilities, about the kindness that ordinary people show her, and about how they are all abused by the evil acts of the corrupt corporations that set up the Towers. A novel like this could easily be fluffy, New Age-ish, preachy, but this one isnt. Okorafor is a master story teller who has struck just the right tone to tell a cautionary tale about much of what is wrong in our present day world. This is a very good book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Signal: A Sam Dryden Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Patrick Lee Page; Review: Drawn by a call cut off in mid-message, a police team speeds to an address in the desert outside L. A. to rescue a young girl whos been missing for over three years kidnapped and never seen or heard of again. Until now. When they get there, they find a mobile home burnt to the ground. In the ashes is a cage. Inside the cage are the burnt remains of four young girls, abducted and held captive by a furtive recluse with a history of sexual abuse. The mans dead too, consumed by the fire that burnt down his home and killed captives. Four hours earlier, Sam Dryden, a veteran with a classified military record, is contacted by a former comrade: she runs a private security business now. Sam needs to meet up with her now! And Sam, don't bring your cell phone! Soon they are racing to save the four young captives. They get to the mobile home barely in time to kill the child molester and release his captives before the house trailer is consumed in flames. Whats happening here? We have two different narratives of the same event, with radically different endings. Thats our introduction to the gimmick at the core of this high-action thriller. Someone has invented a very secret weapon with great potential both for good and bad. Some very bad guys want it for very bad ends. Soon Sam and his partner are running for their lives, pursued by villains who always seem to know where theyll be even before they know themselves. There are a lot of close calls and a good deal of shooting before its all resolved. Signal is a fast-paced thriller that rips along for about three-quarters of the ride, then inexplicably slacks off on the accelerator for the closing. The weapon that leads to all of the shenanigans is scientifically implausible, but hey, thats alright, its not the first time that the bounds of science have been stretched to make a good story. But the ending is sketchy and there is a serious drop in intensity as it winds down. Its a shame because for three-quarters of the novel, its a gripping read.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010; Author: Visit Amazon's Tony Judt Page; Review: When Tony Judt (best known for his Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, 2005) died in 2010, this country lost one of its clearest voices of conscience. He was only 62, struck down by ALS. He spent the last few years of his life confined in a wheelchair, virtually immobile people read him texts, then he thought through his argument inside his head and dictated it back to them. I suspect Ill Fares the Land and The Memory Chalet, both published in 2010 were composed that way. Certainly his book with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012) was: a series of conversations between two peers who shared a common historical interest (Central Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) and a shared commitment to examining hard truths. This collection, edited by Judts widow, historian Jennifer Homans (who contributes a moving and perceptive foreword about what motivates Judt as historian and social commentator) brings together some of Judts occasional pieces, grouped around a number of themes: what has happened to Europe since the collapse of Russian communism in 1989; his concerns about the present history of Israel, and his reaction Americas largely knee jerk support for the country; Americas, and the UNs, role in world politics since 9/11; reflections on how we live now (including an exchange with his teenage son Daniel); and eulogies for three dead peers, Francois Furet, Amos Elon, and Leszek Kolakowski. (The essays on Israel drew controversy: Judts disapproval of Israels position vis--vis the Palestinians was not popular with the Israel lobby in the US.) Most of the essays originally appeared in the NY Review of Books, Judts journal of preference; others in the NY Times and elsewhere. The title is from a quotation commonly attributed to John Maynard Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? That certainly Judt, who, for all the passion he showed in his writing, was never doctrinaire. Judts virtues as a historian, social critic, just as a menschare on display in these writings. Whether one agrees with Judts viewpoint in them or not, he writes lively, compelling prose. He writes as though hes talking to you and he isn't afraid to assume you are intelligent and well read: there is no dumbing down in Judts essays. The sources he draws on are wide and catholic his affinity for social history helps him, as does his seemingly eidetic memory for social and economic facts. He structures his arguments well. Again, whether you agree with what he writes or not, it is easy to follow his lucid prose and systematic arguing. Above the rest of his many admirable qualities as an essayist, he though definitely an intellectual, he had not removed himself from the world. He was the kind of man youd like to know but now won't except through these lively and wholly admirable writings.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Assholes: A Theory; Author: Visit Amazon's Aaron James Page; Review: This is a serious attempt to address a moral conundrum but do it in a manner accessible to non-academic readers. As such, its in the tradition of the many books written by Alain de Bouton --How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) is the firstand philosopher Harry Frankfurts book on a product that cant be named on this page, which was a surprise bestseller in 2005. James doesnt find it hard to define his subject: he (seldom she) is a person who ignores other peoples feelings, opinions, rights and situations, someone who simply feels entitled to his or her own priority in discussion or action. The intriguing question is why it bothers us so much: there are many worse crimes. James argues that it is our feeling that we are not being heard. Its more complicated than this, of course, but these people make us feel we don't matter, maybe not even exist. Their denial of our selfness enrages us. James asks other questions. Why, for instance, are they almost always males? Is it a masculine phenomenon? Not exclusively, but for every Ann Coulter or Tiger Mom Amy Chua, he writes, one finds thousands of males. (Read his comments on Newt Gingrich and Kanye West.) He draws on gender theory and the places where moral philosophy and social theory intersect to posit that offenders are more socialized than born: the vastly different patterns of social interaction to which boys and girls are acculturated make it much more likely for a man than a woman to turn into a roaring jerk of this variety. Likewise he draws on the writings on moral luck to address questions of blame: how much are they to be held to account for their boorish behavior. Lastly, and I feel at too great length, he discusses the causes and effects of the rise of his subject in our capitalist society: America, with its tradition of rampant individualism and commitment to all-for-self capitalism, is at risk of losing its social glue today; Japan, collectivist still, is not. This last section is neither that original nor interesting to read: what he says has already been said elsewhere and better. The book concludes with Jamess letter to an anonymous one of his subjects, which is eminently forgettable. Over all, Jamess book shows both the rewards and the dangers of popularizing philosophical discussion. He raises serious questions and addresses them lucidly and comprehensively. But in the first half of the book, he is prone to adding cutesy side comments that, however funny they may strike you at the moment, change the tone of the book. And the second half, though it too addresses serious issues, seems padded and reads dull.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Fly Trap; Author: Fredrik Sjberg; Review: Fredrik Sjoberg captures flies. Thats what he does for a living. He lives on a small island off the coast of Sweden 16 square kilometers in area, 300 residents during most of the yearcatching, examining and categorizing hoverflies, just that one category of flies but, he argues, one of the most glorious and interesting types of flies. Part of the reason is that hoverflies imitate other insects from wasps and other flies to even a kind of bumblebee- and each species has very specific requirements for food and thus habitat. Hes been doing this on his island his family lives there too- for seven years and hes caught and categorized around 200 species of hoverflies. If he does it for the remainder of this life, which is quite conceivable, he may find specimens of thirty, with great luck forty more kinds. In the meantime, he catches more of the species he already has, trying to find answers, however tentative, to some of the puzzles they raise: what do they use for food and where do they lay their eggs, what conditions are necessary for them to prosper, why are some species that used to be common suddenly rare or missing? Hes got enough work to keep him happy for the rest of his productive life. And the tools of the trade are simple: net, pooter, Malaise net, something to put them to sleep (permanently), mounting pins and microscope. I knew what an insect net was before this but not a pooter. (Its a long tube: you put one end of it over the insect and puff in from the other end; the bugs dragged into the tube and cant get out; it doesnt end up in your mouth because theres a net between the bug and you.) And Id never heard of a Malaise net, which is an outsized tent-like thing that traps insects its upper reaches. Regardless of the name, it has nothing to do with illnesses. Rather, its name after its inventor, Rene Malaise (1892-1978), another Swedish entomologist who led a much more adventurous life than Sjoberg, or indeed, anyone short of Indiana Jones. (Sjoberg tells us a lot about Malaises life ion the course of this narrative.) Along the way, youll read of other heroes of Sjobergs none are names youll recognize: Felix Bryk, Frithiof Nordstrom, Malaises short-term and somewhat exotic wife Esther Blendaand youll learn what the playwright Strindberg had to say about collectors buttonologists, he called them. (He wasn't complimenting them.) All of this is narrated in a lucid but poetic prose that captures that science offers as much sheer joy to the ardent practitioner as it does hard, constant work to be done. Sjoberg is a graceful writer who isn't afraid to borrow from other sources: an image from Kunderas Slowness, repeated references to Linnaeus and Darwin, a poem (about flowers) from Shelley. (Sjobergs comment: has any poet ever written a verse honoring flies?) The reader who enjoyed biologist Bernd Heinrichs 2007 memoir, The Snoring Bird, will be thoroughly at home with this lovely little book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Jezebel Remedy: A novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Martin Clark Page; Review: This is the fourth legal thriller by Virginia circuit court judge Clark. His previous novels have all done well as will, I suspect, this one. This ones about a lawyer, well, two of them, husband and wife team Lisa and Joe Stone. Theyve been married for twenty years and they handle mainly the small business of law in a sleepy town divorces, domestic disputes and suits for personal injury. Theyre in love a lot in love- even after twenty years of marriage, and they re both hot Lisa cant walk into a room without all the men staring at her and Joe had his own cowboyish charm, even though he does have some irritating habits that Lisa wishes she could change but knows she never can. Then theres Lettie, the client from hell, half mad, changing her will from week to week, and involved in an endless stream of verbal and physical altercations with her neighbors, the law, and not so much Joe, whom she seems to like, as Lisa, whom she clearly doesnt and makes sure she knows it. When Lettie is found dead in a fire, the evidence points to her running an illegal meth lab. She left Joe as her executor so the Stones cant get away from her even in death. Joe examines and something doesnt look right: hes not sure Letties death was an accident and there are strange people hanging around who have an unusual interest in Letties estate. Before long, the Stones are entangled in a conspiracy and their opponents seem to have all the cards. In the meantime, Lisa is hiding something from Joe, something that could, if he finds out, end their marriage. Complication after complication, goonish henchmen and an oily corporate scoundrel, it all ends in a trial or the lead up to one. The plot stretches things a bit but Clark writes an amusing story with appealing characters and he holds your interest to the end. Its not quite my cup of tea a bit too Southern cutesy for mebut its a good story and he relates it with charm and brio.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: BULL MOUNTAIN; Author: Visit Amazon's Brian Panowich Page; Review: The past comes back to pollute the present in this action-packed novel about a backwoods Georgia crime family. The action ricochets back and forth across sixty years from the primal murder of one brother by another to a final and bloody showdown. The Burroughs aren't nice guys. Its the kind of family you don't get out but one, grandson Clayton, manages it. Hes sheriff of McFalls County, the county where his brothers live as though in a separate nation way up at the top of unassailable Bull Mountain. The clan used to make bootleg liquor, then switched to growing pot and these days they mostly run meth but they're the same guys living the same brutal life, out there away from the rest of mankind, protected by their homestead. Then one day, a rogue federal agent Alcohol Tobacco and Firearmsshows up in Claytons office. He tells Clayton the feds are ready to mount an all-out assault on Bull Mountain: Clayton can save his older brother Hal if he can persuade him to get out of the business. Hal hates Clayton, sees him as a renegade and a weakling. Clayton leaves their meeting battered and bleeding. From that point on, everything heads downhill. But there are surprises in store, some very nasty double-dealing. Wham, bam, everything blows up, and thats the end almost. Not everything rings true in this fine debut novel but nothing is so far over the top as to make it not credible. Think of it more as violence on speed.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ruins of War: A Mason Collins Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's John A. Connell Page; Review: Ruins of War is as good a historical thriller as you will read this year. Set in the winter of 1945 in war-torn Munich, in the American Occupation Zone, where the Amies are still sorting out how to deal with their so recent enemies, it details the frantic search for a serial killer. The man looking is Mason Collins, former Chicago cop, U. S. soldier and prisoner of war. He works now for the Army CID. Collins is a bulldog smart and experienced, but even more, willing to bend rules in order to capture this madman who eviscerates his victims while they're still alive, then lops off their limbs and leaves them behind arranged in the form of a cross. The narrative voice leaps back and forth between pursuer and pursued: part way through, the pursued recognizes who is pursuing him and begins stalking him too. This may be Connells first novel but it shows no signs of beginners work. Connell writes like a bullet, hard and hammering on impact. You won't want to put this novel down.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Don't Lose Her (The Max Freeman Mysteries); Author: Jonathon King; Review: The action never lets up in this thriller about a kidnapped woman and the private investigator set loose by her husband to get her back. Max Freeman is a former cop. He left the force after killing a thirteen-year-old boy in a shootout. Since then, hes worked as a P.I. and the last few years, for his friend, big-time lawyer Billy Manchester. Billys wife, Diane, is a federal judge and shes presiding over the extradition hearing of a Colombian drug lord. If the federals succeed in their case, he faces fifty years in American prisons. If the federals cave in, hell be extradited back to Colombia where he owns all the judges. Dianes also very pregnant, eight months into her term. When she leaves the courthouse for lunch one noon, s white van swoops up, two men in ski masks pop out, sweep her up and bundle her into the van, and off they go. The FBI is on the case right away but Billy trusts his friend Max more: Max can do things quicker at times than can the Feebies, and he isn't afraid to go farther than the law allows if he has to. Billy provides Max with the intell and with cash to buy leads, and off Max goes. The story is told from three viewpoints: Max narrates his own chase, Diane her own plight and the third is a no-chance woman, the girlfriend of a clueless boyfriend who has signed on the kidnap the judge without knowing what hes gotten into. Local color abounds as the chase ends in a bloody confrontation deep in the Everglades. Theres a surprise at the very end as Billy and Max finally figure out why Diane was taken in the first place.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Year of Magical Thinking Playscript. Joan Didion; Author: Visit Amazon's Joan Didion Page; Review: These lines first appeared in Joan Didion's memoir of the same title. They migrated to the play version, which is ... moving ... emotionally devastating ... honest and human. Lynn says she will spend the night. I say no, Im fine. And I am. Until the morning. When I wake up and he still isn't there. On December 30, 2003, Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, had come home from the hospital where they had been keeping vigil over the comatose body of their daughter (step-daughter) Quintana, who was in a coma, fighting off pneumonia and advanced septic shock. They got home in early evening and settled in. John was reading a book about the First World War. He had a drink, asked for a second one. He asked her what shed given him, said she shouldnt mix liquors. They were sitting across from each other at the table. He was talking and then he wasnt. She thought he was pulling a joke on her, said, Dont do that. He slumped over. She moved closer, thinking he was choking on something, and he fell face down on the table and then onto the floor. Dark liquid pooled around his face. He was dead. Just like that. And like happens to us when something like that happens, we find it hard to admit change. Because if we don't admit it, maybe it didn't happen. Maybe time can be reversed, even though we know it cant. Quintana recovered, left the hospital. She spoke at the memorial service for John. That was March 23. Two days later, on the 25th, she flew to California with her husband Gerry to visit Malibu. Joan was happy: she wanted her daughter to feel the Malibu breeze blowing across her face again, wanted her to be a child again. That evening a friend called, said he was on the way over to her apartment. Joan thought it was about his wife, who had been ill. It wasnt. It was Quintana. She had stepped off the plane and collapsed on the runway, concussing herself in the process. Plane flight to California. Quintana back in the hospital. ICU. Messages from the neurosurgeon: Midline shift. Brain pushed to the left side. Massive arterial bleed. Blood everywhere, like a geyser, no clotting factor. One pupil was fixed and the other went as we wheeled her in. Five weeks later, April 30 (my birthday, by the way), she was stable enough to be transferred. Neurorehabilitation. The Rusk Institute, NYU. My call is behind me. I am taking her home. It might take six weeks, even the whole summer and fall, but she will play tennis again. Except she died. June 2005. Another ICU. This one, Cornells. Acute pancreatitis. Septic shock. Dead. I did not want the year after either of them died to end. Didions a writer. She processes things through writing, through stepping outside herself and observing how she, not some alien subject, reacts. Reaction filtered through observation. So she wrote a book, a memoir, and then this play. When; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Library at Mount Char; Author: Visit Amazon's Scott Hawkins Page; Review: Carolyn, blood-drenched and barefoot, walked alone down the two-lane stretch of blacktop that the Americans called Highway 78. Thats the first sentence in this hell-for-leather fantasy novel, and it doesnt let up ever. There are twelve children in this very odd family. David kills people well, not just people, anything living will dohe has become the slave of murder. Margaret dies deliberately kills herself-- and then after shes decayed for a while, they bring her back from death. This strange life doesnt bother her as much as it used to: she no longer screams herself awake at night but shes developed this irritating giggle. Michael has immersed himself so in the ways of animals that he can barely speak a human tongue any more. And what of Carolyn, the protagonist of this story? Carolyns a Librarian, the most bookish of them all. What she does is learn languages. The last time she counted, she knew fifty, but that was long ago. Some are live, some dead, some are human tongues and some are not. She knows, for example, the language of storms. And then theres Father. He isn't really their father but hes the one who, long ago, adopted these twelve children and hes the one whos trained them to be the strange powerful creatures they now are. Hes not a kind loving father, oh no, not at all! When any of his children disobey, or even when they disappoint, he punishes them. His favorite punishment is a giant barbecue shaped like a bronze bull: he pops them inside and cooks them until all thats left is charred bones. And then he resurrects them. If they don't get the lesson, he does it over and over until theyre, as a management trainee might say, sufficiently incentivized. They all live together on Mount Char. Dont you see? Char! Isnt that funny? Fathers missing now and the children want to find him. Not because they miss him but because he is powerful power-filledwithout him around, the world is even more dangerous than it was with him in it. Especially because of the Library. Thats where Father has recorded all the secrets hes discovered in his eons long life. If they don't find Father, or find a way to take over the Library on their own, even scarier creatures may take over and make them suffer. This weird, utterly original masterpiece reminds me a bit of the free-wheeling works of Neil Gaiman the crumbling of our assumptions about how things work in the ordinary world, the feeling that utterly creepy people may still make sense somehow, a peek into a universe tangential to our own and utterly its own selfs, and not ours. This is a very good book, not just as a debut novel, but as a novel, period.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Constellations: A Play; Author: Visit Amazon's Nick Payne Page; Review: Constellations comes with praise from high quarters: John Lahr called it a singular astonishment (The New Yorker), two different reviewers in the New York Times waxed ecstatic over it (Matt Wolf: The nearest Ive come across in ages to a play that feels heaven-sent. Ben Brantley: [It] gets in your head and under your skin with an immediacy that sometimes tickles and often hurts.). It won the London Evening Standard award for best play. What makes Constellations exceptional is its combination of emotional warmth and experimental form. There are two characters, Marianne, a physicist, and Ben, a beekeeper. They meet, dance around each other, either fall in love with each other or dont, either stay together or dont, and things happen to Marianne that puts all that has gone on before at risk. The play unrolls like a film clip that can be pulled back and run again, and can be altered, old lines leading to new consequences. Mariannes starting speech is said three times over in the first five minutes on stage, with different follow-up each time, and so on and so on till the very end of the play. The ending too cycles back and you're left unsure whats going on between Marianne and Ben or what it will lead to and if the ending of it all has to be sad or not. This is a very good play.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Bone Tree (Penn Cage); Author: ; Review: The Bone Tree is Iless sequel to his Natchez Burning and is the second in a projected trilogy. It is 816 pages long. There! In two sentences I have pointed to whats wrong with it. Its way too long and much too convoluted. In the 11-page prologue, Iles introduces 14 characters. All of the characters have back histories that if not recapitulated in this installment, still have to be referred to. Its crowded and, at times, confusing, and when its not confusing, its because the author stops the forward flow of the story to backtrack to volume 1 of the trilogy. The lead good guys are Penn Cage, Natchezs mayor, his fianc Caitlin Masters, publisher of the crusading Natchez Examiner, and FBI special agent John Kaiser. The three of them are dedicated to bringing down a tangled web of corruption meth sales, prostitution, gambling-- that stretches across at least two states and has roots back to the sixties. The mastermind of this network is Forrest Knox, chief of the state polices Criminal Investigations Bureau and covert head of a Klan splinter group called the Double Eagles. Double Eagles gang members may or may not have been involved in the assassinations of the three Ks JFK, RLK, and MLK, Jr.but theres no question they're violent as violent as they come. The novel starts with the aftermath of a raging house fire that left one of the baddest of the bad dead along with several others. (The fire happened in volume 1.) Penns father is on the run. Charged with the murder of his ex-nurse. Theres an APB out on him because he killed a state policeman who tried to stop him (to kill him). If the police catch him now, hes dead. A reporters notebooks on the Kennedy assassinations the reporters dead noware on the Examiners hard drive but then they're not theres a mole on the newspapers staff another things to worry about. There are more things to worry about and it takes about 120 pages to lay them all out. When the action happens in this goliath of a novel, its fast and furious. The bad guys are vicious and fast, not caricatures but because they're presented in a one-sided manner, they're not far from that. And its hard to get a fix on Penn and Caitlin as people, much less the Fed. Theyre too busy trying to stay alive to take time to reflect. The result is a novel that is neither a bad novel nor a good one, but has structural problems. Some of that may be because of its position: it is the second of three projected novels. When it ends, its clear theres still much to be resolved.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Mask; Author: Visit Amazon's Taylor Stevens Page; Review: This is the fifth in Stevenss series of action thrillers featuring Vanessa Michael Munro, who though a woman usually passes as a male, using her middle name Michael. Although the beginning is muddy, events soon heat up and this may be the best of the series to date. Thats saying something, because this is a good series: Michael is an intriguing character and Stevens knows how to blend action and detection. This episode takes place in Tokyo, where Michaels boyfriend Bradford, ex-something or other and now co-head of an advanced security firm, has taken a job with a pharmaceutical firm that has been beaten out in the market too often not to suspect corporate espionage. Theyve not had success finding out whos doing it on their own so theyve brought in a new pair of eyes to take look. For the first time, Michael is doing something shes not used to doing. Her own past is filled with violence and risk: now shes expected to do nothing, just enjoy being a girlfriend. Then Bradford is arrested for the murder of a Chinese woman who works in the plant. This is Japan, where arrest is tantamount to conviction most of the time and no one cares whether Bradford did the deed or not. Its more important not to rock the boat and besides hes a gaijin, a foreigner. Michaels the only one who can find out what happened and if Bradford didn't do it, find out who did and why and in the process secure her lovers release. What follows is an intriguing mix of derring-do and sleuthing. The action scenes are fast and furious, the detective work slow and tedious, the piece by piece reconstruction of past events and peoples behavior and motives. Michael is faced by more than one bad guy and though she has knack for picking up strange languages give her two weeks in a strange country and she speaks like a nativeher gift cant help her with Japans several thousand ideogram written language. Michaels an intriguing heroine, the setting is exotic, the plotting solid and the action spectacular but believable. Ill say it again, this may be the best in a generally good series.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction); Author: Visit Amazon's Viet Thanh Nguyen Page; Review: A man, his name is never given, has been locked up for a year by his Viet Cong capturers. His task? To write his confession over and over again, until he gets it right, and has proven his conversion to right thinking. But he is a communist. He was an undercover agent, placed in the south Vietnamese army as a mole, and the story he tells is of a man who has hidden his true face for over a decade. He fled Viet Nam with his General: he was the generals trusted aide. He has fingered a south Vietnamese colonel as spy -to do otherwise might have led to his own unmasking-- but the colonel was killed as a result, and now the narrator has the ghost of the colonel following him around in his fantasies, not so much accusing him as reminding him of the consequences of his actions. He eventually does wet work of his own: He shoots and kills a Vietnamese-American reporter, Sonny, who has scoffed at the generals efforts to raise an invasion force to go back to Viet Nam. Sonny too visits him in his reveries. This is a novel about dislocation, isolation and deceit. As the narrator writes, in the second sentence in his confession, I am a man of two minds. The story he tells is dark. The general flees the country but leaves most of his men behind. The few who make it out strive to make something of their lives in the States but they live mediocre lives the general runs a liquor store, his wife a pho restaurant. The narrator, the spy, endures one humiliating experience after another: working for a jackass of an academic who chairs the Oriental Studies program at a small college; serving as technical advisor for a movie by a distinguished director (referred to as the Auteur) who wants to make the Apocalypse Now of Viet Nam War movies but cant stand being contradicted; two liaisons, fore different reasons unhappy. He returns to Asia with a small Bay of Pigs-like force of Vietnamese Freedom Fighters, bankrolled by the CIA and American sympathizers but that didn't turn out too well, did it? The book is not uniformly successful. The sequence with the Auteur, in particular, is done in a different tone than the rest of the narrative, hyped up somewhat, the irony played more openly. The prose, generally effective, is occasionally too much: but, then, the narrator is an educated man, whose failing he admits it-- is often too literary an approach to life. (He wrote his undergraduate thesis on Myth and Symbol in the Literature of Graham Green.) Over all, though, this is a powerful novel and well worth reading. It reminds me in ways of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man (1953) in its theme of the perpetual outsider, the man half way in and half way stuck outside, also in the occasional resort to hyperbole and satire, but above all in the tone of anguish and anger that leaks out from the spys narrative. In the fall of; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: From Bruges with Love (The Pieter Van In Mysteries); Author: Pieter Aspe; Review: From Bruges with Love is a reasonably successful police procedural featuring a slightly out of control overweight, appetite driven policeman named Pieter Van In. His wife Hannelore is a public prosecutor and appealing as she thinks he is, shes put him on a diet to reduce the rubber tire around his middle. Shes also pregnant. And he loves her. So against his wishes, hes cutting back on tobacco, booze and food. A lot of the backchat in this novel is about his attempts to sabotage the new regime his wife has put him on, and hes pretty good at it. As far as police work goes, hes a familiar type in procedural literature anti-establishment, driven more by intuition than patient detail work, and incorrigibly individualistic. Hes a seditious cop. Though justified by the results hes brilliant at ferreting out the bad guysthe methods he uses to achieve success are at best dubious, at worst flatly illegal. (The trick is not to get caught.) When a skeleton is found in the backyard of a restored farmhouse, Van In is the policeman on call. But what looks simple at first proves increasingly harder to nail down. They cant find out who the dead man was. There are anomalies about the place where hes found. Heavy hitters in government and business seem determined to quash an open investigation of what happened. The telling of the story is a bit loosy-goosy, flipping back and forth between Van In and Hannelores investigations and the doings of the villains, who are an appropriately scurvy lot. Almost comic at the beginning, the story grows darker ands darker and ends in a page-turner operation to save a young undercover cop from a very nasty death. This police thriller will not prove everyones cup of tea but if you let yourself sink into it, it has its own kind of charm. Van In? Hes kind of a lighter hearted Harry Hole, I suppose.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Man Who Had All the Luck (Penguin Classics); Author: Visit Amazon's Arthur Miller Page; Review: Millers The Man Who Had All the Luck opened in New York on November 23, 1944, and closed on the 26th, after four performances and uniformly negative reviews. The problem, Miller realized when he watched it, was one of tone: it had been played as straight realism, when in fact it shouldnt have been. Miller later wrote, Standing in the back of the house . . . I could blame nobody. [It was] like music played on the wrong instrument in a false scale. Miller moved on to other ventures and rising success and this, his first play to make it on stage, disappeared from sight, not to surface again for more than forty years. Then in 1988, a staged reading of the play convinced him it deserved another shot at being performed. The next year, it was staged in London by the Old Vic. Miller, who could be sharply critical of his own works, felt it captured the wonder and naiveté and purity of feeling of a kind of fairytale about the mystery of fate and destiny. It reached Broadway for the second time in 2002. Even the New York Times, which had dismissed it forty-eight years earlier, found it compelling. The reviewer asked how it could have been ignored half a century earlier. The problem, let me say it again, was one of tone. Read the title: the last two words are A Fable. And thats what the play is, a fable, a cautionary tale about a kind of reverse Job named David Beeves, to whom so many good things happen over a period of years that he becomes obsessed with the notion of payback, a presentiment of cosmic balance: an unseen deity will some day make him pay for the luck hes had. Success begins to poison his life, his relations with his wife, with his infant son, eventually leads him to consider suicide. The play doesnt end that way it ends instead with David embracing life and a qualified optimism -a provisional acceptance of his good fortune and the realization that luck doesnt negate his sense of agency. Lucky or not, its still his life. At one point in the play, one of the characters, an immigrant mechanic, says that [w]hat a man must have, what a man must believe. That on this earth he is the boss of his life. Not the leafs in the teacups, not the stars. Christopher Bigsby posits in his exceptionally helpful introduction that Millers play is a kind of reverse version of Camuss Caligula. Both plays describe a world with no visible moral/cosmic balance: in both, man must embrace his own agency for there is no other except chance. As far as the gods are concerned, or Fate, its like Gertrude Stein wrote of her home town of Oakland, California: theres no there there. Oh! In case you wonder whether I like this play or not, I do.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Stand Your Ground; Author: Visit Amazon's William W. Johnstone Page; Review: If William W. Johnstone weren't so paranoid, this might be a decent action book. What it really is, though, is a rant packaged as a novel, or rather, wrapped around a passable though not terribly well presented action novel. The U.S. Supreme Court, highjacked by liberal do-gooders appointed by presidents (Democrats, of course) with a political agenda: bring on the aliens!, has released 150 Arab terrorists into the general prison population, in a fateful misreading of civil liberties. They're housed in one prison in the sleepy Texas town of Fuego, and their terrorist friends have come to break them out. A few men, all staunch patriots --not pseudo-patriots or dupes of the left or covert enemy agents, as all the guys on the other side are-- are there to oppose them. Of course, the good guys win in the send but only after a lot of people die. The ranting is so obvious and so extreme as to make you wonder about the author's sanity.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution; Author: Visit Amazon's Dominic Lieven Page; Review: Why, given Russias immediate history of military defeat (the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5) and domestic crisis (the upheavals prior5 to the calling of the first Duma in 1906), and given its military and economic fragility, did the country lurch into a war it was almost certainly fated to lose? You are 312 pages out of 368 pages into this text before the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand occurs, the event that immediately preceded the outbreak of world war. The title of this book is accurate: its a detailed analysis of the antecedent causes of Russias entry into the war. It starts with a long analysis of the players and ideas in play and only then, 182 pages into the book, proceeds to a narrative history, again heavy on analysis, of the events preceding war. What makes this book different from earlier histories is Lievens rich use of historical archives only recently made available in Russia, particularly fuller, more varied accounts of the thought and deliberations of the handful of Russian officials and intelligentsia who could possibly have influenced the murky decision making process of Nicholass tsarist government. Lieven is not only well informed, he is even handed and sensible. He writes well, simplifying without over-simplifying and he keeps the reader on track in an account that could easily overwhelm with its many players and twists and turns of events. It is encouraging to see history reexamined in the light of new evidence from archives hitherto blocked from public access. A parallel to this book is Alexander Watsons Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I (2014). Russia and Austria-Hungary were both second-tier great powers, and their military and economic interests drew both into a conflict from which, looked at objectively, they had much to lose and little to win. And lose they certainly both did.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: CARTEL, THE; Author: Visit Amazon's Don Winslow Page; Review: Wow! This sprawling novel narrates the bloody advance of the narcotics trade in Mexico and the decline of any alternative government or policing as the narcotraficantes bribe or terrify the elected and appointed officials between 2004-2014. In 2010 alone, 15,273 people die in drug-related deaths in Mexico. In Juarez alone, 7,000 die, 10,000 businesses fail, 130,000 people lose their jobs and 250,000 people leave the province, fearing for their lives and those of their families. This is a fierce novel on a grand scale. In the process of fighting the narco traffickers, the few good guys quickly lose their cherry: no one is innocent by the end of the story. The protagonist is Art Keller, Mexican father, American mother, DEA super star but in disgrace because hes ruffled too many feathers in the agency with his cowboy tactics (which work!). His biggest coup? The arrest and conviction of Adan Barrera, patron of El Federacion, the union of drug cartels that rules Mexico. In the process, Keller was responsible for the death of Barreras two brothers (also both lowlifes). The US government extradites Barrera to a Mexican prison and Kellers life is at risk again: Barrera has placed a two million dollar bounty on his head. Barrera escapes prison and Keller is drawn back into DEA business. From then on, its non-stop action and non-stop killing insane Barrera struggles to regain control over a terminally fractured landscape of cartels, dealers and private armies. A lot of good guys die in this novel. Even more innocents even passersbydie too. The death rate among the drug traffickers and their troops (many of whom are state or federal policemen) and among the uncorrupted cops who are trying to bring them down is prodigious. Ive read comparisons of this novel to Mario Puzos classic The Godfather, but they're not all that much alike except in that (1) they tell big stories, (2) they're about bad guys trying to build an empire, and (3) they're both exciting reads. Two-thirds of the way through this 640 page read, Keller reflects on what has happened as the drug war has escalated: Im not a drug agent anymore, he reflected, Im a hunter. One of the virtues of this gripping novel is that it captures the human cost of these dramatic changes in the drug traffic in Mexico and Central America in that decade. But novels of hunt are exciting, if done right, and this one definitely is. The Cartel is great escapist literature.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Bomb Maker's Son: A Parker Stern Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Rotstein Page; Review: As a general rule, Im not crazy about detective novels featuring lawyers and courtroom trials but this legal thriller is first-rate. This is the third novel featuring attorney Parker Stern. His mother heads a cult religion, the Church of the Sanctified Assembly. She took it over after the Churchs founders was accused of sexual abuse of the churchs members children. She hasn't changed. She was and still is a liar, and terminally manipulative, even of her estranged son. Now she shows up and asks him to represent Ian Holzer, a leftover from the 70s, who went into hiding when a bomb he is alleged to have made went off in his hometown and killed four people. Forty years later, Holzer is turning himself in. He insists that Stern represent him and he swears he didn't make the bomb. Stern doesnt want to have anything to do with him but then his mother and Holzer explode their own bomb. He is Holzers son: Holzer has a seventeen-year-old daughter, who is Sterns half-sister. Think what he may of his father, whom he last saw when he was one and a half, he cant let his half-sister down without trying. From then on, two story lines war for the readers attention. The first is the preparation for the trial and Sterns performance in the trial itself. Rotstein does a good job playing it out: the law parts seem credible, there are no anachronisms or creaking gears in the evolution from discovery to trial to conclusion, and the players an idiosyncratic and opinionated judge, a determined young lawyer who is both Sterns second chair and his former lover, a debarred lawyer turned investigator who still spouts radical rhetoric, and a flock of potential witnesses of various political persuasions and personalities. As a legal thriller, it ranks with the best think Connelly or Grisham. The second plot line is all about the present. A bomb is planted in the courthouse. A former terrorist is shot dead in front of Sterns eyes. More bad things happen but I don't want to spill them in a review. Rotstein handles this second parallel plot line with equal aplomb. The result is a very good thriller about the ripple effects of violence forty years past. As to Stern, his back story is good and he is an appealing and credible hero. References to his past life are skillfully woven in they don't intrude on the present narrative. In fact, the only thing they have done to me is to make me want to read the first two novels in this series, Corrupt Practices (2013) and Reckless Disregard (2014).; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Killing Kind; Author: Chris Holm; Review: The premise of this book is close to ridiculous. Hendricks is a hit man who only hits other hit men, cutting in on their contracts for ten times the payoff for the original kill. Hes done so many kills that the Council, a superbody that regulates business among Bad Guy organizations Mafiosi, Salvadoreans, Russians-- puts out a hit on him. But its targeted: the Council calls in one other super killer, a man named Engelmann, for one million Euros to do in this flea in their side hes bad for business. Engelmann is a died in the wool sadist: he loves killing. All he wants is to be number One in his business. Hes so eager to off Hendricks that hed almost be willing to take the contract for free. But after all, money is money and its always good to have more of it. What starts out as a two-sided hunt --Hendricks pursuing his next targetquickly becomes three-sided: Hendricks is after his target; Engelmann is after Hendricks and almost gets him but fails (there is a complicated fight scene in a casino involving Hendricks, his prey, Engellmann and the FBI); now Hendricks knows someone is in pursuit of him and sets his own sights on offing his pursuer. Fairly effective scenes of violence follow and in the end everything is resolved, though not without loss of personnel. Theres nothing original in this book at all and the original premise is hard to accept as plausible but so what? What follows is LOUD, good fun.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: A New World; Author: Visit Amazon's Amit Chaudhuri Page; Review: Sir Andrews The New World, his second sequel to Stevensons classic Treasure Island (Silver: Return to Treasure Island, 2012, was the first) isn't a good novel or a bad one but it tilts toward bad because of a certain over-poeticizing of description that detracts from what should have been a clean and swift novel of action and adventure. Motion also tends to draw in current but not 1803-5 themes like the exploitation of American natives: the sentiment is admirable but it hardly fits with a late eighteenth/very early nineteenth century sentiments on such matters. Over all, there is too much nature description and too little action in this mushy sequel. The description is good but what distinguishes the best of Stevensons fiction is the combination of setting with action. Here, setting overwhelms action. As to characterization, there isn't much to say: Jim and Natty, offspring of Jim Hawkins and Long John in the original, and lovers in the offing in this book, aren't really all that well fleshed out and the rest of the characters aren't people so much as caricatures, the types that tend to appear in picaresque novels such as this. Readers with a higher tolerance of lush nature description may enjoy this book more than I did, which is almost not at all. I was bored early on and never got over it.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Fateful Lightning: A Novel of the Civil War; Author: Visit Amazon's Jeff Shaara Page; Review: Lightning is the final of four novels by Shaara tracing the progress of the American Civil War. The others, in order of chronology, are A Blaze of Glory (2012), A Chain of Thunder (2013), and The Smoke at Dawn (2014). This is his fourteenth historical novel: all of them deal with wars in addition to the Civil War, the War of the Revolution, the Mexican War and World War II. He knows whats doing and generally speaking, writes well. His historical fiction is always absorbing: pick one of these books up and you won't put it down until its finished. This time its Shermans turn. Lightning follows Shermans devastatingly effective march to the sea, occupying Atlanta, and then Savannah, trying down one of the few remaining large-scale southern forces and destroying rails, bridges, factories and warehouses en route. As in previous volumes in this series, Shaara alternates viewpoint, following the progress of the campaign through the eyes of four of its participants, Sherman himself, Confederate general William Hardee, Rebel cavalryman Captain James Seeley (Hardee and Seeley were introduced in the first volume of the series), and liberated slave Franklin, who offers a very different perspective on events. Shaara does a respectable job fleshing out these four characters but his strength lies in his grasp of war: both the history of this war and war strategy in general. Im far from an expert in these fields but I haven't read a book that captures so well what went on in these battles since Shelby Footes monumental Civil War trilogy. Perhaps it takes a novelist to flesh out such complicated battle scenes as these. The book occasionally jumps from one instance to subsequent ones without filling in all the details between them but thats a necessary consequence of keeping the book a manageable read. It still runs over 600 pages but once you start it, you will be surprised by how quickly the pages pass by.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Property of a Lady Faire (Secret Histories); Author: Visit Amazon's Simon R. Green Page; Review: The Secret Histories Novels are Simon R. Greens fantasy takeoff on Flemings James Bond, but with Eddie Drood (think Druid) aka Shaman Bond as hero and a host of baddies with mystical and magical powers. The Droods are a far from functional family. Eddie is frequently at war with them, usually because they think he did something he didn't do, as, in this installment, kill his uncle, and they seldom if ever approve of him. They especially dislike his girlfriend, Molly Metcalf, a Wild Witch of the Woods who loves Eddie (and he, her) madly but whose favorite remedy for any problem is to tear something down or blow something up. The Secret History novels always start half way through one of Eddies capers. (Sounds like the start of a James Bond movie, doesnt it?) This time, hes in the Vatican, trying to elude the Vaticans non-human secret guards. But he hasn't been stealing something from the Vatican, just replacing something with a false copy. Enough of that! Eddie escapes his pursuers, has another adventure involving a hyper-secret club the Wulfshead, where the really bad people go to relax but now someone is eavesdropping on their secrets and spilling he beans on them. He solves that case and heads back to Drood Hall for the reading of the family Matriarchs will and, lickety-split, is right in the middle of an even bigger problem, not to mention in personal danger with a Kill On Sight order out against him in all the detecting, spying and general mayhem-making organizations across the civilized world (including among the Droods, who think he killed his uncle). But he has another mission: to recover a very secret, dangerous, and potentially really not-good artifact, the Lazarus Stone, which gives its possessor the power to go back in time and change history, effacing all that has happened since. Sure, it could wipe out a lot of bad things (including his uncle having his heart ripped out of his chest by an unknown, super-human assailant) but it would also mean Eddie would never meet Molly, and Mollys the one great love of his often frenetic life as spy, assassin (he doesnt like doing that) and generally bad dude Drood. At this point in the story, Green throws everything in the bucket at Eddie and Mollie and Mollie and Eddie rally every time, thought its always close. The denouement of this story, when it finally comes, is a bit weak but by then, who cares? The novel has been so much fun en route that how it ends is almost irrelevant. As long as Eddie and Molly make it through alive, you know therell be more to follow in the next installment. What makes Simon R. Greens novels work so well is the way he combines out and out adventure with sly but hilarious wit. Across eight Drood novels and some fifteen others (the Nightside and Ghost Finders series), hes perfected the art of tongue in cheek fantasy: these novels are both funny and edge of the seat gripping. A few examples; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Benefit of the Doubt: A Newberg Novel (The Newberg Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Neal Griffin Page; Review: This is Griffins first novel and its a good one. He brings to it twenty-five years of experience in law enforcement. The novel shows it: he understands not only police procedure but the cop mentality, both the good side and the bad of a life led under constant siege and temptation. The good cop has to walk a narrow line between what its legal for him to do to capture felons and what hes not allowed to do. Thats Ben Sawyers problem: hes a good cop, in fact a darned good one, but he lost his cool one day and almost killed a suspect (who, to be honest, deserved it). He ends up off the Big City force and back home in Newburg, Wisconsin, where his police chief father-in-law finds him a sergeants job in the local force. Bens in mourning already for his lost job, his failure to live up to his own image of how he should have behaved that afternoon, for having to come back home, tail between his legs, to beg for a job from a father-in-law who has never seemed very happy with him ---then his father-in-law has a stroke, hes off the force completely. Bens new boss doesnt want him at all, Hes going to railroad him off the force as soon as he can without bringing the policemans union down on his back. All that is back story for an overly tricky but engaging story of revenge, corruption, multiple murders and a complicated scheme to frame Bens wife for a murder she didn't commit with a man she didn't have an affair with, though it looks like she did. Bad gets worse, and worse worser, but Ben, with the help of his few remaining admirers on the force works through it. Ben is a great character, as is his wife Alex, and the depiction of their marriage is adult, loving and true. The other characters are under-sketched or, in one case, one of the villains, over drawn, too much dark, too little shadows. Still, you root for Ben and Alex and the action draws you along in what is a pretty good crime novel. I hope Griffin keeps writing because hes got something to offer.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Truth and Other Lies; Author: Visit Amazon's Sascha Arango Page; Review: Arango is a German screenwriter of considerable prominence (twice winner of the prestigious Grimme Prize) who has among other projects, worked on the latest revival of the popular German police detective show Tatort (from 1996 on). His past record pays off in this, his first novel: he knows how to structure plot and character to maintain tension and keep the reader involved. Its difficult to read this book without wanting to get on the next chapter to see what happens next, and his characters, for all that they are types, are delineated in small, almost sneaky touches of description and action. This vastly entertaining novel is a oner. a gripping crime noir and a sly comedy about a psychopath, who is devoid of most normal emotions except for a well developed sense of self-survival. His name is Henry Hayden and hes one of the most successful authors of his day, both in terms of sales and critical acclaim. Everything is beautiful in his life except for two things. First, hes never written a thing: his wife wrote all of his books but she wants him to take the credit for them. So he did. (Thats what psychopaths do. Because they're users.) Now, secondly, his mistress has told him shes pregnant. This novel is about how one misstep leads to another, with complications, and then to a third and so on, and how each step involves other people, most of whom do not come out of it as well off as Henry. Its compulsive reading -real suspensebut its also awfully funny in an understated way I find irresistible. Henry isn't just a con man, hes a killer. Theres a wonderful section part way through (page 54) where Henry reflects on a murder hes just committed: in one paragraph he weighs all the options, finds excuses for why it wouldnt be too bad for the murder-ee. Its chilling but also funny. (Which is pretty much the story all the way through this book.) And there are the asides: witty (but chilling) bons mots like this one, also Henrys: when crafting a tissue of lies, add in a dash of truth: A dash of truth is often enough, but its indispensable, like the olive in the martini. Later, Henry reflects: Thanks to his experience in lying, or merely making excuses, Henry was confident that people would continue to believe him as long as he lied. **It was only the truth he had had to be sparing and prudent with.** (Asterisks mine.) Arango is a cunning observer of people. A policewoman suspicious of Henry (how could anyone suspect Henry?!!) has a pinched face with narrow eyes under a bushy unibrow that made Henry think of an opossum. The silver streaks in her hair seemed to suggest that she was severely over-acidified as a result of professional mistrust. The head of a police squad that is investigating I won't tell you how many murders that henry might have been involved in was a womanizer and liked the sound of his own voice. His lectures on criminal profiles,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Flick; Author: Visit Amazon's Annie Baker Page; Review: Baker won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for this play, the latest in the series of extraordinarily affecting plays she has written. Shes a talent of the first water. The Flick takes place in a past its prime movie theater, one of only eight left in the state of Massachusetts that still shows movies in celluloid. The play is about the three young to early middle-aged people who work there. Its scut work take tickets, serve popcorn and soda, clean up after the show. One of them --Rose, Caucasian, 24, baggy clothes, hair dyed green, who if she isn't lesbian is doing an excellent job of looking like she is-- runs the projection. Sam, Caucasian and 35, is obviously working class. Hes had no college or his hopes peak with the job: ushering in a third-rate, close to failing cinema. Avery is 20, African-American, on break from college. In other words, he has a future beyond this cinema, which neither Rose nor Sam do. Avery also has issues: they surface in his interactions with Sam and Rose. Averys a movie buff: he likes celluloid only, no digital. Digital is dead; celluloid lives. The play unfolds in a succession of encounters, mundane on the surface, among these three workers, as they share their hopes, figure out how they feel about each other. Without pounding it to death, Baker conveys through their semi-articulate, tangential dialogue the frustrations of their jobs and lives. Their lives don't get better in the duration of this play, they get worse, but somehow you feel hopeful (a bit, not a lot) about them. Maybe its just that they are so human. The play is set in a movie theater: the audience is looking at the seats, window of the projection booth, exit doors. Much of the time a movie is playing but the audience doesnt see it because its playing behind their heads, which is where the imagined movie screen is. It makes for nice effects: a drama unfolding in front of the spectators while a movie soundtrack, framing music for a different drama, goes on behind them. Sometimes the soundtrack reinforces the emotions on display on stage. Other times, it runs in ironic counterpoint to it. In every respect dramatic arc, characterization, mood, visual impactthis play is lovely.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Sunlit Night; Author: Rebecca Dinerstein; Review: This is a book about three characters, only two of whom are humans. There are the little touches. Frances and Yasha are the humans. Norway is the third. Its a book of exquisite small touches, never too much but not too little. Yasha describes his father, Vassily, the baker. His father was sometimes eccentric, but never insane; not terribly attractive, but adorable, easy to adore. He smiled when he had amused himself and shouted when he was mad. His pants were yellow from dozens of broken eggs. [He was a baker, after all.] His hair was gray and long around his ears. His core, Yasha suspected, was made of peace. His core [his son suspected] was made of peace. What a lovely phrase that is! And it keeps on the same way through the rest of this extraordinary book, which never overreaches but in its modest way, says lovely things about what it is to be human, young and uncertain about where you're headed. On the eve of her graduation from college, Francess near-perfect, future-ahead boyfriend dumps her. The scene where he does it is subtle but knockdown hilarious (I don't know how you can convey both of these feelings at the same time but Dinerstein does it.) This is when her parents decide to divorce too and boycott her sisters impending wedding. (The groom isn't Jewish enough for them.) Frances cant take it. She flees new York for an artists colony as far away as she can possibly get: Lofoten, a tiny island in Norway ninety-five miles north of the Arctic Circle. Frances is an artist, or wants to be one. In Lofoten she can indulge her fascination with color. Indeed, the whole book is suffused with color brown wood, marigold, a lemon color sun rising over lime-green grass, a yellow house with windows and doors trimmed in white, to add a little mildness, to serve as cream, the color of the sky overhead in this Land of the Midnight Sun changing with the hour and day. Yasha? Hes there to bury his father, whose last wish was to be buried at the top of the world." In Lofoten, these two temporarily dislocated souls meet. They strike sparks off each other, have a romance of sorts, and end up coming to some sort of terms with their lives. You can learn some of this just by reading the books liner notes.. What you won't get from the liner notes is how lovely the story is, and how economically and elegantly its told. Even the minor characters are given their due: including Yashas mother, who by any ordinary standard of judgment is a word Im supposed to avoid in a review written for family consumption. This is Rebecca Dinersteins first novel but her second book to be published. The first was a bilingual collection of Norwegian poems. She is a talent: she can tell a story and tell a poem, and sometimes, in this lovely book, the two almost become mixed together.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Love Is Red (The Nightsong Trilogy); Author: Visit Amazon's Sophie Jaff Page; Review: Love starts out strong as a creepy thriller about a mass murderer: hes called the Sickle Man for his habit of artistically decorating his victims with his sickle knife and he has his sights set on harvesting an unattached and very attractive young woman, Katherine Emerson, who is still looking for Mister Right. Katherine is attracted to two men: Jaff lays enough hints that you suspect one of them may be Mr. Very-Very Wrong but will Katherine discover his secret in time? And what of the other? Will Love triumph in the end? Fairly early, the book morphs into a paranormal thriller. Still, it draws you along. If anything, the tension actually builds. Then, in the last fifty pages or so, everything falls apart. The ending is hopelessly confused, not al all credible, and not satisfying either. The story is related in three voices. The killer is a synesthete: theres lots of dialogue about emotions and the colors they evoke in him. Katherine is observed from the outside: we follow her emerging relationship with David and Sael which one is the bad guy?and theres a fairly graphic but generic sex scene with one of them. The third narrative is a mock-fairy tale, more Grimm Brothers than Walt Disney, about a woman with magical powers. It adds nothing to the book: its not that gripping a tale and it doesnt seem to explain anything about what happens in Katherines present. The first two-thirds of this book show that Jaff can write but the muddled ending and its overwrought prose undermine all that she has worked to achieve up to that point.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Love Is Red: A Novel (The Nightsong Trilogy); Author: Visit Amazon's Sophie Jaff Page; Review: Love starts out strong as a creepy thriller about a mass murderer: hes called the Sickle Man for his habit of artistically decorating his victims with his sickle knife and he has his sights set on harvesting an unattached and very attractive young woman, Katherine Emerson, who is still looking for Mister Right. Katherine is attracted to two men: Jaff lays enough hints that you suspect one of them may be Mr. Very-Very Wrong but will Katherine discover his secret in time? And what of the other? Will Love triumph in the end? Fairly early, the book morphs into a paranormal thriller. Still, it draws you along. If anything, the tension actually builds. Then, in the last fifty pages or so, everything falls apart. The ending is hopelessly confused, not al all credible, and not satisfying either. The story is related in three voices. The killer is a synesthete: theres lots of dialogue about emotions and the colors they evoke in him. Katherine is observed from the outside: we follow her emerging relationship with David and Sael which one is the bad guy?and theres a fairly graphic but generic sex scene with one of them. The third narrative is a mock-fairy tale, more Grimm Brothers than Walt Disney, about a woman with magical powers. It adds nothing to the book: its not that gripping a tale and it doesnt seem to explain anything about what happens in Katherines present. The first two-thirds of this book show that Jaff can write but the muddled ending and its overwrought prose undermine all that she has worked to achieve up to that point.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Barbara the Slut and Other People; Author: Visit Amazon's Lauren Holmes Page; Review: Not all the stories in this debut collection work, but the best do, and there are a number of bests in the book. Holmes works writing in the first person about, I suspect, people much like the ones she grew up with. The tone has an air of authenticity to it, as though shes heard people like these talk and act like these people do. These aren't O. Henry type stories, but then, we don't live in an O. Henry age any more. For these young (twentyish) postmoderns, life is mostly what just goes on. Theres no fillip to it. My mom and I were going to stop to break up with my boyfriend on our way to Emerald Lake Thats how one story (I Will Crawl to Raleigh If I Have To) starts definitely not the age of the romantic. Near the end of the story shes finally reached her boyfriend and told him the news and he asks her what changedshe replies, Nothings changed. I just want something else. From my life. He asks what and she says, I don't know. But don't you want something else too? Something different? Thats pretty much the mood in most of these stories: a nerveless, energy-less disaffection with what ones got, an aversion to making plans even to get out of ones rut. In Desert Hearts, one of the better stories in the collection story, the narrator is a young woman: her father has paid her way all through college and law school and pressured her to pass the bar, but when she doesnt immediately get a job with a law firm, she drifts into employment at a lesbian sex tools shop. And likes it. Pretty much. Not completely. But then, she doesnt like anything enthusiastically, not even the increasingly intermittent sex she has with her ever-at-work boyfriend. At least she can satisfy herself --temporarily, though- with the tools she sells. Eight of the ten stories are narrated by women, one by a man, one by a dog. The dogs tale, My Humans, is the least successful of the collection: it reads like a writing class exercise good idea but it loses in the translation. No surprise, its about the dogs uncomprehending witnessing of the breakup of a relationship between two humans. The title story is about a young woman, a super=-achiever whos just been accepted into Princeton. She sleeps around too much and her classmates call her Barbara the slut. The last page is a killer. I liked these stories but they will not be everybodys cup of tea. The narrators in the stories hurt but they're so flaccid emotionally that they don't seem to know it. When Danny, the narrators fiancée in Desert Hearts, tells her she doesnt have to take a job she doesnt want, she can just stay home until she thinks of something she wants to do and then apply for it, her one thought is that she cant think of anything [she] actually want[s] to do. Salingers Holden Caulfield found the choices that faced him in the; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: On the Steel Breeze (Poseidon's Children); Author: Visit Amazon's Alastair Reynolds Page; Review: With the death of Iain M. Banks (d. 2013), Alastair Reynolds is the best writer of hard science fiction epics alive. He is probably best known for his five books set in Revelation Space, not a connected sequence of narratives (like Peter F. Hamiltons Nights Dawn trilogy) but rather separate stories set in the same imagined world and time. On the Steel Breeze is the second book in a new trilogy, Poseidons Children. Blue Remembered Earth (2012) was the first. The third, Poseidons Wake (2015), appeared in April. Set in the 24th century, two hundred years after the events narrated in the first book, On the Steel Breeze continues the adventures of Akinya family, focusing on Chiku Akinya, space explorer Eunices great-granddaughter, who is both on earth Chiku Yellow- and on a holoship (think BIG spaceship, large enough to carry thousands of people on a centuries-long voyage to a possible second earth) -Chiku Green. The two Chikus are clones of the same Chiku. A third clone, Chiku Red, was lost in space looking for Eunices ship. The plot is complicated, at times too much so, but involves the two remaining Chikus in parallel but separate attempts to come to terms with living extended lives (three hundred is not beyond belief) in a much more complicated world than the one we live in now. Humans can be bio-tailored in all sorts of ways. Chiku Greens son is now a trans-Spermian, genetically engineered to become a human-aquatic: he works with krakens in the oceans of the earth. (The oceans have recovered from our ecological transgressions father than the atmosphere.) Chiku Green, lightyears removed from earth, deals with emerging intelligences (genetically modified elephants who understand and can communicate words), a robot with a near-human personality and another artilect (machine intelligence) that fears humans enough it may want to wipe them out unless things change. Reynolds has always been good at the tech stuff. Hes gotten better at characterization but tends to lay it on too thick. He plots thoroughly but the result lacks vigor at times too many pages to get from point A to point Z and too many subplots between. The result is a novel that taken as a whole is worth reading and quite satisfying but en route may incline the reader to shout, Lets get on with it!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Swimmer: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Joakim Zander Page; Review: In 1980, an American agent looks out of his window in Damascus and sees his wife blown to bits in an explosion intended for him. Thirty-three years later, his daughter Klara, who has never known him, works as an aide to a Swedish politician whos a member of the European Parliament. Her former lover asks her to meet him secretly. Hes in trouble and he needs her help. A contact has passed him the key to an airport locker. Inside it is a laptop with information someone doesnt want made public. The contact was killed in front of his eyes and now the police are looking for him --and who knows who else is hunting him in order to silence him? From then on, its a chase. The bad guys try to catch up with Klara, the old agent her fatherhas to to find her first in order to save her. This thriller drew rave reviews in Europe but its hard to understand why. It isn't gripping enough to qualify as good but isn't bad either. Character development in particular is sketchy, especially the depiction of the American agent/father. The plot seems cut to a form this happens, then that, and if were lucky a movie contract will follow because you know audiences will love a spy thriller about a superannuated spy hunting for his long lost, feisty daughter. There are better books out there. Lots of them.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Robin Sloan Page; Review: This uncategorizable book think Haruki Murakami or early Jonathan Lethem, or a Joseph Cornell shadow boxmay be the most enjoyable book youll read this summer. Its a detective story of sorts but a surreal one, a love song for books but also the tech that may replace them eventually, and the most original Dungeons and Dragons-style adventure since Ernest Clines 2010 knockout, Ready Player One. as in Clines novel, the protagonist-narrator of this book, erstwhile web designer Clay Jannon, takes the role playing fantasy world seriously, even outside the game. And thats another thing about this wonderful debut novel: it takes the world of the techno-geeks seriously too and makes it look pretty appealing at that. The book starts in a tilted-on-its-side bookstore --think Powells or a large-scale Barnes and Noble but only tiled up not out. Jannon, out of work because of the Great Recession of 2008, stumbles upon while looking for a job. He meets Mr. Penumbra, who tries out his ladder-climbing skills, and the next thing he knows, he s the staff for one-third of the twenty-four hours a day Penumbras Bookstore is open. But the books that are stocked are weird, or at least, idiosyncratically chosen, and almost nobody ever comes in to pick out something. There is however a small, very small clientele of people who arrive, hand over a book already read and pick up a new one high up in the stacks, books from the mysterious Wayback List. Whatever Penumbra is selling, it isn't books. Jannon starts digging. He recruits roommates and old friends and a hot new girl he meets, whos a Googler (Google is a big presence in this book), to figure out whats going on and, later, to help Mr. Penumbra achieve his ultimate goal, and if you want to know what that is, youll have to read the book on your own because im not going to tell you. But I will say its complicated. By the time youve finished this unputdownable book, youll have made the acquaintance of the great fifteenth-century Venetian bookseller Aldus Manutius, know more about Gerritzoon typefaces, rubbed shoulders with an on-line pirate of codes named Grumble, helped crack a five-century-old mystery, and visited the California Museum of Knitting Arts and Embroidery Sciences, met a game-playing friend from Clays childhood whos now CEO of a tech corporation that licenses out the best boob technology in the animation business, and learned about the message that is hidden inside the three volume warriors, wizards and rogues trilogy The Dragon-Song Chronicles. Theres a lot, I mean a LOT, of techtalk and booktalk in this book but it all seems natural when you're reading it. This is a book filled with fun. Theres a lot of action in it and definitely theres a puzzle, with smaller puzzles around it, and the characters are sweet, believable and enthusiastic. Boy, I love this book!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Migratory Animals: A Novel (P.S. (Paperback)); Author: Mary Helen Specht; Review: Three girls and three guys. They went to college together, a geeky science and engineering school in Texas. Flannery and Alyce were best friends. When Flannerys sister Molly joined them, she was a friend too. Flannery and Santiago were a thing but they broke up. Alyce and Harry didnt. They were the first among their friends to marry and to have kids. Molly met Brandon and they married too. Flannery moved to Nigeria to study the encroaching desertification that was laying waste to central Africa. Five years later, her projects funding ran out and shes back in Austin trying to finish up her research. Its her first time back. Shes changed. So have her friends. Flannery intends to return to Nigeria and her Nigerian lover, Kunle, but Santiago still has a thing for her. Alyce seems broken now, locked into a depression so deep she can barely move. In college, she studied to be an engineer but she wound weaving instead. Shes made Harry and the boys leave. Ay night, when she cant sleep, she working on a large tapestry of migrating birds. Shes trying to show thorough colors and textures herself and her old friends, how they related, what they aspired to, to communicate somehow to her small children how it used to be with her, her friends, and her estranged-from no-longer-really husband Harry. This is the world that Flannery has returned to friends and family, old expectations but new realities --new strains in their relationships. Then she learns that Molly has Huntingtons Disease, the neuro-degenerative disorder that crippled, then killed their mother. Flannery has a choice to make: stay with Molly or return to Kunle. This thoughtful, human novel has the raw materials for a soap opera. It could easily have become saccharine. But it doesnt. Its slow=starting for a while, I found it hard to stay absorbed in itbut about halfway through, I realized I really liked it. I think the reason is that Specht doesnt trivialize these peoples lives: she respects them, makes them real people, loves them. Neither does she rush to make everything well. Not everyones life in this book is pointed in the right direction by the end of this book and even the ones that may be headed that way are still unresolved: life doesnt come with a roadmap or a guarantee. Still, this big-hearted novel is generally upbeat. Its also quite well written. Specht is a good describer and the scenes where Flannery reminisces about Africa are an added filip to an interesting and enjoyable book.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Patriot: An Alex Hawke Novel (Alex Hawke Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Ted Bell Page; Review: Bell doesnt spend in-depth time on anything in this race-ahead thriller, which features Bells series Action Guy, Lord Alex Hawke, who is both the sixth richest man in England and a spy with the frame of mind and skill set of Ian Flemings Bond. The plotting is ramshackle, the good guys and bad guys (with one exception) glaringly apparent from the beginning. As for attention to ambiance, forget it, but you will find constant references to class signs what one eats, drinks, where one hangs out to be with it ---and being an aristocrat is definitely not a bad thing in this book. When I started it, I didn't think Id enjoy it. The joints in plotting were too obvious, the characters thin. Even the action seemed perfunctory. But there were so many action scenes in this book, and the stakes kept ratcheting up, and its told in such good spirits by the end of the book, I was a convert. Its not quality writing but it works as entertainment. The book starts with an attempted assassination in Cuba. It moves on to Hawkes attempts to catch and neutralize (= kill) an ex-spy with a grudge who is flitting around the world killing the spies on Hawkes side. Then Putin requests Hawkes help in capturing still another assassin. Past events fold together and form connections. Future dangers expand exponentially. Two weeks from now, Ill have trouble remembering a thing about this book, but as potboilers go, it was jolly good fun while it lasted.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Tin Men: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Christopher Golden Page; Review: Tin Men is set in a future not too far from now. The same problems are there save for one difference. But the difference is a big one. America has mastered the technology to export human minds into robots. The soldiers protected bodies lie in cradles at the home base (one is at Wiesbaden, in Germany) while their minds animate super-strong- super-fast robots called Tin Men and whether a country wants them there or not, the Tin Men are there to enforce peace, even against the citizens wishes. You would think that would be a good thing, an end to internecine war, but the actions of the robot forces align too neatly with American policy. Peace is good for business, American business, that is, but our enemies don't want an American imperium. Chaos suits them fine. Now they have their revenge: an unanticipated string of electronic pulses world wide burn out all unshielded electrical gearthat means almost everything: computers, power generators, car engines. The Tin Men innards are shielded against electrical interference but the blast has somehow severed the connection between their bodies and their minds: they are stuck inside their metal shells for now. The world around them is in chaos and the president is in Greece with the rest of the worlds leaders, attending a global economic conference. If the anarchists can kill or capture him, its all over. Take away the high tech element and Tin Men is an old-fashioned military adventure: the good soldiers (well, most are good) soldiers against bad terrorists. Golden lays out the technological underpinnings of the story but rather than focusing on he quickly moves on to the action. The story he tells is exciting, fast paced, and convincing, just what you want in an adventure story. He doesnt spend a lot of time on characterization but the characters in this book behave as you would expect them to and its easy to identify with them. Though the Tin Men have augmented powers, they're not supermen. The Bot Killers that hunt them know how to bring them down and several of the soldiers don't make it through to the end. The narrative shifts among a squad of Tin Men under attack in Damascus; the home base in Wiesbaden, Germany; the American and Russian presidents fighting their way out of Athens with the terrorists in hot pursuit. As a platoon of Tin Men fight its way from Syria to Athens to rescue the president, a computer hacker in Wiesbaden struggles to figure out who is trying to sabotage the defenses of the home base.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Earth Flight; Author: Visit Amazon's Janet Edwards Page; Review: More than anything else, this book reminds me of the juvenile novels of Robert Heinlein, from Rocket Ship Galileo in 1947 to Have Space Suit -Will Travel in 1958. (My favorite was Red Planet, 1949.) Like those earlier Heinlein novels, Earth Flight is upbeat, has just about the right amount of excitement and adventure to offer in a book this size, and is abuzz with science talk but not obtrusively so. This is the third YA novel about Jaara Tell Morath. Jaara is a Handicapped, one of the one out of a thousand humans born with an immune system that blocks them from interstellar travel via instantaneous portal. Jaara has lived her entire life to date --shes seventeenrestricted to Earth and because of her handicap, has had to face prejudice from normal human beings who consider her subhuman, an ape, monkey. Earth is considered subnormal too in this new multi-world universe: its ruled (by a hospital corporation) rather than ruling itself and its citizens do not have the full protection of rights accorded citizens of other worlds. In the earlier books, Jaara proved herself a hero and now her parents clan is preparing to adopt her --a first in the known galaxy. A lot of trouble follows because not everyone wants Jaara to be accepted. At the same time, a probe locates the home planet of an alien race that had sent a probe into space eons ago with a message of welcome (maybe) for whatever race received it. Jaara is has a boyfriend theyve Twoed and are now ready to move on to betrothal if their enemies will allow it. Shes got friends and enemies and has to face threats to her life as well as to her dignity. Throughout it all, Jaara is indomitable again, a throwback to the Heinlein heroesand inventive. The inventive part is actually the least believable part of the story: time and again, Jaara, though she has trouble with pure science, somehow comes up with just the right answer to seemingly insoluble problems. She is also the only teenager of her age I have heard of who has advanced through the military so rapidly. She also and her friendsspeaks a late teen slang that rather than sounding futuristic sounds corny: her boyfriend Fian is a totally zan person, shes totally grazed rather than dazed or surprised, What the nuking Hell! and for chaoss sake are expletives, and shes worried shell make a complete nardle of herself at a clan ceremony, and an attractive older woman looks amaz just amaz. This may sound like carping, and it does not destroy the pleasure in reading this lively sci fi adventure, but the slang Jaara uses the way she talksdoesnt match up with the competence and maturity shes supposed to be showing: the slang makes her sound fourteen, certainly not seventeen, and where it s intended to make the dialogue sound futuristic, it makes it sound dated. Still and all, this is an enjoyable though lightweight book. It held my attention throughout, and I was rooting for Jaara till; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Trust No One: A Thriller; Author: Visit Amazon's Paul Cleave Page; Review: This creepy thriller by New Zealand author Paul Cleave will make your skin crawl. Jerry Grey is a well known crime novelist but now at 49, his life is coming unraveled: hes been hit with early onset Alzheimers disease. As the disease progresses, the line between whats real and whats not becomes more and more fuzzy. Not only does Jerry forget things, like what he did yesterday or even a few minutes past, but he becomes convinced that the murders he wrote about in his novels were real. He didn't make them up, he did them and then he wrote about them. More murders occur. The police suspect Jerry, who has, in a moment of clarity, confesses to them. He knows hes a monster now but its not at all clear that he did what he confessed to. The novel progresses in alternating narratives: extracts from Jerrys journal, which hes keeping as a substitute for his memory, and straightforward narrative, starting from the day Jerry gets his death-sentence diagnosis, until, well, youll have to read the book to see where all this is pointed. As the journal entries proceed, Jerrys writing alter ego, Henry Cutter, starts to take over, and hes scary. Suffice it to say that the journey is unnerving and there are surprises en route. The book is well written and for most of the way, hard to put down. The ending is trickier than I would have wished it to be but not all that much of a letdown. This is Cleaves ninth thriller. He has own awards before and it shows. Hes an accomplished crime novelist.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Vanishing Games: A novel (Jack White Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Roger Hobbs Page; Review: When I reviewed Hobbss first novel, Ghost Man (2013) about the anonymous actually, not anonymous, he just keeps changing his name-- criminal who is referred to as ghost man, I wrote: This novel begs for a sequel. Well, here it is, and its just as good as the first book. In this one, hes reunited with his mentor almost-lover Angela, whos a ghost man/criminal herself. Angela had disappeared from his life six years ago after a botched heist in Kuala Lumpur. Only the ghost man and Angela made it out of that one and hes not heard of (or from) her since. Now shes called him to Macao where shes left him a message an oblique one, to be sure, that he has to figure out and that lands him in deep trouble almost at once. Shes earning her living now as a jugmarker: she sets up a heist and fences the proceeds in return for a share in the profit. A jewel heist piracy in the open sea off Macao -- has gone bad, really bad. Someone, she doesnt know who, is after her to return something taken in the heist something extra that was dumped Angela doesnt know where because a crewmember double-crossed her. The ultimatum is delivered to her in a bag along with the head of the crewmember who tricked her. If Angela doesnt hand over whatever it is that is missing from the heist, her head will be the next one in a bag. Once Angela and the ghost man are reunited, the action is fast is furious: a Chinese triad head presses them to return the jewels and a truly creepy mercenary soldier pursues them for vengeance and gain. When Hobbs wrote Ghost Man, he was a year out of college. It won the Edgar Award for best first crime novel. Two years later, hes written this one, which is just as good. If you want a comparison, think Lee Childs Jack Reacher novels but with a habitual criminal in place of an ex-military drifter. The action starts right off and it never lets up, and ghost man, like Reacher, knows his stuff and isn't afraid to get messy if he has to. Pick this book up and you won't want to put it back down.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Beautiful Bureaucrat: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Helen Phillips Page; Review: In form, this surreal novel reads like an allegory but its more enigma than allegory. It doesnt end pointing toward a message so much as leaving behind a feeling. A young married couple change cities and finally, after months of unemployment, both get jobs. Josephines is at a large building identified only by the two giant letters emblazoned on the wall at either end, A at one end, Z at the other. She works at Z. Her work consists of entering data names, dates, coded remarks- into a giant database, for what purpose she never learns. Its solitary work. Only one person she meets, a woman with the improbable first name of Trishifanny (her parents couldn't decide between Trisha and Tiffany so they named her both) bothers to chat with her. When she asks her supervisor, a man whose face is so gray it blends into the walls behind him and who has the worst breath shes ever come across, what the purpose of her work is, he tells her its better she doesnt ask. She doesnt know where her husband Joseph works but hes started to act he disappears overnight without explanation, seems distracted at times. Her work is getting to her. Physically by the end of the workday, her eyes blur and shes getting zits on her forehead. Emotionally ---words dissociate in her head, rebuilding in new blocks anagrams mostly- its as though inside her head shes trying to find new meaning in common words and phrases. Then something happens at work, and then something else, and the physical facts of Josephs and her existence form new blocks of meaning as well. The book ends, with hints of gain and loss intermingled. On the book jacket, Ursula K. Le Guin compares the story to Italo Calvino and thats a fair comparison. Another commentator invokes Kafka but the tone of Phillipss novel is, nowhere near as dark or despairing as Kafkas bleak writings. If you can write deftly, and have a vast imagination, as Phillips clearly has, Calvinos not a bad model to take for yourself.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Liberated: A Novel of Germany, 1945 (Kaspar Brothers); Author: Visit Amazon's Steve Anderson Page; Review: Liberated has flaws as fiction it takes too long to build up steam and most of the characters seem little more than stick figures- but it tells about events that are usually elided from our popular history of the Second World War, in which, for the most part, we were always the good guys. Andersons story is set in a fictitious Bavarian town named Heimgau. The war has just ended its May 1945 and U.S. Army Captain Harry Kaspar has been sent to Heimgau to oversee its governing during the transition from Nazi-run to self-governed again. When he arrives, he finds that his command has been superseded: he loses his command to Major Membre and he wants it back. Harry discovers three corpses in the road outside the town: all three German, all tortured. This is his chance to dislodge Membre from the post that should be his: solve the case and he can convince the German townspeople that Americans truly care about justice. It soon becomes complicated: the bodies disappear; to get at Membre, Harry has to support an American colonel named Spanner, who soon appears a bigger thug and a much more menacing one-- even than Membre. He gains a girlfriend, a German cabaret singer/actress name Katarina, who has her own axe to grind. There is a great deal in this novel worth reading but ultimately it sinks under the weight of its leaden prose and plebeian, not wholly believable plot.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Drowned Boy (Inspector Sejer Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Karin Fossum Page; Review: This is the twelfth offering in Norwegian author Fossums series of crime novels featuring inspector Konrad Sejer and his colleague Jakob Skarre. A toddler drowns in a backyard pond. The parents call for help but too late. Skarre is the first responder. Somethings not right about the mothers response to the tragedy so he calls in Sejer. Thus starts the patient investigation of what may be an accident but might equally be a murder. At the heart of it is the young couple who are the parents. The father, Nikolai, is devastated by the childs death but the mother, Carmen, nineteen and already a mother for a year, is harder to read. Her reactions seem staged, not truly felt. The child had Downs syndrome and the mother everyone who knows her admits- seemed embarrassed by him, even resentful. Her story about the death holds up until the autopsy. When the facts turn against her, she spins a second story that is hard to crack: if the case goes to trial without evidence pointing to her, shell be acquitted. The jury will buy into her all-too-easily drawn tears. Sejer persists but theres no clear way to unearth the truth. Then comes the ending: if you are one who likes to skip to the end to see what happens, don't do NOTdo it this time or youll spoil the pleasure youll get when you finally reach it. This fine novel has the flavor of a typical Scandinavian crime novel introspective detectives, large social consciencebut Sejer is far from the typical detective of Norse fiction: hes no Martin Beck (Sjowall and Wahloo) or Kurt Wallander (Henning Mankell). Rather, hes a thoughtful and reflective man who is going through a crisis of his ownhes been experiencing recurring bouts of dizziness and fears cancerbut hes not a worrier and hes not the dark brooding type. Hes got a dog he takes along with him on investigations at times, he loves his long dead wife, he seems to get along fine with his grown daughter but she worries about him living alone, and his approach to his job is that someone needs to find the truth and see that justice is meted out and hes that someone. Hes a pretty sunny type for someone who works daily in such a dark realm. The novel is exceptionally well written (and translated, thanks to Kari Dickson) in crisp, economical prose that doesnt slight the feelings of the parties described but doesnt wander off into realms of self-indulgence either. Fossum balances heart and intelligence without slighting either.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Backstrom: He Who Kills the Dragon (Backstrom Series); Author: Leif GW Persson; Review: Swedish criminologist Persson is best known for his masterful trilogy on police efforts to solve a cold case: the assassination of prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. Perssons interest in Palme had roots in the past: in 1977, he had been fired from the Swedish National Police Board after he blew the whistle on links between Palmes minister of justice and a prostitution ring. The year after, he published his first novel The Pig Party, about that scandal. He returned to the Police Board in 1992 as a professor of criminology and served there for twenty more years. Since 1999, he has appeared regularly on Swedish television as an expert commentator, principally on unsolved cases. His Backstrom novels there are three and this is the second one--- treat of a minor character in the Palme trilogy: detective superintendent Evert Backstrom, who is, without a doubt, one of Swedens most corrupt, lazy, and crude police inspectors. Hes an all-purpose hater: scorns Finns, blacks (he keeps referring to a Somalian refugee who is a suspect as sooty), women in general but especially if they're dykes (which simply means he hasn't gotten into their pants yet), gays of course, and all foreigners, as well as anyone on his team who is slow-witted enough to insist on evidence before moving to an arrest. He drinks too much and he eats like a pig and the accouterments of his flat are unexpectedly posh for someone living on an inspectors salary. But theres one other thing about Evert Backstrom. Hes lucky. The truth is if he weren't so lazy, hed be a whiz of a crime solver and lazy as he is, hes still a whiz at it. He spends most of his time trying to involve work and most of the rest of it making digs at his colleagues he likes to see them squirmbut in the end, he comes through when no one else can. Some of its because as head of the investigation, he sees all the evidence and not pieces of it but part of the reason is that hes a brilliant, or at least terribly lucky, cop. The case this time is the death, by battering and asphyxiation, of an alcoholic loner: your standard p**shead, is how Backstrom describes him on first taking charge of the case. But the case almost immediately complicates itself. The dead mans safe deposit box is crammed with undeclared money. (Backstroms only regret is that he had another cop with him when he discovered the money. As a result, he cant make it vanish or go through an instantaneous reducing diet.) Backstroms case may be intertwined with another: a high profile bank heist that went wrong, leaving blood on the streets. Another death occurs. Later on, theres another. Really bad guys circle around Backstrom, but whether to bribe him or off him isn't clear at first. It ends in a glorious blaze of violence that is as funny as it is exciting. And thats the hallmark of this thoroughly satisfying police crime novel: without slighting action, it manages; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Nan-Core; Author: Visit Amazon's Mahokaru Numata Page; Review: Nan-Core is a twisted crime story that should satisfy the most Gothic of tastes. Think of the Japanese analogue to Edgar Allan Poe, combining two strands in Poes writings: his imaginative and extreme explorations of the macabre and his complicated puzzle mysteries, which make logical sense but are probably too extravagant actually to happen. Or, closer to us in time, there are Cornell Woolrichs obsessional meanderings through the dark, closed minds of his depressed, scared, sometimes demented protagonists. According to Wikipedia, since roughly 2012 there has existed a sub-genre of Japanese crime fiction called lyamisu, which deals with grisly episodes and the dark side of human nature. Numata has won two awards for this type of fiction. Vertical, her English-language publisher, lists Nan-Core under crime fiction but it could fit equally well under horror. Except . . . except that there is a mystery in it, it does involve (multiple) killings, and its up to the narrator to solve the puzzle of who did what when and why. Ryo has troubling memories of his childhood. He stayed in a hospital for several weeks and when he returned home, he was convinced his mother had been replaced by a stranger. Gradually the impression died away but all through his life, something inside him has felt out of place, like a milk tooth that was loose but wouldnt quite come out. He grew up, had his own business, a café for people who had dogs could meet and sip tea together. He had a girlfriend, Chie. They were love. But then one day she simply vanished without a trace. And then his mother died, hit by a car, and now his father is dying of cancer. He decided to stop by his fathers house. No one is there. He wanders through the rooms, enters his fathers study and is about to leave when he notices an open panel in a closet. Inside were boxes. It looked like his father had pulled out and then replaced the one on top. He opens it and the story begins. Theres a musty old handbag at the bottom of the box: it doesnt look like it had been his mothers. Inside is a small packet of paper, and wrapped in it a lock hair, black hair. He looks some more and comes across four small journals. He opens the first to read this line: Is it an abnormality in my brain structure that allows people like me to kill so easily? Its the secret diary of a serial killer. The more he reads, the more confused it gets. Who wrote it, his mother or his father? And are the events described in it real or made up? Eventually, he wonders again about his mother: was she his mother or was his real mother replaced, wiped out and replaced, years back by a stranger, and if so, why? The question of whats true and whats not gets harder to resolve the more he explores. The ending is appropriately labyrinthine and theres more blood fresh blood, this timebefore the book; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Book of Evidence, The Sea (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series); Author: Visit Amazon's John Banville Page; Review: Here are the opening sentences of these two novels by the distinguished Irish novelist and Man Booker Award winner John Banville. My lord, when you ask me to tell the court in my own words, this is what I shall say. They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. The first is the confession of a murderer, the second the elegiac remembering of a man whose wife has died, leaving him alone for the first time in years. The murder confession is chilling because the murderer isn't willed to evil but has done great evil anyway. In the center of this man all it is is vacuum. He has all the appurtenances to blend in but all his life, he has never felt that what he says and does matches what he is. Now, with this murder, they do. Who would have thought murder could be so incidental, not just accidental but unrelated to any core of hope or belief inside the person who committed it? Freddie, the narrator of this slow, chilling novel, is the Nowhere Man the Beatles once sang of but without the touch of whimsy of that now old song. And in the second novel, the mans memory is elegiac, yes, but not for his wife. Its the memory of a long past, elusive encounter with a young woman who spent a summer in the house next to the one where the narrator and his parents spent theirs. Childhood, in this case, trumps adulthood. If Dostoevsky were Irish, he might be Banville. In both books, Banvilles strengths shine. The quick hitting and then disappearing wit, the preoccupation with describing, the scintillating verbal panache, the telling and obsessive retelling of stories. Banville has said that he writes sentence to sentence the narrator says one thing and then it leads to the nextand I believe him. Because these scarifying stories are spun out of hollow people, who do something and only long after they have done it realize why they did it and what it meant. Chilling. I hope Ive conveyed that Banville is a truly great writer and a whiz at spinning stories. He is. A handful of novels by him and William Trevor would be enough to satisfy me if I had to be stranded for a month on a desert island with only fiction to divert me.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hollow Man; Author: Visit Amazon's Mark Pryor Page; Review: Pryor has taken a break from his series of thrillers featuring ex-FBI agent Hugo Marston to craft this tricky crime noir, which resembles more than any other crime writer the creepy novels of Jim Thompson. Indeed, the similarity extends further: Hollow Man is not a clone of Thompsons classic The Killer Inside Me (1952) but both books are about men who appear normal enough on the outside but inside are empty. In this case, its Dominic, who works in the Austin public prosecutors office and moonlights as a guitarist and singer on the side. Dominics learned, more or less, to mimic the behavior of ordinary human beings my success in life depends on me wearing the right mask at the right time-- but the cork is always close to blowing, releasing his carefully kept secret which is that he is a monster. The same day that Dominic gets a phone call telling him that his parents have died in an accident (which doesnt bother him), he is demoted at his job (that bothers him a lot) and loses his part-time gig as guitarist when hes accused of stealing someones songs (hes really burned up about that one). He meets a beautiful but dangerous woman and before he knows it is dragged into planning a heist. It doesnt take much persuading with the demotion at work and the loss of his performing gigs, he needs the money. He ropes in two accomplices. Theyre not friends because he doesnt have friends, he doesnt know what the word means, but hes learned to mimic normal behavior well enough that they both think they are. The job is supposed to come off with no violence but everything turns South when a security guard shows up unannounced. Bang, theres one dead man, and then theres two, and Dominic and his friends are into cover-up. From there on, the plot gets twisty. Suffice it to say, loyalty is not one of Dominics virtues. Theres no letup in the action in this exceptionally well written crime thriller. Its even funny at times.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Festival of Insignificance: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Milan Kundera Page; Review: French-Czech (Czech by birth, French by adoption) writer Kunderas slim new novel has received mixed reviews to date and though I think I understand why some reviewers had problems with it, I think they're wrong. I don't feel that way just a little, I feel it a lot. This is a good book, just not so much novel as a reflection on mans fate and foibles, offered in scenes of glancing contact among five associates and friends. Its a novel by the same logic as why the great French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderots secret plays (Rameaus Nephew, Jacques the Fatalist, DAlemberts Dream) are plays: they're all really just an excuse to talk about ideas elegantly and playfully. It starts with one man (Alain) noticing that all the young women he sees passing him on a Paris street are showing their navels. He is provoked to reflect on the sources of erotic appeal: thighs, buttocks, breasts, and now navels. Without transition, it shifts another characters (DArdellos) meeting with his doctor. DArdello learns that no, he doesnt have cancer and no, hes not in imminent risk of dying. He runs into Ramon outside the office neither very much likes the other but they don't admit itand tells him for no reason that he can figure out that hes learned hes dying: hes having a cocktail party to celebrate the news so won't you come please? And then to Charles and Caliban, who temp as waiters in this case, it will be DArdellos partybut Caliban doesnt want to have to converse with the guests so he pretends to be Pakistani and speaks a made up, completely fictitious mock-Pakistani gabble and Charles speaks it back to him. At the party will be Quaquelique (what a name full of whats and whos and written with three Qs!) who never says anything interesting, mumbles instead of talking in full voice, and always winds up leaving parties with the prettiest women, who respond to his insignificance and against DArdellos booming brilliance. Then an anecdote about Stalin, supposedly from Khrushchevs memoir, but nobody remembers who Khrushchev was now, and none of the characters involved in the anecdote seemed to realize that Stalin wasn't serious, he was teasing the other people in the story. Caliban says, why didn't anyone understand he was joking. Charles replies: Because nobody around him any longer knew what a joke was. And in my view, thats the beginning of a whole new period of history. The chapter ends in a discussion of how people think they connect but really dont, how were all separated observation posts, each standing in a different place in time, talking across to each other. A steadily vanishing past, the disappearance of jokes, everyone separated from everyone else, false language in place of real, the root source of erotic desire these are all themes that have appeared in Kundera before, most notably in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which remains my favorite book by him. As before, and like his exemplar Diderot, Kundera presents serious thoughts in the process of relating; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Bangkok Asset: A novel (Sonchai Jitpleecheep); Author: Visit Amazon's John Burdett Page; Review: \Where should one start in describing this firecracker thriller? Its a detective story with a Thai detective, Sonjai Jitpleecheep, who may be the one incorruptible on the whole police force. But the detection doesnt lead to a resolution that is at all positive or tidy and eventually no one has to pay for the murders narrated here except for one rogue and decidedly over the hill CIA agent. Its almost-- sci fi, with a gimmick that, alas, could conceivably happen, and that is horrific in its implications for poor us. Its dystopic, depicting a future that will be infinitely worse than our present, but comic too, almost manic in pace. And lastly, its a novel filled with color, about a place we have heard and read about but most of us don't know an exotic Otherland. Whatever it is, its a darned good read. The action rockets along non-stop, puzzles galore lie about begging to be solved, engaging characters populate the pages of this hybrid creation, a detective-science fiction-dystopian novel. To use two of my favorite words to describe novels I like: its fun and its interesting. Theres never a dull moment in it. Sonjais at the heart of it. Called to investigate a brutal killing --the killer ripped the victims head off in one clean snaphe finds a message addressed to him (by name, no less) written neatly in blood across the top of a mirror. He is sent to investigate a bombing in one of the multitudinous slums of Bangkok and there is a new cell phone with one hundred photographs of him on it and a single number on the phone registry for him to call. More puzzles follow, some involving Inspector Krom, Sonjais new associate on the police force: shes stronger physically and quicker mentally than the people around her, and she exerts a strange fascination which is part sexual and part not over Sonjais almost-wife Chanya. Sonjais personal life his hunt for a never known American father- and his professional life intertwine: Sonjai learns more about his heritage than perhaps he had hoped to learn. Last year just about this time, I read Ian Bostroms Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, strategies. Bostrom speculated: how would we respond, and could we effectively, if an advanced intelligence came along that had its own values and motivators? Suppose it didn't care what happened to us any more? Burdetts book addresses some of the same issues but from a very different, much more oblique point of attack, but its equally disturbing. Chanya comes back from a night with Krom and tells Sonjai: "Somethings been going on, maybe for decades, behind the backs of ordinary people. While weve been amusing ourselves with our little human issues that have to do with love, sex, and freedom, and the quality of life and democracy and pollution and stewardship of the earthlittle minor things like that, which will turn out to be mere distractionssomething else has been happening. Something that is about to change everything suddenly and forever . . .It all really is going to be; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Last Night at the Lobster; Author: Visit Amazon's Stewart O'Nan Page; Review: This lovely short, economical novel is about the closing down of a Red Lobster restaurant, perched in the far corner of a beat-up seen-its-best-days shopping mall somewhere in New England. Its the restaurants last night. Manny, the manager, has already lost staff. Most of them are out of a job after tonight any way so why show up? Others bail on him in mid-shift. Throughout it all, Manny, whose sense of ethics demands that he carry on --as though the job goes on even after the plug has been pulledstruggles to make it through the night with services intact. He has problems of his own to handle: an old flame he still loves, a pregnant girlfriend he doesnt. A blizzard rages outside. Some of the customers are nice, others are awful. And through it all, the restaurant stays open. Lobster received almost unanimously positive reviews from the critics but a much more equivocal response from readers. I think I know why. To start with, the novel is almost plotless. There is little narrative thrust, except for that created when one event happens after another. And you don't learn much about any of the characters except possibly Manny. There is a story in here and I think its lovely: its about this will sound a bit grand but I think its on the markhow work ennobles us, how important work is to us, to our sense of self and worth. But this novel is a slice of life, not the Whole Enchilada, and there is no happy, even clear ending to it. Mannys and the other characters lives just go on after the book is over and well never know what happens to them. This novel is small and contained James Joyces Ulysses is large and chaotic, but they have something in common to them and its that the authors of both are poets of the ordinary life.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter (The Glasgow Trilogy); Author: malcolm mackay; Review: The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter. How a Gunman Says Goodbye. 2013. The Sudden Arrival of Violence. 2014. These are MacKays first published novels and all three appeared within the space of a year. Given how assured the writing and plotting is in all three of them, that blows the mind. The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award for best crime debut of the year and the Scottish First Book of the Year Award. How a Gunman Says Goodbye won the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award. They form a true trilogy, with a story line that stretches across all three but each book has a story strong enough and compelling enough that the reader can read any of the three novels alone and not suffer. Reading all three in sequence, though, completes the story of how crime goes on in Glasgow, and what goes on in the heads of the hard guys and cops who oppose each other on that embattled turf. On balance, its more about hard guys than it is about coppers though and what MacKay has to say about them is fascinating. Once you start one of these books, its awfully hard to put it down. At the heart of the narrative is the story of two hit men, one (Frank) who is growing old, the other (Callum) who is younger but seasoned also. Franks gone in for a hip operation. Callums called upon to replace him. Franks comfortable working within an organization. Callums not. Neither of them really has friends. Callum is Franks protg and his candidate to replace him whenever he cant continue at his job, but when the possibility arrives that it might actually happen, Frank isn't happy at all. No one (with one exception) is truly friends with anyone else in this bleak crime noir series, which owes a debt to old masters Hammett and Chandler. MacKay writes no! he thinksmore like Hammett than like Chandler. Like the master, he has the lingo and mindset of the tough guys and the cops down cold, and he captures the corroding cynicism that infuses all of Hammetts writing as well. The series starts with a contract on a minor drug dealer whos made the mistake of encroaching on mid-level crime boss Peter Jamiesons drug empire. Jamieson and his cold-blooded second-in-command John Young manipulate players with brutal disregard for anyones comfort but their own. The series ends with two deaths, a money mans and a grasss, but the event spirals into increasing levels of insecurity, paranoia and ultimately violence. Its told by a third person narrator but the perspective shifts from player to player, even within the chapters. Short choppy sentences dominate: you follow not only their actions but, step by step, how they reason through to them. Theres no question. The Glasgow Trilogy (the publishers name for these three books) is the real thing and MacKay is a talent to watch. He is apparently already working on a fourth book, but with different characters.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Sudden Arrival of Violence (Glasgow Trilogy 3); Author: Malcom Mackay; Review: The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter. How a Gunman Says Goodbye. 2013. The Sudden Arrival of Violence. 2014. These are MacKays first published novels and all three appeared within the space of a year. Given how assured the writing and plotting is in all three of them, that blows the mind. The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award for best crime debut of the year and the Scottish First Book of the Year Award. How a Gunman Says Goodbye won the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award. They form a true trilogy, with a story line that stretches across all three but each book has a story strong enough and compelling enough that the reader can read any of the three novels alone and not suffer. Reading all three in sequence, though, completes the story of how crime goes on in Glasgow, and what goes on in the heads of the hard guys and cops who oppose each other on that embattled turf. On balance, its more about hard guys than it is about coppers though and what MacKay has to say about them is fascinating. Once you start one of these books, its awfully hard to put it down. At the heart of the narrative is the story of two hit men, one (Frank) who is growing old, the other (Callum) who is younger but seasoned also. Franks gone in for a hip operation. Callums called upon to replace him. Franks comfortable working within an organization. Callums not. Neither of them really has friends. Callum is Franks protégé and his candidate to replace him whenever he cant continue at his job, but when the possibility arrives that it might actually happen, Frank isn't happy at all. No one (with one exception) is truly friends with anyone else in this bleak crime noir series, which owes a debt to old masters Hammett and Chandler. MacKay writes no! he thinksmore like Hammett than like Chandler. Like the master, he has the lingo and mindset of the tough guys and the cops down cold, and he captures the corroding cynicism that infuses all of Hammetts writing as well. The series starts with a contract on a minor drug dealer whos made the mistake of encroaching on mid-level crime boss Peter Jamiesons drug empire. Jamieson and his cold-blooded second-in-command John Young manipulate players with brutal disregard for anyones comfort but their own. The series ends with two deaths, a money mans and a grasss, but the event spirals into increasing levels of insecurity, paranoia and ultimately violence. Its told by a third person narrator but the perspective shifts from player to player, even within the chapters. Short choppy sentences dominate: you follow not only their actions but, step by step, how they reason through to them. Theres no question. The Glasgow Trilogy (the publishers name for these three books) is the real thing and MacKay is a talent to watch. He is apparently already working on a fourth book, but with different characters.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: How a Gunman Says Goodbye (Glasgow Trilogy 2); Author: Malcom Mackay; Review: The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter. How a Gunman Says Goodbye. 2013. The Sudden Arrival of Violence. 2014. These are MacKays first published novels and all three appeared within the space of a year. Given how assured the writing and plotting is in all three of them, that blows the mind. The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award for best crime debut of the year and the Scottish First Book of the Year Award. How a Gunman Says Goodbye won the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award. They form a true trilogy, with a story line that stretches across all three but each book has a story strong enough and compelling enough that the reader can read any of the three novels alone and not suffer. Reading all three in sequence, though, completes the story of how crime goes on in Glasgow, and what goes on in the heads of the hard guys and cops who oppose each other on that embattled turf. On balance, its more about hard guys than it is about coppers though and what MacKay has to say about them is fascinating. Once you start one of these books, its awfully hard to put it down. At the heart of the narrative is the story of two hit men, one (Frank) who is growing old, the other (Callum) who is younger but seasoned also. Franks gone in for a hip operation. Callums called upon to replace him. Franks comfortable working within an organization. Callums not. Neither of them really has friends. Callum is Franks protg and his candidate to replace him whenever he cant continue at his job, but when the possibility arrives that it might actually happen, Frank isn't happy at all. No one (with one exception) is truly friends with anyone else in this bleak crime noir series, which owes a debt to old masters Hammett and Chandler. MacKay writes no! he thinksmore like Hammett than like Chandler. Like the master, he has the lingo and mindset of the tough guys and the cops down cold, and he captures the corroding cynicism that infuses all of Hammetts writing as well. The series starts with a contract on a minor drug dealer whos made the mistake of encroaching on mid-level crime boss Peter Jamiesons drug empire. Jamieson and his cold-blooded second-in-command John Young manipulate players with brutal disregard for anyones comfort but their own. The series ends with two deaths, a money mans and a grasss, but the event spirals into increasing levels of insecurity, paranoia and ultimately violence. Its told by a third person narrator but the perspective shifts from player to player, even within the chapters. Short choppy sentences dominate: you follow not only their actions but, step by step, how they reason through to them. Theres no question. The Glasgow Trilogy (the publishers name for these three books) is the real thing and MacKay is a talent to watch. He is apparently already working on a fourth book, but with different characters.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times (Icons); Author: Visit Amazon's Anne C. Heller Page; Review: Its a daunting task to try to compress the life and works of a thinker as complicated, active and influential as Arendt into 144 pages but author Heller has done a commendable job of it. She starts in midstream, with the publication of and reaction to Arendts most controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), then moves back to trace her life to that point, and then discusses her life post-Eichmann. Her sympathies are with Arendt but she is fair in detailing both the objections her critics, mostly Jewish, had with the book and why they objected: Eichmann was painted as passively, not actively, evil (he was active, much more than a bureaucrat following rules, but that evidence didn't make it into the trial); they were outraged that Arendt claimed European Jews were complicit in their own abuse; her judgments on the fledgling Israeli state and its leaders was scathing. And then there was Arendts own combativeness: she was never one to sit back and take it when she thought she was right. As someone who has read around but not deeply into Arendts life and history Ive read The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann, and parts, not much, of The Human Conditionreading the list of her friends, lovers, mentors and associates is mindboggling. Heres a partial list: from her school days, Gadamer, Jonas, Strauss, Marcuse, Bultmann, and of course, Heidegger, with whom she had a long and complicated sometimes loving, sometimes antagonistic relationship. And then there was her mentor, the kindly Karl Jaspers. In later days, American intellectuals and writers, including Saul Bellow. From early in her life, Arendt consciously styled herself as a conscious pariah. Jews, she said, had been cast out by Germany. It was time for them to adopt the mantle of outlaw. That she was, all her life, an important intellectual who made up her own mind on all matters and took no hostages in defending her views. There was a wonderful series in the early seventies entitled Modern Masters, with volumes on thinkers ranging from Saussure and Marcuse to Sigmund Freud (Richard Wollheim wrote that one). I called on them often back then when I was swotting for my field exams for my doctorate: reading those volumes didn't replace reading the writers being discussed or more thorough studies of their thought, but my time was short and they gave me a starting place. This book reads like one of those volumes.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Dust That Falls from Dreams: A Novel; Author: Louis de Bernieres; Review: When life is elegiac at the start, how do you cope with the change that inevitably follows -- from the mere need to adjust to the passage of time and differences in the way people now think and believe and act to wrenching, catastrophic change a chance for new love blotted out by pained remembrance of old. Thats what this spacious and human novel is about. All the characters involved have to move from the closed in, posh, settled English upper(-upper)-middle class life in the lazy, easy, eminently predictable England of Edward VI (1902 on) to a new life that has been conditioned by cataclysm: the ghastly passage of the Great War, the devastation of the Spanish flu epidemic that followed and killed more men and women than war had before it. Three families live side by side in the countryside south of London. The McCoshes are Scotch-Englishthey have four daughters, Rosie, Christabel, Otillie and Sophie. The American Pendennises live to one side of them with their three sons, Sydney, Albert and Ashbridge, and the Pitts French mother, English fatherlive on the other with their two daredevil sons, Archie and Daniel. The story starts with the decline and demise of Queen Victoria. Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton McCosh celebrate the coronation of the new monarch, Edward, with a coronation party. Daniel and Archie perform a daredevil stunt of acrobatics for everyone assembled and Ash makes a vow to Rosie that will have consequences for the rest of the book. De Bernieres is a masterful storyteller. The smallest parts of his story, even single paragraphs, build the mood, like this passage, early on, the books first description of the Pendennis boys, which, coincidentally, captures the mood of the world they inhabited in 1902 comfortable, no ragged edges, at least none that are noted and commented upon by gentle folk: "On the other side dwelt the Pendennis family, recently arrived from Baltimore, complete with three young sons, Sidney, Albert and Ashbridge, all born a year apart, and each of the younger exactly six inches shorter than his immediate elder, so that they reminded some people of a set of library steps. Every morning these boys shook their fathers hand when they came down to breakfast, and addressed him as sir." They live in a prosperous, tidy, ordered and ranked world but already there are harbingers of change: an aging roué late become king and doubtful of the future of his own monarchy, a nasty bleeding war in the Transvaal, between Boers and Brits. There used to be four Pitt boys but two have already died in that war. More changes follow and all three families move on, but they remain linked by the past and by the attachments the children of the three houses have made for each other. I said earlier that this is a spacious novel. Its also a very rich one generous to the reader, loving to the characters within its pages, who though made up, seem alive, so well are they portrayed and so well are their thoughts and passions captured; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: House of Thieves: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Belfoure Page; Review: House of Thieves is a crime thriller set in 1886 New York, juxtaposing the world of the super-stuffy super-rich and of the poor and criminal. Especially the criminal world, because thats what the novel is about a respectable and connected but not yet wealthy architect is forced to help a criminal gang in order to pay off his sons considerable gambling debts. (Harvard apparently didn't teach the son some things.) Kent, the leader of the thugs, is a cold-blooded killer: he may have earned his medical degree at Princeton but when he threatens you, you stay threatened. The architect is told to pay up or see his sons parts delivered to him in installments. What follows is a series of capers the successful robbery of this mansion, near capture at the nextwith behind it, the story of the architects desperate efforts to free himself from indenture to this criminal mastermind. Because once you're in Kents Gents, you don't leave it at least not alive-- and you're not the only one held to ransom because your wife and children are hostages as well. The capers are interesting enough to hold your attention but the real pleasure in this engaging book is its description of upper-crust New York society ca. 1886: its stuffy and rule-bound, sensitive to any hint of scandal, and oh yes, if I haven't said it yet, boring, boring, boring because you cant do anything except follow the rules, no mater how senseless they seem and are. In the course of the novel, everyone in the architects family revolts against the hypocrisy of this class-bound universe in one way or another. As in his first novel, The Paris Architect (2013), the protagonist is an architect. Since Belfoure is too, his knowledge of the craft enriches his portrait of the hapless protagonist, who eventually regains control of his own fate in unexpected ways.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: House of Thieves - Kindle edition; Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Belfoure Page; Review: House of Thieves is a crime thriller set in 1886 New York, juxtaposing the world of the super-stuffy super-rich and of the poor and criminal. Especially the criminal world, because thats what the novel is about a respectable and connected but not yet wealthy architect is forced to help a criminal gang in order to pay off his sons considerable gambling debts. (Harvard apparently didn't teach the son some things.) Kent, the leader of the thugs, is a cold-blooded killer: he may have earned his medical degree at Princeton but when he threatens you, you stay threatened. The architect is told to pay up or see his sons parts delivered to him in installments. What follows is a series of capers the successful robbery of this mansion, near capture at the nextwith behind it, the story of the architects desperate efforts to free himself from indenture to this criminal mastermind. Because once you're in Kents Gents, you don't leave it at least not alive-- and you're not the only one held to ransom because your wife and children are hostages as well. The capers are interesting enough to hold your attention but the real pleasure in this engaging book is its description of upper-crust New York society ca. 1886: its stuffy and rule-bound, sensitive to any hint of scandal, and oh yes, if I haven't said it yet, boring, boring, boring because you cant do anything except follow the rules, no mater how senseless they seem and are. In the course of the novel, everyone in the architects family revolts against the hypocrisy of this class-bound universe in one way or another. As in his first novel, The Paris Architect (2013), the protagonist is an architect. Since Belfoure is too, his knowledge of the craft enriches his portrait of the hapless protagonist, who eventually regains control of his own fate in unexpected ways.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Corridors of the Night: A William Monk Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Anne Perry Page; Review: Anne Perrys Victorian detective novels are always a delight. Theyre impeccably researched, they present good mysteries and often the action is exciting, and though never preachy, she addresses real social evils of the day, some of which apply just as well to our own times. Most of all, she has created a cast of appealing characters Scotland Yard detective Thomas Pitt and his redoubtable wife and partner Charlotte, and William Monk, now head of the Thames river police, and his equally redoubtable wife Hester, formerly a nurse in the Crimean War she worked with Florence Nightingale and is still at it. Its a tossup which series is better, the Pitts or the Monks, but its indisputable that both series are very good. Hester more than her husband is in the forefront in this novel, which involves secret medical experimentation, Harriets kidnapping, jiggery pokery on the waterfront, and a nasty, utterly self-centered millionaire bad man. It starts with two (unrelated) mysteries, one for each of the Monk spouses, and ends with a trial and its aftermath. In between, the novel rockets along as all sorts of ominous things occur. Pacing is not a problem in a Perry novel. This isn't the best of Anne Perrys novels but its still a good one, filled with adventure and menace and a delight to read. There are some problems with it but they are minor and do not detract from enjoying the book. The lead villain (one of two) is not adequately fleshed out more of a bogeyman than a real man-- and a messy trial three-quarters of the way through the book slows the pace. Readers without other knowledge of the series may be mildly confused by the recounting of lawyer Oliver Rathbones former relationship with Hester, Monks wife. Elsewhere in the novel, Perry handles the back stories effortlessly but this one time its awkward. There is also left unresolved a puzzle from Monks shadowy past. As readers of the series know, he was left amnesiac after a coach accident years before. Ever since has had to feel his way along in relations with strangers who bear grudges against him for reasons he knows not. I know it sounds Victorian melodramatic, but in the context of this series, it works. Another virtue of this fine series and this good but not flawless episode in it is Perrys sympathetic handling of minor characters: the people Hester or William have rescued from the detritus of lower class London, devoted acolytes of the Monks all of them, and Monks colleagues in the river police. Perry is a fine writer whose humanity enriches, not intrudes on, her ability to tell a ripping good story.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Those Who Wish Me Dead; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Koryta Page; Review: Those Who Wish Me Dead Has almost all the elements one would wish in an action thriller vicious, truly creepy killers, a young boy at risk for his life and the survivalist instructor who has taught him how to survive on his own in the wiid, a brave young woman firefighter who is willing to [put her life at risk her life to help the boy. And behind it all, a raging forest fire which threatens the life of everyone in its wake. After he witnesses a brutal murder, fourteen-year-old Jace is enrolled under a false name in a wilderness survival course: its a desperate attempt to get him off the grid until he can testify against the two killers. The Blackwell brothers are the killers. They converse with each other in a hippy dippy loose manner that is reminiscent of surfers and beachcombers but actually reflects an utter indifference to other peoples need or even continued existence. They like killing and they like torturing and working in tandem without a hitch in thought they are surprisingly good at both. The story is a chase: the Blackwells pursuing Jace, Jace using his newly acquired survival skills to shake them off. A lot of people die en passage through this scary and exciting novel, which ends, against the odds, satisfactorily. Dont start reading this late at night --you won't want to fall sleep until you're done with it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence; Author: Visit Amazon's Jerry Kaplan Page; Review: Kaplan, currently a fellow at the Stanford Institute for Legal Informatics, draws on his experience in artificial intelligence and as a computer technology entrepreneur to lay out the risks inherent in our failure to address the issue of how technological change, particularly in the areas of information accumulation, exchange and deployment and robotics, changes society and work. Theres,much more wealth in the world now than in 1970 but it has been radically redistributed with the top half or one percent of the population reaping the lions share of the benefits and the gap between poor and rich increasing ever more exponentially. We are now on the cusp of another social reordering as machines and machine intelligences replace still a larger share of human-filled jobs. What are we going to do about it? The problem is pace: technological change, and the obsolescence of traditional job slots, is occurring so rapidly that we cant adjust, either in retraining laborers who have lost their traditional employment, or in policy, making adjustment that promote not just market growth and profits but the kind of society, with limits set to inequality, that we want and should be pursuing. Kaplan is a persuasive discussant, arguing both through the presentation of competencies) and by analogy. The analogies, in particular, reduce his sometimes complicated arguments to obvious truths. Even for someone who keeps an eye on these matters, some of his information will startle: a law firm entitled Robot, Robot, and Hwang, permits its human partner (Hwang) to broadcast his computer expertise, which dramatically reduces the time, expense, and fallibility of legal advice. Roxxxie and Rocky are soon due to be on the market: robot sex toys that, in the words of the companys founder, can carry on a discussion and express love to you. [Roxxxy] can talk, listen, and feel your touch. Kaplan stresses that unless we want a permanently underemployed and impoverished lower class, one that grows in numbers every year, we need to make changes. The changes he proposes are modest, sensible and relatively conservative they do not abandon the free market ideal for any kind of state-imposed control but rather govern-sponsored incentives like tax benefits for corporations that spread the wealth beyond a few investors and replacing the current unworkable educational loan system with job mortgages with employment ensured through a levy on future earnings. He also addresses the risk of automated bidding systems warring on the stock market, as occurred almost disastrously in 2010, and suggests charging a fractional fee for requests for information from bidding entities. You can agree or disagree with Kaplan, but his argument deserves a hearing and he presents it persuasively. Ive read reviews that dismiss it as more liberalism, but its much more than that: as I have written above, hes no radical: he doesnt want to chop down the tree of free enterprise, just reshape the branches into a more appealing form. Still the same system, but shorn of some of the ugly excrescences that have recently popped up.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened; Author: Visit Amazon's Allie Brosh Page; Review: My friend Allen sent me this book via Amazon so though I didn't purchase it myself on Amazon it was purchased there. Brosh apparently started it as a blog. It spiraled into a book and has been well received. Its hard to categorize: lots of drawings, self-consciously crude like a childs drawings, interspersed with text, the musings of neurotic, usually nerdish Allie Brosh. At times, its out and out funny, and deliberately so. At other times, a sly sense of humor sneaks out anyways. The overall effect is of listening to a series of monologues by a somewhat odd friend of yours whom youve always known was a special, but kind of a hidden treasure, not widely accepted public goods. Most of the narratives are mildly to considerably neurotic. Some of them are about how children can drive their parents nuts and usually enjoy doing it. The section, Thoughts and Feelings, starts: I have a subconscious list of how reality should work and then proceeds to detail how real reality screws it all up for her. Its not her fault shes rigid. Its natures for not living up to her expectations. Dogs Dont Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving narrates her experiences with the dog from Hell, too dense to pick up any commands. The things it does do spontaneously like urping on the back seat of the car while they're movingarent really socially acceptable or psychologically soothing. Telling too much about this book won't explain how enjoyable it is. It makes neurosis something to chuckle about, which is what many of the improv comics do now, but Brosh does with a unique combination of drawings an commentary that was at least for meirresistible.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Whippoorwill; Author: Visit Amazon's Joseph Monninger Page; Review: This fine book, advertised for young readers, age 12 and up, is proof that Young Adult novels don't have to water down their content and they don't have to portray their characters as any different in their thinking and their feeling than are their elders. This is a really good book. Its filled with heart. Its exceptionally well written. And its protagonist, Clair Taylor, is as appealing and competent as in heroine you could seek in contemporary fiction. Its just that her problems are a sixteen-year-olds, not a thirty-year-olds chief among them, Danny, the bratty boy who lives next door, is acting like he wants to be her boyfriend and shes not sure she wants him. Although she finds him appealing, hes too needy, too much a grease monkey type, and his problems with his abusive, bullying, hyper-aggressive father are too much for her to handle. It all explodes over a dog. Wally, a black Lab-mutt, is chained to a pole in Dannys back yard. No one walks him, no one pets him or spends time with him, and in the winter (this is New Hampshire) he almost freezes to death and no one even notices. But Clair does and eventually she does something about it. It starts with trying to take him for a walk. (No one has ever spent time bothering to attempt to train him so that ends in disaster.) Danny notices. Hes ashamed that hes ignored the dog. Soon the two of them are partners, bonded by their mutual concern for the dog and by a growing attraction between the two of them. Many things happen after this. Everything doesnt end happily. But it does end believably and the final feeling from reading this soulful book is one of hope. This is a very generous book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Thirteen Ways of Looking: Fiction; Author: Visit Amazon's Colum McCann Page; Review: This is the first collection of short stories to appear in twelve years for McCann, who won the National Book Award in 2008 for his novel, Let the Great World Spin. A novella, Thirteen Ways of Looking, starts it off: in alternating chapters, we follow the stream of consciousness thoughts of a retired New York Circuit judge on his last day of life and the actions of the police detectives seeking to discover who killed him and why. The conjoining of two such different narratives, both in content and style, works: the detective segments of the story aren't as compelling as the judges internal narrative but the conjoining of the two adds poignance to the judges fate. Three short stories follow. ShKhoi is about an Irish woman with an adopted son who suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome, is deaf and given to fits of rage and fear. Hes nearly a man now and she gives him a wet suit as a present one morning. The next day the suit is gone from the hook in his room and hes missing. ShKhoi was awarded a Pushcart Prize and has been selected to appear in the next collection of The Best American Short Stories. In What Time Is It Now, Where You Are? McCann has found a novel way to write about the experience of a young woman soldier holding down New Years Eve guard duty in an Afghani outpost: her story is being teased out in drabs and dribbets by an author who is under a deadline to produce the story for the New Years edition of a magazine. Its not a real story. Its a made up one, but it feels more and more real the longer he works it over. Treaty is wrenching. A nun recognizes a face on television. Its the man who kidnapped, raped and abused her for months in a Central American jungle years before. Now hes one of the negotiators for a trade agreement with that country, no longer a leftist rebel but a shill for the capitalist miners. She maneuvers a meeting with him, with disastrous results. The story is sad and wrenching. And in so being, it points out a commonality in these four tales: their lack of resolution. They end but they don't resolve. In that respect, they're much like life, but more elegantly expressed.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning; Author: Visit Amazon's Timothy Snyder Page; Review: I first came across Snyders (history: Yale) writing when he assisted ailing Tony Judt in crafting Judts last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century (2013). It was composed by Snyder from taped conversations Snyder held almost weekly with Judd as the great historian struggled to get out his last thoughts before he died of ALS. Snyder didn't just tape Judts remarks: he was an active collaborator in shaping the material of the book. I was so impressed by Snyder that I ordered his Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2012), an outstanding history of the killing zone between Germany and Russia. This present book, Black Earth, doesnt repeat Bloodlands, but it does build on it. As one of commentators remarks on the back cover: Snyder has become our most distinguished historian of evil, which puts him in the distinguished company of scholar-activists like philosophers Susan Neiman and Martha Nussbaum. In many ways, this book reads like a continuation, expansion and updating of the seminal works of Raul Hilberg on the philosophical underpinnings and operation of the Holocaust killing machine and Hannah Arendt, not in Eichmann in Jerusalem so much as in her more historically oriented The Origins of Totalitarianism. Snyder does what good historians do: look beneath sweeping generalization into the particularity of historical occurrences. In the process he manages to dismantle a number of commonplace myths about what happened in the Holocaust. To whit, that Hitler was a nationalist or that he only gradually backed into his drive for extermination of the Jews. From the start, Snyder writes, Hitler saw the Jews as a virus that had to be destroyed. And as to his Germanness, he wasn't any kind of a nationalist, but rather, a racial anarchist who cared about his people only if they succeeded in combat with other peoples. Snyder shows too that the exterminations proceeded differently depending on the condition of the country in which they occurred. Where some vestige of statehood was preserved, deaths occurred at a slower rate. The highest rate of annihilation (reaching 97% in some of the former Soviet zones) occurred where the Nazi onslaught eliminated the state and its institutions e.g., Poland, which was declared to have never been a state or the Polish citizens of a stateand highest of all in zones occupied successively by the Russians and the Germans. In those regions, the Soviets did the Germans work for him, undermining civic institutions and social ties among the inhabitants, so it was fatally easy for collaborators to shift from one side to the other, and to blame all their woes on the Jews, who were both easy pickings and seen as a foreign excrescence. Destroying states was a logical precursor to destroying people. Snyder also takes on the Auschwitz myth, claiming it has allowed historians and politicians to ignore the widespread complicity of Germans and others in the Nazi juggernaut. Almost all Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians . Were culpable, at least in to doing anything to stop it. The devastation was so obvious that they could not have ignored knowing; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings; Author: Mr. Peter Pettinger; Review: Pettinger, who is a classical concert pianist and teaches at Cambridge, has written a detailed and sympathetic biography of the great jazz pianist Bill Evans (1929-80), who combined in one person a consummate musical talent, a usually sunny spirituality and all the low cravings and repeated disappointments of the confirmed junkie. By now, the story is generally known: inducted into the Miles Davis quintet/sextet and playing a major role in the famed Kind of Blue session, Evans moved from lesser drugs to heroin and in no time was hooked for the rest of his short life (fifty-one years). Reluctant at first to record on his own he wasn't sure he had that much to sayhe broke through to jazz audiences with a live album at the Village Vanguard, featuring along with Evans, bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. The music they played didn't appear all that revolutionary but it was, featuring a level of melodic and rhythmic interplay among the three musicians that was unparalleled in jazz then or now. While Evanss playing might appear at times little more than cocktail music, it was informed by his deep understanding of harmonics. No other pianist I know of spent as much time on the voicings of his music the more time you spend listening to what Evans played on a good day (he had bad days too, sometimes on record), the more you got out of it. Pettingers book is more about the music than anything else. His background as a performing artist helps him in communicating what is unique and permanent about Evanss music. Pettinger discusses the vicissitudes of Evanss often rocky personal life but does not obsess over it. I susoect that anyone who reads this book will appreciate Evans exceptional music even more.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: All That You've Seen Here Is God: New Versions of Four Greek Tragedies Sophocles' Ajax, Philoctetes, Women of Trachis;; Author: Sophocles; Review: My friends, you have seen many strange things: countless deaths, new kinds of torture, immeasurable pain, and all that youve seen is god. This is the closing speech of the Chorus in Sophocless Women of Trachis. The play is about the ignominious and painful death of Heracles, the greatest of all Greek heroes. The play isn't often presented but writer/translator/director Doerries argues that it presents a powerful case for euthanasia when death arrives too slowly and pain is too great, having a proper death becomes a concern. Doerries is founder of a group called the Theater of War, which reads ancient Greek plays to veterans, caregivers and their families as a way to help them to talk about the invisible wounds of war and the losses they have suffered. He also co-founded Outside the Wire, which uses theater as a vehicle to address pressing social and public health issues. As Doerries notes, the plays here presented there are three by Sophocles and one by Aeschylushave all been presented to these audiences with a positive effect in freeing them to voice their own distress. Themes of war and loss, the gods indifference toward mans sufferings, betrayal and the longing for meaning that may not be there, the desire to have a dignified ending all these are found in these still moving tales. In Sophocless Ajax, the Chorus laments: How many years will it take for my wandering to end? I wish the Architect of War, had vanished or perished before he gave us the tools to kill and taught us how to use them. He has robbed me of flowers and large bowls of wine, and the sound of sweet music. [W]hat happiness is left for me in this world? I am not qualified to judge the accuracy of Doerriess translations but thats pretty much irrelevant: they read well, which is to say dramatically, with pathos and energy, and the language Doerries uses makes them seem relevant to a modern, non-classics-reading audience. Even the layout of these pages a few words to a line, with lots of white space around themis attractive. People who have lived lives of mythological proportions have no trouble relating to ancient Greek tragedies, Doerries asserts. I think hes proved his point.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club; Author: Visit Amazon's Eileen Pollack Page; Review: Two hundred some pages into this mixed memoir and study of the reasons why so few women students continue in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Pollack cites a 2012 study by researchers at Yale who sent out comparable but not identical resumes, half under the name of John and half under the name of Jennifer, with letters of recommendation and supporting material, to 127 faculty members in physics, chemistry and biology at six major research institutions in the United States . The faculty members were asked to rate John or Jennifer on a sliding scale as to their estimate of the candidates competence, hireability and likeability and their perceived willingness to mentor him or her if he or she was struggling. On every scale except likeability, the male candidate significantly outscored the female, even though the CVs and supporting materials were equivalent. The professors were asked to suggest a salary range they would be willing to offer their candidate. John was offered an average starting salary of $30,238; Jennifer $26,508. When Pollack reported on this study on a website, one writer, a scientist, wrote back that the results didn't show gender bias but rather the scientists objective knowledge that women are, on the average, less able than men. This response, Pollack notes, is a textbook definition of bias: a decision made on gut feeling, or a few anecdotal examples, taking no notice of individual differences. Pollack writes that sentiments like this discourage promising women students from sticking it out in STEM fields. Theres also a culture that makes assumptions about masculine and feminine behavior, blatantly favors the former over the latter, and holds women accountable to a higher standard of behavior than boys both in their studies and their work. It is these subtle and not-so subtle discouragers, from grade school on that drive women out of science and into more supportive and people-oriented fields. A large part of this book is autobiographical, where some readers might prefer hard data, but thats beside the point. Telling her own story enriches personalizes her message. Pollack was one of the first two women at Yale to graduate with a bachelor of science degree in physics. By the time she graduated, she had published articles and presented at a professional (not graduate student) conference. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Yet she didn't continue on in physics. It took a while for her to figure out what she did want to do. Eventually she settled on writing. (The encouragement of novelist John Hersey helped.) Today she writes books and teaches writing at the University of Michigan and s he likes the life she leads. But she cant help wonder if she might not also have liked the life she had dreamed of earlier, as a theoretical physicist, if one of her science teachers had encouraged her. One difference between men and women STEM students, she notes, is that the mens self-confidence is much stronger, as is their aggressiveness they don't need as much encouragement or mentoring. But it doesnt; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Where the Bodies Were Buried: Whitey Bulger and the World That Made Him; Author: Visit Amazon's T. J. English Page; Review: With the release of Black Mass, starring Johnny Depp as Boston crime boss and sociopath Whitey Bulger, the time is good for another book on Bulger. And veteran crime writer T. J. English (The Westies, Whiteys Payback) is well situated to write it. Its his seventh true crime book and the third to deal directly with Irish-American criminals. This book is about the trial of Bulger for multiple murders (twenty in all) accomplished over many years. The trial lasted two months --June 12-August 12- and ended with Bulgers conviction for eleven out of the twenty murders. The verdict was hailed by the FBI and the Department of Justice as a triumph for the American justice system. It had taken decades but one of Americas most ruthless and repugnant criminals had finally been taken down. But English asked at what cost? For, English claims with relatively convincing evidence, the government made its case at great cost, giving a pass to other monsters as heinous as Bulger in order to nail him. Even worse, the prosecution carefully limited the case to hide evidence of decades of corrupt practice in the handling of top echelon informers, Bulger included, which had led to the wrongful imprisonment of innocent men (the decades-long jailing of Joe Salvati), a free pass on murdering other hoods, and the exchange of information and money between cops and crooks. English argues that Bulger got what he deserved out of the trial but the American public did not: trial information was carefully cosmeticized to hide evidence of systematic, decades-long wrongdoing of government law officials. A strength of the book is Englishs personal contacts with the Boston crime figures involved with Bulger. He knows them, meets them for cookouts and dinners out, but doesnt try to romanticize them. He knows they lived still live in some casesin a violent world, but their testimony provides him insights into Bulgers world. Not surprisingly, Bulger, his lawyers and the prosecutors all declined to meet with Engiish. The result is a book that presents a pretty convincing case for Englishs thesis but relies of necessity on uncorroborated testimony, and English is the first to admit that the men he is talking to are masters at manipulating perception. There is much of interest in this book. It could have benefited from a rewrite: some assertions are made too often, the testimony presented in the order it appeared in the trialcould use a re-summation. But for the most part, this is a lively telling of a fascinating trial. As to Bulger, even in a world of slimy creatures like the ones depicted her, Bulger emerges as particularly repellent. And scary.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay; Author: Visit Amazon's William Boyd Page; Review: Sweet Caress is another in a long string of wholly engaging novels written by Boyd, who has won honors in the past for several of his books. The characteristics of a Boyd novel are that they are elegantly written and intricately plotted and the people who pass through the their pages are out of the ordinary, even, in the case of Amory Clay, strong willed and determined to lead her own life her own way, regardless of the many and sometimes painful pratfalls she takes en route through her long, rich life. Amory is the heroine of this book, and a very engaging one. You could claim she doesthat her life started out wrong footed: the [London] Times announcement of her birth informed readers that Beverley and Wilfreda Clay had given birth to a son, Amory, on March 7, 1908. Amorys life played out that ambiguity. She turned down college to become a photographer, was on (or at least near) the front line during the Great War, took photographs on the sly of a den of extreme iniquity in Weimar Germany and when she displayed them in a photo exhibit, was hauled into court on charges of obscenity, and lost both her case and the photos and proof sheets. And on and on, though a life filled with drama, and backing and forwarding, through the between war years, on into WWII and much later Viet Nam, and includes passionate love, violent war, and trying to be a good mother to her two twins who have wills of their own. It may seem like I am revealing too much of what happens in this fine novel but I havent. Amorys is a complicated life but once you start hearing her talk, you won't want to put this book down. And there will be surprises. Readers who have read others novels by Boyd may notice similarities between this novel and his The New Confessions (1988). That novel recounts the life and career of James Todd, a forgotten filmmaker, whose final project was a five-hour, three-screen version of Rousseaus Confessions. Unfortunately for Todd, his masterpiece appeared in the theaters just as talkies arrived and quickly sunk into obscurity. Amory Clay has the same passion for her art as did Todd, and again its a visual art, and though she has more success in her life than Todd did, Amorys projects also run up against the vagaries of history and they don't always make it through intact. Boyd is an elegant writer but hes an interesting one too. When I reviewed The New Cpnfessions years ago, I wrote that it was sparking with ideas. Sparking, not sparkling. The intensity of Amorys involvement with people and events fizzes with energy. And as are many of Boyds protagonists, Amory is strong, durable, human and admirable.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Can I Go Now?: The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood's First Superagent; Author: Visit Amazon's Brian Kellow Page; Review: The list of stars who passed through Hollywood agent Sue Mengerss hands at one time or another in the 70s would knock your socks off: Streisand heads the list, but theres Christopher Walken and Gene Hackman, Ryan ONeal, Ali McGraw, Candice Bergen, Faye Dunaway, and Michael Caine. For a decade, she had the magical touch. She was even profiled on Sixty Minutes, the first time a theatrical agent had ever received such notice. She never lost her touch completely but from the 80s on, her career gradually subsided. Part of it was changes in the way movies were put together now bean counting had replaced talent scouting. Part of it was age to the powers that be who controlled so much of Hollywood film making, Sue was simply no longer young enough. Part of it, though, was the result of missteps as a talent manager. Her premiere client, and she thought a friend, Barbra Streisand left in 1982 after the disastrous mishandling of the release of the movie All Night Long. (Barbra did okay in the film but the movie bombed and Sue wasn't sympathetic to Barbras issues any longer.) Several other clients drifted away in the years to follow, some concerned about results, others alienated by her pushiness. Her career ended in disappointment: in 1988 she was brought back as senior vice president to revive a moribund William Morris agency but she could no longer able the goods. Increasingly an anachronism, she was pushed out of the agency within two years. She was 58 and she would live to 79. . She spent the remaining years hosting high profile parties at her Hollywood home, hanging out with a coven of Hollywood female friends, the Dyke-ettes, traveling to Europe with her husband Jean-Claude Tramont (reluctantly, very reluctantly, for she never liked leaving L.A.), and proferring advice, sometimes asked for and sometimes not, to her show biz friends and colleagues. She outlived Jean-Claude by fifteen years. Kellow (Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, and biographies of Ethel Merman and Eileen Farrell) is a sympathetic and conscientious chronicler and the list of interviewees with whom he met to write this book is mindboggling. But however admirable Sue was, theres something cold and repellent about her climb to fame and the way she managed it after she arrived at the top. Her friends loved her but friends dropped off the table with almost clocklike regularity and once off, she was cold, cold, cold. Somewhere in this book, one of the people being interviewed captures it: Sue was a narcissist, with all the insecurity and capacity to manipulate people for her own ends that the diagnosis implies, but as long as you didn't rock her boat, she could be a charming and supportive friend just not one you could trust if you crossed her. She was loud, often lewd, and boy was she pushy, but for a decade at least, people felt they needed to be around her. Because she had the magical touch. On April 24, 2013, Bette Midler opened on Broadway in a; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: X (A Kinsey Millhone Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Sue Grafton Page; Review: Twenty-four novels in and Sue Graftons chronicle of the adventures of private investigator Kinsey Milhone is still as fresh and engrossing as ever! What makes these novels work without reader fatigue? For one thing, theres Kinsey. She is a wonderful creation, one of the best fictional depictions of a P.I. in the business. Kinseys no Wonder Woman. She has no special talents exotic martial arts or whateverjust brains, common sense and doggedness, a super work ethic, and an appreciation of people which, if it doesnt help in solving cases, makes her appealing to the reader. Shes also very human: shes loyal to her friends, shes a bit stingy, definitely not fashion conscious, and her easting habits are atrocious (although who doesnt secretly love fatty, unhealthy food?). In this installment, Kinsey juggles three investigations. First, the widow of a former colleague asks her to look through her dead husbands extraordinarily messy files (he was a P.I. too but in Kinseys mind, a crooked one) to help her with an upcoming audit by the IRS. Kinsey discovers, hidden in a carton beneath a false bottom unexplained objects among them a sheet of paper with a string of four digit numbers on it. One of her friends loves ciphers he figures it out: its a cipher, a substitution code using the typewriter QWERTY keyboard as its base: 1 is for Q, 2 for W, 3 for E, and so on. Decoded, its a list of womens names, six of them. Kinsey investigates and the menace ratchets steadily up. Second, Kinsey takes a low budget job: find the address of a newly released con for his mother, who abandoned him at birth and now wants to make up for it. But matters soon go south in this case as well and soon Kinsey is pursuing a true puzzle: whats going on here and why? Lastly, new neighbors move next door to Kinsey and her octogenarian and friend landlord Henry and they're the neighbors from Hell. Something is seriously amiss about them. Henrys too nice to do anything about it except be taken advantage of so its up to Kinsey to deal with this problem too. It would be sinful to tell you what happens from this point on. Suffice it to say that this is one of the best installments in an exceptional series of detective novels. I don't know what Im going to do when Grafton runs out of letters to use. (I bought this novel for my wife, who loves the Kinsey Milhone stories. She had been going through a dry spell: no book she started kept her interest all the way through. I gave her this book and a day and a half later, she had finished it.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Killing Lessons: A Novel (Valerie Hart); Author: Visit Amazon's Saul Black Page; Review: Saul Black is the pseudonym for Glen Duncan, author of one of the best werewolf novels one of the few good ones --of recent years, 2012s The Last Werewolf. To all appearances this is his first published crime novel and its just as good as his werewolf book, which is to say, gripping. Pick it up and you won't want to put it down. A widow, still young, living alone with her two young children, finds two strange men in her house. Soon blood is everywhere. Her ten-year-old daughter is pursued but escapes, but at a cost. She holes up with a neighbor nearby: he cant move because his sciatica has flared up and shes suffering from hypothermia and has a broken ankle, perhaps even more breaks in her bones elsewhere. The killers leave her behind and move on to more kills elsewhere. A San Francisco homicide detective is pursuing them but doesnt know who they are or where they're based: the killings are all over the map. Whats common about them is the act. In each case, seven in all now, a young woman is abducted, tortured and mutilated before being killed, and in some cases raped. The DNA and fingerprints show that two men are involved, and theres always an extraneous object inserted somewhere into the victims body a candy apple, a balloon, a hammer, one time a large pottery goose is shoved into the eviscerated torso of a victim. The search for the killers is destroying the detectives life she drinks too much, has nightmares. Three years earlier, her obsession with a similar case had destroyed her romance with another detective. She still longs for him. Now, out of nowhere, he returns, another complication in her running-down life. Theres another killing, the eighth. But there are still no clues. The detective doubles down, watches surveillance tapes of the scene of one of the abductions. She finds something, possibly a photo one of the killers. Thats the first clue. Soon a second comes, then a third. Theres another abduction, but this one is reported early enough that the girl may still be alive. The manhunt is on. In alternating chapters, we follow the killers, the young girl hiding with a neighbor, the kidnapped woman, and the detectives, as events race toward the bloody climax. Along the way, we learn why the killers are killing stands for. I like thrillers and this one is a standout.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Accident; Author: Elie Wiesel; Review: One of the pleasures of Chris Pavones second thriller, The Accident, is that you still don't know whats really happening until the last five pages, and when you do, its a stunner. A literary agent receives a manuscript, anonymous author, delivered by courier on the sly. It tells of horrible things done by media magnate Charlie Wolfe, starting with remember the title? The Accident? an accident that isn't one, the unintentional murder of a young woman and the cover-up of the death so Wolfes subsequent isn't compromised. The agent reads the manuscript. Its what she needs to restart a stalled career, failing since her young daughter died and she temporarily lost her drive to succeed. She notifies a publisher. He not only has a case for her but he too needs the career boost that publishing this page-turner will provide him. Then events slide sideways. The agents subordinate sees the manuscript on her bosss desk. She copies the manuscript on the sly and flies to L.A. to make her own deal. Boom, shes dead. A senior CIA operative is determined to erase all trace of the book: soon the agent and the publisher are on the run, pursued by ruthless killers. Whats going on and why? Can they elude the bloodhounds on their trail? And what of the anonymous author of the manuscript? Theyre tracking him too. The book races from crisis point to crisis point until the very end, when everything is wrapped up in a denouement that finally and satisfactorily explains what everything that has happened has happened. This is a good book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Make Me: A Jack Reacher Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Lee Child Page; Review: Out in the middle of wheat fields, in some godforsaken stretch of the Midwest, lies the town of Mothers Rest. Some stores, a middling fair motel, farms and silos and tractors and backhoes and pigs. Thats where Childs eponymous action hero, ex-military police Jack Reacher, 6 5 and bulked up, lands in Childs twentieth series novel. Reacher stops there to satisfy his curiosity: hes traveling anyways and he wonders how the name got its name, if theres any kind of historical marker or memorial that will explain it. But again he steps into Big Trouble. The Bad Guys have just disposed of the last person to snoop around the town: they used a backhoe to plant him several feet beneath a pigsty. Theres a woman there looking to hook up with the dead man. When she talks to Reacher and then they both sign into the same motel, their suspicions are raised. Reacher wanders the streets looking for some marker to explain the towns name: they read it as reconnaissance. From then on, things goes to hell in a hand basket as the bad guys hustle to eliminate a risk they hadnt foreseen in Reacher and the woman, who is the missing mans colleague in an investigation agency. For most of the novel, Reacher and the woman P.I. cant figure out whats going on. Something really bad has happened and the womans partner is almost certainly gone, but why are they targets now? The answer, when it eventually surfaces, is shocking, and a puzzle within a puzzle. And, what a surprise!, Reacher handles everything that happens to him all with unassuming efficiency. This is one of the best of recent Reacher novels. The sense of menace is palpable, the puzzle is intriguing, and Reacher kicks butt with the best of them. You have to admire an author who can keep a series live and crackling across twenty books. As with the previous books, I ordered this one delivered to me as soon as it was published and I read it from cover to cover the day it arrived, even getting up in the middle of the night to finish it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Almost Everything Very Fast: A Novel; Author: Christopher Kloeble; Review: I find it hard both to define this book and to review it, I think, because Im not sure how I feel about it. The notes on the back cover of the book describe it as a sensitive and dramatic family saga. I don't think it is. Although family ties emerge from hiding in the course of the narrative, its more about quest than realization. At the end, the protagonist does learn who his father and mother were/are and what his relationship to the other major character of the book is, and his relationship to this other character, the brain damaged Fred, is warm, but the story of their relationship is not, definitely not, by any normal definition, a family saga. Rather, this well written book is a somewhat experimental novel about quest for family, not about family life in any ordinary sense of the phrase. Its about the clearing up of mysteries and is much cooler (though not cold) than most family chronicles. A greater emotional distance is maintained throughout it. I suppose what Im trying to say is that this novel is no more a family saga than was, for instance, Gunter Grasss blockbuster The Tin Drum. Just because family plays a major role in it, doesnt make it a family saga. This is a quest novel, though somewhat out of the ordinary in content and structuring. Kloebles book is more intriguing than engaging in part because of the way its presented. There are two separate but intertwined narratives. The primary narrative is set in the present and is recounted by Albert, who has been orphaned since birth and raised in a nunnery and is now companion to sixty-year-old Fred, who may or may not be his father. A second narrative recounts the past history that leads up and explains to the present one: its presented wholly in italics. Fred is the most intriguing character in the novel, and also the one for whom I as reader felt empathy. Hes damaged goods, the hero of a tragic bus accident that left him brain-damaged, with the intellectual capacity, attention span and emotional responses of a five-year-old. Now aged sixty, hes dying. Albert assumes, but doesnt know for certain, that Fred is his father. With Fred dying, he has a limited time to learn about his own past. The book is in modern form and content an odyssey. Albert and Fred travel hither and thither. En route, they meet and talk with interesting people, of whom the most memorable are Violet, short-term girlfriend of Albert who cannot resist any opportunity to videotape her own doings, even to Alberts and her time together in bed, and Sister Alfonsa, who raised Albert and Fred in a nunnery and has a not clearly defined relationship with them beyond that. The subsidiary characters in the book would sit well in something by Thomas Pynchon or early Gunter Grass, which is to say, they tend toward the grotesque and emblematic, although again, think Pynchon or Grass (or De Lillo?)the connection between what really happened back when (or; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Murdstone Trilogy; Author: Visit Amazon's Mal Peet Page; Review: If you don't laugh when you read The Murdstone Trilogy, you may want to ask someone to check your pulse because you may be dead or at least comatose. This delightful book is funny in parts large (plot and character development) and small (characters, places and objects names, turns of phrases, gratuitous irony) and though its irony sometimes has a n edge to it, it never tips over into sarcasm given all the Magickal and Phantastickal Happenings in it, its surprisingly sunny. At least for this book, Peet is Terry Pratchett redivivus, which means satirical, comical, exaggeratical (I made that adjective up) and all the other -cal words that mean what youve just picked up is a joy to read and youll find it very hard to put down again. Award-winning YA author, Philip Murdstone, has hit a rough patch. Readers tastes have changed. His sensitive depictions of variously handicapped youths who fight through bullying and neglect to a slightly less depressed state of mind than they enjoyed earlier on no longer attract the young readers who made it possible for Philip to pay his bills and keep his uber-sexy literary agent, Minerva Cinch, pressing his manuscripts on publishers. Minerva says sensitive YA is dead, youve got to switch to fantasy, preferably Tolkien-style but you choose. If Philip doesnt, hell lose Minerva (along with the lifestyle he wants to preserve and improve) because she no longer makes money off him. He tries, fills notebooks with failed efforts, but phantasy (ph, not f) isn't in him. And then one night on the way home from a tavern (Gelders Rest) where hes been drowning his woes in the house ale, he encounters a disheveled, gnomish-looking man named Pocket Wellfair. In return for swearing an oath to Pocket (if he breaks it, his testicles will magically wither away and disappear) the little man channels a book to him. The book, Dark Entropy, is a runaway success. Philip gains money, instant fame and a very prestigious award, the Nutwell Award for Literary Fantasy. (At the award ceremony, he is seated next to the IKEA Professor of Utopian Studies at the University of Gateshead.) He gets promo gigs on radio, television, with the media, and on a virtual reality TV contest called Weirdie Go, where he is digitized into a sage wizard who helps contestants by popping up in the corner of their virtual reality screens and uttering gnomic statements. And he gains temporary access to the physical pleasures of Minerva, who takes him to dinner in the latest, inner-than-in restaurant in all of London. "The restaurant was lit only by guttering candles within lanterns cunningly wrought for recovered materials. The food was soft, delectable, unidentifiable. Minerva and Philip ate it reclining on embroidered cushions that smelled vaguely of beautiful animals in estrus. He swallowed something that might have been marinated suckling kid, then focused on her liquescent eyes. He tried a smile that had once belonged to Cary Grant. He nodded and drained his glass. As before, the wine filled his mouth with dark satin fruit.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Supersymmetry (Superposition); Author: Visit Amazon's David Walton Page; Review: Supersymmetry is a welcome addition to the ranks of hard science science fiction, in this case, revolving around some of the newer hypotheses of subatomic physics Higgs particles, indeterminate reality, teleportation and a kind of time travel, and, oh yes, an extra-terrestrial intelligence extra-universal, actuallythat wants to replace weak humans maybe with something neater, maybe just with itself. The invader comes from one of the alternate universes that hover alongside our own. The Kelleys daughters Sandra and Kelley, physicist father Jasonhave fought the creature fifteen years before. They dubbed it the varcolac, a Romanian term for a demon that lives on the other side of the mirror. That battle was recorded in an earlier novel, Superposition, which was released earlier this year. One of the consequences of that struggle, not resolved until Jacob shut down the supercollider from which the creature was drawing power, was the splitting of his daughter Alessandra into separated twins, Sandra and Alex. Ever since they have been developing their own personalities, going their separate ways: Sandras a policewoman now and Alex is a physicist. Alex works on a below the radar project to develop superweapons for our armed forces. The scientist in charge of it is a neurotic, almost psychotic physics nerd named Ryan Oronzi. He has brought into existence a universe of his own, a bubble universe, which he monitors in his lab through computer simulation. The problem is that with the emergence of this alt-universe there also emerges, again, the varcolac and though Ryan doesnt know it, it is controlling him. From that point on, all sorts of increasingly dire things happen, including a baseball stadium exploding or did it implode?the varcolac invading a demonstration of the new military technology and taking over the Secretary of Defenses body, a second invasion at a funeral for Sandras and Alexs father, but is he dead?a mass assault on high security prison and the escape of a genius killer, and a shootout showdown between US military and varcolac-possessed Turks that segues to the systematic bombing of the major cities of the world in reverse order of their population. (If they get that far, New York will be thirty-fifth.) How do you reverse such destruction? And how do you stop a near-invulnerable super-intelligence that isn't hampered by the confines of physical flesh from taking over the world? And, lastly, will Sandra and Alex stay separate or lose their new found individuality through reunion in one body and mind a second time? Near the end, the math and physics get a bit hairy but theres enough adventure and even a bit of romance to carry it through in what is a successful return to days of high science but also high adventure science fiction.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Minute Zero (A Judd Ryker Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Todd Moss Page; Review: Minute zero is the moment of chaos that follows crisis: if you are ready to step in then, you have a brief opportunity to reshuffle the deck in your nations favor before the situation stabilizes and rigidifies anew. Theres an election pending in Zimbabwe: an aging dictator is being propped up by a vicious general but for the first time in decades he is vulnerable. A personable, able and honest woman lawyer is running against him. If all else were equal --read that to mean if if the elections were being run fairly and the incumbent weren't willing to declare the election results void and declare a state of emergency if the results go against himshed win handily. But things aren't equal and if something isn't done, the country faces more years of corruption and oppression. This is the second novel featuring policy analyst Judd Ryker, who now heads a small free-wheeling unit within the State Department whose mission is to assist in dealing with crisis in countries that are destabilizing. In The Golden Hour, he headed off a crisis in Mali, assisted by his agronomist wife Jessica and a few other allies. They return in this installment to manage impending crisis in Zimbabwe. As Rykers mentor told him years before when he was headed towards a career as an academic rather than policy wonk: you don't manage crisis, you ride it. Its like whitewater rafting. You don't control the flow of events, you just try to ride them out, giving your vessel a nudge now and then to secure a favorable outcome. Minute Zero is a crisp, well written thriller. The author, formerly deputy assistant secretary of state under G. W, Bush, obviously knows the world he writes about: his charge at the State Department was the Bureau of African Affairs, where he was responsible for diplomatic relations with sixteen West African countries. Judd Ryker and his super-competent wife Jessica are attractive characters, as are many of the peripheral Good Guys. The Bad Guys? Well, they're satisfyingly bad.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Home by Nightfall: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Finch Page; Review: It seems like only yesterday when Finch (The Laws of Murder, 2014) brought forth his first Victorian era murder mystery, featuring amateur detective Charles Lenox and his sweet, elegant, formidably capable soon-to-be wife Lady Jane. And here he is now is the ninth book in this estimable series, in a tangled story that is as intriguing and delightful to read as the first one was. After a spell in Parliament, Charles has returned to full-time detecting, this time as a profession: hes partner in his own agency with his former protégé, Lord Dallington, and a formidable lady detective, Polly Buchanan, who handles womens issues --stolen silver, vanished fiancées, that sort of thing, under the pseudonym of Miss Strickland. After the defection of their former partner Lemaitre, the three are looking for ways to promote business. A success helping Scotland Yard would go a along way to keeping the ink in their ledger black instead of red. As usual in these books, Lenox juggles two very different cases in this installment. One is big. A German pianist goes missing after a concert: no one knows how he even got out of his dressing room, much less why he is gone. Thats the Scotland Yard case. But more time is spent in the country, at brother Edmunds estate in Sussex, where he is approached by a local gentleman to solve the puzzling case of a strange woman or was it girl?spied in an upstairs window, a missing bottle of sherry. That case conflates with another odd happening: thefts at the village market where two missing chickens, four shillings in change, a half wheelbarrow of carrots, a springer spaniel, some blankets and a cloak, a box of candles, and another chicken have gone missing. Then theres an attack on the town mayor, who is left near death, and the stakes rise. Of course, Charles solves them all: the small potatoes thefts in Sussex, the woman in the window and the missing bottle of sherry, the attack on the mayor, but also the missing pianist in London. The search for answers is intriguing from start to finish, Charles and his family, friends and allies are easy to care about, and the local (and historical) color is lovingly depicted. This is a firstrate series and this installment, which shows no sign of flagging energy, is firstrate as well.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Those We Left Behind (The Belfast Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Stuart Neville Page; Review: Those We Left Behind is a crime novel, and a very good one, but it is equally a novel about the concatenating effects of abuse: parents abandoning children, the children bounced around foster homes, the younger one overly dependent on the elder, whose rage leads him to escalating acts of violence. It starts with biting he bites his brother, not himself moves to bullying another child, their latest foster parents son, and then inciting his younger brother to murder: the younger brother is convicted of killing the foster parent, bashing him to death, blood all over the place. But was that what happened? Its not at all clear it was. Yes, Ciaran, not twelve, confessed to the murder. He testified that he did it alone to protect his older brother, Thomas, from the mans abuse. But if Thomas had done it, hed have been put away as an adult for a long, long sentence where as a minor, Ciarans sentence was shorter --and Thomass too as accomplice instead of killer. Ciarans out now with eight years served. Hes twenty years old now but still a child inside, and hes still utterly, helplessly dependent on his older brother for direction and support. The cop who put him away has doubts about Ciarans guilt. With him out again, she wants to question him: to find out what really happened that night. But she carries baggage too. She has just returned to the force after a hard battle with breast cancer. The scars it left on her aren't only outside. She doesnt feel like a full woman yet and her husband isn't treating her like one. Theres a probation officer too. She too has problems in the past but they're not fully stated or resolved in the course of the narration. All you know is that she likes her alcohol. Around these two women circle other cops, some keen to right wrongs, others putting in their time, reluctant to have their former judgment questioned. Ciarans released, Thomas is there, his dominance over his younger brother is back in place, seemingly unshaken. Ciaran will do whatever Thomas tells him to do. Terrible things follow as a consequence: there is a beating, then a murder, then much more blood and terror. On the side, the detective confronts a second, completely separate mystery: the seeming suicide-murder of an elderly couple, both desperately ill in different ways. The pace quickens. Nemesis hovers nearby to claim her victims. Neville has been nominated for the Edgar award for at least one previous novel and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; he won two awards for best first crime novel and was finalist for three more. Its clear why on the basis of this fine novel. Its been interesting to me to watch the arrival of a spate of fine crime and detective novels from the nether parts of the United Kingdom: north Ireland and Scotland. They have common characteristics, which contrast in interesting ways with the many fine Scandinavian crime novels now on the market. I; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Swans of Fifth Avenue: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Melanie Benjamin Page; Review: There are so many good things to say about The Swans of Fifth Avenue that its hard to know where to start. If youve seen either of the last decades movies about Truman Capote (Capote, 2005, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, or Infamous, 2006, with Toby Jones), you know the story: diminutive utterly gay writer with an oversized drive to be recognized woos and wins over his swans, the richest and most glamorous of socialite ladies in New York: Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, C. Z. Guest and Pamela Churchill. He was closest with Babe, whom he nicknamed Bobolink. Even her overtly masculine and none too sensitive husband, Bill Paley, founder and chief executive of Columbia Broadcasting Systems, was won over by him. After writing a number of elegant trifles (think, Breakfast at Tiffanys), Truman finally wrote one great book, his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, about two drifters killing of the Clutter family in cold, bleak Kansas. That was it for Truman. He never again worked up the discipline energy to write anything serious, preferring instead to be a media presence. He hosted the party of the decade in 1966, his black and white ball at the Plaza honoring Washington Post publisher Kay Graham: he hinted to countless friends that he would invite them but then cut them from the list without a warning. And since he leaked the guest list to the media, they couldn't even pretend theyd been invited but had chosen not to attend. Nine years later, running out of excuses for not publishing anything, he sold Esquire a second-rate fictional retelling of the gossip hed picked up in confidence from his Swans under the title La Cote Basque and when his lady friends learned of it he hadnt warned them or asked permission to describe them in prosethey cut him off cold. His life ran down. Its hard to judge his later years as other but the unconscious attempt of a desperately unhappy man to kill himself, only slowly by drugs, booze and haphazard sex encounters. As to the swans, Babe Paley died young 63 years oldin 1978: lung cancer. The other swans? They grew old, saw themselves displaced in the public eye by a newer, younger, wilder generation. Its a heck of a story and tailor made for a novel. There are, after all, the conversations between Truman and his admirers, all held in confidence, and thats what the writers of historical fiction do: they fill in the gaps in the public record with guesses as to what went on that respect the subjects and feel like they're right to the reader. What distinguishes Benjamins book are 1. humanity and 2. perspective. As much or more than this is a book about Truman, its about his betrayed friends, the five swans, or more properly, the one with whom he was closest, the beautiful and ever elegant Babe Paley. This isn't Benjamins first attempt at capturing the unseen side of a noted womans life: her earlier novel, The Aviators Wife, achieved much the same thing for Anne; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Promise (An Elvis Cole Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Crais Page; Review: \Robert Crais is one of the few crime novelists whose books I routinely read IMMEDIATELY after I get my hands on them. Indeed, I now order them ahead of time so I don't have to wait to read them. In other words, he writes exceptionally compelling crime thrillers, I know he won't screw up (think grow stale with repletion) and I find them absolutely compelling to read. As in this, Robert Craiss twentieth. This installment of the Elvis Cole-Joe Pike saga has an added fillip: ALL of his heroes to date appear. Seemingly casual, almost flipped out, but intensely professional private investigator Elvis Cole. His ex-military, closed-in tight but absolutely lethal closet partner Jin his PI agency, Joe Pike. Jon Stone, Elviss and Joes war partner, Jon Stone, no longer officially government but rather a mercenary for hire --but he still has all those connections and skills. And lastly, LAPD K-9 officer Scott James, premiered in Craiss Suspect, an LAPD cop, suffering from his own PTSD and paired with Maggie, a gorgeous German Shepherd dog, back from Iraq with her own PTSD to deal with. Theyre all here in this new novel and all dealt with efficiently, satisfactorily and without confusion or overlap which by itself, is a commendable achievement. (A caveat: although the novel is billed as an Elvis Cole-Joe Pike novel, but Pike is a decidedly minor character in this novel. He appears less often, and less strongly, than his military colleague Jon Stone. In short, it isn't an Elvis Cole-Joe Pike novel, its an Elvis Cole novel, with strong support from LAPD K-9 policeman Scott James and ex-military now merc Jon Stone. ) The plot of this gripping novel is complicated. Elvis takes a case: find a missing high tech firm executive with explosive-making skills. She may be seeking to sell explosives to Al-Qaeda. (Elvis doesnt know this at the start but gradually deduces it.) His client is elusive more than elusive as it turns out. His first lead winds him in trouble. Before he knows it, hes being dogged by a Homeland Security or LAPD team, under suspicion of its not clear what. He finds out that his client is lying to him Big Time, but thats not a surprise. Nothing turns out to be what it first seemed. This mess gets entwined with Scott Jamess story. Scott and Elvis eventually collaborate. Pike and Stone help out. A lot of things happen. Theres more puzzle solving than violence in this case but enough of both to satisfy the most discriminating connoisseur of crime or detective fiction. So a satisfying story. But there are also the small pleasures of professional quality prose along the way, mostly descriptions of scenes or people or feelings. Like this, the description a woman police detective whom Scott has feelings for: They reached a bench at the end of the ridge but Scott found himself looking at Cowly. He liked her bent nose and the full curve of her lips, but the liked her eyes best. They were bright with intelligence, and crinkled from; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar; Author: Visit Amazon's Tom Holland Page; Review: Holland's Rubicon was selected by the London Times as one of the Top Five History Books of the Year and by the Guardian as a Book of the Year in 2003. In that volume, Holland traced the history of Rome from the Gracchus brothers, Sulla and Marius through the ascendancy and eventual assassination of Julius Caesar. In Dynasty, he continues the story, with a lively and well researched account of the reigns of the first five Roman emperors, all of whom were related, however tenuously, to the original Caesar. First was Julius Caesars adopted nephew, Octavian, eventually named Augustus, who started rule with violent repression but once secure in his place, opted to place a velvet glove over his steel fist, refusing undue honors and observing, or pretending to observe, the traditions and practices of republican rule. Tiberius, who followed, was a reluctant emperor and showed it: his back was patrician stiff, his discomfort with the trappings of empire visible, and with time, he retreated from Rome to the south of Italy, where he could indulge his vices without Romes eyes watching. From then on, it was all downhill. Calligula was a monster, Claudius too weak, too tentative and too nervous to last long and his most vicious enemy lay within his own familyand Nero, well, what can one say about him except that as a monster he equaled and probably eventually exceeded Calligula. Augustus and Tiberius died naturally, who knows for sure about Claudius, Calligula was stabbed to death in public (shades of Caesar!) and Nero committed suicide rather than submit himself to the painful and degrading death the Senate had planned for him. Thus ended the reign of the house of Caesar, 112 years after its founder was assassinated. This is exceptionally well written popular history: Holland combines the scholars sober concern for what is known (rather than hypothesized) with formidable talents as a storyteller. And what a story it is! Betrayals and assassinations, torture and forced suicides, incest, a eunuch lover dolled up as the emperor Neros dead wife Poppea (who died after he had kicked her in the stomach she was pregnant at the timehe regretted it afterwards, or at least the loss of her). The story is complicated but Hollands account is so well laid out and so vivid that the reader will not, I repeat not, lose his or her way en route through the reading of this fascinating and exceptionally well put together history.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sword of Honor; Author: Visit Amazon's David Kirk Page; Review: Musashi Miyamoto (d. 1645) was a ronin a free warrior-- in an age given over to samurai, who fought for their lords or houses. By conservative estimate, Musashi, never defeated, fought sixty duels, fighting with two, not one, swords, one long and one short, in a style he pioneered. The incidents described in this fictionalized account of one period in hide long life occurred when he was twenty (it was 1604): a string of combats with adepts of the Yoshioka School of swordfighting, who had been until shortly before then official swordmasters for the shogunate. The new shogun was Tokugawa: in this fictionalized account, Musashi is aided by the Tokugawa governor of Kyoto: the ronin is not an ally of the Tokugawas but he proves an indispensable aid in ridding the governor of the nettlesome Yoshioka. Though unproven, there are claims in the record that the ronin did some time serve the Tokugawa: it is known that he had ties with some Tokugawa vassals and in later years, he was seen around more often than would have been prudent if the Tokugawa meant to punish him. This is Kirks second novel about Musashi. The first was Child of Vengeance (2013). Musashi lived forty-one more years after the events narrated in this present book so other installments may follow. My familiarity with Japanese history and culture is slim to nothing so the remarks that follow focus on the book as fiction and whether what is presented in it feels consistent and credible. The quality of the fiction: the story is told well and the action scenes exceptionally well. Credibility and consistency: Musashi and the subsidiary characters --a blind woman with whom he travels, a (possibly) half-Korean samurai whom he bests and tends back to health, only to see him pursued, captured and killed by the Yoshioka, the figures of the Tokugawa governor and the Yoshioka masters are well delineated: they feel right not just psychologically but within the confines of the culture. What I cannot speak to is the accuracy of Kirks characterization of Musashis rage against samurai traditions, and in particular against seppuku, the practice of ritual suicide. Would a seventeenth-century Japanese warrior hold such thoughts, express such extreme alienation from samurai traditions and standards? The character of Musashi as presented in the book works but I don't know enough about the subject to tell whether if its anachronistic. Regardless, this is an excellent piece of historical fiction. Once you hit the fight scenes, you will not want to put it down. Second thought: There is a brief scene late in the book where a child accosts Musashi and waxes ecstatic over the swordsman's victory over so many Yoshioka samurai the previous day. "I've never seen anyone so amazing as you. Two swords! There was what, fifteen of them? And you just killed them in moments!" ... Only when the boy was done did Musashi look at him."Is that all you took from what I did there? he asked. "The fight?" "What else was there?" the child asked. That's when the ronin; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Golden Age (The Last Hundred Years Trilogy: A Family Saga); Author: Visit Amazon's Jane Smiley Page; Review: When the New York Times reviewed Some Luck a year ago, novelist Smileys first novel in this trilogy about an Iowa farm family, the reviewer wrote that the book was "an elegant solution to the historical novelists problem of how to raise the big barn that is the past without relying too much on power tools or hired help." That book started in the 20s and progressed, year by year, a year to a chapter, through the Second World War up to the death of the family patriarch, Walter Langdon, in 1952? 3? The second volume, Early Warning, appeared earlier this year. It continued the familys story through the mid-to-late 80s. By then, it was more about migration the children and grandchildren spreading across this giant country of oursthan it was about farm life, though there still was a family farm. Golden Age starts in 1987 and extends a few years beyond where we actually are to a hypothesized 2019. The title is ironic. Its not a Golden Age at all. Its a running down age --insider trading and corrupt financial deals, no curbs on bank speculation leading to a crash, 9/11 followed by an unwinnable war in Iraq, and a host of other things. Most of this is approached obliquely not from direct contact with the core actors, financial or political, but from a description of the impact of these events on the happiness and prosperity of the various members of the widespread Langdon clan. As in the two novels before it, the narrative progresses year by year, one year, one chapter. In each chapter, three or four or more separate but interlacing narratives follow the Langdon offspring from three (four?) different generations. Some of the characters find peace in these times. One is Walters son Frank. All through his childrens growing up he was a distant father and an indifferent husband. Now in his old age, he finds rapprochement with his wife Andy and they are at peace. Others don't -marriage attempted and lost, fractious offspring and family spats, deaths and disappointments. There is even a monster in the family, Frank and Andys son Michael, since youth a force of nature who cant stop bullying and taking advantage, with no regard for anyone else not for his congressman brother, whom he manipulates, or his mother and his nephew, to whom he does horrible things without blinking an eye. Some of the people in this story you like, others you dont. There are people who make it and others who dont. All is unrolled in a narrative that channels the great storytellers of the nineteenth century, and most notably Dickens: there is the same verve, the same expansiveness of soul, the same concreteness of place and time, the same love of the characters the writer has fashioned out of whole cloth. Lovely things happen in this book. So do horrible things. Bad times are interspersed among good times. Smiley does a superb job of realizing these characters, their aspirations and their innermost thoughts, but what happens around them the historical universe; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bryant & May and the Burning Man: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's Christopher Fowler Page; Review: With Colin Dexters Inspector Morse puzzlers long gone, there are few takers today for quirky funny puzzle mysteries. One is Jussi Adler-Olsens Department Q series. The other, just as devious and much more loopy, is Fowlers series of novels about the Peculiar Crimes Unit of the City of London Police. This is number eleven and in line with past tradition, its even more convoluted and daffier- than the previous ten. It also may b e old man Detective Arthur Bryants swan song though I, and I hope you, won't want it to be. Still he is getting old. The City of Londons financial district is on fire whole scale riots instigated when an especially devious bank CEO absconds when scads of cash. Head of the Serious Crimes Unit Superintendent Unit, and especially of thorn-in-his-side Bryant but Bryant, masterful as ever at sniffing out an interesting crime, sticks his nose in on a routine matter: the PCU has been asked to help identify a dead burnt to a crispbody. Of course, everything goes haywire from then on, and soon the Peculiar Crimes Unit is in up to its elbows on an assortment of crimes, ten in all, some dating back to previous novels and all coming together in one glorious finale. John May, Bryants slightly younger and infinitely more polished partner, again works to introduce order into the chaos that is Bryants crime solving technique. Does he succeed? Well, a little. The plot is funny, the characters funny, even individual lines and descriptions crack you up. If you didn't get the point yet, Im saying this is not only a good puzzle mystery, its a very funny book. And more than a bit shambolic.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Edge (A Peak Marcello Adventure); Author: Visit Amazon's Roland Smith Page; Review: Sometimes Young Adult doesnt mean much more than that the hero is young in this case, fifteen. As to the story, it can be as straightforward as an adult thriller. Certainly, this one is. Its the second YA novel by novelist Smith about a young climber, Peak Marcello, fifteen years old now and the of world famous climbers, although mother and father are no longer a thing. In Peak, he helped scale Everest, handing over his chance to fame as the youngest cilmber to scale that mountain to his sherpas grandson Siun-jo. This time, climbing as part of the International Peace Ascent, two hundred youths from all over the world, simultaneously scaling the most formidable mountains in the world. Peak, and his mother, whos eager to climb again, are in Afghanistan. Peaks representing the United States and the whole extravaganza is going to be aired on television on Christmas day. Except that things go wrong, seriously wrong. Theres a kidnapping, dead bodies, and the next thing you know, Peak and his ally Ethan, an ex-military type possessed of an intriguing bag of skills, are tracking the kidnappers across Afghani mountain ranges. They find them and deal with them, without recourse to impossible coincidence or unnatural abilities and in the end, all is well in this thriller that is terse, efficient and satisfying. Peak is an appealing hero and he never appears older than his age. But neither does he appear younger and think back on it, fifteen-year-olds can be chillingly competent when they need to be.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Trigger Mortis: With Original Material by Ian Fleming (James Bond Novels (Hardcover)); Author: Visit Amazon's Anthony Horowitz Page; Review: Oh frabjous day! Calloo callay! Another James Bond novel by still another author! This one doesnt have the gloss of William Boyds 2013 Solo, but then Boyd possesses considerable literary talent and on the evidence of this offering, maybe Horowitz doesnt. The publisher touts the book as including original material by Ian Fleming. But all that it consists of is a plot outline for a never produced television series about 007 and four or five hundred words describing Bonds meeting of 007 spymaster Bill Tanner and M at the Secret Service headquarters. Thats it. As for plot, this installment presents three adventures in sequence: a brush with death leaves Pussy Galore (remember her? Lesbian merc to hetero sex by the great James himself?) out of action; a Grand Prix auto race, with Bond intervening to save the (British) racing champ from a flaming death at the hands of a SMERSH operative; and, the main course, Bond facing off against a Korean millionaire, Jason Sin, who really doesnt care which side wins as long as he gets to off lots of people along the way. As usual, there are recorded in loving detail the appurtenances of excessively good living the smoked salmon was good, if cut a little too close to the skin, it was followed by excellent lamb cutlets from a local farm, cooked to a pink, the vegetables were also local, and the wine had a deep, ruby colour and scent of blackberries. Etc., etc., for three hundred some pages. And there is the special knowledge of spies and assassins: Bond disarms a security guard at Sins mansion-palace with the Japanese Strangle, rendering him unconscious but not killing him. Little bits like these come across as so finicky and precise as to produce giggles if not yawns. And there is the basic problem with this mediocre dull book: its a dead man walking. Old routines are served new but they're seen from the outside, not felt from within. If you suffer from insomnia, maybe youll want to read this book because it will put you to sleep. Otherwise, forget it.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Broken Sleep; Author: Visit Amazon's Bruce Bauman Page; Review: This is Baumans second novel. (His first was And the Word Was [2006].) But in many ways, its like a first novel. Its sometimes derivative, other times fresh and original. Its not wholly in balance and sometimes its irritatingly pretentious, but for all that, its fresh and bold and not all the time but more often than not a pleasurable read. The novel is large scale. It spans eighty years from the 1940s to the 2020s-- and it touches on avant garde art and music, the rock and roll life, drugs and sex of course but also politics in our new media- and publicity-driven age, and not least, insanity, Jews, Nazis and punks. It reminded me at times of Thomas Pynchons first big novel, V. There are the joke-ey names: Moses Teumer, his mother Salome Savant and half-brother Alchemy, who is lead singer of a punk group called The Insatiables, and Ricky McFinn, aka Ambitious Mindswallow, bass player for The Insatiables and Keith Richards to Alchemys Mick Jagger. There is the over the top plot and picaresque overtones, and not too deeply buried, hints and nudges of grander social, psychological, esthetic and philosophical messages. So yes, this is an experimental-slash-postmodernist novel, not as much so as, say, the writings of George Saunders, David Markson or Ben Marcus, but Baumans got the chops. This long, loopy history is presented in alternating narratives by or about Alchemy, Moses, Salome, and Ambitious, with the addition of a letter from Mosess unrepentant and utterly repellent Nazi father Malcolm. In his narratives, Ambitious proves entertaining but the songs of the half-mad, nearly always ecstatic Salome are a drag to read for long: overwritten is the word that comes to mind. I dissolved into a southern gentrified inebriation, like ice in an old Virginia mint julep on a sweltering July afternoon. What do you make of a passage like that? And thats the way Salome talks all the time. Nor did I enjoy the made up rock song lyrics that cluttered the pages and in my judgmentslowed down the action too often. Over all, Broken Sleep is a worthy effort but it is successful only in fits and starts. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about it because I think it took intelligence and courage to write it, but I have reservations about it.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years; Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Mallon Page; Review: I reviewed Mallons Watergate when it came out in 2012 and loved it. Finale, focusing mainly on the second term of the maddeningly elusive Reagan, is in many ways a counterpart to the more overtly robust account of the final years of that not-much-lamented president, number 37 in our country, Tricky Dick Nixon. No one would ever call Reagan Tricky Ron. Fog would be a more apt nickname he was, even to those closest to him (even his wife Nancy) maddeningly elusive, warm and fatherly on screen but . removed, I suppose is the term, off camera, the presidential equivalent of Oakland as when Gertrude Stein wrote of that city, Theres no there there. (What would you think of a president who confessed he preferred reenacting baseball games from wire copy after the game had ended to narrating them live, in the middle of the action: things seem more real once they're in the past, he says.) Watergate was a tragedy for our government but the people who brought it to us were such buffoons, it played it as a comedy. Finale plays more as parlor drama, nothing raucous, with inte4se maneuverings for the intangibles of power and influence, and at the center of it, a neurotic lesser movie star who somehow won the Gold Ring by marrying a hack actor who turned out to play perfectly to an audience as long as he didn't really have to engage them or understand what was asked of him. Mallon is an exceptionally engaging author with a gift for political gossip. The novel mixes real and made up characters with glee and aplomb. The real ones do exactly what we know they did by reading the papers. The made up ones fill in the cracks, providing Mallon with entre to the parts of history well never know because they never made it to the history books. The result is a work of fiction so infused with fact as to glisten with authenticity but as work of creative fiction nonetheless. This is not to say that some of Mallons choices are free of question: in particular, his portrait of Reagan embraces the questionable accusations of Kitty Kelly and the presidents disgruntled former chief of staff Don Regan, who had a definite axe to grind in his characterization of the president. Still, its chilling to think that we twice elected a president who was so disconnected from political reality. And I haven't yet written a word about Nancys dependence on astrologer Joan Quigley, which is Hollywood, not Washington, D.C. (or it shouldnt have been).; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Drifter (A Peter Ash Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Nick Petrie Page; Review: The hero of this exceptional first novel isn't Jack Reacher, 6 5, 230 pounds and roaming the country because post-military, he finds he cant stand to be confined to routine. But it comes as close as anything Ive read recently, and its a d**ned good story with a d**ned good hero. Peter Ash is a veteran of two tours eight years a lieutenantin Iraq and Afghanistan. Hes home now but left with white static, a panic reaction that overwhelms when hes inside a confined space. So he spends most of his life outdoors now. He hears that his sergeant, Jimmy, has killed himself and he heads east to Minnesota to help Jimmys widow: he cons her into believing theres a government-funded program to do home repairs on veterans houses. Then he discovers, under her porch, a vicious dog kind of a pit bull on steroidsa bag of cash --$400,000and four sticks of plastique explosive. He doesnt start out to save the world but his code of ethics, the Marine corps code, won't let him walk away from his former partners widow and things grow steadily gummier. A lot of violence follows. There are truly scary bad guys involved and one super villain who is incredibly skeezy but there are also some good guys, most of whom unfortunately don't make it out alive. The action rolls along at a fast clip, the tension builds steadily, and it all ends in a satisfying and reasonably realistic rollout. This is the second novel Ive read right now that simply begs for a sequel. Ash is an appealing hero and the information about PTSD is right on the mark.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Where It Hurts (A Gus Murphy Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Reed Farrel Coleman Page; Review: Some people swallow their grief. Some let it swallow them. Thus starts novel # 22 by acclaimed thriller author Reed Farrell Coleman, three time recipient of the Shamus Award, winner of the Barry and Anthony awards, and three time Edgar nominee. And with it I devoutly hope- the start of a new series. Because, boy, is it good! Gus Murphy is an ex-cop, checked out of his career as a detective because when his teenage son John Jr. collapsed on a basketball court, laid low by an unexpected aortic failure, Gus lost not only his son but his marriage (she wound up in bed with one of his cop partners), his daughter (living out of control, on drugs and alcohol) his career, and any semblance of meaning or happiness in his life. Now he drives a customer service van, picks up people at a second-rate Long Island airport and brings them back to a third-rate motel, and helps out on weekends at the motel complex as a bouncer in its seedy lounge. His life is over. Over, that is, until low level ex-bad guy Tommy Delcamino shows up, asking for his help: Tommys son, another lowlife, has been found dead, his body abused and tortured, and Tommy, in a last burst of fatherly feeling, wants to find out why. He had gone to the cops first but they haven't even interviewed possible witnesses: another low life, another skel dead? Who cares? Good riddance! As to private eyes, al they want is to string Tommy along, billing him by the hour until his money --$3000- runs out. Gus is all that us left. Hed been a reasonably effective cop, no genius, but low life or not, hed treated Tommy with respect and other cops hadnt. Gus says no. Hes too deep in his own grief. But then a cop, a former colleague, warns him off investigating what happened to Tommy Jr., and then a second, and a third, and the word goers out that Gus is radioactive poison in his former department. And then the bereaving father, Tommy, winds up dead. Somethings going on. And slowly, in incremental steps, Gus wakes up. Once awake, hes a bulldog for the truth. Want he finds, at great personal risk, is a conspiracy that spirals higher and higher up into the police department he formerly cherished. He never, never gives up. This is an exceptionally well plotted crime thriller that will please anyone who loves craft, suspense, and good writing.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: American Blood: A Novel (Marshall Grade); Author: Visit Amazon's Ben Sanders Page; Review: American Blood is a good title for this hell-for-leather crime thriller because believe me, blood theres plenty of. Marshall Grade is in Witness Protection. As an undercover cop, he turned a mob boss and theres a longtime hit order out on him. As far as hes concerned, hes been living on borrowed time for years. For reasons explained but not terribly satisfyingly, hes come out of cover to track down a missing woman. From that point on, its blood all over the place. The hoods he fronts seeking information don't take it kindly. Theyre seeking to kill him. But now that they know hes alive, so is the mob. A deadly, under the radar screen contract killer known only as the Dallas Man has accepted a contract on him, but also on the people Marshalls trying to pressure for information about the missing girl. What follows is a generally satisfying bloodbath with a lot of twists and kinks en route to a boom-boom ending. Its not all terribly believable and some of the psychology involved for instance, the mindset of the contract killeris a bit forced but the plot ratchets along so fast and furiously that you don't have time to settle on inconsistencies. Warts and all, this is a satisfying read. And the ending sets up an exciting sequel.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s; Author: Gil Troy; Review: Reading Gil Troys informative and lively history of the Clinton years, I was reminded of one of the reasons why, when I too was a historian, my chosen field of scholarship (the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) was so many centuries back; the consequences of actions back then had mostly died down by now, as had the emotional generated by them. I knew from my own teaching how much more confusing it is to assess the present. Which is all the more reason to take my hat off to Troy, a historian at McGill University and author of books on the Reagan years, the changing history of campaigns, presidents and their First Ladies from the Trumans to the Clintons, and the polarizing quality of Hillary Rodham Clintons First Ladyship. It is particularly difficult to assess Clintons tenure in the White House without coming off as having an axe to bear. A natural politician, Clinton could be, and was, in rapid succession throughout his eight-year presidency, ardent idealist and amoral cynic, generous and greedy, driven by a vision of what America should be but derailed repeatedly by his own mistakes and personal urges. Troys answer, a brilliant one, is to look at the president (and his wife) through the lenses of the age. The result is, year by year, a mosaic of events, people and utterances which trace the replacement of an older version of rooted principles and constrained behavior with newer, less directive ways. As he labels it, the president took office during the birth pangs of an Age of Everything and Nothing. (Elsewhere, he talks of the morally corrosive effects of the 90s affluenza, glorified in pop songs and on shows like Ally McBeal and Sex and the City.) Everything speeds by in this rapid narrative and analysis but hes not glib and his analysis isn't superficial. Rather, he bends his language and narrative to reach a wider audience than simply fellow scholars, and by and large, I feel he succeeds. The framing notion is that the nineties was a transitional decade between an earlier, more judgmental time and the new age of everyone for him (or her) self, all values equal. In 1987, four years before Ciinton threw his own hat into the presidential ring, an illicit affair had derailed the presidential run of Gary Hart. But Clintons own affair with Gennifer Flowers, though it may have embarrassed him, didn't stop his getting elected thats how fast the times were changing. Other changes were happening that made being the countrys leader a particularly fractious role: an increasingly cynical and aggressive media, the fragmentation of its audiences, an increasingly, organized and aggressive Republican attack machine with links to talk radio, think tanks, and news channels. Troy argues that in retrospect Clintons agenda appears more coherent than it appeared at the time. The tragedy was not that he failed to achieve his goals because he did but that his presidency ended as a mediocre one rather than a great one, largely because of Clintons no! both the Clintons actions. Clinton had a noble; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Doubter's Almanac: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Ethan Canin Page; Review: I found this book hard to get into but once I was in it, about a hundred pages or so, I enjoyed it immensely. I empathized with the characters too. Im not a mathematician rather, a historian turned administrator who in retirement spends much of my time writing and actingbut some of what Canin wrote about the feeling of doing mathematics at a high level resonates with me. Milo is a math genius. (I'm not.) All his adult life, he feels at risk. Even when he succeeds for a moment, hes afraid he cheated. He just hasn't been caught out yetand success only means he must climb another mountain to face still more risk, etc., etc. (I know that feeling.) He is so consumed by his work that the rest of life seems unworthy of attention, so he doesnt give it any, not even to his family. In a burst of work and inspiration, Milo came up with a solution for a long insoluble proposition in topology. It won him an assistant professorship and endowed chair at Princeton and the Fields Medal, the mathematicians equivalent of the Nobel Prize. By forty, hes thrown it all away on drink and indiscriminate screwing and by ignoring and alienating virtually all his peers. He ends up married burnt out, with a wife and two kids, teaching hack courses at a backwoods college that is little more than a glorified finishing school for secretarial types. He no longer seems capable of doing math but it still consumes his life that, and the liberal dosings of bourbon he consumes daily. Milo cant relate to anybody. Love, happiness, the feeling of achievement --these are not remotely parts of his life. At this point that, in a somewhat awkward handover, the narrator discloses himself: the narrator is Hans, the mathematicians son. He's also a mathematician. So is his sister and so, he worries at times, will be his daughter. He hopers that her preoccupation with mathematics will not eat her up the way it has her grandfather and almost did him. The rest of the novel, about two-thirds of the book, is about the sons (and familys) efforts to understand this difficult puzzle of a father and their attempts to come to terms with a gift that is more a curse than a blessing. I appreciate that Canin doesnt cop out by using current ascriptions for Milo's condition. He doesnt write that hes autistic or has Aspergers syndrome because thats not what his condition is. Its simply a by blow of his genius, a genius for a form of truth that is so far beyond perceived reality as to require different habits approaching it, a form of truth that leaves the practitioner completely vulnerable, always fearing failure or just as painfulthe fear of being bested out by another, younger competitor. And heres where doing mathematics is the opposite of what Ive done in my life: mathematicians tend to make great discoveries young and lose the ability to make them early, usually before they turn forty. (Was Paul Erdos the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Beatlebone; Author: Visit Amazon's Kevin Barry Page; Review: In 1967, Lennon had bought the small island of Dorinish, in Clew Bay, county Mayo. It was his off-again on-again retreat when the attention of media and fans got to him. In California in 1970, John and Yoko went through an extended session of primal Scream therapy with the controversial Arthur Janov. In 1970-72, John allowed king of the hippies Sid Rawle to establish a commune on Dorinish. And then in 1977, John Lennon announced that he was retiring from performing to spend time with his family and write. He did writetwo books of whimsical, half-formed prose- but by 1980, John was back in the recording studio. Its from these slim facts, and the sound perception that John was going through a prolonged drought music-wise, that the clever, word-rich Irish writer Kevin Barry has fashioned this whimsical fiction. Beatlebone is a very odd book. Its like the mythical hippogriff, one kind of animal in the front and another behind, and of uncertain purpose, less a novel than a good-humored ramble through language and mood refracted through the word-rich and exuberant prose of a very talented writer with a gift for the blarney. The incident it chronicles may have occurred or may not: Johns decision to return to the island for a long, solitary session of Screaming. Some of the people in it are real people John, a mention of Rawlesbut more are not, including Johns driver, pub mate and talking foil, Cornelius OGrady, than whom no character could be more Irish. Theres a lot of talking a lot!, a lot of drifting around, of gorgeous (or striking) descriptions of the bleak and windy terrain of western Ireland and the ocean islands that adjoin it. A couple of times Barry breaks into Q and A format, other time he injects himself directly into the narrative. The fictional Lennon is an appealing character, riven with insecurity and filled with rage, blocked at the moment artistically but when one night he lets his hair down to sing and play Irish songs in a pub, he's still possessed of the voice and spirit of an angel. At points, it seems a terribly slow read and by the end of it nothing much happens but the reader is happy hes made the trip. Near the end of the book, Barry interjects a paragraph about Johns prose. It could stand as John's epitaph in many ways. It "suggest[s] great potential but read[s] like first drafts [I]t is funny and vivid and pacy, but it never slows or comes down through the gears sufficiently to allow moments of tenderness, sadness, love, anger, bitterness, or rancor, all the sweet and thorny emotions he routinely sprang in his brilliant and nerveless songwriting. " With John, a man created something lasting even against his own demons.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hunters in the Dark: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Lawrence Osborne Page; Review: An Englishman, touching thirty, is discontented with his life and his job. Back home, he teaches literature to schoolchildren who are bored when he reads to them from George Eliot and couldn't care less who John Donne was. On a summer trip to Cambodia, he frequents a casino and wins big --$2000. He decides to stay there, at least until his newfound wealth runs out. He runs into another expatriate, an older, somewhat louche American. The young mans driver says the Americans bad, stay away from him, hell hurt you but theres something alluring about the man. The Englishman accepts an offer to dinner at the Americans house, ends up staying the night with him and the beautiful prostitute who is the Americans lover. Some food, alcohol, drugs, and when he wakes up the next morning from a drugged sleep, hes on the river on a riverboat. His backpack is gone, as are his money and his passport, and hes wearing strange clothes. Hes not completely broke: after the American had stripped him of his goods, he put a $100 bill in his pocket. But until he does something about it --perhaps a trip to the consulate-- he has been stripped of identity. Hes No Man, no longer Some One. He takes this as a sign. Henceforth, he will remake his life, starting with his name, living as an outsider in this very alien land. Thus starts this moody, twisty adventure. It doesnt have a sad ending, it doesnt have a happy ending, it just ends --inconclusively, like much of life is. This disconcerting novel has powerful antecedents: intentionally or not, in tone and theme it reminds one of a Paul Bowles novel, though set in Cambodia not Morocco, and that is a good thing. Osborne is an adept writer who here has created a slow building but ultimately gripping half-horror story about the perils of drifting.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Last Flight of Poxl West: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Daniel Torday Page; Review: The format of this lovely debut work is that of a novel within a novel. Poxl West writes a memoir depicting his days in the RAF during World War II, the only Jew to fly a bomber against the Germans. His book gets generally positive reviews. Its a modest bestseller. In Tordays book, between passages from this novel, Poxls nephew not a blood relation, more a tie of sympathytells his story: his warm relations with uncle Poxl and his pride when Poxls book appears, his reaction to the later news that his uncle made the story up. Both narratives end with resolutions: Poxl comes to term with his troubled past, the nephew with his conflicted feelings toward his uncle. As much as anything, Poxls cross was that he couldn't get his story accepted unless he made it into a biography: so he wrote it that way, melding stories he heard in pilot training with his own personally lived experiences. At the heart of this novel is a great love story --Poxl realizes that he missed his one great chance for happiness when he was too young to know what he was doing. But you never know for sure whether that was a real happening or a made up story.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Mare: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Gaitskill Page; Review: I greatly admired the three previous books by Mary Gaitskill that Ive read: she writes evocatively, plots clearly and by the end of one of her fictions you feel like you know its inhabitants. You feel for them too. The protagonists of her stories have complicated lives. They don't lead easy lives and they feel conflicting emotions. She is a master storyteller. But in her previous writings at least the ones Ive read her observations have seemed to me distanced, not written --felt, rather-- inside the characters. Thats not easy to argue because she really does delve deeply into the psyches of her characters but Ive always felt that she is more the observer than a partisan. I guess Im saying I find her writing perceptive, even emotionally fulfilling, but I don't find it nor the authorial personality that lies behind itwarm. Hot (= strong emotions), yes. Warm (= caring and involved), no. Until this novel, that is. The Mare has all of Gaitskills signal excellences especially her observations of how imperfect people relate to reach other, the subterfuges they employ to keep from being exposed as what they know they really are, which is damaged goods, and the stratagems they use to hold themselves together. But as well as that, it has heart. You feel that Gaitskill really cares about her subjects and the result is that you care about them as well. The story is told in short alternating chapters, some no more than a paragraph or two long, by a series of narrators but mostly two. The one, the most important one, the one you care for most, root for, is an eleven-year-old, Velveteen Vargas, who travels up state to spend a few weeks as a Fresh Air Fund kid with Ginger and Paul. The rest of the time she lives in Brooklyn with her volatile, abusive mother and her little brother. Velvet is brown and Ginger and Paul are white no one could appear more white in Velvets eyes than blond-haired Ginger, who glows with a sort of radiance around Velvet and dispenses advice to her that may work well in her world but doesnt in Velvets much more dangerous one. Gingers past seems always about to creep up on her: she was an addict and abused woman in the not too distant past before Paul found and rescued her. Too much stress in any part of their life and it could come unraveled. She quickly grows to care deeplyabout Velvets life too but at bottom, really Velvet is her lifeline. When Velvet falls in love with horses she is a natural with them-- Ginger champions her dreams of competition riding. Theres more to it than this: the horse Velvet rides is damaged too, its face scarred by past abuse; Velvets mother, Silvia, is abusive and often mean but behind all her hurt, shes loving and strong; Paul has to deal with a wife whos drifting out of control, her fantasy life about Velvet taking over and shoving out their own relationship. The ending is positive but not; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Why the World Does Not Exist; Author: Markus Gabriel; Review: Gabriel (professor of philosophy at the University of Bonn) has tried to do one of the hardest tasks around for a serious academic: write a serious book on a complicated topic but in a style that will prove attractive to (intelligent) non-academics as well as his peers in his own specialized field of study, which on the basis of this book and references to his earlier published work, seems to be ontology, the puzzling out of existence: of what does it consist, why is it His intent is to show that previous approaches to the question mislead us, or at best, provide partial (and still misleading) answers. This is not an easy subject to explain simply, much less popularize, but Gabriel has made a yeomans effort at doing it, and for that, he deserves kudos. He labels his philosophical stance New Realism, by which he means two things. 1. that we can know things in (for?) themselves, that perceptions and thoughts are not automatically illusions; and 2. That things, facts in themselves *(as opposed to perceptions of facts) do not fall in (belong to) one single domain of objects (and thats it for you, Spinoza!). The argument by which he proves this is long and complicated, and takes on many other philosophers and philosophies. I did not find it sufficiently rigorous to convince me but the problem may be me, not the book in this case. I felt at times that Gabriel was building further proof on the grounds of statements hed made, not proved. I may easily be wrong, but that doesnt change that I found his proof muddy and hard to follow. When I read Bernhard Williams, for instance, or Isaiah Berlin or Thomas Nagel or Eric Dodds on the irrational and Greek thought or Martha Nussbaum on moral luck, I don't have this problem: its work reading them but I leave convinced of their reasoning and in Gabriels case, Im not, even though I generally agree with his position. What hes saying, if I have it straight, is that different parts of the world organize in different ways, using different organizing principles and criteria, thus creating what may appear to be mutually exclusive orderings of meaning: you don't find beauty next to science, nor an actual physical creature next to a troll or hippogriff, but all of these things/qualities exist just in different parts of what we can know. My biggest objection to this otherwise acceptable book is the authors too frequent attempts to make it hip by referring to artifacts of contemporary culture movies and television shows a lot. These references will inevitably date the book, no matter how relevant they seem today. Though he says many good things in his chapter on The Meaning of Religion, I found the overarching argument in the chapter fuzzy. Still, his main point is well stated: religion is, or should be, more about why things are than what they are, and rule-bound religion is the wrong path to take. So ultimately, religion is one of the ways we situate and try; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: John Dies at the End; Author: Visit Amazon's David Wong Page; Review: With his new novel, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, just on the bookshelves, its a good time to look back on David Wongs first novel, John Dies at the End (2012), a stoned-out-slackers-face-off-against-totally-awesome-other-dimensional-alien-invaders comedy so deranged that it spawned an indie movie which is just as deranged, only shorter. (Film scripts run a hundred pages, the book to 466, plus a preface.) To start with, David Wong isn't David Wong. Hes an on-line blogger-humorist named Jason Pargin, and David Wong is his nom de plume, or is it cle? Wong composed this tale on line, then an indie press published it (more or less) and then a mainline publisher, St. Martins, picked it up and it proved a raging success, outselling even Gone with the Wind no, I made that up, the last part, not all of it. And then an indie film maker, Don Coscarelli, made a movie out of it same title- and the film even has Paul Giamatti in it. Its quicker to say what the story doesnt have in it than it is to list what it does have but that wouldnt help you to decide whether to buy or read it. So here goes. In this novel, you will encounter: two slackers, college dropouts who can barely hold jobs and whose oratorical strengths extend on further than poop, fart and penis jokes; an alien overlord named Korrok whom you don't want to get to know better; Korroks evil legions who pop up on earth in various forms, including taking over human bodies (minds too, if the owners of the bodies have one); assorted ghosts; occasional sex acts, usually too rapidly executed or half-fumbled; and a new drug called Soy Sauce that opens portals in the mind to other worlds and other times. Oh, yes! A meat monster, arms made of game hens and country bacon, with sausage fingers and a roast turkey head, and a flying mustache and colorless wingless flies that burrow into your flesh and try to k ill you. And theres a psychic, who may or may not be conning people but helps out any way. And theres David, the narrator, and his equally clueless friend John. Does John die at the end? Read it and find out. But he does reappear in Wongs second novel, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Dont Touch it (2013), which I have waiting for me by the side of my bed.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Selected Poems of Donald Hall; Author: Visit Amazon's Donald Hall Page; Review: Donald Hall, U. S. poet laureate from 2006 to 2007, is proof that poetry can be rigorously crafted without loss of accessibility. Hall is one of a small number of poets, confessional in nature one thinks of Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Snodgrasswho draws on his own history to produce lovely, textured poems, often quite short in length. In his respect for physical labor (lovely reminiscences of his farmer grandfather) and for perceived and felt nature (plants, animals, landscape, his dead wifes flower beds, the activity around her now abandoned hummingbird feeder) and his feeling for times changes (a recurring motif in his poems), he reminds me of several other of my favorite contemporary poets: Philip Levine, David Ignatow, Haydn Carruth, B. H. Fairchild are a few that come to mind. Reading selections from a lifetimes writing like this makes clear Halls enduring preoccupations: time, the cycle of growth and decay, the virtue and pleasure of working with ones hands, natures seductions, but also how we f**k up our own lives by bad choices, anger at a venal and self-important world, and near then end, the lovely, mournful, agonized poems about his poet- wife Jane Kenyons agonizing battle against leukemia, her death, his loss and his memories. The first poem in the book (My Son My Executioner) is about holding his infant son in his hands. It ends: We twenty-five and twenty-two, / Who seemed to live forever, / Observe enduring life in you / And start to die together. The second poem is about a four=year-old Donald Hall looking out the window of his house at the countryside, waiting for a giant, a sleeping giant, to wrench himself out of the earth and walk around. The giant doesnt come. Summer ends and school began, / And winter pulled a sheet over his head. Snow covers a hillside but also a four-year-olds fantasy will die. Not all of these poems work for me. (Woolworths is an example and {The Snow strikes me as trivial, just a wordworkers conceit.) But most do, and the best ones are very very fine. An example, and another instance of his preoccupation with the cycles of living and dying, is Digging, twenty-five lines long, which starts about the pleasure of the act of digging in the earth and ends talking about being in the earth and new things growing out of the remains of old. Best of all for me are the memory poems. Walking back from his grandparents farm by the side of a horse (named Riley), then another time riding back on a wagon after helping his grandfather gather the hay: My skin dried in the sun. Wind Caught me in clover. The slow ride Back to the barn. I dangled Legs over split-pole rails While my grandfather talked forever In a voice that wrapped me around With love that asked for nothing. In my room I drank well water That whitened the sides of a tumbler And coolness gathered like dark Inside my stomach. in a voice that wrapped me around with love. I like that; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: His Right Hand (A Linda Wallheim Mystery); Author: Visit Amazon's Mette Ivie Harrison Page; Review: This is the second time that Linda Wallheim, loving wife of Kurt, the Mormon ward bishop of Draper, Utah, has gotten tangled up in a case involving murder. The first case was detailed in The Bishops Wife, which was praised by Janet Maslin in the New York Times but panned by a handful of Amazon readers who self-identified as Mormons. Behind their complaints about a boring story or pedestrian prose, the principal complaint seems to have been that Mormons wouldnt express the views that are voiced by Linda --theyre not Mormon enough. But the author is definitely not a dummy: she holds a Ph. D. in German literature from Princeton, not a bad school at all, and lives (Mormon) in Utah with her (Mormon) husband and five (Mormon) children. Its a little like criticizing Scientology: if you do it in print, you better expect to get I wasn't certain Id enjoy this book when I requested it for review. But I was intrigued by the Mormon background and interested in the dilemma encased in it. A man is killed, the wards second counselor, an important lay position in the Mormon church hierarchy. But it turns out he was a woman. Twenty some years before, hed crossed, had reconstructive surgery and took hormone treatment to make him a man. Hed buried his past, married and his wife and he had adopted two children, now in their teens. As ward bishop, it falls to Kurt, Lindas husband, to deal with this case, which would potentially require the resealing of every covenant in which the dead man had been involved. What follows describes the reactions and attitudes of a notoriously conservative religious group as its members deal with both a murder and the news of the mans transgendering. In the process, you learn that opinion in the Mormon church isn't a monolithic block: attitudes have changed in the church and probably will continue to change, though at a slow pace. I liked the book a lot. The narrative isn't flashy but the story is solid and the characters seemed both true and interesting. I didn't want to put the book down once Id started it. Linda in particular is a gem. Though shes a dutiful wife and a devoted church member, she hasn't lost her capacity to think critically, shes competent and determined, and her domesticity and devoutness, when combined with her willingness to think outside the box, makes her utterly appealing. As a detective, shes so-so, more of a witness than a solver of riddles, but that too seems sensible. In her role, we shouldnt expect a Sherlock Holmes, inspector Maigret or Steve Carella. But she is so grounded, and such an attractive character, that she makes you think better of this religion which sometimes seems so alien to the people outside it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Armada (The American Heritage Library); Author: Visit Amazon's Garrett Mattingly Page; Review: Clines first novel, Ready Player One (2012) was a really good pop novel. Its hacker hero, still a teenager, ends up saving the world, but en route, theres a lot of humor and lots of action and the hero is an appealing character. The setting was good to, a future world where the poor are permanently dis-endowed and kept in tutelage by a combination of handouts and flashy media toys. Armada is like ready Player One but the steroids have run out. Again, the hero is a hacker. It turns out that for the past four generations, the hidden rulers of mankind have been using movies (2001 Space Odyssey, Alien, E. T.) and video to train the Earths next generations of interstellar warriors because, what a surprise!, we have been under attack all that time. It started with a giant swastika carved on the reverse side of the moon but now its a full-scale invasion armada which is approaching earth with surprising rapidity. So all these teenage war gamers, geeks at school until now, have been called up to active duty. Theyll be piloting drone warships in one last effort to stop the attackers. There are surprises in what follows but they're not terribly exciting ones and the sense of humor that suffused Clines first book is conspicuously absent in his second. Nothing in this book is as good as its counterpart in the first. The result is a book thats so so, never terribly good, never unredeemably bad. And since the heroes, with few exceptions, average out at age eighteen, and even the older ones are gamer geeks, there isn't much in the way of subtlety or perspicacity in the dialogue or action. I wouldnt call this a hack novel but its much too close to one for an author good enough to turn out Clines scintillating first novel.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Sunfail; Author: Visit Amazon's Steven Savile Page; Review: Sunfail is neither an exciting adventure nor all that clear as to what is going on. A series of catastrophes happen in rapid succession: birds fall out of the skies, everything running on electricity shuts down, strange men dressed in black are caught writing graffiti in the subways, the countrys foremost military outpost on the Eastern seaboard is wiped out, and planes, trains and busses start to shut down, locking New Yorkers in their inorganic city. Panic is the result but the goal of the perpetrators is financial gain. The principal good guy is a veteran whos portrayed as decidedly not superhuman yet acts much that way. Hes aided by a former colleague whos now an assassin for the bad guys (will she make it through alive?) and a devastatingly attractive Columbia University anthropologist with whom the vet had a one-night stand a while back and she still has the hots for him. Shes engaged in deciphering hieroglyphics (well, writing thats kind of like hieroglyphics that have been discovered in an underwater city near the Bermuda Triangle). The writing is on buildings that resemble Egyptian pyramids and the writing seems a mixture of Mayan and Olmec. Bermuda Triangle? Egyptian, Mayan, Olmec, all mixed together? As to the bad guys, they're known as The Hidden. At least thats what they[re called by three guys in black who pop up half way through the story, do precious little and then disappear , who may or may not be federal agents and thus possibly good guys. And what are the bad guys named? The conspirators have confiscated the names of Olmec etc. gods. Does this sound confusing? I hope so because it is. Its also, lapses in logic aside, not very exciting at all. To cap it all, the story doesnt so much end as stop: the bad guys are still around, just their current assault foiled, and I suppose, soon installment two of this deflated epic will appear but I don't know why anyone would want to read it.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Armada (Easton Press); Author: Visit Amazon's Garrett Mattingly Page; Review: Clines first novel, Ready Player One (2012) was a really good pop novel. Its hacker hero, still a teenager, ends up saving the world, but en route, theres a lot of humor and lots of action and the hero is an appealing character. The setting was good to, a future world where the poor are permanently dis-endowed and kept in tutelage by a combination of handouts and flashy media toys. Armada is like ready Player One but the steroids have run out. Again, the hero is a hacker. It turns out that for the past four generations, the hidden rulers of mankind have been using movies (2001 Space Odyssey, Alien, E. T.) and video to train the Earths next generations of interstellar warriors because, what a surprise!, we have been under attack all that time. It started with a giant swastika carved on the reverse side of the moon but now its a full-scale invasion armada which is approaching earth with surprising rapidity. So all these teenage war gamers, geeks at school until now, have been called up to active duty. Theyll be piloting drone warships in one last effort to stop the attackers. There are surprises in what follows but they're not terribly exciting ones and the sense of humor that suffused Clines first book is conspicuously absent in his second. Nothing in this book is as good as its counterpart in the first. The result is a book thats so so, never terribly good, never unredeemably bad. And since the heroes, with few exceptions, average out at age eighteen, and even the older ones are gamer geeks, there isn't much in the way of subtlety or perspicacity in the dialogue or action. I wouldnt call this a hack novel but its much too close to one for an author good enough to turn out Clines scintillating first novel.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Elizabeth Strout Page; Review: At Lucys wedding reception it was to her first husbandher mother-in-law introduced her this way: This is Lucy. Lucy comes from nothing. Years later when Lucy has started to sort out her life through writing about it, she comments: I took no offense and really, I take none now. But I think: No one in this world comes from nothing. Inside, she knows she almost did: a dirt-poor family which was just as poor in emotions, a mother and a father who never told her they loved her or praised her for her accomplishments, living for a good part of her childhood in a converted garage, always old clothes, short even on food (sometimes they had bread with maple syrup on it for their supper), behind her back other students making fun of her. Lucy got out of that life. She went to college, got married and had children, started a career (writing)but her past life never fully left her. Even though she no longer saw her parents or siblings, she felt the deficit inside her: shed never watched TV, her clothes sense was wonky, it took a while for her to learn common etiquette. Then she goes to the hospital. A simple operation turns bad and shes stuck there for nine weeks. She hasn't seen her mother for years but her mother shows up, stays five days by the side of her bed, not even leaving to sleep she sleeps in the chair by the sides of Lucys bed instead. And she talks. Simple stuff. Do you remember so and so? This is what happened to her. Still shying away from the personal, no emotion, at least not overtly, still unable to tell her daughter she loves her. But she showed up and Lucy needs what she gives her. Its a gift why so much needed? Because she didn't get it when she was a child? Probably so, but she cherishes it regardless. Lucy tells us about this time from a time later in her life. In the process, she talks about a lot of things her first marriage and what was good and what became bad about it, her relations with her daughters both before she left her husband and after, her own growing up, the last times she saw her parents, first her mother and then her father, as they lay dying, her oblique and passing relation to a sympathetic doctor at the hospital, a woman writer who gives her the advice she needs to forge her own literary voice, a neighbor whos there before she goes to the hospital and gone afterwards, dead of AIDS. The story ends with a short chapter (half a page) with Lucy accepting her story as hers, freed (though she doesnt phrase it this way) from the shadow of her mothers expectations at last. She ends it: But this one is my story. This one. And my name is Lucy Barton. Thats beautiful. But its not the end. An equally short chapter follows that talks about her daughter and her: if it has; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Beetle Boy; Author: Visit Amazon's M.G. Leonard Page; Review: This rollicking adventure is targeted at children 8-12 years but its a good read regardless of your age. I loved it! Darkus Cuttles dad used to be a beetle expert --Darkus didn't know this because his dad has never talked about itand now hes Director of Natural Science at a Natural History Museum. But he disappeared good old dependable dad who would never EVER fail to pick up his thirteen-year-old son after school. Darkuss mother had died five years before and his archaeologist uncle Maximus is out somewhere in some desert doing what he odes best, which is exploring. Exploring for what? Thats irrelevant for this story, so who cares? Maximus returns and Darkus gets out of foster care but his father is still missing so Darkus, a plucky youth, sets out to find him. Along the way he makes friends three of them, all brave (well, two of them are) and true. Two are classmates Virginia (fearless) and Bertolt (timid). The third is a beetle, which, wonder of wonders, seems to have adopted him. He names the beetle Baxter. Baxter, it is soon clear, is no ordinary beetle, either in intelligence (hes quite perceptive) or friendliness (hes very protective of Darkus). In fact, there are other beetles they live across the street in a rundown gigantic heap of a house-complex owned by two cousins, Humphrey and Pickering, nasty types who are constantly fighting each other and who, when by accident they capture Darkus nosing around in their house, contemplate mincing him up and baking him inside a pie. As to the beetles, they're super-intelligent too and theres an ominous scientist-type, Lucretia Cutter, who wants to capture them all so she can anesthetize them and pin them on display cards in the museums beetle collection. Darkus, Virginia, Bertolt, uncle Max, Baxter and two beetles (one is a lightning bug) who have adopted the other two children, fight back gloriously and in the end Darkuss father is free and the beetles safe. What happens is exciting and hilarious both. En route there are surprises and the ending leaves the way open for a sequel. This isn't deep stuff. Its just fun, a delight to read. I can imagine how much a middle schooler will enjoy it and because it has both boy and girl heroes, boys and girls can both relate to it. I liked beetles before but I like them even more now. The book includes an entomology dictionary which is not included in the review copy. (I may be a 79-year-old reader but Im still a kid at heart, I guess).; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Saving Jason (A Jason Stafford Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Sears Page; Review: An appealing and resourceful hero, a tricky plot, a child at risk, and the requisite amount of violence from start to near end whats not to like this nonstop action thriller by four-time winner Michael Sears? To call it a financial thriller is a misnomer although at the heart of it is an elaborate scam that culminates in a takeover attempt of the New York investment brokerage firm run by the friend and boss of Jason Stafford, the series hero. Sears does the finance parts well. He ought to --he worked on Wall Street for more than twenty years including stints as managing director of both Paine Webber and Jefferies & Co. But the novel starts in violence, a half-botched assassination attempt on a financial advisor whos about to blow the whistle on still another investment scam: the advisor survives the assassination but is killed by police when he inadvertently fires at them, thinking its the kiers come back again. Thats the first chapter. In the second chapter, Jason is on Long Island. Hes investigating a semi-abandoned building thats filled with trucks it looks hes found a hidden chop shop for trucks. The bad guys return. Jason has to flee and hes chased around the lot by a herd of angry bison. Bison are both big and fast much better than guard dogs to protect your property. And thats just the start. By the time the novels over, there have been two kidnappings, four people are dead by violent means, Jason and his autistic seven-year-old son (also named Jason, but always referred to as the Kid) are hiding in the Witness Protection program: unknown baddies are trying to do Jason senior in in order to stop him from disclosing information he doesnt know he has to a hyper-aggressive district attorney who got him in trouble in the first place by publicizing his involvement in the tabloids. Jason ends up chasing all over the Arizona desert looking for his missing son, and just when he finds him, hes kidnapped himself. And so it goes until the thoroughly satisfying finale. (The last surprise in the novel occurs in the final sentence.) This is accomplished crime fiction by a writer at the peak of his powers.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Promised Land; Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Antin Page; Review: "The lives of most people, unless they were very famous, slip away into oblivion when those who still remember them die in their turn. These days few people even leave a record of their existence; whatever there is in digital form will disappear soon. E-mails are not written to last. But Bernard and Win did leave a record, not because they wished to be immortal or even wanted others to see it, but simply because they couldn't bear the thought of throwing it away." (Ian Buruma, at the beginning of the book) "Today, while I was gardening, a time when many thoughts and philosophies run through my mind I said to myself there are just two things in this world which make me proud and eternally thankful. One is that I am an English woman, privileged to live in and for the most wonderful country in the world, and the other is that I won the unique and faithful love of such as man as you." (Winifred Schlesinger to Bernard Schlesinger, March 2, 1943) History books don't usually merit the epithet loving, but this book does. Its both good history and an act of love. Buruma (prof., Democracy, Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, with eight previous books, incl. Year Zero and Taming the Gods) has drawn on the copious correspondence (thousands of letters) of his paternal grandparents, Winifred and Bernard Schlesinger, to illuminate both their lives and marriage and the changing social and attitudinal world in which they lived. Its the story of a successful, happy and loving marriage with all that these adjectives entailed dragged along in its wake courtship, marriage, early married life, children and grandchildren .. and wars, two of them to be exact, because the principal reason there are so many extant letters is that Bernard was a soldier in both World Wars and thus separated from Win for years at a time. The first letter is from Bernard. Its 1915. Hes just met Winnie, as he called her back then. Buruma surmises its not the first letter the two wrote each other but its the first we have still. The tone is of a jokey schoolboy, sort of the fallback position in correspondence and conversation that his grandfather would adopt all through his life to mask deeper feelings. Though there are no effusions of love in it, its clear hes courting her. And her letters back, stiff and proper, show she liked it. Wins parents felt she was too young yet for a serious relationship and someone told him so, so soon after Bernard reluctantly wrote Winnie to tell her he wouldnt be writing though he still had feelings for her. Then came the war. Bernard enlisted, was shipped over seas, France, Macedonia, Egypt, Jerusalem. Winnie becomes a nurse: she wants to do her part for the war effort. And their correspondence resumes. By the time Bernard is demobbed at the end of the war, they're courting again, this time with her parents consent. Bernard starts medical studies. Marriage. Children. Jobs. They live in one; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Stop the Presses! (The Nero Wolfe Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Goldsborough Page; Review: Before his death in 1975, Rex Stout wrote 33 novels and a slightly bigger number of novellas starring his overweight, orchid-loving, work-hating, super-smart detective Nero Wolfe and Wolfes amanuensis, general dogsbody and sometimes detecting aide Archie Goodwin. The stories followed a common format. Archie narrated the story. Wolfe was dragged into a case against his will perhaps there were orchids he wanted to purchase or bills might be coming due soon. The suspects had to be finagled into visiting Wolfe in his study since he never well, almost ever- left his apartment. At some point, inspector Cramer, Wolfes police force antagonist, would storm into the apartment to yell at Archie and Wolfe. Then hed storm back out. If Wolfe needed detecting help, Archie supplied it himself or private detectives Saul Panzer or Fred Durkin were called in. After an initial round of interviews with all the suspects, everything seemed fuzzier than before. Then Wolfe would get a brainstorm. The Great Man would stop everything and sit dead silent thinking through the case, his lips pursing methodically, open, then shut, open again, over and over, dead silence around him for as long as it took to round up the suspects, plus police inspector Cramer and his minion, sergeant Stebbins, for a meeting in Wolfes study that night, where he would explicate the case in linear fashion. The stories were great fun not so much the mysteries which tended to be so-so as the cast of characters. Archie, the flip narrator, in particular was a great creation. Wolfe died but the series goes on, under the able pen of author Robert Goldsborough, for whom this is the eleventh Nero Wolfe mystery. Its neither the worst Nero Wolfe story penned nor the best probably closer to the bottom than to the top or even the middle. A nasty-tongued gossip columnist has been getting death threats (which he arguably deserves!). Hes found dead. The police call it suicide. His publisher disagrees and hires Wolfe to investigate. The dead man had named five people as those most likely to want to do him harm. Archie arranges a round of five interviews. Wolfe muses. Theres the climactic conference meeting and Wolfe solves the case. Everythings according to formula but its all sadly pro forma. The interviews are brief and nothing seems to come out of them. The stock characters are there brainy, lazy Nero Wolfe, wise-cracking Archie, Wolfes chef Fritz, belligerent inspector Cramer, Archies on-again off-again girlfriend Lily Rowan, reporter friend Lon Cohen of the New York Gazette, the newspaper with the fifth largest circulation in the country. Saul Panzer is mentioned but doesnt do much, sergeant Purlie Stebbins makes an appearance at the final meeting but doesnt even speak. The result is a curiously flat mystery that isn't very mysterious and just as little exciting. Its still fun but nowhere near as enjoyable as past outings have been.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Wolves (A John Wells Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Alex Berenson Page; Review: The tenth novel to feature once-upon-a-time CIA agent and now-not spy and assassin John Wells is a follow-up to the previous one, Twelve Days (2015). In that book, Wells almost singlehandedly proved that a supposed plot by Iran to smuggle nuclear weapons into our country was a setup: a casino magnate named Aaron Duberman had faked it in an effort to drag the United States into a war with Iran. That war didn't happen squelched hours before the Presidents deadline to attack Iranbut the man responsible for causing the trouble fled to Israel and the President already hurting in the polls-- refused to go public about the plot for fear of embarrassing his administration still further. Everyone seems more concerned with sweeping the dirt under the rug than going after the bad guy. Except for John Wells, that is. In return for keeping his mouth shut, he pressures the President into a three-month deadline: the US will persuade Israel to expel Duberman and then, at least this is Wellss reading of things, well go after him. Three months pass. Duberman has moved into his Hong Kong casino and no ones doing a thing about it except watching him from a long distance off. So Wells steps in. The mayhem that follows draws in not only Wells and Duberman and Dubermans deadly bodyguards and knock dead ex-model wife but the Russians, the CIA and MI6, the US Navy, and a US Senator with a decidedly tainted agenda --but hey, any port in a storm, right? Blackmail, assassination and a three-party shootout add to the fun. Berenson is an efficient writer and Wells an interesting action her intelligent, competent, driven and deadly. This book isn't as exciting as the previous one maybe because its not as new to me as that one -the first of Berensons books Id read, was-- but its a quick and enjoyable read.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Far From True (Promise Falls Trilogy); Author: Visit Amazon's Linwood Barclay Page; Review: This is the second novel in a proposed trilogy. Broken Promise (2015) was the first and this book ends with a preview of the next book. Thats really the problem with this book: I became frustrated with the recurrent references to events that precede this installment and at the end I was left with too much that was unresolved. Its a Twin Peaks kind of mystery: surreal mixes with the transparently real and beneath the placid exterior of this idyllic small city located somewhere not too far from Albany, New York, all sorts of nasty goings on are occurring, have occurred or are going to occur, from group sex to kidnap and murder. The book starts with the bombing of a drive-in movie screen. Its the outdoor theaters last show before closing for good. This time, the patrons get a murder along with their out of date movies and fresh made popcorn the screen falls on a vintage car, squashing its two occupants. There are two detectives, a policeman who is investigating the bombing but is equally puzzled by a murder from the first book and a P.I. who is hired to look for a missing tape (originally the possession of one of the two squished adults in the smashed car at the drive-in) that implicates respectable people in some very nasty goings on. (Think rape.) Chapter by chapter, its a diverting read and there are enough surprises in it but cumulatively, my interest waned, then went away for good.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Dark Days Club (A Lady Helen Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Alison Goodman Page; Review: Although Goodmans Eon/Eology duet of Young Adult sci fi novels was critically acclaimed and she has written two other novels, one sci fi and one an adult murder mystery, this is the first book by her that I have read. I asked to review it because of a reference she made to Georgette Heyers Regency novels. Besides, I enjoy Young Adult novels. When they work, the elements of fiction writing character, setting, actionfit together cleanly and economically and don't get in the way of storytelling. Well, this one is a good one. And given the ending, more of the adventures of the eighteen-year-old heroine, Lady Helen, and her mentor and partner, the brooding, dishonored Lord Carlston, we may expect more episodes to follow soon. The Dark Days Club offers a perfectly legitimate Regency romance (will Lady Helen fall under the spell of disreputable Carlston and what does he want from her?) intertwined with an over the top but enjoyable supernatural adventure. To tell what attracts Carlston to Lady Helen would already start to take away the surprise so all Ill say here is what it says on the dust jacket: its 1812. Lady Helen is being presented at the royal court of George III but since hes mad, its Queen Charlotte who receives her. Theres already a mystery in the Wrexhall household: a maid has gone missing and Lady Helen finally appeals to Carlston for help in finding her. The next thing Lady Helen knows, shes fighting demons by the side of the brooding Lord and she discovers something new about herself. Lady Helen would fit well into Georgette Heyers scheme of things. She is one of those plucky, obedient on the surface but bucking against all the strings that are attached to a proper young woman in those decidedly unfeminist times when girls were meant to paint screens, sob out ballads, and play the pianoforte [though not so well as to appear unfeminine], not see through the masks of polite society. Carlston too fits the moid. His reputation is black and his initial appearance impressive enough his dress, his build, his aquiline profile-- but also menacing. The brown of his eyes was so dark that it merged with the black pupils making their expression impenetrable. It gave him a flat look of soullessness, like the eyes of the preserved shark she had seen in the new Egyptian Hall. And of course, when she dresses for her own presentation ball, Lady Helen looks stunning and the description revels in her newfound beauty: "She turned back to her reflection [in the mirror], finding refuge from her own doubts in the fierce contemplation of her gown. Madame Hortense had outdone herself. The pleated cream bodice sparkled with brilliants, and the band around the high waist was thick with spring-green embroidery and pearl flowers, the lustrous gems also sprinkled across the sheer overskirt. The sleeves had been caught up at the center of each shoulder with a pearl-and-diamond fleur-de-lis, exposing a delicate lace half sleeve beneath. It was a suitably magnificent gown for her last; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Anna and the Swallow Man; Author: Visit Amazon's Gavriel Savit Page; Review: This odd little book is a near-fairy tale about real times. Its 1939. Poland has just been invaded, Germans on one side, Russians on the other. A little girl seven and suddenly an orphan, and nine when we say goodbye to her wanders across the country, trying top avoid capture, with an odd, driven man whose name she never ever learns but whom she calls the Swallow Man. (He never tells her his namein his world, names put you at risk around strangers.) Awful things happen around them and their lives grow steadily harder across the course of two years but its refracted through the lenses of an innocent who moreover is shielded from horror as much as possible by her distant, quiet but ultimately caring protector. In the middle section of the book, Anna comes across a man, Reb Hirschl, in a forest clearing. Hes playing his clarinet, his last possession but he isn't really playing he cant: the reed is broken so he cant play it but he pretends anyway, singing along while he mock fingers it. Besides, hes drunk. From the moment she sees him, Hirschl is important to Anna. Hes a man filled with joy in a joyless time. Anna cant leave him behind. She persuades the Swallow Man to add him to their entourage, no matter the risk of exposure his presence poses for them all. As much as she trusts and depends on the Swallow Man, she misses things she used to have moments of joy, lightness of being, smiles and laughs, childlikenessand these are qualities the Reb possesses in surplus. But he is devoid of the basic life skills needed to keep a low profile and a Jew besides, which is like wearing a sign on ones back that says Persecute me, so you know in advance it will not end well, and it doesnt. Long after, the novel ends softly in an act of self-effacing sacrifice. In a way, this book is an antidote to the relentless savagery of Jerzy Kosinskis horrific 1965 novel-memoir, The Painted Bird, which depicted the wanderings of another child-innocent in that plagued land and time. But in her unquenchable humanity and optimism, Anna remains throughout all her experiences as a wanderer much more like Anne Frank, and thats what makes this novel what it is, which is lovely.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: God's Kingdom: A Novel; Author: Howard Frank Mosher; Review: This is the first novel by Howard Frank Mosher that I ve read. If the others are like this one, thats my loss because this one is near perfect. Behind apparent simplicity of form (a series of short stories that follow a boys growth to the edge of adulthood) and style (evocative but never flashy, lucid never dull, and streaked with a quirky sense of humor) hides a sophisticated writer whose every written word is considered. The sense of place in these stories the town of Gods Kingdom in the far northeast of Vermont, almost in Canada it is so close to the borderis ever present. The protagonist, young Jim Kinneson, has spent all his life so far in this town. Hes fourteen in the first story, approaching eighteen in the last. He gores hunting with his Gramp and father. His father edits the local newspaper: hes own a Pulitzer for his reporting. His mother is both conventional and, in hiding, the freest of spirits, untrammeled in her joy in life and love of her family. In the first story, fourteen=year-old Jimmy goes deer hunting with his father and grandfather: he with his baseball team to see the Red Sox play the Yankees they never get there; making and losing a friend, who flees the local Academy when a teacher persecutes him; and then one chapter later, helping the Academy headmaster empty out the teachers house after she (finally) dies; what happened to a cousin named Crazy Kinneson; and to a moose that seemed to have adopted one of the family --on it goes up to his graduation, Jimmy seventeen now going on eighteen now and having experiencing his first love, and at the very end, Jimmys discovery of hidden secrets about his familys long past in Gods Kingdom. Two themes run through these stories. One is how place and family shape our responses and set the bounds of our passions. The second, lovingly articulated in story after story, is how a still partly formed young man turns into a writer and what it means to adopt writing as ones vocation. Mosher is eloquent here without being preachy. Rather he narrates. Like the passage, late in the book, when Jim and Gramp are on a fishing trip and Gramp spills the beans to him about a dark passage in their familys history. Lying in their bunks after the sun is down, Jim asks him: Theres something about what you told me, Gramp. Something I don't understand. There are fifty somethings about what I told you that I don't understand. What is it? Jim asks him why he finally told him about the incident. So you can write about it, Gramp replies. Why don't you write about it? Thats not the kind of writer I am, Jim. Youre the storyteller Im a newspaperman. I cant make anything up. Or leave anything out. From the time you could spell cat you were inventing stories. Jim thinks for a minute, then asks: Which is more important? Being able to make things up or being able; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy); Author: Visit Amazon's Marcus Sakey Page; Review: This is the third, and supposedly concluding volume, in Sakeys Brilliance trilogy. If you haven't yet read them, the other two Brilliance, 2013, an Edgar nominee, and A Better World, 2014are well worth attention. Across the three, using the same characters for the most part (although quite a few die across the span of the series), he has charted the course of conflict between the 99 percent of human beings who are still normal and the emerging 1 percent of the young and middle-aged who are Brilliants, possessing a variety of special talents and at different levels. Cooper and Shannon are the heroes among these Brilliants. Shannon can anticipate where the people around her are going to be and where they will look next and thus can adjust her location relative to them so as to remain effectively unseen and uncatchable. Cooper is a super strategizer. In the first book of the series he works for the government in an agency called the Department of Analysis and Response: it is taxed with capturing and neutralizing renegade Brilliants bent on destroying the normals world. By book three, he is no longer able to sit on the fence. Two presidents have been killed by revolutionaries, the second a man he was helping in an effort to avoid a head on collision between normals and Brilliants. Now all out war beckons. A militia has invaded the Brilliants stronghold in Utah: it is marching to capture and imprison all Brilliants and Cooper, aided by Shannon, needs to do something. Against him, hidden somewhere in darkness, is the rebel leader John Smith, a Brilliant who is convinced the only answer is to wipe out all normal, just as homo sapiens did the Neanderthals. Its a daunting task to have to write the conclusion of an action trilogy with as complicated a story line as this series has but Sakey accomplishes it with bells on. Although the reader will benefit from having read the previous two books, its not essential. The story in this book is gripping enough to hold the readers interest on its own. This is supposed to be it for the Brilliants but Sakey adds a hook at the very end that opens the door for another novel, or a new series.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Wisdom of Dead Men (The Wildenstern Saga); Author: Oisn McGann; Review: This is the second book in a projected steam punk trilogy but it stands on its own feet well enough I haven't read the first book (Ancient Appetites) but was fully able to enjoy (and follow) this one. The book is marketed as Young Adult but I suspect thats because teenagers have demonstrated a taste for steam punk. The book is straightforward enough for Young Adults, packed with enough action and ideas to intrigue older readers as well. (For instance, me, who is 79.) Its the 1860s the American Civil War is referenced a few times. The Wildensterns are the most powerful family in the British Empire: for the most part, they reside in Ireland (around Dublin) but their business enterprises have tentacles worldwide and without being part of government, they are powerful enough to bend government authorities to their will. Its a bloody, violent family. Theres something in their blood they call it aurea sanitas- that gives them extra vitality. They live longer and heal quicker than normal human beings do. Theyre rules by as patriarch but to prevent the ruler and heirs growing complacent, the family has drawn up its own Rules of Ascension: any male Wildenstern can kill any other male Wildenstern if its to advance into his position and if he succeeds, no one can take vengeance on him killing for personal reasons isn't permitted. Thats one thing thats unique about the Wildensterns. The other is their possession of several enigmals. Enigmals! What a brilliant creation they are, part-animal, part-machine creatures left over from some long gone civilization that can be bent to the will of a Wildenstern by injecting a single drop of Wildenstern blood into the creature. They range in size from small to large and several are shown in the cunning drawings that head every chapter. (The illustrator isn't named.) The Beast of Glenmalure is eight feet long, with a tiger-like torso and a head like a bull. It runs on wheels, with pistons and motors, and its flanks are metal and ceramic, black and silver with gold and red streaks across them. The giant Trom is a bull-razer, the size of a locomotive, moving on hinged tracks, with zigzagging stripes of black and yellow across its sides and a massive jaw like on a steam engine, and bigger still is an odd creature down by the docks, half giraffe and half octopus, which is used to load and unload ships quickly. A mechanical bird and a snake-like creature with ceramic skin and metal eyes, it sings, play a role in the story, as does a self-propelling wheelbarrow. The creatures look like and act like animals: the protagonists velocycle like a fiery racing horse, the self-propelling wheelbarrow pleading with its master for something to pick up, carry away and dump just like a pet dog with a ball, the drawbreath getting pleasure from vacuuming and a frog-like creature blowing out hot air to dry the mistresss hair. Around these wonderful creatures is woven an action-packed story that contains several cases of spontaneous combustion (providing material; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Andromeda's War (Legion of the Damned: Before the Fall); Author: Visit Amazon's William C. Dietz Page; Review: If like me, you enjoy regular infusions of junk reading in between your forays into High Kulcha, William C. Dietzs military sci fi novels of the Legion of the Damned should rank high. The prose is blunt, not at all pretty or subtle, and incomplete sentences abound in it. But it never slows down and Action is the Name of the Game. The books twelve feature the Legionare set in an alt future seven hundred years from now when humanity is fighting both the locals on many of the planets theyve invaded but an alien race called the Hudathans, who are organized into clans a la Genghis Khan or Attila and rate themselves primarily on how bloodthirsty they are in their response to any challenge. Its not very real: you have to wonder how so monomaniacal a race could have made it into space and posed a challenge to any subtler thinking people (like us). But Dietzs novels of space warfare aren't meant to be subtle. This is Warrior Time --the Legion is an analogue of the Foreign Legion of Frances near past, soldiers who have for one reason or another chosen adventure and anonymity over the calmer enterprise of living civilian. The mortality rate in battle among them is astronomically high. If savaged, they are often so damaged that they can only continue in battle as brains controlling cyborg bodies, human-machine constructs that are almost indestructible under attack but are so large as to be eminently visible and thus . attackable and ultimately destroyable. Legionnaires learn early that it doesnt pay to grow too attached to your Legion companions. The heroine of the Andromeda novels (this is the third) is Legion platoon leader Andromeda McKee. In an earlier, safer life she was the Lady Catherine Carletto high nobility. Then the empress Ophelia assassinated all her family except for one (but he dies early in this installment, also at the hands of the empress). Alexandra fled to the anonymity of the Legion and now shes a hero. But if the empress Ophelia discovers her real identity, shell die. (Ophelias a real Baddie and Andromedas a real Goodie.) In this novel they face off against each other one last time. Ophelia is stranded on a backwoods planet under Hudathan attack. Shes kidnapped by the Hudathans. Andromedas unit is tasked with rescuing her. How Andromeda resolves the challenge of saving the empress shes sworn to kill while finding a way to vengeance provides lively but not terribly deep entertainment for the reader. Hey, I already said its junk fiction. But I liked it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Arrangement: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Ashley Warlick Page; Review: The Arrangement is an exceptionally fine account of the coming to maturity of the great food writer MFK Fisher. It concentrates on a period of great change in her life, change that in retrospect seems rapid but that progresses, when one is living through it, with at times glacial slowness when it will ever end? be resolved? At the start of the novel, Mary Frances is twenty- six. Its 1934. She is married, to a would-be poet, but her husband, All, has pretty much given up on his writing and theres no longer much to the marriage either. Mary Frances is another animal altogether: fiercely independent behind her conventional exterior, a free thinker, and unhappy with her life as it is. Shes always writing while stirring soup or stew in a pot, slicing vegetablesshe writes down her thoughts about food, about her past, her hungers, as she feels them, in note book after notebook. (In later passages in the book, a much older Mary Frances, nearing her death at 83, sorts through her hundreds of notebooks before they are carted away to be archived at Harvard; she throws out the ones she thinks too personal for public airing.) She has an affair, one night, with her husbands best friend, Tim. Hes married too, to a would-be movie actress, but his marriage quickly sinks and burns. There progresses a three-year period of painfully drawn out tension, toward the end of which Mary Frances, her husband Al and her lover Tim live together, each doing his or her individual best to ignore the elephant in the room. What happens after that is shocking enough but it hews to the true story of Fishers life. This is a very lightly fictionalized account and where Warlick has filled in gaps predominantly explicating Mary Francess, Tims, and Als innermost thoughtswhat she writes has the flavor of truth. So there you have it, a novel about a brief liaison, the tensions that followed it, and the eventual resolution of a lovers triangle. But beyond that, this is the tale of a writer of genius discovering herself. She flounders around at the beginning but soon finds her stride writing about the subject that most intrigues her, the pleasures and back history of food, both high and low, sensuously described and extolled. There is a passage halfway through the book when Mary Frances, back with her parents temporarily and waiting for the publication of her first book of essays, is taken on by a pompous elderly reporter, who asks her, with a pseudo-polite sneer on his face, What do you write about? Novels, like Pretty Princess [his name for another woman writer at the table] here? Hunger, Mary Frances says. I write about hunger for all kinds of things. Thats what comes through in this first-rate book: the passionate nature that drove Mary Frances not to accept the limits of genteel living that her family, friends, acquaintance, nigh the whole world pushed her to accept. Early on in the novel, Tim, who was one of the first to see her; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Watcher in the Wall (A Stevens and Windermere Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Owen Laukkanen Page; Review: Owen Laukkanens crime novels are unputdownable. Get one and you start reading it as soon as you can. The next thing you know, its late at night. Youre still at it and if you don't finish it that day, you pick it up the next day and finish it then. The trick to them is nonstop action, backed up by a detailed yet pared down description of the painstaking multiple steps that have to be taken to identify, track down and catch an extraordinarily elusive suspect. There are no waste words, no abatement of tension. These are detect and chase novels, police procedurals if you will, starring Minnesota BCA detective Kirk Stevens and FBI agent Carla Windermere. In the earlier novels, this unlikely pair was yoked together ad hoc when crossed jurisdictions necessitated state-federal cooperation. They gradually found out how to work together and now they're partners, lead agents in a joint FBI-BCA violent crime task force their success at this type of work has caught up with them. The differences between the two add to the series appeal. Stevens is fortyish-fiftyish, white, settled down, and happily married with children. He notices how attractive Windermere is but he refuses to play that game. Windermere is thirtyish, black, beautiful and single: shes tightly wired, a firecracker waiting to explode. She picked up a boyfriend in the previous novel (Kill Fee, 2014). As a consequence, the sexual tension between the partners has abated but she has her own unresolved issues that play a dominant role in this episode of a series I hope never stops. The other thing that makes this series good is Laukkanens choice of crimes and villains. The stakes are always high. Theres always someone immediately at risk. If the two don't crack the case in time, someone faces an awful end. The clock is ticking from the beginning of the novel to the end. In this latest installment, the villain is a sicko who preys on teenagers through internet chat rooms, suicide sites where desperately unhappy people seeking advice about how and when to kill themselves. The predator uses fake personae, both male and female, tailored to his victims: he befriends the most vulnerable and leads them on to and he wants them to send him live videos of their deaths. Then he sells the videos as snuff tapes. How the detectives learn of him, their painstaking pursuit as they trace the thinnest of leads, the physical pursuit at the end with another vulnerable teenager in his hands its exciting stuff exceedingly well done. Although there is a backstory to the series, its really not necessary to have read previous novels to enjoy or understand this one. It stands alone quite well.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sharp Teeth; Author: Visit Amazon's Toby Barlow Page; Review: This book is a werewolf novel and a revenge tale of two gangs (for gangs which denotes human, read, packs which denotes dogs) fighting each other and the story of the strange love between a man and a wereb**ch and how it plays out. One pack leader, Baron, finds a way to destroy another pack leader, Lark. Lark survives but is forced to hide: discovery means death. Abandoned by Lark, his b**ch meets a man (a non-were) in a bar. Hes gentle and kind, so she soon falls in love with him: but he doesnt know shes a shape changer. Meantime, Lark skulks in the shadows, building a new pack. Then its payback time. The novel is told throughout in verse short punchy lines and vivid, brutal imagery. It doesnt seem a bit awkward or too long even at 308 pages. The action never ceases, the characters even as dogsare distinct and coherent and the narrative has a special quality, as though the wolves were telling the story, not humans. The story is jarring life looks different from underneath. Im not a fan of tricky writing for the sake of showing off how trickily one can write but thats not the case on here. The blank verse makes sense: it helps the story and doesnt get in the way of reading it. This book can sit up there with Glen Duncans equally gripping and innovative The Last Werewolf (2012).; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: I'm Traveling Alone: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Samuel Bjork Page; Review: Samuel Bjork is the pen name for Norwegian playwright novelist songster Frode Sander Olen. This chase thriller is the first book of his released in America. Two police detectives, a man and a woman, are on the trail a very faint and terribly twisty trailof a mad man who has already killed four young girls: all of the bodies were found hanging from a tree dressed in over-sized dolls clothes with a rope knotted around the neck. Each had a number scratched on her fingernail: I, II, III, IIII. Its hard to encompass but the killer may plan to murder ten children in all, one for each finger. Thats one of the puzzles the duo must solve. There is also a reclusive sect that may have abducted children and whose pastor seems to be running a scam on elderly widows, persuading them to give all their money to his church. And theres the mystery of a baby stolen from a hospital six years ago: a sign hanging on the first childs necks refers to this case, though in code. Then another girl goes missing but this one is the granddaughter of the detective in charge of the investigating unit. The two lead detectives are well-fleshed characters: by the end of the novel, you care what happens to them. The mad men there is more than one of themwill make your skin crawl and the story races along, with the stakes higher and higher as it progresses. The story, once resolved, is complicated but though as bit hyperbolic, its conceivable that it all could happen weve known enough of maniac killers in our own country to stretch the limits of reasonable behavior a bit when we read about psychos like the ones in this well written, thoroughly entertaining crime novel debut.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Into Oblivion: An Icelandic Thriller (An Inspector Erlendur Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Arnaldur Indridason Page; Review: This is the first Inspector Erlendur novel I have read but it is the fourteenth in the series and a sequel to Reykjavik Nights, which received critical acclaim. The second mystery, Silence of the Grave (2001), won the Crime Writers of America Gold Dagger Award when it appeared in English in 2005 and he has won other prestigious awards for his books, which have been published in 26 countries and translated into 24 languages. In reviewing Reykjavik Nights in 2015, the New York Times noted that Arnaldur (Indridason is his patronymic, not his last name) differs from other writers of Nordic crime fiction: the crimes he writes about aren't particularly gruesome and his villains not outrageously villainous. As for his detective hero, he too doesnt particularly stand out: in this novel, set in 1979, hes thirty-three, still a young cop. Hes moody has a backstory which is only partly explained in this bookand though a good detective, hes no Sherlock Holmes. in this novel, one of the cases hes working on is the disappearance of a teenage girl sixteen years before and he admits repeatedlythat he doesnt have any idea what happened to her. He has no strategy to find out except dogged pursuit of whatever lead he has at the moment: a classmate of hers who helped her get American records Doris Day, Patti Page- for a party she was having, a reclusive neighbor who used to spy on her from a window across the street. One thing leads to another, the net tightens and at last he finds what hes looking for and a sixteen-year-old mystery is laid to rest. The other crime being investigated in this two-track novel is the death of an Icelander who worked at Camp Knox, a U. S. air base outside Keflavik. His body is found face down in an icy lagoon. Its apparent from the damage to him that hed had a great fall, but from where, and why? The investigation, pursued primarily by Erlendurs superior, Marion Briem, and only secondarily by Erlendur himself, takes the two detectives on to the base, where they are met with a stone wall of silence from the Americans. With the aid of a military police liaison officer who is more interested in solving a crime than in the official line, they pursue the case, which involves a giant hangar, the possibility that someone is running contraband flights in and out of the base, and a host of other interesting occurrences. Arnaldur lays out the very real tensions that existed back then between the American military and the citizens of Iceland, who were willing enough to take the bases money but objected to a foreign military presence in the country and their politicians obsequiousness before the American intruders. The result is an uncommonly intelligent police procedural that achieves its ends without hyperbole of any kind and is all the better for its absence.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: City of Secrets: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Stewart O'Nan Page; Review: The only other novel by ONan that I have read is Last Night at the Lobster (2007). It was superb. This book is almost as good, which is saying a lot. But where Lobster was an eloquent book about a not very great event the final shift at a closing Red Lobster restaurantthis book is about grand events, the messy bloody determined fight of Jewish immigrants to Israel in 1945 to wrest their land from British hands. It starts in sadness the protagonist Brands memories of surviving the Holocaust when his wife, family and friends didnt, and the deep-seated shame he feels for not acting then. In the camps, ONan writes, he had learned to stand and watch. It had saved his life and made him useless. Now he is in Jerusalem and what will happen in the course of this short novel will leave him with the memory of another tragedy, when a violent act by the underground resistance (of which he is a member) leaves dozens of people dead and wounded. At the end, Brand is still alive to walk away but others dont, and its not clear whether he has learned anything from what has happened or not. There is a love story of sorts, Brand and Eva, a revolutionary with her own past to mourn: she whores both for money and garner information. ONan writes like an angel, a low-keyed, almost laconic but deeply evocative prose that nails the truth, the truth of inner emotions, every time. There is a resolution of sorts, but at the end, Brand is still confronted with the same question as at the beginning: how did you live when you let the people you loved die? Its still not clear that hes anywhere close to finding the answer.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Swallows: A Malko Linge Novel; Author: Grard de Villiers; Review: Gerard De Villierss Malko Linge is like Ian Flemings James Bond but with even more, and more graphic, sex, and not only MORE sex but sex in more varieties --including a bit of S&M. Linge takes a decidedly utilitarian approach toward love, even when he connects with his sexy fiancée Alexandra, who gets back at him any time he displeases her (by putting his work ahead of her whims, for instance) by heading off into the wilderness (well, shopping or partying or) with some other man, whoevers available at the moment. This particular episode starts with an attempted seduction. With virtually no warning, a Russian financiers wife, Zhanna, tries to seduce Malko. When that fails, she offers him a bribe to kill her husbands new mistress. The payoff is huge: her husband runs a circle of swallows, Russian sleeper agents inserted into the United States decades ago to work their way up to positions of influence, and shell turn them all over to the CIA in return for one simple act of murder. But Malko isn't a killer, at least not when he doesnt have to be. He does however free-lance for the agency its the only way he can pay for the renovation of his rundown family castle. So soon hes sitting in a secure room with a CIA handler, deciding how to play out Zhannas offer without actually killing anyone. What follows is a long and tortuous cat-and-mouse game between Russian spymaster and free world spies, with Malko in the hot seat. The Russians know that Malko is involved. The question is whether to neutralize him and alert the West to the real importance of the U.S. spy operation or to let him run and watch for signs that its time to step in. En route, Malko has sex with one woman, then another, and then well, you get the drift He eats and drinks his way through a slew of top drawer stuff: there is an excellent Pouilly Fume and then a Chateau Latour 1992, sautéed fois gras and lamb with ginger. More sex, more meals, and on to the climax, which is both satisfying and believable. The best thing about the book, though, is the building of tension between the two sides as the Russians watch Malko and debate whether to maintain a watching brief on him or just cut to the chase and do him in. This is only the second Malko Linge novel Ive read De Villiers wrote more than 200so I expect we will see a lot more of them in months to come. I not only liked it better than the first (The Madmen of Benghazi, pub. in English in 2014) but better than many of the James Bond novels. During his lifetime (De he died in 2013), the French literary establishment pretty much ignored De Villiers but a former French minister commented, The French elite pretend not to read him but they all do. If you like James Bond, youll like Malko Linge.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells: An Homage to P.G. Wodehouse (Jeeves and Wooster Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Sebastian Faulks Page; Review: \If someone had told me that ANYone could imitate P. G. Wodehouse in print, I wouldnt have believed it, but Faulks has in this thoroughly satisfying madcap adventure through Wooster Land. The narrator, of course, is Bertie Wooster, a man who combines utter vacuity and innate inconsequentiality with the benefits, though only half-remembered and garbled a bit, of a resolutely classical education. The result is a unique style of locution and story telling that explains why Wodehouses light and airy books have endured so long. Its like Oscar Wilde: you don't have to say weighty things if your wit illuminates every line you write. There is a plot, and its tightly meshed around a string of improbable but for the moment barely credible coincidences which propel young Bertie from one disaster to the next until the very end, when all turns out for the best. At least for the nonce. Berties in love again, although for a while he doesnt know it. A college friend of his, Woody, is also in love. Neither is allowed near the objects of their affection Bertie because hed acted the usual ass when on vacation with his friend-is-she-girlfriend?, Woody because his love objects guardian has an eye on a more suitable (read richer) swain and barely tolerates Woodys presence at his castle-estate because he needs him to win an upcoming intra-village cricket match. Jeeves what a surprisecomes up with an answer to get Bertie on the estate. The next thing you know, Jeeves, masquerading as a reclusive lord, is an invited guest and Bertie is masquerading as his valet. At his hosts equivalent of a state dinner, Bertie is forced to fill in as waiter when one of the regulars doesnt show: there in front of him, waiting for him to spill something on her or some equally embarrassing faux pas, is the Dame Judith, a friend of his most fiendish aunt. In the past, when she has deemed to notice him, she has treated Bertie as though on a par with one of those plagues brought down on that naughty old Egyptian pharaoh in one of the Old Testament books. What follows is vintage Wodehousean prose, even though Wodehouse didn't write it: Dame Judith had rows of black beads over her evening dress and an unblinking gaze, like a rattlesnake thats just spotted its lunch. In appearance, her old classmate, Lady H, ran more to the blowsy end of things, but her voice was a pure icicle of disappointment. Between them they were about as welcoming as Goneril and Regan on being told that old Pop Lear had just booked in for a month with full retinue. And on and on the coining of those perfectly senseless phrases: the lead-filled sock of fate or of a rather large-framed butler: No one would have wished or daredto call him corpulent: there was no suggestion of spare flesh beneath that mighty waistcoat; but it would have been unwise to attempt a circumnavigation [of it] without leaving some sort of forwarding address. And when Bertie tries to tell; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: City of Secrets: A Novel - Kindle edition; Author: Visit Amazon's Stewart O'Nan Page; Review: The only other novel by ONan that I have read is Last Night at the Lobster (2007). It was superb. This book is almost as good, which is saying a lot. But where Lobster was an eloquent book about a not very great event the final shift at a closing Red Lobster restaurantthis book is about grand events, the messy bloody determined fight of Jewish immigrants to Israel in 1945 to wrest their land from British hands. It starts in sadness the protagonist Brands memories of surviving the Holocaust when his wife, family and friends didnt, and the deep-seated shame he feels for not acting then. In the camps, ONan writes, he had learned to stand and watch. It had saved his life and made him useless. Now he is in Jerusalem and what will happen in the course of this short novel will leave him with the memory of another tragedy, when a violent act by the underground resistance (of which he is a member) leaves dozens of people dead and wounded. At the end, Brand is still alive to walk away but others dont, and its not clear whether he has learned anything from what has happened or not. There is a love story of sorts, Brand and Eva, a revolutionary with her own past to mourn: she whores both for money and garner information. ONan writes like an angel, a low-keyed, almost laconic but deeply evocative prose that nails the truth, the truth of inner emotions, every time. There is a resolution of sorts, but at the end, Brand is still confronted with the same question as at the beginning: how did you live when you let the people you loved die? Its still not clear that hes anywhere close to finding the answer.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hard Cold Winter: A Van Shaw Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Glen Erik Hamilton Page; Review: This is the second action thriller featuring ex-Ranger Van Shaw. The first was Past Crimes (2015). Out of the Army and now unemployed, Shaw is a veteran of multiple tours in Afghanistan: he still suffers nightmares from it. His pre-war past was a disaster zone. His grandfather was a professional crook and until Van turned eighteen, Van was his accomplice. His grandfathers dead now. (For his grandfathers death, see Past Crimes.). Vans out of the service now, looking for work back home in Seattle, and he has no interest in falling back into the criminal life but he still has all the skills he picked up in his formative years. Van is roped in by one of his grandfathers cronies to search for the mans missing granddaughter. Van has a past with her years ago, before he joined the service, she went to prison rather than rat on Van and his grandfather after a half-botched breaking and entering job. Thus starts a deadly adventure with the bodies piling up all along the way. Van has his own allies in the search. One of his squaddies from Afghanistan has shown up on his doorstep: he needs Vans support in dealing with his own PTSD, and theres Vans girlfriend, who however much she may love Van, isn't certain she can deal with his continuing addiction to danger. The villains are believablebig and tough, tooand a very wealthy Seattleite steps in to quash any further investigation of his own sons murder after all, we wouldnt want to find pleasant truths that might negatively affect his companys stock value. The action is fast and furious, the writing is crisp, and Van Shaw is an appealing and believable hero. If Hamiltons subsequent novels about Shaw are as good as this one, I will be very happy.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Jasper Fforde Page; Review: FFORDE, Jasper. The Eyre Affair. Penguin. 2001. 374p. $16 (pb) FFORDE, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book. Penguin. 2002. 399p. $14 (pb) The Eyre Affair (2001) and Lost in a Good Book (2002) are the first two installments of the phenomenally popular alt-history sci fi-fantasy-tec series starring literary detective Thursday Next, an Operative in SO 27,the Literary Detection Division of the Special Operations Network based out of London. (There are other SO Divisions. SO-24 polices Art Crimes, SO-30 Neighborly Disputes, and the ChronoGuard is SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. SO-1 may its not at all clear what it does- police SpecOps itself.) If you haven't figured it put yet, the series is one long spoof, wreaking havoc on the published literary greats of Merry Old England, starting with (in volume 1) Brontes classic Jane Eyre. And what fun it is! Because you see, as originally written, Jane and Rochester never get back together although we know they do. But then, in Thursdays world, the Crimean War is still going on, one hundred and thirty some years after it started, Wales is a separate republic communist, as well, Neanderthals have been re-cloned and have their own liberties movement, and almost as powerful as the elected British government is the almighty Goliath Corporation, whose motto is profit, more profit, and oh, what was it they said? Oh yes! More profit yetand whose representative is named Jack Schitt. (Subtle its not, but its very, very funny.) Thursday has a genius uncle, Mycroft (echoes of Sherlock Holmes) who invents things, like, for instance, a method for sending pizzas by fax and a 2B pencil with a built-in spell checker, and a limo that can turn black or white depending on whether you're going to a funeral or a wedding. But most relevant to this book, he has invented a portal that gives human access to enter or leave books, where soon in this complicated story, Mycrofts wife of many years is abducted into Longfellow pastoral. In The Eyre Affair, Thursday fights as fiendish super-villain named Acheron Hades, who is almost but not to Thursday uncatchable. By the end of the book, the bad guys have all been done away with or contained, although they come back in later books to haunt Thursday again. And theres a love story: Thursday and her old, longtime alienated swain Landen Parke-Laine, who lost a leg in the Crimean War, and when Thursday finally realizes hes the man for her is approaching the altar to marry someone else. Lost in a Good Book is the immediate sequel to The Eyre Affair. Reviewers generally liked it even more than Eyre, but I didnt. That doesnt mean its not good because it is. Both of these books are utterly diverting reads. But its not as new, and in books as different as these, new counts. In the second book, Thursday learns how to jump without use of uncle Mycrofts Prose Portal (which he has destroyed in book 1 in order to keep it out of the hands of the Goliath Corporation). Jack Schitt is; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lost in a Good Book (A Thursday Next Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Jasper Fforde Page; Review: FFORDE, Jasper. The Eyre Affair. Penguin. 2001. 374p. $16 (pb) FFORDE, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book. Penguin. 2002. 399p. $14 (pb) The Eyre Affair (2001) and Lost in a Good Book (2002) are the first two installments of the phenomenally popular alt-history sci fi-fantasy-tec series starring literary detective Thursday Next, an Operative in SO 27,the Literary Detection Division of the Special Operations Network based out of London. (There are other SO Divisions. SO-24 polices Art Crimes, SO-30 Neighborly Disputes, and the ChronoGuard is SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. SO-1 may its not at all clear what it does- police SpecOps itself.) If you haven't figured it put yet, the series is one long spoof, wreaking havoc on the published literary greats of Merry Old England, starting with (in volume 1) Brontes classic Jane Eyre. And what fun it is! Because you see, as originally written, Jane and Rochester never get back together although we know they do. But then, in Thursdays world, the Crimean War is still going on, one hundred and thirty some years after it started, Wales is a separate republic communist, as well, Neanderthals have been re-cloned and have their own liberties movement, and almost as powerful as the elected British government is the almighty Goliath Corporation, whose motto is profit, more profit, and oh, what was it they said? Oh yes! More profit yetand whose representative is named Jack Schitt. (Subtle its not, but its very, very funny.) Thursday has a genius uncle, Mycroft (echoes of Sherlock Holmes) who invents things, like, for instance, a method for sending pizzas by fax and a 2B pencil with a built-in spell checker, and a limo that can turn black or white depending on whether you're going to a funeral or a wedding. But most relevant to this book, he has invented a portal that gives human access to enter or leave books, where soon in this complicated story, Mycrofts wife of many years is abducted into Longfellow pastoral. In The Eyre Affair, Thursday fights as fiendish super-villain named Acheron Hades, who is almost but not to Thursday uncatchable. By the end of the book, the bad guys have all been done away with or contained, although they come back in later books to haunt Thursday again. And theres a love story: Thursday and her old, longtime alienated swain Landen Parke-Laine, who lost a leg in the Crimean War, and when Thursday finally realizes hes the man for her is approaching the altar to marry someone else. Lost in a Good Book is the immediate sequel to The Eyre Affair. Reviewers generally liked it even more than Eyre, but I didnt. That doesnt mean its not good because it is. Both of these books are utterly diverting reads. But its not as new, and in books as different as these, new counts. In the second book, Thursday learns how to jump without use of uncle Mycrofts Prose Portal (which he has destroyed in book 1 in order to keep it out of the hands of the Goliath Corporation). Jack Schitt is; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hundred-Year Walk; Author: Dawn Mackeen; Review: MacKEEN, Dawn Anahid. The Hundred Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 352p, 21 bxw photos, map, index. As German troops prepared to invade Poland in 1939, Hitler instructed them to kill [the Poles] without pity or mercy. He added this afterthought: Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians? He was right. In 1914, Ottoman Turkey included 2 million Armenians in its population of 20-some million. Four years later, 1.2 million of them were dead, deliberately massacred by the Turks. A century later, the Turkish government still refuses to admit its crime, claiming instead simply to have quelled dissidence. In 2007, the Turkish prime minister issued a circular that called on government agencies to refer to the Events of 1915 rather than the so-called Armenian genocide. This is the background to this wrenching story: the systematic abuse and murder of a whole people and one man, Stepan Miskjian, and his arduous journey away from death. Its told by the mans granddaughter, Dawn Armenian mother, American father of Scotch-English descent. Dawn never knew her grandfather, who died in his late eighties when she was a baby. But her mother Anahid talked about her father and his home town, Adabazar, constantly. Though she had never lived there herself, she saw herself more as a native of Adabazar than of Los Angeles where she had lived all of Dawns thirty-some-year life. A telling figure: in 1914, half of Adabazars 30,000 inhabitants were Armenian; today only a handful are.) A prolonged return to her parents house and no journalism project under way, the discovery of missing journals kept in Armenian by her long-gone grandfather, conversations with the increasingly older Armenian ladies who were acquainted with her motherDawn had a new project: to tell her grandfathers story. Along the way, she decided she had to walk in his footsteps, along his long and arduous journey of escape from imprisonment and near death at the hands of Turkish troops. The result is two stories that though related are still separate told in alternating chapters: Stepans odyssey from before the First World War I until he arrived with his family in the United States in 1921, Dawns journey to Turkey and Syria in 2007 to trace his path, culminating in a joyous reunion with the descendants of an Arab desert sheik who befriended Stepan when his rope had almost run out and saved his life. The at first odd-seeming construction works: Stepans story is so harrowing that its good to read a bit of it and then take a break and its easy to follow Dawns path when she describes visits to places already covered in Stepans narrative in the preceding chapter. The prose is occasionally clunky but this is a moving - -wrenching- story and one that deserves telling. Stepan comes across as a hero almost in spite of himself, an ordinary man who was quick enough and resolute enough never to give up and who, as a result, won through to a satisfying later life in a more hospitable land. Early in the; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: City of Blades (The Divine Cities); Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Jackson Bennett Page; Review: I wish there were less backtracking in this novel. Some of it is understandable. This is the second novel in the series, following on City of Stairs, which won wide acclaim, including reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post. I haven't read that novel but its apparent, from the many references to it in this installment, that the plot was complicated, and so is this one. Too complicated, in my opinion. Its well written in parts, overblown and unnecessarily drawn out in others. Some times its just the nature of the genre alt world fantasy almost-steampunk. It calls for a little hype. But other times, I think the book just needed a good editing. Most of it takes place in and around the city of Voortyashtan, formerly the center of worship for Voortya, the four-armed ever-silent goddess of war, whose supernatural sentinels served as an army of death for her. The gods were killed off in the previous novel I never learned the details of it but when they died, so did magic, which disappeared in the moment in a phenomenon referred to as the Blink. But now something strange is happening in Voortyashtan. A government agent has disappeared without notice she had been sent to the city to investigate the possibility of magical events recurring. The prime minister ropes in General Turyin Mulagesh, a military hero who left the service without explanation a while before, The reason, we learn in flashbacks many pages into the book, is her distress over the horrible things she had had to do in the great war against the gods: killing civilians, burning villages, all in the name of victory and the peace that was supposed to follow. Turyin is an attractive character: she lost one hand and forearm in battle and wears a prosthetic that limits what she can do --its an attractive trait in a story like this because it makes her more human, for all her energy and forcefulness, shes not superwoman. A few of the other characters around her are fleshed out but most are not. Its not that kind of a novel: most of the people met in its pages are placeholders, signs and signals of attitudes and actions. Turyin is a person but even she is over-determined is probably the word. A good deal of space is spent laying out her past traumas: there are flashbacks, visions. Subtle, its not. The action parts are good. Its just all so long. And muddled. The supernatural parts just don't mesh smoothly with the natural parts. Bennett is a talented storyteller and some of his descriptions are quite good this, for instance, describing a pile of human corpses that have been horribly butchered and strung up for viewers to see: It is, despite the viscera and stink, a curiously neat presentation, carefully and thoughtfully done, as if these corpses were vegetables to be washed and peeled for dinner. Their faces, blue and distorted, have the dull, stupid look of the dead, as if theyd just been asked a difficult question. In; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Arcadia; Author: Howard Hughes; Review: In this eminently readable fantasy, four characters inhabit three narratives. In 1960 Oxford, lecturer Henry Lytten is creating his own alt world from the ground up, Anterword he calls it, hoping to correct the parochialisms he sees in the fantasies of Lewis and Tolkien. (Lytten has a wrought-iron pergola stored away in his basement, left to him by Tolkien. Oxford is a small world in 1960.) The professor has a fifteen-year-old neighbor, Rosie Wilson, who tends his grumpy, over-fed cat Professor Jenkins, who is the same age as she is. The cat disappears one day and she hunts for him. In the professors basement, she finds the pergola and sees light on the other side of it. She steps under an arch, sees a different world on the other side, and falls through into an Arcadian world. A young boy stares back at her: hes terrified by her sudden appearance. Later in the novel, theyll meet again in that pastoral paradise: by then, the boy will be several years older but Rosie will still be the same age. Wonders piled on wonders! Parallel to this story, in the distant future a psychomathematician, Angela Meerson, is investigating the potential of time travel: but is it time travel or the entry into parallel worlds? To save her discoveries from exploitation, she flees through time: she ends up in Germany, in 1936. And soon after, in Paris, where she meets a much younger professor Lytten, who is one of Englands gentleman spies in the age when spying lost all innocence. Then theres Jay, full name Jaramal son of Antus and Antusa, who dares to question the monk-like Story Teller who has journeyed to his village to settle disputes and assess the tax on the villages goods. Jay lives somewhere, somewhen, and hes the boy who sees Rosie. He reports seeing Rosie to the Story Teller she seems an angel to himand helter skelter, Jay is packed off with the Storyteller to embark on a many-year apprenticeship, studying to become a Story Teller himself. The doubles build up Lytten here, Lytten there, Angela too, Jay and Rosie crossing paths againas these different worlds interlace. The thread binding these narratives and these characters together is presaged: in the narrative: Lyttens specialty is the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney --Queen Elizabeth Is Sidney, the Sidney who died in 1586 fighting the Spanish-- and especially Sidneys long prose poem, Arcadia, in Lyttens mind the greatest romance in the English language. Rosie is much like Rosalind, from Shakespeares great comedy of crossed paths and mixed identities, As You Like It. Lytten thinks Rosalind the greatest, most perfect heroine in Shakespeare and so is Rosie here. (Once when Henry was running Angela as a spy in pre-WWII France, he gave an impassioned oration on the logicality of Shakespeares plots, arguing that outrageous coincidence was more natural than carefully, formed, reasoned action.) and other characters in this long, tangled, careening narrative also pop up in unexpected guises. This book is sheer delight. How did Pears manage to pack so much wisdom and; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Wreck and Order: A Novel; Author: Hannah Tennant-Moore; Review: I found it hard to keep reading this novel, not because its bad but because its upsetting. Elsie, the narrator, is a woman who on the face of it has everything to offer intelligence, looks, even some startup money courtesy of an inheritance her father got and shared with her-- but she consistently devalues herself. Even when good things happen to her a considerate boyfriend for a change she throws it away. She doesnt think shes worth it. Her fallback position is rough, dirty sex with someone who repeatedly abuses and ignores her. All this is told in a rapid-fire, fall-over-itself prose that captures both her emotional disarray and her innate intelligence. (I started to write perceptiveness but Im not sure Elsies perceptive at all sure, she observes some of the things around her but shes clueless as to her own drives or the worth of the people she vents her neediness on). She travels to Paris after high school, to Sri Lanka after a particularly repugnant boyfriend finally freaks her out, to New York in hopes that a new venue and new career (one she never gets around to doing anything about) will change her. But its easier for her to change her outside than it is her inside. The book is exceptionally well written: the style of writing matches the protagonists inner anguish. But thats also a problem: after so many false starts and so much angst, and so much dirty sex, I found it hard to stay interested in what happened to her. The dust jacket says that this is a story about a woman seeking to change, who must first come face to face with herself. Thats the problem. Im not certain that Elsie ever will. Ive read accounts of womens struggles that were as wrenching as this or even more so, but somehow I could connect to them and I cant connect to this one.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Shaker: A Thriller; Author: Scott Frank; Review: \Shaker is an odd (very odd) variant on the hit man theme. Because thats what Roy Cooper is, a hit man Years ago, he went to prison juvie version-- after his mother killed his father and told the police Roy did it, not her. He didn't object because if his mother was arrested, he feared his baby brother would be put in foster care and he cared more for his brother than he did for himself. He came out of juvie as killer and now he works for Harvey and Rita, who have him in a lock because if he crosses him, they say theyll kill his baby (now young adult) brother. Not that Roy minds. Thats what he is now, a contract killer. Hes sent to LA to do in a snitch. The killing goes fine but afterwards, Roy wanders into a combat zone near the dead mans house. A jogger runs into a wolf pack of gangers. Theyre tripping on their own, but when he challenges them, things turn bad. Then Roy turns up. Hes just looking for his rental car. All he wants is to get out of LA and get back on a plane to New Yorkbut he winds up being part of the problem when he fronts the gangers. He even whaps one of them across the head, a major diss. The jogger winds up dead anyway but later it turns out that hes the leading challenger for the mayoralty of LA. The banger head shoots Roy but security police intervene to save him from death. So hes in the hospital and, because an onlooker filmed it all from his window (no, he didn't call 911. Yes, he got paid half a million for the film), hes a media hero, which is just what he doesnt need. Because hit men are supposed to be anonymous, not public figures. Thats just the start. What happens from then on is double tracked. First, how did Roy arrive where he is in his life. Second, tracking the efforts of three separate parties the banger head and a stone killer from Roys past (he is really scary!) are trying to track down Roy and off him for good and a woman cop is hunting for him because she knows he killed the snitch way back at the beginning of this tangled tale. All this happens while LA suffers a recurring series of major quakes, sevens and eights, which interrupt the chase at select points and reshuffle the plot cards. Way back when the stone killer Albert was friends with Roy, though now hes hunting for him in order to kill him, he told Roy: Love and hatred are both weaknesses. The most powerful thing a person can feel is indifference. You cant hurt a man who feels nothing. But Roy does feel something, and when you discover what it is, youll be surprised.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Behave; Author: Visit Amazon's Andromeda Romano-Lax Page; Review: This is Romano-Laxs third novel and the third that Ive reviewed, all positively. All have dealt with history. Her debut novel, The Spanish Bow, was pretty much a roman a clef about the life of the great Catalan cellist Casals. The second, The Detour, was a bitter-sweet near-romance about a reluctant German sent to Rome in 1938 to steal a famous Roman marble statue, the Discuss Thrower, and get it across the border into Gestapo custody. This novel, spanning the 1920s and half of the thirties, tells Rosalie Raynors life. She was one of Vassars most promising graduates in 1919. She moved on to Johns Hopkins where she became assistant to the pioneering apostle of behaviorist psychology, John B. Watson. Watson was married but that had never stopped him. Within a year, he had seduced Rosalie into a torrid affair. When it became public, Rosalie had to leave Johns Hopkins (and end her education) and Watson was sued by his then-wife for divorce and dismissed by Johns Hopkins for immoral conduct. That was his last full-time academic job. Watsons wife got his divorce, Rosalie wouldnt go away, and soon she was Mrs. John B. Watson. Watson found a new lodging place in advertising: his concern for analyzing human behavior paid off well there. Rosalie was soon pregnant, and then pregnant again. John had more affairs. Rosalie joined him, but more as a way to keep him interested in her than from her own interest. She helped him on his influential text, n Psychological Care of Infants and Children (1928) on how to raise children. The book drew on Watsons extremely controversial Little Albert experiment of 1920, which, Watson claimed, proved that fear responses were learned, not inherited. But Watson had used only one child, eleven months old, and almost certainly not normal (he died of hydrocephaly at six, and even at the time of the experiment, was exceptionally unresponsive to stimuli). More than that, Watson exaggerated claims: the size of his data base, not one child by hundreds, and the strength of Alberts conditioning: in reality, Albert backslid repeatedly and the fear response had to be reestablished by methods that today seem just short of brutal. In print at least, Watson never expressed doubts about his past work but this subtle and well written fictional account portrays him as a driven, insensitive man just on the edge of being a narcissist. The greatest strength of this book, though, is its sensitive portrait of an able but time-bound woman who sacrificed her own dreams and honesty to keep faith with a man who really wasn't worth it. There never has been a time when women had equal status in western society but the twenties and thirties were particularly difficult times for a bright and able woman to negotiate. Rosalie tried but she left the world at age thirty-five of dysenteryregretting that she had swallowed Johns doctrines on childrearing whole=-cloth and leaving two children behind who had very unhappy lives. (Both tried suicide but only one succeeded.) This is a very good book, with; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Bonnie Jo Campbell Page; Review: This is Campbells fifth book but the first Ive read. I wish I liked it more but I dont. The problems are two. First, behind surface differences, most of these stories are the same one. Theyre mostly the narrations monologues either linear or ramblingof women who have been abused and taken advantage of (rape is one of the more common words) but either continue to let themselves be used or, too late to change their lives, they rise up in rebellion against their offenders. (For the latter, read A Multitude of Sins, which is one of the best stories in the collection.) Secondly, they are overwritten. Campbell is a talented word worker but she goes for effects too often: it goes against the natural voice of the hardscrabble women shes trying to portray. A few of the stories in this book are near-throwaways but most are serious fiction. I just don't think it works and so much of it is alike that it numbs the readers mind, even the mind of someone like me who is generally sympathetic to Ms. Campbells stance. Are there any good stories? Yes. For instance, the title story which is long, disconnected but continuous rant by a dying woman against the life she was dealt, or rather, against her daughters smug refusal to see how constrained her mother was in her choices., how some things just happen to us. But even this piece is marred by excess in prose. Its too expressive for the woman its meant to portray. On the low end is To You, as a Woman, to which the phrase literary conceit well applies. I was equally underwhelmed by the two-page My Bliss.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It (John Dies at the End); Author: Visit Amazon's David Wong Page; Review: In David Wongs first novel, John Dies at the End (2012), stoned out slackers Dave and John faced off against totally awesome other-dimensional alien-invaders. The action was fast, the thrills many, the book contained more off color references than any one piece of fiction should probably hold, but it was funny, truly funny in a deranged kind of way. That book spawned an indie movie, same title, Paul Giamatti as one of the actors, and just as deranged, only shorter. Humorous David Wong is an on-line blogger named Jason Pargin: David Wong is his nom de plume. So heres a sequel of sorts --same characters Dave, John, Daves one-handed girlfriend Amy and dog Mollysame narrative style, stoned and seriously inexactsame jokes but its Daves fixation on **** that saves the day in the endand the same blend of high action ubernatural thriller and low comedy. Again, its the fate of the world thats at stake and nothing, literally nothing, is resolved until the very very (very) end. Just different monsters. No meat monster or interstellar alien overlord this time. Just spiders. Lots of them. Really a lot. In fact, splders everywhere, eating out peoples brains from the inside, then operating them as violent, flesh-eating zombies. Because John and Dave drank the magic Soy Sauce --some super-probably-not-earthly super-drug, like cannabis on stiltsin the first book, they see the spiders but most people cant: everythings going along fine and then your neighbor or spouse, whos been fine until then but has just been attacked and her brain eaten by the spiders, tries to bite your head off too. Its hard to keep your faith in human kindness when something like that happens. The Soy Sauce also freezes time for Dave and John, though not permanently, just until they decide what to do when time starts up again. (Its frozen for everyone else but not for them.) The biggest pleasure in this book is the narrative voice. This novel is the book equivalent of the hilarious 2004 movie, Shaun of the Dead, with its slacker hero wandering through life not noticing for a long time that his neighbors have all turned into zombies. But when he does notice, he kicks. Ditto here. The principal voices are those of Dave and John. Both are master narrators, funny in both their preoccupations and their unconquerable vagueness. And because they're so clueless, Wong doesnt have to try to explain the weird sh*t that happens on these pages. He just lets it roll out. The funny lines just keep coming: if you're not wowed by the first, author Wong just hits you with a second. Heres John, trying to explain to a skeptical detective why bad things keep happening in their home town (whose name, by the way, is Undisclosed): Theyve been around for a while. Stories about this town go back as far as the history books go. Maybe forever. Whats so special about this town? Dont know. Maybe theres some kind of electromagnetic conditions that make it ideal for whatever it is they do. Maybe they just; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Power of the Dog; Author: Visit Amazon's Don Winslow Page; Review: This monster of a crime novel is the predecessor to Winslows 2015 The Cartel, detailing the sordid mess that led up to that blockbuster book. It features the same protagonists, DEA agent Art Keller, who is locked into a life and death struggle with his former friend, now adversary, Mexican drug lord Adan Barrera. Most of the Mexican politicians are in the pockets of the drug cartel, and so are the police. The cartel is subsidized by the CIA in return for its help putting out brushfires in Central America in the contest between eradicating drugs and stamping out Communists, the Communists win hands down. Who dies in the conflict? Pretty much everyone, and on all sides. Once you start this novel, its hard to put down. The stakes are high and so much happens so rapidly. Its a continuous series of cliffhanger moments. It also rings true: Winslow, a former private investigator and a veteran writer on crimes and criminals, has done his homework. This book is just as good as The Cartel, which is saying a lot.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mark Bittman's Kitchen Matrix: More Than 700 Simple Recipes and Techniques to Mix and Match for Endless Possibilities; Author: Visit Amazon's Mark Bittman Page; Review: BITTMAN, Mark. Kitchen Matrix. Pam Krauss Books. 2015. 304p, illus., index. $35. MIGLORE, Kristen. Food52: Genius Recipes: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook . Ten Speed Press. 2015. 272p, illus., index. $35. Here are two cookbooks by food columnists, Bittman for the NY Times and Miglore, for Food52.com. Neither is an essential book for ones cookbook collection but both are helpful fruitfulin showing variants on standard recipes (Bittman) or ways to improve favorites (Miglore). Bittmans Kitchen Matrix is intriguing in its organization. He provides base recipes and shows how each can be varied, even moved from one national cuisine to another. You have a central recipe, usually quite simple. Around it or following it, is a number (4, 6, 8, even 12) of greatly different tasting but similarly prepared variants. Bittman is a minimalist chef. (His 2014 book, an Amazon Best Book of the year, is entitled How to Cook Everything Fast. My wife bought that book at the same time that I bought this one.) Michael Ruhlman, no slouch at these matters, says that Miglores cookbook is his new favorite. While it has many recipes that are new to me, the books outstanding virtue is to help reconceptualize how to make dishes one already makes: only make them better now. Both books are elegantly presented and both fill a niche on my cookbook shelf that needs filling. When I cook, I like to set out the contents of refrigerator and larder and then browse through cookbooks to see how I can vary my recipe. Here, both of these books are a help.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Merciless Reason (The Wildenstern Saga); Author: Oisn McGann; Review: Oisin McGann is a busy man, with three Young Adult sci-fi-ish novels one dystopic (Strangled Silence) and two steampunk (The Wisdom of Dead Men and this book, books 2 and 3 of the Wildenstern saga)published in the space of one year. This is the third book tracing the tangled history of the Wildenstern family, robber barons and rack renters in an impoverished Ireland. Its the 1860s one of the topics debated is how the family can make money out of the American Civil War and one of the brothers, the loathsome (overweight too, hes physically as well as morally repugnant) Gideon, still (probably) runs slaves on their transatlantic freighters. His cousin Gerard, who in book 2 arranged the death of the family patriarch, now rules the family. Everyone is afraid of him. His research into the intelligent particles that infect the Wildensterns blood and convey on them superhuman healing powers has given him the power to control their will. When one of his cousins attempts to assassinate him, he makes the cousin walk himself over the edge of the roof to fall to his death stories below. These particles also animate the enigmals, strange half-alive machines that come in all sizes from small to behemoth and are shaped to all sorts of purposes from animated vacuum cleaners to bulldozing steam shovels. Gerard is researching how to control them and already his researches have made him a dangerous enemy. The family has its own Rules of Ascension, which were established in the first place to keep its heads from becoming complacent or weak: any male Wildenstern can kill any other male Wildenstern if its to advance his position and if he succeeds, no one can take vengeance on him killing for personal reasons isn't permitted. In the previous book (The Wisdom of Dead Men, 2015), Gerard used it to trick and kill the reigning patriarch but almost lost his own life in hand to combat with the patriarchs brother Nathaniel when he fell over a water fall strangely reminiscent of the Reichenbach Falls of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. At the end of that volume, Gerard seemed gone and Nate had abandoned the family estate to wander across the world, going who knows where in quest of who knows what. In this volume, Nates back. So is Gerard, though, and its up to Nate, added by the few good members of his family to deal with him. There are a lot of fun touches, including a whale hunt straight out of Moby Dick, a highwayman who takes from the rich and gives to the poor, Irish revolutionaries, and with a playful nod to Mary Shelley, a Wildenstern ancestor who has been raised up after five hundred years dead into precarious life again. This third volume is more cluttered than the previous one the references to happenings in the first two books don't weave in as smoothly as in volume two and the description of weird happenings on earth way, way back, is somewhat hard to believe-- but it is, as was the second; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: At the Existentialist Caf: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails; Author: Visit Amazon's Sarah Bakewell Page; Review: Every once in a while, you come across a book that is simply so good you simply want to say, This is a great book. Read it. I felt that way about Bakewells How to Live: or, a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answers, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography in 2010. Now shes done it again but if anything, with an even more refractory subject: the confluence and interactions of phenomenologist and existentialist philosophers in the fractured and tormented Europe of the mid-twentieth century. The subjects of this book really ARE Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, and Husserl, Heidegger, on through Emmanuel Levinas. Were talking thinkers not know for ease of reading but Bakewell, crossing back and forth between the worlds of the printed page and the lives of the people who wrote them has written a thoroughly engaging study that is both philosophy and biography. For it is Bakewells position that for these thinkers, writing in those fraught times, their lives fertilized and helped form their thinking. Bakewell has the rare gift of making ideas, even the most complicated ones, not only comprehensible but enjoyable to read about. Bakewell enriches her discussion of these writers with personal history: her first readings of Heideggger and Husserl, of Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, and her evolving appreciation and assessment of their thought. In the end, she finds the French existentialists the more appealing, philosophically as well as personally. (How anyone could find Heidegger personally appealing is difficult to understand, though Arendt somehow managed it.) Whereas Heidegger circled around his home territory, Sartre moved ever forwards, always working out (often bizarre) responses to things, or find new ways of reconciling old ideas to new. Heidegger intoned that one must think, she concludes, but Sartre actually thought. [Sartre] was always thinking against himself, as he once said, and he followed Husserls phenomenological command by always exploring whatever topic seemed most difficult at each moment. / All this was true in his life as well as in his writing. He labored tirelessly for his chosen causes, risking his own safety. He took his engagements seriously --and for every unwise and damaging commitment, there was a worthwhile one, such as his campaign against the governments abuses in Algeria. He was never able successfully to toe a party line on anything, no matter how hard he tried He was anarchic because he would not stop using his brain. Moreover, to quote Merleau-Ponty he was good or at least he wanted to do good. He was driven to it. This is philosophy (or is it biography?) at its most enjoyable. The book bristles with passages you will want o underline. Even the footnotes are lively.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Food52 Genius Recipes: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook; Author: Visit Amazon's Kristen Miglore Page; Review: BITTMAN, Mark. Kitchen Matrix. Pam Krauss Books. 2015. 304p, illus., index. $35. MIGLORE, Kristen. Food52: Genius Recipes: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook . Ten Speed Press. 2015. 272p, illus., index. $35. Here are two cookbooks by food columnists, Bittman for the NY Times and Miglore, for Food52.com. Neither is an essential book for ones cookbook collection but both are helpful fruitfulin showing variants on standard recipes (Bittman) or ways to improve favorites (Miglore). Bittmans Kitchen Matrix is intriguing in its organization. He provides base recipes and shows how each can be varied, even moved from one national cuisine to another. You have a central recipe, usually quite simple. Around it or following it, is a number (4, 6, 8, even 12) of greatly different tasting but similarly prepared variants. Bittman is a minimalist chef. (His 2014 book, an Amazon Best Book of the year, is entitled How to Cook Everything Fast. My wife bought that book at the same time that I bought this one.) Michael Ruhlman, no slouch at these matters, says that Miglores cookbook is his new favorite. While it has many recipes that are new to me, the books outstanding virtue is to help reconceptualize how to make dishes one already makes: only make them better now. Both books are elegantly presented and both fill a niche on my cookbook shelf that needs filling. When I cook, I like to set out the contents of refrigerator and larder and then browse through cookbooks to see how I can vary my recipe. Here, both of these books are a help.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: I'm Glad About You; Author: Visit Amazon's Theresa Rebeck Page; Review: What I appreciated most in this book is the intelligence. Ms. Rebeck, who has a distinguished pedigree as playwright among others, she wrote the wonderful play, Seminar (2012)has taken what could have been a soap opera and turned it into a novel about real lives in real crises. Theres a lot of angst detailed in this book. Both of the main characters suffer from the choices they made. But it isn't weepy boo-hoo type pain. Rather, its the type of distress that comes from living out your earlier choices in life, which . ah, its sad!... didn't work out the way you had hoped they would. Alison and Kyle, they meet in high school, are still together six years later, all the way through college. Their love is fierce but they're both, especially Kyle, Catholic, which means that after six years of intense love making, they still haven't really, not quite, made love yet. Then they break up. Kyle is starting med school. Afterwards, he wants to move somewhere where people really need help. He even tries to learn Navajo, thinking he might move to a reservation. (Thats where the title comes from. Apparently, Im glad about you, is how Navajos say I love you, a less possessive way of saying it.) Until then, hell stay in his hometown, Cincinnati. Alison wants to act. Eventually that leads to her New York, where life at least, among the people she knows- are worlds apart from the family-oriented values she knew at home. Life is HARD there. Slowly she makes it, but there are surprises in store along the way. Kyle marries on the rebound, settles in Cincinnati. His patients hes a pediatricianhave parents with cell phones and expensive designer handbags. The kids are fine but all the parents really seem to care about is that their cosseted lives not be disrupted by their childrens inconvenient illnesses. His home life is even harder. His wife looks good but is a shrew. His kids don't cotton to him. He still dreams of Alison. And Alison? Well, how does a beautiful and talented woman get ahead in show business? A cameo on a mediocre television series leads to bigger roles, all emphasizing what a sex kitten she is. Sex is a commodity in her own life as well. I know, it sounds like chick lit at its worst, a modern day tale of the sad fate of star-crossed lovers. What redeems it is the two lovers intelligence, as I wrote at the beginning of this book. Both Alison and Kyle are smart. At least at heart, they're good too. Their cards just got shuffled wrong. I won't tell you what happens to them because that would spoil an enjoyable session of reading. One of the jacket blurbs, from Francine Prose, calls the novel smart, funny, deeply sympathetic and astringently observant. I didn't find much that was funny in it, but shes spot on about the rest.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Linda, As in the Linda Murder: A Backstrom Novel (Backstrom Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Leif GW Persson Page; Review: This is the second book by Swedish crime expert Persson featuring the misanthropic detective superintendent Evert Backstrom. The first was He Who Kills the Dragon (2015). The Backstrom series follows Perssons earlier trilogy investigating the unsolved assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. (The first of the three was Between Summers Longing and Winters Cold, 2010, and they are gripping.) But where the trilogy was straightforward drive-ahead police procedural, though enlivened by occasional comic passages, the Backstrom novels are an altogether different animal. The humor is much more in the forefront, though not so much as to crowd out the detective work that is narrated, and it is broad and ribald. Backstrom is a wonderful character. Hes thoroughly unlikeable: egotistical, greedy, deceitful, lazy as sin, lecherous and misanthropic (he looks down on all groups equally). But he possesses one redeeming virtue: he somehow manages to get results because at heart, hes a pretty good detective. Backstroms outlook is an advantage for storyteller Persson, though, because it allows him to comment on Swedish police antics through Backstroms jaundiced eyes and hungover brain, and the result is outrageous. There is almost no shibboleth of modern crime detecting that isn't shattered when Backstrom takes a look at it. An example is the narration of the first meeting of Backstroms police team with a woman psychologist appointed to work with them as its crisis counselor. The local police chief, who has to work with Backstrom on a nasty case (Linda Wallin, a young police trainee is found tied, raped, stabbed and murdered in her apartment), has called her in to help his men deal with the trauma of investigating. At their initial meeting, the psychologist, delivers this rambling monologue the elisions ( . . . ) are in the original--- offering up every clich thats ever been heard from a trauma counselor, and its funny: "Well, my name is Lilian Olsson . . . but everyone who knows me just calls me Lo, so I hope you will as well . . . Well, Im a trained psychologist and psychotherapist . . . and a lot of you are probably asking yourself what one of those does . . . I give lectures and run courses . . . I work as a consultant . . . and in my free time. .. voluntary work for a lot of different charities . . . the womens helpline . . . the mens helpline . . . the crime victims helpline . . . and Im writing a book as well . . .and most of the people sitting here . . . its okay to feel upset . . . a lot of us seem sensitive, confused, badly affected by crises whereas others take refuge in macho attitudes and denial, not saying anything and some people abuse alcohol and sex themselves and those around them a lot of us have eating disorders were all human we have to affirm we have to raise our consciousness we have to take the step free ourselves from; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Gratitude; Author: Visit Amazon's Oliver Sacks Page; Review: This is the last book from the prolific neurologist essayist Oliver sacks, who died two weeks before the last piece appeared in print. Theyre unlike any other essays Sacks published, except in the humanity that shines through them. He wrote them knowing that he was dying. In 2005, he had been diagnosed with cancer of the eye. The cancer was treated and seemed done with. In 2010, he published a book, The Minds Eye, in which, among other cases, he discusses his own. In 2013 he published the first essay in this book, Mercury, in which he ruminates on the pleasures of old age: he doesnt dismiss the frailties it brings with it but he moves beyond them in writing about what one still can do. Then eighteen months later he learned that his old cancer had metastasized to his liver. He wrote another essay, My Own Life, expressing his gratitude for the life he had been allowed to lead, and then went under the knife, seeking to extend his active life by several months. It worked. The last two essays in this book are the product. In My Periodic Table, he writes about his lifelong fascination with the periodic table, but the piece is also about his impending death. He wrote the final piece, Sabbath, over and over in the short time left to him. It is a non-religious Jews affirmation of the importance of Jewish ritual in his life. Its about how were shaped by the life we lead. Gone from this book is the careful analysis of complicated symptoms, the blending of advanced scientific knowledge with Sacks extraordinary respect for his patients human worth. These are Last Letters. There was no time, or need, any more for elaborate explanation. These are love letters to the human condition. As such, they are close in intent, though not form, to Carnegie-Mellon professor Randy Pauchs The Last Lecture (2008), co-authored when he too was dying. They differ from Pauchs work in two respects: concision (very short essays) and poetry (Sacks was a poet of scientific writing). Im grateful to Oliver Sacks for this last gift to his readers. Ill miss him.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Emperor of Any Place; Author: Tim Wynne-Jones; Review: Evans sixteen. His mothers been gone since who knows when. His formerly hippy, still rad father doesnt even know where she is. Evan and his father live alone, perfectly happy together. Then his father dies, a normal death heart attackbut too young, and Evan is alone. Evan finds a book in his fathers desk: the diary of a Japanese soldier stranded ion a Pacific island in WWII. Things get weird. A man calls and asks Evan to talk to his grandfather, persuade him to allow the book to be published or edited, its not at first clear what. But Evans never known his grandfather Griff, who, by his fathers account, was a stiff-necked ex-Marine who made his fathers life sheer torture until the day his father absconded to Canada to avoid the draft. His father even claimed Evans grandfather was a murderer although he didn't tell Evan why he said that. Then Evans grandfather shows up. Evan cant stand him. The rest of the book alternates Evans reading of the Japanese soldiers journal and scenes between Evan and Griff as Evan cautiously negotiates the landmine that is his contentious relation with his only surviving relative. Parts of this book work well, others not. The Japanese soldiers journal is the best part. Well, those and the affecting picture of Evans grief. YA book often skate over this kind of emotion but Wynne-Jones handles it with sensitivity and dignity. As to the journal, it has an authentic voice, and as you read it, it slowly sinks into you that Isamu, the young Japanese soldier, is only twenty-one, not much older than the readers toward whom the book is directed. There is a supernatural element in Isamus narration and it too is dealt with well. Wynne-Jones never resolves whether the creatures who appear on Isamus island are imagined or real. They just are and they play important roles in the story Isamu records. Not all of this generally affecting novel works that well: the tension between grandfather Griff and grandson Evan unrolls well enough but the ending doesnt play out as effectively. Its, partly, too abrupt, and partly, it doesnt feel authentic. But this is small potatoes commentary on a novel that tries new things but still manages to convey basic human emotions. Wynne-Jones has written numerous previous YA novels and won awards for some.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Travelers: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Chris Pavone Page; Review: On assignment in Argentina, a travel writer, Will Rhodes, is seduced by a ravishing blond and then, turn of the screw, blackmailed by the seducer into spying for the CIA. If he refuses, his already tenuous marriage will soon be an ex-one. From that point on, Will crisscrosses Europe either doing his blackmailers chores or trying to figure out whats going on here. No one is who they seem and in the end its a battle between agents of one spy ring and another ring of wannabees. The quest ends, not terribly believably, in not one but two combats on the cliffs of Iceland. This is Pavones third thriller. The second, 2014s The Accident, was a stunner, a real page-turner with a conclusion that was a surprise all the way until five pages from the end. The Travelers, alas, doesnt repeat that books success, at least not for this reader. Its a cookie cutter novel: flicking between one character and another, and whenever possible the chapters ending in a cliffhanger, an unforeseen threat which then hangs there unanswered until a few chapters down the road, when the author takes up the thread of that particular story line again. Add that the narrative feels padded most often with travel narrative, since it involves a travel magazine cum agencyand that the overarching story line is hard to accept as realistic and you have a book that seems too long for the story it has to tell and a thriller that doesnt thrill very much.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Other Side of Silence (A Bernie Gunther Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Philip Kerr Page; Review: Starting in 1987 and still going strong, Philip Kerrs Bernie Gunther novels are one of the crowning jewels of contemporary crime fiction. This is the eleventh: Kerr has promised a twelfth to follow in 2017 (Prussian Blue). They go as far back as 1934, when an honest cop like Bernie has already had to leave the force under pressure from the Nazis and try to earn a living as a private eye. During the Second World War, Heidrich forces Bernie to work for him and then Goebbels in Poland, and after the war, Bernie washes up in places like Havana and Buenos Aires and one of his employers is Meyer Lansky. Throughout, Bernie is a near-perfect anti-hero. His experiences have left him with no hope and less and less of a sense of humor. (Gallows humor, yes, that he still owns a share of.) Now hes in St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, not a PI anymore but concierge at a luxe hotel on the Riviera. Its 1956. Bernie plays bridge every week with the same bridge partners: he wants a dull, ordinary life, time to lick his wounds. But thats not what he gets. A nemesis from the past appears his name was Hebel then and twice he had blackmailed Bernie into doing things he didn't want to do. The second time was at Konigsberg, when the city faced the implacable Russian advance on in the last days of the war. Bernie blames Hebel for the death of his girlfriend/wife there. Then another man intrudes, a notable figure, the world famous author Somerset Maugham, with his entourage of gay followers. Hes being blackmailed. Oops, Hebels involved again! And Hebel suggested that Bernied be the perfect intermediary in the exchange of Maughams cold cash for Hebels incriminating photographs. That exchange leads to more complicated intrigues that eventually involve the British Secret Service. As always, the story is narrated by Bernie, whose mordant voice is a pleasure to read. (Its like Chandlers Philip Marlow, but battered by history.) The story is sufficiently cynical, the characters (especially those around Maugham) terribly louche, but, unlike in the best books in this series, this story just doesnt hold together well. The flashbacks to Berlin in 1938, Konigsberg in 1945seem staged. The central crime a blending together of felony and espionageseems not quite believable, or if believable, maybe explained in too convoluted a manner. Dont get me wrong! I enjoyed the book but I think its subpar Gunther.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Rain Dogs: A Detective Sean Duffy Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Adrian McKinty Page; Review: This is the seventeenth novel and the fifth Sean Duffy crime novel by talented North Irish novelist McKinty. All four of the previous books featuring police detective Duffy have received awards. The Glasgow Herald called him the best of the new generation of Irish crime novelists. On the basis of this exceptionally well plotted and written police procedural, hes certainly in the ballpark. Id rank this book with Stuart Nevilles Those We Left Behind, 2015), Malcolm MacKays brilliant Glasgow trilogy (The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, and The Sudden Arrival of Violence, 2013-14) or earlier, Ian Rankins Inspector Rebus novels (1987-present). Duffy is a cop. The novel is set in Carrickfergus, North Ireland, in 1987. Its the Time of the Troubles, when the last three suicides the police have investigated have been fellow coppers whove eaten their guns and every policeman checks beneath his car before he gets in it. (One is blown up in this novel.) The story is a tricky one, with at the heart of it a locked door mystery: a smart young journalist is found dead, her head cracked like an egg, fallen from the 100-foot-high top of an old castle. Its hard enough figuring out how she got into the castle since its inspected, then locked up every night, with a thick stone wall all around and a sharp-toothed portcullis barring the exit way, but even if she did find a way to hid herself inside when the gatekeeper made his final rounds, surely no one else could have gotten in there with her to kill her so suicide it must be. Of course it isn't and its Duffys job, using not Sherlockian brilliance but routine and dogged determination, to solve the problem. Along the way, one of Duffys superiors gets blown up and he almost does too, we get an illuminating picture of how power can corrupt, or at least impede, the efforts of an honest detective who persists in doing his job. But in Duffys hard world, if you're a cop, you take what you can get. Youre a realist. You don't expect justice always to win.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Snobs : A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Julian Fellowes Page; Review: Midway through this lovely novel of manners, the heroine, Edith Laverty, now Countess Broughton, is sitting in her bedroom, flicking through the invitations, letters, solicitations and thank you notes that have arrived in the days mail and allowing her vague discontent with her current state to percolate in her mind as she bit[es] into a piece of toast, mid-brown with its crusts carefully removed. There, in a nugget is much of what screen writer (Gosforth Park, Downton Abbey), actor (Monarch of the Glen) and novelist Julian Fellowes has to say about living among the established upper crust in England. Edith doesnt realize it at this point in the novel, but she is supported by a web of comfort and attention she could not otherwise have gotten, having no special talents or expertise of her own and coming from middle-class parents. This is the story of Ediths rise, then fall, then recovery to make everything almost right again. As such, it has much in common with the novels, full of social commentary delivered without umbrage, of someone like Trollope or Wharton. Without umbrage is an important qualification here: Fellowes doesnt judge his players though some of his narrators comments are pretty sharp. He likes them, even the unlikeable ones. He realizes that happiness, in whatever degree it is attained, is not a function of wealth or status: people of relatively modest income can be happy and very rich, and established, ones not. This is, in not, both an intelligent (perceptive) novel and a sunny one. And its certainly enjoyable to read. Both the story line and the observations lines and paragraphsthat are dropped along the way by the narrator, an actor friend of Ediths well placed enough in society to straddle the two very different social worlds of acting and country aristocracy, are candy for the eyes and mind. Its a book you compulsively underline as you read, if you're in for that kind of thing. And oh, the zingers! From Good skin is frequently dwelt on when talking of the plainer members of the Royal Family on page 4 to The English, of all classes as it happens, are addicted to exclusivity. Leave three Englishmen in a room they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them on pg. 19 and rudeness is very easily learned two pages later. Why is it so hard to break into the upper crust in England? Fellowes comments on the curious need on the part of the upper-classes to demonstrate that they all know each other and do the same things with the same people. How do you break through to real familiarity with a people who use names like Googie, Tigger, Sausage and Snook? Who use a special language (fussy and slightly out of date) and whose conversation seems to cycle thorough their common childhood experiences? What is so good, though, about this dissection of upper class mores is that Fellowes is so goodwilled, so even: he loves his subjects and, looking at them closely, they deserve to be loved. There are some; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Passion of Dolssa; Author: Visit Amazon's Julie Berry Page; Review: This is a novel, not just a Young Adult novel, although its being marketed as one. Although its labeled for grades 7 and up, I find it difficult to believe that seventh through ninth-graders will be drawn to it but for any other age, its a darned good book. Its set in southern France in the late thirteenth century -- the lands of the langue doc, not langue doueil. The 'Albigensian crusade' against the heterodox (and thus in the eyes of the Holy Church, heretic) Cathars has ended. The heretics have been massacred or hounded into hiding, the Provencal nobles cowed into subjection and now a great papal inquisition has begun, with more deaths, confiscations, martyrs, sorrow and agony to come in the future until all trace of heresy has been obliterated. The principal characters are two young women, Botille the peasant matchmaker and Dolssa the aristocrat mystic. Dolssas the problem: she has visions, Jhesus is her lover, and miracles happen around her. The Church has to crush her and any who have benefited from her presence. Dolssa has already escaped the funeral pyre once. Botille found her afterwards, almost dead of hunger, and saved her. And now not just Dolssa but Botille, her family and fellow villagers are at risk from the Holy Inquisition, in the person of a young, determined and deeply troubled Inquisitor who has taken it as his personal mission to find the heretic Dolssa and extirpate all trace of heresy around her, no matter how many die in the process. Religion is difficult to mix into a novel like this but it works in this case because author Berry has immersed herself in the mindset and imagery of this very different age. The story is told by numerous narrators Botille and Dolssa, other villagers testimony, Church records. It moves forward without muddle or delay. The tale that is told is uplifting but ultimately tragic: decent ordinary people arrayed against the juggernaut of the Church. There are more heroes in this tale than villains, but its not comic book stuff. Rather, ordinary people are moved by chance circumstance and their loyalty to people near them to momentary acts of greatness. The result is a good story gracefully told, a pleasure to read.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: "If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?": Questions and Thoughts for; Author: Visit Amazon's Gina Barreca Page; Review: The subtitle of this collection of Barrecas columns is Questions and Thoughts for Loud, Smart Women in Turbulent Times and its appropriate, though it would be more so if the essays gathered here had more weight. Theres no question that her heart is in the right place. But she throws away too many good points in the search for cheap laughs. Most of these essays run two to four pages and there are 74 of them in the space of 258 pages. There is necessarily redundancy in a collection of short pieces like this but redundancy is not the problem: flipness is, and an occasional tendency toward the maudlin when giving advice. Barreca, a professor of English at U Conn, is intelligent. She writes well and has a sharp wit but too much of this book is puff minutes after you put the book down, you won't remember what it said. Some of the essays have a serious purpose, and a few are good reflections on what shes learned through therapy (Shrinkage), a too short piece entitled Questions I Wished Id Asked about her relationship with her mother, dead when Barreca was sixteen, an appreciation of her current, now decades-long marriage ( Happily Married Is Not an Oxymoron)but most of the book is throwaway stuff. Can she be funny? Yes,, like when she writes that the premise behind Spanx [girdles] is if you put Jello into a thermos, it won't remember its Jello. Her conclusion? Women don't need to bring back the whalebone in our corsets; [they need] to develop enough backbone to shed them altogether. Or when she writes that shes learned in twenty-three years of marriage that love isn't blind, but it is hard of hearing. But there aren't all that many lines like these in the books 258 pages and it all starts to blur in the mind. I think I would enjoy meeting Barreca in person, and we certainly agree on most of the topics she writes on, but this book was a waste to me.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Righting America at the Creation Museum (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context); Author: Susan L. Trollinger; Review: The Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Kentucky, within driving distance of Cincinnati, opened its doors on May 28, 2007, promising the faithful proof through unimpeachable scientific evidence- that the Creation did indeed occur in six days, just as the apostles of Bible inerrancy argue or at least the most doctrinaire do. For most tastes, its more than a bit weird, a high-tech religious Disneyland rather than something to be taken seriously. But as the Trollingers, both from the University of Dayton, assert, it is worth everyones effort to understand the mindset that produced this place in our present age of bitter religious strife and the resurgence of a militant Religious Right. The book may be a slog to read at times the prose is pedestrian and there are excursions into scholarship that could better have been written without recourse to academes- but they have produced a solid, useful study of a phenomenon that opens doors to larger issues in todays culture and politics. Their strategy is to take the Museums founders at their word and apply their own tests of what is good science and what is not to the material on display at the Creation Museum. Several of their conclusions are damning, the more so because reported without apparent animus. The Museum repeatedly fails to live up to its own standards of proof: it is not so much a museum that supports a scientific argument for the Creation or the Flood (the founders are building an Ark Museum now) as one that pretends to and moves away from science to assertion. There is no Bible on display that visitors can actually browse through or read, and nowhere is the complete text of Genesis 1-11, the verses on which their view of Creation depends, available on view. Indeed, where Bible verses are quoted, they are typically presented in extract and out of context. There is also little presence of Jesus in the exhibit, and particularly of the Jesus who preached that to be saved you must first treat the poor and downtrodden as though they were Him this is a museum instead about mans creation, fall from grace and Gods repeated punishments of him, and a warning that the final days are just ahead and all but the intransigent faithful will be damned. This is not a subtle book, but it is never boring, and the Trollingers have done their spade work on what is a valuable study of an outlier phenomenon, but one whose influence we should no longer ignore.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul; Author: Visit Amazon's James McBride Page; Review: McBride is an outstanding writerhe won a National Book Award for his memoir of his mother, The Color of Water. As well as a reporter, hes been a jazz musician and he is clearly at home in the bubbling, vibrant musical world of James Brown and his comperes. He is also African-American (father African American, mother a Polish Jew), angry about what America and the recording-performing world still do to American blacks. All this makes him a good choice to write about a complicated man, the Father of Soul James Brown. This isn't a regulation biography. At points, its a rant. The biography parts are liberally spiced with anger: a no-holds-barred condemnation of the straightjacket of race that constrains, thwarts and warps even the most exceptional black performer like Brown --or Michael Jackson, who is a player in the book as well. (Talent is just dessert in the ear-candy business anyway. Its about who can stand the ride.) He contrasts Browns notorious generosity, his neatness and attention to appearance (he never ventured out with his hair mussed up or raggedly clothes on, and you could eat off the floor of his kitchen, it was so clean) and his musical perfectionism with his compulsive hoarding, his ramshackle love life, his petty acts of tyranny and meanness (coming out of nowhere at times) toward his musicians (but at other times, there were acts of considerable generosity). Along the way, McBride meets and interviews Browns prize saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis, the ever loyal Rev. Al Sharpton, Browns (black) manager Charles Bobbitt and (white) accountant David Cannon. And he keeps cycling back to how Browns carefully worked out plans for his fortune were torn to pieces by the vultures who descended on his corpse after he died his not-wife fourth wife, all of the relatives who wanted a bigger chunk of his wealth than hed left them he wanted the bulk of his fortune to spent on educating and raising up poor children black AND whiteand the legal vultures who have milked the estate of most of his hard-earned cash for ten years now, with no appreciable end in sight. McBrides prose is sometimes high flown, lyrical-- at other times, its racy and demotic. But his anger is a rhetorical tool too, persuasive and eloquent in itself. When you have finished this eloquent account, you will understand and appreciate James Brown James Brown, the man, not just the performerin ways you didn't before. Highly recommended.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Trap; Author: Visit Amazon's Melanie Raabe Page; Review: Twelve years ago, celebrated author Linda Conrads walked into a room and found her sister dead on the floor, lying in a pool of blood. The killer was still there when she arrived. She saw him but he fled and the police could never find him. Since then, Conrads has lived a recluse: emotionally fragile and bruised in ways she still hasn't fully absorbed, she hasn't left her house in eleven years. Shes given up all hope of resolution. Then she sees the killer on television. Emotions flood back: she wants revenge. But how? What can she do? Hes a respected press correspondent now. Shes an emotional cripple. She determines to use the one weapon she has at her disposal her reputation as an author, her facility with wordsto draw him into a trap: she will write a novel about her sisters murder, so precise in what it says that he will want to see her. Shell send him a copy in advance, invite him to her house to interview her she, who has refused interviews for years. She does and he comes. The mind games start. Almost a third of the book 127 pagesis devoted to the interview that follows, which quickly devolves into a mind game between the two, writer and reporter. At the end, everything seems resolved, though not as she had expected. But then, in slow drips of revelation, she discovers that what she has learned from him isn't true. When it comes to gaming, her antagonist is far her superior. This is the type of thriller that Patricia Highsmith and Margaret Millar used to write and Hitchcock loved to film, but it doesnt work her. Partly its the way Raabe has framed her narrative: author Raabe alternates chapters from the novel her protagonist has written with narrative of the real present. But the chapters from the novel are curiously pallid and every time one appears, it interrupts the narrative of the real events that are transpiring outside her fiction. The story starts to build up heat, then a chapter of the fictitious novel intrudes and the tension is abated, over and over again throughout the middle half of this book. There are other flaws. Raabes novel is too literary not just Conradss quoting Kafka (A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us) and by implication justifying her actions but the general tenor of the narrative, which is short on action and long on soul-searching. Furthermore, coincidence plays much too big a role in Conradss final unveiling of the murderer. Raabe has grafted the hyper-intellectuality of Golden Age mystery puzzlers think John Dickinson Carr or Philo Vance Jacques Futrelle (The Thinking Machine stories)onto a Hitchcockian framework and it doesnt work. Too little action, too much thinking, and one big trick that is just a little too complicated to have ever come off. The result is a crime noir novel that doesnt noir anywhere near enough.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Out of the Blues (A Detective Sarah Alt Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Trudy Nan Boyce Page; Review: First-time novelist Boyce is ex-Atlanta PD, with thirty some years experience on the job. At different times she was a beat cop, homicide detective, hostage negotiator and finally, lieutenant. She also holds a Ph. D. in community counseling, acquired before she joined the police. She clearly knows the job of policing and, as icing on the cake, somewhere along the way she learned how to write. Not every sentence and phrase in this procedural is pure gold but she writes crisply and for the most part eloquently, the story is engrossing, the action moves along without a hitch and she does people really well it doesnt take long into her descriptions of character to know what the people shes writing about are like and how you feel about them. She has another indefinable quality, one you cant learn in a writers workshop: heart. Shes not nave about how hard and emotionally wearing it can be to be a cop or how crude some of her compatriots in the squad room and on the street beats can be, but the picture she paints is for the most part of companionship, not indifference. The protagonist is a new-minted homicide cop, Atlanta PD, Sarah Salt Alt. Salt has just come off the beat where, it is soon clear, she was cherished and (almost) revered by her police and social worker colleagues and where she has built up a network of trust and tolerance with the local citizenry. But her old job is dead meat now. Shes got a new one and her new teammates who are mostly male and assertively heterosexualare out to test her. (There is one other female in the squad and one who is gay and another who is transitioning from male to female. Its a new world even in the Atlanta PD.) Her sergeant assigns her a cold case, the death of a blues musician that was originally tagged as suicide. But new evidence has come up, an allegation by a stone killer Salt sent to prison years before. Hes angling for reduced time on his sentence but she knows how untrustworthy he is, also how explosive and dangerous even in the confines of the prison interview room where she will have to meet him. From then on, the story unfolds as a series of discoveries. Salt spends most of her time in shady places, among the homeless and felonious, but along the way, she also helps her lover, another homicide detective, who is his investigating the high profile killing of a socialite mother and her children. This is a very good police procedural, with an appealing heroine whos super-competent but not unrealistically so. She is also a lovely human being, who because she still sees the good in people, oftimes brings it out in them.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pacific Burn: A Thriller (A Jim Brodie Thriller); Author: Visit Amazon's Barry Lancet Page; Review: Pacific Burn is the third in Lancets series of crime thrillers featuring antiques dealer and sometime PI Jim Brodie. (Tokyo Kill was the second.) How do you get to be both antiques dealer and private eye? Your ex-Army father settles in Tokyo and opens a detective agency and until the age of seventeen, you shadow him at his work. Then you split Japan with your Japanese artist mother and settle in LA, where you learn art, especially Japanese, and establish your own business, handling high end Oriental artifacts like five and six figure Oribe tea bowls. Then you father dies and leaves you half of his agency, and the next thing you know, your involvement in the agency, your contacts in the international art world, and your knowledge and sympathy for Japanese ways leads you to a dual life because your father wasn't dumb: he knew that you were the one person who wouldnt let his inheritance die. Lancet is an efficient writer who plots good plots, writes great action scenes, can craft a mystery and depict characters from two cultures, and his knowledge of Japanese arts is a decided plus. In this installment, a nearly invisible hitman, pseudonym the Steam Walker, is killing off the members of one of Brodies art colleagues and friend, Japanese potter Ken Nobuki. Brodies on the hit list too. The action is fast and furious and the puzzles puzzling in this very good action thriller. I picked it up because I had bought (but not yet read) Tokyo Kill. Guess what book Im going to start next?; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Second Life of Nick Mason (A Nick Mason Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Steve Hamilton Page; Review: Two-time Edgar winner Hamilton never disappoints. He certainly doesnt this time, in this one-off crime thriller about a near-to-lifer whos freed from prison to act as a crime bosss enforcement arm outside prison bars. Nick Mason is serving year five of a twenty five to life sentence for a robbery that went bad: a cop was killed and Mason, who didn't kill him, refused to cough up his associates so he took the weight for the murder. Now hes freed. Suddenly and mysteriously. Hes living in a sleek townhouse in a chi chi section of Chicago, his car(s) is (are) super cool muscle machines from ten to twenty years past, hes got money to burn, a huge screen TV, beer and almost anything else he might want. Except freedom. Because hes tied to his cell phone. When the crime bosss associate, former gangbanger Jose Quintero, calls, Mason is expected to pick up the phone at once, no hesitation, and do whatever hes asked to do, no questions asked. Usually whats asked is murder. Masons an appealing counter hero but no good guy. Hes a bad guy whod like to pull out but probably will never make it. In the meantime, he tries to minimize risk. The problem is that the guys hes being asked to dispose of are cops or their criminal business partners, so its not just the bad guys who are out for Masons skin, its the cops. Corrupt cops, sure, but cops nonetheless. The action never lets, up, theres lots and lots of violence. As a bonus, Mason is an appealing counter hero. I suspect we will see a sequel to this high tension action thriller.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Drawing Dead: A Cross Novel (Cross Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Andrew Vachss Page; Review: There are some positive grace notes in this decidedly noir crime thriller but taken as a whole, its almost hopelessly bad. From the start, Vachss has pared down his characters and plots in an almost comic book series manner. It worked for a while: striking images, characters summed up in a phrase or a picture, a plot blazing in action with most of the inbetween slower parts left out. But the plots have grown more ridiculous or equally, in the case of the novelarcane to the point of un-understandable. The characters are still striking and the criminal sensibility still strong the six foot tall behemoth psychotic killer Princes who is born a boy but sees herself a woman, and is accompanied by a giant easily-arousable killer dog Akida and Rhino, Buddha, his foul-tempered always-scheming Hmong wife So Long, Ace, and behind them all, The master criminal Cross, who in Vachsss calculus is the one True Criminal in the group for reasons that don't hang together all that well when written down. Cross, gang leader/tribe leader, who has an enigmatic tattoo below his one eye which only few of his gang members can see and which throbs and pulses when danger is near, although the description of what it does is so fuzzy that its not clear what it is doing or why. Theres a plot the attempted killing of Aces wife leads to a string of encounters, most of them bloodyand by the end, there is a master nemesis who is trying to do in Cross, and then you get to see how well that works out. Too much of this novel depends on the reader having read previous novels in this series and the connections aren't all well explained. When potential dead spots occur in the action line, Vachss simply jumps over them and continues on, with little concern for elucidation or continuity. There are supernatural elements but they're not terribly credible or impressive, and theres a fair amount of blather, which leads to flatulent pronouncements like this: Every tribe has a name for what it fears. Every tribe has a name for what it cannot explain. It has always been so. It has? So? What does this pronouncement mean? The early Burke novels by Vachss were good in their stark simplicity and their unavowed endorsement of the outlaw life. This is the second Cross novel I have read: both have been limp sisters.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Shylock is My Name; Author: Visit Amazon's Howard Jacobson Page; Review: Halfway through this exceptional novel of passions and ideas, the author recounts an old confrontation: the English magnate Strulovich, who is a Jew but not a practicing Jew, and his wife Kay (this is before she has a stroke which leaves her bed-ridden and incommunicative) are confronted by their rebellious daughter Beatrice who isn't happy being Jewish. Its such a horrible little word, she spits out. Jew. It sounds like a black beetle with spikes. Kay slaps her while her father sympathizes Strulovich isn't all that happy being Jewish either. But in his mind, it isn't something you get to choose. In a way, thats the origin of the troubles he has with his daughter as she grows up. Hes not too Jewish but in his efforts to keep her Jewish at the core, he over-protects and over-polices her, too close a watch and too tight reins, and when shes fifteen going on sixteen, she leaves him for a goy lover and one catastrophe after another follows. This is not a novel about one thing. Among other things, its about what it means to be a Jew in a society that never lets you forget you are alien. (Good Jew kicked. Bad Jew kicks [back].) Its about how close love and hate lie in the relationship between father and daughter, each needing each the other but rebuffing any proffer of help or compromise. Its a prolonged and fruitful discussion of Shakespeares perceptions and intentions in the writing of The Merchant of Venice --particularly, why should or should not have Shylock felt like he did and why was the humiliation of Shylock so gratuitously cruel. It is a vindication, or at least explanation, of why revenge can be a natural response to others rebuffs of you. Lastly, it is a brilliant and bitingly funny satire, peopled with harsh caricatures of the plays originals. Shakespeares Antonio becomes the vicious, epicene collector (of art works, people, grievances) DAnton. There is the cossetted beautiful and rich television idol, Plurabelle, absolutely vicious in her disregard of anyones interest but her own, and there are the dense, self-absorbed love-objects of both DAntons and Beatrices attention. There is also Shylock. Strulovich talks with him, seeks advice from him, asks for but doesnt receive sympathy. In this retelling, Strulovich and Shylock occupy the same space: everything Strulovich does or thinks we get to mull over twice in the reflection of Shylocks response as Strulovich gradually takes over Shylocks role and Shylock moves into a grayer area slightly, but not much, to the middle of him. At one point, Strulovich and Shylock engage in conversation about brises. It leads to a revelation about how Shakespeare may have perceived Shylock as a character. Strulovich has made a bargain with DAnton: DAnton must pay him a pound/piece of flesh if DAnton cant come through on the original exchange. But its not DAntons heart that Strulovich wants. Its DAntons foreskin. He wants the goy to undergo a bris, become symbolically the thing he hates, a Jew. Interestingly, in this exchange its Shylock who is; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives; Author: Visit Amazon's Bernd Heinrich Page; Review: Heinrich is one of the best writers around on nature and on science, which is to say that he is very good, both as a scientist and as nearly-- a poet. He is exact and precise in spelling out the consequences of his observations for our understanding of animal (in this case, bird) behavior, expansive and lyrical in describing how beautiful nature can be, and how exuberant and at home it can make us feel to be around other living creatures. This book is aptly titled: its a series of essays on individual birds he has observed and the broader characteristics of the species to which they belong. In some of these nature essays are buried the germs, the gist, of his scientific studies or his thoughts for future study: as he writes, common knowledge [of avian behaviors] is often worth examining. Because he has taken detailed notes for fifty-some years on the creatures, fellow residents of his forest retreat in Maine, a rustic cottage and the grounds and forest around it, for fifty-some years, he is well placed to challenge conventional wisdoms on the causes and uses of anomalous bird behaviors. He is a master of serendipity. He sees snow grouse denning in an unusual manner one exceptionally harsh winter day, and then repeating the behavior in subsequent days. (Denning is burrowing into the ground to create a cavity where the bird is insulated by snow from the full force of the weather outside.) He wonders why they behave differently than they have other times and investigates checks out the interiors of the dens, hunts for the birds exit places, collects the birds scat piles, counts them, weighs them and dissects them to see what they are made of. At the end, he has not a full-fledged explanation of their behavior but a reasonable hypothesis that is consistent with what we do know of avian behavior and the behavior of species like these grouse. Its brilliantly presented not enough for a formal scientific paper but scientific nonetheless and advancing our appreciation of the object of investigation. In an essay on the drumming behavior of sapsucker drumming --he questions: Why does a woodpecker drum?he writes: Predictions can bias or mislead, if they come too early. But once you have a data set, there is nothing like having a prediction for making progress in at least a tentative direction. If the facts match, you are a step closer to solving a riddle. Theres the scientist in him. But a sentence on, he informs the reader that once, in Vermont, for the fun of it, he surveyed 176 live poplar trees that lay along the woodlands road he ran on. (Heinrich is a serious runner, who has written on running and holds several records for long-distance running. You can see the Salomon TV video of him running on YouTube.) For the fun of it. Thats the human being in him, as is his description of heading off on his daily inspection of his lands accompanied by his two dogs, two goslings and a rooster.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sara Moulton's Home Cooking 101: How to Make Everything Taste Better; Author: Visit Amazon's Sara Moulton Page; Review: With some new cookbooks, I just scan the recipes looking for ones Im interested in. A few I read from cover to cover. This book is in the second category. It contains so much useful information and the advice is so well presented that I found it fascinating to read. Ill admit that I skipped some recipes foods Im not wild about or, more often, ones I knew Id never attemptbut for the rest, I read this book from cover to cover in the first two days I had it. Its really good, but more than that, really helpful. Moulton uses series photographs to illustrate techniques how to cut up a chicken, make your own pizza dough, a new way to pound cutlets thats better than the way Ive been doing it up to nowand peppers her recipes copiously with side bars which help in choosing ingredients, steps in preparation, alternative ways to flavor a dish. Just one example will illustrate. Below the recipe for sautéed fish filets with creamy mustard-tarragon sauce is a paragraph on how to make with less fat (replace the crème fraiche with nonfat Greek yogurt, flour and water but she goes on to tell how to add it to the skillet) and on the side there are two sidebars: 1. what spices and coating to use on the fish and 2. which side of the fish to cook first (the ugly side, because when you flip it, you want the pretty side face up for presentation). The book starts with first lessons, proceeds with what tools you need in your kitchen (I don't agree with all the choices) and suggestions for your larder, and continues with a series of recipes on how to make basic sauces, dressings and stock. She doesnt cheat when a recipe requires time to cook but the book offers very sensible alternative recipes to shorten cooking and prep time. She writes an informal, friendly prose that makes you like her as a person and she is generous in acknowledging other cooks who have helped and inspired her. Lastly, there is her provenance. She has prepped for Julia Child and cooked with her in her kitchen, is friends with and has learned from Jacques Pepin, worked in restaurants for years, then tested and developed recipes for Gourmet magazine for four years and ran the magazines fining room for twenty-one more years, hosted cooking shows on the Food Network for a decade and since then shows on PBS, and writes a weekly food column for the Associated Press. She also cooks at home for her family and has, as she makes clear, a husband whos not an automatic sell when it comes to a new dish placed in front of him. I thumbed a number of recipes I hope to try in the coming year: a creamy root vegetable soup with fresh-made pita crisps (prep time 60 minutes), a Lyonnais-style salad with smoked salmon (prep time 35 minutes) and a grilled chicken with peach salad (prep time 40 minutes?), Cubano burgers (prep time 45 minutes),; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dodgers: A Novel; Author: Bill Beverly; Review: Crimes and violence --shootings, beatings, car theft, drugs-- abound in this book, but to categorize it as just a crime novel misses the point. Rather, its an example of the classic theme of moral education: a troubled and questing young man grows and changes as he experiences life. But the man this time is an LA gangbanger, not a notably reflective type. His name is East, no last name given, and hes barely turned sixteen. He loves his mother but shes so deeply into crack she barely notices him when he shows up at her apartment: her attention is on the money he drops off for her. Hes got a half-brother, Ty, whos two years younger than East. But they never got along and now Ty has left home. Hes working as a hired gun: want someone killed, hell do it. Both work for Fin, the top dog in their section of the sprawling south LA ghetto, The Boxes. Fin is Easts father, not that youd notice it the way he treats him. Easts job is to stand watch outside one of Fins drug houses: long hours, narrow focus, but no direct involvement in violence. When the house is raided, Easts future is uncertain: failures don't lead long lives in south LA. But Fin maybe because East is his son--sends him with three other boys on a car trip across the country to wipe out an informer about to turn states evidence against Fin. One of the boys is Ty and locked in a car for long trip, the combination is volatile. East, whos never been outside his neighborhood in south LA, is confronted with a world hes never known. He has to make decisions that will determine his own chance of survival in an alien, but strangely seductive new world. Along the way, he glimpses the possibility of a different world for himself. The result is explosive, jolting, and sad. Without preaching, just by telling Easts sad story, Beverly has written an indictment that is just as effective as Jill Leovys account of ghetto life in south LA, Ghettoside (2015).; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Finest Traditions of My Calling: One Physicians Search for the Renewal of Medicine; Author: Visit Amazon's Abraham M. Nussbaum Page; Review: The message of this book is a good one, and timely today. Nussbaum, director of the adult inpatient psychiatry unit at Denver Health, argues that the practice of medicine has been led away from patient care not that word care, its an important word for himtoward models of delivery that are more appropriate to a factory than a hospital: volume, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, quality improvement a la Edward Deming. He offers a number of suggestions for corrective, though no step-by-step program. Physicians should take responsibility for the whole patient, regardless of how many care providers are actually involved in practice. They should see themselves as tellers of their patients stories (this is an excellent suggestion), learn to talk with instead of to the patient (again, good). Evidence-based treatment is fine but physicians need to develop their prudential judgment to see what is happening, and needed, in particular cases rather than prescribing blanket treatment. Check lists are fine for pilots readying for a flight but patients aren't airplanes: they have particular histories and particular current needs, which may explain their illnesses differently. Physicians should prescribe regimes to build or conserve health as well as pushing meds and more (expensive but billable) tests. In short, he prescribes what philosopher-physician Victoria Sweet has called slow medicine, something difficult to do in todays health-insurance-driven environment when ten minutes per patient can mean profit for a doctor but fourteen, financial disaster. He draws on a range of authorities and exemplars to make his argument and illustrates it with examples from his own career. The range of authorities he cites is impressive: the list includes Aristotle, Foucault, sociologists Weber and Parsons, philosopher Charles Taylor, the medieval polymath nun Hildegard of Bingen, Ivan Illych, monks and nuns, Liberation theology, the example of Dominican brothers, Catholic nuns, Mennonite caregivers in the Second World War . And he questions whether the current goal of medicine is a good one, or even an achievable one, given that our bodies do grow old and fail. (In our new world of medicine, life consists of parts in motion, and medicines job is to keep these parts moving.) For all that is good and admirable in this book, and there is much of it, it leaves me flat and I am puzzled why. Something is missing. I think its a sense of concreteness. Nussbaum describes incidents and patients from his own life, they don't come to life, are too sketchily drawn and too quickly let go of. This is an acceptable book but it could have been a better one if Nussbaum had been not a more passionate, but a more concrete, illustrator of his thesis. I think of Oliver Sackss riveting tales of neurological disorder, both their effect on individual patients, drawn out on Sackss pages in great detail, and categories of ailments. The great naturalist Berndt Heinrich achieves it to in his methodologically rigorous but personally engrossing studies of birds and other animals, and the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was a master of this sort of explication. So the result is a passable; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Wolf of Sarajevo; Author: Visit Amazon's Matthew Palmer Page; Review: The Balkans, Winston Churchill once observed, produced more history than they could consume. And in this thriller, written by veteran diplomat Palmer (twenty-five years in the Foreign Service with extensive experience in the Balkans) past history comes back to bite the present. Twenty years after Srebrenica eight thousand massacred, while UN peacekeeping troops look on helplesslyBosnia is again falling apart. The countrys leader, a Serb with a disturbing past war record, has backed peace but is now pulling out and with his defection, each day the prospect of war seems closer. Eric Petrosian covered the war in 1995 as a reporter but now hes a junior functionary in the State Department, seconded to Bosnia to back up a political appointee ambassador who doesnt have a clue whats going on but doesnt care. Eric has a stake in the part: he sent a colleague, a Bosnian Muslim, to Srebrenica to scope out the place and his colleague died there instead of Eric. Eric owes it to him to preserve peace in this most volatile of all Middle European nations. In a meeting with a Bosnian national, Eric commits an indiscretion speaking without his bosss permissionthat buys more time for peace initiatives but alienates his ambassador boss. The boss hands Eric over to the European Union High Representative in the region, Annika Sondergaard --Bosnia wants into the European economic union so Bosnian leaders cant ignore Annika gratuitously. Annika has a plan for peace. Now Eric has a chance to work with her (on assignment) to see it gets a fair hearing. This is where the plot gets complicated. But then, everything to do with the Balkans is confusing. Its a region where politics conflates not only with ethnicity but with centuries-old grievances. (Look back far enough and someone will have killed someone else important to you.) Its complicated but not confusing because all of the parts feed into the whole. . The action moves from Sarajevo across Bosnia and to Paris and Langley, Virginia, and in time from the 1500s to the present. There are two two! CIA agents pursuing separate goals and hiding its from each other. There are hidden secrets. A master assassin, ridden with guilt for past sins. Several people dead and some amusing incidents. This isn't Disneyland, Eric says. It certainly isnt. How good a thriller is this? Its not in the front ranks no Charles McCarry, Alan Furst, John LeCarre, or Oren Steinhauer-- - but its crisply written and filled with suspense and action. The characters are a bit sketchy but not so much that it leaves you flat. The writing and plotting is serviceable. Not much in love interest. A good B-, Id rate it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Snow Job; Author: Charles Benoit; Review: Its 1977 and Nick, seventeen going on eighteen, is sick, sick, sick of his life. He wants out. Home has nothing left for him: his fathers cheating on his mother and they're both hinting its time for him to find his own place to live. Hes got two sisters but they don't live at home anymore and don't seem to care about him anyway. Then there are his high school buddies: a bunch of stoners indifferent to anything Nick does that doesnt fit into their circumscribed life routine. His one true friend is Karla, but shes a Goth a decade before Goths even came along and shes planning to leave town and Nicksoon with her boyfriend (and how long will that romance last?) for a move to sunny Florida. Even as a (kind of) stoner, though, Nick stands out. He doesnt do drugs, he won't steal from the convenience store where he works for $2.65 an hour and he won't let his buddies get away with anything either. He has this odd idea that if something isn't his, he doesnt have any right to rip it off. Nick decides he has to change. He makes up rules he gets them from a book in the high school library, a scything sword and flashing breasts potboiler about a John Carter-clone transported across space to an alien and barbarian world--- and decides to live by them, sink or swim. His life soon takes an unexpected --and potentially dangerous-- turn. A young thug, Zog, resurfaces with whom Nick has a troubled history with him. Zog pressures Nick to join him in working for Reg, a pusher who likes his own product a bit too much: its making him paranoid and besides, he likes to hurt people. Then theres an alluring young woman, Dawn, who is taking an interest in him too, for reasons that will probably turn out not to be good. Nick, Zog, Reg and Dawn cross paths with explosive results. Snow Job is advertised for ages 12 and up, but its audience really is for late teens, say 16 and up. The action moves along. Nick is an appealing character. What happens to him in the course of this YA novel is, I hope, more daunting than what most schoolchildren have to deal with in their teen years, but its believable and its certainly entertaining to read about. The story sort of peters out toward the end. (This is why I gave it 3 instead of 3-1/2 stars.) I could see myself reading this book if I were 17 or 18 and liking it a lot.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Vinegar Girl: William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew Retold: A Novel (Hogarth Shakespeare); Author: Visit Amazon's Anne Tyler Page; Review: The Hogarth Shakespeare series is a new venture: mining the treasure trove that is Shakespeares plays to tell stories for today, and assigning the plays to todays best writers to retell them. Tyler is certainly one of our most prestigious writers, with one Pulitzer Prize winning novel (Breathing Lessons) and another that was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize (A Spool of White Thread). Then theres The Accidental Tourist, made into a successful and memorable movie. But Tylers intimate and neighborly universe she writes mostly about people and places in and around Baltimore, where she has lived for almost forty years, and in a wider circle around that, what I call the Shallow [as opposed to Deep] South- is the antithesis of Shakespeares more sprawling and open world, and Tylers characters especially her women- seem better suited to Jane Austen than to Shakespeare. In short, I wouldnt have thought she was a good choice for Shakespeare. But I was wrong. Pick the right play and shes perfect. And that play is The Taming of the Shrew. Kate, Shakespeares tart tongued, untamable virago, is a perfect Tyler heroine. Her name now is Kata Battista. Her father is a professor at Johns Hopkins, an immunologist on a project that never seems to go anywhere. With no results to show for his work, year by year hes been moved further and further away from the centers of academic influence at the university. As for Kate, shes twenty-nine and still living at home. She went to college but got thrown out her sophomore year when she told a professor his explanation of photosynthesis was half-*ssed. (This is the one unrealistic moment in an otherwise realistic novel. Outside of a Bible school, no college today could have gotten away with suspending her. Kicked out of class, maybe. Suspended, no. There are procedural safeguards in place against such things.) She works a go-nowhere job as assistant to the teacher at a private day care center. Her high school friends have moved on by now and nudging thirty, she has no boyfriend or even the prospect of one in the offing. All she has is an impossibly absent-minded and eccentric father, who cant even make a sandwich on his own, and a self-indulgent bubble headed sister whos fourteen younger than her. Kate s smart and self-willed, but she has no delay switch between what she thinks and what she says so shes always upsetting people. So is it any wonder that her father thinks of finding her a husband? Especially since theres a young man he has to save. Pyotr, his lab assistant, the only man who understands his research, is about to be deported: his 3-years resident visa is soon up. Theyre on the brink of a breakthrough at last. Without Pyotr, the research is doomed. So suddenly Daddy is more attentive to his daughter than usual. He calls up on a cell phone he has never usedto tell her to bring his sandwich to him at his lab, something hes never done before. When she gets there,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Furious (Faith McMann Trilogy); Author: Visit Amazon's T.R. Ragan Page; Review: Faith McMann has everything loving husband, two kids, both under ten, and a job (teaches fourth grade) she likes and is good at. The business her husband and a colleague started years ago seems finally past the start up phase the McManns aren't millionaires but they lead a relatively debt free life. Then she picks up the kids one afternoon and comes home to a nightmare. Minutes later, her husband is dead, her children gone and shes bleeding out on the floor from a slit throat. The quick action of her next-door neighbor an ex-ER nursesaves her life but she returns from the hospital with no family and no future. At least at first. Because as her memory comes back and she remembers more about he assault, she gains hope --and determination. Her mission in life to get back her children, Lara and Hudson, wherever they and whatever has been done to them. The path isn't smooth and it included a detour into an anger management class, mandated by a judge after she loses her temper in a police station and breaks a detectives nose. But she makes allies there. Rage is an abused young woman with a low flash point, Beast a giant of a man whos never recovered his balance since a teenager texting while driving wiped out his family. Beast worked as a bounty hunter before he got in trouble for not controlling his anger so he has a useful set of skills for this kind of search. (They all use nicknames in the class. When Faith is asked for hers, she say, Furious.) EVERYONE in Faiths family including her brother-in-law helps out as Faith, Rage, and Beast set up a website for information, check out local pedophiles and troll the streets and tattoo parlors looking for a way into the hidden world of sex trading. Along the way, they make some very bad people uncomfortable and the search becomes deadly. The story is narrated in separate tracks with changing focus of attention most often its Faith and her crew, but we also read the stories of a young girl held captive by the sex traders, ditto a boy, and a hotshot lawyer who has changed to the dark side and now works for the boss behind all this. This is a problem, but a minor one: the story would have been more compelling with fewer switches of attention perhaps just Faiths story and that of the young girl, Miranda, who was held captive, punished into submission and sold out to perverts by the sex traders. There are also flashbacks (set out in italic print): Faiths memories of happier days, her husband and children, time with the family. There are too many of these they interrupt the narrative and since they don't contain much new information and the writing verges on schmaltzy in these passages, they diminish the narrative thrust of the story. The result is a pretty good but formula-driven story telling. If you want a comparison, check out Owen Laukkanens The Stolen Ones, published last year. My; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: A Hero of France: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Alan Furst Page; Review: Furst is exceptional among todays spy novelists in how carefully he builds his stories and how much he relies on small hints, intimations of a subtly changing and hard to predict future. This is the fourteenth novel by Furst about Europe on the eve of or the early years World War II. It starts in a way typical of him not with action but place. A man is waiting at a Parisian Metro stop. The rest of the starting page of this outstanding novel is description, nothing but description, place and mood, the calm that precedes violent happenings. The ground trembles. The Metro arrives, disgorges its passengers, among them a 17-year-old girl. She walks past the man Mathieu, leader of the Parisian resistanceand whispers, They have crossed the border. Theyre in Spain. Thus starts a typical Furst novel, his fourteenth about resistance to the Germans before or during WWII. All have been good. This one is exemplary. What follows is a string of incidents. Mathieu is at the center of them but surrounded by a host of characters, all of whom have reasons to fight the Boche. Annemarie is a French aristocrat, roots over five hundred years deep. The German occupation is an affront to her: if shes truly French, she must resist them. Daniel is a Jew. The Germans took away his livelihood, identity, life. He simply wants revenge. Max de Lyon, an arms dealer turned nightclub owner, may have to cotton up to the occupiers to earn a living but he loathes them. That makes it easy for him to help his friend from pre-war days, the bon vivant Mathieu. Then theres Joelle. The real reason shes in all this is that she loves Mathieu: whatever he needs from her, shell do. Incidents occur. Over time not too long a time- the noose tightens around Mathieu and his associates. How will he save them? Him? There is a climactic incident. If you want to know what, read the book! What can I say about the book in comparison to Fursts previous thrillers? Furst is a wonderful storyteller, but more than that hes a master of mood, who tells his story not in continuous burst of action but as a succession of incidents separated, discrete, building to a picture of concerted effort. Mathieu is a typical Furst hero: cosmopolitan in the 20s and 30s mode, which means free living, but underneath a man of principle and moral strength. He stands for something in a time when many people simply fade away from their moral princi0ples. He puts his life at risk for what he stands for. He has depths, is in every respect hes a mensch. Then there is the writing! Furst is a master at capturing scenes and peoples in economical but evocative style. Reading him is like being there. I like spy novels but think the genre rarely achieves literary greatness. With Furst I think it does. Put them in a line John LeCarre (the first master), Charles McCarry, Oren Steinhauer, Robert Littell. Furst is first in line. (Sorry; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pretty Enough for You; Author: Visit Amazon's Cliff Hudder Page; Review: Texas writer Hudders novella, Splintersville, and short stories have won several prizes but this is his first novel. Its only partly successful but its clear that Hudder is a writer of some talent. He simply needs to channel it. In this shambolic caper, which parodies and uses the forms of both picaresque novel and detective whodunit (more the former than the latter) as framing device, he creates a respectable comic character, Harrison Bent, a man who never met a drug or drink he didn't like --woman eitherand who is arguably the worst lawyer ever produced in the Lone Star State, a state not short on eccentrics to begin with. There is a plot, but it veers from the track ofttimes and is hard to follow any way Hudder packs so many characters and descriptions into this novel that the brain overloads when reading it. Its no surprise that Hudders prose is extravagant. In a throw-it-all-in-and-see-what-comes-out-at-the-other-end novel like this, everything is always about to come apart, including literary elements like tone, sentence structure, the images evoked to explain things. The master of this style of writing was Hunter S. Thompson. Hudders Bent and some of the other characters in this rambling-all-over tale remind me of the mad Mexican-dash-American Oscar in Thompsons great Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). But it means that sometimes the writing is on the mark, others off of it, alternating between bravura and outright jejune. Some examples follow. In a rundown cantina bar, Bents drink tastes vaguely of cranberry juice and hotel room disinfectant. Millionairess Maggie Leidecke had set up a showroom to sell her witching wares that looked as if a bookstore had taken a jewelry store to a candle shop to assault it. In Mexico, in a town named San Judas Tadeo, reachable only by passage through a deep tunnel bored into a mountain side the road through is one lane wide so the driver on one end yells through to drivers on the other end to tell them that someone is coming throughand then theres the very narrow road along the side of the extremely high mountain, so narrow that when visibility is bad, someone walks ahead of the car or bus to keep the driver on the road in Mexico, in San Judas Tadeo, Bent described a peasant woman thusly: Her eyes were shockingly pale in the dark plaza. The cave hole of her mouth showed rows of black teeth like oily rail ties sunk back in a mineshaft. (San Judas, by the way, is described as the patron saint of lost causes. How appropriate for Bent, whose causes have always and probably will always be lost.) Depending on your tolerance for exuberance, you will appreciate these passages or not. I was in between, but let me say again, Hudder is a writer of talent and this novel shows it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: King Maybe (A Junior Bender Mystery); Author: Visit Amazon's Timothy Hallinan Page; Review: Hallinans crime thrillers about master burglar Junior Bender --this is the fifth in the series-- mix comedy and thrills more successfully than anyone in the genre since Donald Westlake, with whose Dortmunder novels (the best known is The Hot Rock) they stand comparison. That means that Hallinan devises a straight plot one adventure leading to the next, and clues where appropriateand then introduces into it seriously criminal types who are also, almost without exception, grotesques or eccentrics. And for all his intelligent preparations, Junior blunders from one disaster to another, until somehow in the end, he escapes well, not unscathed but with most of his scalp still on top of his head. There are lets see if I can count themthree robberies in here and one, two, no, three murders, with a fourth in the offing. One of the bad guys is a loan shark called simply as the Slugger, in reference to his preferred means of persuasion when his customers are late playing up -- a Louisville slugger baseball bat. Another, a behind the scenes movie mogul named Jeremy Granger, is usually called, but not to his face, King Maybe, because thats the phrase he uses to dangle hope in the faces of his petitioners scriptwriters, directors, would be producersmost of whom never get what they want. Jeremy is really despicable but not so despicable that Junior won't work for him when hes being blackmailed: do my job or I turn you in to the police. Theres a fence named Stinky Tetweiler, the disinherited heir of a very wealthy family. (Yes, this is Hollywood, and yes, those whove got it, like Stinky and Jeremy, may have got It, but they don't have taste. Or scruples. Junior calls Hollywood the beached whale of popular culture.) Tasha Dawn (real name Suley) starred in Dead Eye, probably televisions worst ever zombie series, with Tasha, an appallingly bad actress, playing the zombie detective lead. Now shes Jeremys wife, soon to be ex-wife, and he wants Junior to crack his uncrackable mansion and steal a Turner painting. God forbid it makes it to the divorce settlement! You get it already. The names tend to be over the top Louie the Lost, a pair of fourteen-year-old lesbians name Anime Wong (if you know your early movie history, think Anna May Wong) and Lilly, Tingting and Jejomar, Garlin Romaine, and of course, Junior, whose father actually gave him that as his first name. Oh! Theres Juniors girlfriend. Here name is Ronnie LeBlanc, although Juniors not sure about that, or where she came from, or how she acquired such impressive criminal skills to save his bacon when hes in trouble. As in Westlakes comic capers, the technical details are well thought out and described in detail. Theyre interesting to read and made more so because Junior is usually in deep trouble when hes doing his work someone comes home too early or hes been ratted out to a bad guy or something really bad this time. (Want to know what? Read the book! Read the book!) One of the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Stephen O'Connor Page; Review: Once OConnor (writing, Sarah Lawrence; two collections of short fiction) had committed to this ambitious project, which deals with the troubled relationship between slaveowner Jefferson and his slave concubine Sally Hemings, he started in writing concurrent with doing research. The novel emerged in fragments he wrote in any genre that fit and on any part of his subjects real or imagined lives he felt moved to write about. The result is a jarring exploration of big themes rooted in the contrary behaviors of ordinary people, presented as a kaleidoscope show juxtaposing straightforward narration with fictionalized memoir, fabulist outpourings, bald listings of historical fact, reflections on the poetry of colors, all moving from past to present time and back again. In energetic prose, OConnor explores the boldest subjects: how a persons hold over another corrupts them both; how a captive can fall in love with her captor even while still hating the capture; above all, how an institution as morally repugnant as slavery can make a liar out of even so well-meaning a person as Thomas Jefferson. The sweep of narrative, quality of writing, intensity of feeling and boldness of thought make this a strong candidate for major awards. (Originally posted in Library Journal. Reposted here with some modifications.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid; Author: Visit Amazon's Wendy Williams Page; Review: MONTGOMERY, Sy. The Soul of an Octopus. Atria. 2015. 261p, illus., bibliog., index. WILLIAMS, Wendy. Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid. Abrams Image. 2011. 224p, illus., bibliog., index. These two books are about cephalopods octopuses (not octopi, the word comes from Greek, not Latin) and squid. Both books are well written and copiously illustrated (photographs and drawings) but what makes them such fascinating reading is the creatures they are about. Octopuses and squid offer us our only examples of what intelligence and feeling could be like outside of the vertebrate family. University of Chicago neuroscientist Cliff Ragsdale comments: Short of Martians showing up and offering themselves up to science, cephalopods are the only example outside of vertebrates of how to build a complex, clever brain. Alexa, who works with octopuses as a volunteer, says: Theres nothing as peculiar as an octopus. (Both quoted in Montgomery) There is ample evidence of octopus intelligence. There is general agreement that they are among the smartest animals on earth. But its not our kind of intelligence, not even close although there enough points of similarity to convince observers they are reasoning and feeling. To start with, their brains are organized differently, distributed in parts spread across a central brain and eight tentacles rather than consolidated in one central spot like ours is. Furthermore, whatever they think and feel, their actions are so different from ours that in many cases, we don't have a clue why they react like they do. Octopuses in captivity, even in the wild, respond differently to different people. With some they're comfortable, even friendly, with others hostile or defensive. We know from this and from their puzzle-solving ability --they are master locksmiths, for instance, who can get though up to three sealed containers to reach the food within-- that they make inferences and remember what theyve learned. They get bored, need to keep active. Bored octopuses held captive in tanks get in trouble, much like bored Border collies moping around a house get in trouble, but where the collie will likely chew up rugs and furniture, the octopus will try to escape, maybe migrate to a neighboring tank to eat the creatures inside it. Octopuses in captivity beg for food, appearing in the same part of the tank and adopting the same posture whenever food-bearers arrive. We can read their emotions in broad strokes: red, angry or excited: white, calm or indifferent. The books are written by seasoned science reporters. This is Montgomerys ninth natural science book for adult readers and her twenty-first in all. For Williams, its her seventh. Both writers have won awards for science reporting. Montgomerys is the warmer book, as she details her personal interactions with four octopuses in succession: gentle, friendly Athena; playful, inquiring Octavia; the more fiery Kali; and Karma. These are fascinating and informative books about a creature thats like us in some respects but alien in most, an animal that sees and weighs us just as do it. Montgomerys especially is about what it means to respect and love a; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness; Author: Visit Amazon's Sy Montgomery Page; Review: MONTGOMERY, Sy. The Soul of an Octopus. Atria. 2015. 261p, illus., bibliog., index. WILLIAMS, Wendy. Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid. Abrams Image. 2011. 224p, illus., bibliog., index. These two books are about cephalopods octopuses (not octopi, the word comes from Greek, not Latin) and squid. Both books are well written and copiously illustrated (photographs and drawings) but what makes them such fascinating reading is the creatures they are about. Octopuses and squid offer us our only examples of what intelligence and feeling could be like outside of the vertebrate family. University of Chicago neuroscientist Cliff Ragsdale comments: Short of Martians showing up and offering themselves up to science, cephalopods are the only example outside of vertebrates of how to build a complex, clever brain. Alexa, who works with octopuses as a volunteer, says: Theres nothing as peculiar as an octopus. (Both quoted in Montgomery) There is ample evidence of octopus intelligence. There is general agreement that they are among the smartest animals on earth. But its not our kind of intelligence, not even close although there enough points of similarity to convince observers they are reasoning and feeling. To start with, their brains are organized differently, distributed in parts spread across a central brain and eight tentacles rather than consolidated in one central spot like ours is. Furthermore, whatever they think and feel, their actions are so different from ours that in many cases, we don't have a clue why they react like they do. Octopuses in captivity, even in the wild, respond differently to different people. With some they're comfortable, even friendly, with others hostile or defensive. We know from this and from their puzzle-solving ability --they are master locksmiths, for instance, who can get though up to three sealed containers to reach the food within-- that they make inferences and remember what theyve learned. They get bored, need to keep active. Bored octopuses held captive in tanks get in trouble, much like bored Border collies moping around a house get in trouble, but where the collie will likely chew up rugs and furniture, the octopus will try to escape, maybe migrate to a neighboring tank to eat the creatures inside it. Octopuses in captivity beg for food, appearing in the same part of the tank and adopting the same posture whenever food-bearers arrive. We can read their emotions in broad strokes: red, angry or excited: white, calm or indifferent. The books are written by seasoned science reporters. This is Montgomerys ninth natural science book for adult readers and her twenty-first in all. For Williams, its her seventh. Both writers have won awards for science reporting. Montgomerys is the warmer book, as she details her personal interactions with four octopuses in succession: gentle, friendly Athena; playful, inquiring Octavia; the more fiery Kali; and Karma. These are fascinating and informative books about a creature thats like us in some respects but alien in most, an animal that sees and weighs us just as do it. Montgomerys especially is about what it means to respect and love a; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Diana's Altar (A Detective Joe Sandilands Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Barbara Cleverly Page; Review: The thirteenth investigation (= murder mystery, = adventure) featuring former soldier former lawyer now police detective Joe Sandilands, is set in Cambridge, England, in 1933, and like its predecessors (most of which I have read) its a good one. Joe is now an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard. Hes in charge of an elite unit of sometimes rough mannered agents who handle the Yards special investigations and dirty tricks activity. (Think MI5 but no Communist moles in it.) In this episode, Joe enters the modern era of spy catching as he and his men as he investigate a not quite English nob who seems to be scheming to steal high level scientific information from Cambridge: the scientists there are working with Atoms. Smashing them to smithereens in magnetic chambers to see what they're made of. . . . Huge potential for war work. The nob is building influence in high quarters through a sex and blackmail operation operated out of his manor. He may already have snagged several members of Parliament and a Cabinet member or two. The book starts with a murder: an undercover agent Joe has sent in to investigate is found dying in a chapel, a knife buried in his chest. He dies confessing hes killed himself but theres no evidence of any reason, all though the middle of that day, that he was harboring thoughts of suicide. About the same time, a woman dies in a manor house owned by the toff Joe is investigating. The death is covered up and shes identified by a false name but theres clear evidence she was poisoned. From these twinned events the story takes off. Its a gripping one I use that adjective advisedly because it fits the tone of the story, which is resolutely Buchanesque, with Joe filling in for the Richard Hannay part. The prose is at times resolutely grand, hyperbolic: It may be that we have to deal with a type of madness. Were looking at vicious unreason and the vaunting ambition of as Roman Emperor. None of you are safe, the country is not safe, until this man is behind bars or dead. [W]ho can say when Armageddon will break out? I shall be ready. Indeed, the gentleman Joe is investigating is named Pertinax, which was the name of one of the six emperors who reigned in the Year of the Six Emperors, 193 AD. To get to his subject, Joe must solve first one mystery the death of his agentthen prevent an act of sabotage, then deal with two villains at once, one in plain sight and the other masked behind him. The second seems to take his inspiration from Hitler and Benito. A character shouts, Youre joining the Fascist cause? You swine! and in an excess of vaunting ambition, the bad guy responds, Not at all. They will be joining me. e plans At the end of it all, another character reflects, It never ends, Joe. This mans madness. . . . The need to grab power and have someone else pay for it. This; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Magicians: A Novel (Magicians Trilogy); Author: Visit Amazon's Lev Grossman Page; Review: Grossmans The Magicians, first of a trilogy, is a fantasy novel with all the trappings of the genre, including great set pieces with magic blazing right and left and a magical kingdom with a very scary Beast loose in it who must be dealt with. But it is equally a novel, a deep and nuanced meditation, on the cost of growing out of your dreams: what is the cost of getting what you always thought you really wanted? Its protagonist, Quentin, is almost Asperger-like in his drive to come in first, be best, pass the most tests and win the most awards, all coupled with a profound lack of social graces and minimal sense of empathy. Hes not good at reading people including himself as it turns out. At the end of the book, Quentin and his friends of sorts, all young magicians, are pursuing a quest in the imaginary world of Fillory, which was simply a make believe land they had read about in books until suddenly it became real around them. If they succeed, four of them will become kings and queens of Fillory. Theyre not sure they all want this any more the cost has been too high. Alice, Quentins on-again off-again girlfriend, asks him: Do you even want this anymore, Quentin? Thats the key question of this book. Once you get it, will you be happy? You aren't happy now. Why do you suppose one more achievement will change you? She continues: Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop Waiting. This is it: theres nothing else. Soon one of the gang will be dead and another maimed. Quentin will be king. But no happier. En route to this ending, Quentin takes a test and winds up at a magic school, hidden from the non-magical world by wards and hexes. (His parents never quite notice what happened.) There he makes friends and they become proficient at all kinds of spells, and there they first encounter the Beast, a shadowy creature that rises from nowhere in the middle of a magic demonstration and almost destroys the academy before it is vanished again. More happens, love, graduation, boredom. Then they're in Fillory. Drinking beer in a bar with a bear named Humbledrum. Dryads. A magical ram. A mysterious creature, the Watcherwoman, who grafts clocks into trees and seems determined to destroy Fillory by slowing down time until it stops. In a horrific battle, Quentin and his companions are attacked --by five Black Elves, two goat-legged men, two terrifyingly giant bumblebees, and something fleshy and headless that scrambled along on four legs, and a silent, wispy figure composed of white mist. All this before they confront the Beast again, and the results of that are horrendous. Ive read a fair amount of fantasy, even taught a course on visionary fiction once. I know of no fantasy literature quite like this book. There is a similar darkness in Philip Pullmans great Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) and the feeling of how magic and; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Anatomy of a Soldier: A Novel; Author: Harry Parker; Review: Its a surgical dressing in the first chapter, a bag of fertilizer, one of four confiscated by Afghani insurgents to make bombs, in the second. There are 45 chapters in all. In each, it is an object or a physical reaction that narrates the story, telling both sides of the local combat that is part of the larger war in Afghanistan. A British army combat boot, a homemade bomb, a tracheal tube used on a wounded officer, a duffel bag, his mothers purse (shes visiting him in the hospital), an infection in his remaining leg that necessitates a second amputation, a surgical bone saw, a battery and later a digital watch used by insurgents to detonate an IED --blood sac, catheter, safety razor, folding camp cot (the solders sleep on it at first; when they leave, the insurgents take it for their own use), a rug, a letter, a bullet, a combat helmet, dog tags, a prosthetic limb and then another, more sophisticated onethese are the vehicles through which former British Army soldier Parker (Iraq, 2007; Afghanistan, 2009) tells his story of a war that goes nowhere and leaves both sides maimed. The story is not perfect. The narrative device inanimate objects talkingis mannered and he stretches the conceit too far: objects not only describe what they experience directly but relate the internal dialogue of the people the war is happening to. And Parkers account of the insurgents isn't as well fleshed out or convincing as that of the British officer who loses his legs but not his life and has to live with his loss afterwards. But its a harrowing tale and the descriptive passages sometimes leave you aghast. Like this one, the surgical oscillating saws narrative when the wounded officer (one foot blown off) is brought back to the operating room because something has gone wrong: infection has spread to the other leg. "They stood over the table, their heads covered with masks and bandanas so only their glasses were visible. They wore blue scrubs and worked below an array of suspended lights, bent over pink flesh that spilt from a leg. They cleaned or cut away putrid grey areas, glancing up from their wounds to a screen that showed magnified swirls of red, shiny bulges of scarlet and globules of white. // This mess slopped out of a body splayed on the table. The bodys arms were held out cruciform on padded extensions and the head was obscured by a mask and pipes that fed up to machines. There were other people in the room who monitored the apparatus or handed the men equipment." What follows is even more horrific, all the more so for being relayed in flat descriptive style, without commentary or overt attempt to arouse sympathy. Its a long time 1990-- since I read Tim OBriens narrative of the war in Vietnam, The Things They Carried, but Parkers book seems a worthwhile successor to it. Warts and all, it is worth the reading.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live; Author: Visit Amazon's Colin Tudge Page; Review: Tudge is one of the great explainers of our day, versed in his subject (natural science botany and biology), possessed of a fluid prose style and rich sense of humor (but he never lets the humor overwhelm his subject), and able to render complicated subjects interesting and explicable, without overstating or simplifying what he is explaining. This is the second book by him that I have read. The first was The Variety of Life: A Survey and Celebration of All the Creatures That Have Ever Lived (2000), a book I could not put down once I started it. Here his subject is birds and what a fascinating tour of the avian kingdom he takes us on. En route, he explains where birds came from and why their bodies and systems are put together the way they are (the limits imposed by flight), identifies and describes all the families in the bird kingdom (All the Birds in the World: An Annotated Cast List, at 93 pages, the longest chapter in the book), deftly summarizes all we know and don't know about the puzzling business of bird migration (assesses the plusses and minuses of avian diets (meat versus grain, nuts, or grass) and how diet determines stomach, gut and crop in birds, and defecation and urination practices too, and concludes with fascinating sections on bird sex and bird intelligence. One of Tudges (many) virtues as an explainer is that he doesnt oversimplify and he never claims too much for the state of scientific knowledge on a topic. Thus, discussing bird migration, a truly puzzling phenomenon (how did it start? given the high cost in energy and risk to the migrating birds, what was its original advantage?), he writes: "Definitive answers to these obvious questions are not yet forthcoming. There are many theories, for some of which there is good evidence; and if you put all the theories and the evidence together, it is possible, in the early twenty-first century, to tell a story that sounds coherent and can be made to seem convincing. But actually, the picture is a hotch-potch: a small area of near certainty here, a solid-looking fact there, all stitched together by a narrative that still relies heavily on invention and supposition. I do not mock. Progress in understanding has been impressive But nature is difficult. I feel in my own bones (as many do) that there are still fundamentals to be unearthed." Nature is difficult. Especially so with birds. Most of them live in places that are not easily accessible to us curious humans in the tropic rain forests, for instance, or high up trees or in mountain aeriesor they are invisible by day and come out only after dark, to their very survival depends on their ability to be elusive hiding or camouflaged. And when you do see them, they're not easy to identify and separate they're small (most of them are) and because of convergence different species end up looking alike because they fill the same ecological niche, and its not always easy to pair up males and; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Secret War; Author: Max Hastings; Review: A spy should be like the devil: no one can trust him, not even himself. (Joseph Stalin) Perhaps one-thousandth of 1 per cent of material garnered from secret sources [in WW II] contributed to changing battlefield outcomes. (Max Hastings) Most accounts of SOE agents, particularly women and especially in France, contain large doses of romantic twaddle. (Max Hastings) Hastings brings a wealth of experience as a military historian of twentieth century wars to this fascinating account of spying, codebreaking and guerrilla warfare in the Second World War. And by casting his net wide, he adds perspective to a tale that is often blown out of proportion when looked at small the story of a single spy or operation. He also brings a salutary dose of skepticism to a story that is so romantic that it has repeatedly been made hyperbolic. Spying certainly, support of guerrilla operations also, codebreaking less so none of these activities significantly altered the course or duration of a long, hard fought, costly war. Brute force, as always, made the difference: where one side or the other had men and guns, and the leaders didn't mess it up spectacularly, that side won the battle. And enough battles won, you won the war as well. Humint (human intelligence) was especially problematic. Even where the intel received was good, (1) the reputation of the spy agencies (especially MI6) was low in the eyes of their masters, in part because of past embarrassments, (2) good intel often arrived accompanied by bad intel, information that was extraneous, confusing or outright incorrect or (3) was received or looked at too late to be of assistance. Lastly, (4) the decisionmakers Churchill, Hitler, Stalinhad their own priorities: these led them to ignore information that ran counter to their own preconceptions (Hitler especially) and, in the case of Stalin, who was paranoid and not at all averse to sacrificing his stooges, made it dangerous to forward intel to him he might not like. Hastings survey makes evident how poorly prepared the western powers were to enter the world of espionage. (On Russia, on the other hand, spying was virtually a national pastime and had been for decades.) Nor were most of the early heads of the intelligence agencies the brightest lights: historian turned agent H.R. Trevor-Roper asked of Britains chief spymaster, C, Brigadier Stewart Menzies, how so unbelievably stupid a man could have ended up such a position. But all of the spymasters displayed an embarrassing tendency to value information obtained by human agents (spies and informers) above more mundane but more accurate (and comprehensive) information derived simply by a careful reading and analysis of publicly available sources, from railroad schedules to newspaper and magazine articles. Even where a spy did have success Richard Sorges amazing run in Japan, for instancewhat ultimately determined victory was almost wholly military force and resources. Most successful among covert operations was sigint, code breaking e.g., Enigma. Spying yielded only occasional small gains that were often not even acknowledged as of value by their recipients. Guerrilla actions in occupied territories probably helped; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: On the Move: A Life; Author: Visit Amazon's Oliver Sacks Page; Review: This book, by the justly famed -no, beloved- neuroscientist cum essayist Oliver Sacks was his last real book to come out before he died last year and the second to qualify as autobiography. (The first was Uncle Tungsten, his memoir of his youth and his relationship to his exotic chemist uncle who worked with tungsten. That happens to be the only book of Sacks I haven't read. But life is yet young.) A very short book was published this year with Sacks two valedictory essays and a few other equally brief pieces. I admired it for what it was an immensely human mans thank you for having livedit barely qualified as a book, more of a memory piece, of value because of who wrote it and what he stood for. On the Move has received glowing praise and deserves it, but it is far from perfect. The early parts, especially those describing Sackss early years in the United States, rely too much on travel journals he kept then and though Sacks had a gift for description even then, they aren't warm: read a bit too much like travelogues. Thats not true of all of these passages: there is a lovely description of his hookup with a long distance driver and his possibly halfwit driving companion. But for the most part, if these passages hadnt been written by Oliver Sacks, you wouldnt read them. In later sections, the organizing principle seems often to be the books he had written or the people he had met. While I find this material very interesting Sacks was friends or friendly associates with many of the writers, thinkers and artists I am interested in, from Gerald Edelman and Stephen Jay Gould to Robert De Niro and Robin Williamsand I am very interested in the thought and writing process that led to his fascinating essays and books, it seems to me a less than ideal organizing principle for a book whose foremost purpose is to show how the writer grew into what he was and to describe to readers what he was. And what a what he was! He grew up in London in a hyper-achieving family his mother and father, both physicians, who practices until close to their deaths. (And the father died at ninety-four!) They raised three achieving children and a fourth who, plagued by schizophrenia, lived a troubled life until he passed away in his fifties. Sacks seems to have been in some ways the brightest of them all but he was a wayward child in some respects and his revelation to his father that he was homosexual, and the fathers revealing of it to his mother, led to his mother telling him that he was an abomination: she wished hed never been born. Clearly, she later regretted saying that. Her actions made it clear she loved him, worried about him, and reveled in his later success and fame. But neither in sexual matters nor in his career was his early life a bed of roses. He is candid in describing his (few) successful liaisons; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World; Author: Visit Amazon's Tim Whitmarsh Page; Review: This is a book of value for both scholars and lay readers. Whitmarsh (prof., Greek Culture, Cambridge) has parsed the vastly deficient ancient record (many documents and artifacts are missing, much that we do know is related at second hand, and the surviving record was largely written by the winners who used it to express their perspective over other competing views) to show that, contrary to much modern opinion, denial of the gods and other theist views can be found in many places in the classical world. Whitmarsh argues persuasively that only intermittently were there attempts to squelch heterodox views on gods, the immortality of the soul, and related issues. In so doing, he provides a useful corrective to current views that either (1) see atheism emerging for the first time in European history only with the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment and (2) argue that man is religious by nature (see Daniel Dennetts Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon [2007].) Whitmarshs argument is detailed, often suppositious but exceedingly well presented: working with a fragmentary record like the heritage of the classical world requires imagination, the courage to risk leaps of thinking, and great sensitivity to nuances in texts that are now 2000 to 2500 years old and written in obscure dialects of now almost dead languages. I found the book fascinating but it won't satisfy the reader seeking absolute certainty because that kind of certainty is no longer possible with what has survived for us to interpret. This is a good book. No, its more than that, its an important book, not earthshaking but substantial and addressing an issue that grows in importance as our country slides backwards away from an acceptance of the coexistence of disbelief and toward a mindless Biblical literalism. Its salutary to be reminded that our issues are not all new issues. Serious people argued about the same things two millennia ago.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Magician King: A Novel (Magicians Trilogy); Author: Visit Amazon's Lev Grossman Page; Review: The second novel in Grossmans Magician trilogy is just as good as the first, The Magicians (2010), which was superb, gobstoppingly good. Same characters (minus one, who died in the first book) and the same hero, Quentin, who now is the king, one of four monarchs, two queens, tow kings, of the magical kingdom of Fillory. Quentin is happier than he was as a youth but still far from fully contented because it turns out that even being monarch of the fantasy kingdom that occupied most of your thoughts as a teen isn't as continuously satisfying as you assumed it would be before it happened. So Quentin sets out on a quest a perfectly logical thing to do in a magical kingdom. The quest leads Quentin and his childhood flame (all the flaming was on his side, not hers) and now companion queen Julia beyond the bounds of Fillory into the far seas. Fabulous things happen but this book isn't about them so much as about how Quentin, a flawed hero, comes to terms with where he is in his life, and about Julia and her attempts to address the serious issues she has about her own worth and identity. Fantasy novels tend toward either the sentimental or the horrific. Grossmans book does neither. Rather, it is a serious look at how hard it is to grow up when you think more is going to happen to you in your life than does happen. Its about accepting --accepting what you are, not what you arent. Its an odd join: the merger of all-out fantasy (a fight between two super ninja assassins to decide which will be Quentins bodyguard on his great ocean journey, a talking tree sloth, a side journey to Hades or at least a place like Hades..) and an introspective look at growing up that could have happened to Holden Caulfields if not for all the magic around the edges. By the end of their journey, Quentin and Julia and some old friends from book 1 of the trilogy have flitted from one world to another. Quentin has made painful choices. And in the end, which is sad-sweet, he has to pay for them. But paying is almost a relief because now, maybe, he can begin to chart a normal life, devoid of unreal and unsustainable fantasies.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Greene on Greens; Author: Visit Amazon's Bert Greene Page; Review: This is my second purchase of this wonderfully useful cookbook. I bought it when it first came out and bought this second copy because my first copy was falling apart. I love cookbooks, and cooking. This is one of the books I use most often and most successfully. (Two nights ago, I made the pale fried parsnips recipe for perhaps the twentieth time.) First off, it's organized in a particularly useful way: there vegetables, in alpha list, from A to Z. For each vegetable, you get a delightful reminiscence from Greene, followed by instructions on how best to select and prepare the vegetable, followed by a catholic selection of recipes that use the vegetable. If you think about how you shop for food, you'll realize how helpful this way of presenting recipes is: a vegetable is in season, you can buy it and Greene will provide you with ten to twenty different ways to prepare it. If there is a down side to Greene's recommendations, it is his love of rich sauces --butter, cream, etc.-- but, hey, that's true of Julia Child too, and countless other gourmet chefs. This is a very, very good cookbook and Greene is (was) a lovely man whose enthusiasm for cooking and eating is infectious. I rate this book among the best --co-equal in my cooking with James Beard, Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Andrew Schloss's Cooking Slow, and David Waltuck's Staff Meals from Chanterelle. It's just .... GOOD.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Learning to Listen: The Jazz Journey of Gary Burton: An Autobiography; Author: Visit Amazon's Gary Burton Page; Review: It puzzled me that it took so long for a book to appear on Gary Burtons life and career because there is no question that he is a great artist, an innovator both in technique (the four-mallet technique) and playing. He has also been, over the past forty some years, one of jazzs great combo leaders, nurturing and working with a constellation of superior players. There are, to start, the amazing string of first rate guitarists who have played in his quartets and quintets, from Larry Coryell through Jerry Hahn, Sam Brown, Mick Goodrick, Pat Metheny and John Scofield (probably the most successful of them), up to teen phenomenon Julian Lange, who started with Burton at age sixteen and has played with him at least through 2013. There are also sidemen drummers Roy Haynes and Bob Moses, bassist Steve Swallow, and on and on, and the occasional unions with other musicians the duets with pianist Chick Corea, an album with Keith Jarrett, another with French violin great Stephanne Grappelli, and still another with nuevo tango giant Astor Piazzolla (and after his death, two more with Piazzollas great quintet). And his apprenticeships with the George Shearing quintet (which had six people) and Stan Getzs quartet. Listing the people Burton has played with is like listing my own past as a jazz listener and aficionado. Duster, his first (and very mild) fusion album appeared just when I was making the leap from teaching high school to entering grad school full time and I bought Country Roads and Other Places, an album that fused jazz and country music, the day our son was born. (Hes now 46.) Every time I play the tune The Green Mountains it reminds me of our son as a small boy, joyous, sunny and always moving forward. As you might expect of an artist who has also been a success as music educator, first dean and then executive vice president at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Burton explains things well. His anecdotes often presented in sidebarsabout Shearing, Swallow, Getz, Corea, Piazzollaand others (Carla Bley, Miles, Mingus, Ellington, Milt Jackson [who for a long time nursed an irrational dislike of Burton], Bill Evans, and Burtons antecedents on vibes, Red Norvo and Lionel Hampton) make this a near irresistible book for a jazz nut like me. I liked also Burtons account of his early years when he started playing vibes, his father had to build a platform for him to stand on so he could reach the keys; in his early years as a performer, he played wherever he could and with whomever he could get a gig with. He idolized pianist Bill Evans (who didnt?) but when they finally got together for a session, nothing worked: there was a discontinuity in the flow of their two separate musics, and the tapes had to be deep-sixed. Much later, someone was it Eddie Gomez?told him that the same thing had happened when other outside musicians had played with Evanss trio. There was something about the way Evans and his cohorts phrased music; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: How Judges Think; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard A. Posner Page; Review: Posner is pretty much the Go-To Guy in legal studies today. You may disagree with his conclusions but he won't bore you (hes a forceful writer), you won't find it hard to follow him (he writes clearly), and you won't wonder whether he has a hidden agenda (he is open and forthright in stating his sources, as well as any reservations he has about his own conclusions drawn from them). Hes academic (well documented and well reasoned) but not overly academic: his observations are always rooted in experience, for he is both an eminent teacher of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago and an acting federal circuit court judge, with years of practice on the bench. His books are not easy reads he explores complicated issues and doesnt simplify thembut youll never get lost in them, because he is an exceptionally articulate explainer. Years ago, when I was a history professor at a small womens college in the east, I taught a course on historical method, and it was writers (thinkers) (scholars) like Posner I wanted to introduce to my students, not that he writes like historians do but that he writes forcefully, sparingly, lucidly and compellingly, and persuasion is just as important a part of any scholars business as explication. This is the third book by Posner that I have read. All three books were good. Two including this oneare superb, models of engaged scholarship. (If you haven't read anything by him before, I recommend you start with Reflections on Judging, 2013.) Posner is It. Arguing against legalism and various forms of moralism, Posner argues for a restrained pragmatic approach to the law, in line with his models on the bench, especially Holmes (The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience), who accepted that the written law only went so far and that beyond that point, the prudent judge crossed from enforcing pre-existing, stringent rules to making new law. Law in action is imprecise but not amorphous. In our system the law as it is enforced in courts is created by judges, using legal propositions as raw materials. He does not argue that a judge can make any law he wants. Rather, he argues that in any but the most constrained case, the judge must choose among courses of action that are not automatically (because the law tells the judge exactly what to do) clean --or should I say clear? From this simple premise that judges are de facto legislatorsPosner moves to a critique of many, maybe most academic commentators on the law, and a scathing critique of what is taught in even the best law schools in our country. He has, is in other books, harsh words to say about Justice Scalias supposed originalism, which he finds inadequate and self-deceiving even Scalia admitted that he moved beyond it at times. If I were a lawyer, I would read this book NOW.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Magician's Land: A Novel (Magicians Trilogy); Author: Visit Amazon's Lev Grossman Page; Review: The Magicians Land is the third and final installment of Grossmans superb fantasy tale of magician-with-angst Quentin Coldwater and his friends, most but not al l of whom attended or graduated from the magically camouflaged Brakebills Preparatory College of Magic. Quentin has been the lead character in all three novels, a man growing up but always faintly out of his proper place. That indeed has been the dominant theme of these wondrous novels: Quentins exceptionally slow growth to maturity. And part of the reason that these books resonate so strongly with readers is that Quentins dilemma isn't so far different from most of ours: everyone thinks him(her)self special but the world doesnt always realize our specialness and the adjustment between uncaring world and self deeply caring about its own trajectory is all too common to our own experience of living. Thats one of the reason these nooks are so affecting: they tap into our personally felt experiences and feelings. Join that with a glorious fantasy adventure and you have a recipe for success unequalled since Philip Pullmans somewhat similar His Dark Materials trilogy. Neither Pullman nor Grossman espouses a world where bravery, virtue and a positive outlook resolve all. Rather, they appropriate the materials of epic adventure and the excitement of magic to write high adventures that feature heroes and heroines we could conceivably see as us, though more magicked of course. All of the characters of the first two books come back in this one. Eliot, now High King of the magical kingdom of Fillory, formerly gay but more than that snide, is now responsible and much more human: he truly cares about the fate of Fillory, which is going through a crisis well, not a crisis, more like Armageddon, the End, the alt-worlds final Running Down. Janet, bitchy as ever, is there to help him, but so are Poppy and Josh, and Julia, always problematic, hovers around the edge for part of the story. There are new characters as swell, most notably Plum, about whom I won't say more than that there are surprises in her past that feed directly into the story and history of Fillory. There is an even more startling twist to this story but youll have to read it to find out what it is. There is a lovely but almost throwaway paragraph forty pages into the book that captures its essence: Quentin is back in Brakebills, ten years older and no longer king of Fillory, just a very junior and temporary junior instructor there. "Pacing the aisles of a silent classroom, surveying the exposed napes of rows and rows of students bent over their fall exams, he realized hed lost his old double vision, the one that was always looking for something more, somewhere else, the world behind the world. It was his oldest possession, and hed let it slip away without even noticing it was gone. He was becoming someone else, someone new." Thats what this book is about ultimately, growing up and becoming someone else, someone new. But en route the author tells; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bangkok Haunts; Author: Visit Amazon's John Burdett Page; Review: John Burdetts Bangkok series, featuring Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, are not only first-rate mysteries, they are weird. They may be the weirdest mystery stories around today. For their match, you have to go back to William Marshalls Yellowthread Street mysteries, and for weirdness, George Baxts stories about the gay, black, eventually transsexual (or was he just transvestite? Its been a long time since I read them last) detective Pharaoh Love. Burdetts novels have in common with Marshalls an exotic and Asian-- setting (Hong Kong for Marshall, Bangkok for Burdett) and both writers have a robust sense of humor, an awareness of anomaly. Their detectives seem to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense out of the senseless: its clear a crime has been committed but not always as clear why. As for Baxt, theres not only the weirdness but Sonchais assistant Lek is transgendering no operation as yet but hormones and hes clearly out. The crime in this installment is a snuff film: a prostitute strangled on camera. The death of a Third World prostitute wouldnt be much of a deal in corrupt Bangkok certainly Sonchais exceedingly venal boss, Inspector Vikorn doesnt think so- but earlier, she had been for a short while Sonchais sex partner and he has never gotten over it. What follows includes, among other things, a medical examiner who has videotaped the ghosts of the dead having sex in her morgue at night, a photograph of a man being trampled to death by an elephant (hes been tied up and put inside of a bamboo ball and the elephant enticed to push it around and then stomp on it), a female FBI agent who falls in love with transgendering Lek, the Thai concept of gatdanyu (a kind of blood debt), a handful of ex-Khmer mercenaries, a lot a lot of action and more than one deaths, none of them natural. I love these books so when I see one I haven't read yet in a bookstore, I pick it up (which is why I just now got to this 2007 installment). Stuff this good doesnt get old.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome; Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Beard Page; Review: This history of Rome from ca. 753 BC to 212 AD will benefit and be appreciated by scholar and lay reader alike, so good is it and so well written. Oxford scholar Beard (he Fires of Vesuvius, Confronting the Classics) is eminently familiar with the voluminous writings of the Roman masters but equally at ease in discussing the lives, actions and thoughts of the more obscure citizens of Rome, its subject peoples and its allies. SPQR is the acronym for the Senate and People of Rome: this book traces the rise of the republic and its institutions (a process nowhere as tidy as presented by Roman authors of the day), the adaptations made as Rome grew in power and geographic reach, and the republics eventual subornation and demise from Sulla on. As she showed in her Sather Classical Lectures, delivered at UC Berkeley and published in 2014 under the title, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up, Beard is a fluent and often witty writer. She makes complicated truths understandable if not always simple, and along the way she tells you enough about how the evidence was uncovered and interpreted that you, the reader, can judge the results. Thats what the very best historians do and Beard is one of the best. Drawing on more than fifty years of research and writing on the subject, she has many insights to impart. Especially intriguing are her observations on how the Romans dealt with the problems of (a) incorporating ever larger numbers of client and subject peoples into their empire and (b) governing vast numbers of people spread widely across three continents with only a thin veneer of on-site Roman oversight. Also refreshing is to read an author who does not automatically believe everything bad that has been written about the more notorious of the emperors (Caligula, Nero).; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Razor Girl: A novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Carl Hiaasen Page; Review: On the first day of February, sunny but cold as a frogs balls, a man named Lane Coolman stepped off a flight at Miami International, rented a mainstream Buick and headed south to meet a man in Key West. He nearly made it. Thats the leadoff paragraph in this latest installment of Hiaasens accounts of the screwy world of southern Florida (in this case, its the Keys) crime and mayhem. It starts with a woman bashing her car into the one ahead of her, which is Lanes. Her excuse is that she was distracted: she was shaving the hair on her private parts while driving to a date with her boyfriend of the night. But this is not a surprise in a Hiaasen novelits all a scam. Shes been paid to slam into the car so her colleague, a near-no-neck named Zeto (he later electrocutes himself by standing in a puddle of water while recharging the battery on his Tesla), can highjack the other cars driver who, he thinks, owes mega-bucks to a very bad dude. Except shes bumped into the wrong car. The drivers name is a parody of Hollywood agent names, Lane Coolman, but he isn't the man they want at all. But he is agent for Buck Nance, the star of a terribly cheap, terribly scuzzy reality show called Bayou Brethren, about a family of High Red Neck chicken farmers in Deep Cajun Country. Oh, just so you know. Buck isn't a Cajun at all though he talks like one. And he hates chickens and he and his two brothers aren't named Nance. They were originally an accordion band out of Wisconsin, recruited to reality TV because they looked like Deep South trash and they didn't cost much to hire. After all, who said that reality TV had to be real? But now they're real popular and that becomes a problem later in the book when weird things happen to Buck et al. The characters pile on. The hit(wo)man driver is Merry Mansfield. (We never learn her real name.) Theres an ex-cop, now restaurant inspector, named Andrew Yancey. (Later, when Merry has the initials A. Y. tattooed on her Yancey worries that it stands for his name but she assures him it really means Always Yours.) Theres Martin Trebeau, a conman whose shtick is stealing sand from one beach and moving it to another. (Climate changes ensure that Floridas beaches always need new sand. Without it, why would tourists keep coming there?) Theres Big Noogie Aeola (yes, his last name evokes the word aioli) who is a Mafia sub-boss, Florida-based: Martin and he end up partners in a beach reclamation business named Sedimental Journeys. And theres Benny Blister Krill, submoronic, near-homicidal and with a Jones on for Bayou Brethren. There are lots of other people most of whose names sound vaguely risible. And there are two six-pound giant Gambian pouched rats. You don't want to know any more about them but Hiaasen assures us that they are real. This is Hiaasens 27th book and his 13th comic crime caper; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits: A Novel; Author: Mark Binelli; Review: If you're looking for a novel with a conventional beginning, middle and end, this book isn't it. If you're willing to accept it for what it is a fictionalized reminiscence on the life of one of the most unauthentic and bizarre of all rock and roll performers, one-hit wonder Screamin Jay Hawkins, then youll dig it. It starts somewhere well into Hawkinss professional life, its not clear exactly when, goes back to his beginnings (abandoned at birth, Native American foster parents, childhood and schooling in Cleveland, Ohio), moves through his stay in the Army (1943 on) and on to his record career. It ends with Hawkins an old man and a failure, on his sixth wife and living in Paris. The final chapter is set in Hawaii and though based on facts, is pure fiction. The old rocker has been reduced to playing house piano in a run down lounge for an audience that couldn't care less what he does. He meets a young woman who is intrigued enough by his persona he still wears a long cape and espouses a theatrical and menacing look. He talks to her about meeting Presley (didnt think Presley was very good), reminisces about an encounter with voodoo, and leaves her, filled with anticipation, having cast or not cast a spell on you. As in his one true hit, I Put a Spell on You. Think of this book as fiction by riffing: its more separate hits than a continuous melody line and the best of the riffs are very good: the account of the original recording session that produced I Put a Spell on You; a meeting with Alan Freed and Freeds advice on how to market himself; a demonic chapter set in Alaska where Hawkins, still a soldier, boxes the local champion to his surprise, for the first time in his life, his white companions are cheering him on (Army vs. locals trumps whites vs. blacks) and Binelli does a superb job conveying Hawkinss complicated reaction to white adulation; Hawkinss bizarre introduction to Fats Domino. In 1980 (this is from the book), Hawkins told a companion, I wish I could be who I was before I was me. Binelli does a bangup job capturing what that must have felt like to be Screamin Jay. That doesnt mean that Hawkins was like Binelli painted him, but to capture a historical figure as elusive as Hawkins and create a picture of him that seems authentic was a titanic task.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Innocents (A Quinn Colson Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Ace Atkins Page; Review: This is the latest installment in Atkinss ongoing series of south noir crime novels about Quinn Colson, ex-Ranger and sometime sheriff of Tibbehah County, in very Deep South Mississippi. Like the earlier books, it is first rate, just as good a novel about the South as it is a crime novel. It starts with a meth-addled down-and-outer who cons an elderly woman into letting him enter her house: he steals her twelve-gauge Browning and Kawasaki four-wheeler and takes off for the hinterlands before the sheriff arrives. If this were an Elmore Leonard novel, the story might continue on this almost-comic level, a tale of under-leveraged criminal types fumbling and bumbling through one caper after another. But Atkins writes darker stuff and soon this novel turns very dark indeed. Its ending is gut-wrenching in the pessimism it implies about mans capacity for evil-doing. About a third of the way through the book, a horrible crime occurs. A young woman is discovered staggering down the center of the highway leading into Tibbehah. Shes already dead but doesnt know it and someone has poured fuel over her and lit it. By the time the fires out, her corpse is burned to a crisp. The rest of the novel details the efforts of sheriff Lillie Vergil, formerly Quinns deputy but now his boss, and Quinn, formerly the sheriff but now her newly appointed deputy, to find out what happened to the dead woman, and who did it and why. The result is crime writing at its best. But to write that Ace Atkins is a Southern crime master, as one of the blurbs describes him, understates things. Its like writing that William Faulkner wrote good books about the South the statement is true but not true enough. It doesnt capture how accurate Atkinss judgment on people and things is or how fine a writer of action fiction he has become. True, he uses the conventions of the genre: the stand-alone hero, steadily growing incidents of violence and risk, the massing of bad things happening that portend failure but in the end is turned into victory (though in this case, its a highly qualified victory because nothing bad ever totally ends in a county like Tibbehah, Mississippi. Atkins is skillful in building and maintaining tension -- his books, after all, are marketed as thrillers. But he transcends the genre in describing the cesspool of violence, greed, backbiting and corruption that is this Deep, Deep South county, Tibbehah. Another virtue of the series is that each installment builds on what happened in earlier ones but each episode can be read alone without loss of understanding or readerly pleasure. As is apparent, I find this book a success from start to finish. Id hate to live in Tibbehah County but I sure like reading about it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Best Man; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Peck Page; Review: This book teaches a good and necessary lesson about tolerancebut so well and interestingly is it delivered that it doesnt seem like you're being required to learn anything as you read it, just enjoy it. And enjoy it I did. The apparent effortless of Pecks prose, written for students between the ages of nine and twelve, and the easy flow of the narrative, hide artfulness. Its no surprise: with his childrens and adult fiction, Peck has won almost every prize available for childrens fiction and even a nomination for a National Book Award. This time its the story of a young boy, Archer Magill, whos just about to become a teenager and who tells us the story of his family, friends and classmates as he negotiates the span of time between the first marriage in which he took part five, he was one of the ring bearers, and everything that could go wrong that day did, leaving him with an embarrassing video clip on the internetuntil the present day when hes twelve and involved in another marriage ceremony, this time as best man --for both parties, for two of the men he loves most in the whole world. All of this fits into a narrative of a very stable three-generational family with just enough quirkiness in it to have grown up more concerned about compassion and tolerance than about setting boundaries on whom one can love and not. There is a good deal of humor delivered along the way. Nothing is stretched beyond the believable, nothing pushed for effect, and Archer is a delightful narrator. There is a good deal of humor delivered along the way.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hell Fire (Inspector Sejer Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Karin Fossum Page; Review: Three separate and distinct narratives alternate throughout the book until the very end when they suddenly, and tragically, come together. There is a mother and a son and theres another mother and her son, and finally, there is the policeman who is investigating the brutal murder of one pair. The policeman is Fossums series protagonist, Inspector Sejer, though he is less in the forefront in this book than in last years The Drowned Boy. For most of the book, there is little hope of solving the case there are no witnesses and few clues, and the crime seems random. When things do come together, it is almost anticlimax because the focus in this fiction is less on detection than on the unfolding of family dynamics. Typical of Scandinavian crime fiction, there is a large element of social conscience on display but Fossum doesnt hit you over the head with it. As well written as the novel is, the plot seems faintly contrived: most violent crime isn't so over-determined by the victims complicated past.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Murder and the Making of English CSI; Author: Ian Burney; Review: The topic of this book is one worth studying so I started it disposed to approve of it. Alas, that soon vanished. This book is so badly, almost interminably, written that whatever it has to offer to the student of modern crime practice is drowned in awkward, obfuscatory, puffed up language, making the book an irritation to read, much less digest. Books written for scholarly audiences are often less exciting than popular fiction or nonfiction. Precision of expression is the goal, not emotive thrust or even vigor. I take that for granted when reading a book like this, which, the authors state, is written for both a scholarly (specialist) audience and a general one. But even by the standards of academic writing, this is a limp noodle. A trudge. Let me illustrate. Here is a sentence near the start (pg. 7) in which the authors try to communicate the scope and focus of their research: The pages that follow feature networks of fields and labs, regimes of expertise and objectivity, incommunicable knowledge, matter out of place, boundary objects, and spatial production. Read that sentence again. In this context, what really does it mean to write incommunicable knowledge, much less spatial production, introduced at this early stage in the book with no qualifiers or explainers? There is too the authors dreadful love of pompous, pseudo-academic qualifiers, as on pg. 71, where they write of pathologist Spilsburys spatiotemporal distance form the work carried out by police investigators at a 1924 crime scene (one of two highlighted by the authors). What does the word spatiotemporal add here, other than an air of academic respectability? Nothing! It just sounds, I suppose, more impressive. At least to academics. This wouldnt matter if writing well didn't matter in scholarly texts. But it does. Writing well counts just as much in scholarly writing as in popular writing. It just has a different end. Precision and exactness, the slow and detailed unraveling of a train of evidence or thought. Thats what good academic writing is about. Did I say anything about puffery? In this case, the authors inattention to, or tone deafness towards, concision in language works against their end, which has to be communicating, readability. Thats not the end of it. They also write awkwardly but awkwardness is not a sin in academic writing. Puffery, though, is. (My side notes range from awk to turgid to awful.) Id like to herald this book because its subject interests me but this book is a loser. (Burney is director of the University of Manchesters Centre for the History or Science, Technology, and Medicine and author of Bodies of Evidence and Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination. Pemberton is a postdoctoral fellow at the center and coauthor of Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830-2000 and Leech [which is about leeches].); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: War and Turpentine: A Novel; Author: Stefan Hertmans; Review: This novel, about a grandson (Stefan Hertmans) discovering his grandfathers life in the old mans journals, won the AKO Literature Prize for Dutch language literature in 2014. His grandfather, Urbain Martien, was born in 1891, the son of a church painter, a humble man who was always poor and always ill and whose livelihood was the restoration and embellishment of aging church paintings and frescos. After his fathers death, Urbain, fourteen, became the principal support of his mother and siblings, doing grunt labor in an iron foundry. Then he had an epiphany, or something close to it, and realized that whatever he did to earn his living, what he wanted to do his passionwas to paint (and draw). After the foundry, Urbain spent four years in a military school. That too didn't satisfy him although he showed, even that early, that he could be a natural soldier if he had to be. The first part of this book, resolutely old-fashioned in shape and content, is about these early years, up to the start of the Great War which would change Urbains life irrevocably. His grand passions were treetops, clouds and folds in fabric. This part is rich in sensory impression olfactory, visual, auditory, tactile. Here is an example of how even a hard life can still stir memory. Reading the journals, Hertmans reconstructs in his head a vision of the world his still-young grandfather grew up in. "The world was full of smells that now have largely disappeared. A tannery gave off its tenacious stench in the thin September mist; the tenders with their loads of raw coal pulled in and out of the station in the dark winter months; the odour of horse droppings in the streets in the early-morning hours could create the illusion for the half-slumbering boy by the draughty window, that he was in the countryside somewhere, as could the smell of hay, herbs and grass that still pervaded the city. The penetrating odour of old wood and damp burlap the closed courtyards [that] smelled of Brussels sprouts trimmings, horse manure scraped off the streets and drying tobacco leaves. Describing his own grandmother, born in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, he said that her black apron he called it a pinaforesmelled like the offal of young rabbits." A paragraph further on, he writes: childhood years wrapped in the sulphurous fumes of early factories, the memory of the street hawkers cries, the slam of the thin wooden door of the public toilet at the end of the alley by an ivy-covered wall that smelled of urine and nettles. Smells first, last and always, the feeling of cold around oneself, colors and sounds. Then came the War. The young man, Urbain, enlisted and his life changed. Painter became soldier. The material for the first two thirds of the book come from three notebooks, roughly 600 pages in all, left behind by Urbain and bequeathed to his grandson, who happens to be one of the greatest living Flemish poets In them, he detailed his life and thoughts before the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Fourth Figure (The Pieter Van In Mysteries); Author: Pieter Aspe; Review: This crime novel by the prolific Pieter Aspe originally appeared in Belgium in 1998. It now appears in translation as part of a growing list of police detective e stories featuring Belgian police commissioner Pieter Van In of Van In published by Open Road. In 2001, Aspes Zoenoffer (roughly translatable as Peace Offering) won Belgiums Hercule Poirot award for best mystery novel of the year. A young woman is found dead. With the discovery that she may have been involved in a satanic sect, a simple suicide becomes something more than that. Complications abound and soon Van In and his sidekick sergeant Guido are chasing after two other possible Satanists and the shadow of a third (Venex? Who is Venex?) lies behind them. As all this goes on, Van Ins very pregnant wife, District Attorney Hannelore Martens, draws near to term. Van Ins boss forces him to drag around a beautiful young investigative reporter who wants to profile the case. Romantic complications follow. The subplot with the reporter highlights whats missing in this book. Depth. Substance. The book is well enough written, the hero adequately portrayed though nothing to write home about, and all sorts of things mostly badhappen en route to the denouement. But its zipped through, not left around long enough for the reader to bond to it. The villains motivations, when they finally are exposed in the last scene, are both too sensational and not believable. Its hard to believe so much wrongdoing would result from such a puny cause. The ending is too abrupt, the brief scene of violence in it more telegraphed than described. This is the second Van In mystery I have read. I liked the first (From Bruges With Love, 2015) but this one is a yawner. The books jacket cover states that it was nominated for the Hercule Poirot award in 1998. Im not sure why.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: War and Turpentine: A novel - Kindle edition; Author: Stefan Hertmans; Review: This novel, about a grandson (Stefan Hertmans) discovering his grandfathers life in the old mans journals, won the AKO Literature Prize for Dutch language literature in 2014. His grandfather, Urbain Martien, was born in 1891, the son of a church painter, a humble man who was always poor and always ill and whose livelihood was the restoration and embellishment of aging church paintings and frescos. After his fathers death, Urbain, fourteen, became the principal support of his mother and siblings, doing grunt labor in an iron foundry. Then he had an epiphany, or something close to it, and realized that whatever he did to earn his living, what he wanted to do his passionwas to paint (and draw). After the foundry, Urbain spent four years in a military school. That too didn't satisfy him although he showed, even that early, that he could be a natural soldier if he had to be. The first part of this book, resolutely old-fashioned in shape and content, is about these early years, up to the start of the Great War which would change Urbains life irrevocably. His grand passions were treetops, clouds and folds in fabric. This part is rich in sensory impression olfactory, visual, auditory, tactile. Here is an example of how even a hard life can still stir memory. Reading the journals, Hertmans reconstructs in his head a vision of the world his still-young grandfather grew up in. "The world was full of smells that now have largely disappeared. A tannery gave off its tenacious stench in the thin September mist; the tenders with their loads of raw coal pulled in and out of the station in the dark winter months; the odour of horse droppings in the streets in the early-morning hours could create the illusion for the half-slumbering boy by the draughty window, that he was in the countryside somewhere, as could the smell of hay, herbs and grass that still pervaded the city. The penetrating odour of old wood and damp burlap the closed courtyards [that] smelled of Brussels sprouts trimmings, horse manure scraped off the streets and drying tobacco leaves. Describing his own grandmother, born in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, he said that her black apron he called it a pinaforesmelled like the offal of young rabbits." A paragraph further on, he writes: childhood years wrapped in the sulphurous fumes of early factories, the memory of the street hawkers cries, the slam of the thin wooden door of the public toilet at the end of the alley by an ivy-covered wall that smelled of urine and nettles. Smells first, last and always, the feeling of cold around oneself, colors and sounds. Then came the War. The young man, Urbain, enlisted and his life changed. Painter became soldier. The material for the first two thirds of the book come from three notebooks, roughly 600 pages in all, left behind by Urbain and bequeathed to his grandson, who happens to be one of the greatest living Flemish poets In them, he detailed his life and thoughts before the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Uprooted; Author: Visit Amazon's Naomi Novik Page; Review: Novik is best known for her series of novels of an alt-past --the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon-- in which dragons exist and both the English and the French employ them as warships, breathing, sentient, loyal weapons of war. With Uprooted, Novik spreads her wings into the Brothers Grimm land: witches, sorcerers, kings, queens, princes and nobles, and evil creatures of many kinds. As with the Grimms, the most ominous happenings come from the forest, a tainted, corrupted, maleficent Wood that steadily encroaches on humankinds land and lives. Agnieszka is a peasant girl. She lives in a sleepy, shabby but pleasant town on the edge of the Wood. Every ten years, a great sorcerer known as the Dragon comes to them and demands a young maiden to work for him in his tower fortress. Agnieszka knows he won't take her, not when beautiful Kasia, her best friend, is standing next to her. But he does. Its not a union made in heaven. Contrary to rumor, he doesnt ravage her but she irritates him in almost everything he does. And though it turns out she too is a magic maker, shes a singularly inefficient witch, who is as likely to cause chaos in his lab or library as to do something useful. But as the book goes on, Agnieszka discovers that she is a witch, a powerful one too. Its just that she does her own kind of magic. Soon it is enlisted in a prolonged struggle to contain and either destroy or purify the evil Wood. Uprooted is not my favorite kind of fantasy novel but its well told with convincing characters, a prolonged and sensible narrative line. The descriptions of magic making of the Dragon or Anieszka or both together doing their thingis exceptional. The reviewer for NPR said that when you picked it up, you wouldnt want to put it down. That wasn't true for me but Im glad I read it and when I finished it, I was satisfied enough.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Vicious (Villains); Author: Visit Amazon's V. E. Schwab Page; Review: In both plotting and characterization, Vicious is comic-book like, but in this case thats not a bad thing. Comic books cut to the chase. Theyre full of energy and clearly define the difference between good and bad. Except this time. Because Vicious isn't about the conflict between super-Hero and super-Villain. This time, both the supermen are bad. (I should say super people two of the four subsidiary characters are women who have super powers too.) It started ten years ago. At the start of their senior year in college, friends and roommates Victor and Eli choose to study EOs, ExtraOrdinary human beings, people with abnormal powers. Eli surmises they are created out of stress in a moment of near death. Create an adrenaline rush and combine it with a will to survive, then almost kill a person and then revive him (her) and sometimes new powers emerge. Eli is the first of the two to try it and survive. He emerges with the power to heal himself. For the remaining ten years covered in the book, he can be wounded but not killed, his body heals with amazing rapidity, and he never ages. Victors experience is jolting: after a first failed attempt, he tries again and revives with the power to transmit intense, even killing, pain to anyone around him. Before he knows how to handle his new power, he kills someone and in the process, convinces Eli, who has a messianic strain in him, to attack him. Victor is wounded near death again. Eli convinces the police that Victor is insane and a murderer and Victor spends the next ten years closed in a cell in a maximum security prison. Now hes escaped and Eli is his target. Two EO teams, four superpowers, on a collision course against each other. One of the women has the power to persuade: what she tells a person, the person does. Another brings back the dead. Victor, pain. Eli, healing. Eli out to eradicate all EOs as abominations in the eyes of God. Victor, out for revenge. Its great fun, made even more so by the lack of one side to root for.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Cauliflower: A Novel; Author: Nicola Barker; Review: The Cauliflower, Man Booker-shortlisted author Barkers fictionalized novel of the extraordinary nineteenth century Hindu savant-saint Sri Ramakrishna, is an exotic amalgam of reported reminiscence, fantasized interludes, a journal entry and later a letter from an Englishman (amateur) anthropologist and the bluestocking daughter of one of his acquaintances (back home I think its not clear) and the moanings, diatribes and second guessings delivered by the sometime narrator of this tale, the swamis puzzled, frustrated but ultimately devoted nephew Hriday. There is a virtuosic travelogue, eleven pages long, delivered as though seen through a miniaturized camera suspended from the neck of a small, fast bird (a swift) one of the conceits of this book is that someone, probably the author of this book, which is always referred to as Cauliflower TM, is making a film about the swamis life. There are also frequent haiku interjected into the text, passages from The Song of Solomon, and a musing (delivered by the author) on the antithetical relationship of Mother Teresa and Sri Ramakrishna to their gods, the former worshipping God in her work but no longer feeling a connection to God inside herself and the latter seeing God or gods in everything and everywhere so that his life was a series of discontinuous attempts to worship, almost to occupy Gods space. (An interjection: my favorite haiku is this one, advice given by Sri Ramakrishna to his devotees ca. 1882: Live like the mudfish- Even though it dwells in filth its skin stays spotless.) Ramakrishna was a guru who [would] not be called a guru, a priest who [would] not follow tradition, a wise man who [would] not read or write or lecture or develop a philosophy or tolerate publicity. Everything is contested. [He inhabited] a liminal space, an air bubble within history. In his life and behavior, there was little difference between swami and mad man or idiot. One time, he decided he must live like a monkey, so henceforth he did, driving Hriday almost up the wall, until hed finally had enough of that life. Another time, he dressed like and acted like a woman in worship of his beloved goddess Mother Kali. How many ways can one man hope to see God? lamented Hriday. But thats the point of this (to us) very odd life. For a westerner, rationalist and monotheistic (or non-theistic), the swamis life is fascinating but often bewildering but then in our world, gods aren't everywhere and the world isn't also nothing. As to the title, a cauliflower isn't introduced, other than as self-reference to the book itself, until page 261, when a western observer mentions a devotee bringing the swami as cauliflower, and its gone from the book by page 264, because Hriday won't let Uncle eat the cauliflower, his stomach having been ruined for so robust a food by years of abstinence. Its hard to wrap up a review of a book like this because its not a book that wraps itself up, though Ramakrishna does die in the end. The prose is playful, virtuosic, and daring. It flows; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy; Author: Visit Amazon's Cathy O'Neil Page; Review: Data scientist ONeil comes with killer chops for this kind of book: she has worked both in academia and the business world, headed a team of eager beaver math wonks at a hedge fund, built predictive models for several startups, and started a program in data journalism at Columbia. Shes authored a book on doing data science (thats its title, Doing Data Science) and appears weekly on the Slate Money podcast. The message of the book is simple and clear: when numbers are crunched together to predict or influence peoples behavior, the people fall through the cracks. Outdated theories of behavior, misuse or over-simplification of theories (e.g., police use of the broken windows theory of community policing, which now, in crime prediction programs, reinforces the exact opposite of the behavior it was originally intended to encourage), the use of proxy data for data thats either prohibited from being used by law or unattainable (read her remarks on teacher assessment software packages) it all works to discourage creative thinking and subtle distinctions in decision making. Who suffers most? The disadvantaged and inarticulate. Most of the time, they don't even know they're being exploited or discriminated against and the predictive algorithms used to determine their suitability for this or that venture are opaque, unreachable and thus, for the most part, unquestioned even when often seriously flawed. The chapter on how for profit universities and colleges find and recruit their students will make your blood boil, as will the verdict on teacher evaluation software programs. Shes not a mathematical Luddite. Data mining is a part of our future that won't go away just because we wish it would but it needs to be approached with a heavy dose of suspicion and humility. An example of data mining that she thinks works well? Its use in professional sports to fine tune and improve team performance. But the sports wonks know their inputs --theyre direct, not proxiesand when their predictions go awry, they make changes (error adjustment). In sports, they're not working outside a black box.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Rain in Portugal: Poems; Author: Visit Amazon's Billy Collins Page; Review: Fifty-nine poems in 111 pages. This is a book of sharp impressions and observations, nothing developed at length. Thats both its strength and its weakness: you can absorb a poem in a flash but what you absorb is uneven in quality. Collins is an accomplished craftsman, known and admired as a poet, but many of these poems seem throwaways: apercus, jeux desprit, but nothing to remember or even to spend time over savoring them. There are a lot of references to painters and paintings and other writers (Basho in Ireland is good), ditto jazz musicians The Five Spot, 1964 details an evening listening to the marvelous multi-reed (multi-instrument) player Rahsaan Roland Kirk but its used more to proffer a lesson about life than to describe what the instrumentalist was doing and its too short (one page) for the lesson to have much content. He nails what it is like to be an only child (I never wished for a sibling) in the poem of the same title (The Only Child) and a poem about still life painters is a stunner. (Bravura) But every time I came across a poem that stuck with me for a moment, another followed that fell flat. (Note to J. Alfred Prufrock and Microscopic Pants are almost embarrassing.) I approached this book with anticipation. Collins is a good poet, sometimes an outstanding one. But this is not his best book. Not by a long shot.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: A Country Road, A Tree: A novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Jo Baker Page; Review: This exceptionally well written novel follows the life and thoughts of the astonishing twentieth-century poet, novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett from 1939-1945. At the start, Beckett has just returned to Paris where he lives with his longtime partner and eventual wife Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil. Soon the Germans invade. Their lives grow steadily grimmer and friends and colleagues start to disappear. Beckett joins the Resistance. His cell is betrayed and Beckett and Suzanne have to flee. This novel is good from start to close but the readers interest will pick up a notch in the section detailing the pairs desperate flight. They settle in the south of France and Beckett becomes involved with the Maquis a second time. One of the excellences of this novel is its intimation that there are echoes in Becketts closed in, gnomic prose of Becketts situation in these desperate, claustrophobic years when he endured physical deprivation, hunger and pain (the deplorable condition of his boots and feet is a recurrent preoccupation of his). By then, his prose style had already been shaped --clipped, concrete, stripped of all extra verbiage, hinting at feelings rather than spreading them across the page, a language both constrained and evocative. It is easy to see his post-Paris experience as a real life version of Waiting for Godot. The people Samuel and Suzanne depend on for their lives show up later than expected; lifes pleasures narrow down to transient, concrete things; he must live through long stretches of purposeless waiting; he feels in his bones the loss of control over his life. The book ends after the Germans have been defeated: the poet returns to Paris and Suzanne. The challenge in writing a book such as this, about a writer (thinker, feeler) who had such a resolutely unique way of expressing himself, is to capture the tone of the writers style without sounding false to ones own narrative. There are a handful of passages early in this modest-sized book where Baker over-reaches --the prose seems hyper-loaded-- but it only takes a few pages before the prose settles in. What emerges and continues through the rest of the book is a near-seamless join between the sensory images of the external world and Becketts much more concealed inner feelings. Baker admirably succeeds in getting under the skin of this famously opaque and elusive communicator. Beckett is one of the giants of English prose. We want to know him better and his own writings don't make the task easy. By a leap of her writerly intuition, and hard work behind it, Baker has helped us a bit- to know this giant who changed the way language can be used. Heres Beckett, writing again after a long dry spell. Its 1943. He has two more years of the war ahead of him. Writing never seemed more extraneous but hes writing still. "The prose creeps. Notebooks fill. A soft evening in Ireland, a redbrick villa, and the elderly and lame and syphilitic. An unseen man upstairs, dishing out pabulum, approval and approbrium [sic.], entirely arbitrarily / And when he surfaces; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Night School: A Jack Reacher Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Lee Child Page; Review: This is Lee Childs 21st Jack Reacher and hes still going strong with no let-up. As big --6 5 and 250 plus pounds-- and strong as Reacher is, hes never just muscle. The books in this series have always been about detection as well as physical violence. Theres plenty of both in this installment, which is set before Reacher leaves the Army (Military Police) to become a nomad roaming our country. But if you weighed the two elements on a scale, this one would probably come out as about two-thirds detection/chase and one-third violent explosions of action. Both parts are good in this latest episode. Childs choice of heroes, an oversized but fit not beefy career soldier, smart as can be but trained to look at the world as a series of percentage choices so much a chance of success if you do this, so much if you do that, nothing at all if you don't do anythingand possessed of hard earned knowledge about the world of international bad guys and mayhem. Theres good sex too because Reacher has normal appetites and women, no surprise, find him attractive. Its never overdone though, as neither are the action scenes. Child stays inside Reachers head bright but no genius, street and army smart, but also, in some ways, extraordinarily literal. Reacher doesnt have flights of fancy. He weighs odds, assesses them against his past experience, and moves ahead without concern for the odds (why should you be too concerned when you are 6 5, 250 pounds and fit as a fiddle, also not averse to inflicting pain if delay would have led to him receiving it instead) regardless of the risk to him. Hes not a knight in shining armor but he is a hero, fearless but not foolish. The story in this episode of the Reacher saga is about an AWOL soldier lost somewhere in Europe or maybe only in Hamburg, the rumor of a 100 million sale of some mysterious item (or items) to Arab terrorists, and the desperate search to find out (1) who the renegade soldier is, (2) whats he selling and (3) how do they stop the delivery of (2). Its fascinating to see how Reacher and associates (mostly Reacher) piece facts together. Theres a second set of bad guys against them but about that I won't say more, except read the book. Its a good one, not the best in the series but good.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hag-Seed (Hogarth Shakespeare); Author: Visit Amazon's Margaret Atwood Page; Review: I got my first opportunity to act in Shakespeare when I was 71. I played Prospero in The Tempest. Needless to say, I loved every minute of it. It turned out to be one of the easiest plays I had acted in to sink into character, so well composed was it. It was easier than I had anticipated to believe in the world it evoked, no matter how exotic it appeared at first glance. Shakespeares autumnal comedy shows no sign of any diminishing of the bards talents. Its a mix of everything. Its a revenge play but equally a romance. The most ravishingly beautiful poetry is presented side by side with low farce and the play includes some of Shakespeares most memorable roles. Theres something in The Tempest for everyone just abandon yourself to its magic. And if you're an actor, its an impossible play to resist. Now poet-novelist-critic Margaret Atwood, author of forty some books and winner of multiple prizes, including the Man Booker Award, has undertaken to retell the story, not modernizing it in any trendy way (Shakespeares best plays don't need to be made relevant they already are) but making it her own work, taking advantage of its playfulness. This time, Prospero is Felix, formerly the artistic director of the prestigious Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His Antonio is Tony Price, Felixs former right-hand man, who committed treason against his boss and brought him down utterly. No more Felix as artistic director --Tonys that now. And no chance to redeem himself because Tony has allied with a government minister, Sal ONally, and together its in their best interest to block Felix from getting a start again elsewhere after all, Felix mustnt get the chance to outshine Tony! Devious, twisted evil-hearted, social-clambering, Machiavellian foot-licker these are Atwoods for bootlicker Tony. They don't match Shakespeares curse words but theyll do. Twelve years after his fall, Felix gets his chance for revenge. The wheres and why fors of what happens are complicated: Felix had slunk away, had lived as a hermit for a while, but then came back to teach one course a year in theater to the convicts of a high security prison. (He teaches under an assumed name.) The course is a hit. Convicts line up to get in. In past years, theyve put on Richard III and MacBeth and Julius Caesar. But Tony and Sal are coming to the prison to watch their next play so its time for The Tempest, the play Felix was mounting when Tony stabbed him in the back. Felix will play Prospero. He brings back Anne-Marie, the actress hed picked years ago to play Miranda. For the rest, the cast will be all cons, with names like 8Handz, Bent Pencil, Red Coyote, SnakeEye, Leggs and Wonder Boy. And what role will the conniving Tony and Sal play in all this? Not the role they thought they would. There are twists and turns all along the way, kind of like a complicated caper movie or television show. The characters are well fleshed and definitely their own selves.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Black Notebook; Author: Visit Amazon's Patrick Modiano Page; Review: This short novel (132 pp.) by 2014 Nobel laureate Modiano reads like a novels version of one of my favorite but more frustrating movies, 1961s Last Year at Marienbad, which was directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay from Nouveau Roman novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. In other words, its all mood over plot, deep uncertainty over what happened and even who the characters really are, all of it seen through a veneer of passed time by an auteur who has at best at the time only partial knowledge of what was happening and uncertain familiarity with the principals involved in it. A writer, Jean, returns to Paris after fifty years. He met a woman fifty years past, had a short but for him- unforgettable affair or near-affair, its never clear in the book, with her, and then she was gone and hes never seen or heard of her since. Afterwards, a police investigator had called him for questioning. He learned that the woman --her name was Dannie but she had multiple identitiesmay have or may not have been involved in a homicide, and she may have or may not have had justification for the killing, which may have or may not have been accidental. (Do you detect a pattern here?) None of the characters from that long past time is fleshed out well, not even Dannie, not even Jean. Theres a good deal of attention to setting but even that lacks concreteness. (Here is one place where the novel diverges from the movie. The movie lingers on the concrete. In its setting of the absolute concrete gardens, stairways, hallways, the clothes people wear, murmurs in the elegantly accoutered dining room- vague things happen. But in Modianos novel, vague things happen among vaguely defined people in vaguely described settings.) The prose is elegant and Polizzotto is a first-rate translator, but even a great writer and a great translator cant disguise mush at the middle. Its so well written Im giving it 3 (out of 5) stars but this is not a book I would recommend to anyone; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Surface to Air: A Malko Linge Novel; Author: Grard de Villiers; Review: De Villiers (d. 2013) wrote over 200 thrillers about the Austrian prince and part-time CIA agent Malko Linge before he died in 2013 so theres a good deal more of them to mine if the publisher is willing. But with one proviso: how current do they seem as time passes? The answer so far is very. De Villiers was known for his expert and up to date knowledge of the international espionage scene. A novel of his predicted the assassination of Egyptian president Sadat, another Indias Indira Gandhi, and he was about to bring out The Hunt for Carlos when the dread assassin was finally captured. De Villierss works appeared, four to five a year, for more than forty-five years in a row, and were pored over by domestic and foreign intelligence services. He was, in short, the Real Thing, or as close to real as a fiction writer can be. He did his research before he wrote. This is the fifth Malko Linge spy thriller to be published in English by Vintage/Black Lizard. I assume there will be more to follow and I, for one, look forward to reading them. Of the five out in English to date, Ive enjoyed four a great deal and the fifth (The Madmen of Benghazi) enough not to regret having taken the time to read it. Theyre bagatelles, of course, or the fictional equivalent of those short musical pieces defined in the dictionary as a short piece usually of a light, mellow character. Very sexy bagatelles, though, because one of the defining notes of a Malko Linge thriller is sex, lots of it, much of it kinky. I didn't count them but my memory is that there is a kinky sex scene on the average of every twenty-five to thirty pages through this fairly short (288 pp., small pages) novel. None of them is all that memorable but most feature over full and pointy breasts (one does not) and garter belts and black hose, all feminine characteristics that seem to appeal to Linke. In between these scenes, Linge and associates move on with their sleuthing and spying, which is both good technique and great fun. Theres a big blowout at the end and virtue triumphs for a few more months, years days? while Malko goes home to his crumbling ancestral mansion in Switzerland and his overly endowed and utterly untrustworthy fiancée. This time, the problem is an American naturalized citizen, a rug dealer and husband, recently converted to jihad. He wants to purchase a ground-to-air missile and use it to bring down Air Force One while president Obama is in it on s diplomatic visit to Russia. Soon the Russians are plotting to embarrass the US, the CIA and FBI are pursuing diverging but ultimately colliding paths, and a Russian arms dealer is cutting his own deal with separatist terrorists. AS I said before, its great fun, and if you like Ian Flemings James Bond, you will find it hard to resist De Villierss Malko Linge. Fact based it is. Real (I hope) its not.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Shores of Tripoli: Lieutenant Putnam and the Barbary Pirates; Author: Visit Amazon's James L. Haley Page; Review: James L. Haley has written prolifically on Western and particularly Texan history, with twelve non-fiction books in print and three previous novels. Shores is his fourth foray into fiction and likely the start of a series of sea thrillers set in the early years of the nineteenth century before America had woken up to the consequences of its nascent stature in a rapidly changing world. The American Navy was still small and only sporadically equipped and deployed. It had nowhere near the array of encounters, victories and defeats to narrate that the chroniclers of Englands mighty navy could draw on for dramatic underpinning to their yarns. Thus the more credit to Haley for tackling this project: he shows how much there is interesting in that period not just sea action and sea lore but the attitudes and behaviors of men in a navy so small and provisional that even its officers moved back and forth between civilian and military duty. The hero, Bliven Putnam, is the great-nephew of Revolutionary War hero Israel Putnam. Bliven is a believable enough character in this installment but I expect his character to emerge more fully as the series progresses. Hes fourteen at the start of the book, midshipman of a baby fighting vessel -- eighty-five feet long and equipped with only a dozen guns firing six-pound shot - but the ship, and Bliven, prove their worth in preliminary skirmishes with Barbary Coast pirates. By the end of the book, Bliven is eighteen. Hes grown up quickly. (One of the pleasures of this book, which is filled with naval and martial information, is watching Bliven learn, from his own mistakes and those of the people around him.) As the title states, the book is about our countrys attempts to rein in the Barbary Coast pirates, who were taking American ships and holding American citizens captive by the hundreds, possibly thousands, holding them for ransom or using them for slave labor or (the women) life in the harem or seraglio. Bliven, his family, his closest navy friend, the woman he woos and her family are fictional constructs but most of the rest of the characters in the story are real: they participated in the events described. Best known today are naval heroes Stephen Decatur and Oliver Hazard Perry, both painted as over-eager for fame, but a young John C. Calhoun and the abolitionist preacher Lyman Beecher make appearances. Neither appeals to Bliven, who objects to Calhouns vanity and Beechers self-certainty and intolerance. By the end of the book, Bliven has met and wooed (its all stiff, formal) a young woman from his Massachusetts homeland and had one brief falling off of virtue (in the least believable part of the book). I enjoy series like this. On the basis of this first installment, Haley succeeds. Bliven Putnam is a hero worth following, not as complex as either C. S. Foresters Horatio Hornblower or Patrick OBrians Jack Aubrey but it will definitely be fun watching Bliven grow.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Last Days of New Paris: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's China Miville Page; Review: No other alt-world writer I know, not even Haruki Murakami, has as wild an imagination as China Mieville. Nor a sharper wit, or better sense of humor, or way with words. As far as fantasy goes, hes The Complete Package. The world of this short novel (168 pp [plus afterword and notes) is closer to that of his 2010 Kraken than that of Perdido Street Station, mixing alternate history, pseudoscience and occult magic, with a heavy lashing of the surreal and surrealist. In 1941, Germans occupy Paris. In Marseilles, American engineer Jack Parsons gains entry to an anti-Nazi group wholly populated by surrealists. (Andre Breton is a member.) But Parsons is really a secret agent for occult Aleister Crowley and his experiments taping the surrealists musings lead to a magical catastrophe, the unleashing on Paris of every dream and nightmare imaginable in surrealist writings. Paris becomes a battleground of three forces: Germans, Resistance fighters and the magic-released army of monsters. In 1950, its up to Surrealist Resistance fighter Thibault to find a way to disburse the monsters that now plague the city. He makes his way through the city with two allies: an American photographer with her own agenda and an exquisite corpse, one of the created figures dreamed up by the earlier surrrealists by playing that old game where you fold a paper in three and each person draws in one-third of the body of the resulting creature. Its not fair to tell more of this exotic tale. Just trust me, its good. Man, can this guy write!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Gap of Time: A Novel (Hogarth Shakespeare); Author: Visit Amazon's Jeanette Winterson Page; Review: Ive followed Hogarths new series of rewritings of Shakespeare by eminent authors with great interest. Four have been published to date Howard Jacobsons Shylock Is My Name (The Merchant of Venice), Anne Tylers Vinegar Girl (The Taming of the Shrew), Margaret Atwoods Hag-Seed (The Tempest), and this one, Jeanette Wintersons reworking of The Winters Tale. I gave strongly positive reviews to the other three books in the series but must give a qualified one to this. The Winters Tale is not one of the plays by Shakespeare with which I am familiar but in many respects its plot is troubling, out there, outlandish yet moving. It stretches reality farther than most of the Bards plays, which is already saying a lot. (The life lived by most Shakespeare characters is hyperlife, not the kind of life we --ordinary mortalslive.) A king becomes convinced that his wife is pregnant by his best friend. He hands the daughter over to be abandoned (but shes saved), his wife dies, his friend leaves him. Then years later, through an extraordinary series of coincidences, father and daughter are reunited, the mother too, and all is well in the world. (Its too much!) Winterson, a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction, is a good choice for this story. I t begs not to be treated as real but rather as a type of hyperbole, which through its virtuoso display of writing, acquires a truth value of its own not true but not not-true. Thats the type of fiction writer Winterson is, a word worker and experimentalist, who is at ease with shifts in persona and tense and narrative line. She has situated her version of the play in modern London, time not quite certain but around now, in a new American city called New Bohemia. Leo is a magnate driven and crude and once possessed of an idea, unable to back down. His wife Mimi is both his love and a possession but all is well or as well as it can be when living with a man with a reduced emotional paletteuntil he becomes convinced his wife is having an affair with his best friend and sometime lover Xeno. Then everything happens just as it does in the play: out the wife, baby abandoned but rescued by a stranger, Theo gone, the magnate all alone. Years later, the past surfaces and its a complicated mess. The story is hard to follow in Shakespeare, harder still with Winterson. The text hops around a lot changes of setting, perspective, tone, the interjection of her own comments to create a not too coherent metatext. The quality of the prose is uneven, some passages sharp and brilliant, others almost Victorian Purple Prose of the worst, most clotted variety. (Theyre usually describing the love affair of Perdita, the missing daughter, and Xenos son Zel.) I cringed when I read this sentence: Love is the unfamiliar name behind the hands that wove the intolerable shirt of flame. Sounds good, means little. The book is almost redeemed by the final section, which brings daughter and; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: City on Edge: A Novel (Eve Rossi); Author: Visit Amazon's Stefanie Pintoff Page; Review: Following on her popular crime thriller of last year, Hostage Taker, Pintoff has written another detective novel featuring FBI Special Agent Eve Rossi. It starts with an assassination attempt: someone shoots the police commissioner of New York City while hes addressing the press on the day before the Macys famous Thanksgiving Day Parade. But hes been shot with a paint gun, not one loaded with bullets. And while the attention is on the commissioner and the search for his assailant, someone else spirits away the commissioners thirteen-year-old daughter Allie. From there on, it escalates rapidly. Reviewing the videos taken from street cameras, it becomes clear the event was orchestrated. Allie was the target, not the commissioner. The commissioner presses Eve into service to find his her: with a dozen other credible terrorism threats to deal with, he cant divert attention from the parade. Besides, hes ambitious and it wouldnt help his career if he op suddenly bowed out under pressure. A ransom call comes and the game alters. The kidnapper wants more than money. The commissioner must follow through on a series of three demands, each to be announced only after the previous demand has been met. Each is more outrageous than the last and the third is outright dangerous. The plot is a Matryoshka doll, a Russian nesting doll, with each new layer of mystery concealed behind the layer masking it. Rossi heads a clandestine FBI unit, the Vidocq unit, composed of ex-cons, loyal to Eve and diversely talented. She presses them into service to contain the threat. Here is where the plot veers off from believably exciting and becomes increasingly formulaic. Hot shot oddballs on the hunt, steadily escalating threats, short tight chapters to build heat, occasional breaks from the narrative for color --live broadcasts on station WYXJ, classified briefings detailing the background, strengths and weaknesses of the Vidocq team members. (Theres the reference to Vidocq as well, the nineteenth-century detective who was a criminal himself before he revolutionized Parisian police detection.) Its all a little too neat, too tailored to appear spontaneous, and as the threats escalate, they become more unlikely to be real. Pintoff knows how to maintain interest throughout a book but mine flagged as it went on. The book is over-written and the plot doesnt feel like it could ever really happen. Anywhere.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Eastern Shore; Author: Ward Just; Review: This is Ward Justs nineteen novel and I don't know how many-eth book. Ever since he left the newspaper business (maybe even before) hes been a steady writer who has turned out, in his fiction, one first-class character study after another. Hes won a host of honors and has been a finalist for National Book Award (Echo House, 1997) and the Pulitzer Prize (An Unfinished Season, 2004). His fiction, grounded in the style and perceptions of Henry James, doesnt break new ground: rather, he plows deeper and deeper into the ground hes already tilled in one novel after the other. In this respect, he resembles two other American authors I admire greatly, Louis Auchincloss and John Updike. His usual subject, and his subject here, is the intersection of personal lives and national politics. His characters come from the privileged elite. If they don't live abroad, they live in Washington, D.C. He writes about what drives them, about the elusiveness and transitory nature of their insider knowledge, the alienation they feel as their lives move on. His protagonists frequently hail from the Midwest. Theyre intelligent and perceptive. Something about life in the Capitol draws them in but eventually leaves them wondering if their lives have been worth the doing. In this story, its Ned Ayres. Raised in a comfortable but dull Indiana town, he turns down college for a job on the local newspaper. At twenty, he is an editor. His vote tips the balance on publishing a story involving a prison sentence years before and the assumption of a false identity by a respected local haberdasher. The story is true but its publication leads to tragedy, a suicide, and a family ruined. Ned isn't sure what he learned from it but he still worries it over decades later. As much as anything, its a parable of how disinvolved he is in other peoples lives: he reports on them, yes, but he doesn't live WITH them, not really. Eventually he leaves Indiana for Chicago, and later still, Chicago for Washington. (The Kennedy era has just closed. LBJ is king.) Through all this, hes no eunuch. He has his share of affairs. But though some last for a while, he never marries. Marriage, travel, seeing something new nothing can compete with the allure of the editing desk. Just describes him thusly: He was not truly interested in the things of his own life, preferring the lives of others. . . . He had no material. He edited material. He ends his career as senior editor of a major newspaper (clearly modeled on the Washington Post, for whom Just worked for years). Afterwards, in his long, not terribly exciting retirement, he wonders what he has accomplished in his life. He seems to have little of interest to pass on to others. This is another winner from one of our very best writers. (An intriguing thought: Just doesnt write or plot like Camus but there's something Camusian in his picture of Neds life.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Can Science Resolve the Nature / Nurture Debate? (New Human Frontiers); Author: Margaret Lock; Review: Although cautious (un-inflammatory) in how they express it, anthropologists Lock and Palssons position on the nature/nurture debate is clear: it is unhelpful to maintain a dichotomy between what a persons genes bring to the table and what his (external and internal) contribute. There are too many instances where the evidence clearly shows, or at least strongly intimates, that a humans living conditions, from fetus on, can not only affect development but even the genes the person passes on to descendants. The authors discussion ranges broadly: the history of the debate from ancient times to present, the coopting of eugenics movement to social ends and its unfortunate effects, the context-dependent nature of the reactive system of which DNA is just one part (Contingency displaces determinism), changing views of the primacy of the genome as the driver of human development and the growing interest in the role junk DNA may play, the growing importance of the relatively new field of epigenetics, which looks at how genetic inheritances play out in a conditioning and interactive environment, studies of fetal development. The outcome is a book that is understandable but heavy with technical and academic language. Its not always easy to follow, but its readable and clear. You just have to work at it. The book is admirable for what it does but I have a few very modest reservations about it. First, if the intent of this admirable series by Polity is to help the educated layperson keep current on a complex topic like this, the prose needs to be more readily accessible, and secondly, less cautious. I am not urging the authors to rush into battle on unresolved issues, but their scientific caution at times makes a potentially exciting discussion just pallid. Secondly, although there is no necessity for the authors to broach the topic in a book as brief as this (shorn of scholarly apparatus, this book is 157 pages long) but for laypeople, at least for me, one of the topics I hoped to read about was how much or how little parents, peers and other mentors influenced human growth not the early environments effects on genes but the later (post-natal) environments impact on psychological and social development. Its alright that the topic isn't raised: the reader just needs to know that the focus of this book is elsewhere. This isn't a book that will excite most readers but its a useful one.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Livia Lone (A Livia Lone Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Barry Eisler Page; Review: Eisler, best known for his series about ex-soldier turned freelance assassin John Rain (Rain Fall -republished as A Clean Kill in Tokyo- won the Barry Award for Best Thriller and The Gumshoe Award in 2005) and black ops soldier Ben Treven. This is his thirteenth thriller novel and his second stand-alone. It may be the start of another series, both because Eisler, who has a social conscience, can make a point with it about a major social abuse and because Livia is a hero you want to read about. Livia Lone is her name but it isn't the one she was born with. Thai parents sold her sister (age eleven) and her (thirteen) to strangers. Theyre transported to the coast, shoved in a sealed container and shipped to the United States. En route, Livia is regularly abused. She submits to save her sister from the same treatment but it doesnt work. The girls are separated before the ship docks. Police raid. Livia is freed but her sister is gone. Livia is adopted by Mr. Lone, forced to abandon his native first name and take the more American Livia and force-fed our language and culture so she can adjust. The problem is her foster father. Hes an abuser, a pervert, and Livia is forced to satisfy him. Well into her teens, even as she excels at school and in her judo studies (at which she is a whiz), he takes advantage of her. Then she gets free. Thats the back-story, which alternates in the narrative with the account of Livias activities in the present. She has become a police detective but shes also a vigilante, sex predators are her targets, who kills them if she cant get satisfaction in the courts. The twisted part is that she also kills because it gives her what sex, at least normal sex, no longer can. Killing, power and sexual satisfaction have become twisted in her mind, no longer separable. The story is about her hunt for her sister and how she finds and disposes of her original tormentors. Theres lots of sex, a good deal of violence with detailed descriptions of fights (Eisler owns a black belt in judo), and its dark, very dark, gut wrenching at points. The shuttling of the narrative between past and present is irritating at first (why cant he just get on with whats happening now?) but smoothes out as the novel progresses. Eisler does a good job of conveying what it feels like growing up having been systematically abused. In this respect, and in the lean hardness of the plot flow, the book resembles the earlier novels of Andrew Vachss and thats a good thing.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Who Watcheth (An Irene Huss Investigation); Author: Visit Amazon's Helene Tursten Page; Review: This is the first crime thriller by Swedish author Tursten I have read but the eighth to appear in print in English translation. Its a police procedural: a team of police detectives chip in to solve the case but the spotlight is on Irene Huss, who is a fiftyish police inspector who is tough but vulnerable, human, even witty, and wonder of wonders in a Scandinavian police novel, happily married. There is a mention of Goteborg early in the novel: I think thats where she is based. A check of the Wikipedia for Irene reveals that the series is very popular in Sweden. Indeed, if I only spoke Swedish, I could watch a dozen TV movies based on the character. In this installment, Irene and her colleagues are faced with an elusive serial killer. He stalks women, obviously is fixated on them, and when they fall below his expectations (that means, have a lover) strangles them. Then he takes their bodies somewhere and cleans them, before he leaves them, wrapped in plastic, in some public place. The police know almost nothing about the killer he washes off his victims bodies before disposing of them, doesnt leave a body contaminated by his DNA or body hairs. There is a woman who may have been his first victim. She survived --someone passed by just in time to scare him off-- but she bears an ugly livid scar all around her neck where his improvised garrote pressed into her skin. She didn't see his face, most of what she can say of him is impressions, and vague at that, but one thing she remembers well: he stunk, smelled to high heaven. There is another attempt that is foiled again a neighbor pops up at the right moment to drive the killer awayand finally, the police have a sort of a picture of what the man looks like. From then on, its a race: do they catch him before he takes more victims? Irene has another worry. Someone is stalking Irene. An increasingly ugly and potentially dangerous set of incidents happen that ultimately leads Irene and her husband to flee their home. The intrigue plays out in a novel that is well written for the most part, features a detective you really cheer on, and, again for the most part, fast paced action that leads to a lethal and menacing denouement. I could have done with the occasional interjections (delivered in italic print) from inside the killers mind and the ending is a bit abrupt, but; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World's Greatest Civilization; Author: Visit Amazon's Anthony Everitt Page; Review: If I counted right, this is English scholar Everitts ninth book and his eight dealing with the classical world. He writes well, sets a good scene and does a good job describing the character and actions of his players, and he knows his sources. Even when he writes popular history, which is most of what hes published, its of a uniformly high level, informative but equally, a pleasure to read. His approach is to tell stories, usually focusing them on the actors involved. Needless to say, the story of Athenss rise and fall provides him with an exemplary cast --from the early law-reformer Cleisthenes to Pericles, Socrates, Alcibiades and Demosthenes, Alexander of Macedonand he makes the most of it. His narrative is strongest on political history, weaker on economics and other ancillary disciplines. He does not ignore the social sciences but the center of his narrative is men, states and politics much like his model in ancient times, the admirable Thucydides. It is salutary to compare Everitts book with the recent history of Romes rise and fall, Mary Beards SPQR (2016). There is much less talk in Everitts account of the difficulties the scholar encounters in deciphering texts. Although Everitt does discuss the every day lives and activities of common people, his is essentially history from the top down the history of the people who made the history. Its a good one, as so is Beards, but Beards account goes deeper into analysis of myth, of archaeological evidence, etc.- than Everitt. Having written that, let me reiterate: I not only enjoyed this book, I learned from it. Its a very good thing to have an accessible, lively and readable history of the rise and fall of this seminal city-state.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Kill the Dead. Richard Kadrey (Sandman Slim); Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Kadrey Page; Review: KADREY, Richard. Sandman Slim series: Sandman Slim (2009). Kill the Dead (2010) Aloha From Hell (2011). Devil Said Bang(2012). Kill City Blues (2013). The Getaway God (2014). Killing Pretty (2015). The Perdition Score (2016). The hero and narrator of these wham bam thank you maam supernatural thrillers is James Stark, aka Sandman Slim. He was wafted off to Hell while still alive, endured eleven years there as slave and gladiator and later enforcer, came back to earth and is now wreaking vengeance on those who originally betrayed him (and killed his girlfriend too) and then on any supernatural meanies who threaten little things like the Future of the Universe. The bad guys he fights are really, really bad I mean capital letter BAD, how else can I write it? He ends up doubling for Lucifer for a short time but hes not very good at it: his heart just isn't in it. Along the way, he finds out why he survived one assault after the other in the gladiators arena in Hell: hes not human. Hes half-angel and thus an Abomination (thats what they call him) in the eyes of the more self-righteous of Heavens angels. Hes really only good at one thing, killing, but hes very good at that and most of the time, hes fighting the good fight. Most of the time. Hes got a new girlfriend, Candy. Shes a Jade, which is a scarier version of vampire, all claws and fangs when she manifests her Jade self to suck the life and soul out her victim. For now, shes on a methadone-like substitution diet that keeps her need of human essence locked down (Most of the time.) Stark has an apartmentmate too, a man whose head he cut off in the first installment of the series. But he didn't kill him, just separated head from body, and he feels a little bad he did it, so he and Kassabian coexist now, are almost buddies --they run a video store together that offers movie classics that were never made, along with a killer collection of porn and horror flicks. There are other friends and allies. A two-hundred-year-old man, Vidocq, a whiz with potions, who functions as a surrogate father to Stark. (Most of the time.) His great-grandfather, now in Hell after being back shot in a card game, the legendary Wild Bill Hickock. When he was Lucifer, Stark set Bill up in a bar in Hell and he visits there every so often to quaff a few shots of Aqua Regia and smoke a few Maledictions, Hells cigarettes and stronger than French Gitanes. Carlos runs the Bamboo House of Dolls in L. A. Stark likes to hang out there as do all sorts of non-human types good and evil. The stakes ratchet up from novel to novel in this peerless (of its own sort) series. Start hunts down the bad guys who sent him to Hell in the first place and wreaks vengeance on them (Sandman Slim, 2009); takes on zombies in Kill the Dead (2010); fights an insane serial; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Aloha from Hell: A Sandman Slim Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Kadrey Page; Review: KADREY, Richard. Sandman Slim series: Sandman Slim (2009). Kill the Dead (2010) Aloha From Hell (2011). Devil Said Bang(2012). Kill City Blues (2013). The Getaway God (2014). Killing Pretty (2015). The Perdition Score (2016). The hero and narrator of these wham bam thank you maam supernatural thrillers is James Stark, aka Sandman Slim. He was wafted off to Hell while still alive, endured eleven years there as slave and gladiator and later enforcer, came back to earth and is now wreaking vengeance on those who originally betrayed him (and killed his girlfriend too) and then on any supernatural meanies who threaten little things like the Future of the Universe. The bad guys he fights are really, really bad I mean capital letter BAD, how else can I write it? He ends up doubling for Lucifer for a short time but hes not very good at it: his heart just isn't in it. Along the way, he finds out why he survived one assault after the other in the gladiators arena in Hell: hes not human. Hes half-angel and thus an Abomination (thats what they call him) in the eyes of the more self-righteous of Heavens angels. Hes really only good at one thing, killing, but hes very good at that and most of the time, hes fighting the good fight. Most of the time. Hes got a new girlfriend, Candy. Shes a Jade, which is a scarier version of vampire, all claws and fangs when she manifests her Jade self to suck the life and soul out her victim. For now, shes on a methadone-like substitution diet that keeps her need of human essence locked down (Most of the time.) Stark has an apartmentmate too, a man whose head he cut off in the first installment of the series. But he didn't kill him, just separated head from body, and he feels a little bad he did it, so he and Kassabian coexist now, are almost buddies --they run a video store together that offers movie classics that were never made, along with a killer collection of porn and horror flicks. There are other friends and allies. A two-hundred-year-old man, Vidocq, a whiz with potions, who functions as a surrogate father to Stark. (Most of the time.) His great-grandfather, now in Hell after being back shot in a card game, the legendary Wild Bill Hickock. When he was Lucifer, Stark set Bill up in a bar in Hell and he visits there every so often to quaff a few shots of Aqua Regia and smoke a few Maledictions, Hells cigarettes and stronger than French Gitanes. Carlos runs the Bamboo House of Dolls in L. A. Stark likes to hang out there as do all sorts of non-human types good and evil. The stakes ratchet up from novel to novel in this peerless (of its own sort) series. Start hunts down the bad guys who sent him to Hell in the first place and wreaks vengeance on them (Sandman Slim, 2009); takes on zombies in Kill the Dead (2010); fights an insane serial; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Killing Pretty: A Sandman Slim Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Kadrey Page; Review: KADREY, Richard. Sandman Slim series: Sandman Slim (2009). Kill the Dead (2010) Aloha From Hell (2011). Devil Said Bang(2012). Kill City Blues (2013). The Getaway God (2014). Killing Pretty (2015). The Perdition Score (2016). The hero and narrator of these wham bam thank you maam supernatural thrillers is James Stark, aka Sandman Slim. He was wafted off to Hell while still alive, endured eleven years there as slave and gladiator and later enforcer, came back to earth and is now wreaking vengeance on those who originally betrayed him (and killed his girlfriend too) and then on any supernatural meanies who threaten little things like the Future of the Universe. The bad guys he fights are really, really bad I mean capital letter BAD, how else can I write it? He ends up doubling for Lucifer for a short time but hes not very good at it: his heart just isn't in it. Along the way, he finds out why he survived one assault after the other in the gladiators arena in Hell: hes not human. Hes half-angel and thus an Abomination (thats what they call him) in the eyes of the more self-righteous of Heavens angels. Hes really only good at one thing, killing, but hes very good at that and most of the time, hes fighting the good fight. Most of the time. Hes got a new girlfriend, Candy. Shes a Jade, which is a scarier version of vampire, all claws and fangs when she manifests her Jade self to suck the life and soul out her victim. For now, shes on a methadone-like substitution diet that keeps her need of human essence locked down (Most of the time.) Stark has an apartmentmate too, a man whose head he cut off in the first installment of the series. But he didn't kill him, just separated head from body, and he feels a little bad he did it, so he and Kassabian coexist now, are almost buddies --they run a video store together that offers movie classics that were never made, along with a killer collection of porn and horror flicks. There are other friends and allies. A two-hundred-year-old man, Vidocq, a whiz with potions, who functions as a surrogate father to Stark. (Most of the time.) His great-grandfather, now in Hell after being back shot in a card game, the legendary Wild Bill Hickock. When he was Lucifer, Stark set Bill up in a bar in Hell and he visits there every so often to quaff a few shots of Aqua Regia and smoke a few Maledictions, Hells cigarettes and stronger than French Gitanes. Carlos runs the Bamboo House of Dolls in L. A. Stark likes to hang out there as do all sorts of non-human types good and evil. The stakes ratchet up from novel to novel in this peerless (of its own sort) series. Start hunts down the bad guys who sent him to Hell in the first place and wreaks vengeance on them (Sandman Slim, 2009); takes on zombies in Kill the Dead (2010); fights an insane serial; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Perdition Score: A Sandman Slim Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Kadrey Page; Review: KADREY, Richard. Sandman Slim series: Sandman Slim (2009). Kill the Dead (2010) Aloha From Hell (2011). Devil Said Bang(2012). Kill City Blues (2013). The Getaway God (2014). Killing Pretty (2015). The Perdition Score (2016). Harper Voyager. The hero and narrator of these wham bam thank you maam supernatural thrillers is James Stark, aka Sandman Slim. He was wafted off to Hell while still alive, endured eleven years there as slave and gladiator and later enforcer, came back to earth and is now wreaking vengeance on those who originally betrayed him (and killed his girlfriend too) and then on any supernatural meanies who threaten little things like the Future of the Universe. The bad guys he fights are really, really bad I mean capital letter BAD, how else can I write it? He ends up doubling for Lucifer for a short time but hes not very good at it: his heart just isn't in it. Along the way, he finds out why he survived one assault after the other in the gladiators arena in Hell: hes not human. Hes half-angel and thus an Abomination (thats what they call him) in the eyes of the more self-righteous of Heavens angels. Hes really only good at one thing, killing, but hes very good at that and most of the time, hes fighting the good fight. Most of the time. Hes got a new girlfriend, Candy. Shes a Jade, which is a scarier version of vampire, all claws and fangs when she manifests her Jade self to suck the life and soul out her victim. For now, shes on a methadone-like substitution diet that keeps her need of human essence locked down (Most of the time.) Stark has an apartmentmate too, a man whose head he cut off in the first installment of the series. But he didn't kill him, just separated head from body, and he feels a little bad he did it, so he and Kassabian coexist now, are almost buddies --they run a video store together that offers movie classics that were never made, along with a killer collection of porn and horror flicks. There are other friends and allies. A two-hundred-year-old man, Vidocq, a whiz with potions, who functions as a surrogate father to Stark. (Most of the time.) His great-grandfather, now in Hell after being back shot in a card game, the legendary Wild Bill Hickock. When he was Lucifer, Stark set Bill up in a bar in Hell and he visits there every so often to quaff a few shots of Aqua Regia and smoke a few Maledictions, Hells cigarettes and stronger than French Gitanes. Carlos runs the Bamboo House of Dolls in L. A. Stark likes to hang out there as do all sorts of non-human types good and evil. The stakes ratchet up from novel to novel in this peerless (of its own sort) series. Start hunts down the bad guys who sent him to Hell in the first place and wreaks vengeance on them (Sandman Slim, 2009); takes on zombies in Kill the Dead (2010); fights an; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Journey Under the Midnight Sun [Paperback] [Jan 01, 2015] Higashino, Keigo; Author: Visit Amazon's Keigo Higashino Page; Review: HAGASHINO, Keigo. Under the Midnight Sun, trans. Alexander O. Smith with Joseph Reeder. Minotaur. November 2016. 560p. $26.99. This absorbing novel is billed as, and actually is, a detective novel but more than that, its a novel of character in the nineteenth-century sense of the phrase. Its almost Dovstoyevskian. Theres a detective in it and certainly there are crimes, horrendous crimes, soul-searing crimes, but foremost the book is a powerful, almost bruising dissection of how the abuse of one set of people by another concatenates, creating a never-ending cycle of abuse, corruption and dark deeds: an ever-expanding circle of moral decay. The tone is matter of fact: events recorded as they happen or are discovered to have been, or may have been, upon later reflection. The cumulative effect is jolting. This is what evil looks like! As to plot line, the story plays out over two decades, starting with the discovery of a dead mans body in Osaka in 1973. The crime is brutal and the site sordidan abandoned building and no good reason for the victim to have been there then. No killer is found but the investigation leads the dogged police detective to a suspect: the dead mans in-the-shadows lover. Then she too is found dead. Is it a suicide, as it seems? Or is it something darker? (By that point in the narrative, the savvy reader votes for darker.) Two children are left behind, the dead mans son Ryo and the dead womans daughter Yuhiko. Thats the start of it two abandoned children, a detective who senses something wrong but cant figure out what. The detective follows the two childrens lives for the next twenty years as bad things happen and then worse, and then worse yet. The readers unease builds: theres something terribly wrong with the two survivors. A lot of things happen in this book. You need to read it to find out what. (Hagashino has been a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery novel.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Letters of Note: Volume 2: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience; Author: Visit Amazon's Shaun Usher Page; Review: This is the second volume of letters originally aired by Usher on his popular web blog Letters of Note and it is almost as good, maybe just as good, as the utterly captivating first volume. The format is the same: Usher reprints letters from different ages (in this volume, back to ancient Egypt and Babylonia), some of the writers famous and some of them not, and letters vastly different in topic, intent, and tone The book starts with a hilariously unpolite letter from cartoonist Robert Crumb to Swedish saxophonist Matt Gustafsson, who, admiring Crumb, had sent him his new CD, a deconstruction of jazz classics by such as Ellington, Lars Gullin, and the Ayler brothers. Quite frankly, Crumb wrote him, I was kind of shocked at what a negative, unpleasant experience it was, listening to it. I had to take it off long before it reached the end. . . . I wrote in large block letters, in silver ink, Torturing the Saxophone Masts Gustafsson. Gustafsson took it well: he named his next album Torturing the Saxophone. That letter set the tone for me: in general, I liked best the letters in this collection that either insulted, attacked, or joked. I found least interesting the love letters and memorial letters, which by and large I found pallid, as I did an effusion about the state of things in Yosemite Valley written by naturalist John Muir and poet Baudelaires letter to Richard Wagner about the greatest musical pleasure I have ever experienced. (Wagners music, of course.) The most affecting of the love letters was Raymond Chandlers paean for his newly dead wife (She Was the Music Heard Faintly at the Edge of Sound). Back to the Attack letters. There is a terribly blunt, dismissive telegram from painter Asger Jorn to The Guggenheim, spurning any attempt by a corporate entity to honor him (Go to Hell With Your Money Bastard); William S. Burroughss damning assessment of the talent and future of Truman Capote (not at all good, in Burroughss view); Bertrand Russells oh-so-polite but blunt shutting off of any future overture from Black Shirt leader Oswald Mosley and Ursula K. Le Guins equally abrupt refusal to permit a story of hers to be included in a collection of science fiction that had no other women authors. Michelangelo writes a furious letter to one of his brothers, who was abusing his father; Hunter S. Thompson offs Anthony Burgess in no uncertain terms; a Babylonian merchant 3775 years ago complains in cuneiform about the treatment hed received from a supplier; Katherine Anne Porter finally breaks off her friendship with Hart Crane, and Felicia Bernstein writes husband Lennie to say hell always be a homosexual but she loves him any way. There is a delightful response to a request from a high school class asking novelist Kurt Vonnegut for advice on living (Make Your Soul Grow); a letter from David Foster Wallace to Don Delillo that presages Wallaces later suicide; an exchange between a junior high student and president Reagan over the condition of the students bedroom; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Geese of Beaver Bog; Author: Visit Amazon's Bernd Heinrich Page; Review: Our son had just come from hearing Carl Safina and he brought us a signed copy of his latest book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (2015). I looked, as I usually do with new books, at the table of contents, index and chapter headings and lo and behold, there was an epigraph from a book I was then reading this one, naturalist-scientist Bernt Heinrichs 2004 The Geese of Beaver Blog. This is the epigraph: The problem is that rules are simple, and animals are not. Thats always been one of the virtues of Heinrichs nature writing, which combines the strengths of pure observed science with the interests of the naturalist and the writing skills of the poet. Heinrich doesnt reduce things. He observes closely individuals, not statistical aggregates. Hes not afraid to quantify quantifying individual observations is how we get sciencebut he doesnt think aggregate observations wipe out observed variations from the mean. (See his most recent book, One Wild Bird at a Time, 2016, for an example of his approach.) This book, Geese, came about almost by accident. He came across an abandoned gosling. It was too late to do anything but try to help nurse the bird back to life, and so he did. The bird bonded on him and stayed bonded even after it returned to the wild and had flown off on winter migration. The next year it returned with a mate. Heinrich observed them and because he was a scientist and naturalist took detailed notes on the pairs behavior. He couldn't observe them in a vacuum: his watching spread to the entire bog complex, other birds, other parent pairs. A second year. Changes of mates, nesting sites, and inter-pair dynamics. All of this is followed over the course of several years and related in vivid and poetic, but also precise and scientific, prose. At several points, Heinrichs geese didn't behave as he expected them to. Whenever that happened, he tried to figure out why, and he tested his hypotheses by minute interventions in the wild animals lives. In the process, he came up with testable hypotheses for the future study of these fascinating birds: why and how their unanticipated behavior attuned with evolutionary theory. But he also learned how different one bird could be from another and a great deal about the role of prior experience, will and preference in these little, small-brained, supposedly driven wholly by instinctual response, animals. Birds make choices too and have their own preferences as friends.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Getaway God: A Sandman Slim Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Kadrey Page; Review: KADREY, Richard. Sandman Slim series: Sandman Slim (2009). Kill the Dead (2010) Aloha From Hell (2011). Devil Said Bang(2012). Kill City Blues (2013). The Getaway God (2014). Killing Pretty (2015). The Perdition Score (2016). The hero and narrator of these wham bam thank you maam supernatural thrillers is James Stark, aka Sandman Slim. He was wafted off to Hell while still alive, endured eleven years there as slave and gladiator and later enforcer, came back to earth and is now wreaking vengeance on those who originally betrayed him (and killed his girlfriend too) and then on any supernatural meanies who threaten little things like the Future of the Universe. The bad guys he fights are really, really bad I mean capital letter BAD, how else can I write it? He ends up doubling for Lucifer for a short time but hes not very good at it: his heart just isn't in it. Along the way, he finds out why he survived one assault after the other in the gladiators arena in Hell: hes not human. Hes half-angel and thus an Abomination (thats what they call him) in the eyes of the more self-righteous of Heavens angels. Hes really only good at one thing, killing, but hes very good at that and most of the time, hes fighting the good fight. Most of the time. Hes got a new girlfriend, Candy. Shes a Jade, which is a scarier version of vampire, all claws and fangs when she manifests her Jade self to suck the life and soul out her victim. For now, shes on a methadone-like substitution diet that keeps her need of human essence locked down (Most of the time.) Stark has an apartmentmate too, a man whose head he cut off in the first installment of the series. But he didn't kill him, just separated head from body, and he feels a little bad he did it, so he and Kassabian coexist now, are almost buddies --they run a video store together that offers movie classics that were never made, along with a killer collection of porn and horror flicks. There are other friends and allies. A two-hundred-year-old man, Vidocq, a whiz with potions, who functions as a surrogate father to Stark. (Most of the time.) His great-grandfather, now in Hell after being back shot in a card game, the legendary Wild Bill Hickock. When he was Lucifer, Stark set Bill up in a bar in Hell and he visits there every so often to quaff a few shots of Aqua Regia and smoke a few Maledictions, Hells cigarettes and stronger than French Gitanes. Carlos runs the Bamboo House of Dolls in L. A. Stark likes to hang out there as do all sorts of non-human types good and evil. The stakes ratchet up from novel to novel in this peerless (of its own sort) series. Start hunts down the bad guys who sent him to Hell in the first place and wreaks vengeance on them (Sandman Slim, 2009); takes on zombies in Kill the Dead (2010); fights an insane serial; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Red Dog: A Slim in Little Egypt Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's Jason Miller Page; Review: MILLER, Jason. Red Dog: A Slim in Little Egypt Mystery. Harper. 2016. 352p. $14.99 (pb) This is the second offering by humorist-crime novel writer Miller. The first, also a Slim in Little Egypt mystery, was Down Dont Bother Me (2015). I loved this book! It has all that I want in a crime thriller, a determined detective and thoroughly ugly, also scary bad guys, an intriguing puzzle, and plenty of surprises and plenty of danger, even violence, along the way. The detective is Slim, former coal miner in this wrecked formerly coal mining country, now self-proclaimed redneck detective taking small and large cases to eke out a living for his thirteen-year-old daughter Anci and him. (The short story included as a bonus in this book is about Slim recovering a mans prize chickens.). Anci acts as on-again off-again Watson to Slims Holmes but for the most part the roles are reversed: shes the smart one, or at least she thinks she is. She can be critical of her father but shes a tornado if you stir her up (say when her father gets hurt, as which happens more than once in this book), and she loves her father with no limit. As she should. Because he loves her back the same way. One of the side virtues of this book is its depiction of Slims and Ancis loving, comfortable, open relation --father and daughter with no mother, the girl approaching but not quite at puberty, the accommodations they make as they learn new things about each other and themselves. Its lovely and admirable. As to Slim as detective, determination is his greatest virtue. Also hes got a moral compass. Hes not corruptible. But determination is his biggest driver: once he sics his teeth into a problem, he doesnt give up even at risk to his own life. This time its a missing dog. The pay is only $65 but, Slim doesnt have another job at the moment and the houses one air conditioning unit had given up the ghost two weeks before, so what the heck. He finds the dog but only after encountering a machete-wielding redneck who doesnt seem to like him very much. Then theres a murder. Slims the one who reports it so he winds up the number one suspect. From then on, things heat up. Slim finds himself involved in the world of competitive dogfighting, has to ease his way around a bunch of vicious white supremacists without losing his scalp, and much more. In an oblique way, mostly because it describes a vastly changed universe, this is Raymond Chandler country, brave man facing off against thuggish opponents, fighting thro god fight against encroaching moral entropy, the gray soup of bad deeds and bad people. Miller brings to it a lively prose style, as good sense of tale, and a wry, never over done sense of humor. This is a superior whodunit.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: What You Break (A Gus Murphy Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Reed Farrel Coleman Page; Review: Colemans entry is Raymond Chandler redivivus and when done right, as Coleman does it here, that genre, the weathered but not beaten private eye who retains integrity lives by his own standardsin a soupy grey world of moral entropy. Coleman has written twenty-three previous novels I think all crime and tec fiction. This is the second to feature as protagonist battered but not defeated ex-cop Gus Murphy. (The first was Where It Hurts, which was very good.) Gus works now for a second-rate Long Island hotel/lounge as the hotels pickup van driver and weekend bouncer for the lounge: he gets drawn in for the second time into using his old contacts and considerable detecting skills and old contacts to solve a puzzle: trying to find out the motive behind a gangbangers brutal killing of his clients granddaughter. Soon Gus has a second problem: he witnesses the execution of a man who has ties to Murphys one friend, the hotels doorman Slava. Murphy knows that Slavas past is dark but has never asked why but its clear now that both the dead man and Slava did something very bad back in the mother country and someone wants Slava dead Murphy is in the crosshairs too. This novel has everything a good detective novel should have: a solid puzzle (actually, two, the dead girls and Slavas); scary Bad Guys and a battered but resourceful Good Guy; interesting ancillary characters; ambiance; and nonstop action leading to a generally satisfactory resolution in a world populated by as many bad guys as Murphys world has, a wholly satisfying resolution is too much to ask for: at the end of this novel, survival is enough. Coleman has won numerous writing awards for previous novels. This fine book shows why.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: These Heroic, Happy Dead: Stories; Author: Luke Mogelson; Review: "It was going on a month that Lilly had been staying with her parents, at their lake house in Vermont. Shed left after the window broke after I punched the window. It had been a bad scene: ambulances and police, concerned neighbors milling in their robes. I let her go. I knew that Caroline who Im sure to this day is convinced that I laid hands on Lillywould do her best to turn her." This is the second paragraph of To the Lake, the first story in this collection of short stories about soldiers and ex-soldiers trying to adjust to the constant assault they are either currently enduring or lived through in combat until they were returned home. Only their partners in battle (intense moments of action alternating with longer spells of boredom) understood them and they aren't around long left dead or wounded or cycled off home or to another theater of combat. What is left is emptiness inside and meaningless outside, bursts of anger that culminate in willful violence alternating with a disregard for the proprieties of normal living. The paragraph isn't unique. Weve come across similar expressions in other literature: were not short of books now that try to communicate the disorientation and horror of modern day war. But the narrator isn't talking about the wife or girlfriend he returned to from war. Shes new. Hed met her after his return and in weeks, had her name tattooed on his arm (I think on his arm I cant find the reference in my notes or by scanning the story). My problem, Bill [Lillys father] had once told me, was that I had difficulty moderating my affection Hes off balance from page one of the story and it steadily grows worse: a car wreck, arrested for DUI, etc., all told alternating with flashbacks to his tour in Afghanistan. He meets another vet, a double amputee. The amputee pays his bail, mortgages (or is it double mortgages?) his house to pay for it, without telling his long-suffering wife before he does it. Things careen forward to an ambiguous possibly horrific- end. The second story (Sea Bass) is about another floundering soul, another vet destroying his own life by contrary anger. In New Guidance, US troops coexist with Muslim nationals in a hostile area. When a Muslim soldier is killed, the US military cant helicopter him for burial for days, in violation of local custom: the radical disconnect between the two groups of soldiers is laid bare in a tale that is eloquent, wrenching and very, very disturbing. And on and on, story through story, ten in all. Home, away, home again. Meaninglessness, anger, alienation. The players in these stories have lost the ability to adjust. Along with their humanity at times. And their hope.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: No Man's Land (John Puller Series); Author: Visit Amazon's David Baldacci Page; Review: This is the thirty-sixth book by veteran fiction writer Baldacci, and the fourth to feature U. S. Army Special Agent John Puller. In the third (2015s The Escape) he had to hunt down his own brother, who was accused of treason and has escaped from prison. Once he found him, he had to clear him of the charges against him and in the process, he cut plenty of corners in official procedure. Now its his father, retired three star general and national hero John Puller. Fighting John is retired now and sinking rapidly into dementia. He remembers the past only sporadically and thus cannot help himself when thirty years after the fact, he is accused of having murdered his wife, John Jr.s mother. But when his son goes to clear him, someone high up in government circle, its not clear who, intervenes to block him. John goes outside channels for a second time way outsideto find what really happened thirty years past when his mother walked out of the house one afternoon and never returned. Running counter to this narrative is a second one: a man named Rogers is released from prison after having served ten years for killing a man in a bar fight. Rogers seeks vengeance, not for the prison sentence he earned thatbut for nameless things done to his body (covered with scars) and mind (he doesnt remember his past, knows that Rogers isn't his name but doesnt know what his real name was) in a hidden and secret Army research compound. Rogerss bones and muscles have been enhanced, his skin has been replaced with something more durable and versatile (he can climb walls like a lizard), but even more his conscience has been removed theres something inside his head and its starting to go bad: Rogers doesnt even know how much longer he will live. But while hes alive, hes a killing machine --hes super-competent and he kills without qualms. The two stories cross and become one. Usually these split narratives don't work well: changing focus back and forth looks like a writers way out when he (or she) cant find a unified storyline. But it works here. Theres plenty of action, interesting characters both good and bad, a great deal of interesting material about the Army, and of course, action. I liked it and may even go back to read the three preceding John Puller thrillers.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Burning Bright (A Peter Ash Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Nick Petrie Page; Review: Petries Burning Bright is the second novel featuring Peter Ash, an ex-soldier who this is the twist to his character-- suffers from PTSD, in the form of aggravated claustrophobia. (The first was 2015s The Drifter.) If he has to stay inside for long, he breaks out in a sweat and he hears senses through all his nerves-- a White Noise that rapidly makes it hard to concentrate or stay calm. In this second novel, Ash seems finally to be gaining control over his affliction, but its still sets him apart: he avoids crowds and prefers to sleep and live outside, not inside, houses, because in his deep memory they tend to harbor dangerous and unexpected things, IEDs, or hostiles in ambush and little boys with bombs hidden beneath their jackets. In this installment, Ash climbs a tree and meets up with a damsel in distress, a high-powered freelance reporter. Hes up there because he was treed by a bear. Shes in hiding. She suspects someone has killed her scientist Mom and she knows theyve tried to kidnap her. She explains her situation to him. They wait, very quiet, and hear men and gunshots below them. From then on, this is a classic novel of pursuit, a group of very competent Bad Guys in aggressive and persistent pursuit and Ash and the woman fighting in a desperate effort first to save their own lives and second to find out why she is being pursued and whos behind the search. The action is plentiful and well described, Ash is a resourceful hero (he even has a sense of humor) and the young reporter an appealing heroine, and the bad guys are satisfyingly bad, which means they're competent sometimes almost super competentand utterly devoid of any moral compass. Theres a good love story embedded in the midst of all the action and even the scenerynorthern California-- is appealing. Another plus is that this installment is a stand-alone: you can read it without having to retrace the installment before it. After the first novel appeared, one newspaper reviewer wrote that Ash was an action hero of the likes of Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne. That doesnt say much, either about the character or about the authors talent in writing about him. Ash is fit, observant and trained in all the arts of hiding and combat but he cant do what Reacher does because hes nowhere as big as he is and hes much less troubled than Bourne. But more than that, theres the writing of this series to date. Petrie tells a better story than Ludlum (less clichd and nut clogged up with digressions) and as good a story as Child does in the best of Reacher series. Burning Bright is a very good action thriller.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Just Try To Stop Me (A Waterman & Stark Thriller); Author: Visit Amazon's Gregg Olsen Page; Review: Olsen is a prolific writer who has won awards for his non-fiction crime books and has authored a string of crime novels. This appears to be the fourth novel featuring Kitsap County sheriffs detective Kendall Stark and forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman. For the most part, the action takes place in or around Kitsap County, not far from Seattle and Tacoma. Serial killer Brenda Nevins has escaped from prison again. (She escaped once before in Now That Shes Gone [2015].) Shes free to exact her revenge, this time on a team of cheerleaders, who are proxies for girls who in Brendas egoistic minddidnt appreciate her enough when she was a teenager. Shes a master at exploiting people, preying on their weaknesses and twisting them into her acolytes and lovers. The bodies pile up. The deaths are gory and brutal. As Kendall, her colleagues in the sheriffs office and an FBI agent (a minor character in the novel) hunt for her, Brenda broadcasts a series of self-justifying and preening videos that attract a wide audience of admirers. Beneath and around the story of the search for this stone killer, the author weaves in details of Kendalls and Birdys lives and hints at a possible future recruit to Brendas nasty doings. How well does this crime thriller work? Well enough to make it enjoyable reading, but the gears creak a bit too loud and often beneath the surface and it doesnt pay the reader to dig too deeply into some of the players motives and behaviors. Brendas a creepy villain but she didn't seem real to me. Nor did the behavior of some of her victims. (I cant say more because it might give away some of the plot.) Kendall and Birdy, though, are good characters, the type you enjoy reading about again. So all in all? An adequate thriller, which will hold the readers attention until the book is through, but not a novel to make you want to read it again or even think about once youve finished it.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Spirit Mission: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Ted Russ Page; Review: This is Russs first novel, started shortly after he left West Point and entered US Army Flight School. The final product is a novel thats split between war story (Iraq in 2015) and reflection on the lead characters life as a West Point cadet almost two decades earlier (1987-90). The two halves don't mesh perfectly and Russs narrative of his growth from wet behind the ears plebe to accomplished firstie doesnt probe as deeply as it might into why a West Point education is the right, or at least a very good, way to grow our next generation of military leaders, but for the most part this is an enjoyable read and a sincere one too. As to the adventure part? Its about the off the book rescue of an old colleague, now an American aid worker, who has been captured by a group of thugs loosely tied to ISIS. The US government has forbidden any attempt at rescue for fear it would draw attention to how badly the US Army is doing in the region. But West Pointers don't abandon their old mates.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Adventures of Joe Harper; Author: Visit Amazon's Phong Nguyen Page; Review: Nguyen (assoc. professor, English; U of Central Missouri, and author of two collections of short fiction) has accomplished the near impossible in this surprising, thoroughly enjoyable book. He has written a continuation of one of Americas iconic texts, Mark Twains The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, continuing it as the reminiscences two decades later of a minor character from that book, Toms boyhood companion Joe Harper. He has adhered to Twains mid-nineteenth-century muscular and vernacular style of prose but altered the trajectory of the narration. Joes twenty years older, thoroughly disillusioned with high ideals and talk of adventure. At the start, all he wants is to find a cave where he can hide away and die. By the end, hes moving again but never again will he be an enthusiast of anyone or thing. On the way? On the way, this novel is more like Huck Finn than Tom Sawyer. Joes two companions are a Chinaman and an Amish woman. The Chinaman philosophizes too much: he opens his mouth once too often and they have to flee town in order not to be tarred and feathered. The Amish woman is running away from an arranged marriage. In an America where Chinamen aren't considered Americans, no matter how long theyve lived here, and women have no rights except through their husbands, the three of them bond. They hit the road, as boes (hoboes), bindlestiffs. On the road, they meet all types from bum to millionaire (the bums are nicer) and stagger from one adventure to another. Some parts are telling. Joe is put on a chain gang in Kansas and the gang boss says all the others are there because they're runaway slaves. But weren't they mancipated? Joe asks the black man next to him on the chain. Every black man in prison in Americy is a runaway slave, he says, and no matter how I twist it, I caint argue. Other parts, are just funny. Like when Joe narrates their visit to Salt Lake City. Until someone corrects him, he calls its inhabitants Morons and their leader Bring em Young, which Joe thinks isn't a bad moniker for a gent with fifty wives, ranging down in age to fifteen. Religions in general get treated roughly by Joe, whose enthusiasm for hypocrisy is non-existent. We meet up with Tom Sawyer again. Hes not a nice man. Huck Finn, we learn, died fighting for the Yankees in the War. Joe runs into Hucks grandfather on a train: he wants to know how his son Hucks horrifying Dadis doing. Theres a story line to this book, but it twists and turns a lot and it doesnt really lead anywhere, except to the death of illusions that comes as one grows older. But this isn't a novel of plot, story. Its a picaresque novel, where the protagonist, free of ties for the most part, wanders. In his wanderings, he meets people and has experiences. For the most part, Joe isn't a trickster like most picaros (Lazarillo de Tormes, Felix Krull) are, but he does the trickery bit; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Burning Bright (A Peter Ash Novel Book 2) - Kindle edition; Author: Visit Amazon's Nick Petrie Page; Review: Petries Burning Bright is the second novel featuring Peter Ash, an ex-soldier who this is the twist to his character-- suffers from PTSD, in the form of aggravated claustrophobia. (The first was 2015s The Drifter.) If he has to stay inside for long, he breaks out in a sweat and he hears senses through all his nerves-- a White Noise that rapidly makes it hard to concentrate or stay calm. In this second novel, Ash seems finally to be gaining control over his affliction, but its still sets him apart: he avoids crowds and prefers to sleep and live outside, not inside, houses, because in his deep memory they tend to harbor dangerous and unexpected things, IEDs, or hostiles in ambush and little boys with bombs hidden beneath their jackets. In this installment, Ash climbs a tree and meets up with a damsel in distress, a high-powered freelance reporter. Hes up there because he was treed by a bear. Shes in hiding. She suspects someone has killed her scientist Mom and she knows theyve tried to kidnap her. She explains her situation to him. They wait, very quiet, and hear men and gunshots below them. From then on, this is a classic novel of pursuit, a group of very competent Bad Guys in aggressive and persistent pursuit and Ash and the woman fighting in a desperate effort first to save their own lives and second to find out why she is being pursued and whos behind the search. The action is plentiful and well described, Ash is a resourceful hero (he even has a sense of humor) and the young reporter an appealing heroine, and the bad guys are satisfyingly bad, which means they're competent sometimes almost super competentand utterly devoid of any moral compass. Theres a good love story embedded in the midst of all the action and even the scenerynorthern California-- is appealing. Another plus is that this installment is a stand-alone: you can read it without having to retrace the installment before it. After the first novel appeared, one newspaper reviewer wrote that Ash was an action hero of the likes of Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne. That doesnt say much, either about the character or about the authors talent in writing about him. Ash is fit, observant and trained in all the arts of hiding and combat but he cant do what Reacher does because hes nowhere as big as he is and hes much less troubled than Bourne. But more than that, theres the writing of this series to date. Petrie tells a better story than Ludlum (less clichd and nut clogged up with digressions) and as good a story as Child does in the best of Reacher series. Burning Bright is a very good action thriller.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: This Census-Taker; Author: Visit Amazon's China Miville Page; Review: MIEVILLE, China. This Census-Taker. Del Rey (Random House). 2016. 211p. $24. This has been a good year for lovers of China Mievilles short fiction, with two novellas published, this one and the later The Last Days of New Paris which I have reviewed elsewhere. Everything Mieville writes is odd hes an off-center writer whose works of speculative startle stir your imagination and provoke thought -- but even within his corpus of eccentric tales, this tale is very odd indeed. It isn't so much the story, although the story is decidedly murky in detail: a boy (the narrator) is raised by alienated and alienating parents, one of whom (the father) may or may not have killed the other (the mother), after which the boy goes to work for a vaguely described agency of census takers set up by a miasmic government after a hinted-at collapse of government, society, whatever in some not nailed down time in the future (maybe not too far off). In short, this is a dystopic novel but only somewhat because the narration is so claustrophobic in focus that it doesnt so much define negative utopia as a condition of imprisonment. There is too the very odd way the narration continues. Its all about the boy, and he is the principal probably sole narrator of it but the account shifts repeatedly and without warning between first and third person: I is doing something and then he is Its an unsettling way to present a narrative but also effective: it amps up the feeling you have that the boy isn't so much actor as acted upon, a feeling amplified still further by the barebones of the narration. Some parts of the story are never explained. They just happen. Central to the story is the boys, now lads, keeping of journals. His mentor and boss tells him to keep three books. The first is a book of numbers calculations, lists, weights and occupations and schedules. This books public but no one will want to read it. The third book is private you write secrets in that bookbut youll never know if someone else finds it and reads it behind your back. The second book lies between the other two: its your book for readers. But read this passage, in which the lads mentor explains the uses and risks of this book: "[T]he second books for readers, he said. But you cant know when theyll come, if they do. Its the book for telling: no code for that one. But he counted one again and had my close attentionyou can still use to tell secrets and send messages. Even so. You could say them right out, but you can hide them in the words too, in their letters, in the ordering on lines, the arrangements and rhythms. He said, The second books performance." In short, it's a lot like Kafkas world, but the world of his short pieces loss of place and threats and punishments hinted at rather than lined out in clear prosemore than The Trial, The Castle or Amerika. I think; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us; Author: Visit Amazon's Walt Kelly Page; Review: KELLY, Walt. Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us. Simon & Schuster. 1972. 127p. (pb) KELLY, Walt. Walt Kellys Pogo Revisited: Instant Pogo. The Jack Acid Society Black Book. The Pogo Poop Book. Simon & Schuster. 1957-1966; 1972. 320p. (pb) It starts at the beginning with a commentary by the artist: Fun, like God, is declared dead every once in a while. And near the end of the collection, there is a poem: THE TROUBLE WITH PEOPLE IS PEOPLE If we could climb the highest steeple And look around at all the people, And shoot the ones Not wholly good As we, like noble shooters, should, Why, then thered be an only worry Who would be left to bury us? In our own particularly nasty political season, soon, I hope, to be over, my thoughts went back to gentler times and to Walt Kellys Pogo, my favorite cartoon strip ever. Kelly didn't shy away from political comment. (In Revisited, see especially The Jack Acid Society Black Book.) He had causes preserving Okefenokee Swamp was definitely one-- nor was he afraid to call a spade a spade, labeling bad guys like Mole and the Deacon bad and calling the good guys, the ordinary fellows of the swamp like Pogo the Possum and Albert the Alligator good. Even he was riding his hobbyhorse, his humor was gentle but boy could he skewer bigots and hypocrites, like the pompous deacon who said he had founded a newspaper dedicated to fighting that unknown peril (something I call creeping democracy!) Im forming a society to name names. That society of course was the Jack Acid Society, the perfect pseudonym for a group of far right loonies in the days of the real, and equally loony, John Birch Society. Well make a Black List, the deacon enthuses. a lot of simps who believe in World Brotherhood bleeding hearts -Put down their names, he admonishes Pogo, who stands there listening, calm, amazed at what hes hearing but not buying it. Pogo asks: Whats the Jack Acid Society stand for? We won't stand for much, believe me! Its what were against thats important, says the deacon. Theres a lesson in these funny books. The references have changed but the humor hasn't aged. Alas, though, I don't know how much people will hear it in our own age of stentorian roaring about whos more American and how to prove it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Walt Kelly's Pogo Revisited: Instant Pogo / The Jack Acid Society Black Book / The Pogo Poop Book; Author: Visit Amazon's Walt Kelly Page; Review: KELLY, Walt. Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us. Simon & Schuster. 1972. 127p. (pb) KELLY, Walt. Walt Kellys Pogo Revisited: Instant Pogo. The Jack Acid Society Black Book. The Pogo Poop Book. Simon & Schuster. 1957-1966; 1972. 320p. (pb) It starts at the beginning with a commentary by the artist: Fun, like God, is declared dead every once in a while. And near the end of the collection, there is a poem: THE TROUBLE WITH PEOPLE IS PEOPLE If we could climb the highest steeple And look around at all the people, And shoot the ones Not wholly good As we, like noble shooters, should, Why, then thered be an only worry Who would be left to bury us? In our own particularly nasty political season, soon, I hope, to be over, my thoughts went back to gentler times and to Walt Kellys Pogo, my favorite cartoon strip ever. Kelly didn't shy away from political comment. (In Revisited, see especially The Jack Acid Society Black Book.) He had causes preserving Okefenokee Swamp was definitely one-- nor was he afraid to call a spade a spade, labeling bad guys like Mole and the Deacon bad and calling the good guys, the ordinary fellows of the swamp like Pogo the Possum and Albert the Alligator good. Even he was riding his hobbyhorse, his humor was gentle but boy could he skewer bigots and hypocrites, like the pompous deacon who said he had founded a newspaper dedicated to fighting that unknown peril (something I call creeping democracy!) Im forming a society to name names. That society of course was the Jack Acid Society, the perfect pseudonym for a group of far right loonies in the days of the real, and equally loony, John Birch Society. Well make a Black List, the deacon enthuses. a lot of simps who believe in World Brotherhood bleeding hearts -Put down their names, he admonishes Pogo, who stands there listening, calm, amazed at what hes hearing but not buying it. Pogo asks: Whats the Jack Acid Society stand for? We won't stand for much, believe me! Its what were against thats important, says the deacon. Theres a lesson in these funny books. The references have changed but the humor hasn't aged. Alas, though, I don't know how much people will hear it in our own age of stentorian roaring about whos more American and how to prove it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History; Author: Visit Amazon's Lawrence Levy Page; Review: I got this book at five p.m. yesterday, sat down to look at it, and didn't get up until I was done with it at 8:30 that night. Thats how much it held my attention. Its about Pixar and its amazing digital film-making capabilities but its not about the technical side of the business but rather the financial: how do you make a prohibitively expensive operation like Pixar, with a prohibitively long window to payoff, succeed and grow or, in business terms, what has to be done to take Pixar public and make it succeed? From the start, no one doubted Pixars product. The question was how to make money on it. It had been saved from extinction by a movie deal with Disney but still lived hand to mouth with monthly cash bailouts from Steve Jobss pocket (Jobs had put in fifty million by the time Levy came on board as chief financial officer in 1994). It took three years to make a movie using Pixars superior but time-consuming process and Disney had locked them down in a three-picture contract (think nine-year window till any renegotiation of terms). Any sequels (Toy Story 2) didn't count toward the three-film obligation and the terms for profit sharing, residuals, the marketing and sale of spin-off products (dolls, etc.) were stringent and iron clad. Pixar had other products than its films and they too were superior but they offered no better hope of profits: their markets were too limited. Jobs approached Levy because he was getting antsy: he had infused too much of his own money into a business that seemed to be going nowhere and his other post-Apple venture, NeXT, was floundering. He wanted vengeance on Apple for unceremoniously dumping him the early 90s and he wanted a turnaround on Pixar. Levy, trained in corporate law and experienced in startup technology industries, was Jobss answer to his problem. Jobs was reputedly a difficult boss and colleague he was self-willed, dismissive of differences of opinion, and no respecter of social niceties, outright prickly at times. Levys challenge was to figure out how to work with the computer entrepreneur. Pixar was Jobss company, it was his money that was sustaining it. He called the shots and he wasn't known for his patience. It is fascinating to read how Levy and Jobs worked together, more comfortable with each other and growing in trust and appreciation of each others strengths and viewpoints. Its fascinating also to read how corporate maneuvering and corporate agreement-making work in the high cost, high-risk world of movie entertainment. Everyone knows what happened. Pixars first movie, Toy Story, was a runaway success. Pixar did go public and its stock price shot through the roof. Jobs became a bona fide billionaire off of the proceeds of the sale. It hasn't yet ended. Levy comes across as a man youd like to know. He doesnt puff his role up and hes respectful of the many other big personalities involved in the story. The result is an entertaining and fascinating story that is also, in an askew; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Juggling Kittens; Author: Visit Amazon's Matt Coleman Page; Review: Mr. Colemans first novel was a pleasant surprise. I liked it quite a bit and think other readers would as well. Its well written, with a personal voice engaging and often funny. The story is told by first-year teacher soon-to-be father Ellis Mazer, who teaches seventh-grade English in Ruddy Creek, a rural community somewhere outside of Texarkana. (If youve never taught seventh grade, you have no idea how hard it can be, even for an experienced teacher. Teaching in a backwoods area is no piece of cake either. Ellis doesnt know what to do to motivate his under-enthusiastic students so he has them write essays on their personal experiences, even though, as seventh-graders, they haven't had many yet. Three months into the fall, he leaves class one day and is mugged in the school parking lot by three high school jocks wearing ski masks. Its weird. All they seem to have wanted was the homework papers his students had handed in.) Soon after, Ellis visits a truant student, Spencer, to give him his overdue class assignments. Spencer hasn't impressed him much in class -- trailer trash with more ringworms than friends, is how he describes him. But Spencer seems to be missing and no one seems to care. Except for Ellis. Assisted by assistant principal The Drew (thats how Drew refers to himself), he starts digging and finds that there are nasty worms beneath the rocks he turns over. What follows is a detective story by accident, with plenty of pratfalls on the way to spice things up, and a gently comic account of life in half-rural half-small-town Arkansas. There is no grand epiphany at the end of Elliss search but in the process of searching, Ellis has grown up substantially. And thats a good thing.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dark Horse: An Eddy Harkness Novel (Eddy Harkness Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Rory Flynn Page; Review: This is the second Eddy Harkness crime thriller -the first was Third Rail [2014]- and the first I have read. Its a good one, superior in all respects: setting (Bostons gritty lower South Side alternating with Nagog, the upscale history-laden town outside Boston where Eddy grew up), characters (Eddy, his girlfriend soon-to-be wife we hope, his cop colleagues and the assorted high and low life stiffs who move in and out of the story with regularity), plotting (which tells you a lot about the claustrophobic high politics of the Bean City) and narrative tone (Eddy tells a clean mean story). The plot is complicated but credible. A deadly new brand of heroin called Dark Horse is killing South Side addicts right and left. When a hurricane leaves the South Side under water, the brand mysteriously disappears from the streets. South Side residents deprived of their homes by the flood migrate to the suburbs an obscure 18th-century law allows them to homestead in upper middle class plus upper crust Nagog and tensions grow between newbies and oldies. Boston has a new mayor but something stinks in City Hall. Eddy, who heads the PDs narcotics unit, disobeys orders to keep his head down and spreads his investigation of the missing Dark Horse into a sneak peek at whats going on with the mayor and things heat up. Theres not a moment in this novel when the readers attention flags. Its a highly professional, wholly absorbing foray into the police procedural genre. I recommend it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life; Author: Visit Amazon's Adam Phillips Page; Review: Phillips is a figure of some note in British psychotherapeutic and literary circles. (John Banville called him the Martin Amis of British psychotherapy.) His stance toward his chosen profession, clearly stated in these essays, is that psychotherapy is closer to poetry an art formthan to medicine a science. As such, it must be practiced with flexibility and humility: if one approach doesnt work in sessions, try another. He has written a study of off-the-center but highly influential psychoanalyst/pediatrician D. W. Winnicott (d. 1971) whose contributions to the discipline lay primarily in the field of object relations theory, the notion that we develop a sense of self, a psyche, in interaction with others during childhood. New interactions remind us of old ones, which have metamorphosed into something like archetypes of behavior objectslurking in our minds. Therapy then becomes something closer to play than medical examination as analyst and analysand re-en-act old dramas in order to resolve the new ones. Phillips also lists among influences on his town thinking in addition to Freud (about whom he has much disagreement) and Jung (whose ideas seem to lie vaguely in the background of Phillipss writing), such wildcard thinkers as Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell and W. H. Auden. William James receives positive mention. In an interview with Alain de Botton, Phillips said, For me, psychoanalysis is only one among many things you might do if you're feeling unwell you might also try aromatherapy, knitting, hang-gliding. There are a lot of things you can do with your distress. I don't believe psychoanalysis is the best thing you can do, even if I value it a great deal. This is the second of eighteen books written or co-written (one book) by Phillips and, as the subtitle says, its about aspects of our unexamined life but not exclusively or even primarily about neurotic aspects. Rather, Phillips writes about such interesting phenomena as how we manage and what is the psychological significance of being tickled, kissing and being kissed, growing bored (what does boredom do for a child?), being alone, worrying There is along the way a great deal of comment on Freud and other theorists Melanie Klein doesnt get good press, Winnicott gets very good press- and essays on phobias and hates, and the idolatrizing (I made up the word) of psychoanalysis. Even the most theory-laden essays in this collection are in the classic sense: they are a la Montaigne first attempts rather than complete statements of position or theory. This is not an easy book to read. The language and ideas are at times dense, abstruse. Then you come across passages like this, which almost alone redeem the book: Symptoms are a way of thinking about difficult things, thinking with the sound turned off, as it were. A phobia, like a psychoanalytic theory, is a story about where the wild things are. As transparent and self-evident as these two sentences seem to be, they're not. There are assumptions in them that need to be unpacked. But what makes them brilliant is that in the unpacking you, not just the; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Highly Illogical Behavior; Author: Visit Amazon's John Corey Whaley Page; Review: Three years ago, Solomon walked out of class, stripped to his boxers and sat down in the middle of the fountain in front of his school and all his class mates. Sixteen now, he hasn't left his house for three years. His parents aren't happy about it but they love him and at home hes funny and most of the timeat ease. Except when his panic attacks hit. Enter Lisa, a year older than Solomon, and All Everything at her school, which is the senior school Solomon would have progressed to if he hadnt retreated into home schooling. Lisass a lot like the Reese Witherspoon character in the movie Election, just not as mean. Shes determined to get ahead, has already picked out her college. (It has the second best undergraduate program in psychology in the country.) Now all she needs is to win a free ride there. The program offers one full scholarship a year. To get it, she has to write a killer essay on My Personal Experience with Mental Illness. When she thinks of Solomon, hes her ticket to success: all she has to do is ingratiate herself with him and cure him. Who could offer a better experience than that to a college admission counselor? First she has to meet Solomon, though. Then convinced him shes his friend. And well see what happens from then on. Dont worry, though, Lisa has a plan. Lisa always has a plan. Lisas boyfriend Clark is almost the perfect high school boyfriend handsome, a jock but not overly jockish (his sport is water polo and hes really good at it, gets along with everyone and, though he doesnt work at it, smart enough. But he has no ambition, which is a definite negative with Lisa. Here it is half way through their junior year in high school and he hasn't starting filling out college applications yet. Clark may have to go but not yet, because Lisa (1) likes him a lot and (2) she has a plan for him too hes going to help her win over, then cure Solomon of his agoraphobia. Itll be hard work but they're going to get Solomon to leave his house. Many things happen after this point and not all of them are good, but in the end, it works out well, and Lisa, as well as Solomon, learns a necessary lesson about growing from self-centered childhood into empathetic adulthood. This is a very sweet, funny, human novel. Its labeled Young Adult but its not really because anyone who likes a good read will enjoy this novel. Ive already recommended it to my wife.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Darkness of Evil (The Karen Vail Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Alan Jacobson Page; Review: This is the seventh crime thriller to feature FBI profiler Karen Vail. Its a good one, because of strong plotting, characterization and a knowledge of the techniques and insights drawn on by modern day investigators. Vail is an appealing heroine, a strong player who takes charge of her own life and damn the proprieties. She has a son, Robby, now in college and thinking of following his mother into police work; a fiancée who works for another agency, DEA; good colleagues and less than good colleagues, both past and present, upon whom she can call for assistance when the going gets rough, which it does early in this tense novel about the search for an escaped serial killer. The pace is fast, a lot of people die, there are a number of cliffhanger moments to keep the readers attention riveted on the book, and the plot has unexpected twists (one of them is big!). If the writing seems formulaic at times, thats not a bad thing: a formula, used rightly as it is here, gives structure to the book,; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Edit: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's J. Sydney Jones Page; Review: An unnamed man with a loathsome past sits at his desk writing his memoirs. For who knows how many years he has been hiding in an equally unspecified American state, protected by his money and a network of corrupt officials who sympathize with his views. A journalist, Miss OBrien, comes to interview him. She gets close enough to him that he leaves her unguarded in his house for a few minutes while he goes to the kitchen to brew tea and when he returns, shes reading through his manuscript. He cant have that. Hes a wanted man still. If his enemies find that hes still alive, theyll come after him, just like they did after Eichmann. So he imprisons her. He jabs her with a needle loaded with an anesthetic. It incapacitates her and he locks her up in a room. But what does he do now? He had no difficulty letting thousands die in World War II but there are proprieties: he cant simply kill off a guest, a woman, like he would a Jew or a Gypsy or a deviant or a criminal. Thus begins a painful dance between captor and captive, in which the captor tries to avoid unpleasant truths and must always defend his own repugnant views and the captive won't let him. Hes a real piece of work, writes contemptuously of the Jew Freud (who with the Jew Einstein is responsible for all the woes of the modern world). Killing miscreants, deviants and underpeople didn't bother him but Miss OBriens use of the f word offends him. I am tired of being misunderstood, he writes, and I believe I have remained a gentleman throughout this difficult situation. A gentleman! At Mauthausen in the winter of 1944, he let nature take its course when an influenza epidemic hit. 4000 of the concentration camps inmates died Jews, Gypsies., social undesirables, and hardened criminals. Hes proud that he was known as the Problem Man. He was the efficiency expert: I solve, rather than make, problems, he writes. Thus begins a war between captive and captor over what the aging fugitives life really means. He claims she doesnt get it. But its no surprise: Man and woman are of two different worlds. There should be no talk of sharing spheres . . . Chaos and order: These do not compromise with each other. Besides, he was no criminal. He was a soldier, engaged in a purifying war, a holy war. We Germans were the modern Crusaders. Those were inspirational times. No one can truly understand those times who did not live through them. He writes, she reads, critiques his writing, keeps him off balance with interpretations of his motives that he cant admit, especially the way she tries to sexualize his life. He never admits it but the extracts from his memoirs show how deeply eroticized this life has been. The novel doesnt end as well as it starts, and parts don't always fit together smoothly, but there is a power to it, mostly in the sections from the mans memoirs.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: What Becomes Us; Author: Visit Amazon's Micah Perks Page; Review: Perks who co-directs a creative writing program at UC Santa Cruz is a prolific writer of short fiction. She has published a memoir (Pagan Time, 2009) and a long personal essay (Alone in the Woods: Cheryl Strayed, My Daughter and Me, 2017) about her own life growing up in commune in the Adirondacks. This is her second novel. Its a lovely creature but hard to pin down. Thats a virtue: much fiction today, and especially fiction intended to be popular, reads as though cut from molds. Cookie cutter is not the adjective youd apply to What Becomes Us because every time you think you have a handle on where its headed, it changes direction, not dramatically but enough to make it a unique creation about a unique heroine who finds herself in a situation at once common but singular, with a cast of characters around her who are people, sometimes eccentric ones but people, not comic stereotypes. The story line: mild-mannered Evie finds shes pregnant. She abandons her controlling husband and flees cross-country to live in upstate New York and teach in the local high school. The teacher she replaces had assigned the class a book to read, The Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson, the first book written by a woman in America, an account of her capture and escape from Native Americans during King Philips War in the seventeenth century. Evie becomes obsessed with the book, even dreams of it at night. Shes equally obsessed with her neighbor, a Chilean immigrant, whom she finds unbelievably sexy. The problem is that hes married, to a woman whos determined to be Evies best friend. At first, its a tight, reasonably harmonious community, but as Evies pregnancy continues, everything goes belly up. The story is narrated by the growing baby fetus in Evies belly: hes one of two, twins. The novel ends after Evies water breaks. The story line doesnt communicate how enjoyable this book is, how much you love the characters, how sweet and funny it all is, and how interesting it is to follow the growing complications in Evies and her neighbors lives. Theres nothing stale in this book, nothing second rate. Fiction-wise, its definitely the Real Thing.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: House of Eight Orchids; Author: Visit Amazon's James Thayer Page; Review: For me, this is the best kind of leisure reading, an old-fashioned straight ahead adventure novel set in an exotic place and time 1937 Chinaand populated with vividly drawn, also exotic characters. In 1937, the city of Chungking and the land around it is in constant turmoil, as a bloody war is played out among the Japanese and Chinese national armies and thuggish warlords who owe allegiance only to the advantages of the moment. There is no safe haven here but the narrator of this rousing tale, 27-year-old John Wade, still thinks he lives in one. He is servant to Chungkings most feared crime lord, Eunuch Chang. He serves him as assassin, swindler and thief. His brother William is two years younger than John. He serves Eunuch too. Hes a talented artist, the Eunuchs forger who makes him everything from phony money to fake masterpieces. But John and William are gweilo foreigners, westerners Johns nickname is Yellow Hair. Eunuchs men abducted them off the street twenty-five years ago. Their father was the American consul in Chungking. Their parents never found them. Instead, Eunuch took them into his house where he had them trained as criminals. They don't even remember their parents: Eunuch is now their mentor and protector and he demands absolute obedience of all who work for him no questioning, no hesitation, do what he tells them to do. Until now, that is. Now Eunuchs gang has abducted Tsingtao Lily, a Chinese movie star. He plans to sell Lily to a magnate who has bought copies of her every film (all awful) and watches them twenty, thirty times each: the magnate wants Lily as his private pleasure toy. Lily wants to escape. In Changs camp, she works her wiles on Johns brother, William. William pressures John to help him escape with Lily. John says no. Lily and William head off any way and are caught. Theyre brought back for punishment. William will be flogged until his bones show through the flesh on his back. Then things happen. William and Lily head off. John heads off too, seeking to catch up with them and save William from disaster. From then on, its one thing after another, most of them unexpected and all of them exciting. John must deal with venal soldiers, a warlord who posts the heads of enemies on spikes outside his quarters as a caution to others, a friendly American naval captain who cruises the rivers near Chungking with enough firepower to save Johns bacon when he needs it, a redheaded missionary doctor who tries to talk him into reforming, killer monks, lepers, a giant black dog that adopts John and defends him from attack. And the names! There are Eunuch Chang, Ham Fist (bad man!), One Eye Gao Bai, Tsingtao Lily, Madame Tuan, and places like Widows Tear Drop Number Three and the House of Eight Orchids, where Chang rules like emperor over his gang of thieves, killers and con men. Orchids is an exemplary piece of action writing, like reading H. Rider Haggard or John Buchan, minus the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Our Chemical Hearts; Author: Visit Amazon's Krystal Sutherland Page; Review: This Young Adult novel about a first love affairas it turns out, a failed oneis far from perfect but its full of heart, enjoyable to read, and at the end of it, I found I cared about Henry and Grace, its principal characters. Its more than just enjoyable. Its very enjoyable. The situation is extreme, the coincidences a bit too many, and the supporting cast Henrys friends Lola and Murray, his Bohemian-at-heart parentsstretch the readers credibility a bit. But its still pleasurable to read. The plot: Henry Page has never had a girlfriend. The only girl hes kissed is his longtime friend/neighbor Lola, who came out as lesbian the week after they kissed not exactly an endorsement of Henrys skill as a lover. Hes a demon writer though and thats why hes a shoe-in for high school newspaper editor. Enter Grace. Greasy hair, walks with a limp, wears old, man-style clothes, grumpy and doesnt talk to anyone. Shes a transfer student and at her old school at leastwrote like a dream. Co-editors: Henry and Grace. No one would fall for Grace. But Henry does. Clearly she has issues, but Henrys love can win through those. He thinks. Theres a lot of truth in this novel. Its full of good stuff, just not perfect.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Quicksand: What It Means to Be a Human Being; Author: Visit Amazon's Henning Mankell Page; Review: Every new morning I have to think about something other than my illness. In January 2014, Henning Mankell, author of the marvelous Kurt Wallander mysteries, was told by his doctor that he had lung cancer. He was 65, going on 66, and would live for another year and a half before dying at the age of 67. He used the time between diagnosis and death to think about his life, the memories and perceptions that had formed him. This book is the product. In it, he tells you a lot about his past but it isn't so much memoir as the use of past experience(s) to sharpen his perception of what it means to be human and what our obligations to each other, to generations yet to come- are or should be. Mankell travelled widely and long, from the better part of a year in Paris when he was on the lam from high school and family to repeated stays in Africa, where he produced and directed theater. This cosmopolitanism gives his comments a universality that might not have if his life had been more restricted. He felt but also thought. About almost everything that came to his attention. He comments on the damage we have done to the world that sustains us. There are repeated passages on global warming, the extinction of animal species, the disposal of nuclear waste (a fatal clock ticking away), human trafficking, prostitution, child labor, the misery of the poor, the human costs of fracking oil, a piece of Greenland ice that took 1,500 years to form but has melted away in twenty-five years We lead transitory lives: here, then gone; living between two Ice Ages, one 10,000 years past, the other yet to come. Many of the chapters describe encounters. The impression that comes across is of a man who was by temperament an observer above all else. (Did that feed into his fiction writing? His theater?) He observes and comments. A woman sits by herself in a public place. Shes shaking. She radiates fear. Shes called to take a phone call. Upon returning, she leaves the place, her face radiant with joy. Mankell, who hadnt spoken a word to her, asks another person what had happened: her husband had been near death but she has just learned that he has made a recovery. Thats a recurrent pattern: Mankell observing but not intervening, later learning what, if anything, had transacted, and reflecting on it. Sometimes, he reproaches himself for cowardice mostly, inaction in the face of something wrong: abuse and outright, dispossession and poverty. He is fascinated by our past: documents from Timbuktu on display in the Vatican archivers, the ruins of a civilization on Easter Island, the first drawings and cave drawings, the ruins of a prehistoric religion at Hagar Qim on Malta, a pocket of 10,000-year-old salt water in the rocks in his native Sweden where hes having a new well drilled. This is a book of small pleasures that build into bigger ones, small perceptions gradually enlarging. At first, I found his constant; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Big Law: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Ron Liebman Page; Review: This is the fourth novel by Liebman, a former federal prosecutor and a practicing lawyer since the 70s. Not surprisingly, its law he writes about in this diverting novel about high level corporate and lawyerly malfeasance. Carney Blake is a very junior partner at Dunn & Sullivan (D&S). He doesnt make decisions, never gets to head the legal team on a case. So when senior partner Carl Smith, a cold fish if there ever was one, asks him orders him- to take the lead in a class action suit, hes surprised and puzzled. A multi-national energy conglomerate, GRE has a gas plant in Assam, India, that has blown up. The managers delayed evacuating the workers. Many died as a result and many more were affected by the cloud of poisonous air that blanketed their villages. In an Indian court, a judge ordered GRE to pay damages of 2.5 billion dollars (rupees converted to American dollars) but GRE hasn't coughed up a dime. GREs assets are in America so the plaintiffs have to file suit in an American court to get their money. Carney is going to be their attack dog. But why him? Something smells off. Thats only the first thing that will stink in this extraordinarily smelly outing. The principal malfeasants are two lawyers, stags Carneys boss, Smith, had spread a rumor that got himself promoted to senior partner and his rival Peter Moss ousted from the firm. Moss wants vengeance. This lawsuit is his opportunity: hell trap them in it and use the leverage he gets from it for a takeover: Smith will be out, Moss in. Thats one set of wheels grinding away Mosss honey trap, the GRE class action suit. But the wheels are grinding on Carls end too. Hes negotiating with Wall Street bankers to take D&S public, with an IPO (Initial Public Offering) that would make it the first law firm to be traded on the Stock Exchange. He needs to beef up the firms revenues to make the offering more attractive. The GRE suit, and other like it, is the way: hedge funds have diversified into litigation financing. advancing the funding for high potential cases like the GRE one. Smith can list the hedge funds upfront money as revenues and also the 50% payoff the firm will get if it wins the suit. It all makes the IPO look even more attractive. There you are, one legal giant using the suit to bring down the other, the other using it to beef up his firms revenues before he goes out to make even more money in a public offering. Squeezed between them is Carney, who begins to feel very small indeed as D&S, then Carney and D&S and then Carney alone, are deluged with law suits. Soon, Carney is up on federal charges, with the threat of disbarment and jail time. Its a diverting read and the action moves quickly. The characters are engaging but thin, and Carney an engaging narrator though unbelievably obtuse. (How did he ever make it to junior partner as nave; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Kids of Appetite; Author: ; Review: Victors having a rough time of it lately. His father, whom he adored, died two years ago, too young to die yet but you cant contradict cancer. His mom and dad were the perfect couple similar sensibilities, down to even the books they read and talked about together. They were a really good thing because Victor needed their support. Victor suffers from Moebius syndrome. Its a rare genetic ailment that leaves the muscles of the face frozen -- or nearly so Victor can move his mouth and jaw some. But Victors eyes are always open and they dry out. He even sleeps with them open and he carries a bottle of Visine with him everywhere. Plus, he drools a lot (he s carries a handkerchief with him to wipe the corners of his mouth) and little boys ask whats wrong with him and kids his own age taunt him. But Dads gone now and Moms seeing another fellow, a lawyer named Carl who does everything wrong from Victors point of view: he wears a suit all the time, he loves to eat canned green beans --canned, for heavens sake! and hes so poorly lettered he thinks Tolstoy wrote Crime and Punishment, or whatever the books called. The worst, though, is that Victors mother seems to be forgetting life with his father. So Victor splits. He takes the urn with his fathers ashes and runs away from home. He winds up with a bunch of other castaways. The oldest head, protector and wise man of the groupis Baz, 27. His brother Zus is 20. Then theres Mad, 17, a year older than Victor, and last of all, Coco, age 11, and foul-mouthed well beyond her biological age. Bazs real name is Mbemba Bahizire Kabongo, Zuss is Nzuzi Kabongo. Theyre from the Republic of the Congo. There was a civil war and they had to flee when Baz was ten and Zus three. Their parents and sister didn't make it. They almost didn't too. Now Baz works in a grocery store to earn a living and he longs to write a book. And Zus doesnt talk anymore at all --only snaps his fingers, once or twice, depending on what he wants to communicate to others around him. Victor falls for Mad. The attraction is mutual but Mad has her own troubles, dead parents, an abusive uncle, a grandmother who doesnt even know who Mad is anymore. Theres a lot work through here but thats one of the joys of this wonderful book: these young people, caring for each other, solve their own problems. Victor needs to honor his fathers wishes, scattering his ashes in five special places named (but location not specified) in a note Victor finds in the funerary urn. Mad needs to protect Jamma, her grammy, and somehow get her away from abusive uncle Lester. (Hes not even a real uncle, just the man they were left with when Mads parents died suddenly.) All of this complicated story is unfolded in stagesslowlyin the interstices of a detective story. Someones dead. Who killed; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: For Time and All Eternities (A Linda Wallheim Mystery); Author: Visit Amazon's Mette Ivie Harrison Page; Review: This is the third Linda Wallheim mystery and the second I have reviewed. (The other was His Right Hand, (2015). Linda is an appealing character, wife of a Mormon bishop, Kurt. Kurt is an accountant by trade and very devout: whatever the church decrees, he feels he must accept without reservation. It isn't that he never questions but he feels his faith requires obedience to ALL of the Churchs decrees, even when they cause him and Linda even morepain. Linda and Kurt are empty nesters now: their four boys have all left home. The youngest of them, Samuel, who is gay, is now doing missionary service. Samuels gayness, which Linda accepts but Kurt does not, and Kurts unquestioning acceptance of the Mormon Churchs condemnation of same sex marriage, has caused strains, huge strains, in Kurts and Lindas marriage. Linda, the almost-by-accident-but not-quite detective, is an appealing narrator in these tales. In the process of solving (or not solving) cases, she talks on about her religion and marriage, and one of the pleasures in these very interesting stories is learning more about this (to most of us) exotic faith from someone who lives in the Church but doesnt automatically approve of the decisions of its human and fallible leaders. Lindas standard is her trust in a loving all-inclusive God who wouldnt willingly exclude Samuel for something he cannot help. Now her son Kurt plans to marry and it turns out Naomi is the daughter of a Mormon polygamist. Linda and Kurt agree to spend time with Naomis family though much that goes on there makes their skin creep. The mystery in this book is about the bloody murder of Naomis father early in the story. As detecting goes, the exposition is clumsy, rather mundane. The polygamy angle is interesting but the problem-solving part not so much. But the ongoing saga of Kurts and Lindas marriage, tugging back and forth between Kurts ultraconservative heart and Lindas more inclusive one, is a pleasure to read about because it seems so real and they're such good people. They genuinely love each other. That means they don't give up on each other no matter how intense their disagreement, so hurrah for Linda and Kurt! Its hard not to finish it without applauding both Linda and Kurt. Theyre human, deeply loving (of each other and their children), and thoroughly decent people.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Dark Room; Author: Visit Amazon's Jonathan Moore Page; Review: SFPD homicide inspector Gavin Cain is waiting for a casket to be opened: the department has received credible evidence that there is something wrong with it. He is abruptly pulled off the case: the mayor has ordered him to come to City Hall --now. His lieutenant sends a copter to transport him back. Thats how urgent it is. Its blackmail. The mayor has received a packet with photos in it a young woman elegantly dressed, then undressed and in bondage, who knows what the ending will be? The accompanying note indicates more are yet to come. The mayor swears hes never seen the woman in the photos, they're not about him. He orders the detective to find out who she is, what happened to her. Back at the funeral home Cain has left, the casket is opened. There are two bodies in it, not one. The second body is of a young woman. She had been put into the coffin still alive. That was thirty years ago. Cain soon suspects, it soon becomes evident that though decades separate the two happenings, these crimes overlap. The tempo accelerates. The detective, working with partners in the SFPD and a cooperative FBI agent (you don't find many of those in contemporary crime fiction), doggedly pursues the trail. The evidence is confusing and inconclusive and the mayors family members are hiding something. In a burst of shocking violence, the case spills over into Cains personal life, threatening the fragile woman he lives with. This exceptionally well written crime tale is a policier in subject, and though set in San Francisco and not LA, Chandleresque in tone. Moore (The Poison Artist, 2015) has succeeded better than anyone I have read recently in capturing not only the police detectives procedures but his mindset: keep the crime scene intact, don't plunge in, attend to detail, document everything, maintain unbroken chain of custody --above all, tell no one anything you don't have to tell them because facts leak and leaks pollute. Its all laid out for you in this exceptionally well written crime thriller, without any drop in tension. And the Chandler element? Cains integrity, the grittiness of detail, the secret lives and motives of the pampered socialites and politicos Cain is investigating. The novel ends in one final spurt of violence: that is a bit over the top doesnt detract from this exceptionally well written crime novel at all.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: An Unsettling Crime for Samuel Craddock: A Samuel Craddock Mystery (Samuel Craddock Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Terry Shames Page; Review: How did I miss this series? On the evidence of this installment, billed as prequel, it is superior in all respects. The detective, police chief Samuel Craddock, who narrates the story, is newly appointed and green behind the ears but hes intelligent, dogged in pursuit and not too proud to learn from other policemen with more experience than he has. Hes got a loving wife: she didn't want him to take the police job in the first place though and shes not happy seeing him talking to the towns blacks. The time frame isn't specified but in other novels in the series, Craddock is retired. In one, the Gulf War is mentioned so Im assuming this prequel is set in the 50s or verity early 60s. The attitude of most of the white characters in the novel supports that time frame. The other characters are well laid out too: good cops and bad ones, black characters who talk and act like African-Americans were expected to act then and there (rural Texas) one of Craddocks problems is winning their trust, even a little bit of it. The setting is rural Texas: the town of Jarrett Creek, pop. 3000. The crime? The murder and torching of five unidentified African-Americans. Craddock is only peripherally involved in the case at the start: jurisdiction lies with Texas Highway Patrol. But its Craddocks town. He grew up there, came back to live there. Hes police chief now. No matter that hes not been trained for much more than locking up drunks, looking for missing cats or finding out who did the occasional schoolboy prank. Hes the chief, its his town, and these are his people. Blacks included. When a racist Highway Patrol trooper arrests a young black man who has done work for Samuel, he starts snooping, jurisdiction be damned he suspects the cop is just looking for an easy solution and he knows the young man whos been apprehended isn't guilty. From that point, its a matter of baby steps and small discoveries. Soon Craddock must deal with a second problem: drugs are leaking into his town. He needs to discover who imports them and who is distributing them at the high school. The problem is that everyone wants Craddock to settle these problems but not if it upsets established and often corruptrelationships. The town and the police, even State police, have their own Good Old Boy networks and thus their own people to protect. At one point, a frustrated Craddock steps over the line of police protocol. He leaks where the young man is interred to a Houston rabble-rouser: its the only way he can ensure that nothing happens to him before trial. The end comes not with a burst of violence but with a contained victory: as young as he is, Craddock is also wise enough to know he can achieve so much. He does it but not without heartbreak. I don't know any book quite like this one in its combination of small town detail and police action. There are points of similarity with; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Running Girl (Garvie Smith); Author: Simon Mason; Review: Who would have thought that a Young Adults novel would be todays best remake of the classic Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson detective novel? Only this time the Sherlock figure is a high school slacker sixteen-year-old Garvie Smith, IQ off the radar but addicted to, if anything, the pursuit of pleasure(s) in lieu of schoolwork. His laziness and other bad habits he has, like smoking weed, hanging out with his laggard friendsis driving his mother, a hardworking single parent whos a nurse in a London Hospital. Shes a single parent: she works long hours to make ends meet. The last thing she needs is a son who is a layabout and who lies to her all the time rather than tell her what he's really up to. He's so gifted! If he would only apply himself! And Dr. Watson? Hes newly promoted Detective Inspector Raminder Singh, a Sikh, and a stickler for routine and detail. (Inspector Singh did not deal in the obvious. He dealt in detail.) No one ever faulted inspector Singh on dedication. But thinking outside the box? It never happened. A high school girl, Chloe Dow, goes missing. She left a note for her parents mother and stepdadthat she was going running. But she never came back. Singhs in charge of looking for her. And then they find her body in a ditch. Its murder now and Singhs efforts and the efforts of his detective squad redouble. But Garvie, who usually isn't interested in anything except abstract numbers --thats even how he approaches people problems, with graphs with positive and negative axes and Venn diagramsis interested in this case: Chloe used to be a girlfriend of his. It didn't end well but he still has feelings of a sort for her. Besides, hes bored and puzzles turn him on. (If this sounds like the immortal Holmes, so be it.) Singh tells him to stay out, Garvie ignores him, Garvies mother threatens to take him to Barbados with her (no more London, no more laggard friends), Garvie tells her one lie after another, and no matter how Singh threatens him, plunges ahead. Garvies approach is more oblique than Singhs. He takes a bouquet of flowers to the grieving parents, says they're from his mom, asks if he can get something back that he left in Chloes room, and thus gets to snoop uninterrupted among her belongings. He comes back later when they're away. He brings along his buddy Felix, who has housebreaking skills. (Not all of Garvies companions are useless: they're just good at the wrong kind of things.) What does he do there? He tries on Chloes clothes: wet-look gray leggings and a wide-neck T-shirt in pink and a short white jacket smelling very crisp and clean. Sleeveless orange bodycon dress with pale gray snow boots. Black jersey dress with red clogs. Gray denim skirt over sheer black tights with snake-print kitten-heel slingbacks. Felix says to him: Tell me you're not thinking of nicking them. I couldn't bear to see you in this sort of getup at the Old Ditch Road; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: How Not to Be Eaten: The Insects Fight Back; Author: Dr. Gilbert Waldbauer; Review: If you're looking for a vivid story line, this is not your book. But if, like me, you find fascinating how the creatures around us manage their lives and doings, youll enjoy this book. Think of it, rather, as a succession of hundreds of short, short stories about one short though oft repeated phase in the protagonists lives: how do they avoid being eaten. After chapters on where and how insects fit into the web of life and the behavior of insect predators (birds, small and large animals, other insects), the book takes off. Chapters follow on hiding in plain sight, various kinds of mimicry (aping bird droppings. Leaves and bark, twigs, foliage, the ground cover, lichen and fungus, other unappetizing or noxious insects), flash colors and eyespots (that startle and drive away or confuse predators), safety in numbers, and defensive measures and warning signals like pincers, bristles, venom. The book ends with chapters on how predators counterattack and another look at protection by deception and a brief epilogue. Waldbauer writes briskly, without flourish or fanfare. Its refreshing. The prose doesnt get in the way of your reading but what keeps you reading is information, not eloquence. Its a very attractive book, with helpful and elegant drawings to illustrate points and a helpful bibliography if you're inclined to read more on the subject. (Im not. This book, E. O. Wilson on social insects and Bernd Heinrich on bees will do it for me.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Girl in Green; Author: Visit Amazon's Derek B. Miller Page; Review: When I reviewed Millers first thriller, Norwegian by Night, in 2013, I called it exciting and big-hearted and wrote that though social commentary was embedded in the novel, it didn't wear its political persuasions on its sleeve. I concluded by noting that that book was also funny at times. That book won the Top Novel award from the Economist and a Crime Writers Association John Creasey Dagger Award and was an Indies Choice Honor Book. Not bad for a first-time novelist. The Girl in Green is Millers second novel and its all of the above, only more so. A British journalist, Thomas Benton, meets the American Arwood Hobbes, just old enough to enlist in the army and bored out of his skull, guarding a checkpoint on the Kuwait-Iraq border. Its 91. Desert Storm is over, lasted barely a week. Its mop-up time now. Saddams men are again free to wreak vengeance on their own people. Allied troops are under orders to back off: watch but don't touch as long as no one attacks us. Benton walks into a village in search of an interview and an ice cream (the ice creams for Arwood) and winds up in the middle of a savage air attack by Iraqi forces. Its complicated and bloody but so is the whole war. Arwood comes to rescue him, they save a young Arab girl dressed in green whos nearby and start the trek back to Arwoods guard post. Then an officer appears, challenges them. Bam! He shoots the girl in the back. Shes dead, gone, and what have Arwood and Benton accomplished? Nothing, only the meaningless death of a girl too young and innocent to die yet. Thats 91. Now its 2012. Bentons 63. Hes never been able to gain back his balance since then. His marriage is a wreck. He cant even talk about it to his daughter who wants him to fight for it. But he doesnt fight for anything anymore. Then Arwood calls. 21 years, and Arwood calls: hes sighted the girl in green. Shes alive and hes seen video of her in another attack, this time near the Syrian border. Arwood calls, Benton goes. Thus starts an exciting, complicated, and over-and-over-again surprising adventure, at the end of which Benton and maybe Arwood too have a new take on their lives. Maybe they weren't wasted after all. The characters in this big-hearted novel Benton, Arwood, a Swedish relief officer, othersare well fleshed and engaging. Even after all weve read and seen (at a distance) about these conflicts, they startle and shock its the randomness of cruelty and violence, the radical uncertainty, hopes lost and nothing gained Miller writes that he got the idea for this book while writing his doctoral dissertation on press involvement in the Iraqi civil war of 1991. (His dissertation was entitled Bad Press. In 2007, it became the book, Media Pressure on Foreign Policy.) Theres no question that Miller knows what hes writing about.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Robonomics: Prepare Today for the Jobless Economy of Tomorrow; Author: Visit Amazon's John Crews Page; Review: Though uneven, theres a great deal thats good revelatory, even startling-- in this book about the economic impact of robotics in the workforce. Best are: Crewss cost-benefit analysis of the employment of robot workers in place of humans (higher initial cost but great savings follow); his summary of the present state of development of robots and the cost of a robots components (treads, feet, power source, sensors of various sorts ); and his analysis of the effect a robot workforce will have on consumer prices (cost per unit drops dramatically because robots don't need prolonged training -just software uploads- don't take breaks or vacations, and work 24/7) and human employment (over the long haul, robots are cheaper, faster and safer so why employ humans?). He discusses the impact of robots on various parts of the economy and recommends investments to prepare for the vast changes soon to come. While there is some fluff in his discussion of the impact of robotics on the various economic sectors from agriculture to educationits difficult to ignore what he says. It makes sense economically as well as technologically. Over time no, soon-- race will be won by the technologically adventuresome. They will produce goods faster, cheaper and with a much lower failure rate. (Think Amazon.com.) If the technology continues to improve as it has up till now, he estimates that by 2040 only two percent of us will any longer have jobs. Readers of this book will also be interested in Jerry Kaplan Down Humans Need Not Apply (2015). Kaplan reports on Oxford researchers who reported in 2013 that 702 current occupations could be wholly or substantially automated, replacing humans with machines. That report concluded that 47% of total U.S. employment is presently *high* risk of significant automation in a range of blue and white collar occupations. Among the occupations at risk is long distance hauling. The upside is a savings in lives: currently more people die in truck-related traffic accidents each year than died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Cells at Work! 1; Author: Akane Shimizu; Review: The preview notice of this book was intriguing: the power of manga graphic novels harnessed to tell the story of how the body fights disease and other threats to the system. But the story as actually told is repetitive, superficial and not at all instructive (if indeed that was a purpose of it). A cute young female blood cell (she transports oxygen and carbon dioxide to the bodys cells) gets caught in crisis en route to doing her work (which way do I go to get to the lungs? I have to get there to finish do my work!). Chaos reigns around her. There are lots of cell quotes like Slam, Gaaaaaa (Yes, seven as), Break! Tktch, Die Germ!, slice, slither slither slither slither slither (repeated five times), rumble, heh heh heh heh (four times over), splash, roar!, ka boom, and lines like :Gah! The Release center! and Its an Emergency! A big scrape wound opened over there! And bacteria are swarming in from the opening! They hype the action but (1) they're puerile and (2) they're not very informative. If one of the purposes of this graphic novel is information, then how the information is delivered and at what level of vocabulary is relevant and this book fails on all accounts. Its too confusing to inform and the action is too routinized to make its narrative compelling. As much as theres an ongoing story line, as opposed to recurring crisis, its about a cute little red blood cell who meets a foxy male white blood cell and they keep meeting from story to story in, I guess, a sort of kind of almost maybe love story, except that nothing ever really happens between them. But that isn't surprising given that there are roughly 3500-9500 white blood cells per uL and 4.3 to 5.7 million red blood cells ditto in an adult male. Blood cells, red or white, are not unique entities and this manga text doesnt spend anywhere near enough energy to make them so. En route, we have dialogue like this gem: WHOA! THE VASCULAR ENDO-THELIAL CEELLS BROKE! The action progresses repetitively, alas!- across four episodes ch. 1, pneumococcus, ch. 2, cedar pollen allergy, ch. 3, influenza, ch. 4. scrape wound. The drawings throughout feature typical manga character drawings: in other words, all the characters are simplified and juvenilized, and the artists took short cuts through the hard work of drawing. I grew up loving comics, but really, do I have to like this stuff?; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Mariana Enriquez Page; Review: These scarifying, often horrific tales read like post-modern analogues to the truly scary ghost stories of the early twentieth-century English master of the ghost story, M. R. James. Like those earlier tales, these work because the horrible objects in them are usually encountered obliquely, not head on. Not all of the stories inn this collection are ghost stories but the best are. But all of the stories will jar the reader. Its hard to feel your own sense of comfort when you are confronted with this world, modern day Argentina where brutish cops and soldiers, street fixers, thieves and murderers, homeless folk are your neighbors and hyper-poverty saps your will and leaves you helpless before your predators. A dirty homeless boy disappears; the narrator regrets that she couldn't save him from an absolutely awful fate (The Dirty Kid). In a country where everything is running down or out, a group of teenagers cant even hold their friendship together (The Intoxicated Years). In the first true ghost story in the collection, a gutsy girl, already an outsider because born with one arm a stump, enters a house and never comes out (Adelas House). A guide on a bus touring famous mass murder sites begins to see the murderer hes telling his customers about (An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt) A disturbed girls fixations begin to infect another girl (End of Term). A woman with a dark past of her own sees something in her neighbors courtyard. Her husband thinks shes just crazy. Eventually that something comes to visit. Shes alone to meet it. This story is creepy beyond creepy: the ending paragraph is jolting not because of what happens in it but because of what it implies will happen afterwards (The Neighbors Courtyard). The title story isn't a ghost story but is equally unsettling: men are setting their women on fire and the women fall in love with the idea of mutilating themselves (Things We Lost in the Fire). This is not comforting writing but it is good writing. Enriquez has talent to burn. (But perhaps thats not a good image to use here.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap; Author: Visit Amazon's Gish Jen Page; Review: This isn't so much a book with conclusive answers as one with provocative ideas. Many of them seem conclusive but even when not, they impel you to examine your own thoughts. It is written in an informal and approachable style that doesnt condescend to its subject but neither puffs it up with academic or other over-hyped vocabulary or terms. And certainly the subject is an interesting one: why and where do Chinese and Japanese (one pole) differ from Americans and western Europeans (the other pole) in their attitudes, beliefs and actions, and why. The title comes from an incident. A Chinese student applies for admission to a prestigious East Coast academy. She sends in her TOEFL scores. Theyre great. Ditto her essays. An on-line interview using Skype is equally reassuring. Then she shows up. A representative of the academy shows up at the airport to pick her up. And finds that she can barely speak English. Over time it becomes clear that this is not the girl they had interviewed. It is her sister. Her sister had taken the tests for her, written her essays and sat in her place for the on-line interview. What is going on? Is this just fraud or are there hidden cultural biases that would lead a family to practice this subterfuge? Jen doesnt condone fraud but yes, she writes, there are cultural differences and they would lead an older sister to help her younger sister, even to the point of deceit. The rest of this fascinating book, which dances lightly over many deeply serious topics, never slighting them but equally not weighing them down with overly academic verbiage, explores this question and along the way, raises new questions to explore: western versus eastern views of the nature and intent of art, why Orientals test and Westerners test, the Eastern emphasis on training versus the Wests on education (= self-discovery? Self-discipline?). Above all, it is about two different conceptions of the relationship of self to society (community). She characterizes the western view of self as big- pit self, or in one of the few infelicitous characterizations in a book that is generally right on in matters of tone, the avocado pit self. Westerners are taught to self-actualize/self-realize/develop their individuality over connection with community. Even our view of rights is individualistic. Our rights are our possessions. We own them and thus have a near exclusive right to enjoy them. Easterners cultivate an interdependent self, which she says is a flexi-self, attuning itself to the demands and needs of others and not exclusively or even primarily self. This is an unsubtle summarizing of a very subtle book and a very good book too, which, because of its subject, is worth reading now, in our present-day age when it certainly would help to understand and appreciate differences in why we act the way we do and others act much differently.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Sterkarm Tryst; Author: Visit Amazon's Susan Price Page; Review: PRICE, Susan. A Sterkarm Tryst. Open Road. Jan. 24, 2017. 524p. $20.16. Commenting on the first novel in this trilogy, Philip Pullman, write that it was enthralling brilliantly imagined (Philip Pullman on The Sterkarm Handshake) That book won a literary prize. I cant imagine this one winning anything. Its both too crowded and too slow. There are too many characters to follow the plot is that twenty-firstst-century time travelers have pulled a clan of sixteenth-century Scot warriors through their Tube and dropped them into a variant universe to fight themselves, a task at which he twenty-first century intruders have failed miserably not once but twice. Thus most of the Scots characters not all of them because events have gone differently in the two parallel universes-- are confronted with doubles and where there must have been a lot of characters in the first two volumes of this series, there are now twice as many. The Sterkarms are fearless fighters and fearful enemies so when finally, the two sets of Scots join forces, the twenty-first century mercenaries who have been sent to exploit them face a formidable adversary. Action alternates between sixteenth-century Scotland and twenty-first century England and between the two sets of characters, and it moves slowly, glacially slowly at times, until the ending, which for a while is explosive but then slows down again. Price has sixteenth-century Scotland nailed down. If the story in this overlong epic were as good as the details about Old Scottish ways, thinking and action, this would be a much more interesting book. But as it is, it takes too long for much to happen, and you almost need to read it with a score card in hand to remember whos who and who does what and why.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Incensed (A Taipei Night Market Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Ed Lin Page; Review: This loopy novel set in modern day Taiwan (a country most of us know little about) starts with an eating contest. The narrator-hero Jing-nan (in Americas it was Johnny) is attending with his girlfriend Nancy to cheer on Dwayne, who works at Jing-nans food stand, Unknown Pleasures where they sell meat and entrails on skewers. Jing-nan is a bit of a foodie. He makes the best meat skewers in Taiwan: everything must be right with them. Hes a music nut too. His stand is called Unknown Pleasures, which is the title of a Joy Division album, and he dresses like a punker, only more cool (he thinks). I digress but its hard not to in a novel as convoluted as this one is, a story that is kind of a caper novel, but also a family comedy, although what a family!, filled with action and exotic characters from start to close, and very funny too. As I said, I digress. The novel starts with an eating contest but not hotdogs or donuts. Rather, this is a Stinky Tofu Eating contest, a foodstuff so obnoxious to smell and taste that one of the five contestants will soon refuse to start and another will end up puking her guts out after eating one bite. Dwayne doesnt win but he does finish and thats victory enough for Jing-nan who cant conceive why anyone would want to compete in this horror show to start with. Then Jing-nan is called to the side of his uncle and the story really starts. Hes dragooned by familial piety and the fact that his uncle (named Big EYE) is one of the most ruthless gangsters in the country and he really doesnt like to hear the word no, especially from his nephew, into chaperoning Big Eyes pubescent daughter Mei-ling around Taiwan for a while. The problem is that Mei-ling is uncontrollable and if anything goes wrong, it will be Jing-nan who pays. Maybe with his life. This is Lins second novel about Jing-nan. The first was Ghost Month, 2014. Its funny, its gripping, the characters are a gas, and its absolutely, utterly charming.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Scar Island; Author: Visit Amazon's Dan Gemeinhart Page; Review: In the opening scene of this Gothic thriller for young people, Jonathan Grimsby arrives by boat at a forbidding, falling down slab of a building that occupies all the space on a tiny island far off the mainland. Its called Slabhenge, an ominous name, and it serves as a school more a prisonfor troubled boys aged ten to fourteen. Theyve been sent there some voluntarily by worried parents and some by judges who see the place as an alternative to more serious prison timefor instruction and correction. The place is run by a mad man named The Admiral. He moves around, accompanied by staff and one (repulsively oily) inmate toady, wearing a cocked hat and carrying a sword in his sash, and he has devised special humiliations and tortures for his charges. Hes paid to house and feed them so regardless how long they have been sentenced for, he finds ways to extend their stay: he forces them to write weekly letters home telling their loved ones how nice it is on Slabhenge. Slabhenge itself and the Admiral and his loathsome staff this is the first implausibility in this sometimes gripping but ultimately unbelievable story. As for Jonathan, it will not be until almost the end of the story that his crime, and his role in it, are unveiled, and this too seems forced. Jonathan, who seems sharper than most of the lads around him, is curiously quiet, burdened with sadness and guilt. The abuses pile up and like the other inmates, Jonathan accepts them without protest. Then there is a freak accident. All eight adults on the island are left dead. This is the second great implausibility: what happens could have occurred but it stretches coincidence almost to the breaking point. The boys are left alone on the island with no supervision. Here is where the story really takes off in a YYA (Young Young Adult) riff on Goldings Lord of the Flies. There are more implausibilities. Down below the building, in one its unlit and labyrinthine corridors, there is a locked door, a Hatch, from behind which come ominous sounds: the warden who conducts Jonathan to his quarters (more a cell) tells him there is a monster locked behind it. Exploring on his own one time, Jonathan finds another surprise, also implausible. He discovers whats behind the hatch and why the door is locked, a not very implausible reason. Through it all, the boys, freed of supervision and control, ape more and more the behavior of their past oppressors: the bully boy who takes over even wears the Admirals hat and carries his sword and hes not averse to using cruelty to maintain his control. What happens before everything falls apart is gripping enough, and the characters of Jonathan and his one friend there, Colin, are appealing, but what transpires before everything falls totally apart is unlikely. The book ends in a crisis that allows Jonathan to show his stuff, but, you guessed it, is too is over the top. This book has heart but it ultimately founders on the; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: City of Saints & Thieves; Author: Visit Amazon's Natalie C. Anderson Page; Review: Part way through this high intensity detection and revenge novel, Mr. Omoko, the terrifying head of the Kenyan city street gang that employs her, gives Tina this advice: "[I]f you decide to take revenge, you have to think of it as a vocation, a calling. Like a priest is called to serve. It isn't something you do once. It is something you do every day, like learning a dance. Before you can dance, you must put your time in. You must learn the rules of the dance, its rhythms, and be sure not to step too soon. You have to be patient." But Tinas been patient long enough. Its four years since she came on her mothers dead body in the Mr. Greyhills study outside Sangui City. The day before, shed heard Greyhill threaten her mother. Shed fled Greyhills estate the next day, spent the intervening years a runaway on the streets of Sangui City, learning her trade a thiefas a foot soldier in the Goondas, the most feared criminal gang in the city. Now its payback time. With the aid of another loner, a boy-girl named BoyBoy, shes going to gain entrance to the Greyhill estate and the owners study, hack into his computer, download files that will prove his guilt and help Mr. Okomo and the Goondas drain Greyhill of his personal wealth. Once she gets in, though, nothing goes as it should. The Greyhills son Michael, who was her best friend and playmate when her mother worked for the Greyhills, comes upon her in the study. A security alarm goes off. Her face has been caught on a hidden camera. She tells Michael why shes there. He saves her from capture in turn for her promise to work with him to find the real killer of her mother Michael is convinced its not his father. The pace and the menace ratchet up. The Goondas are thugs and Mr Okomo is an impatient man: you don't ignore his orders and Tina and BoyBoy seem to have done thatand you especially don't short him of profits hes already spending in his mind. Tina, Michael and BoyBoy eventually find themselves back in the Congo that Tina, her mother and her baby sister had fled years before. The land is still ravaged. You cant trust anyone. Violence is just around the corner. The action is good. The setting and characters are exotic. Tina is a strong and appealing heroine. Pretty much everything works in this exciting debut novel.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: August Snow (An August Snow Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Stephen Mack Jones Page; Review: August Snow, son of a Mexican mother and an African-American career cop, was railroaded off the Detroit police force after he blew the whistle on some bad cops and worse politicians. But he won a wrongful dismissal case against the department and as a result, walked away $12 million richer. He left the city but now hes back to Detroit. Hes not sure what hes going to do with his new life but hes bought back his parents house in Mexicantown and seven more houses in the block and hes determined not to let the neighborhood disintegrate. Its where he grew up: in his memory, his mothers books of poetry in Spanish Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Sor Juana de la Cruz still rub up against his fathers beloved tec novels ofHammett, Doyle, Chandler, signed copies of books by Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes. Hes barely back in town when hes summoned to the Grosse Point estate of business magnate Eleanor Paget. Shes concerned about the odd things that are happening at her investment bank shes being shut out of information and she wants to know why. She orders Snow to investigate. He says thanks but no thanks. But when she turns up dead a day later, an apparent suicide, he knows something is wrong and he regrets having done nothing about it. He starts small but soon is over his head. The case expands exponentially: jiggery pokery in Pagets investment firm, crooked businessmen and corrupt cops, something fishy in city government. Add to the mix Russian hit men after him, and lots of sex, not all of it straight, the possibility of financial cyber-terrorism, and the pervading presence of racism in a running down city, and you have an outstanding tale of violence and detection. This is published poet Joness first novel, and his first outing into crime fiction. Lets hope its not his last.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Inventing Human Rights: A History; Author: Visit Amazon's Lynn Hunt Page; Review: Analyzing contemporary reading habits and conducting a close reading of contemporary texts, Hunt argues that between the 1740s and 1780s, western attitudes changed dramatically: there emerged a newfound feeling for others, appreciation of others as self-directed entities. The reading public developed this sensibility largely as a consequence of reading the new epistolary novels of Rousseau, Richardson, etc. Concurrently, there was growing abhorrence of torture or public punishment. Thus was laid the foundation for a language of rights that stressed the possession of rights by all men, a concept incorporated in Americas Declaration of Independence (1776) and Frances Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789). Though women were still excluded from political (but not civil) rights, the door was at last open to religious minorities, the Jews and free blacks. Talk of rights waned with Napoleon; other political languages engaged Europe for the next century and a half. Rights surfaced again in 1948 with passage of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This book is cultural history of a high order.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Gunmetal Gray (Gray Man); Author: Visit Amazon's Mark Greaney Page; Review: When I get a new book in Mark Greaneys Gray Man series, I read it right away. Theyre well written and I appreciate that the esoteric information of spy craft/Black Ops work is communicated without derailing the storytelling part of the books. But mostly its that they plunge you right into the action theres no delay in gearing up the tension and it doesnt let up until the end. The book floats on its own bottom: you don't need a scorecard to remember past players who are present again, or why they're here. Just plunge into whats happening in front of you. Thats sufficient to understand whats going on. The present episode takes place in China, Taiwan, and Vietnam and involves the hunt for Fan Jiang, a high level computer expert who has run away from his Chinese bodyguards. Court Gentry is sent in as contract agent by the CIA to attract the attention of the Chinese killers who are hunting Fan and once hes conned them into thinking hes working for them, get ahead of them and extract Fan. Until he fled, Fan was a member of an elite team of Chinese hackers who probed the countrys computer security system in search of cracks to plaster over: what he doesnt know about Chinas and Americassecurity systems isn't worth knowing. Its critical to get to him before anybody squeezes him dry. There are complications. The Chinese hold Courts former employer Donald Fitzroy captive. If the Chinese feel Court is playing them, Fitzroy will pay. Thus, if it can be done, Court needs to find a way to extract Fitzroy from his captors at the same time he moves on Fan. And there are other players, including three layers of Oriental gangs and much more serious, a deadly team of Russians whose goal is the same as Courts: get Fan. Its non-stop action from start to finish as the Gray Man again proves how deadly he is a nemesis, polishing off a veritable army of enemies along the way.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: False Friend: A Novel (Detective Cooper Devereaux); Author: Visit Amazon's Andrew Grant Page; Review: Everyone in this creepy-nasty tec novel has a secret. Everyone. Not just the adults, starting with Birmingham police detective Cooper Devereaux but also the children, whose secret lives are just as twisted as those of their elders. Were in David Lynch territory, Twin Peaks, only in Alabama, and have what seems a whole town composed of people who live hidden lives, with substories dramatically at odds with the surface they show the others around them. The It makes for fascinating reading but don't doubt it these are sick, truly sick people. Even the ones who aren't insane are sick. There are an arsonist and a pedophile. Theres also at least one serial murderer whos as nutty as a fruitcake and a couple of mothers pedaling hard to deny the truth about their sociopath offspring, and at the center of it all, we have Devereaux, a policeman who spends almost as much time trying to expunge evidence of his own dark past as he does on pursuing new criminals. At the center of the story is a series of school burnings. Devereaux and his colleagues in the PD and FBI tack one way and then the other in their efforts to nail the arsonist who, for a long time, shows himself (herself?) smarter than his pursuers. This edgy, convoluted tale unfolds in short, punchy chapters boom, boom, then move on to the next shock. Many of the later chapters end in shocking revelation. The veneer of normality is suddenly peeled back by a simple action and we see a monster in the birthing. This is Grants second novel about detective Devereaux. (False Positive was the first). You don't so much root for this flawed hero as you read on fascinatedto see what happens to him next.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Reckoning: Book Three of the Niceville Trilogy; Author: Visit Amazon's Carsten Stroud Page; Review: STROUD, Carson. The Reckoning: Book Three of the Niceville Trilogy. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original. 2015. 480p. $15.95. The Reckoning is the concluding volume in a trilogy of novels about a Southern town called Niceville (note the irony) where increasingly nasty happenings occur concurrently or in rapid succession almost ad infinitum. Most of the happenings are criminal in nature but its soon clear that the cause of them isn't human frailty. Its supernatural. Theres a lot going on in Niceville murders, attacks, you name it. The cause is an evil thing that resides beneath the waters of a thousand-some foot sump in Niceville. The town is haunted by a Kaloni Ayeleski, a Raven Mocker demon, something out of old Cherokee legend. In simpler language, the demon is a soul eater, something not dead yet not alive and wholly malignant. Its been in Niceville for a hundred years, getting inside the heads of the living and forcing them to do awful things and then when people die as a result of it, eating their souls as they writhe in pain or remorse. This has been going on for three books of which, thankfully, I have only had to read the one. As a reader (not in real life), I have a fairly high tolerance for the intrusion of the supernatural into plots: done right, it pumps up the excitement. But this monster seems a Cookie Cutter monster to me, made up of mostly generic parts and though referred to and then explained at length, not all that convincingly explained. There is a slew of references to the two previous books: some of the revelations are startling, others just back fill. By the end of the book (480 pages in), youve read enough to make sense of them but early on, you almost need a score card. That may work for massive tomes like Les Miserables or Bleak House, but not in a modern day tec/supernatural thriller like this.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Damascus Threat: An ICE Thriller; Author: Visit Amazon's Matt Rees Page; Review: The Damascus Threat is about a fake terrorist attack on US and foreign dignitiaries. The purpose of the attack is to force Western and Middle Eastern powers into war over Syria. Homelands Security Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Dom Verrazzano is on the hunt for the terrorists. There are connections to his own past: he once worked for the very men organizing and leading this attack and he knows that they care about nothing other than their pocketbooks. The lethal nerve drug sarin is the weapon du jour and some place in New York City is the target. The action is fast and furious. It spans two continents as the dedicated team of ICE agents races against time to stop a catastrophe of unimaginable portions. They do, at the last minute. If all this sounds a bit over the top, thats because it is. Threat isn't a bad thriller but everything in it happens a little too coincidentally and fast. The result is a thriller that thrills only if you don't examine it closely. Rees has written a series of exquisite detective stories set in Palestine and featuring gentle and wise Omar Yusssef. (The first was The Collaborator of Bethlehem [2007].) This first-of-series thriller isn't bad but doesnt match up to the quality of his earlier work.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Damascus Threat: An ICE Thriller - Kindle edition; Author: Visit Amazon's Matt Rees Page; Review: The Damascus Threat is about a fake terrorist attack on US and foreign dignitiaries. The purpose of the attack is to force Western and Middle Eastern powers into war over Syria. Homelands Security Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Dom Verrazzano is on the hunt for the terrorists. There are connections to his own past: he once worked for the very men organizing and leading this attack and he knows that they care about nothing other than their pocketbooks. The lethal nerve drug sarin is the weapon du jour and some place in New York City is the target. The action is fast and furious. It spans two continents as the dedicated team of ICE agents races against time to stop a catastrophe of unimaginable portions. They do, at the last minute. If all this sounds a bit over the top, thats because it is. Threat isn't a bad thriller but everything in it happens a little too coincidentally and fast. The result is a thriller that thrills only if you don't examine it closely. Rees has written a series of exquisite detective stories set in Palestine and featuring gentle and wise Omar Yusssef. (The first was The Collaborator of Bethlehem [2007].) This first-of-series thriller isn't bad but doesnt match up to the quality of his earlier work.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Poetry of Pop; Author: Visit Amazon's Adam Bradley Page; Review: Rather than a formal and potentially dry as dust sorting out of the types of poetic devices used in pop lyrics, Bradley, who is a professor of English at Colorado, Boulder, and founding director of the Universitys Laboratory for Race and Pop Culture (RAP Lab) has chosen to use this enlightening and diverting book to ask larger questions of the subject he chooses to explore here. How important, for instance, are lyrics to pop tunes? In the hierarchy of production elements melody, lyrics, singer, producerhow important are the words sung in a song? What differences are there in words and lines produced for the written page and for the sung word? Even when a piece doesnt follow an ordered beat, how essential is rhythm to pop music and how does rhythm affect/alter what is sung or spoken? Why do rap pieces typically have so many more diverse words in a song than other forms of pop music? Why do pop songs typically take the shapes they take? How limiting is an art from ninety percent of whose output is about love, love, love (or its loss), especially given that songs usually rhyme and there are only three direct alternatives to the word love? He presents ammunition to support his observations, from the scrutiny of the words and performance of hundreds of songs to citation of poets and writers (Audre Lorde, Stephen Dobyns, Robert Frost, Charles Simic, Ralph Ellison), scholars (Helen Vengler, his former teacher at Harvard), critics and commentators on music (I like especially Gene Lees, an astute commentator on how pop lyrics get formed, but theres Stephen Sondheim as well) and the musicians themselves (Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Loretta Lynn, et al.). There is, for instance, the scrambled eggs story, first told by Eric Clapton and then emended by Paul McCartney, about whom it is told. McCartney had a melody line floating around in his head but no lyrics for it yet. He was singing Scrambled eggs Everybody calls me scrambled eggs (Claptons version) or Scrambled eggs/Oh, youve got such lovely legs. (McCartneys memory of it). Then, one day, driving to the coast in Portugal, it came to him, the perfect (because evocative) three syllable to match the three beat opening riff. Yesterday. Thus was a song born, with a sellable lyric. Keith Richardss take on it is that the lyrics, like the melody, should appeal south of the belt, not above it: sex, emotion, gut. Loretta Lynn and Rosanne Cash extol the story form. The most obvious break point between printed modern poetry and modern pop music is, no surprise, rhyme, which is ubiquitous in the music and increasingly missing in the poems. Rap music in particular, because of the conventions governing its composing and performing, abounds in rhyme. I appreciated this book a great deal but here Bradley misses an opportunity in my judgment. The counterpart to rhyming and meter in pop music isn't so much written poetry as the rhymed or metered lines in a Shakespeare play, which are meant to be spoken aloud and provide hooks for the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East; Author: Visit Amazon's Rachel Aspden Page; Review: In 2003, Rachel Aspen, 23, had just landed in Cairo, where she hoped to launch her career as journalist. She lived in Cairo from 2003-2004 and then moved to other venues. At 26, she was literary editor of the New Statesman and she has continued to work as a freelancer, reporting in such prestigious journals as the New Statesman, Observer, Prospect and the Qatar Foundations English-language journal Think. All this time, from 2003 till now, she has dipped in and out of Cairo and Egypt, checking the temperature of its politics and thinking. In 2010 she was awarded a yearlong fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to research activists working to fight extremism within Islam. (This is a direct quotation from the cover notes.) This book is one of the fruits of that research. What she found in Egypt in 2003 was a country of young people governed by old men who were desperately out of touch with them. 2/3s of the 70 million population were under the age of thirty. What would happen when the old men died or were shoved aside.? What did these young people aspire to and how prepared were they to take on the trappings of leadership? She focuses on a handful of young adults, five men and four women, and records their aspirations in the years preceding 2011, when it seemed impossible to imagine any change in government; to the unexpected overthrow of president Hosni Mubarak in the spring of 2011; and to the twists and turns of the following years. BY the end of the book, which follows events through 2016, all of these young people are dispirited. Many are leaving their country. The goal of those who stay behind is to stay below the radar of a repressive, military-dominated government. As to hopes for enlightenment of the condition of women in this increasingly reactionary society, all hopes are gone. This book is a fine example of what responsible, well-researched journalism can bring to us, helping us better to understand and come to grips with issues that aren't simple and because of the distance between our societies, aren't immediately easy for us to grasp. Aspden writes well. But much more important than that, because she seriously tries to understand different viewpoints and lifestyles within the country she is examining, she can help us to understand how, in a society where hope and other options for self-identification and self-worth have vanished, even very conservative religious views can provide the vehicle for political reform. In Egypt at least, it is gratuitous violence we should be fighting, not religious conservatism, because all conservative groups are not the same.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Hannah Tinti Page; Review: I loved Tintis first novel, The Good Thief (2008) it had strong, engaging characters, the action zipped along and grabbed the attention, and she wrote like a dream: crisp, strong prose and when she described something --a setting, a charactershe hit on just the right details, no waste, no fuss. And no pretension. Here, nine years later, is her second novel and its just as good as the first, with much the same virtues. Again, its a novel of character a young womans growth and maturing, the tight bond of single parent and sole childwrapped inside a fast moving adventure story. Loos the child never knew her mother and now shes come to believe her father may have killed her. Hawleys the father, and his body is marked all over with bullet holes by the end of the book, twelve of them. They move a lot: hes obviously running from something. He always carries a gun with him and there are more, lots more, in their house. And he teaches her, but not the ordinary things: how to hot wire a car, where are good places to hide cash and where not, how to shoot a gun. The story is told in roughly chronological sequence but with flashbacks to explain backstory to the present one. Interspersed with the story of Loo and Samuel are twelve chapters, each narrating where Hawley got one of his twelve bullet wounds. The book ends with violence but also understanding, reconciliation. This is a very good book but also, one that you will find hard to put down once you pick it up.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Making the Elephant Man: A Producer's Memoir; Author: Jonathan Sanger; Review: In 1978, Sanger was 34. A graduate of the Directors Guild of America Training Program, he had served as assistant director on one Mel Brooks film (High Anxiety) and associate producer for Anne Bancrofts Fatso, but hed never produced his own film. Then, serendipitously, he laid his hands on a script, its writers new to the business, entitled The Elephant Man. It was based on the true story of a young man hideously afflicted with an incurable and inevitably fatal disfigurement that rendered him horrible to look at. Now we all know the story. Then, people didnt. He k new he had to have it. He acquired the rights to it, a one-year option, and looked around for an angel. Art films won critical kudos but studios preferred big bucks so who in Hollywood would take on this project? He found his backer in Mel Brooks, who had just moved independent in order to maintain control over his own writing, directing and producing efforts. He soon found how lucky he was: Brooks had the clout to secure financing but once convinced of a project, he trusted the persons heading it he wasn't a meddler (which was a rare quality among Hollywood brass). The making of the film wasn't without hitches, even moments of terror, as, for instance, when with John Hurt (the Elephant Man, William Merrick) newly arrived in town (London) and Anthony Hopkins (playing Dr. Treves, the man who rescued Merrick from abuse) under binding contract to end his work by a certain date (soon) because he was committed to start work on another film, the prosthetics for Merricks face and body didn't work and a new prosthetic makeup man had to be found and shooting of the key scenes with Merricks face and body exposed to light delayed until the new prosthetics were made. Sanger doesnt boast or hype his role in affairs but his pride in what he achieved, and his own contribution to the success of the film, is apparent. (As it should be.) He made one right choice after another director, David Lynch, new then with only one commercially released film to his credit, and that the controversial and arty Eraserhead (fortunately, Brooks liked it when it was screened for him); the choice of Hurt for the role of Merrick (Dustin Hoffman was suggested at one point but Sanger and Brooks felt, rightly, that he was too recognizable: if he had played Merrick, viewers would keep looking beneath the makeup to find the star they already knew); Anthony Hopkins, John Gielgud, Anne Bancroft, Wendy Hiller ; the decision to shoot in black and white and the choice of Freddie Francis as cinematographer and Stuart Craig as production designer. It had never been clear to me what a producer did in a film. I don't know that Sangers memoir answered the question for me but I do have a good idea what he brought to his film and it was a lot. It seemed a bit like what I did when I was vice president of a university:; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Is Islam an Enemy of the West? (Global Futures); Author: Tamara Sonn; Review: With this tiny, readable book, Sonn (prof. history of Islam, Georgetown Univ.) has produced a useful primer on the Islam vs. West question. Not surprisingly for anyone who has given thought to the question, she concludes that no, Islam isnt. Its politics, and economic and social grievances, that fan the fire. She does not discount the rhetoric of radical jihadists, nor the potential (because of economic and social disjunctions) for radicalism in much of the Muslim world, but notes that all but the most radical enemies of the West frame their grievances not in religious language so much as nationalist. They feel, rightly enough, resentment and anger but it is exploitation, a long history of Western intrusion into their affairs and ignoring their concerns, that fuels their enmity. Even there, though, anti-Western sentiment is not a monolith in the Islamic world. There are people and peoples who admire us though they resent our present-day actions (or inaction) and others who oppose us but condemn violence against innocent (i.e., non- combatant) parties. Sonn provides short histories of the political development of the principal Muslim countries and reminds us that Muslims comprise a substantial portion of our own people. (The Pew Research Foundation estimates that as of 2015, 3.3 million Muslims live in the United States, or 1% of our population.) There shouldnt be a need for a book like this but there is, especially in the light of Samuel Huntingtons and Bernard Lewiss writings to the contrary. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Sonns stance, everyone could benefit from reading this eminently readable book which does not so much take sides as lay out the facts. Unfortunately, in todays heated environment, the people who could benefit most from reading it wont. In 2004, I returned from the Middle East in 2004 after working there for three years. (The apartment complex I lived in was called the Twin Towers. I was there on 9/11.) I remember talking to a friend of mine college-educated, not at all unletteredand trying to explain to him that Muslims and Arabs come in all varieties and most of the ones I met or heard about over there disapproved of radicalism. Most of them just wanted to get on with their own lives and besides, they felt the Koran condemned this kind of violence. His response was that I didn't understand the situation because Id been too close to it. When I asked what knowledge or contact he had had with Muslims, it turned out hed had none. Utter conviction with no attempt to find the facts now to me, that is scary.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lenin's Roller Coaster (A Jack McColl Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's David Downing Page; Review: Downing (prof. English, Univ. of Pennsylvania) has written nine other spy and historical thrillers, only one of which I somehow came across in my voracious consumption of fiction of a similar ilk. Thats my Bad, because this book, the second to feature British spy Jack McColl, is really good. Its 1917. The tsar is out, the Bolsheviks are in, but their hold on Russia is tenuous. The British haven't decided yet how to take the new government but they want the Germans defeated and the Bolsheviks are negotiating for a peace with the Germans, so they are ipso facto against the new regime at least for the moment. Enter Jack McColl, ex-car salesman turned spy. Hes been sent to Russia as a general dogsbody, to take on all the unpleasant, dirty work that spies have to do for the good of their country. What follows is the best description of a spys work Ive come across since Somerset Maughams classic Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928). Downing never makes a wrong step as he follows the confusing changes of heart within the new government that encourage first a tendency toward leniency, and then, as threats from outside multiply, expansion of the power of the dread Cheka, who preside over an expanding list of state enemies, and the steady tightening of the reins of power. If this were all the book provided, it would be worth reading but Downing raises the stakes by scripting a parallel narrative: McColl has a lover, American journalist Caitlin Hanley. She is a feminist and a progressive and she is in Russia too, sussing out the Revolution and in most respects sympathizing with its goals. What McColl wants (or his government wants) and what Hanley wants are in conflict. Theyre star-crossed lovers: ts unlikely theyll last as a couple regardless of their love for each other. Just being in Russia at the same time puts them both at risk. The secret police is suspicious and Jack has an enemy in the Cheka, a man who has particular reason to destroy him. Its not renecessary to this review but the book evoked memories for me. Caitlin is friends with Alexandra Kollontai, the Russian communist and feminist who, for a brief moment early in the Revolution, held out hopes that Russia might break the shackles that held back its women. It didn't happen but thats neither here nor there. Years back, when I taught history at a small college in New York, my office mate Beatrice Farnsworth, was busy finishing her second book, a biography of Kollontai. As a consequence, thanks to Tris, I, whose general knowledge of the Revolution was superficial, learned a great deal about this one exceptionally capable and forward-looking reformer.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Old Bones (A Detective Sarah Alt Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Trudy Nan Boyce Page; Review: This is the second police procedural by thirty-plus-year veteran police officer (now retired) Boyce featuring Atlanta policeman Sarah Salt Alt. Out of the Blues (2016) was the first and it was great. This one is about (1) an attack on Spellman College (a traditionally black womens college) students during a peaceful protest against police brutality and *(2) the discovery of a dead body, of a young woman Salt had helped two (three?) years before but now shes dead. Salt is still an appealing character. The details of the police investigation are still solid. And Boyce keeps the adrenalin pumping, moving between one story and the other adroitly. The result is a police procedural that doesnt match up with the first novel but is still better than run of the mill. What are my reservations about this followup to installment one? I have three. (1) Boyce needs to keep a rein on sentimentality. The detectives in this series are lovely people but its important that Boyce not become their rooter, rather than their chronicler. Police procedurals work best when none of the characters involved are too lovable. (2) I love jazz and am attuned to any and all descriptions of it in literature. Boyce is not the first to use jazz for color: John Harveys Charlie Reznick novels feature jazz and so do the Harry Bosch novels of Michael Connelly. The problem is that descriptions of listened-to jazz music so easily sound soupy, as they do here. Salt and her lover listen to Miles Davis and Concierto de Aranjuez, then to Wayne Shorter. It sounds like jazz but romanticized, and that, I don't like. (3) And most serious, the plotting in this novel, Salts unraveling of what led to the death of the young woman shed saved from Hell a couple of years earlier, doesnt compute well. Its an easy out, and not believable. All of this is not to deny the real virtues of a generally sound series. But Boyce can do better, provided she steers clear of (1) over-complicated solutions to the crimes under investigation and (2) any tendency toward excess sentimentality.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dancing with the Tiger; Author: Visit Amazon's Lili Wright Page; Review: \However modern in form, Tiger is melodrama at heart, an old-fashioned genre of fiction but reshaped by the authors (generally) superior sense of prose and by modern sensibilities. Wrights a talented writer, so what we get is an entertainment that entertains, a thriller that thrills and never lets up, with an ending that is both ambivalent to strike us as modern and positive enough to satisfy our lizard brain (amygdala) instincts. The story, of the pursuit of a 500-year-old funerary mask that may well have been Moctezumas death mask, is told in short, often choppy chapters focusing on the different players in the hunt. Anna is the central player, the daughter of a failed mask collector, whose wife died trying to help smuggle antique masks across the border while he drank himself into an alcoholic stupor in a bar. Anna was there when her mother died. Its haunted her ever after. Shes loyal to her loser still-alkie dad but shes plagued by feelings of inadequacy (guilt?) because she didn't save her mother when maybe she could have. What is her way out now, years afterwards? Lots of sex, usually with meaningless partners whose primary value is that they confirm her worthlessness. But with news of this one great discovery, the funerary mask of the last Aztec emperor, shes out to save her dad. Poor man, hes just discovered that the grand book he wrote to validate his collection of priceless masks is flawed by error. There are oodles of them. Masks are reported as ancient but actually are newly made. They come from places that don't exist and were supposedly danced at festivals (you wear the mask over your face and dance with it at semi-religious, wholly ecstatic festivals) that never happened, or at least not where he reported they happened. But shes not alone. Theres the looter who first found the mask. Hes a twigger (derivation: meth tweaker plus archeological dig digger) and he wants well, he wants a lot of different things across the span of this book, and the question is what will he get. There are the two Mexicans, gardener and pool tender to a wealthy American couple, who also serve as part-time employees of a truly scary Mexican narcotraficante, who is himself a player, in part because hes a rabid collector of masks but also because hid threats to kill people (the tweaker, his part-time Mexican servants) pushes the plot along. Theres also a young woman, the love object of already married Hugo, one of the two Mexican servants of the rich American couple she has secrets of her own. Soledad, Hugos wife. Thomas Malone, the terminally corrupt, maybe insane husband of a rich, alcoholic Texas heiress. Lorenzo Gonsalves, a (definitely corrupt) art expert on all things Mexican, who has his own agenda on the mask. Emilio Luna, who still carves masks, and is an innocent. And around them, Santa Muerte. At one point, Constance, the very drunk wife of one of the three collectors fighting to own the mask, says: Heres my problem with religion: If; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Old Man; Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Perry Page; Review: This is the twenty-fourth thriller from the gifted pen of Thomas Perry, who has won virtually every prize available to a writer of crime fiction. Perry is best known for his Jane Whitfield series (Jane helps people disappear) and for the Butchers Boy trilogy (a contract hit man on the run from the Mob) but this one is a standalone, and, no surprise, a good one. On the surface, Dan Chase doesnt look like a threat to anyone. Hes sixty, a widower and retired, and with his children long gone from the house, his live-in companions are two mixed breed dogs, big, rambunctious even but no threat to passersby or anyone. Then someone comes for him. The dogs alert him of intruders in his house. He deals with them and then speedily rolls up shop and vanishes. It dates back twenty-five years, when he did something that made both his employers (covert agency) and his enemy (Libyan bad guy) very angry at him. Now someone, whether one or both of them, wants him dead. What follows is what Perry does best, perhaps as well as anybody in the business: a chaser story, told from the perspective of the one being chased. Dan hasn't forgotten any of the skills he learned back then. Hes fast, hes worked out regularly, and he has cached around him the cards and paraphernalia needed to create alternate personalities he changes his name three times in this novel and Dan Chase wasn't his original nameas well as, well, guns and ammo. Once awakened to danger, he never lets down his guard. Thats one of the fascinations of this book as Perry details the hunted mans thinking, not just in the moments of danger but times when he should supposedly be thinking of love. The result is less a string of violent episodes and dead bodies left behind than a step by step investigation of the thinking of a man who has lived his whole adult life as artifice and who can only hope to grow older by even more artifice. This is not Perrys most perfect novel. A revelation late in the book solves a plot problem I cant write more about it without spoiling the surprisebut seems contrived. But for the rest, this is a delightfully thrilling book which never lets down its pace for a moment. Some of the people you meet in it the ones on the good sideyoull like. The others, less differentiated as people, are hired and working for the wrong side. Yul don't learn much about the shadowy guys up above but I suspect thats a fairly accurate picture of how it works in the world of espionage, subversion and wet works.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly: A Detective Sean Duffy Novel (Sean Duffy Series, Book 6); Author: Visit Amazon's Adrian McKinty Page; Review: This is the sixth Sean Duffy novel and McKintys eighteenth novel over all. Its set in North Ireland, 1988, in a deeply divided, still violent country. Seans right in the middle of it, a Catholic living in a Prod neighborhood, once loyal to the IRA and now a cop. The one side doesnt trust him because of what he used to be and the other because of what he is now. And no one on any side says anything to a copper without being forced to because grassing is a quick way to exit living. Now Duffys investigating the crossbow murder of a drug dealer. It gets complicated almost at once. He discovers that this is the second attempt against a dealer to involve a crossbow. He arrests the Bulgarian wife of the dead dealer as her probable drug mule. Shes made regular trips in and out of the country. The bail set for her is high and she has to turn over her passport but then (1) someone posts bail anyhow and (2) when shes out, she disappears, probably dead. The stakes escalate. Soon Sean is a target himself, both of IRA killers (why do they want him dead?) and his own police forces Internal Affairs unit. Its resolved eventually but there are high level surprises along the way. Duffy narrates his story in call-a-spade-a-spade not-surprised-by-anything prose. Theres little surface resemblance but the effect is similar to what one feels reading someone like Dennis Lehane, which is high praise. As a snoop, Duffy is a bit like Jo Nesbros series hero, Harry Hole. Theyre both ramshackle on the surface and both contrarians, natural enemies of the brass, who tolerate them with gritted teeth because unlike the other detectives on their squads, Duffy and Hole get results. They both make enemies easier than they do friends and both run on stimulants, not all of them legal, which they use to quell their night dreams and keep themselves moving. Unlike Hole though, or any other series detective that I know, Duffy lives in a bomb before climbing into the drivers seat. Duffy has to be on the alert every minute simply to stay alive. If hes not, he may not have more minutes left to him. A distinguishing difference between Sean Duffy and Harry Hole is culture. Sean has plenty of it and Harry little to none. The cultural references are one of the pleasures of this enjoyable series. Duffy is university educated and he grew up in a country that takes things like memorizing lines of poetry seriously. Its not just poetry. The narrative is peppered with references high and low. I kept a running list from start to finish: heres what I got. Duffy mentions, paraphrases or quotes from: Schuberts second, Miami Vice, Philip K. Dick (Beth, Duffys partner and wife of his daughter, is writing on Dick for her maters thesis), the old Voltaire Rule, Robert Plant, Kylie Minogue (Duffy cant stand her), a ninth century Irish poem, Noel Coward, Carl Sagan (mentioned more than once), John Wayne, Sibelius, Chariots; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet; Author: Visit Amazon's Lyndal Roper Page; Review: ROPER, Lyndal. Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. Random House. March 2017. 555p +index to com. Illus., notes, bibliog., index. This is in all respects the best book Ive read on Luther and Ive read a lot of them. What makes it so good is perspective, backed by massive amounts of research. It is exceptionally well documented I enjoyed following along with the text in the footnotes. Roper states her approach at the start. First off, she is not a church historian but rather a historian of religion, which means (in her case at least) that she doesnt write about the great reformer in a silo: she doesnt treat him as a lone hero fighting against a uniform religious environment. Rather, she explores affinities: where did Luther come from, both sociologically and psychologically (his home environment, his relation with his father, what it was like to be a late medieval scholar and then monk) and in matters of faith in the context of medieval theology and philosophy. Exploring what Luther and his peers had in common, she is then better situated to point to his differences, and how radical some of his views were his insistence on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist for example, or his radical Augustinianism, which led him to refute any concept of free will in favor of the hidden God of inscrutable will. Oddly enough, this denial of human will liberated his thinking on the physical life. If we can never do anything good, as all human acts are sinful, Roper writes, then sexual acts are no different or worse than other types of sin. This gloomy anthropology paradoxically freed Luther to take a relaxed view of sexuality. Lust was part of human nature it was how God had created mankind. This is one of the attractive features of Luthers thinking: the acceptance of sex as normal and pleasurable. The author doesnt slight Luthers less attractive traits, of which there are many. A splenetic temper led him to repeated battles (with words mostly) over the smallest slights. He couldn't tolerate disagreement, especially on issues of faith, leading to a break with many of his former friends and allies (most notably Andreas Karlstadt). He exhibited a pronounced leaning toward authoritarianism, both in his dealings with his acolytes and in his passivity, almost timidity, before the secular princes of the Empire (although in writing them he seldom pulled punches). Lastly, there were his prejudices. Even in an age of systemic anti-Semitism, Luthers diatribes are particularly distressing, the foul language and disgusting images he used in writing about the Jews and his unwillingness to bend as to how they should be treated. There is the Peasants War of 1524-1525 and his violent diatribe against the peasants. There is his fixation in his writing, preaching, his everyday talk at the tableon excrement, talk about his constipation and the enemas he took to void his bowels, and the written tracts about Jews drowning in **** and **** and the anti-Christ Pope as well. Lastly, there are his views on womanhood. His; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Devil and Webster; Author: Visit Amazon's Jean Hanff Korelitz Page; Review: "She might not have spent her years in academia preparing herself to be a college president but the job, she quickly learned, was basically a game of Whac-a-Mole. You didn't have the luxury of going back to contemplate the wisdom of having swung your mallet, because the next crisis was already exploding somewhere else, and you had no time to spare. Comprehend the problem, hear the grievances, get advice, and then decide. And don't go back." Thus Wheaton Colleges first woman (also first Jewish, first feminist, former VISTA volunteer and inveterate protester) president, Naomi Ruth, reflecting on her job as it currently seems. Or, better, has suddenly become. For a crisis has come seemingly out of nowhere, over an issue, the denial of tenure to a popular African-American professor, that shes legally bounden not to talk about at all because its a contract matter. But students are protesting. Theyve built a tent city on the Quad and some of them are her own students, whod taken classes from her on the history of feminism and protest in America. The students just think shes stonewalling them. Besides, they're not interested in dialogue, certainly not with someone so misguided (read old and in a position of authority) as her. Its as new age of mis-information and the students control it, not Naomi. To make worse, her daughters out there too and their weekend get-togethers are dotted with pregnant silences as they negotiate around their ideological differences. To make it worse-er yet, the dissenters have a leader --Omar, a charismatic refugee from Palestine with a back story that would make a stone statue dissolve in tears. How could someone with such a sad past possibly be wrong? Events escalate. Wheaton students are joined on the Quad by protesters from neighboring colleges too. Theyre on the national news now. Theres a shocking act of vandalism, and then another. Trustees and alums ask questions, more and more insistently. Naomis on the hot seat and she doesnt know how to get off it. At this point, the plot slides smoothly into melodrama but its so enjoyable and author Korelitz is so witty that you don't mind at all. The novel ends with not one but two shocking revelations that bring the novel to a tidy and satisfying ending. This diverting novel has a good deal to say about what its like to steer so unwieldy a ship as a college. Im sure I enjoyed it more because for twenty years, I was dean, then vice president, then dean again at three institutions of higher education, and what Korelitz describes here, though hyperbolic a bit, rings true. I laughed a lot when I read this book. I don't think you have to have had anything to do with running a college, though, to enjoy it: its good and fun and exceptionally well written. Long live Naomi! And the students too! After all, if you're going to protest something going wrong, young isn't a bad time to start it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lola: A Novel (The Lola Vasquez Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Melissa Scrivner Love Page; Review: This seditious monster of a book never stops. The action never lets up. Most of the book takes place in a ghetto. You see it through the disillusioned but oddly loving eyes of the heroine, Lola Vazquez, an epic character for whom you will root even as you tsk tsk her appalling life. On the surface, Lola is simply Garcias girlfriend. Hes head of the Crenshaw Six, a barely hanging on gang of drug dealing Latinos in southeast LA. But Garcias boss of the gang only because Lola put a bullet in his brothers head. Garcia only looks like he makes decisions. Lola really makes them. Her life, thoughts, actions as you follow them, they will appall but the more you read about her, the more you will admire her. Shes a force of life. Its just a really dirty life. Pimped out to rich white dudes by her druggie mother before she reached her teens, Lola is ferociously honest about the options open in her life (which she expects to be short). Sex is a weapon to her. So is her defenseless appearance. She uses whatever she has to negotiate her way among ruthless drug lords (or rather, middle men who are still way higher on the totem pole than either Garcia or Lola), corrupt cops, and mindless killers, crooks and druggies. Shes determined never to be anyones victim again but her choices aren't easy and they're certainly not clean. The only pure characters in the book are Lola (regardless of all the horrible things she does) and the little girl she is trying to save from a life that replicates Lolas own early life. (How do you redeem a six-year-old girl whos already been turned out by her own mom, not once but time and again? Until Lola comes along, shes afraid of everything.) By the end of the story, Lola has been beaten up and threatened with a painful death by not one but two drug dealers. And thats just the tip of the iceberg. This is a very good story about a truly horrible life.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: In the Name of the Family: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Sarah Dunant Page; Review: In Machiavelli: Chief Works and Others, vol. I (ed. Allan H. Gilbert, 1965), there is a short piece, only six pages long, that is the most chilling thing that the notoriously unsentimental Niccolo Machiavelli ever wrote. It is entitled A Description of the Method Used by Duke Valentino in Killing Vitellozzo Vitelli and Others and it describes how Borgia tricked his enemies into attending a celebratory banquet and when they were in the feasting room, had some garroted instantly and the rest tied up to be disposed of later. That happened on New Years Eve, the last day of the year 1502. Cesares father Rodrigo had been pope then --Alexander VIfor twelve years and when the news of Cesares magnificent treachery became public, the Borgias dominance over large stretches of Italy seemed sealed. Dunants previous book on the Borgia clan: Rodrigo, the pope; Cesare, the warrior; Lucrezia, the daughter, used as a pawn in marriage by her ever scheming father. Blood and Beauty (2013) related the Borgias rise to power, the assassination in Rome of Cesares older brother Juan, Lucretias first two marriages and the complicated emotions that existed between sister and jealous brother (he had her second husband murdered). This is the second and last book on the Borgias. It focuses on the crucial years of 1502-1503, when Cesare was consolidating power, with an epilogue (Machiavellis musing on past events in 1513). Events provide the book, which is excellent in every respect by the way, with its dramatic arc: you follow the events that lead to Sinigaglia and you read what happened afterward, when Cesares seemingly ineluctable hold on power over central Italy is lost following his fathers death and the election of an enemy pope Giuliano della Rovere, longtime enemy of the Borgiasas Cesare lies near death, brought down most likely by an attack of the French pox, aka syphilis. Dunant switches focus from chapter to chapter, sometimes within a chapter, among the three Borgias Cesare the warrior, Rodrigo bankroller and fixer, and Lucrezia married off a third time to cement an allianceand, a stroke of authorial brilliance, the veteran Florentine political servant Machiavelli. Borgia takes a liking to the man he calls Signor Smile. (Ah, the man whose face smiles even when he says he does not, Cesare greets Niccolo, who cant seem to get rid of the half-smile that graces his face in Santo di Titos portrait.) Its not a friendship, just friendly=-like moments: Cesare only thinks of himself and is ruthless in using, then dispensing with others, but it gives the Florentine diplomat the chance to watch what happens when martial virtu is favored, for however long, by Fortune. While Fortune remains on his side, Valentino is indomitable. But the problem is that Fortuna, like men, is fickle and when she abandons her favorite, the fall is sharp. Before Dunant wrote the two books on the Borgias, she crafted a trilogy on women in the Renaissance. It shows in her nuanced and approving treatment of Lucrezia in this present book. All four of the lead characters are; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rocks Beat Paper: A Wilson Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's Mike Knowles Page; Review: Richard Starks (Donald Westlakes) Parker stories are the boiler plate for this kind of hard guy crime caper novels but there are good clones of Parker and less good ones. This novels protagonist, Wilson, is a good one and the story is diverting and in fairly constant high-tension action. Its the type of crime novel you pick up and don't put down until you're done reading it. If youve read any of the Parker novels or Loren D. Estlemans Macklin novels, you know the routine: the loner bad guy, pretty much emotionless except for the job, kills when he needs to but not gratuitously because killing is an inefficient way to do business most of the time; he accepts a caper which forces him to work with other criminals and ends up doing the planning for it (in the process, the reader learns a lot about the technical details of a high end criminals work); someone or somebodies in the team have a different agenda, or their passions intrude, and cooperation is replaced with trickery and out and out warfare; the protagonist wins out in the end: though plans have changed dramatically, the caper is a success, and the bad guys former allies who tried to outwit him end up either dead or badly damaged (if not dead, they may show up in a subsequent installment). This time its a diamond caper ten million dollars worth of uncut and cut diamonds sitting in two safes inside a locked down room in an impregnable building with a state of the art security system. There are ten people in in it, way too many from Wilsons point of view but he didn't set up the job so he has to take what hes got. Theres bad blood from the start. Miles, with whom hes worked before, complains to Wilson about another player, an aggressive bully, but Wilson shuts Milo down. Grow up, he tells Miles, the only quality in a person in our line of work needs to have is reliability. They have to be able to do whatever they say they can do. If they can do that, you put up with the rest until the job is done. Wilson figures out a way to make the job work but theyve barely started preparations before the job goes south in the most drastic way: the inside man, who is essential to the plan, dies in a car crash. The jobs over but Wilson keeps thinking about it. (That much money concentrates his thinking.) He comes up with a way to make it work again and the rat race starts over again. From then on, its the mechanics of the job and a steadily growing series of surprises and catastrophes. By the end of the book, there is a pile of dead bodies left behind. The ending is a bit much but it works. Wilson opines a bit: The games we play are never fair and they never end clean. They just end. And so does the book, not with an A grade but; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Wanderers; Author: Visit Amazon's Meg Howrey Page; Review: The separate narratives there are seven in all: the three astronauts, the children of two of them and the wife of the third, and one morein this amazing novel grab hold of you as they unreel and pull you along. Then you reach the end and everything folds together in glorious epiphany. You feel what it is like to do such an outré thing as to stuff yourself in a tin can and travel eight months out and eight months back, all for a month on the surface of a simulated Mars. And at the end, when youve read all about it, from the pre-blastoff preparations to return landing, you're happy and proud to be human, like these three glorious creatures surely are, and fragile like astronauts, children, wife, observer find ways, with partial but substantial success, to reach out and hold each others hands. This novel is one of a kind, and pure pleasure to read. A long time back, Helen, the oldest of the three astronauts at 53, was on another space shoot and her brother Phil tried to commit suicide and failed. The flight center hid the news from Helen until she landed for fear it might compromise the mission. Her brother still finds it hard to talk to Helen, angry that everyone was more concerned about her feelings than they were with his. That was a sign: now Helens on the mission of a lifetime, one of three astronauts setting forth on an eight-month crossing to the planet Mars. Theyll stay there, on the surface of an alien planet, doe a month and then return home, seventeen months in all. Except they're not. Its really a test mission, seventeen months in simulated flight, land explore and return, staged by the private corporation thats funding the real Mars shoot two years after. There are questions that need answering before the real thing happens --most of all, how astronauts will hold up under such rigorous, intense and constrained conditions three people in a sardine tin for almost a year and a half, all the time under observation, their every word and gesture analyzed for signs of dysfunction and strain. But behind them, back on earth, are people they care for and there are stressors as all of them, astronauts and waiting-for-astronauts, adjust to nearly a year and a half of constant scrutiny and unforeseen strain. By genre, this book qualifies as science fiction. Theres a lot of technical talk and most of the action takes place in space or on an alien planet --well, sim space, sim planet, but even simulated reality is a science fictionish kind of concept. But though the science is necessary to the novel, thats not what this extraordinary book is about. Its about relations and inner feelings, what it is to be human, the mismatch between exterior appearance and interior feeling: three superbly trained and self-contained human beings interact and act inside themselves in close, constrained, continuous contact under conditions of stress. (One of the stressors is knowing that they are always being watched and; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Quicksand: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Malin Persson Giolito Page; Review: Its the kind of horrific situation we see chronicled in the news more and more nowadays. Theres been a school shooting, the teacher and the students dead, a fourth student injured, the last person in the room, Maja, unwounded but in shock. It appears that Maja and her boyfriend Sebastian walked into the classroom and started shooting. Sebastian went first but Maja shot and killed Amanda, her best girlfriend, and then Sebastian. The killing of Amanda was an accident. Maja was unfamiliar with the gun, thought the safety was on, didn't aim well, and boom, her friend was shot and dead. She admits shooting Sebastian but she, or rather her lawyers, among the most expensive in Sweden, claim self-defense: Sebastian was preparing to shoot her. Its nine months later now, time for the trial before a panel of judges, which will determine whether Maja, 18, is sentenced to prison for a long, long time or whether she will be let go. In the hands of most crime thriller writers, what would follow would be the back and forth of a complicated legal battle, a few surprise discoveries or revelations thrown in along the sway, to lead to the tricky conclusion. In first-time novelist Giolitos hand, what emerges is something much more: a look inside the skull of a much tormented and much maligned young woman, A privileged being who had always before been on track to a good future and is now, in over her head and not at all convinced she doesnt deserve the charge of murderer. The story is told in a mixture of trial narrative and flashback, back to when the two privileged became lovers a year before the massacre. Maja narrates. Giolito has the tone pitch perfect: as the tale unfolds, it never feels forced and you understand more and more, in stages, how Maja got where she is now, and what, if anything, shes really guilty of. In short, although technically this stellar novel classifies as a crime thriller, it isn't really. The thrills are slight. There is no legal sleight of hand, pulling a rabbit out a hat at the last minute to save Maja from imprisonment. Its just an awfully important justthe story of a confused girl in a mess she wasn't prepared for and had no idea how to deal with. This is a good book. It received critical acclaim in the authors home country and I suspect it will receive acclaim here too.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Taduno's Song: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Odafe Atogun Page; Review: Atogus debut novel, Tadunos Song, is a dystopic fairy tale about a present-day Nigeria under the rule of a bloodthirsty military dictator. Its written in a simple style that is sometimes eloquent but more often closer to mundane, both in language and images. Theres affinity to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in this tale of a master song crafter who returns from exile to rescue his loved one from a present-day Hell but this novels antecedents lie much closer: the life and myth of Fela Kuti (d. 1985), founder of Afrobeat music and a constant protester against oppression in his native Nigeria. Kuti was a political force during his short life time (twenty-five years) largely because his music was so popular. Taduno, the Kuti figure in this book, plays guitar. He used to sing but the beatings he received earlier at the hands of Mr. President and his men have reduced his voice to a harsh croak. He left the country in despair but now his woman, Lela, has written, begging him to return: the country needs him again. He returns to find that no one remembers or recognizes him, not even his neighbors, not even Lelas despairing parents. As for Lela, shes gone, kidnapped by the government. The President offers a trade: you sing a song praising my government and Ill set Lela free. No song, no Lela. (No you either.) But who is more important, Lela, the one person you love or the nation that has forgotten you, straining now under the bonds of strong feelings? The magical element in it (e.g., everyone has completely forgotten Taduno in his absence, they don't even recognize him when he returns to live among them again) makes the tale almost cartoon like. The subject is a worthwhile one, but the result is not lasting literature. Compare Song to some of Coetzees early novels or Orwells 1984 and youll notice the difference. Song isn't bad but it lacks heft.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, Americas Maverick Publisher and His Battle against Censorship; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Rosenthal Page; Review: Drawing on the Rosset papers at Columbia, Columbia professor Rosenthal has written a short and efficient biography of Americas maverick publisher, Barney Rosset. In 1951, Rossett bought the defunct Grove Press, with a backlist of only three books, none a strong seller (Melvilles The Confidence Man, the poems of Richard Crashaw, d. 1649, and the writings of Aphra Behn, d. 1689). By the end of the decade, he had ratcheted it up into the champion of the new, largely European writing of such luminaries (luminaries later on, but not in the U.S. when he first published them) as Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter and Genet, all of whom remained loyal to Rosset in decades to come. Rosset fought lengthy court battles to gain the right to publish uncensored the texts of D. H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover and then Millers Tropic of Cancer (on which he had written an adulatory essay while still in prep school). These victories were extraordinarily costly to wage but his victories wore down the Feds and Post Offices (enforcers of the Comstock Act) prosecutorial zeal to such an extent that Rosset got away with one exception, a Boston trial, with publishing William S. Burroughss truly obscene, however much literary value it has, drug sex and hallucination novel, Naked Lunch. Rosset wasn't easy to be around he fired, rehired, then fired again one after another of his publishing associates and he ran through five wives, wearing them out with his upfront narcissism and constant philandering. (The final one outlasted him but he was eighty-five by the time he married her and perhaps wearing down by then.) But how can you help but admire someone who could say and mean it: I feel personally there hasn't been a word written or uttered that shouldnt be published. No other publisher has ever taken as many risks as Barney did and this book shows why we should honor him for; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Erstwhile: The Vorrh (2) (The Vorrh Trilogy); Author: Brian Catling; Review: This odd book by poet, sculptor, novelist, film maker, performance artist Catling is the second book in a proposed trilogy about the Vorrh, an imaginary forest in deepest Africa (the name is taken from Raymond Roussels Impressions of Africa). The forest is an active presence for part of the book: an expedition into it results in the forest is an immanent presence but not a tangible one: whatever is playing out across these 480 pages, the Vorrh, or its agents, are players behind the scene. What happens happens because of or in response to the unarticulated demands or pressures of the Vorrh. This cosmic drama involves humans, fallen angels (the Erstwhile), mechanical men (the Kin), cannibals (anthropophagi) and near-zombies (the Limboia, hollow humans), greedy (mostly German) capitalists, insane asylum inmates and staff, a one-eyed not-wholly human and another who it is hinted but never made clear is a magical savior (but of what? when?), a Satanic priest in an obscure religious sect that punishes wrongdoers (almost everyone) instead of redeeming them, a man whose hands were cut off to punish his father and stitched back on opposite wrists, and ants that eat sugared words written in the dirt and then transmit them as completed messages to who knows who. The book starts with the poet artist William Blake and the making of one of his most famous prints, Nebuchadnezzar. Its subject, it turns out, is actual: he/it is an Erstwhile, one of the angels abandoned, forgotten, cast away by God after they failed to protect Adam from the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. In their despair and loneliness, not they try to bury themselves in the earth, to become inanimate though not dead yet. But now something is bringing them back to life. And thus starts this long, confusing, but not unsatisfying readers journey, which ends with a surprise event I will not give away. Theres an awful lot stuffed into this book but as narrative, its more about impending events (in the volume to come) than of events ended in this installment. Also, references to events and people or better, creaturesin the first book appear with minimal narrative. Anyone like me who grew up on H. P. Lovecraft, with his constant references to obscure gods and books, not to mention the mad Arab philosopher who wrote the dread Necronomicon, will read these references as a kind of local color. Over the course of the book, usually enough context emerges to make their meaning and history clear, al least clear enough not to bother. There are also a lot of arcane references that almost make sense but don't really, like this one, 388 pages into a 480-page narrative: Did you know the oceans are the memory of the world? What you saw was the river [Thames]demonstrating what is happening all over the city tonight. Semblance comes now in the game and shakes the normal out of its current time and gives the before a while to sit back cosy where it used to. This isn't a book to nitpick over, though.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Lucky Ones: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Julianne Pachico Page; Review: This book is scary. Its good too. And exceptionally well written. Narrated in a series of chapters that at first seem disjointed, everything folds together to paint a picture of a society careening down a hole to hell. Most stories are told in third person, some in first. The focus changes, different voices and different times, 1993 to 2013, set in Colombia most of the time but a couple in New York City. Collectively they portray the psychic costs of a society disintegrating, where the only certainty is radical uncertainty. Each story has a lead character, but what an array of different types and views they form! A teenage daughter, Stephanie, waits in her parents gated, guarded, fenced-in villa, for her parents to return but they never make it back to her. Outside, a disfigured stranger waits to take her some place and do what to her? A teacher, long since taken captive by the rebels, tries to retain his sanity by teaching his students some rocks, twigs, leaves about Hamlet. The rebel leader, running out of muscle, hope and dedication, gears up for one more futile campaign against a relentless army. Spoiled school girls are cruel to a classmate, an insignificant gesture in a land crueler than they will ever be. A drug-addled emigre barely gets along in New York years after leaving Colombia. Unnamed figures look on as wealthy ex-pats party in a country villa. The most jarring story of all is told from the perspective of the white-furred rabbits left behind when the rebels attacked the villa and killed or kidnapped its occupants: the rabbits have survived but are permanently addicted to the coca leaves they found stashed there. An apprentice teacher searches for a missing girl and ends up with three fingers of his right hand slashed off: he had questioned the governments involvement in the death squads devastating the country. The routine of a servant of a wealthy family is contrasted with the lives of her employers. A young girl visits the stations of the Cross: a disfigured man, they call him the Armadillo Man, takes her on tour of the homes destroyed in a brutal police raid. Lastly, in 2013, with a semblance of order reestablished in Colombia, two of the characters from earlier stories visit old haunts trying to find meaning in the past. The details are jolting. If you are poor and live in Colombia while all this horror is going on, your vocabulary soon includes words like these: sapos, snitches; vacuna, extortion tax. Picar para tamal means to cut up the body of the living victim in small pieces, bit by bit. Bocachiaquiar is to make hundreds of small body punctures from which the victim slowly bleeds to death. A young woman remembers her childhood when you could go swimming in the river except when the bodies were floating in the water. Sometimes there were vultures sitting on them and sometimes not. Imagine growing up in a country where some fifty to seventy thousand people became forced disappearances and where the governments forces; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Ends of the World; Author: Dborah Danowski; Review: The argument in this grossly overwritten and under-pruned book is that we must reorient our values, policies and actions in light of the destructive impact our current and past actions have had on this world of ours, upon whose survival health-- our own wellbeing depends. The consequences of our misuse of the environment has produced an unpredictable world in which we can no longer predict the rate of change: were on a runaway train and its accelerating in unpredictable and unhealthy ways. We don't have long left to halt it if we can. Though written for a good cause, this is a bad book. Its insights and argument are lost in a flood of verbiage and there is too much sign of academic posturing certainly for the general reader, if not the specialist. The authors, a philosopher and an anthropologist, both Brazilian, seem determined to find complicated, even arcane, ways of expressing ideas that are important and deserve to be expressed more simply, because if they're not, theyll lose their audience. Cosmological deixis, the end of epochality, inert bearer of geophysical Karma, metatemporal instability, runaway temporality, this niche of negentropy, biocosmopolitical consciousness and dystopian gnosis, the a-subjectifying de-hominization of Man by deterritorialized technocapitalism provided he or she remains patient, the intelligent reader can decipher this jargon but it gets in the way of the authors message. Heres an example of how their words obscure their meaning: in discussing the Gaia theses, they write of our current predicament as a catastrophic terrestrial objectification of the correlation. Simpler stated, they argue that the earth is giving us a blowback, showing us that what we thought was going to happen is going to happen and in the process, stripping mankind of the controls it thought it held over the ecosphere. There are too many pilings on of words and phrases, one descriptor after another, in place of a few select ones that make the point. The citations are frequent as is to be expected in a work aimed mostly at other scholars. The authors have a stylistic device that tells the reader when they're moving to side bar (often a page or so long) but not all of the sidebars speak directly to the argument of the book. A long digression on dystopian literature and films (Lars von Triers Melancholia, the book and movie of The Road, pretty much anything by Philip K. Dick but especially Ubik) is neither that interesting nor that central to the book and in discussing Gabriel Tardes dystopian Fragment dhistoire future (translated as Underground Man, 1974) they never mention that it was written in 1896. Thats a petty criticism but in a scholarly book, provenance is important. There is also a longish section on primitive peoples worldviews that, at least to this reader, never quite fit into the rest of the argument. Lastly, as to language, a few of the terms embraced in this book are just ghastly, either newly made up (subvived for surviving in diminished circumstances, philosophiction) or borrowed from other writers but shouldnt have been (Capitalocene to; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World; Author: Visit Amazon's Nell Stevens Page; Review: This is Stevenss first book but she was a finalist for the 2011 Elle magazine writing talent contest and runner-up in two writing contests (one memoir, the other short fiction) in 2014-15. Combine that with a bachelors degree in English and creative writing (Warwick), study at Harvard (Arabic and Comparative Literature) and an MFA in fiction at Boston University, where she received a graduate fiction award, and you have a formidable combination. Oh, did I mention she just completed her Ph. D. in Victorian literature at Kings College London? This book is an odd but appealing join: its part memoir, part travel book and part fiction, and it is inspired by Dickenss very odd but masterly novel, Bleak House. Stevens book narrates her trip to the Falkland Islands, located off the southernmost tip of South America, and in particular her six-week stay on Bleaker Island (serendipitous name!), a desolate pile of rocks and dirt eight miles square, inhabited during her stay in the winter (winters aren't nice down there), aside from Nell, by only the occasional sea lion or seal, about a thousand sheep and several cows, a colony of gentoo penguins and countless other birds, including one large aggressive raptor called the caracara (its characterized on the website allaboutbirds as a tropical falcon version of a vulture). There are no trees. The wind blows. A lot. And if lack of sunlight affects your moods, prepare for mood swings. She went there on a grant, her hope that the enforced solitude and straitened regimen would force her to be the novelist she aspired to be. All told, she had bought herself three months of being on her own: during that time, she must write 90,000 words (rough draft shed revise later- only 2500 words a day). She had to carry her food with her for the entire stay: money and freight weight limits meant that shed live on 1,000 some calories a day. In seemingly disjointed order, this memoir tells what happened to her there and what it taught her about herself and about writing. It spins out tumbles out at pointsin chapters on her life on the island, her life before arriving there, about an old boyfriend she finally left and what that incident said about her ability to connect, the advice of her writing teacher at Boston U. (the great Leslie Epstein) and scattered chapters from the novel she never finished, which paralleled some of the tropes of Victorian fiction but set on Bleaker Island. The result is a book that will not appeal to everyone but that I enjoyed quite a bit. I have been trying myself to find ways to write my experience not sequentially but with tangential connections, and thats what she does here. If you're looking for a travel book, this isn't it. If you're looking for a finished novel, no again. But if you want to follow along as a young writer, with a strong vein of whimsy included in her makeup, find herself, this may be your cup of tea.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Forgotten Girls (A Stevens and Windermere Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Owen Laukkanen Page; Review: The appearance in 2012 of Owen Laukkanens high voltage policier, The Professionals, heralded the arrival of a new and important player on the crime fiction scene. Six novels on, its hard to remember how refreshing that thriller was, filled with nonstop action and nail-biting suspense. At first glance, the detective heroes, FBI agent Carla Windermere and Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Kirk Stevens, didn't seem a good mix. Kirk was white, fiftyish and settled in a comfortable marriage, not the adventuresome type at all, at least not on the surface. Carla was a pepper pot, single, black, boiling over with energy. But beneath the surface they meshed perfectly. They were both savvy professionals and both bulldogs in pursuit of their targets. The icing on the cake? They liked and respected each other and though they found each other attractive in the earlier installments of this series, nothing happened between them. There was no hanky panky, no phony eroticized angst. Six novels in, Kirk is still happily married and Carla still single, though by now she has picked up a boyfriend, another agent. Carlas not the marrying type but things look good between them. Carla and Kirk are linked organizationally now as the lead investigators in a joint FBI-BCA violent crimes task force. Jurisdictional issues between the two agencies are moot. The investigators can do what they do best, which is to track down criminals, mostly but not exclusively killers. Their targets are the abusers -- tough guys, con men, sick loners who prey on the vulnerable. It has become Laukkanens specialty, high tension high speed thrillers about the pursuit of an elusive figure or figures who skulk in the shadows, taking advantage of the jurisdictional limits of individual police forces to do truly heinous things to undeserving victims (more often women than men). In this book, its the hunt for a serial killer. By accident one of his killings surfaces. The authorities have no idea how many women he has killed in the far north reaches of Minnesota: when winter comes, the area shuts down. Even if bodies are found the following spring, its hard to tell what killed them the cold? an accident? if prostitutes, the perils of their profession? The search that follows is narrated from different perspective, shifting among the efforts of Stevens and Windermere, Windermeres boyfriend, a young drifter seeking to avenge a friend, and the killer himself. All told, this is not one of Laukkanens stronger books in the series. The start is slow but once the pace picks up, fast and violent. Thats the problem, though. The pace is slow for too long and even when it picks up, the action feels a bit mechanical. The personal relationship between Stevens and Windermere isn't as well fleshed out as it was in previous novels and the secondary characters don't have much to offer, not even the killer, who seems a stock figure. Having written that, all of the books in this series are compelling reads. Start the book and you will probably not put it down.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Murder on the Serpentine: A Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Anne Perry Page; Review: This is the thirty-second Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mystery by British crime novelist Anne Perry. She has written another twenty-two featuring private detective William Monk and s authored a slew of other mysteries, Young Adult novels and Christmas stories, for a total publication probably in the 70-80 range. Ive only read her Victorian era thrillers the Pitts and Monk novels. I haven't read them all but I have read a lot and its surprising how uniformly good they are. She knows the era 1870s through 90s- and milieu, middle and upper class London with excursions lower down, to a T. She plots well intriguing puzzles with just enough danger in them to keep you on your toes. The social crosscurrents are fascinating in this novel, there are a couple of interchanges Charlotte at a womens club meeting, Thomas facing his upper-class preythat definitely get the blood moving faster. They tell you so much about attitudes in that outwardly prudish age where people still did shady deeds and had wicked thoughts: they just hid them behind the window dressing better than we do today. The book starts with a request: Queen Victoria, reigning now sixty-two years, wishes to see Thomas when its convenient for him. Thomas now heads the Special Branch, charged with the nations security: bombings, assassinations and treason are his targets. She asks him to investigate the death of an old friend, who was found face down in the water at the Serpentine, along the Thames. She had charged him to investigate an acquaintance of her son, Prince of Wales Edward, and now hes dead. Had he died by accident? And what had he found out about her sons companion? Thomas, of course, promises to investigate. He must keep it secret from Charlotte, both because the queen asked him to and because he doesnt want to put his much loved wife at risk. But Charlotte is as good a detective as Thomas, and better at dealing with the social elite, and she and Thomas have always worked as a pair. One of the pleasures of this series is looking in on the loving marriage the two snoops have a pairing of equals- and in this installment, watching how carefully they both negotiate with each other to help without breaking confidences. I don't have to step sideways out of life just because Im married, Charlotte says to him one time. That isn't the end of everything. Its supposed to be the beginning. Isnt that lovely? As in previous novels, part of the detecting is social conversation. Thats Charlottes term and shes the master of it. Together, they find out what happened and in threw process, Thomas is able to derail a scheme that would have had disastrous consequences for his beloved England. The ending is lovely.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Woman on the Stairs: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Bernhard Schlink Page; Review: The first half of this novel is slow, expressed at such a distance from the events that precipitated it that its not terribly interesting, and certainly not compelling. Then the novel takes off. What had been a detailing of the fifty-year-delayed resolution of a love triangle that was actually a quadrangle, becomes something else: the step by step dissection of the life and dreams of an empty man, who had all his life played things safe in his career, his marriage, being a father, and certainly being a lover. The base situation is straightforward. Fifty years previously, the narrator, I don't think hes ever named, then a young lawyer, is tasked with negotiating a truce between a later-to-be-great artist and an inordinately wealthy client, who had commissioned the artist to paint a portrait of his wife, and who has since lost his wife to the painter. The clients response is to damage the painting in small ways, over and over again, drawing the painter, obsessed with the work, back to him to repair it. The negotiation is a trade: the painter will hand the woman back to her husband and he will hand over the painting to the artist. But the woman has other ideas and turns to the lawyer, who is, or at least thinks he is, deeply in love with her. He helps her flee with the painting and for fifty years, thats it. Then the painting resurfaces. In Australia, where the woman, in the intervening years a wanted terrorist, is hiding. The ex-husband, the painter and the lawyer retreat there, and the four of them talk. So far, the novel is a bit pallid, too abstract, not enough passion on display. In short, very European new novel, along the lines of something by Marguerite Duras or Alain Robbe-Grillet. But the second half of the novel is something else. Its when the painter and the ex-husband take off, leaving the woman and the lawyer behind, that the novel changes, both in direction and in quality. The woman and her never-was-but-hoped-to-be lover talk and because the woman is dying of an aggressive cancer- they talk about dying, death, about what they took from life and what they never even tried to take. There is a glorious passage, several pages long, in which the lawyer tells a story to her: what could have (but didnt) happened the day that she fooled him as well as her two ex-lovers and absconded with the painting, not to be seen again for fifty years. The lawyer no longer sees himself as her lover. Its obvious she never thought of him that way and still doesnt. The narrative he spins is gentler, about the two of them as friends but life-mates. In the telling, his own defenses come down and he realizes what a constrained life he has made of his own. Raised by his grandparents, I did as my grandparents told me [growing up], he says. Be as little of a bother as possible, need as little as possible, ask as little as possible. Thats; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Exploded View; Author: Ivan Vladislavic; Review: This is a most unusual work of fiction, and powerful. It offers four kind-of, kind-of-not stories about life in the authors native South Africa. All take place in or around Johannesburg. The mood throughout is distancing: the lead characters, otherwise little described, are united in their avoidance of the uglier social and economic realities of the world they live in. Villa Toscana. A statistician is testing a revised national census on selected subjects. He becomes enamored of one of them, a woman who lives in a guarded and gated community. As he muses, numbers --the number of black cars against other colored cars, women drivers versus men-- scroll through his thoughts --not people, just cold attenuated percentages. At night, back in his rented room, the mattress feels to him like the soft edge of a bar graph. As he drifts off to sleep, he hypothesizes about the levels of pollutants in the atmosphere, the radiation from the microwave, the possibilities for accidents [while driving the next day] while in his mind came the thought that he had just 28 per cent of his life to live, if he was fortunate enough to be an average man. Afritude Sauce. An engineer, a civic planner, visits a construction site to check the layout of the plumbing network. The people who live there now, part of the 48 per cent of South Africans living below the poverty line, want him to look at their toilets: they don't work, aren't completed yet. Nothing in these new units works right, feels human-scaled. The engineer, like the statistician in the first tale, comes across as fatally disconnected from the people hes supposed to serve. Curiouser. A conceptual artist is preparing for a new show. The theme of his last three was genocide the Holocaust, Bosnia and Rwanda. He has lucked into a cache of tribal masks and wood animal figurines. He strings the mask together, drilling into them, disfiguring them in the process, and stringing them together to make grotesque lanterns. One of the central pieces in his show will be a string of animal figures, sliced thin and thinner and thinner like cold cuts and displayed laid out in a row on the floor. He paid next to nothing for them but will make outrageous sums of money selling his constructions/installations to art dealers. It isn't spelled out rather, obliquely presentedthat the artist, like the protagonists of the previous two pieces, has all sorts of ways inside his head to avoid involving himself with the less fortunate many who lie around him. (Ive stated this badly but don't know how to state it better. Vladislavic is a subtle writer: he doesnt pound you over the head with his message, just insinuates it through clinical observing. Crocodile Lodge. Im at a loss how to characterize the concluding piece in this short book. Traffic jams, women boxing, putting up a billboard. In this section, the phrase exploded view appears. The protagonist, who is unnamed, thinks that way, splintering made objects (organic objects too?) into their component parts, concentrating on; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography; Author: Visit Amazon's Edmund Gordon Page; Review: This is not a perfect biography but its a good one and about a subject, the marvelously contrarian author Angela Carter, who deserves the attention it brings her. Not that there aren't books out on Carter, whose status has skyrocketed since her death at age 51 in 1992. But most are studies of her work and its leitmotifs and this is full-fledged biography. Carter is a good subject for such a study for many reasons. The first is that as an author shes just GOOD. Her idiosyncratic, demotic novels burst boundaries in their age, offending shibboleths right and left, even including the feminists with whom she was supposed just by her existence to agree with. But as this book makes clear, though Carter was a feminist, feminism came down the list in her allegiances to frank expression. She wasn't good at crossing her ts and dotting her Is, no matter how much she agreed in principle with a movements ethos. Life for Angela was too complicated, too seething with vital essences, to be summed up in some convenient formula. She had a fairly messy early life, as Gordon makes clear: an over-possessive mother, almost absent father (later on, she loved him), then an early marriage (to Paul Carter) in large part as a way to escape her family. There followed years married to a chronic depressive who, it turned out, depressed or not, was really quite good at undercutting her. She finally left him. There followed a period of frequent sex with frequently changing partners. Among them were two Japanese men, one of whom dropped her and the other of whom she dropped. (He eventually committed suicide but that was years later.) Through all of this she wrote. Thats what she did. Write. At writing, she was (1) her own person and (2) a consummate pro. She turned out one book, and then another, and another, and another. By the time she turned forty, she was an established quantity, one of the truly original writers not just in English English but in the English language. She did relatively well financially and in literary prizes awarded but somehow never made it into the big time. Gordon argues, and I think persuasively, that two things held her back from truly cashing in on her rising fame. First was that she wrote, by the standards of the time, transgressively. She wasn't a cautious writer and her work blended high and low language, tragedy and farce, genres and times and genders indiscriminately but deliberately. Another way to say it is that even in the most exquisitely worked piece by her she wasn't afraid to intrude a fart joke. Thats reason #1. The second reason is nastier. Simply put, she was a woman, and it was harder for a woman to crack the ceiling. So year after year, she saw men making the short list for the Booker Prize but not she, even though one (horrific for her) year, she was a judge for the award. Secondary awards and honors were for her, not the big ones,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem; Author: Visit Amazon's George Prochnik Page; Review: This is not a book for everyone the rarity of its subject: the life and thoughts of Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of the Kabbalah- precludes any chance of that, as does the abstruseness of many of the ideas presented in the book, both as initially expressed by Scholem and subsequently interpreted by Prochnik. The book is thus not at all quick read but it is a good one, constructed in an unorthodox but, I feel, ultimately rewarding way: the narrative of Scholems maturing is paralleled by that of Prochnik, the author. Some may feel that the narrative of Prochniks growth, and the influence of Scholems thought and personal example on it, distract from the central narrative of Scholems life. I felt rather that it gave flesh to old bones. In one year, 1915, Scholem, seventeen going on eighteen, convinced himself that he was a Zionist, discovered the Kabbalah, got thrown out of high school, met Walter Benjamin (he was older than Scholem but still young, not yet the iconic critic of modernity he would later become) for the first time, and kissed his first girlfriend. He lived in Berlin then. Looking out his bedroom window at the snow falling one day, he wrote in his journal: Earth is a snowflakes destiny. For snow, fate is an unknown, inexplicable, and terrestrial power. We also put up resistance when we plunge into an unexpected abyss, and we also melt. We are snowflakes with a bit more distinction. we plunge into an unexpected abyss, and we also melt. The notion of the abyss, our inability to know what it contained or would do to us these would be dominating themes, an idee force, for the rest of his long, productive life. Later, still young, he wrote: Reason is a stupid mans longing. He wasn't against the use of reason. Indeed, throughout his life he employed the tools of logical analysis and close reading in his own work. But, for Scholem, reason ended before meaning arrived it was the souls, emotions, meaning that counted, not cold bare logic. To achieve meaning, we have to make a leap. Scholem saw himself as a Jew through and through, and lived and worked in Israel for most of his adult life (1923-1982). But he thought that Judaism had taken a wrong step. My apologies: what follows is less elegantly explained than it deserves to be. Scholem argued that Mosess separation of God from Nature and Man ignored an earlier, richer view of the relationship of man and God, in which God never separated from us at all and resided in nature rather that solely outside it. Scholems used the analogy of the writer: God was the master writer, who created Man and nature using letters, which remained encoded in our nature, waiting only for us to crack the code and reunite with the Maker. The result would be reason and logic underpinned by raw feeling, and a uniting of God, nature and man, opening up the possibility of all sorts of good things. The Kabbalah was the key; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Dying Detective: A Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's Leif GW Persson Page; Review: Conan Doyle tried to do it with Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls but his readers made him bring the detective back. Nicholas Freeling did it in mid-novel with his detective hero, inspector Van der Valk: Van der Valks wife Arlette had to finish up the case for him. Henning Mankell didn't kill his detective Kurt Wallander off but in The Troubled Man (2011), Wallander is suffering from Alzheimers Disease which is affecting his memory. Now its time for Lars Martin Johansson, the legendary police detective who could see around corners and who is featured in Perssons brilliant trilogy about police corruption and the assassination of prime minister Olof Palme (in 1986) as well as two stand-alone novels featuring detective Evert Backstrom. Johansson isn't dead yet but hes doing a good job of killing himself off after a near-fatal stroke. Lying in a hospital bed, tired and disturbed by memory loss and flushes of emotion (he actually winds up blubbering one time, and for little reason, not a Johanssontype way of behaving), he is bored and frustrated. Is this the way hes going to end his career? Then his doctor, Ulrika Stenholm, brings him evidence never unearthed beforeon an unsolved rape-murder case. Twenty-five years before, the body of a nine-year-old girl, Jasmine Ermegan, had been found in a ditch, wrapped in plastic bags. Shed been raped and strangled. The vagaries of work assignment in the police department had led to the case being assigned to the worst detective ever, Evert Backstrom, who first did nothing and then did everything possible wrong. Confined to his hospital bed for the first part of the investigation, and then convalescent at home, Johansson tries to solve the case on his own, even though by a quirk of Swedish law, the statute of limitations has exceeded on it: catch the killer and you still cant put him away. Persson has shown repeatedly what a good writer he is and he doesnt disappoint this time. The novel won the Glass Key Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel and the Danish Academy of Crime Writers Palle Rosenkrantz Prize and was named Best Crime Novel of the Year by both the Swedish and Finnish Academies of Crime Writers. I don't know how it will do in translation but Id say its a contender for English-language awards too. Persson excels as a writer in this genre for several reasons. His plots are complicated but tightly constructed so that eventuallyeverything that happens leads somewhere. His characters, including the bigger than life Johansson, are full fleshed and many of them Johansson, his friend and former colleague on the force Bo Jarnebring, his wife Pia, the two young caretakers who are hired to help Johansson get back on his feet are just terribly appealing. Youd like to know them and Persson captures their ways on paper so well that you feel you do know them. There is too the authors intimate acquaintance with police procedure, the business of detecting, the technical tools of the forensics lab, his wry insights into bureaucrats, politicians, and plutocrats ways; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Single Spy; Author: Visit Amazon's William Christie Page; Review: This tough as nails novel offers an unusual take on the spy thriller. Its good ---very good. It starts in 1936. An orphan for years, sixteen-year-old Alexsi Ivanovich Smirnov has become an accomplished thief, liar and smuggler. Hes been living below the radar for so long that hes forgotten what respectability is like. Then hes caught by the Soviet authorities. The novel starts with this action: Alexsis capture and the brutal treatment meted out to him subsequently in a Russian security prison. Hes beaten and abused but not killed until after his ability to survive has been demonstrated repeatedly under the harshest circumstances, hes taken to a small room and told why hes still alive, even though inveterate criminals like him are typically executed out of hand. He resembles a sixteen-year-old left behind in Russia and now desired by his German uncle, who wants to bring him to Germany and his household. Alexsi is fluent in several languages including German. He keeps his own counsel and has shown he can survive on his own. He possesses unique skills to be trained and inserted as a deep cover spy in Nazi Germany. His uncle is a Nazi and well connected. In his household, Alexsi should be able to rise and thus put himself on a position to supply his Russian masters with valuable intelligence in the war they fear will soon arise with Germany. The training is brutal. Alexsi is never allowed to forget that he can be reached wherever he goes if he unwisely defects. Then hes in Germany, and soon actively engaged in ferreting out information and sending him it home to Mother Russia. Its 1940. Ahead lies a volte face with Hitler that leads temporarily to Hitler being a good guy in Stalins mind. When Alexsi forwards details of Hitlers plans to invade Russia, he is ordered to stand down: never send such lies again or be punished. Then Hitler invades and Alexsis worth to the Russian cause rises. Eventually comes Teheran, 1943, where the Allied leaders Churchill, FDR, Stalinare meeting to coordinate their final attack against the Nazi dictator. Here it becomes interesting. In the second volume of John Ericksons Stalins War with Germany, there is a five-page account of a purported plan to assassinate Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt at Teheran called Operation Long Jump (parachute troop leader Otto Skorzeny was to lead it), and the rumor that it was thwarted by the actions of a Soviet intelligence officer. Its out of this rumored about but never confirmed event that Christie has fashioned this engrossing thriller, which never slows down the action but also never over-hypes it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Welcome Murder; Author: Visit Amazon's Robin Yocum Page; Review: Id never heard of him before, but this is Robin Yocums fifth crime novel and sixth book about crime, and it shows. He knows how to write. On all the counts plot, interesting characters engagingly presented, background and ambience, plus the requisite technical knowledge of how policemen actually carry out a crime investigationhes firing on all cylinders. The story, about the death of a weaselly police snitch who has more enemies in town than the town (Steubenville, Ohio) has people, is narrated in rapid alteration by five people. Francis Roberson, the sheriff, aspires to higher political office (actually, eventually, the US presidency). Hes the one who has to investigate the killing but hes entangled with the dead man and disentangling the connection could be fatal to his political hopes. His wife Allison wants only one thing: to get out of Steubenville, a town she describes as dingy and gray, dying a slow death. She won't let anything get in the way of her husbands political dreams, not even a brief fling with the village slut, because his political future is their ticket to move out and on. Theres the slut, former Miss Everything while in high school, and congenitally unable to separate truth from fiction. The list of townies with whom shes had affairs is not short. Her husband is the fourth narrator. Since the dead man was one of the more recent flings of his wife, and since said dead man beat him up and humiliated him when he told him to leave his wife alone, theres reason to suspect him of the killing. Lastly, theres Johnnie Earl. Earls problem is his past. The best athlete ever to come out of Steubenville High and good looking to boot, he left high school for the minor leagues but only made one game in the majors because of a weakness for slow ball pitches. Returning with no money and little reputation left, he made another bad choice and ended up serving six years in a federal prison for drug dealing. Hes back now, wants to go straight. All he wants to do is hole up for a few weeks so nobodys keeping an eye on him, then slip out of town, pick up the $400 thousand some in illegal drug money he stashed away before he was imprisoned, and move to another town where he can convert that cash into a new, and legal, business. The problem is that the dead guy is the snitch who ratted him out so when the snitch turns up dead, Johnny is in the spotlight again. Matters grow even more complicated: Johnnys cellmate in prison was an absolutely horrifying neo-Nazi named Alaric Himmler and to survive around him, Johnny had to agree to join him in his newly created, nobody-knows-quite-where-its-located Aryan Republic.. and hand over to him Johnnys hidden cache. So thats the setup. Lots of players with conflicting objectives and, for most of them, a conflicted relationship with values like truth and loyalty. This is a novel --hard to put down and at times very funnyabout; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Boy in the Earth; Author: Visit Amazon's Fuminori Nakamura Page; Review: In the past twenty years, SOHO Crime has become the best of current crime fiction publishers, presenting us with crime writing from all over the world. Theyre not locked into certain types of crime fiction, as are some of their competitors: their catalogue includes detective fiction, police procedurals, spy thrillers, tales of the bad guys (thieves, killers and mob guys) and tales of revenge. Even within this spread, The Boy in the Earth, a novella actually rather than a full novel, sits alone, existentialist in tone and impact. From the details on up, its about disconnection. The narrator, never named, is a 27-year-old taxi driver. He drifts through his days in a haze of disaffection, exhibiting a near-terminal ennui. As a child in an orphanage, he liked to drop live things lizards and frogsoff the top of a cliff near where he lived and watch them drop, then hit the ground and splatter. His childhood was horrible, constant physical abuse, no affection and no emotional or intellectual stimulation. His foster parents, distant relatives of the father and mother who abandoned him as an infant, simply liked to hit him, kick him, starve him of food. They locked him in a room while they went off with their own childto watch the television. --Now, grown up, he acts out the violence that was the only human contact he knew as a child. Hes got a girlfriend, Sasuyo shes named, hes not. But shes as much a mess as he is: an alcoholic, still mourning the still birth of her child and resentful of sex any more because her baby never was born. Theyre booth rootless. The girlfriend is killing herself with drink. The narrator repeatedly puts himself at extreme risk. (The novel starts with a brutal beating. Even as it happens to him ten motorcycle thugs hitting on him with metal pipeshe longs for it, wonders if it will somehow break open the steel cage inside him where something --his identity?is locked away. (At another point, he soliloquizes: What would I see on the other side of the fear and anxiety?) The mode of describing things reinforces the narrators mood. Individual objects pop up in his vision, as though out of the void, and then disappear, to be replaced with something newly observed: a toad smashed on the pavement, a slightly soiled white glove, one finger pointing to the right, a dog barking in the night, a ten-story building looming out of darkness, the echo of his footsteps as he climbs the stairs to the apartment he shares with Sasuyo. The relentless progression of one day after another seemed to engulf me like heavy smoke. With sentences like that, were back in Sartre land almost, or maybe early Mishima. Another clue to this novellas provenance? In moments of angst, the narrator retreats to his favorite book, which he reads and re-reads and re-re-reads again and again. (Again again?) The book? Franz Kafkas The Castle. I do not at all mean to imply that this novella is bad, or even derivative, except in the; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Ancient Warfare and Civilization); Author: Jennifer T. Roberts; Review: In this latest entry in Oxfords Ancient Warfare and Civilization series, CUNY Graduate Center professor Roberts (Athens on Trial and Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction) tasks on the daunting task of explaining the ins and outs of the two-thirds of a century long war (actually multiple wars) between Athens and Sparta. The first stage of the conflict erupted in 431 BCE and it didn't end until 371 BCE when the Theban infantry shattered Spartan might for good. The winner of the war, as in many other conflicts, was neither side. Thebess moment in the sun was short. Soon a new player, Philip of Macedon, took over, and after him, a son named Alexander. These wars had everything victories followed by almost immediate reversals, civil strife, plague, plots, exiles and assassinations, and for the ordinary citizen of these small city-states, a new standard of misery in war, as traditional restraints on misconduct weakened and then dissolved altogether, replaced by vengeance and blood lust. Roberts is a good explainer and a witty commentator on all things classical. Think of this as an update to Robertss mentor Donald Kagans study of the Peloponnesian War, incorporating the results of all the scholarship that has followed the publication of that classic work.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: This House, Once; Author: Visit Amazon's Deborah Freedman Page; Review: Once an architect, now Freedman writes and illustrates books for young children, including this one, about the connections between the house a young child lives in and the world its component parts came from. The front door first, once part of a colossal oak tree about three hugs round and as high as the blue. The stones below. Bricks out of mud, baked and formed. Shingles, glass, and fireplace, lights, doorknob, bookshelf, under the stair. The drawings are lovely, images rising out of soft, warm or cool backgrounds. I do not find this book as compelling as, say, Goodnight, Moon, which is my beau ideal for books written for children this young, both poetic and concrete. And the thinking informing some of the connections seems muzzy to me, or perhaps a bit over sentimentalized. The book is promoted for ages 4-8 but I suspect will prove harder to resist for children four or five than later on. Over all, this is a lovely book. Its just not an essential one.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: My Cat Yugoslavia: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Pajtim Statovci Page; Review: 272p. $25. 95. Yugoslavia starts out as though a light fantasy a Bosnian exile living in Finland encounters a talking cat in a gay bar and the cat moves in with him (and his pet boa constrictor). But it soon turns serious. The young mans story alternates with that of his family, particularly his mother, who enters marriage two decades before and soon finds shes living in a nightmare: a tyrannical and hot-headed husband, living poor in a strange country where no one likes them. Different culture, different language, different values. Time passes. The father never finds his way out of the box hes dug himself into. The boy, now man, and his mother do. The book is lifted above the obvious by the quality of the writing, which is at times outright poetic without ever seeming strained, and the authors human love for his characters. This is a very good book by a talented new writer. It deserves an audience.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Stockholm Delete; Author: Jens Lapidus; Review: This is the fourth novel by Swedish author Jens Lapidus to be translated into English. All have dealt with Swedish low life, and all have been, to date, good. No, more than good! Exceptional! The first three formed a trilogy of sorts, the Stockholm Trilogy. With Stockholm Delete, Lapidus moves on. And the stakes are high. Can he maintain the high suspense, readability, and dirty gray naturalism he projected in the first three books? The answer is a qualified but enthusiastic yes. Lapiduss new novel starts diffused and fragmented more than the reader may expect. Part of this is style. More than anyone else, Lapiduss prose style echoes the late style of James Ellroy: fragmented and incomplete sentences, jumpy transitions, elisions not just of the words written to describe but of occurrences on route to a much later resolution of doubts and hesitations as all prior uncertainties are settled. Its all faintly hokey, not completely naturalistic, and also and more damningat times irritating. Because its not needed. The story Lapidus unfolds is sufficiently compelling not to need the cutesy stuff for which Ellroy, and now Lapidus too, has become known. Lapidus tells a good enough story he doesnt need artificial style hooks to gussy it up. After youve worked your way through the halts and starts, and half-feints of the early parts of the narrative, this is an absolutely compelling, and utterly jarring=, story about crime life in modern Sweden. Heres the heart of the story. Theres a pending murder trial. A novice lawyer, one of the most attractive characters in this many-character novel, is lawyer for a man coming out of a coma. She has no idea whether he killed the man found mutilated in a building near where he crashed her client car (and ended up in a coma) but she takes on the case anyway. Shes new to the law and her firm doesnt handle criminal cases. A sidebar to the main narrative. Her efforts to defend her client put her at risk in the firm where she works: corporate clients don't like the presence of criminal law, and criminal defendants, tainting their cleaner than clean corporate image. Shes aided by a former criminal who, though he doesnt know it at first, has ties to the current offense: years past, he went to jail for eight years because he kidnapped the defendants father. It was a contract job. He never knew why the kidnapping was ordered. But now unpleasant facts come out of the woodwork and its not clear whether what happened now wasn't a consequence of his own past. What follows a twisty path beyond twisty, with loads of violence and unintended consequences, literally down to the last page. In the process of following this path, we learn a great deal about ethnic rivalries and loyalties in the New Sweden Serbian and Turkish gangs prominent among them. There are corrupt cops, gratuitous violence, and a generous helping of entropic cynicism about how the real world works in modern society. Some of the scenes, particularly of gratuitous violence, are; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: New Boy: William Shakespeare's Othello Retold: A Novel (Hogarth Shakespeare); Author: Visit Amazon's Tracy Chevalier Page; Review: The latest entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare series is a retelling of the sad tale of the noble Moor Othello and his doomed love Desdemona. In this short (188 pages) but poignant script, master word worker Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring, 1999, and others) transfers the tale from the courtyards and streets of sixteenth-century Venice to a Washington DC elementary school in 1978, and its actors from Venetian dignitaries and street people to a bunch of sixth-grade schoolchildren and their teachers and principal. The result is devastating. The heart of it is still a love-tragedy. Yes, sixth grade children have feelings too- love, jealousy, plus a host of lesser emotions like insecurity! But its about racism too, the casual racism of self against different, compounded by the systematic racism that afflicted and still afflicts the relations in our nations capital and elsewhere. Racism is the stuff of schoolyard life in this devastating explosion of a novel. Its more open when the kids in this tale do it but the childrens homeroom teacher just leaks prejudice, nasty prejudice not at all filtered by propriety, from his very pores, and the principal is prone to her own misassumptions about the behavior of the schools one, and first, black student, the son of a Ghanaian diplomat newly assigned to the capitol. Oseis his name Osei Kokote-- but he calls himself O. When he lands in that schoolyard that morning, its his fourth school in six years: London, Rome, New York, now Washington. O knows the ropes of adjusting: don't stand out, don't be a threat to anyone but don't be a walkover either, find allies if you can but don't expect much from them. Now here he is. Its the final month of the final year of elementary school and here he is in the midst of a bunch of white kids, all their hormones bursting and feeling more insecure than ever before in their brief lives because next year theyll be starting over again as the lowliest of the low in another level of schooling. The students have had a year to five almost six years to adjust to each other and have never ever seen a black student in their school. Some of what happens then is just fear of difference: what does Os hair feel like? are his people cannibals? The thought of touching O, or him touching them, sends shivers down the girls spines and the boys make monkey jokes. Its mean and demeanin, but not deliberately vicious. The vicious part is reserved for Ian, the class bully, who is extorts lunch money from kids in the grades below him, arranges wagers in the schoolyard on who will win an arm-wrestling contest, for instance, and then pockets forty percent of the takings, and when teachers try to curb his abuses goes into the parking lot and keys their cars. He doesnt expect to be the most popular boy in his class, nor the best athlete or student especially not student. But he does expect to be the most feared.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rusty Puppy (Hap and Leonard); Author: Visit Amazon's Joe R. Lansdale Page; Review: The Hap and Leonard series is one of the best in contemporary crime fiction. It isn't crime comedy a la Donald Westlake or Carl Hiaasen but boy, is it funny too. Set in small-town East Texas, it chronicles the adventures of two not private eyes who for all their difference, are the closest of friends, 60s-70s burnout white trash Hap and black, gay, Republican Vietnam vet Leonard. Perseverance is more than their natural suit than actual detecting, at which they're not very good. But they never give up, cant be intimidated, and both have a strong moral spine that keeps them at it even when theres no monetary gain in their work. They talk back and forth all the time, and their talk is one of the secret pleasures of indulging in this kind of fiction. For Lansdale is a natural storyteller, in a very Texan, almost tall tale sort of way. Once you start, you're hooked. You want to know more about the characters, want to see how Hap and Leonard will extract themselves from the mess they always get themselves into, you just want to enjoy the flow of words. Lansdales a good plotter too. In this episode, its a dead young man, an African American in a town where African Americans know they won't get a fair shake. The PIs are soon embroiled with a bunch of truly nasty, corrupt, violent cops. For a while, there only help seems to come from a foul-mouthed young project dweller whom Leonard refers to as the midget vampire. She fears no one. Respects no one either. The exchanges between the detectives and her are worth the price of admission on their own. This is a very good book. All of the books in this series are.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Robert B. Parker's Revelation (A Cole and Hitch Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Knott Page; Review: Robert B. Parker was a prolific writer of both detective fiction, who ventured into Westerns with four novels about territorial marshals Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. Parker is deceased but three of his series are not, each now written by a different author. Knott handles the Wild West stories. From the start, Virgil and Hitch have been appealing characters. In their speech, they're laconic beyond laconic, especially Virgil, who never uses a sentence when a word or phrase will do and prefers one-word answers to two. (Hitch is ex-West Point. He talks out a little more.) Theres a good deal of gentle humor in the series and the violent moments are handled efficiently and effectively. But . but the series is getting old. Knott is a good writer but this series is a trap for him. Hes locked into the concepts and characters of a dead man, and it shows. This book was diverting Virgil and Hitch are pursuing a group of prison runaways; one is an old nemesis of Hitchs; Virgils love, Allie, inadvertently is put in danger. It feels flabby and predictable and the plotting is not all that great.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Nowhere Man: An Orphan X Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Gregg Hurwitz Page; Review: The subtitle tells it all. This is a sequel to Hurwitzs earlier thriller, Orphan X, which the Washington Post praised as smart, stylish, state-of-the-art, and it has already been optioned for a movie. I didn't read the earlier book but this one is preposterous, and along with that, not terribly interesting to read. The hero, Evan Smoak, is a runaway from a secret government program to create deniable and hidden assassins. He was taken as a twelve-year-old orphan, trained to surveille, kill and survive and then sent out to work, and he has fled the program, which, at the beginning of the book, seems to have been disbanded. Smoak now operates below the radar as a free-lance savior of those in hopeless situations. Each time he frees somebody, he gives that person a phone number and tells him or her to pass it on to another person who needs his help. This, apparently, is intended to assuage his guilt for the horrible things he did while under government sanction: there are a few other things he won't do, like killing ravenous guard dogs who are attacking him. The story is straight comic book stuff: Smoak is taken captive, kept in a locked cell in a mansion located he knows not where and guarded by a gang of thugs recreated from narcotraficantes plus a giant and terribly strong mute who has a tattoo on the back of each hand: one is a smiley face, the other a snarling face with vampire fangs. His captor is definitely the stuff of comic books: filthy rich and seeking to avoid aging by sampling the blood of younger, healthier beautiful things. One of them dies in the process but hey, you cant make an omelet without breaking eggs. There is a succession of confrontations during which Smoak kills one, then another, then several of his guards, but the only result is that more thugs are imported, and these proficient in threw martial arts as well as the use of artillery. Two long-range snipers are posted outside the mansion in sub-zero weather to take Smoak down if he decides to run on one of his few journeys outside the house. There is a maiden in distress, en route in a sealed shipping container to the man who has bought her to use and abuse her until her life no longer has worth. Just before he was captured, Smoak got a call from her. He needs to get out to rescue her. Of course, theres another threat to Smoak: another orphan, Orphan Y, is hunting him, assisted by two others of this distinguished foster family. All three are unsavory and psychopathic with easily recognizable character traits to distinguish them. (Think comic book villains and how easy they are to identify.) Smoak tries to escape, fails, tries again, fails, and then boom, boom, all heck breaks out chez captor. The story line is hokey, character development jejune, and there are too many gimmes on the way to Smoaks eventual triumph. One of them comes close to the classical definition of; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: I Walked With Giants: The Autobiography of Jimmy Heath; Author: Visit Amazon's Jimmy Heath Page; Review: Jimmy Heath is ninety now. A fine player (alto and tenor sax), arranger, composer and educator, Heath sits high in the ranks of top flight jazz musicians who don't qualify as Jazz Legends but definitely have contributed of their own to our one great indigenous music, jazz. During a career stretching back sixty years, hes played with and knows virtually everybody in jazz, starting with playing with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis in the forties. Hes a good storyteller, whose enthusiasm for life, family, friends and colleagues, and (I love this) teaching comes across in this lovely memoir. Of necessity, it comes across as a bit I did this and met so and so, and then I did that, and but he was there and he did it. He also comes across as a very nice, decent man, possessed of good values. (He did an early stint in prison on a drug charge but cleaned up his act afterwards.) The narrative is regularly interrupted for reminiscences from those who know him: some seem little more than testimonials to what a good man, teacher, player, arranger or composer he was, but thats par for the course in a memoir like this. The point is that Heath deserves it. You won't learn much about new jazz in this book Ornette is mentioned and I believe also Cecil, but thats about it- but you will learn a great deal about the six vibrant decades during which this fine musician has graced the jazz world.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Presumption of Guilt: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Archer Mayor Page; Review: Its a Red-Letter Day when I come across a new Joe Gunther novel by Vermonter Archer Mayer. Theres never been a bad one Ive read all of them- and they always alwaysare a fluid and interesting read. On all counts plotting, characters, atmosphere, technical detail- the series is a winner. And although Mayer has been turning them out since 1988 now, and this is the twenty-seventh in the series, they are still fresh. By now, police officer Joe Gunther, head of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, is an old friend to the reader, as are his three partners in detecting. Willy Kunkle is a former Army sniper; his one arm is crippled from a gun injury years past when he was still drinking; he is still, on most matters, a misanthrope who resents authority and rubs people wrong from the get go. Hes mellowed since pairing up with fellow officer Sammy Martens, the youngest member of the team, and the two of them having a baby but hes still an acquired taste for most who meet him. Hes mellowed also toward Joe and his partners because he respects them, both for ability and their fairness (tolerance) toward him. The fourth member of the crew, Lester Spinney is thorough to a fault: hes their detail man, on the surface a plodder but solid and he seldom misses anything at a crime site. Ive taken the time to describe them briefly because in important ways these novels depict crime detection as conducted by a family: by now, the players have adjusted so well to each others strengths, failings and day to day quirks that who they are and how they interact is integral to what they do and achieve. One of Mayers signal accomplishments is that he has managed to keep them fresh and real in the readers mind without overburdening the reader who starts late in the series with needless back chat. Mayer makes it seem effortless, just storytelling, but it isnt. It requires attention, discipline, and hard work to produce stories that appear read so freely. Place is a player in Mayers novels. Joe started out as chief of detectives in Brattleboro, Vermont. He has since migrated to the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, set up to help local police and sheriffs offices with major crimes. Vermonts a small state. His office is small too four investigators and a handful of supporting personnel. It interfaces with other police, assisting with their work and sometimes taking the lead. Joes lady friend this is his third in the seriesis head of the crime forensics lab. Joe knows everybody in this small (population and area) state thats one of his strengths as an investigator: he knows the territory, as the chorus of traveling salesmen in The Music Man say you have to if you want to succeed in business- so not too surprisingly, names and faces from former books pop up from time to time in this book too. For the reader, its almost like you lived there too. Joes a good cop, a good boss; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The One-Eyed Judge: A Novel (The Judge Norcross Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Ponsor Page; Review: Michael Ponsor has served as Senior Judge of the US District Court of the District of Massachusetts for the past twenty-three years. For ten years before that, he was Magistrate Judge of the same court. When he writes crime thrillers about a judge this is the second-- he knows what hes talking about. His first book was The Hanging Judge. This is the second. Both feature David S. Norcross, a fairly new judge on the federal bench, and in both, he confronts new challenges. In The Hanging Judge, its the first death penalty case in the state for decades; in this book, the sequel, the solicitation and possession of child pornography materials. There is a plethora of judicial thrillers on the market, but most often they are told from the perspective of the lawyer. Seeing the case from the other side of the bench is both interesting and enlightening. The case is complicated by locale. Norcross holds court in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a city of only 40 thousand people, and the alleged offense took place in Amherst, Mass., an even smaller place of approximately 38 thousand residents. The man accused is a professor of English literature at prestigious Amherst College (1795 students as of 2015) and Norcrosss fiancée, Claire, teaches in the same department with the accused and owes him a debt of gratitude for his intervention in a nasty incident when she was a new professor there. Once you step outside the mechanisms and agents of the law (Norcross, Norcrosss aides, an FBI agent, an assistant US attorney), everyone knows everyone and ones persons business quickly gets mixed up with someone elses, to the detriment of a clean prosecution of a clear case. There are a couple of unsavory characters, a second plot involving an FBI sting to capture a major sexual predator in the region and a third plot involving, well, if you want to know, read the book. Norcross isn't blessed with Holmesian (Sherlock or Oliver Wendell? Take your choice!) powers of deduction or even resolution of courtroom disputes, and none of the lawyers is a Perry Mason stand-in. The result is a savvy and very human description of what a case might actually look like, and what might happen in its prosecution, jazzed up a bit to make it savory to the reader, but nothing that strains credibility. David is a very appealing hero, and his relation to Claire is loving, respectful and adult, thoroughly delightful to read. When his high-charging older brother is critically injured in a plane crash abroad, David gets to experience at firsthand what its like to be a parent, in this case of two badly disturbed girls, one only seven and the other a teenager, with all the contradictory signals between child and adult that a situation like that signals. This too he handles well, nothing superhuman, but again, loving and attentive. I haven't read the first book in this series yet but I expect I will soon. David is a mensch.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World; Author: Visit Amazon's Scott Hartley Page; Review: Hartley is a venture capitalist who in the past has worked for Google and Facebook, been a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House and worked at Harvards Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. His goal in this interesting and generally well researched book is not to show that being educated a fuzzy (majoring in college the humanities or social sciences) is better than being educated a techie (the STEM disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math). Rather, for technology to work optimally, the two approaches, techie and fuzzy, need to be blended. That also means that in the foreseeable future, there are, and will be, jobs for fuzzies as well as techies, and not just as barristas at Starbucks or behind the counter at McDonalds. There are illuminating passages that illustrate just where and how fuzzies can fit into an increasingly technologized business environment. Thus, Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene, in an article on driverless cars and the challenges they pose to design, writes that machine decision-making is more philosophical than technical. Before we can put our values into machines, we have to figure out how to make our values clear and consistent. Shyam Sankar, director of Palantir Technologies, a $20 billion firm that designs analytics platforms for security and police work, states that human intelligence is essential to stay ahead of the curve: Terrorists are always adapting Computers don't detect novel patterns and new behaviors. Humans do. What do fuzzies bring to this world? Hartley emphasizes flexibility, breadth versus depth and the ability to bridge disciplines (especially important today), ethical orientation. He stresses too that many of the soft disciplines do in practice train students in intellectually sophisticated mathematical and statistical analysis, or, conversely, in rigorous philosophical thinking. Lastly, machines are built to serve humans, and human needs, and humankind has problems of its own which technology can help to solve (or at least abate). Here too, people need to collaborate across disciplines to address complicated, human-centric design and sales problems. Hartley roams wide in topics discussed and examples cited. If occasionally, he veers over into boosterism, he deserves to be cut slack because, over all, this is a worthwhile and eminently readable book on a topic that should be of interest to all of us.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: How to Listen to Jazz; Author: Visit Amazon's Ted Gioia Page; Review: I bought this book on pre-publication last year. I was excited to read it: Ive read others of Gioas writings on jazz and found them worthwhile. I got it. I read it. And here, a year later, Ive finally gotten around to writing how I felt about it. I didn't like it. Its not that theres nothing of worth in it Gioa brings a wealth of experience as performer as well as critic to his writing and many of the comments he makes in this book are right on the mark. He also writes well, by which I mean clearly and in flowing prose. Its not hard to read the book and if you know nothing, literally nothing, about jazz, you will probably find it helpful as well as enlightening. But Im not that guy. I bought my first jazz record sixty-seven years ago and my listening taste in jazz spans the spectrum, both chronological and stylistic (I make an exception for soft jazz, which I abominate). I expected more from this book and it didn't deliver. For me. Not for everybody, all readers. As to judgment, I agree with Gioa some of the time and some of the time not. Hes absolutely right when he recommends that the best way to crack the nut on Louis Armstrongs revolutionary and absolutely stunning recordings with his Hot Five and Hot Seven is to listen to Louiss contemporaries along with listening to him. When you do that, youll be struck by how fluid Louiss playing is, and how virtuosic his melody lines and choice of note and timbre are. You see some of it in Louiss playing with King Oliver but with his own group, he breaks loose, and its glorious. I agree too that the best way to break into Monks music is on the great late 50s ensemble(Monks Music, Brilliant Corners) and solo albums but wish he would expand on what he recommends, perhaps comment on the many brilliant homage albums that have come out since Monks death Hal Wilmers composite tribute album, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Fred Hersch, Bill Holman, Anthony Browns Asian American Orchestra, Giorgio Gaslini, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Eddie Lockjaw Davis and Johnny Griffin. Lastly, I wish he would expound more on jazz in Europe: Django Reinhardt is discussed briefly, and there are listings of single albums by Jan Garbarek, Egberto Gismonti and Enrico Rava, but thats it. Likewise, beyond Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, Gioa has little to say about the avant garde in jazz: his Recommended listening list for Postmodernism and Neoclassical jazz includes single albums by Henry Threadgill (last years Pulitzer Prize winner), the World Saxophone Quartet (but Night Train, one of its least modernist pieces), and John Zorn (his Ennio Moricone tribute, The Big Gundown). Where, at least, are Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, the Art Ensemble of Chicago? (And I haven't even got to the really out there musicians like Peter Brotzmann, Derek Bailey.) In short, I worry that this book will limit what a novice listener listens to as much as it will open; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Barthes: A Biography; Author: Tiphaine Samoyault; Review: Like the writings of its subject, the innovative critic of language and almost philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980), this book is more powerful than its failings. But its failings are legion, and at points, intensely irritating. At points in my reading of this biography, I had to stop and move back to make a second stab at deciphering the authors almost indecipherable, and indisputably over-written prose. Samouyaults biography may have been a finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt (in 2015) but French intellectuals like this type of writing, rich in neologism, puffed up and intellectualized. My notes, marked in the margins of the pages as I read, indicate my irritation with it. Early on, there is this three-sentence blockbuster: she is discussing Philippe Rogers 1991 study, Roland Barthes, towards the neuter: "This portrait of an intellectual endeavoring to abolish distinctions was destined to be a landmark. (Samouyaults prose takes off in the next two sentences.) The projective dimension of Barthess texts, their relation to the fragmentary and to note form, the love of the fleeting and the paradoxical, make this coherence compatible with contradiction, hesitation and even palinode. To base ones authority as a teacher on phantasy is to free oneself from the principle of non-contradiction: it is to draw oneself and others into a whirlpool where it is very difficult to find any foothold." If you read this fragment carefully, with reference to Barthess own writings, it makes sense. Though not a full-blown deconstructionist himself, unlike his colleague and correspondent Derrida, Barthes was known for transforming whatever text he was writing on into notecards, the texts overall meaning (plot) dissolved into a series of discontinuous note cards on particular topoi, themes and preoccupations. He would then reassemble the cards to produce a text, allowing him to analyze and comment on the original document as though it were only a set of preoccupations, of a mindset preceding and undercutting the surface (author-intended) meaning. Its part and parcel of Barthess talk about the death of the author. Author was irrelevant, habits and structures of language were not in the new age of literary criticism. But the last sentence in the fragment from Samouyaults biography, quoted above, is puffery, pure and simple, offered in place of plain and clear explication: ...to draw oneself Then, two sentences later, she writes a sentence like this, which is lucid, insightful, I would say even elegant: "While he never produced any system, any strong thought, Barthes shaped his pupils and his readers by showing the need to place different forms of knowledge in tension, to detach oneself, to develop a culture of affects, to encounter the improbable." I read Barthes -a little, not a lot- in the very late 60s-early 70s, when I was looking for a way to impose sense and order on the raw materials of my own scholarly project, a study of the hidden patterns of explanation embedded in some fifteenth-century documents. I wasn't sure what I was looking for so I read widely then,, focusing my attention as to subject, on what language does and; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Every Day Above Ground: A Van Shaw Novel (Van Shaw Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Glen Erik Hamilton Page; Review: An old con, recently released from prison and dying from a brain tumor, shows up at a house where ex-soldier (multiple tours in Afghanistan) Van Shaw is working. It was his grandfathers house. Vans rebuilding it after it burned down in a previous novel. Vans short on money. Materials for the house are costing him a fortune and two years of taxes on it are coming due in a few months. The con worked with his father years ago. Vans grandfather was a professional criminal. Van worked with him until he turned eighteen and joined the corps. Hes had a problematic relationship with crime ever since, trying to stay away from it but drawn back to it time and again. This time is no different. The old con needs him, his lock picking and safe cracking skills, to get into a safe that everyones forgotten about but that sits hidden in an abandoned building, with four million dollars in gold bars inside, past loot from a major drug dealers past enterprises. All goes well until Van finds the money. The safe is rigged. A signal is transmitted to some very bad guys and next thing Van knows, hes in a fire fight with them. Van gets away. The old con does not. Thus begins a deadly cat and mouse game that puts at risk not only Van but old colleagues and the vulnerable young daughter of the missing con and ends with a lot of people dead. This is the third novel tracing the adventures of Van Shaw. The first two 2016s Hard Cold Winter and 2915s Past Crimes --were good. This one is less so. Hamilton writes good action scenes and his lead character, the ex-soldier near-crook Van Shaw. But this installment suffers structurally. Two narratives alternate: the present-day story and one of Van at age twelve. The story of Van at age twelve may explain how he became the kind of man he is today but it interrupts the narrative flow too much. Equally flawed is the plot, which is needlessly complicated and doesnt ring true, neither the elaborate ruse employed to track down and take captive a missing bad guy from decades past nor the motive behind the ruse. I trust Hamilton to write another and better thriller next time, but for me, this one doesnt work. Two out of three isn't bad but three out of three, ah! I would have liked that even better.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Force: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Don Winslow Page; Review: In two previous novels, most notably 2015s acclaimed The Cartel, Don Winslow has taken on the Mexican drug trade. In vivid prose, he detailed the perils moral as well as tacticalfaced by the government agents entrusted with bringing down the narcotraficantes. Dirt sticks to both sides. Its hard to avoid contagion when the stakes are so high. The good guys cut corners and the bad guys bribe them with floods of money and drugs, mixed with threats. Whatever it takes to reach a compromise, thats what the bad guys do. In Winslows new novel, its the NYPDs turn. Detective sergeant Denny Malone heads a four-man team, Da Force, with an open charge to investigate crimes of violence and drug-related offenses in the Upper Manhattan District. Malone sees himself as a good guy but hes not: he takes bribes, turns a blind eye to some criminals while intimidating, even framing others, and he routinely lies on the stand when giving testimony in order to convict defendants he thinks should go down. Now his team has made a major drug bust a hundred kilos of high grade Horse. But only part of it makes it into the evidence locker. Everybody in law enforcement knows Dennys the King of Upper Manhattan District but his time is running out. The razors are out and soon hell be forced to confront unpleasant truths about himself, his loyalty to his team, his own moral value. This is a novel about a good guy who rises high but in the process loses himself and then has only one direction to go down. Winslow is a good writer and he knows his stuff, so its gripping. The obvious comparison, other than with Winslows previous books, is with Mario Puzos The Godfather but the world Winslow describes is so vicious that it makes the world of the Corleones look old-fashioned.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Child: The must-read Richard and Judy Book Club pick 2018; Author: Visit Amazon's Fiona Barton Page; Review: The body of a long dead infant is found on a construction site. Who is she and how did she get there? A reporter, Kate Waters, starts digging and soon three women, inter-related though they don't know that yet, are involved. The narrative moves from one to another party as the investigation proceeds. Bartons previous novel, The Widow, which also featured Kate Waters, was a critical success. I suspect this one will be also. It should especially appeal to readers who enjoyed Gone Girl. Its not my style though: it feels needlessly protracted theres too much filler proseand under suspenseful to me. Also, the plot seems unrealistically complicated. I know its done to build suspense, but still .; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country: and Other Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Chavisa Woods Page; Review: Believe me, Chavisa Woods is the Real Thing. You won't find much of what she writes comforting. Its raw and jagged weird is one of her favorite adjectives. But its honest and strong and imaginatively conceived, and she writes like an angel, from small touches (characterizations, descriptions.) through plot line (again, imaginative to the nth degree). The very first story captures it. The title is deliberately flip: How to Stop Smoking in Nineteen Thousand Two Hundred and Eighty-Seven Seconds, Usama. A young woman, fled from the Midwest years to New York City (where difference can better be tolerated) returns home to spend time with her three (half-)brothers, all of whom are natural born losers gullible, ignorant and criminal. This far into the story its realism a la Flannery OConnor style, but minus the religious fervor. (No one in this story seems bothered by religion at all. For that, move on to later stories in the collection where religion --Pentecostal and Baptist-- is quite a big deal.) Shes talking with her near-siblings when the tone and plot narrative shift: its more like George Saunders land now, or maybe David Wong (John Dies at the End, 2012, and others): not realism any more but the utterly fantastic, whimsical, but narrated as though still real. Her sibs have seen gaseous green globes floating in the woods outside their trailer. Bizarro! But the globes come back while Sis is in the trailer and it freaks her out. She leaves. Heads for a local pub (Chubbys Bar, Serving Spirits for More than Forty Years) where she meets a high school friend from years before. Strange revelations, for instance, that her friend, who appears normal and content, had electro-shock therapy a few years back. But hey, its okay now, shes got a steady man friend and a good job . The New York chick starts choking, cant breathe, too much smoking? Downs a house special, a Hot Cherry Bomb, whiskey and cayenne pepper, to open up her pipes again and winds up outside hacking her guts out. Something truly bizarre then happens, followed by something even more bizarre, and it all ends in an utterly unreal moment. Its hard to describe what happens in this story but it works: it all fits together, and the story, especially an eleven-year-old and a twelve-year-old meet a hideaway, a zombie, in a cemetery and end up catering to her needs. Along the way, they get a hint of how scary being adult can be. Take the Way is about what its like living with a crazy woman: where does intriguing veer off into schizophrenia and how do you deal with mood swings that don't depend on your own behavior at all? In A New Mohawk, a trans-gender boi (not boy) wakes up with the Gaza Strip conflict being enacted on his head actually the conflict, but with miniature live figures. Whatever happens in real life happens there too: dead figures fall off his head with alarming regularity. As to the provenance of these powerful stories, think Jeanette Winterson perhaps or George; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Biografiktion; Author: Visit Amazon's Ana Albero Page; Review: This amazing work isn't a graphic novel. Its something else, and a very good something else. It doesnt tell a coherent story for its entire length although there are narrative chapters. But equally there are stretches of loosely connected art work that hints at story but doesnt lock story down: they're more of free-flowing fantasies, an excuse for the illustrators to let their pens roam. The most developed narrative sequences deal with Eddie Murphy and ABBA. They are sly digs at pop celebrity, the fans fascination with their idols, and the mundane reality of what idols are actually like. There are shorter narratives on food, which meld the acts of making food, eating it and alien monsters. I know! I wrote that, alien monsters. Thats what this book is. its a whimsy, as much a work of art as of comics, and I love it! In norms of artistic sensibility, think of a merger of clip art and perhaps a touch of Matisses late period cut paper work with the blunt, cutdown figures of South Park. This imaginative, visually attractive book deserves an audience.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Ballad of Black Tom; Author: Visit Amazon's Victor LaValle Page; Review: LaValles The Ballad of Black Tom is a short novel about a black trickster in 1920s Harlem. He cant play guitar worth a hill of beans and his voice is godawful but playing and singing and on a street corner or near the rapid transit stop is something even a black can do in the City without bringing down the cops down on him, and he needs the money. A white dude pays him to come to his house in the suburbs and play. The dude is weird. He doesnt care that Tom is faking it with his playing. Thats what he wants, to fill his house with different kinds of fakers, tricksters, so he can draw on their auras and raise ---what? Something from outside our dimension. Bad things follow weird and in the end Tom gets vengeance of a sort, and at a cost, against some crooked white guys who had killed his father. The storys okay definitely creepy enough- and La Valle is a good writer and I very much liked his earlier novel, The Devil in Silver (2012), but the joints creak audibly in this outing.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Night Ocean; Author: Visit Amazon's Paul La Farge Page; Review: Paul LaFarges The Night Ocean is something else, a first-rate work of fiction, more about detection than horror, and revolving around an incident a periodin Lovecrafts life and the ferreting out of what really happened then three decades later. A psychiatrists husband, an investigative reporter, has disappeared and is presumed dead. This is 2012. He had been investigating a period in Lovecrafts life, back in 1934, when the reclusive writer, forty=-four at the time, left his familiar haunts in Massachusetts and moved to Florida to live for two months with a sixteen-year-old fan named Robert Barlow. Three years later, Lovecraft died. Later yet, Barlow became a noted anthropologist, teaching and working in Mexico. And a man named L. C. Spinks put up for sale a book called the Erotonomicon, which purported to be Lovecrafts journal and filled in all the blanks on his sex life and how he sublimated the terms for it into Chulthu talk. From there, it gets complicated and telling what happens would spoil the book, which is about truth and fiction, how people hide themselves from others, and, around the edges, the weird appeal of Lovecrafts fiction. LaFarges previous works, says the article in Wikipedia, are gently experimental. Hes an interesting writer, and this is a major book, a case of trickster fiction at its best.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Neonomicon; Author: Visit Amazon's Alan Moore Page; Review: Neonomicon is a graphic novel. I don't read many graphic novels I make up my own pictures in my mind to match the words in non-graphic fiction. But I loved comic books when I was a kid and I am aware and appreciative of what a well crafted graphic novel can do. Like this one., Which is excellent. Its exceedingly well scripted. (Plot and dialogue in a graphic novel are constrained constricted may be better- by the limit on pages and the large amount of space taken up in the pictures.) The illustrations are superb, realistic, heavy on line but not ignoring shading and contour, and the coloring, dark but bursting into explosions of color in the more psychedelic interludes, is equally effective. Moore wrote story and dialogue, Burrows illustrated, someone named Juanmar colored the drawings. They all deserve praise. The story is a modernization of Lovecrafts Chulthu mythos. An FBI agent is staking out a neighborhood where a series of brutal ghastly murders have taken place. The killer had no history of violence and only speaks now in a jumble of alien words. Hes hopelessly psychotic. But there are two other recent mass murders and in both cases, killers with same past record no history of violenceand the same present behavior. There is no apparent connection among the three. The FBI agent is an expert in anomaly theory. He looks for anomalies and tries to fit them into patterns. The only connection seems to be a mysterious drug called aklo and a possible dealer, a man named Johnny Carcosa who hangs out at the Club Zothique. The band there is the Ulthar Cats. Theyre beyond punk or Goth, singing songs that starts in freeform descriptions of violence and swerve part way through a (very long) song into a string of alien names which we know (because weve read Lovecraft) but the agent doesnt are names of entities in the Chulthu myth. No one knows how old Johnny is and he wears a veil over the front of his face, covering it from the bridge of his nose down. The agent digs deeper, finds that a similar string of killings and mutilations occurred in the same place in the 1920s. (Think Lovecrafts time.) He makes contact with Johnny Carcosa and arranges to buy some aklo. Soon, the agent is locked in a cell. Hes killed several people and he too speaks an alien tongue. A new team of agents is sent in to investigate, man and woman, and the story accelerates in tempo and in horror. It ends in an explosion of color and horrific images, with a dire fate in store for all of us. Its a good recreation of Lovecrafts twisted world, with one addition. The sexuality that is hinted at but never allowed to enter Lovecrafts asexual tales is explicit, in text and drawings, in this disturbing story. It works and its not intruded gratuitously but if you're squeamish about such things, you may want to take a pass on this book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Garden of Small Beginnings; Author: Visit Amazon's Abbi Waxman Page; Review: This may be the perfect Beach Book for this summers vacation, if, like me, you like a lively narrative, engaging characters, and an ending where if all doesnt go well, at least most of it does. First-time novelist Waxman has taken a situation that could have been a downer (husband dies unexpectedly, three years on, the wife still cant get out of the rut of resignation to the loss) and turning it, in stages, into an upbeat tale of life and romance begun again. In fact, there isn't just one romance. There are three, or four, if you count the grouchy older guy who turns out to have the perfect second wife to humanize him and make likable. The character, well defined and mostly quirky, are well in the range of the believable, although its something that such a motley group could come together. The vehicle for their bonding is a class, six weeks learning how to plant and rear an outdoor garden. The protagonist and narrator, Lili, is an illustrator. She works for a textbook company and illustrates little tales and big books for second graders and the like. The firm takes on the task of illustrating the packets and instruction brochures for a family-owned seed company: they're illustrating all of the packets, and not with computer generated pictures but rather, free hand. And Lilis been assigned the job. Not only that, her boss has signed her up for a six-week course in gardening. It meets every Saturday for three hours every Saturday, and is taught by the Ph. D. (in gardening? botany? biology?) son of the seed company family. Lili goes, her spinster sister Rach goes, her two girls, ages seven and ten go too. And there Lili meets a bunch of really interesting people shed never have met in her predictable and increasingly contained life. Including a hunk the Ph. D. bio-type teacher. Lili tries to fight it, but the sparks between them are apparent from the start. By the end of the book, Lilis life is starting to change. So is Rachels. If this book weren't so wittily written, it would be saccharine, but lifted by humor, and a lack of self-importance, its not. Its good. Especially good are Lilis descriptions, e.g., her house, which she describes off-handedly as decorated in early childhood instruction. Now thats cool.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Coach Wooden and Me: Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court; Author: Visit Amazon's Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Page; Review: A basketball Hall of Famer, John Wooden (1901-2010) may be the greatest coach in modern history, not just of basketball but of any sport. Its not just the ten national titles his UCLA teams won, seven of them consecutive (it helps to have Abdul-Jabbar as center, followed by Bill Walton), the seventeen collegiate All-Americans and twenty-four future NBA players he sent on to the NBA. Its the man his decency, how honorable he was, how humble he was, how determined he was that he and his boys should become the best they could be. He started his first meeting with high-school-age Lew Alcindor, who had committed to attend UCLA on a basketball scholarship, by telling him (and his parents) how pleased he was to see that Alcindor was earning good grades in high school. Athletic prowess only lasted a while. A good education helped you all through your life. At the first meeting of the UCLA freshman team, before it even took the court to practice, he drilled the boys on how to put on socks: learn how to put them on right and you avoided blisters, blisters that might sideline you late in the game when your team needed you playing. Failure to prepare is preparing to fail was one of his homilies. He always stressed physical conditioning: his players weren't going to wear out over the course of a long, arduous contest. But the most admirable thing he did at that first practice was to list the priorities he wanted his players to remember. Basketball was fifth down the list, after family, the religion of your choice, their studies, representing the university honorably, and then, last if we have some time left over, well play some basketball. How can you not admire someone like that? Now his greatest coaching success, NBA great Abdul-Jabbar, has written this brief memoir about their time together, on court and off, and it is, no surprise, a love letter to a man who was in many ways not at all like him but inside was very much like him. Wooden was white, mid-Western conservative, devoutly Christian, a staunch patriot. Kareem as African-American, New York born and bred, an early convert to Islam days, much more conflicted in his views about our country, a Black activist unwilling to follow its leaders blindly wherever they tried to point him. This section of the book, where Kareem writes about the troubling issue of race and how his coach and he reached, if not rapport on it, then understanding and mutual respect, is worth the price of the book alone. This is the kind of book that could have topped off as a feel-good book and nothing more. The prose is simple, there are lots of warm fuzzies, and Wooden is a natural for the All-American hero. But its not just a feeling good book and thats because Abdul-Jabbar is intelligent and thoughtful. The prose is simple because he wants to communicate and because he honors the way his coach and mentor and friend- communicated with him. Ive long; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Every Night I Dream of Hell; Author: Visit Amazon's Malcolm Mackay Page; Review: Crime novels aren't about a pretty world. The world that criminals live in, cops too, is gray and slimy. Even the guy you root for in one of these stories is tainted, if not wholly corrupt. This is the fifth in Scottish author Mackays chronicle of low living in Glasgow. The fourth was The Night the Rich Men Burned. Theyve all been good no, exceptional! and this one is no exception. Fictional crime doesnt come any better than in these hard, terse tales of wrongdoing. The protagonist of this episode is Nate Colgan. Hes a hard guy but not a killer. Fists, boots and his scary six foot three presence are his weapons of choice, not guns. But with Glasgow in chaos following the arrest and imprisonment of Peter Jamieson, one of the two crime czars of Glasgow, Colgan is called upon to step up as security consultant to Kevin Currie and Marty Jones, two of Jamiesons top subordinates. Colgans freelanced up till now but now he has to declare his allegiance. The problem is uncertainty. With Jamieson out of the picture, at least temporarily, the rats are gathering, ready to nibble away at the edges of his Glasgow empire of drugs, protection racketeering, prostitution, gambling and loansharking. Suddenly, theres a murder. Who did it, and why? Is it somebody outside trying to worm his way in, or somebody inside trying to consolidate his position as Jamiesons number two to the disadvantage of his peers? There are candidates for both. Soon, everyone is looking askance at everyone else. Something needs to be done soon and Colgans the one called upon to resolve it. (I love the way they asked Colgan to take his position at the start; People are terrified of you, Kevin told him. You know how valuable that is.) Theres a complication, man to woman. Its not romance. Colgan may be attracted to the woman, who is the mother of his only child (though now shes prevented from any contact with her) but Colgan is the ultimate loner. His occupation is too dangerous to put people he cares for her at risk and hes temperamentally reluctant to open himself to anyone, much less a woman with a history of deceit like this one. This isn't the type of novel where someone wins at the end, though Colgans side is on top at the end, and its not a novel about happy feelings. Its about crime and criminals, whose lives, if not selves, are gray and slimy, just as I wrote at the beginning of this review. Mackay is the real thing, and this novel, like its predecessors in the series, is as good as it gets in crime fiction.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Old Man's War; Author: Visit Amazon's John Scalzi Page; Review: SCALZI, John. Old Mans War series: Old Mans War (2005). The Ghost Brigades (2006). The Last Colony (2007). Zoes Tale (2008). The Human Division (2013). The End of All Things (2015). Stand-alone novels: Fuzzy Nation (2011). Redshirts (2012). The Collapsing Empire (2017). John Scalzi is a highly respected writer of hard science fiction novels, by which I basically mean space operas with science. Id never read him before but I got ahold of the first novel in his Old Mans War series (aptly titled Old Mans War, 2005) and liked it so I decided to read the whole series. The premise of the series is that interstellar wars are fought by repurposed old people from Earth: reach the age of seventy-five and you can enlist as a soldier in the CDF (Colonial Defense Forces); you receive a new, drastically upgrade body with nanobot-filled artificial blood, genetically enhanced skeleton, musculature, organs and (green) skin, and you're telepathically connected to your fellow soldiers through a BrainPal inserted in your brain. Serve ten years and you're placed in a new, normal-human cloned body and allowed to become a colonist in one of Earths numerous new colonies. The series follows the footsteps of two respected novels about war in the interstellar future, Robert A. Heinleins Starship Warriors (1959) and Joe Haldemans The Forever War (1974). The first novel (Old Mans War) is good: its filled with action and gives you a lot to think about. The second (The Ghost Brigades, 2006) is ridiculously convoluted with weak science as the hero thwarts a revenge plot to wipe out mankind. The third, The Last Colony (2007) brings back the heroes of the first: the plot creaks. Zoes Tale (2008) retells parts of the story from the previous two books but from the viewpoint of a fifteen-year-old girl. Aside from a fair amount of recycled content, the novel suffers from tone: Zoes voice is much too cutesy at times and doesnt sound at all like a smart fifteen-year-old girl sounds. BY the time I got to the last two novels in the series, The Human Division and The End of All Things (2013 and 2015), my interest in following the series had waned significantly. Along the way, I had also picked up three stand-alone novels by Scalzi. The first, Fuzzy Nation (2011), is a reconceiving of H. Beam Pipers 1962 Little Fuzzy: what do you do when you discover the cute little animals on the planet your employer is looting aren't just animals, they're sentient beings with wills of their own? Too cute. 2012s Redshirts was the best of the lot, a funny reworking of the clichés of televised space opera, along the lines of a bad Star Trek (or good Captain Video) show. It was clever, tricky, fun, and in this context, the late teen-aged mindset of the antagonists and the sophomoric joshing back and forth that characterizes all Scalzis books was appropriate. The Collapsing Empire (2017) is a followup much later in history of the world, politics and devices of the earlier Old Mans War novels. It; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency); Author: Visit Amazon's John Scalzi Page; Review: SCALZI, John. Old Mans War series: Old Mans War (2005). The Ghost Brigades (2006). The Last Colony (2007). Zoes Tale (2008). The Human Division (2013). The End of All Things (2015). Stand-alone novels: Fuzzy Nation (2011). Redshirts (2012). The Collapsing Empire (2017). John Scalzi is a highly respected writer of hard science fiction novels, by which I basically mean space operas with science. Id never read him before but I got ahold of the first novel in his Old Mans War series (aptly titled Old Mans War, 2005) and liked it so I decided to read the whole series. The premise of the series is that interstellar wars are fought by repurposed old people from Earth: reach the age of seventy-five and you can enlist as a soldier in the CDF (Colonial Defense Forces); you receive a new, drastically upgrade body with nanobot-filled artificial blood, genetically enhanced skeleton, musculature, organs and (green) skin, and you're telepathically connected to your fellow soldiers through a BrainPal inserted in your brain. Serve ten years and you're placed in a new, normal-human cloned body and allowed to become a colonist in one of Earths numerous new colonies. The series follows the footsteps of two respected novels about war in the interstellar future, Robert A. Heinleins Starship Warriors (1959) and Joe Haldemans The Forever War (1974). The first novel (Old Mans War) is good: its filled with action and gives you a lot to think about. The second (The Ghost Brigades, 2006) is ridiculously convoluted with weak science as the hero thwarts a revenge plot to wipe out mankind. The third, The Last Colony (2007) brings back the heroes of the first: the plot creaks. Zoes Tale (2008) retells parts of the story from the previous two books but from the viewpoint of a fifteen-year-old girl. Aside from a fair amount of recycled content, the novel suffers from tone: Zoes voice is much too cutesy at times and doesnt sound at all like a smart fifteen-year-old girl sounds. BY the time I got to the last two novels in the series, The Human Division and The End of All Things (2013 and 2015), my interest in following the series had waned significantly. Along the way, I had also picked up three stand-alone novels by Scalzi. The first, Fuzzy Nation (2011), is a reconceiving of H. Beam Pipers 1962 Little Fuzzy: what do you do when you discover the cute little animals on the planet your employer is looting aren't just animals, they're sentient beings with wills of their own? Too cute. 2012s Redshirts was the best of the lot, a funny reworking of the clichés of televised space opera, along the lines of a bad Star Trek (or good Captain Video) show. It was clever, tricky, fun, and in this context, the late teen-aged mindset of the antagonists and the sophomoric joshing back and forth that characterizes all Scalzis books was appropriate. The Collapsing Empire (2017) is a followup much later in history of the world, politics and devices of the earlier Old Mans War novels. It; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship; Author: Visit Amazon's Philip Pullman Page; Review: This is Philip Pullmans first graphic novel, ably illustrated by Fred Fordham. Its like a Tin Tin mystery, updated to the twenty-first century and minus the heavy dose of humor that Herge added to his mix. The good ship Mary Alice sails across time and the oceans, appearing in various ages and places, its crew made up of the castaways it has rescued a fisherman from the Devon coast rescued from Barbary Coast pirates in the seventeenth century, a second-century Roman legionnaire, a deckhand from the H.M.S. Bellerophon, rescued when he fell overboard in 1790, and . and John Blake, disappeared while his scientist father was testing the correctness of Einsteinian physics by measuring a solar eclipse in 1919. The Mary Alice roams the oceans and ages as a ghost ship, never knowing its next destination or what year it will be. It arrives in the present, 2017, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just in time for John to rescue a young girl, Serena, swept overboard in a flash storm. But the present is a dangerous place for the ship, and particularly for John, who is being hunted by Carlos Dahlberg, head of the giant Dahlberg Corporation. Youll find out why Dahlberg wants John if you read the book and youll find out how John, Serena, the crew of the Mary Alice, and a few friends thwart him and save the world, all in 156 pages with one to ten frames a page. The illustrating is handsome, the text crisp, and Im sure well see John around another time.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Line Made by Walking; Author: Visit Amazon's Sara Baume Page; Review: This is the second novel by Irish author Sara Baume. Her first, 2015s Spill Simmer Falter Wither, was short listed for the Costa First Novel Award and she has received other awards for her short fiction. I haven't read her first book but this book is extraordinary. I use that word advisedly: this book is extra-ordinary, out of and above the ordinary. And beautiful. A twenty-ish artist, Frankie, isn't making it. Shes retreated to the running-down house left vacant since her grandmother died three years before and there she pursues her current project, taking photographs of dead animals. Its performance art in a way, or found art. The rules of her project are strict: only one of each species and the animal must already be dead, she must not have helped it die. The chapters of the book there are tenare named in order after the animals she captures on film: robin, rabbit, rat, mouse, rook, fox, frog, hare, hedgehog and badger. Her preoccupation sounds morbid but it doesnt come across that way. Its more of a memorializing, capturing the pathos and the beauty in their mangled bodies. Frankies mother visits her from time to time: shes worried about Frankie and you don't have to be a mental health professional to see that Frankie is profoundly depressed and more than a little obsessional. But its never clear in this book whether shes truly loony or just, in some deep, maybe ineradicable way, out of sync with the world she sees around her. Thats it. Thats the novel. No plot, just situation, mood, Frankies monologue as she moves from day to day. Shes a keen observer, with attentive eyes to the flutters and twinges of the outer world, and she has the habit very effective in this novelof calling up in her memory works of art that seem to reflect or offer perspectives on her own experience. Some are paintings. More are performance art or instances of found art. Heres one: an artist builds a house of rooms and inside the rooms builds smaller rooms, and smaller and smaller, and when its done, people find it so amazing that they have the house torn down and reassembled in their own galleries far, far away. Although Frankie has a self, an identity, for much of this novel Frankie is principally a pair of eyes, cataloguing what she sees around her with little comment. Just eyes. An artists eyes. Keenly observing. I meant what I said when I wrote that this isn't a novel of plot. Frankie experiences no real inner development and there aren't the twists and turns of a plot-driven novel that lead to epiphany or denouement. As far as action goes, the novel is flat. But its amazing. Moving. Revelatory. And magical.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Separatists (A Newsmakers Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Lis Wiehl Page; Review: This is Fox News legal commentator Lis Wiehls fourteenth novel and her third Newsmaker novel. Interestingly, all of her thrillers shes authored four series, a total of thirteen novelshave been written in collaboration with a co-author, which may reflect something about how they are put together. I suspect, but am only guessing, that the collaborators meet to discuss plot, then the co-author writes a draft and Wiehl or them both revise it. Collaboration can work well but series like these that are run off quickly can turn into cookie cutter operations, and that surely is the case with The Separatists. There is a surface fervor to it and the action comes fast and furious but beneath it, as the clichés of thriller fiction are pumped out, one after the other, the whole enterprise creaks at the joints. Its just not a good thriller. A charismatic woman, married to a weak husband (dont worry, hes gone part way through the novel, one of many who die along the way), bulldozes through a secessionist movement in North Dakota (a state that is so rich in oil it doesnt to sup at the federal trough). A brave television investigative reporter, whose evening show is number one in the nation, ferrets out her machinations and against high odds and after many sidetrackings, saves the nation. Cardboard characters, needless complications, melodramatic prose and a creaky plot this book has it all. Nothing in it comes across as true and real, and aside from a certain surface tension, it isn't all that exciting to read.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Clockwork Dynasty: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Daniel H. Wilson Page; Review: Wilson holds a B.S. in computer science and a Ph. D. in robotics and since 2005 has written a slew of books, mostly about robots but also about technology in general. This is his fifth novel. His second novel, Robopocalypse (2011) was a runaway bestseller and deserved to be. Its sci fi, not Proust, but Wilsons prose is clean and lean fiction; the characters, though not deep, are believable and you care about his protagonists; there are complicated plots with lots of action so your attention never wanes; and his endings aren't usually as tidily resolved as in more conventional sci fi fiction. He gives you things to think about. If I were compare him to anyone else in the field it would be Cory Doctorow (his 21009 Makers can be downloaded free from Creative Commons BY-NC-SA) or Neil Stephenson (1999 Locus SF Award winner Cryptonomicon; 2015 Hugo Award winner Seveneves) though Wilsons books don't approach the massiveness of Stephensons huge tomes. In this book, its not robots per se but automata, millennia-old manufactured creatures made in the form of humans who live hidden in the nooks and crannies of human society. They live, well, not forever, but a long, long time. The ones we meet in this story have been around since long before third millennium BC China, where a crucial bit of the story takes place and is remembered five thousand years later by Peter as he tried to sort out his past and his loyalties. For the most part, the story flips back and forth between the present day and three centuries to a century past. The present narrative is told through the perspective of a young anthropologist, June Stefanov. Her specialization is mechanical creatures, automata, and she works for a shadowy foundation that is hunting out these creatures. She is placed in danger when she learns too much about the creatures she is hunting and is saved by one them, Peter, an outsized man-thing who may or may not be the angel of vengeance her grandfather saw terrorize German invaders at Stalingrad in 1942. They are pursued all around the world by other automata and their hired thugs as Peter tried to find his missing sister Elena and find a way to thwart the evil Worm Mother Leizu. The past narrative alternates with the present one and starts in 1710. It is narrated by the automaton Peter and explains how Elena and he got from then to now. A great deal happens around all this. Youll have to read the novel to find out what and why, but it works, it really does. The novel as a whole has the feel of a much modernized and made leaner H. Rider Haggard novel, maybe She for a modern generation. (Leizu isn't a bad analogue for that novels Ayesha. The plots are different but both characters are supernally powerful, monomaniacal, and utterly indifferent to the lesser and mortal worms who move through the world day to day blissfully unaware of the evil that lurks behind a veil.); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Weight of Ink; Author: Visit Amazon's Rachel Kadish Page; Review: This is a beautiful novel, elegantly written and filled with humanity. It starts slowly but keep reading. Soon, you will not want to put it down. Like A. S. Byatts Possession, which is referenced on the book jacket, it tells two tales concurrently. The one, set in the present, follows Helen Watt, a woman academic expert on the marrano culture of late seventeenth century London, after Jews had been allowed back into the country for the first time since their expulsion by royal edict in 1290. (Yes, Shakespeare had probably never met a real Jew when he wrote Merchant.) She is invited by a former student to examine a trove of documents, very old and seemingly Jewish, found in a covered over closet in his house, which dates back to the seventeenth century. Sensing a find and under time pressure from the houses owners, she enlists Aaron Levy, a brash American graduate student whose dissertation is in a stall (hes looking for Jewish contacts with Shakespeare) to assist her in sifting through the fragile documents and to translate as many as possible as fast as possible. Shes made a rare find, a late seventeenth-century genizah (cache) filled with priceless shemot (etymology: names, documents with the Makers name in them which have been saved for ritual burial). The rest of this portion follows their fight to make something of the documents and publish something astounding in a proper historical journal before a rival team of researchers takes it all away from them. The woman is retiring soon and suffers from Parkinsons Disease badly. She feels she hasn't been given her due in the male-dominated cloisters of British academe and shes given up her personal life to get where she is. One of the high pleasures of this portion of the narrative is to watch the slow blooming rapprochement, if not friendship, growing between elderly, stiff upper lip woman scholar and young, blustery, too often flippant but inside radically insecure American scholar. Love not sexual love but love between friends and associatescan unfold of its own accord if theres inner respect between people working on a common task. The second tale is of Ester Velazquez. Shes Portuguese by descent, an orphan, emigrated from Amsterdam in 1657, and now lives with a saintly rabbi in semi-poverty London. Hes blind. He needs someone to read to him so he has indulged her unwomanly thirst to learn languages. In truth, shes one of the two best, only true students hes had. The other was Spinoza, expelled by the Amsterdam Jews from the community for heresy. Esters tale is the tale of any intellectually curious, questing woman living in an age and culture with no room for women to be scholars. There is a commonalty here with Eva Figess The Tree of Knowledge (1990), a fictional life of Miltons daughter Deborah, educated in languages to read to her blind father but having no place or life outside of that. But Ester is fiercer and more inventive than Deborah Milton. This story is about her struggle to find a; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Room of White Fire; Author: Visit Amazon's T. Jefferson Parker Page; Review: I thought Id read virtually all of Parkers riveting crime thrillers but when I checked on Wikipedia, I found I was wrong. Ive read a number of them but this is his twenty-third novel, all crime fiction. Hes written a number of stand-alones but I hope this is the first in a new series of procedurals because its an awfully good one and hes an awfully good writer. Parker has always been good at capturing the dark undertones of West Coast violence and this novel is no exception. Ex-vet, ex-cop (he didn't last at that job long; he refused to cover for his partners over-hasty shooting of an innocent), now PI Roland Ford is hired to find a patient who has gone AWOL from the mental institution where hes been incarcerated for quite a while. The missing man is Clay Hickman, an Air Force veteran. Ford quickly realizes that something else is going on behind the scenes. Hes being paid above his usual rate and three people the patients physician, the institutions director and the very wealthy psychologist who founded and still owns the institutionall insist that when Ford finds Clay, he return him directly to the person asking him and not just to the hospital. Clay keeps popping up just beyond reach and hes talking about bringing White Fire down on the people who put him away. It turns out that he worked for the rich man and the hospital director when he was in the service: they operated a clandestine interrogation operation where something, itss not clear what, terrible happened. Whatever, it snapped a ling in Clays head and ever since hes been dogged by guilt and dark memories. Eventually, Ford has to take a side to help unravel a dark conspiracy that has connections all the sway to the highest levels of government. A lot of scary stuff happens en passage in this very good action fiction which is another winner for one of our very best crime fiction writers.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Hidden Light of Northern Fires: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Daren Wang Page; Review: Wang isn't new to the book world. Hes executive director of the AJC Decatur Book Festival, the largest independent book festival in the country. But this is his first published book on his own. Its a good one, building in power as it continues, with a bitter sweet ending that, after all the bloodshed and loss, still holds promise for the future. At the center of it, and still there at the end, is a young woman, Mary Willis. In 1859, Shes just out of college, Alfred University, returning home to Town Line, NY, with a copy of Uncle Toms Cabin and a bundle of anti-slavery booklets in her luggage. Shes ready to make a difference for the abolitionist cause but theres nothing for her to do back on her fathers farm. She finds a cause in the underground railroad. In 1861, she rescues a runaway, Joe. Theres a complicates story around his arrival. His master had allowed him to earn money on his own. Worried by the attention the masters son was showing his sister Alaura, he saved it to buy his sisters freedom. When he came home one day, the son had taken it. There was a fight. Joe knocked the son down and had to flee. Now there was a price on his head and a vengeful man pursuing him. Now too, a war is starting. The rest of the book is about the cost of that war, and of the shameful blight of slavery that lay behind it, to the people living in Town Line. For most of them, it ends in loss. For a few, a new start in life. Why Town Line? Because Town Line has an interesting history. In 1861, the hamlet of Town Line voted to secede from the Union, the only Northern town to turn rebel in the war. The townspeople only rescinded that vote in 1946. Wang has taken that historical tidbit and woven it into his story of conflicted loyalties and aspirations in a trying time. The story is bracketed by two other historical events. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln passes the town on a train en route to Washington and his inauguration as president. Mary, her friend Charlie and the fugitive slave Joe stand in the Williss grain field and wave at the presidents train as it passes by. Lincoln notices them and waves back. In 1865, things finally look like they might be going right for Mary and Joe, and they receive word of the presidents assassination. Its a sign of how divided American loyalties were in that troubled age, but also a harbinger of things yet to happen locally. This novel has a great deal to offer: a strong, definitely appealing heroine; strong male and female characters both good and bad; the propelling force of history in a time of rapid, chaotic turmoil. There are bounty hunters, a Confederate spymaster, a riot in Buffalo and a plot to take back the city and march on New York to force the Unions hand. The book is elegantly written and carefully; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: In the Valley of the Sun: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Andy Davidson Page; Review: You won't have to read very far into this scary tale to realize its another vampire novel, but one updated to match our modern times and fears. It reads like Stephen Kings Salems Lot visited on Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian, which is to say its creepy, terrifying at moments, and never at any point cliché-ridden. Its an original, and a darned good one too. A man, fortyish, ex-military, never had a break, picks up a woman in a West Texas bar. He takes her back to his camper for a night of fun and wakes up in the ends up in a rundown RV-camp, run by the widow of a soldier. The RV camp was her husbands dream: it died along with him but shes still living. She provides for her young son and herself by running an end-of-the-string restaurant for local ranchers and farm workers. She lets the drifter stay in her camp in return for him doing chores for her. From then on, its a struggle: the mans new hungers, as he wakes up to the nature of the monster he has become, against his desire to protect and the young mother and younger child, who represent the decent life he never had. All along, hes haunted by the specter of the woman-haunt. Shes a succubus. She needs him to eat other people in order for her to feast on him. Theres one scene in the middle of the novel that is horrifying: a sheriff follows the trail of dead bodies, all women, across Texas and ends up examining the body of the last victim, whose body is so mauled there is no hope she still lives, and then she crawls off the bed and starts walking toward the nearest live bodies, seeking the nourishment she needs to keep alive. (I guess alive isn't the right word for it. Moving?) It is so creepy! Its difficult to do something new with a genre as old and content-bound as the vampire novel but Davidson has done it, not by breaking the old tropes but by a change in sensibility. Again, think Cormac McCarthy, and especially Blood Meridian. This book isn't the unqualified masterpiece McCormacs book is, but it has some of the same energy and effect, which is saying a lot.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dangerous Ends: (Pete Fernandez Book 3); Author: Visit Amazon's Alex Segura Page; Review: This is the third novel featuring Pete Fernandez, former newspaper reporter, now PI, and his partner, freelance writer Kathy Bentley. The setting is Miami, and even when the action moves out of Miami briefly, which it does two times, its Miami that fills the screen and determines what happens next. Miami is a dangerous place to live if you're caught up in the decades long death-at-its-end war being fought there between pro- and anti-Castro forces. Pete simply wants out. Kathy and he have lived through their horrors in previous novels. For now, it may be boring but hes happy just taking photographing of cheating husband and tracing cons whove skipped bail. In his off hours, he heads to the nearest AA meeting. Thats an adjustment too. Kathy comes to him with a new client: the daughter of a former police officer serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife. All his appeals have failed. His daughter wants to hire them for a fresh look at the evidence. Neither Pete nor Kathy has much hope of finding anything new but it opens the doors for Kathy to write a new true crime story, the story of fallen cop Gaspar Varela, who killed his wife for who knows what reason and got caught at it. The case quickly turns dirty. Kathy is threatened. Bad things happen right and left and soon Pete and Kathy are in hiding, pursued by a vicious gang of pro-Castro thugs and drug dealers called Los Enfermos. Theyve put out a fatwa on Pete, but why? The answers go back two generations, and into Petes family as well as Varellas. The resolution is bloody: Pete and Kathy are safe for now but you don't feel they will be for long. One parts of this novel is clunky. Segura relates the generations-long back story in chapters laced throughout the narrative. It gets the information across but interrupts the present narrative, which otherwise charges ahead, action foiled. Still, this is a good crime novel, which, with that exception, keeps the tension high.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: LoveMurder: A Novel (Valerie Hart); Author: Visit Amazon's Saul Black Page; Review: LoveMurder is a dark, jolting crime thriller that works even as you look at its premises and say, This is too much. Theres a pair of serial murderers, man and woman, lovers. They get their jollies out of kidnapping, raping, torturing and eventually killing helpless young women. They videotape the whole process. Hey, when you're having fun, let the whole world share the pleasure! The sixth time, they get caught, or rather, one of them, the woman, Katherine Glass, is caught. She goes to prison, life sentence. The man, referred to by everyone as only The Man in the Mask, gets away. It turns out hes lied about everything, even to his partner in crime and sex. They don't have a clue who he really is. Six years later, theres a copycat murder. Valerie Hart, the detective who caught Katherine, receives a message, in code of course, from the killer. There will be more killings, he promises. Soon, it is clear that the new killings are related to the old. Katherines partner, the Man in the Mask, is back, and only Katherine has a chance at deciphering the esoteric messages he leaves the detectives. What follows is a cat and mouse game between a dedicated detective and a smarter than blazes and elusive killer, with the killers old partner, Kathrine, sitting in the middle, maybe helping Val and maybe not. The action is fast, the dialogue brisk and gripping, Vals and Katherines characters as well as those of the other players in the story are reasonably well developed. The exchanges between detective and lady killer, Valerie and Katherine, are more than disturbing, they're chilling: Katherine, smart and super intuitive, knows exactly how to dig her hooks into Val. She wants to persuade her adversary hat theres no essential difference between them. We see the world the same way, she says. Do we? says Val. Youre Police. You see that theres no natural justice in the universe. The evil do not get punished nor the virtuous rewarded. Were both looking at the same blank canvas. Its just what we paint on it thats different. Val is a wholly admirable character: she resists Katherines enticements and as much as is possible when dealing with a sociopathic narcissist, keeps Katherine on a straight line. The problem is that what Katherine says is both disrupting (of Vals values, even of her love life) and, worse yet, seductive. The premise of this novel is too much: two super smart, super privileged serial killers unite and have almost super human knowledge of what their opponents do and want. But it works. Its like reading about Hannibal Lector: it may be hard to imagine a real Hannibal Lector existing doing all the things that he does, but once you start reading about him, you're hooked and all you care about is to see what happens next. There are lots of chills en route to the conclusion of this first rate suspense thriller.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Who Is Rich?: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Matthew Klam Page; Review: Its difficult to fit this novel into a slot. It crosses expectations. Rich, the narrator-protagonist, most usually describes the world around him in comic terms and the people who populate it stri.ke hi m as largely a gallery of grotesques. (Thats sure enough comic.) Rich is a one-shot graphic star, author of a once fast-selling graphic novel, for which he never wrote a sequel. But now hes years beyond his Sell Date and hes married, in debt with a wife whose patience with his whims is fading quickly and young children who leave them both with no time for the rich legacy of hanky pank they remember in their shared past. Instead of graphic novels charting the side paths and odd quirks of his daily life, he churns out cartoons on demand for a respected but low-paying journal of contemporary commentary a caricature of an international disaster here, a questionable temporary notable there. His life is leaching him of any self-respect. It no longer seems to be headed anywhere. (Thats NOT comic.) Hes back for a week or two now at l summer arts conference hes attended for the past six years, teaching a course on introduction to comics to people with variable interest in the subject and in all but one case, minimal talent for drawing. (Some none.) (Maybe comic, maybe not. It depends where the plot line goes.) More important, Rich hopes to meet up again with Amy. Her husband is a billionaire but he treats her like an employee and it reached a head last summer, when Rich and she had a short but memorable roll in the hay, which was followed by a year of angst-ridden email messages, shared photos, and one memorable hour-long reunion where they rolled in the hay again in her husbands and her multi-million dollar estate. (Theres potential for comedy, but also something more. Which way will it go?) Throughout the book, there are cartoons, rambunctious pictures of calllipygianesque women and men with sagging bellies and breasts, drawn by John Cuneo, and these are definitely comic. But the mood isnt. Its sad. Its about things longed for and lost. And thats what this quite good, almost amazing novel is really about. No easy answers, just what lives are often really about.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Golden Prey (A Prey Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's John Sandford Page; Review: This is the twenty-seventhtwenty-seventh!- in Sandfords Prey series, featuring super-cop Lucas Davenport. Over the series, Davenport has progressed from working on the Minneapolis Police Department to a high profile position in the statewide Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and now, after saving an ex-senator from prison for a crime he didn't commit and preventing the assassination of a very high profile presidential candidate, hes working as a free-lance federal marshal. Its a great gig for a bloodhound like Tanner because he gets to pick his own cases. He picks one in Biloxi, Mississippi, the robbery of a drug site that left five dead, including the six-year-old granddaughter of a major league drug dealer. The investigation quIckly spirals out of control. The perpetrators are two members of the Dixie Hicks, a loose association of murderers, thieves, all out bad guys who band together as needed for rough work across the Deep South. One is the hard guy. Hes hell on wheels with guns, and people die around him, but not him, just others. The other is the planner, the scouter, whos just as mean and just as criminal. Its just that he doesnt like to initiate the killings, though he has no problem following through once theyve begun. Theyre both terminally bad dudes, a type that Sandford is expert at describing. This time its a robbery, pure and simple. The killers leave with millions in illicit drug money, and thats the problem. Because the Hondurans who bankrolled the drug operation aren't kind in dealing with people who mess with them. They send their own people, a killer and an interrogator, woman whos known as the queen of home improvement tools, to suss out what happened but more, to get back the money they lost. Lucas and his people, the Hondurans people, the two he committed the offense plus the people around them its a rich brew of players, most of them felons or close to it, trying to get through alive. Some do, some dont. Justice is served in some says. In some ways, its not. Over all, this is both a pretty realistic and pretty ironic novel about the gains against the costs of criminal life. Its clear that Tanner is a good guy but though the bad guys are really bad in some ways, in others they're not, or not quite as clearly. This isn't Sandfords best novel in this series but hes done these long enough, and he knows his trade and his characters well enough, that this Default level has risen quite a bit, and this, which is by far not the best in this series, is still quite respectable. (Being a pro can be as good thing.); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera; Author: Visit Amazon's Adam Begley Page; Review: Begley wrote a good biography of novelist poet John Updike. This book, though much less heavy in bulk, is even better. Delightful is the best word for it, but its also insightful, filled with appropriate and insight-granting illustrations (most of them are photographs), and it is elegantly, gracefully, wittily written. Nadar was, in succession, a bon vivant and out at the pockets Bohemian in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, a caricaturist and cartoonist of indifferent skills but exquisite comic sensibilities, a first-class, even pioneering photographer, and finally, a daredevil enthusiast for balloon and heavier than air transport, whose books oozed his enthusiasm for inventions that didn't yet exist in his France (or anywhere at the time). He was also, in ways that are apparent when you follow his career but hard to nail down in cold prose, a nineteenth-century analogue to the Andy Warhol of a century later: a self-promoter who sold his celebrity as his art, head of as workshop that churned out works of art (photos) in his name but not from his own toil, an inveterate promoter and seeker after of the New and the Novel. Lastly, much like Warhol, he was never a theorist of the New, rather an enthusiast. Thats may be why lit crit darling Roland Barthes admired Nadars photographs so much. Because there is something in Nadars work and attitude that mirrors modernity. Regardless, one doesnt have to delve deeply into Nadars output. He is simply, as he appears in this delightful and insightful book, someone you want to know. (If it seems I like this book, I do. Very much. Books don't have to be heavy or thick to capture their subjects. The proof in is the pudding here.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder; Author: Visit Amazon's Leah Carroll Page; Review: When Leah Carroll was four, her mother didn't come home one night. Two days later, the police found her abandoned car. Four and a half months later, the skeletal remains of her body were uncovered by the side of a road. When Leah was eighteen, her father her alcoholic fatherwas found dead of a heart attack in a room he rented above a strip club. This is the story of Leahs screwed life from point one to point two, and beyond. Her mother was an addict. She went to a motel to score cocaine. There were two Rhode Island mafia men there. The one made her go down on him. When he was done, the other came out of the bathroom and used the towel in his hands to strangle her to death. They suspected she had ratted them out to the cops. The police eventually caught the guys who murdered her mother, but the authorities traded down their sentences in turn for evidence against a mob boss higher up the chain. They paid for other offenses, but no one No one really paid for her mothers murder. Leah grew up with a mystery: what happened to her mother, and then, once she knew that, why? What was her mother like before she got taken over by drugs and became, as the killers saw her, just a disposable person.. She never really knew her mother. That was one of the motives for writing this book. The second was to know her dad. He was an alcoholic charming, even smart, but in the end not someone you could count on. But he was still her dad. She wanted to know him. She found that they both had had lives and hopes, but they and the times were a bad fit. Their marriage had unraveled even before Leahs mother disappeared, and her fathers life kept sliding down a slope to a pretty sad end. The third motive for writing the book was to describe what happened to Leah after her parents were gone. The ending is a lot more positive than one might expect given her early life but it has left her aware both of how much she has received from her own married life and how much her parents never got. This is a book that could have been a downer but it isnt, saved by the authors unsentimental style and by her own ability to find stability in as world that was perilously short of it in her early years.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: In the Midnight Hour: The Life & Soul of Wilson Pickett; Author: Visit Amazon's Tony Fletcher Page; Review: This book about the life and times of legendary soul singer Wilson Pickett rectifies an omission in the literature about the emergence of soul and r & b. There are memoirs about Pickett written by his sister and by his daughter, but until now, no full-length biography of the great and influential performer. Journalist Fletcher comes with solid credentials for this type of work: with published books on Echo and the Bunnymen, R. E. M., the Clash and The Smiths and a biography of the Whos Keith Moon. The books virtues are many: serious scholarly apparatus with notes, bibliography, and index; a good black and white photospread; detailed information on who played when and where and why (Pickett was a volatile performer who changed musicians often on a whim); solid judgments on all of Picketts many recordings; and best of all, a non-judgmental look at the roots and nature of Picketts notorious and long-lived self-destructiveness, which often undercut his best interests. Why, for instance, did he not show up for his own induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, at a time when his career badly needed a boost? Fletcher is not an exciting writer but he is good on two important counts: thoroughness and his familiarity for the music he so lovingly describes. Given the time that has passed (Picketts peers are dying off) and effort and thought that Fletcher has put into researching and writing this book, it is unlikely it will be surpassed in the years to come.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: DR. DOA (Secret Histories); Author: Visit Amazon's Simon R. Green Page; Review: The Secret Histories series details the activities of super-spy and near immortal Eddie Drood, scion of the Drood family who for centuries have worked for British monarch and parliament protecting the realm against alien and magical intrusions of the Green Meanie variety. (Drood stands for Druid did you get it?) Like all the Droods (well, most of them they have their renegades too), Eddie possesses an alien device that armors him up and makes him invulnerable and other things when the times demand supernatural powers of him. In the outside world, Eddie goes by the name Shaman Bond. For the most part, he hides his membership in the Drood family but family business and spy business have a way of ending up twined together in this generally diverting though insubstantial series. The second to most recent installment, released in paperback this spring, is Dr. DOA. Its okay, no better than that. Eddie is a good character as is his wood witch girlfriend. The generally stuffy but daunting Drood family members add spice to the mix. (Think old guard British aristocracy but with the nuclear option.) The problem with this episode of the series (the titles are takeoffs on James Bond novels) is that it offers only the first half of the adventure. You have to buy Moonbreaker, issued in hardcover this June, in order to find out what happens to Eddie. In installment one, he finds out hes been poisoned. By Dr. DOA. Hes a dead man walking unless he can find a remedy. En route, he faces the usual multiple menaces and solves the usual multiple problems but the novel ultimately leaves the reader frustrated because it stops more than it ends. This series has never been as enjoyable as the Nightworld series but this episode in particular left me flat.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Very Important Corpses: Severn House Publishers (An Ishmael Jones Mystery); Author: Visit Amazon's Simon R. Green Page; Review: Corpses is the latest novel in Greens fantasy/spy series about Ishmael Jones. Jones isn't human. In 1963, a spaceship crashed in the English countryside. Everyone on board was killed except for Jones. There was no hope of return to the home planet so the ship reprogrammed the survivor, flesh and mind, turning him into a perfectly normal looking English gent. In the process, all memory of his previous life was erased. So there Jones is now, an alien-now-Englishman with no memory of anything in his life before his 1963. Oh, hes not completely normal because if you observe him closely, youll learn that, 1. he never ages, 3. hes fast as blazes and 3. just as strong, and 4. his senses are all super heightened. Indeed, it is his sense of smell that helps him solve the case on which he is currently working. He and his partner Penny are employed by the Organization to protect someones, probably the nations interests against foreign, sometimes alien intrusions. This time its the meeting, very hush hush, of twelve magnates who collectively virtually control the financial market: their decisions shape whether the market goes up or down from year to year. Theyre meeting in Scotland this time, in a huge almost dreary mansion along the shores of Loch Ness. The Organization has an agent there to look out for the wellbeing of the cabal while they're convening on British soil. When the agent is killed, and her brain sucked out of her head, Jones and Penny are sent in to fix things. What follows is a cross between the more melodramatic Sherlock Holmes adventures and something out of Agatha Christie. There are too many dry patches in the plotting and dialogue and the resolution doesnt hold together too well. This is my first Ishmael Jones novel and I suspect it will be the last I read. I ts just not good.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Tool of War (Ship Breaker); Author: Visit Amazon's Paolo Bacigalupi Page; Review: If you're looking for a warrior, Tool is the best youll get. In this world of the future, devastated by floods, hurricanes and other man-provoked if not made disasters, mega-corporations have replaced nations and they fight for economic ends, which are no longer indistinguishable from tactical military objectives. There is no god except profit and no morality except winning. The warriors they use to fight their battles are humans, sometimes, but the best, also the most expensive to make and train, aren't human at all, or not wholly human. Theyre hybrids, artificially created from the genes of the most vicious fighters on earth tigers, wolverines and badgers, maybe snake for other qualities, with improved structure and musculature, blood, skin, healing powers. Theyre killing machines. And to keep them loyal, a goodly dose of dog genes is included. However human in motivation and behavior these augments seem under non-war circumstances, they live to obey their master(s). That is, till now. Now theres Tool. Hes an experiment, a new blend of hybrid with superior skills and strengths. He stands eight feet tall. Hes heavily muscled and his arms and legs aren't only strong, the nails on his hands and feet are razor sharp, and as fast and strong as he is, he scares the bejeesus out of human warriors when they meet him in battle. If hes wounded, his body heals quicker. He can see, smell, hear better and from farther distances than any humans can. Hes smart too, not only smart but possessed of an inbred sense for tactics and strategy, a near-perfect killing machine. Thats not been a problem in the past but because at heart, hes still a dog. He thinks in terms of Master and Pack. He hasn't lost those constraints totally but now Pack wins over Master in his loyalties. Hes been betrayed too often and seen too many of his warriors killed around him. Now he wants, at first, freedom, and later, after more betrayals, revenge. His masters may rule over the human world but can they stop Tool from getting the revenge he wants. Since his first novel, The Windup Girl (2009), winner of both the Hugo and the Nebulas awards, Bacigalupi has excelled in imagining ravaged worlds shared between man and man-made creatures. This is his simply his latest. In this book, Bacigalupi succeeds admirably in getting you inside Tools head. You see as not human, but a creature that shares enough values with us that we care what happens to him because his defeat would diminish all feeling creatures. The story line is good enough --but not exceptional-- in this latest work from speculate fiction writer Bacigalupi but the character of Tool will hold your attention and win your sympathy.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Rat Catchers' Olympics (A Dr. Siri Paiboun Mystery); Author: Visit Amazon's Colin Cotterill Page; Review: This sort-of detective novel and all-out tale of local color and idiosyncrasy is fantastic in both senses of the word. It is fantastic (aka supergood) and fantastic in imaginative, unreal (except it is somehow very real, more real than more staid fiction paints things), mixing fantastic and realistic elements (ah, there you have it!). A hilariously complicated plot shuttles back and forth between The Democratic Peoples Republic of Laos and the Summer Olympics in Moscow. Its 1980. Laos is a Communist republic now but the government is as corrupt and inept as ever. Functionaries shuffle on and off stage trying to follow rules of operating as much implied as written down. Facing economic catastrophe, not its first) the Laotian government is offered an opportunity to divert the publics attention from its failings when Russia invite the country to send its first ever team to compete in the Summer Olympics in Moscow. (Sixty-five countries, led by the US, have boycotted the games to protest over Russias involvement in Afghanistan. Having built facilities in anticipation of a large crowd, Russia needs warm bodies, lots of them, to compete in the games and fill the stadiums. Botswana, Laos every small and insignificant Peoples Republic on the globe is invited. The Laotians know they won't win, but hey, its a good party and Laotians don't get many shots at the spotlights. Soon twenty athletes (shooters, boxers and runners, various functionaries including a senile general and as team physician and team matron the redoubtable Dr. Siri Paiboun, ex-national coroner for Laos, and his formidable wife Mme. Daeng. Siri has a private spirit, Auntie Bpoo. He pops out of our reality periodically to communicate with her in the cabin of an Aeroflot Tupelov jet, which for some reason is always flying upside down. Shes an obnoxious witch and her comments never help Siri directly but somehow talking to her, or back in our reality to his wife Mme. Daeng helps him sort out the mysteries which come his way on the trip: a shooter who isn't who he says he is and the possibility of a planned assassination while they're in Moscow; an explosion that kills several, including the Moscow-based heir of a very big wig back home; other occurrences too numerous to mention. Back in Laos, Siris friend inspector Phosy is investigating his own killing, which of course eventually connects to what is happening in Moscow. In the interstices of this baroque crime thriller, wonderful things happen great character sketches, barbed jokes, a generalized sense of loopiness that lifts this exotic crime novel far above the realms of the ordinary. Through it all, somehow, Cotterill keeps tight reins on the various subplots he spins so that, at the end, they coalesce and are triumphantly resolved. Let me mention one incident which conveys a feeling for how zany this book can get. In Moscow, Mme. Daeng comes back to their room after getting a complete makeover, facial and all. She is now a redhead and her face looks =more like a mask than a human face. There are; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Beautiful Animals: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Lawrence Osborne Page; Review: Whos better than us? is retired airline executive Jimmy Codringtons nightly toast to his wife Phaine. No one! is what she says back to him. And then they go on to drinks and food, all supplied without fuss by their Greek maid-cook as they sit, talk, argue and gradually grow too drunk to talk or argue in their exquisite summer villa on the small Greek island of Hydra. Comments Osborne: it was the law of summers among the rich that the season of leisure should flow like a large and charming river. The imperative was to have a good time and float along on the luminescent surface. You couldn't back down or show weakness. It was not that different from the Hamptons, except this was less pretentious and slightly less soulless. (That last sentence is chilling!) There is a neon sign above a bed on the Codingtons yacht that spells out the word Disgrace. It cost him $20,000. The bedside lamps are made of solid glass; Keith Haring panels are set in the walls. The Codingtons daughter Naomi and her friend Sam end up at an artists villa one night. In the garden, they see tortoises moving slowly by, candlesticks soldered into their shells. Its a world where nothing bad is ever supposed to enter but of course it does. The vehicle for disruption is a man, a stranger, an Arab, Faoud, whom Naomi and Sam find on a beach. Hes a refuge, washed ashore in flight from Syria, or so it seems, and the Codingtons daughter unlocks the gate to him, impelled by as mixture of idealism (we need to treat Muslims even better than we would Christians because theyve been so mistreated) and sexual interest. Sam has reservations about getting close to Faoud but she goes along with Naomis plans and in the process provides the reader with a second perspective on what unfolds. Because the Codingtons and Haldanes (Sams family) live in a bubble. The world outside that bubble isn't innocent or nice. Its indifferent, even cruel. Thats something they soon, and tragically, find out. Osborne has been compared to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh for his but a fairer comparison to me is Paul Bowles. Both novelists document the clash of cultures, what happens when the contained world of the disaffected and wealthy is intruded upon by an exotic untamed, and the jolting, bloody consequences of such meetings. It takes a while to get into this disorienting novel, but the payoff is worth it. Osborne is a writer of consequence.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Slow Boat (Japanese Novellas); Author: Hideo Furukawa; Review: Its hard to know what to call this idiosyncratic fiction, which is part fantasy the narrators dreams play a part in it- and part either a completely made up story or thinly fictionalized memoir. Whatever, this tale of a young mans three failed attempts to leave Japan and his three equally disastrous failed loves, is charming. It doesnt try too hard and doesnt rely on wit, cuteness or zippy style tricks to promote its wares. Rather, it just tells the story, with the right amount of self-distancing on the part of the narrator from the relating of his own woes to take away any emotional heating up. You can just enjoy the tale, without being involved in it. In an afterword, Furukawa acknowledges his debt to the great modernist master of Japanese fiction, Haruki Murukami: it plays out in this tale in similarities of tone and style. On the evidence to date, Pushkin Press is doing yeomans work resuscitating small masterpieces from forgotten authors and introducing interesting authors we might otherwise never know. With high production values and attractive cover art work, its modest volumes are always a good value.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Hideout (Pushkin Collection); Author: Egon Hostovsk; Review: Pushkin Press has been around since 1997 but only this year came to my attention. Its specialty is publishing works of short fiction novella length worksthat might otherwise be missed by even the discerning reader: lost masterpieces or near masterpieces by forgotten authors and new pieces by authors who, for reason of geography or whatever, have been largely ignored in Britain and the States. Hostovsky (1908-73) falls in the former category: a Czech author, active from the late twenties through the very early seventies, a cousin of the much better known Stefan Zweig and admired by Graham Green, but hardly a household name in the West. Published in Czech in 1945 and now translated into English, The Hideout, only 128 pages long, may be his masterpiece. Except . its not a masterpiece. Its a well crafted tale, and I admire the moral fervor expressed in it, but its uneven in tone and direction, as though starting out to be one kind of fiction Kafkaesque but without cockroach, torture machine, judge or bureaucrat)- and ending up another. A mild mannered Czech engineer has invented an improved anti-aircraft sighting mechanism. When the Germans move into Czechoslovakia, they want it. He flees to Paris. Soon, the Nazis are there too and he is forced into hiding. He spends the next two years living in a cellar. The door to his cellar is unlocked. He can leave any time he wants but he cant, its too dangerous, and gradually he loses will and nearly sanity. During this time, he writes feverishly to his wife back in Prague, trying to explain how he got where he is and how he feels. You can feel in his writing how tenuous his hold on the world is growing. To this point, the novella is very effective. Then he is forced to a drastic act, and that act leads him to another, with one last chance to redeem himself. At which point, the novella ends. Abruptly. Just like that. The last third of the novella is flat, the first two thirds rich in a particularly central European style a casualty to the unbelievably awful times he lived through and influenced by his early allegiance to expressionism and an authorly preoccupation with psychological development. The result is a work that is neither all Kafka nor Zweig but something uneasily crafted of pieces of both in style and content.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Downside; Author: Visit Amazon's Mike Cooper Page; Review: Finns specialty is stealing really big things a whole factory line, fully loaded autoracks, heavy machinery. That makes him a bit of a dinosaur in our age. He doesnt steal with a few key strokes on a computer. He actually puts his hands on the stuff he steals. He physically hauls it away. Someone fingered his team on a high profile train robbery seven years. He doesnt know who but it had to be someone on his team or maybe the contractor. Finns just out of prison and hes got two objectives in mind: stay out of prison but find out who did him in and do something about it. While he was gone, though, his bank has gone under. The state has his money now and since he stashed it in a safe deposit box under a made up name, he cant ask for it back. He needs money now and just when he needs it, who is there to offer him a lucrative job? The contractor who may have betrayed him to the police seven years before. Hell need a team to do the job and because of the technical requirements, itll have to be pretty much the same guys he used seven years before. Whom can he trust? Thats the first of the many problems hell have to address as he agrees to break into an unassailable vault, located in the middle of a heavily guarded train yard, in order to steal the rhodium ingots stacked up inside of it. Well, not quite steal them. Rather, the contractor, who owns them, wants Finn to trade them for ingots one vault over the contractor unwittingly bought fake ingots and now he needs the real ones. Finn doesnt trust the contractor. He knows he cant be trusted but what about his go-between: she seems willing to sell her boss out. Can he trust her? It should be obvious by now that The Downside is a caper novel, along the lines of Richard Starks Parker novels, with many of the same strengths though a more sympathetic (and human) protagonist. Finn is a good enough bad guy that It is easy to root for him as he addresses not only how to carry off this complicated venture but how to correct everything that inevitably goes wrong along the way.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Tom Clancy True Faith and Allegiance (A Jack Ryan Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Mark Greaney Page; Review: This is a franchise book. Tom Clancys name is on the front cover in bigger print than the authors, and the book has all the hallmarks of a Tom Clancy thriller: a large cast, pages and pages of techno talk about warfare, weaponry, etc., and pages and pages of book for that matter, 742 of them in this case. Reading a Tom Clancy thriller in hard cover rather than e-book format, like I do, your arms get a work out holding it. Ive never gotten a thrill out of Clancys bloated thrillers and still dont. Theres not much nuance to them. The characters are cookie cutter figures and the plots mundane. I read fast but never faster than is needed to appreciate what I am reading: Im not a Speed Reader, I slow down to appreciate details and any small stylistic graces the book Im reading may exhibit. That noted, it takes me barely two hours to read a seven-hundred-page novel by Clancy, as it did this bloated monstrosity. Theres so much filler in them. Clancy died in 2013. Its franchise time now. Mark Greaney should be a good choice for this series. His Gray Man series is good a lot of technical stuff but fast moving with plots that interest and characters who, if not full fleshed, at least aren't paper doll cutouts. This is the fourth Tom Clancy novel to be written independently by Greaney. Before that, he collaborated with Clancy, who seemed in his latter years to run a writers factory, on the last three credited to Clancys name. Unfortunately, Greaney seems to have lost his writerly smarts for this assignment, perhaps because the format is so constrained. True Faith and Allegiance features Clancys hero, Jack Ryan, who is now president of the United States. His son, Jack, Jr., who is following in his fathers footsteps, first a CIA analyst and now full blown agent working for The Campus, a small but important offthe-books intelligence organization populated with former military and intelligence types. As is typical for a Clancy thriller, there is a four-page listing of Principal Characters in the front of the book: with this many involved, you cant tell the players without a scorecard. An unknown entity is leaking confidential information about US agents: what they're involved in; their real names, addresses and pastimes; where youll find them if you want to pick them up or attack them. It starts with two security breaches a US sub captain is attacked and an undercover agent arrested and imprisoned in Iranbut escalates. Behind it is an even greater threat: jihadists are leveraging the information to force president Ryan to declare war on Iran. Hes resisting the pressure but he needs information and results now. Seven hundred pages on, several good guys and even more bad guys are shot up or dead, and America is saved from war for the nonce. A good thriller this turkey is not.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Rainy Lake House: Twilight of Empire on the Northern Frontier; Author: Visit Amazon's Theodore Catton Page; Review: CATTON, Theodore. Rainy Lake House: Thoughts of Empire on the Northern Frontier. Johns Hopkins. 2017. 432p, illus., maps, notes, index. Catton, associate research professor of history at the University of Montana, is the author of several books on the Old West, exploring our countrys national park system and forests and early relations with the indigenous natives. This book builds on his earlier published work but significantly expands the focus. Catton does in this book what conscientious historians do well: he takes an apparently localized incident and by teasing out its connections and ramifications, enlightens us on larger, more enduring issues --in this case, our ambivalent relationship with the native Americans we early dispossessed of their lands, livelihood and dignity. The book is especially interesting because of the time, the 1810s through 1823, and place, the borderlands of Lake Superior, where in the aftermath of the War of 1812, American and British traders fought over a lucrative though already diminishing fur trade. in September 1823, three men from three different cultures come together at Rainy Lake House, a Hudsons Bay Company trading post near the Boundary Waters (between the US and Canada. John McLoughlin was a part-time physician and fulltime proprietor of the post. Major Stephen J. Long was on a surveying mission to plot the northern prairies from the upper Mississippi to the 49th parallel. John Tanner, was a white Indian. He had been captured as a boy, kept as a slave for a while but then adopted by an Ojibwa mother. He was there to seek McLoughlins and Longs assistance in recovering his two young daughters, whom he believed were being held captive by fur trappers in a nearby fort. This is a study of mis- and part-communication: Tanners request filtered through McLoughlins and Longs preconceptions about the primitiveness of Indian culture. They had their own ideas about whether Tanner was any longer even salvageable for white society. There are gaps in the historical record. There are times when a log was not kept and there are omissions in Tanners own account of his life but Catton is fortunate to have Tanners autobiography, dictated later in life to an English-speaking writer, and McLoughlin and Long left behind their journals, diaries, and reports. Out of these Catton has fashioned a narrative ripe with adventure, betrayal (Tanners Indian wife and mother-in-law collaborated in an assassination attempt against him) and revenge. Around the central narrative, largely about Tanners attempts to create a stable family around him, Catton tells other stories: of the on-again off-again warfare between Hudsons Bay Company and American Fur Company traders; Americas early explorations of the virgin Midwest; wars and alliances among tribes, and in particular the running feud between Ojibwa and Sioux, and the advantages each brought to the fight) and he enlightens us on the minutiae of Amerindian and trader camp life and ways in that now distant age. There is a running account, spread across several chapters, that describes how a young man in this case, a white transplant- acculturates to his adopted family and tribe. He writes; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Safe: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Ryan Gattis Page; Review: This novel snuck up on me. When I started it, I didn't know whether itd be good or bad but I thought it would follow a formula: bad, maybe hopeless, guys in the ghetto; drug cartels and violence; dirty cops. But quickly, thats not what I got. Or rather, I got most of that but I also got more than that. I thought I was getting Don Winslow (2005s The Power of the Dog, 2015s The Cartel) but somewhere along the way, though delivered In the guise and format of a typical crime thriller, I had read as novel of character and conflict, two men, both flawed, in opposition to each other even as in key respects they should have treasured (honored) each other. The one is a thirty-something recovered drug addict, Ricky Mendoza, aka Ghost. Ghost was lucky. His crime busts are hidden and he works now for a locksmith. His specialty is cracking safes. He lives in La and does it for the LA Drug Enforcement Agency. Back in the bad days, Ricky almost died. Brain cancer. But it was cured. In treatment with him was a young woman named Rose. She didn't make it. But he didn't forget her. Its because of her that he went cold turkey, got off the drugs, and began to make his life something worth living. His boss, his name is Frank, was Roses father, but Ricky has never told him of the connection. Now the cancer is back again. Ricky, now Ghost, knows hes going to die soon: he intends to go out with a bang, helping people who need (financial) help but don't have anyone to provide it. Its 2008. Thousands of people in LA are about to lose their homes because they were lured into unsafe mortgages that no longer are good. Ghost plans to crack a safe on orders from the DEA, its a holding cache for the cartersand split with the money inside, which he will hand on to buy people time to pay off their mortgages. But once hes done it, theres someone on the other side. He cant stop Ghost but he intends to find him, take back the money if it isn't lost irrevocably, then kill him. His name is Rudolfo Reyes, and hes nicknamed Glasses. When he was young and more reckless than he is now, police officers hit him across the head too many times and damaged, almost destroyed his one eye. That taught Reyes something about vulnerability. Hes the number two man now in a major drug ring. When Ghost does his heist and leaves with $900 thousand plus in cash, and the druggies learn about it, its Glassess job to find Ghost and come to terms with him. (Thats a euphemism for torture and kill.) There are complications which I won't describe. Theres more in common between Ghost and Glasses than you expect. Both are hardened by the horrible lives theyve led but they're more than just beasts. You won't accept the choices theyve made in their lives leading up to climax,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The River of Consciousness; Author: Visit Amazon's Oliver Sacks Page; Review: Oliver Sacks is dead but, fortunately for us, his ideas are not. River is the first of two books of posthumously collected essays. These are occasional pieces, but only in the sense that they were crafted for general audiences. The shortest (Mishearings) is six pages long and none run beyond the high twenties. Every one has something pertinent to say and they are all, all, delightful to read, so good a stylist and so sharp an intellect was Sacks. Another note about Sacks: he wasn't a Pollyannaread his observations on his own coming out in London and San Francisco in the 60s, or his chilling account of the aftereffects of a radical treatment to deal with his own, greatly advanced by then liver cancer (A General Feeling of Disorder)- but he was, even in his own worse moments, sunny and humane. He was an optimist of sorts a realistic optimist, whose optimism was tempered by his scientific training and skeptic bent. He was generous in acknowledging forebears who influenced him. Thus, he acknowledges Darwin and Freud in paired essays. He puts Darwins late work on flowers in context. More than the dithering of an ailing, worn out man, it constituted a sustained and radical attack on the enemies of evolution. Darwin produced six books and seventy odd papers on plant life in his later years Sacks pictures him lob[bing] great missiles of evidence at scoffers at his theory of natural selection. As to Freud, Sacks champions his great, but strangely neglected, earlier work as a neurologist, which, he argues, laid the groundwork for the great mans later abandoning of physiology for psychology, under the assumption that at some much later stage, science would discover a connection between the two. There is also a marvelous essay (Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science) on forgetting or ignoring scientific discoveries when either no general theory has been discovered into which the discoveries can fit or the phenomenon under study seems irrelevant or insignificant. He cites the obvious cases the abandoning in the second century AD of Aristarchuss elegantly simple heliocentric world and its replacing by the needlessly complicated Ptolemaic system five centuries later (a replacement that survived unchallenged for fourteen centuries), the decades long ignoring of Gregor Mendels work on geneticsbut he also draws on his own work: why was there no scientific literature on the intricate hallucinatory patterns that were present in one out of twenty migraine cases, why so little written about and so few cases observed of patients with Tourettes syndrome, etc., etc.? The key note of these and the other essays in this miraculous volume is the question why. If anything happened to Sackss body or psyche, he asked not just what draw so little attention for so long? When he read William James (along with Freud, Sackss greatest inspiration), he hypothesized about the nature of perception: how is time perceived by humans, as continuous stream or separated but strung together moments like a cinema film? There is also a wonderful article on the mental activities of worms and plants. This; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bones: Brothers, Horses, Cartels, and the Borderland Dream; Author: Joe Tone; Review: In April 2015, the alt-newspaper the Dallas Observer published an article by former editor Joe Tone, entitled The Rookie and the Zetas: How the Feds Took Down a Drug Cartels Horse-Racing Empire. Tone had left the newspaper to write a book on this story. This is the book. Already, before publication, its been optioned as a movie. Its a heck of a story. After working at manual labor for years, Jose Trevino suddenly broke loose and began buying champion quarter horses. His horses not only won at the track, they made him tons of money at studquarter horse racing, for short distances, is big business in the southwest. Eventually Jose had his own stables. He owned at least on paperfive hundred horses. (At one auction, his agents spent $2.3 million to buy twenty-three horses. Where did the money come from? And why do his horses win so often? Joses brother, Miguel Trevino Morales, was second in command of the ruthless Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas. Jose disavowed Miguel in public but there was nowhere else this much money could be coming from, and if the Zetas were involved, then even the horses wins were suspect. Los Zetas had no problem making money. The problem was making it clean afterwards. The border wasn't as porous as it was before 9/11 and old money laundering schemes no longer worked as well as they had in easier times. Horse racing, like gambling casinos, offered Miguel the chance to clean up dirty money, so family ties trumped Joses desire to stay clean of criminal activity. Enter a rookie FBI special agent, Scott Lawson, assigned to Laredo, Texas. The FBI was already paying a lot of attention to Miguel. Lawson focused on Jose. He found an informer, a wealthy Anglo horse and cattle breeder who had an in with Jose. A lot of squeezing, several near shaves that could have made it all fall apart, and at the end, after three years of effort, Scott, no longer a rookie, got his man. The story is interesting and fast-paced, the cast of characters intriguing. This is reportage, not fiction, and Dallas-based Tone was enough of an insider to know the players and the territory. He does a good job of describing changes in the Mexican drug scene (killings, torture and intimidation, mobs and factions up and down) and explaining the ins and outs of the drug traffic, the mechanics and problems involved in laundering money, and the particular charms of quarter horse racing. Only a good reporter could write this book, and being a Texan himself was a definite asset.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The After Party: Poems; Author: Visit Amazon's Jana Prikryl Page; Review: This is Prikryls first published book of poems but her poems have appeared in such prestigious journals as The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review and the New York Review of Books. (She is a senior editor at the NYRB.) The New York Times selected her book as Best Poetry Book of the Year and it comers with endorsements on the cover from the poet John Ashbery and poetry critic Stephen Burt, both extraordinarily well respected in their fields and neither an easy sell when it comes to endorsing someone elses work. The book is in two parts. The first (untitled, just the number I) presents a series of short poems, none longer than three pages and many but part of a page). The second half, entitled Thirty Thousand Islands, is much the same, presenting forty poems l inked by place and mood, at moments highly ironical. As to theme, her poems range widely, especially in the first half (actually two-thirds) of the book. They traverse the world, comment on its sights. Figures referenced in titles of individual poems are Benvenuto Tisi (late Renaissance mannerist painter, d. 15589), George Kennan and John Lukacs, Stanley Cavell and Roland Barthes. Buster Keaton is referenced and commented on in another poem, Ode / Our Hospitality, one of the best in the book, and she muses on the reasons for Benedict Cumberbatchs success in Ars Poetica. I found most of these poems quite interesting, especially the one about Kennans and Lukacss corresponding with each other. She inserts herself into their conversation as a third party, not talking to them but expressing her own inner thoughts. The contrast in the speakers preoccupations and style of presenting them makes her own comments all the more effective. The same is true of her poem about a Tisi painting, which shows what a thorough and sensitive observer she is. Her take on Barthess late diary, mourning the death of his mother, and his book on photography, Camera Lucida, is equally effective, an oblique commentary on the limits of spoken or written language. (I won't comment on the poem that alludes to Cavell because I don't quite get it.) Others of her poems are closer to but not quite full out nature poems. Prikryls approach is far different from, say nature poet Ted Hughes or Arthur Sze, both of whom tend to become absorbed in their subject, be it animal or plant, and depict the world from inside or alongside the creature being described. Prikryls nature -ish poems start with keen observation, phrases that capture how some particular phenomenon in nature looks or feels to the observer, but soon veer off into musings on whats inside the observers head. They become poems about the poets experience more than the experienced. Still other poems, very short and written in barebones language, lean towards the elliptical. They seem to lie somewhere between the playful Zen poems of Robert Creeley (whom I adore) and the gloom-filled expressionist-drenched early poems of Paul Auster. I found them interesting not so much because; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History; Author: Visit Amazon's Kurt Andersen Page; Review: Why are we so peculiar? is the question Andersen tackles in this occasionally (though righteously) intemperate but always lively (and well researched) book on American exceptionalism and the perilous path it has now led us to. Fantasyland is an appropriate title for the book, which is about how we have lost whatever hold on factuality we ever had. The book is a running argument against the growing resistance to factuality and moderation in our nation of supposedly sane and reasonable human beings. Andersen doesnt think this is new to us. He argues that our five-hundred-year history points in one direction: time after time, enthusiasm and hope win out over facticity and reason. A good place to begin is the footnotes. Often humorous, always trenchant, they can be found scattered across the bottoms of the pages, not in a separate, thus seldom read section in the back of the book. Theyre a kick. Some are factual he cites surveys, authors. The others form a running commentary around and alongside the themes discussed in the text. Heres one, at the bottom of page 283, in a chapter headed America Versus the Godless World: Why Are We So Exceptional? In its entirety, the footnote reads: Marx famously called religion the opium of the people, and when Lenin founded the Soviet Union, he agreed, saying it was used for the stupefaction of the working class. But neither man had evet been to the United States, to see that for Americans it was as much or more a stimulant and hallucinogen than a stupefying opiate. Heres a second footnote, which I find particularly chilling: Hitler is a fool, Spengler said in 1932, then voted for him for president anyway, because he thought that only strong leaders on the model of the Caesars might save the West from further decline. Nuff said. This is not a book meant to bash one party or the other. (Andersen is disenchanted with both.) But for obvious reasons, Andersen is harsh on Republicans, whom he sees as less likely to let facts cloud their already arrived at judgments. What do we make of the fact that in a 2013 Public Policy Polling survey 34% of the respondents who voted Republican believed that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government? Or where only eight of the 278 Republicans serving in Congress in 2014 were willing to acknowledge that global warming is real? (By contrast, only 17% of Americans who don't call themselves Republicans believed that global warming was a myth.) The problem, says political analyst Josh Barro, is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions. They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them to ignore inconvenient facts about policy, and they have abolished standards of discourse. When smoking came under attack in the 60s, the tobacco companies used doubt opinion and sentiment over factas their most effective defense against doing something. Andersen argues things still work that way in the corridors of; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Flying: A Novel (Flying Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Carrie Jones Page; Review: Over-cutesy and under-thrilling, this teenage-cheerleader- whomps-aliens novel doesnt make it. Given the apocalyptic premise of the plot, that the country, nay the whole world, is at peril from alien invaders and that only Buffy the vampire slayeroops! excuse me! cheerleader Mana the alien kickercan save us, the action progresses at snails pace, repeatedly put on hold while we read long, not very interesting discourses on Manas inner feelings, usually about the boy shes got a crush on. The prose verges on saccharine. The characters are stock types. During the course of the novel, Mana, seventeen, matures from a probable inner age of fourteen or fifteen to a possible sixteen. What follows you can read on the book cover, so its not a spoiler if you decide to read this book. (I don't know why you would.) Manas a cheerleader. The big game is coming up and shes got a crush on a boy who drums in the pep band. Something complicated happens at the game and Mana and the boy wind up in the boys locker room, where his tongue suddenly grows long and he starts spitting green acid. Mana does a flip to avoid being hit by the green goo and ends up on top of a locker. As the promo material says, shes leaping around like a kangaroo on steroids. She gets out of that fix and goes home, only to find her house trashed, her mother gone and another, equally scary guy (thing?) in the living room. Then things get really weird. It could have been a good premise light fiction, appealing heroine, lots of action, gussied up with cool teen talk. But it isnt. Its flat. Its over-extended. And if I were a teenage girl, I d be insulted by the picture painted of Mana, who even after her epiphany with the aliens, doesnt seem to grow up much at all.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Forest Dark: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Nicole Krauss Page; Review: There are two actors in this novel. One, Jules Epstein, is a lawyer, a wealthy and successful man, who has suddenly and fairly dramatically remade his life: left his law firm and his wife (thats pretty much the order of priority of the two in his mind) and sold off or given away his earthly goods. Hes gone to visit in Israel fairly regularly through his long life but now he wants to go there again, maybe even stay, but for different reasons than in the past. And because hes still wealthy --his giving away of his goods is an act in processhe still runs into people who would like to relieve him of it. Thats Epstein. We read about him in third person narrative and the novelist has given us his name. Even in the writing about him, there is a distance. This is a quotation describing whats happening inside him: the slow unfurling of self- knowledge He did not wish to be sure. Had lost his trust in it. The other actor is a novelist, unnamed. Her narrative is presented in the first person. She talks out in her head what is going on both inside and outside her. Shes come to Israel too. Somethings come unglued, in her work (novels) and home life (husband and children). Heres a quotation about her thought (feeling?) processes: What if, I thought, rather than existing in a universal space, each of us is actually born alone into a luminous blankness, and we who snip it into pieces, assembling staircases and gardens and train stations into our own peculiar fashion, until we have pared our space into a world? [W]hat if its human perception and creativity that are responsible for creating the multiverse? Or maybe- Ambiguous, yes. But shes thinking about possibilities, of growing to where she is now in a different world/set of circumstances, and maybe, just maybe then, a different set of outcomes. In some respects, you see, theres not all that much difference between Epstein and Ms. A. Nonymous. Both have been successes but don't feel like successes. Both feel as if a wrong turn has been taken, or maybe (Epstein) its just time to take a new one. And this novel is, kind of, their taking one. Epstein is cornered by a rabbi, charismatic and a bit of a con man, who is planning a reunion of King Davids great great great great great great (by now you get the point) grandchildren in Israel. Itll be a big deal and maybe Epstein would like to bankroll it as a memorial to his long dead parents? The writer is cornered too, by a man who may be a literary scholar and may also at some point in his murky past have worked for Mossad, Israels premier spy organization. He spins a story about lost Kafka manuscripts that need completing (by her, of course) and about Kafka having faked his death and lived out the remaining years of his life as a gardener in different parts of the Holy Land. Kafka for; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo; Author: Visit Amazon's Ian Stansel Page; Review: Hed defined his life in relation to his brother, first as his mentor, then as his partner, then as his rival. This fine novel, an updating of both the Cain-Abel story and the classic western, starts with a killing. Silas Van Loy shoots his brother Frank and heads off for the wilds on horseback. It isn't the classic Old West. Its modern day central and northern California, and Frank and Silas, though both horse trainers, train society women and men in the fine arts of English style riding, dressage and all that stuff. The back story to the killing becomes clearer as the story progresses. But the heart of the story is a chase. Franks widow Lena saddles up her favorite horse and lights out after Silas, intent on finding him and killing him. Shes joined, somewhat against her will, by Rain, her stable assistant, and the rest of the tale is the story of the chase, how Silas, Lena and Rain behave, mixed in with backward glances at Silass, Franks and Lenas contentious and lethal relationship. When Lena asks Silas why Frank and he fight all the time, the only answer he can give is were brothers. But thats not it and this fine novel is about what really is it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Colter's Journey (A Tim Colter Western); Author: Visit Amazon's William W. Johnstone Page; Review: William Johnstone wrote around 300 books, mostly western, horror and survivalist novels. He died in 2004 and his nephew, J. A., has continued the franchise. I read some of the elder Johnstones books years and years ago. They were pulp fiction, strong on adventure and he-men, a quick read but just as quickly forgettable, written for a not terribly discriminating market, with little attention to subtlety or style. Whatever else the nephew picked up from his uncle during his tutelage assisting him, he certainly learned that. In this not terribly exciting tale of hunt and revenge, a teenage boy survives a massacre. His parents are slaughtered by Indians, and his girlfriend, her mother and his two sisters are abducted. He turns the tables on the man left behind to deal with him. Leaving him dead, he sets off west following the trail of his attackers intent on rescuing his partys womenfolk. Hes joined by a one-eyed, salty tongued plainsman, former beaver trapper, named Reno, and the two set off on their quest. Theres a reason why Reno goes along with the boy: it has to do with the Indians not being Indians at all and a particularly nasty specimen among them who is trying to incite a war between whites and Indians by faking an Indian attack. Young love wins out in the end. As for Reno? Well, hes always lived outside of civilized society and he aint about to change now. Every so often along the way, the author drops in gobbets of historical fact with little concern whether his characters would have thought about such matters and his preferred way of dealing with back story is to shift into reminiscence, which is always indicated by a shift to italic print. I may be exaggerating but reading the book, it felt like a quartet to a third of the book was in italic, and every time the italics showed up, the books forward momentum, which was never that strong anyway, slowed to a halt. Occasionally you run across a book so bad you wish you didn't have to review it. This is one of those books.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Undertaker's Daughter (The Family Secrets series); Author: Visit Amazon's Sara Blaedel Page; Review: Two murders, one old, one new, take place in The Undertakers Daughter so this is clearly a crime novel, and they are unsolved at the beginning and solved at the end, so it is also a novel of detection. But the books protagonist, Ilka Jensen, doesnt so much detect as be witness to the detecting, and this fine novel is more about her actions and her mindset than it is about the act of detecting. The detecting is almost incidental to what is central to the novel, which is the slow unfolding of character. The very appealing protagonist, Ilka Nichols Jensen, has the potential to change what she is. Plunge her into a new world with new demands and watch her what happens thats what this novel is about at its heart. The change is enormous: from Copenhagen, Denmark, to Racine, Wisconsin. Copenhagen has 763,000 people, Racine 78,000. Everyone in Racine seems to know everyone else, either directly or at one or two removes. Ilka, forty years old, widowed and tall as her Viking forebears, is almost wholly out of her comfort zone. Speaking English isn't the problem. Her father, who abandoned mother and child and fled to America when Ilka was seven, spoke English and Ilka does too, fluently though with a slight accent. She hasn't heard a word from her father in thirty-three years, and now she learns that (hes died, (2) he had another family in Racine, a wife and two daughters, (3) he owned a funeral parlor there, and (4) hes left it to Ilka in his will. Ilka signs a paper without reading and finds shes now sole owner of the business and liable for its numerous and pressing debts. Shes stuck until she can at least unload it. The business comes with two employees, kind of. Artie is an artist: he fixes up the dead peoples faces and bodies so they look good again for their mourners. Sister Eileen is a nun: she works there without recompense other than her lodging and food, and helps out with arrangements and settling down the clients. A dead body is brought in. The man has beaten savagely, his features almost destroyed. Its murder but more than murder. Someone hated this man and they took their hatred out on his dead body. The body is identified at last. Seventeen years earlier, a never proved he committed it but everyone assumed he did. His flight confirmed it. But as the story unravels, it gets complicated. Someone paid him to leave. Why? And there was a suicide some time after that seems connected to the murder, but how, and why? The solving of these mysteries continues wrapped around the story of Ilkas growth into her new life. She has to learn quickly. her father was a funeral director even when she knew him back in Denmark but she has no experience in the field and aside from the day to days issues of running a business whose clients are emotionally wrought when she deals with them, there is the matter of the; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Poison Dark and Drowning (Kingdom on Fire, Book Two); Author: Visit Amazon's Jessica Cluess Page; Review: Im not a great lover of sequels that aren't even endings of series of books, but this one, book two of the Kingdom on Fire fantasy series, works. True, a lot is left unresolved. All the big challenges are still ahead and its irritating no, frustratingat times to follow the references events in book one. Still, this book works even on its own, and thats because Cluess has a coherent vision of the world she creates, the actors who play in it and the dire challenges her heroine faces. In book one, Henrietta Howel, the first woman sorceress in ages, seemed to fulfill the prophesy of the Promised One, sent to save who England from the ravages of the dread Ancients. She wasn't the Promised One, but apparently own through anyhow. Even worse, she wasn't all sorceress but a mixture of sorceress and magician, and not long before, England had burned all the magicians it could find at the stake. So being a magician is not a plus. The Ancients are still out there, in particular her nemesis, Rhlem, the Skinned Man, who drips blood from all over his body when he appears. Rhlem wants her, its not clear why, and is killing and maiming people right and left to pressure the English government to hand Henrietta over to him, with who knows what horrors to follow. Theres warfare, a rapidly dwindling army of sorcerers facing a seemingly unbounded set of monsters. Theres a subplot involving sorcerers and magicians. The Fae (faeries) are involved. (A great scene involving Queen Mab, alluring on the surface and chillingly scary underneath.) Theres a love story maybe two. And a good heroine. The New York Times invoked the Harry Potter series in its review of the first volume of this series but I don't think its a good comparison. Theres none of the twee quality in this book that I felt weakened the Potter books. Theres more muscle in this book. Think Philip Pullmans steely and gripping His Dark Materials trilogy. Thats more like it. This book ends with many more challenges ahead but I left reading it wanting to read more.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Evaporation of Sofi Snow; Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Weber Page; Review: This YA sci fi novel is hyped as a successor to Enders Game, The Blade Runner, and The Hunger Games, but it isn't any of those things. Instead, although it starts strong enough, its a confused novel one of two or three, but neither strong enough on its own to sustain interest nor pressing enough to make you want to read volume two when it comes out. It almost makes but never does. There are nice touches in the book but its flabby over all. Dystopic visions like this, dystopic need to be crystalline hard to have effect where this book compromises at too many points. Plot? Earth loses half its population and more than half its natural resources in World War III. World War IV is even worse. At the end of it, miraculously, the alien Delonese, appear in the heavens, out beyond the moon. They live on a small ice planet and offer earthlings cornucopia of goods and services, which salvage our ravaged planet. Nation states have failed. After WWIV, corporations take over the providers of genetically enhanced goodies, food, medicines, technology, media. The world is run by thirty corporations and ordinary people are kept happy with televised games, Fantasy Fighting viewers even get to vote to decide where and how the gamers compete zombies clawing up from the earth, monstrous traps which maim and kill unwary competitors, an entire battle waged under sea level. Sofi, 17, and brother Shiloh, 12, play in the games, Shiloh in the stadium and Sofi leading a tram of computer geeks in backing him up. Theres a catastrophe. Sofi survives but Shiloh is gone. She sees him being wheeled out of the arena on a med cart, led off by Delonese whatever they are. She seta about finding him and heres where the novel goes seriously off the rails, with fuzzy plotting, weak character building, and an inconclusive ending that points toward volume two but doesnt make me want to follow it. There are cute touches in this novel, though not as many as there should be, but where it should fizz, it flops. There are a lot better YA books out there than this one.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Outer Cape: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Patrick Dacey Page; Review: Four characters. A husband. Hard, driving, easily lured into fantasies of wealth acquired without much effort, not overly deterred by moral considerations. His wife. She thought shed be an artist but she never put in the work to become one and shes frustrated with her marriage and life, even her children. Growing old is a challenge shes not handling well, the love handles, an uncertain future. There are two boys. The one, Nathan, is bigger and stronger than the kids around him. Hed planned on going to college on a football scholarship but a last minute injury ended all that. He ended up in Iraq, then Afghanistan. Ten years. And now he lives on mood altering meds and pain killers. Out of the service, hes become a drifter. The other son, Anthony, is in finance. Hes well off but nothing has quite worked out in his life either. Around the middle of the novel, his marriage tanks for good: their sex has never been as good as it was before they became one couple and they don't talk to each other any more. Starting in the 70s and extending into this new century, this is a novel about the rotting away of hope, the attenuation of connection between mates once joined together but no longer so. Disaffection starts early: Is it me, or is your rump getting a little bigger? says Robert to Irene. Soon hes involved in real estate scams. Not too much later, their marriage folds and Robert leaves for good. Later, he goes to prison. Even when he comes out, an electronic monitor clamped around his ankle, hes pursuing his wildcat schemes. He even tries to persuade Anthony, successful but unhappy Anthony, to invest in one of them. By the end of the book, the mother has died and one son is gone for good but hey! two out of four coming out okay isn't a bad a success rate in middle class American life nowadays! This is Daceys second published book and his first published novel. Its a compliment to say that it doesnt suffer by comparison to the novels of Richard Yates.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: An Echo of Murder: A William Monk Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Anne Perry Page; Review: Across two long and still growing series of novels, about detectives Thomas Pitt and William Monk, Perry has used the business of crime to write about the serious social issues that affected Victorian England. In style and form, her books, always well plotted and narrated, are a modern style redaction of the early great detective novels of authors like Wilkie Collins or novels of manners and character like those of Trollope. Theyre a lot shorter in length than their forebears and the depictions of women in them much more nuanced and understanding, but if Dickens had been a twenty-first-century woman novelist, rather than a nineteenth-century man, he would have sympathized with her viewpoint and her characters. And maybe its Dickens shes most like as a writer the same venue (mostly London), the same range of characters, the same use of local color, and the same use of fiction to expose social and moral- wrongs. Another similarity, which is all to the good neither author flogs the reader over the head with these issues: they just expose themselves over the course of a colorful story. Writing in the Victorian mode also allows the writer a good deal of leeway in exotica: the stories can veer toward the outré or fantastic without breaking wholly with realism. (When you read a novel like this, you realize how much youve missed this kind of storytelling.) For those new to the William Monk series, Monk is or was- a private detective. He woke up one day remembering nothing about his past life. Over several novels, Perry has described his pursuit of knowledge about his past life. He finally got enough but what he learned most of all was that he no longer wanted to be the kind of person he was before he became amnesiac. Among the way, he met, became enamored of, and married Hester, a nurse who had worked at Florence Nightingales side in the Crimean War. She has her own troubled memories of a ghastly, savage war for which the British were totally unprepared, emotionally and physically. Hester is involved at Monks side in this book as in others but is not as constant a player. Monk now heads the Thames River Police. Being a policeman of any kind is somewhat non-U in Monks and Hesters England, but he bears the title of Commander Monk now, and is a properly respectable Englishman. The case this time involves a dead Hungarian, one of a small but growing community of emigres from that troubled country from mid-century on (think, Revolutions of 1848). The man is not only dead, brutally stabbed, but his body is surrounded by candles, seventeen in all. Is his murder a cult activity or was he killed by someone resentful of the presence of these foreigners in London? More murders follow. Parts of the plot stretch coincidence more than one would usually be comfortable with, but it works in this setting and style. The result is good detecting, ending in a last-minute unveiling of dark truths in a courtroom. Along the way, subtle; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times; Author: Visit Amazon's James L. Kugel Page; Review: From a New York Times article about Kugel, dated February 11, 2011: "In the ancient world, Kugel says, to become aware of God meant grasping the eerie proximity of this terrifying presence, as if God were waiting for you on the other side of a curtain. If you wanted to see him on the rare occasions when he crossed over, you had to undergo a sudden, radical shift in perspective." I had read Biblical scholar Kugels award winning The Bible As It Was (originally 1997) and found it fascinating --convincing! So when the opportunity came up to review this book, I jumped at it. Kugel (How to Read the Bible, 2007) is emeritus professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard and currently chair of the Institute for the History of the Jewish Bible at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Kugels newest book is an elaboration of comment he made in an interview with Michael Orbach, James Kugel: Professor of Disbelief, in Moment, 2014 March/April: "Theres a gap between the last pages of the Tanakh [Bible] and the first texts of our rabbis, Kugel explains. So much of what we think about the Bible is really dependent not on the Bible but what these ancient interpreters said. I tried to highlight that they were as important to Jews as they were to Christians." ( [url]/) So much for background. Kugel is an Orthodox Jew who believes the Bible must be accepted as absolute, with no wavering. But he is also a literary and Biblical scholar who persists in the enterprise of digging out how Biblical (Old Testament) messages were conceived and written down and how perceptions of God, our relationship to him, etc., etc., have changed over time. As a scholar, he is acutely aware that the Bible wasn't handed down unedited and inspired by God but that it was written by men over long periods of time, with consequent modifications, second thoughts, and reversals of judgment or commandment. Thats what this book is about: how over decades and centuries, the unknown authors of the books of the Old Testament modified their take on the critical questions of 1. how God communicates with us, 2. Do we perceive reality differently than we did early on, and what are we then as psychological/social entities, and 3. related religious matters of importance, such as: Where is God located? When did God become the One God and Only God, and why? What do angels do and why? Why the emphasis on the written and rules later in Biblical writing? What happened to all the prophets from earlier times? Why don't we have prophets now?)? (Or do we?) When and why did the concept of the soul appear in the Old Testament? When and why did praying become important, as opposed to priests praying for us in the temple? Kugel comes well armed to address these questions, and other like them. He is not only an exceptionally astute reader of texts Biblical and extra-Biblical, but from the period when the Biblical texts were written and canonized. He also; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Silencer; Author: Visit Amazon's Marcus Wicker Page; Review: If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least theyll see the black. Thats Chris Marker (Sans Soleil) quoted as epigraph in Claudia Rankines Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). No amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived Rankine again. Heres Wicker: Sometimes, I can barely walk / out into daylight wearing a cotton sweatshirt / without trembling & surely I don't have to / tell you who gets put down, which one walks away. If you're black, it doesnt matter if youve made it. Youre still black and black is back. Slights befall at unexpected moments, until you internalize that slights will always be there for you. The moments of relief are when they just don't get expressed openly. The success youve earned feels provisional. You excelled in college, gained tenure at a college or university, but thats because of Affirmative Action, not because you're you. A sales clerk looks surprised when you show up in person and are black, not white. Wicker ends another poem, ruing: Im sorry. No, friends. / None of us is safe. I have reservations about much of Wickers poetizing in this book: he has the technique down but I feel many of the poems end up fragments, not whole, and I wish there was a stronger linear thrust to them. But when he hits, hes good. Like this, from a poem on turning thirty-one. He writes it to Tupac Shakur, the brilliant and charismatic rapper who only made it to twenty-five: Dear Pac, / I know I don't see / what you see. But I read the internet / & history. Stand at rallies, weep / openly. I metabolize rage, / almost all of the time. This collection is about the cost of racism to all of us but especially to its victims: the slurs, ignorings and stereotypings that replace being perceived as one is and has become by ones own efforts. By any reasonable standard, Wicker has achieved the American Dream. Hes got tenure at a respectable school and edits a poetry review. He has a mortgage on a house in the suburbs, he cooks grass-fed ribs in Guinness on his backyard grill. But hes still black and as he points to in one of his poems (one I think works only intermittently), even Harvard professor of history Henry Louis Gates, by most standards deserving of being a national icon for his achievements, can be assaulted by police for the simple act of trying to unlock the door to his own house.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dunbar: William Shakespeare's King Lear Retold: A Novel (Hogarth Shakespeare); Author: Visit Amazon's Edward St. Aubyn Page; Review: If any novelist around today should be prepared to write about dysfunctional families, its Edward St Aubyn. His father raped him repeatedly between the ages of five and eight and he has made his career writing about filthy rich dysfunctional families, notably in his series of five novels about Patrick Melrose (Mothers Milk was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006.) Now he takes on Lear, the grandest and darkest of Shakespeares doomed protagonists. (I almost wrote heroes, but though Lears behavior has heroic elements, he was hardly a hero in any sense.) Lets deal with the Shakespeare tag first. Its unfair to the novelists who are rewriting these great dramas for twenty-first century audiences to see them as rewriting Shakespeare. Theyre not. They cant. Shakespeares been here and gone, so move on with it! Theyre just mining his plots. Agreed, they're some of the most expansive plots in the history of western literature. But plots like character outlinesare the easiest parts to lift from Shakespeare. The rest of it, what makes Shakespeares works so ineffably enduring, is not: it doesnt translate so readily. The result is that even in the rewritings in the Hogarth series that worked for me Atwoods Tempest, Tylers Shrew- the authors substituted household drama for Grand Drama, the Bards cosmic world as encased in human skulls. In Dunbar, St Aubyn has written a thoroughly respectable novel about an absolutely horrible media magnate (think Rupert Murdoch on steroids) who has gotten his comeuppance from his equally, maybe more horrible younger daughters, who by a combination of illegal drugging and legal jiggery pokery, have confined him in an uplands mental institution so they can take over his media empire and loot it for their own gain. When, Dunbar escapes, they go after him. They have to because hes the only one who can upset their carefully balanced apple cart. Dunbar is accompanied on his flight by Peter, who is the Fool figure of the book, an alcoholic loony ex-TV comic, who is early done away with (as by inference is Lears Fool in the play). Most of the other characters in Shakespeares play are in St Aubyns novel too. Florence, the younger daughter whom Dunbar wronged and now wishes he hadnt, flies in to rescue her father but is done the dirty by her half-sisters, just as Cordelia was by Regan and Goneril in the original. There isn't an Edmund here but other lowlifes and freaks make up for his absence. Theres even a Tom OBedlam counterpart, though he doesnt have much to do except provide color. In general, St Aubyn is weakest when it comes to plot. Its too over the top. Somehow hyperbole works in the hypercharged world of Shakespeares Lear. It doesnt here. St Aubyn does a good job of conveying the terrors inside Dunbars mind as he struggles to come back from insanity but again, it only serves to make this tale a twenty-first century psycho-comedy of manners, ho hum, and not the great elemental drama of retribution and redemption (of sorts) that is; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Is Science Racist? (Debating Race); Author: Visit Amazon's Jonathan Marks Page; Review: When I accepted this small book for review, I didn't expect much from it. The tittle struck me as reductionist and from what I could glean from the liner notes, I suspected the topic might be too limited to live up to the grand sweep of the title. I was wrong. Its a good book, tightly organized and well focused and argued. Marks is a professor of anthropology (Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte). He has written previously on this subject (What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee, 2002) and on the uses and limits of science in general (Why I Am Not a Scientist, 2009). He isn't hyperbolic at all and in the context of his argument, the title Is Science Racist?makes sense. The book is about the ways in which scientific arguments about race, a scientifically indeterminate concept, have been promoted to justify discrimination not just a century ago but now. (In this respect, he dissects Herrnsteins and Murrays The Bell Curve, the classic experiment of psychologist J. Philippe Rushton as reported a New York Times op-ed [April 11, 2014], the hereditarian pronouncements of DNA co-discoverer James Watson [Edward O. Wilson called Watson the Caligula of biology], two papers in Science 2005 on brain research, Nicholas Wades A Troublesome Inheritance.) Racialist ideas, writes Marks, took root in scientific terminology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Linnaeus reified them in his subjective typologizing of racial differences. Post-Darwin, the wording changed but the invidious comparing of races did not. It was still easy to assert racialist notions as part of the baggage of legitimate science. Well into the twentieth century, eugenics kept these ideas in the forefront of scientific research. Marks differentiates between racialist notions, which are empirically dubious, and racist assertions, which are morally evil. The problem is that the one enables the other. Bad science, once out, endures even refutation. He takes up the issue of IQ differences across populations. Once you find that Koreans test better here in the States, where they are of equal status with other residents, than in Japan, where they are not, its easy to see how differences in IQ results between American whites and blacks could equally be caused by culture and history, with no recourse to genetic difference. There is a longish section on the misuses and abuses of physical anthropology. Although Marks doesnt cite him, I was reminded of Carl Sagans destruction of the idea that skull size could serve as a proxy for brain size in his 1986 Brocas Brain. The best chapter in the book is on how science reified the idea of race, and what is erroneous with race as a viable scientific category to begin with. Genetics doesnt support the idea of race. Humans don't come partitioned. Genetic differences tend to reflect geographic separation more than racial difference. Within any one group, variation differenceis more pronounced than similarities. Race is a spurious variable, a cultural construct taken over and assumed to be biological but not. But when it is taken as a given, and with it the possibility; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: How to Behave in a Crowd: A Novel; Author: Camille Bordas; Review: This novel is a pleasure from start to finish, with a closing that captures the mood and direction of the narrative in one elegant descriptive sentence. If you have read through this book, not drifting in and out and losing track of what is being written, it will make you draw in a breath when you read it. Youll want to say, Yes, thats it, thats what this story is all about. The narrator is a young boy, Isidore Mazal, French and though not wealthy, privileged, eleven years old at the start, the youngest of six siblings. His father is distant, his mother loving but neither of them, nor, for that matter, any of Dorys five older siblings, understand him. For starters, hes the only child in the family who is progressing through school at the normal rate. Hes got two sisters and a brother, all on track to complete their doctorates by the age of twenty-eight. His other brother spends all his time, when hes not performing with symphony orchestras, writing his own music on his computer, and Simone, the sister closest in age to him eighteen months olderisnt two grades ahead of him in school but five: shes already decided to be a novelist, although about what she doesnt know yet, and she has enlisted to take notes about her and write her biography because later but not much later, everyone will want to know about her. In short, Dory is the youngest child in a nest of wunderkinder, and because hes different from them, its hard for them to see what is so special about him. It has to do with social intelligence. They don't have any of it and he has lots, a surplus of it actually. So when something bad happens in the family, hes the one who handles it best. He becomes a sanctuary for siblings and parent who cant bring their own grief into the open and in the process he grows up a little. Dory is the narrator of his own tale: his quizzical take on the weird wanderings of people even less aware of what they're feeling and doing than him is delightfully expressed and his efforts to help the people around him is admirable. Hes even pretty good at figuring out whats going on inside himself. Sad things happen in this novel one that is simply awful- but the tone of the novel isn't sad. Nor is it elegiac. This isn't a novel about a genius (emotional intelligence variety) in the making. Its just lovely, human, not vainglorious Dory feeling his way along the bumpy road of Life. (By the way, its not only Dory I liked in this book. I liked all the siblings. The mother is more of a cipher but I liked her too. Theyre human. The last time I checked, so are we.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Disappeared; Author: Visit Amazon's Francisco X. Stork Page; Review: This Young Adult novel is pegged for ages twelve and up but is probably best suited for the up end o because of the harshness of its theme, which is how corruption spreads, drawing in even those who want to lead good lives, in a lawless society like Juarez, Mexico. In alternating chapters, it follows a sister and a brother, Sara and Emiliano Zapata. Their father is gone, across the border and divorced now from Mami. Mami understands why he had to leave she wouldnt leave Juarez and there was nothing for him. Sara has accepted it but Emiliano has not. He acted out when the divorce papers came, was arrested but was saved by a priest, brother Patricio, who recruited him to a Boy Scout-like group called the Jiparis. The Jiparis thing is hiking the desert and climbing the mountains near the US-Mexico border. Emiliano is still in high school. Hes a soccer star there but that won't earn money when he graduates at the end of this year. He needs to find a way to support his family, Mami and Sara, and its hard to find a way thats honest. Saras best friend Linda was abducted four months ago. Sara reports for a newspaper in Juarez, El Sol. She writes about Linda and before long has a column in the paper where she writes about other desaparecidas in Juarez, dozens of them every year. Shes been threatened before but now she receives a threat specifically aimed at her and her family. Somethings happened: the stakes have increased, but how? and why this threat against her? Sara starts digging. Meanwhile Emiliano gains a girlfriend, Perla Rubi, from a well to do lawyer family in Juarez. But wooing her comes at a cost: Emiliano will have to bend (really break) his principles to win her. Here we have the two narrative tracks of the novel: Saras efforts to find her lost friend and increasing pressure against her to shut her down, Emilianos attempts to negotiate the thin line between adhering to his moral standards and the subtle but intense pressure on him to jettison them in favor of an easier, infinitely more profitable life. Given the location, you know narcotics are involved. There are corrupt cops, other people corrupted as well, even a death squad. The book ends in a desperate chase across the desert. Sara sticks to her principles. Emiliano is forced to a decision about his. The book is well written. Extreme things happen in the novel but they are things that actually do happen there. Nothing is exaggerated or hyperbolic. Sara, Emiliano, Mami, father Patricio, many others are presented as good people. The bad people don't seem to have been created monsters. Harsh reality and the seductions of money and power simply led them that way.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Light It Up (A Peter Ash Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Nick Petrie Page; Review: This is the third novel featuring ex-vet and still warrior Peter Ash and theres no letup in quality. This is a very good series. The characters, both good and bad, grab your attention, the plotting is tight and the action, when it occurs, happens fast and is graphic and intense. Ash is something like Lee Childs Jack Reacher as action hero, a point Child makes in a promotional note on the book cover, but hes not at all a clone of Reacher. Ash came back from his tours in the Middle East with a bad case of PTSD: inside a building, any building, he feels white static build up inside his head. It leaves him near-petrified so he lives outside as much as possible, even to eating and sleeping outside. In the last book, he met a woman her name is June. Hes in love with her and she seems to be in love with him too but she told him to leave her alone until he got normal -- when he could sleep and make love inside her house, shed consider him. June shows up in this novel too, as does another old friend named Lewis, who was or maybe is still a dangerous hoodlum but is always there to help Peter when he needs help, whether legal aid or a second gun. (The lawyer he hires, the gun[s] he brings along with him to Peters side.) Once you meet June, youll get why Peter fell for her. June is Ash, minus the soldiering experience, the specialized skills and the PTSD, but she, like he, is tough inside, always says what she means and once she commits to a man, she stays committed. Oh! Did I add that shes ingenious too? Its because of her that Ash (and her) are alive at the end of this escapade. The other thing Ash discovered overseas is what he is: hes a hunter, a soldier, and hes not afraid to kill if killing is needed. He doesnt kill for kicks. But if killing is needed, he doesnt hesitate. And since hes good at it, and at fighting, tracking, you name it, he makes a satisfying action hero to follow. Ash seems bigger than life but also real hes possible to be even if most of us aren't him. In this respect, he is indeed much like Jack Reacher. At the start, its about the disappearance of the owner and an employee of a marijuana business in Colorado, where growing and selling pot is legit. The problem is that while selling and buying marijuana for medicinal purposes is legal in the state, it isn't at the federal level, so any bank that gets involved in a transaction is liable to big federal penalties. All transactions are cash. Eventually, when the cash builds up, someone has to move it to a safe place (not a bank). That is Ashs first assignment. He signs on to help guard the cash in transit but things don't end up well. The truck, with Ash and three others in it,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Nine-Tailed Fox (A Sergeants Sueo and Bascom Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Martin Limon Page; Review: There are two things you need to know about Martin Limon. First, he loves his Korea. So does George Sueno, the Army CID sergeant who narrates these mysteries and is the only one in his unit who bothered learning the language. The attitude of the others? Why bother when you can hire a master story teller. The second thing you need to know? Limon is a really good story teller. This is the twelfth novel in this series about sergeants George Sueno and Ernie Bascom, investigators in the US Army CID, based in Seoul, South Korea, toward the tail end of the 70s. George is a thinker, he reads, in a different world he might have become a college professor. Ernie just acts. Between capers, they both do what grunts everywhere have always done to kill the stupidity of their job: eat and drink, get in fights, chase women (Ernie with exceptional success), grouse about their bosses. They complement each other as detectives: Georges calmer, more analytic approach and Ernies combativeness, his impetuosity and openly expressed disdain for higher authority. When they're investigating a case, they cut corners a lot. Often, they don't know what they're doing other than to stir the waters to see if anything surfaces. Their method works but its a bit chaotic en route. Three GIs have gone missing. The brass want them back, or at least to find out what happened to them it doesnt look good on performance records to lose soldiers without explanation. Theres no apparent connection among the cases. The soldiers didn't come from the same base or do the same job and It doesnt look like they went AWOL. Thereve been no ransom demands. The only thing they have in common is that they all disappeared off base, on visits to in the ville where non-coms go to let off steam. One was last seen leaving a bar with an elegantly dressed lady, probably Chinese but no one knows her. She had a car and a driver with her and the drivers face was hideously scarred. The GI, woman and driver disappeared into the night. No one has seen them since. George is told that the mystery woman might be a gummy whore, which is GI-ese for gumijo, a mythical creature in Korean legend, a woman who used to be a fox and seduces men, then reaches down inside them and tears out and eats their livers. Sueno doesnt put any credence in the legend but they need to find out who this woman she really is and if she has anything to do with the three GIs disappearances. The investigation heats up and by the time its over, George and Ernie are working with a senior Korean police official named Mr. Kill they first encountered him in the 2011 book, Mr. Kill-- and the investigation has come to entail much more than three missing GIs. Their investigation is sidelined time and again when superiors order George and Ernie to take on other tasks. George and Ernie are way down the feeding chain; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century; Author: Visit Amazon's Timothy Snyder Page; Review: The lessons listed in Snyders books are good ones --1. Do not obey in advance. 2. Defend institutions.-- and are backed by the authors solid knowledge of twentieth century history, in particular what happened in central and eastern Europe as tyrants assaulted and undermined confidence in democracy. The advice is good and the illustrations trenchant. (History does not repeat, Snyder writes, but it does instruct.) The emphasis changes, or sharpens, in mid-book: more generalized observations about democracy and tyranny focus on Trump and our current administration. Snyder has deliberately made this book small: it runs 126 pages with 117 pages of text. The book is small enough that you can comfortably hold it in one hand, and inexpensive enough that no one has an excuse not to buy it. In our polarized political environment, a large segment of the reading public will dismiss this book out of hand as liberal propaganda. They shouldnt. It offers sage counsel for a troubled time. I particularly like lesson 10, which reads: Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding light.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Stiletto: A Novel (The Rook Files); Author: Visit Amazon's Daniel O'Malley Page; Review: Mash together James Bond and the Marx Brothers and you come close to Daniel OMalleys Stiletto, five hundred pages of mayhem, skullduggery and prat falls, the humor as well as the mayhem delivered in impeccable comic deadpan. This is the second novel to feature agent Myfanwy (rhymes with Tiffany) Thomas, who works for the Checquy, a very secret British agency that protect the British Isles from supernatural threats. The agents all carry chess titles. Myfanwys a Rook, pretty high up the hierarchy. That means she mostly gives orders for other people to carry out. Except it doesnt work that way. Most of the time chaos is the order of the day, not order. Myfanwy and her colleagues have to improvise and Myfanwy gets her hands dirty time again. A lot of blood flows en route. This kickass caper is about a merger: the Checquy (composed of agents with supernatural powers) is burying the (three-hundred-year-old) hatchet with another secret agency, the Grafters, which is the Checquys name for members of the Wetenschappelijk Broederschap van Natuurundigen (they have no supernatural powers but using surgery and drugs, have modified their bodies beyond belief. One of the advantages of the union for Grafters agents will be nationalized medical insurance. Someones determined to sabotage the talks between the two groups. A succession of terribly bad and then terribly badder things descend on Britain. Myfanqy, Pawn Felicity (first seen in the book clothed in urine-drenched rags its heartening what a Checquy agent will do to disguise herself on duty), and Grafter Odette, whos in England as part of the Grafter delegation, must work together to solve the mystery of whos behind these attacks and stop them. Unfortunately, Felicity and Odette loathe each other on sight thats another issue to be resolved. Along the way, there is the routine work of the Checquy to be done. Englishmen must be protected from various supernatural threats without ever knowing what is going on or thered be panic. (Politicians don't like panic. It loses them votes.) So there are cases to be dealt with: a house with missing people and tongues coming out of the walls and ceiling; a church that seems to be eating its parishioners; a behemoth that climbs out of the sea to rot away on land. (Its shape put Odette in mind of a lumpy butternut squash, if as butternut squash were several stories high and smelled like the gym socks of a lesser god.) OMalley achieves the difficult task of writing whimsy without making it at all fey. The humor is robust, the action fast and furious, the characters eccentric (and possessed of very odd powers) but human. There are laugh-out-loud moments along the way, teasing touches that lift the book high above the conventional in capers like this. A few examples will suffice. One of the Checquys Bishops is a vampire: he appears only after the sun goes down and Felicity finds his presence oddly alluring. One of the Pawns is accompanied everywhere by a cloud of butterflies circling around his head, and the body and; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Passenger; Author: Visit Amazon's Lisa Lutz Page; Review: After the first attempt to kill Tanya, her new friend (maybe) Blue gives her advice: You cant just start a fight. You have to finish it. No matter what it takes. Thats what Blue just did. Two strangers had abducted Tanya and Blue when they walked out of Blues tavern in Austin. They were headed to a convenient dropping off place to dispose of the two ladies when Tanya kicked the driver in the head and yanked the emergency brake, sending the car off an embankment and into the woods. Blue got ahold of one of the mens guns and put one in his head. Then she put two through the seat and into the drivers body, taking care of him too. Thats only forty pages into the book and three people are already dead, though the first (Tanyas husband) was an accident. Tanyas on the run because of that first death. Rather than stick around and explain that death, she fled. Shes got secrets to hide. She cant afford to be in the limelight, innocent or not. She not only fled. She changed her name, Tanya to Amelia, and got ahold of forged documents, anything to stay off the radar screen. Tanyas only the first of many names that she assumes over the course of this novel, and its not even her real name, which you don't learn until late in the novel, after many, many hellzapoppin moments. Tanya becomes Amelia. Amelia becomes Debra, then Emma, and then Sonia and then Paige, then Jo, and finally Nora. The problem is it doesnt work. All the time shes pursued. Her existence puts a very bad guy at risk and the easiest answer is to disappear her permanently. Along the way, she picks up one very dubious ally in Blue, who has her own agenda in play and obviously isn't too worried about a few deaths along the way. She also picks up a potential love interest but the problem is, the guys a sheriff, not a good combination for a woman on the urn with a dark secret in her past. She starts out green at what shes doing but picks up interesting skills and attitudes en route to this decidedly thrill-packed journey. That its also funny is a bonus but then, Lutzs trademark, demonstrated in several other crime novels, has been the comic caper. Passenger is a breakout novel for Lutz regardless of humorous moments or utterances, this novel is dark, fast and furious. Tanya isn't at all like Thomas Perrys Native American heroine Jane Whitfield (one of my favorites) but like Jane, Tanya spends the whole novel in flight, she has to rely on her quick wits and unwillingness to see her way through, and like Jane Whitfield, shes a heroine, not a hero. Its nice to see a not specially trained but awfully resourceful woman as protagonist. Lutzs specialty till now has been comic capers but I hope she continues writing in this new vein as well. This book is unputdownably good.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ragged Lake: A Frank Yakabuski Mystery; Author: Ron Corbett; Review: Corbetts debut novel is set in the Northern Divide, just over the border in Canada. The village of Ragged Lake used to be a mill town: hundreds of people cutting and processing wood. But its dead now. There are three houses with regular residents left in the entire village. The one-time hotel restaurant survives off the itinerant hunter trade. Then three people a familyare found dead in a squatters cabin outside the town. Detective Frank Yakabuski is sent west with two junior officers to investigate and what he finds unwittingly stirs u p a hornets nest of trouble and violence. By the end, Yakabuski is fighting to stay alive against a small army of biker hoods. Ragged Lake is far from a perfect thriller but its a good start toward one. Yakabuski is a realistic hero, strong and determined. His colleagues are well realized too, though their roles in this affair are much smaller. Corbett is less successful in turning the locals and the visitors to the lodge into real people but he tries and the bad guys are, well, bad, and realistic enough for what they do in this book. A strength is Corbetts transparent love for place: the descriptions of the terrain, the effect of the seasons, a fierce snowstorm followed by another one, are good real writing, and deserving of praise. And there is real tension and real moments of violence in the book. The book is weakened by two things. First is the over long, over lyrical (for part of it) interjection of a discovered journal written by the dead woman in the squatters cabin and hidden and not discovered by the villains. Corbett uses it to expound the backplot to that murder but whenever he stops the present action to introduce the journal, momentum dies. The second weakness is that not all of the plot twists emerge inevitably from what has already been described, and one of them explains one of the two mysteries being followed in the novel. Still, I enjoyed this novel. I wanted to keep reading, see what happened next. Corbett has something to offer. I look forward to his next book.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Heart's Invisible Furies; Author: Visit Amazon's John Boyne Page; Review: The Hearts Invisible Furies received positive reviews in the United Kingdom when first published there in 2016, and for good reason. Its a (very) good book thats almost a great one, great along the lines of a book like Dickenss Oliver Twist, with which there are points of comparison. (Ill come back to that later.) Boyne is Irish and gay and this isn't his first work of fiction, its his sixteenth (preceded by nine other adult novels, five for younger readers, a collection of short stories). Hes won prizes for his fiction, been awarded an honorary doctorate, and two of his novels (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and The Telegram Man) were made into movies. This is his first novel to be set in his home country, though. As he explained in an interview for The Guardian, he didn't want to write about [his] own country until [he] had a story to tell. And what a story it is! The protagonist and narrator, Cyril Avery, Dublin born and bred, relates his life, birth to approaching death, sixty-three years in all, told in segments at seven-year intervals along the way. His mother was kicked out of home, church and town by a mean-spirited woman-hating priest (a type with which Boyne has had his own familiarity). It isn't until years later that it was discovered that the priest who could not tolerate promiscuity had his own offspring, by two different women hidden away in two neighboring towns. The mother moves to Dublin to earn her living. She doesnt abandon her baby but she does give him up for adoption. The baby is raised by two of the oddest adopted parents one could imagine. Hes not allowed to call them mother and father or to say hes their child. Hes their adopted child he has to use the word when he talks to or about themand though they don't treat him badly, its an arrangement he knows will end when hes old enough to fend for himself. Maude, the adoptive mother, is a novelist she writes excruciatingly detailed, well, you cant call them miniatures because they're way too long for that, more like books by Ivy Compton-Burnett, books she means not so much to be read as written, and the slightest sign of notoriety makes her livid. After she dies, she becomes immensely popular, which makes it all the more comical. Reading her books is de rigeur in serious literature study; her face is one of four Irish authors emblazoned on a commemorative tea towel, along with Yeats and I forget the other two (pick from Wilde, Shaw, an embezzler who ruins his career in banking not once but twice with stays in prison. Charles, the adoptive father, screws up twice embezzlement and generalized jiggerey pokery, plus a lot of random sexand goes to prison not once, but twice in his otherwise privileged life. Neither pays much attention to Cyril but neither is cruel or repressive of him. Cyril is gay. You learn that early in the text. The UK wasn't a good place; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Incredible Magic of Being; Author: Visit Amazon's Kathryn Erskine Page; Review: Reading this delightful froth of a book, its easy to see why author Erskine has won a National Book Award (for her 2010 book, Mockingbird). Its harder to see who is the audience for this book, because delightful or not, its hero is too young to appeal to the older Young Adult audience (junior high and high school) and the writing may be too sophisticated for younger readers. Well, maybe not, because Julian, aged eight (Im relying on memory here I cant find the reference in the book) is an awfully engaging hero. Hes an interesting amalgam of young nave and smart perceptive. He doesnt always understand what he hears or sees but he never fails to observe it. The other characters in the book Julians fourteen-year-old sister Pookie, who somehow turned from a confidant and an ally into a monster, perpetually boiling with irritation at everyone and anything in the family; his over-attentive, over-worrying mother (Julian has a health problem, a big one, and she never forgets it) , formerly a doctor but now moving to Maine to ease stress on Julian (stress can kill him); moms mate, Julians second mother Joan, whos an EMT and the only breadwinner in the family until she and mom get their bed and breakfast operation off the ground; and their curmudgeon neighbor, old Mr. X (Julians name for him he cant handle his neighbors long Italian last name).The plot is simple: Mr. X is suing them to take down the addition to their new house in Maine, but thats where the B&B beds are located. Julian goes to talk to him and they became, over time and some minor mishaps, friends of sorts. The scale is small and personal in this tale of neighbors working out of their differences and brother, sister and both mothers remembering what ties them together. Julian is a lively narrator: throughout Julian, an astronomy nut, sprinkles the narrative with Facts and Random Thoughts its an acronym, which is how Julian refers to itabout stars, people and things. I liked all these people, the plot just sped along, and Julian is a delightful (sometimes insightful) narrator. Theres a lot of love in this book but it never gets soupy, and I liked that too.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fools' River (A Poke Rafferty Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Timothy Hallinan Page; Review: I have read other books by Hallinan but none in this series, which now number eight. Theyve all gotten good reviews and so should this one because its good, quite good, and the setting, Bangkok, and the players make it stand out among other crime novels. The lead character, Poke Rafferty, isn't so much a detective as he is a determined pursuer, and he knows enough players in Bangkok in vice and crime ridden Bangkok to bull his way through the obstacles to finding out what he needs to know in order to do right. Poke is an appealing hero: hes an itinerant travel writer --one bookbut has settled in Bangkok to raise a family. His wife Rose is a former go-go dancer. Shes pregnant now and hes driving her batty with his constant hovering over her. Their adopted daughter Miaow is as former street urchin. What she wants now is to be, well, shes not certain but maybe an actress. She knows the next role she wants at the local acting school. Theyre doing Shaws Pygmalion, but speaking cockney is a big step for a girl who a few years back spoke only pidgin English. Shes got a friend who has the acting bug big --she/he is Lutanh, a katoey, a boy-girl, boy by birth, girl by nature. Hallinans sympathetic treatment of her is one of the many good notes in this good story. The exotica is heavy in this crime thriller but the basic story is simple. A young mans father, a rich sex-pat who has come to Bangkok for its seamier pleasures, has vanished with no notice. Now someone is looting his checking account and maxing out his credit cards. Its not the first time its happened, and all fourteen or so other times (except one), the next time the missing party appeared, it was dead face down in a Bangkok canal. But in Thailand, cops are paid so little they either have to work multiple jobs or take bribes. Even if they're not complicit in a crime, solving it is way down their list of priorities. So Poke, assisted by a few good cops and with the off again on again help of ex-pat bar stool sitters and the only man who managed to escape these kidnappers, sets out to find where the missing father is being held. He has to do it fast: if the past is any indication, the missing man may be dead in forty-eight hours if Poke doesnt find him. From then on, all sorts of things happen. Its hard not to find appealing a novel where people congregate in a neighborhood called Soi Cowboy, do their drinking at an ex-pat bar named Leon & Toots and go to the This or That Bar to scope out the girlies, but this novel is a serious action thriller, not a comic one. It could stand on its own even if Hallinan had set it in Pocatello, Idaho (pop. 54,000 and change).; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Whispers Through a Megaphone; Author: Visit Amazon's Rachel Elliott Page; Review: This novel is exceptional for all the ordinary reasons a novel is typically exceptional: quality of prose, sharpness of description, appealing characters, and it goer somewhere and gets there by the end, more or less. But its also because of its scope, which is deliberately modest modest, not miniaturishand because it is so human. Its about two lonely people striving to be normal again and how meeting each other helps them. Its not a romance although theres a hint that romance might be coming later, much later on, and not with the other character. Its a novel about friendship and how it helps us to heal damage. Miriam hasn't left her house in three years. She knows she has to do it sometime but the trauma she endured at the hands of a mad mother have taken away her sense of self. She doesnt talk, she whispers. She learned long ago that avoiding attention meant minimizing abuse so now she can barely be heard when she says something. Ralph? Well, he got married, had two kids, but his wife doesnt love him, she owns him, and because of that, tolerates his presence. Finally it goes too far. He leaves, just walks out the door in the middle of a birthday party for him he didn't want and had no say in. He ends up camping under a tree in the park. Then Miriam and he get together very tentatively at first but eventually, they're friends. Elliott is a very good writer. Shes witty but doesnt overdo it, reserving wit for the places where it illuminates the twisted dynamics of Miriams and Ralphs increasingly barren lives. Heres her description of one aspect of Ralphs dreadful wife, Sadie: "His wife was oblivious to her own snobbery. Ralph blamed this on her parents, a lecturer and mathematician who discussed current affairs, played the banjo and made home-made pesto, all at the same time. They were brilliant, quick, sarcastic. They lived in France and never visited. No child could ever emerge from their narcissism without hating herself, and Sadie had converted her self-loathing into something more tolerable: snobbery." And heres Miriam: "She is a doll inside a doll. Pull a string on the outer doll and nothing happens. Pull a string on the inner doll and she speaks. Trouble is, no one can hear the inner doll. No one knows shes there. " Ralph feels as though something had been stolen that he couldn't describe. Rachel is terrified of impersonating her mother and getting locked inside it. The wonder is that this tale of two broken individuals coming together isn't at all sad, although there are sad moments in it. Its joyous, positive and ultimately salvational for both Ralph and Miriam. Along the way, the author gets in a good dig at cell phone culture. (Sadie breaks into tears one night when her cell phone dies on her. How do you survive socially if you're not constantly tweeting?) There are some lovely secondary characters, one of whom in some future time beyond the scope of this; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Best American Essays 2017 (The Best American Series ®); Author: Visit Amazon's Leslie Jamison Page; Review: In Jason Arments Two Shallow Graves), he reflects on something that happened to him during a tour of duty in Iraq. He stood by as a Marine guarded an Iraqi bomb maker. The bomb maker was on his knees in the blistering sun, a sack over his head, wailing and sobbing as he waited for Iraqi regulars to pick him up and lead him to a place where very bad things would happen to him. The subtext of the essay is that war strips away our common humanity and leaves behind layers of guilt we often cant get of. At one point, the writer-observer talks to the Marine guarding the jihadist. I had a strange dream last night, I said. What happened? I had blood on my hands and he [the bomb maker] was there, I said . Sounds like being awake, the guard says. Whoa! In The Weight of James Baldwin, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah tells how her respect for Baldwin was reawakened by a pilgrimage to his abandoned house in France, scheduled for demolition now but still evoking its long dead occupant. Baldwin no longer struck him as solely a man who had simply conveniently fled the States for a more comfortable life abroad: "If I knew anything about being black in America it was that nothing was guaranteed, you couldn't count on anything, and all that was certain for most of us was a black death a slow death, the accumulation of insults, injuries, neglect, second-rate health care, high blood pressure, and stress, no time for self-care, no time to sigh, and, in the end, the inevitable, the erasing of memory." Elise Colette Goldback recounts her fragmented memories of childhood and sexual abuse, a pattern that continued into adulthood when she was raped by two young men. She was eighteen then and when she testified before a campus panel, she was told that she had consented to be violated. Therefore, the sex was consensual. She describes subsequent difficulties overcoming a sense of shame and worthlessness, her lack of a secure sense of self. Johns Hopkins professor Lawrence Jackson dissects the Baltimore trial of the police officers who caused the needless death of young Freddie Gray by failing to lock a handcuffed Freddie in a seat belt and then wrenching the vehicle back and forth, battering Freddie against walls and doors of the car until he died of the battering. Its also a recounting of decade after decade of neglect and exploitation of African Americans in one our countrys most violent cities. Trauma center nurse Emily Maloney writes of the vagaries and inequities of medical insurance and patient care in a monetized and fragmented health care system. Still another essay memorializes miners who have died because of inadequate safety precautions in our countrys mines. Not all of the essays are this dark but a startling number are. Its hard not to think that maybe, just maybe, we are entering another age of yellow journalism in the good sense of the epithet, an investigation that may disrupt our sense of complacency with; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Alive in Shape and Color: 17 Paintings by Great Artists and the Stories They Inspired; Author: Visit Amazon's Lawrence Block Page; Review: This theme-oriented collection of short stories, a successor to an earlier volume of stories inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper, contains color illustrations of sixteen paintings linked specifically to stories, plus a seventeenth as frontispiece. Editor and mystery writer Lawrence Block had picked it for his contribution to the anthology but then couldn't come up with a story by the deadline. He The painting is Raphael Soyers: four young women on their way to work (Office Girls, 1936). Other artists included are Norman Rockwell (twice), Renoir, Gauguin, Bosch, a Lascaux cave painting, OKeefe, Dali, Van Gogh, Balthus, Gerome, Hokusai, Rodin, Magritte, Clyfford Still, and one artist Id never come across before, Lilias Torrance Newton (Nude in the Studio, 1933). Most stories are indeed tied to a painting, either directly (as for instance, Joyce Carol Oatess take on the Bluebeard legend, tied directly to a Balthus nude of a barely pubescent young girl); or the artist or work appears in the story (Clyfford Still in Justin Scotts Blood in the Sun; Georgia OKeefe in Gail Levins After Georgia OKeefes Flower; Gauguin in Nicholas Christophers Girl with a Fan); or they serve as oblique inspiration (Joe R. Lansdales Charlie the Barber isn't about Norman Rockwells First Trip to the Beauty Shop, 1972, but its about an old-style barber). The best stories are good by any standard. In Gail Levins After Georgia OKeefes Flower, the artist is faced with an over-confident, ardently feminist interviewer who makes the mistake of pigeonholing OKeefe as a woman artist rather than as an artist, period. David Morells Orange Is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity riffs on Van Goghs insanity in a noir story that rides on the edge of H. P. Lovecraft country. Joyce Carol Oatess Les Beaux Jours is a close to perfect piece of writing think The Story of O for a barely teenage ingnue. Kristine Kathryn Ruschs Thinkers riffs on a piece of history: the Rodin statue of the Thinker outside the Cleveland Museum of Art was damaged by bombs placed there by student radicals in 1970 where are those rebels now, and what have they become? None of the stories in this collection are bad, most are good, and the best are quite good. What else could you want?; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Short Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Lee Child Page; Review: The twelve short stories collected here range in length from six pages to eighty and in time from 1974 to the present. In Second Son, Jack is thirteen. His father has been assigned to the military base in Okinawa and a young Jack and his slightly older brother Joe (15) are adjusting for the umpteenth time to a new resting place. Its one of the most interesting stories in the collection because it fills in the back history of the middle-aged nomad who inhabits the pages of the Reacher novels. The detecting part of it is adequate, no great shakes, but the part laying out Jacks character is good. The same is true of High Temperature, where a seventeen-year-old Reacher visits New York City just when the famous city-wide blackout occurs. Again, good character sketch, but pro forma plotting. Too Much Time, he first story in the collection, is the best: Reacher is detained has to deal with cops who are either lazy or outright corrupt. Many of the stories are just sketches, too short for development of plot or character, and there is a tendency throughout for quick, overly glib solutions. I find the Reacher character interesting so I enjoyed this collection but only three or four of the dozen stories merit much attention.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Bluebird, Bluebird; Author: Visit Amazon's Attica Locke Page; Review: This is Lockes fourth novel. The first three all either won or were nominated for prizes. Its easy to see why on the evidence of her fourth. Its set in East Texas, in a miniscule town named Lark. Lark is apparently a real place, though not this one, but its irrelevant because Lark isn't really a place in this book. Its a mood -an angry one, East Texan whites still resenting uppity blacks and outsiders, which means anyone not born and raised there. Blacks survive in Lark by making themselves small, unnoticed. But it doesnt always work because whites notice blacks and sometimes take advantage of them and the blacks have to take it for the most part. Thats the setting for this surface-simple interior-complicated novel about a black Texas Ranger who decided on his own to look into two murders in the nowhere town of Lark. The first is of a black man. That case is buried in no time the locals have done little investigating and reached no conclusion, even as to homicide versus suicide. After all, the dead man is black. Even worse, he was an outsider and northerners shouldnt snoop around where they don't live. The second dead person, two days later, same place, is a woman though. Shes white and a local. Her husband may be a member of the White Aryan Brotherhood, which could mean drugs and connections. Enter Darren Matthews. Hes black, from East Texas. He left the U of Chi law school to join the Rangers. Hes on probationary leave at the moment for intervening in the case of the shooting of a very nasty white racist that may or may not have been committed by an old black man who worked for Darrens family for twenty years. The racist had threatened the old mans daughter two days earlier. Darren carries a lot of baggage. His marriage is in trouble his wife has moved out. Hes drinking, way too much, beset with grief and guilt. He has reservations about the Rangers: his boss seems too concerned to keep the Brotherhood out of the mix in his cases but its the Brotherhood that controls drugs in this part of the state and theres no one more racist or more prone to battery and killing than a Brother. Darrens case starts simple but soon becomes complicated. Past history blends with present grievances as Darren tries to muddle through. The ending adds one final complication. Bluebird, Bluebird (the phrase is from a classic blues song) is an exceptional novel of detection thats really about people and place. We may not live in Lark but it doesnt let us forget this countrys tangled, oft poisoned race relations. Lockes portraits of the various players are understanding and apt: none of them, even the worst, comes across as cardboard. Lark isn't a place Id ever want to visit, much less live there, but it jolts you into remembering that, much as we might like it otherwise, we haven't moved past the days of bigotry and oppression. Locke does this without; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Denis Johnson Page; Review: This posthumous collection of short pieces by National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer finalist Denis Johnson visits terrain similar to that of his groundbreaking Jesus Son (1992). There is the same chaotic narration, mixing time, characters, incidents and moods, narrated by a bunch of losers so addled they don't even know theyve lost. The most normal narrative in this new collection is the title story, about an ad man who lives an outwardly tranquil life in San Diego, writing and designing glossy brochures, mostly for a group of western resorts where golf is played and horses take you along bridle paths. You get the tone in this understatement. The narrator looks like hes won finances and marriage good, children out of the roostbut feels hes lost. Spiritually, hes dead. He just isn't admitting it yet. The story reaches climax obliquely through a series of loosely connected musings and incidents. A conversation at a dinner party leads to people comparing the loudest and softest sounds theyve ever heard. Loudest? a wife says she doesnt love him anymore, a pounding heart in the middle of a coronary attack, a baby crying in a daughters arms, a brother with Tourette syndrome shouting out obscenities at church. The softest the conversation ends abruptly when one man volunteers his choice: it was the time a land mine took off his right leg in Afghanistan. Theyre all half-drunk: the land mine revelation leads to a bet that no one is willing to kiss his stump. A woman does it, bursts out in tears, six months later marries the guy in front of the same circle of friends. The next incident: another drunken party. A man destroys a precious painting on a dare. Flick, and the ad man muses on his life. His musings end with a description of his visit to his chiropractor: its Halloween and everyone, including the chiropractor, is costumed. Flick: a phone call from his first wife who is dying, or is it his second, Ginny or Jenny. What difference does it make? Shes dying and hes not going to call her back. A night walk in his pajamas, robe and tasseled loafers. A talk with a man on Death Row and then with his wife, who, it turns out, has lied to the inmate about everything. Picking up a cell phone on the pavement and receiving a call from its owners wife. Her husband had been carrying it when he was hit by an old woman driving a Cadillac. Talking with a weirdo painter. At the painters funeral. In New York to receive an award for a twenty-year-old TV commercial. Solicited in a toilet stall. Settling in at home and getting less than he had bargained for. The last paragraph of this story is to die for, its so beautiful and epiphanic. Largesse is a virtuoso piece and its only the first of five. Starlight on Idaho is a set of whacko letters from an addict. Strangler Bob charts the descending path of a heroin addict, but again, not directly, more through a; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: In the Crosshairs: A Sniper Novel (Kyle Swanson Sniper Novels); Author: Sgt. Jack Coughlin; Review: This is the tenth action thriller in the Sniper series, co-authored by ex-sniper Gunnery Sergeant Jack Coughlin and Donald A. Davis. All follow the career of former Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, now CIA operative Kyle Swanson. The series has grown better, not worse, as it has progressed. The action is intense, and with Coughlin riding herd, there are no technical glitches to make it not believable. There is also none of the posturing that disfigure similar series, such as John Ringos bloviating novels. In this installment, Kyle is on the hunt for a rogue CIA assassin, also head case, named Nicky Marks. It starts in Mexico when Marks blows up the casket of a dead friend and colleague of Kyle. Kyle is there at the time, as is the widow of his friend, Beth Ledford, aka Coastie, a former sharpshooter colleague of Kyles and Kyles secret love. Coastie wants revenge. Kyle, and the CIA, need to find and neutralize Marks. Behind Marks lurks a shadowy figure called the Prince. The Prince seems to be seeking to rationalize the international drug market. But is that what he wants or is this a vendetta against Kyle, and if so, why? Flitting across the globe, and assisted at times by old friends and new colleagues, Kyle and Coastie grow close to the Prince and make a surprising discovery. All ends well, but only after a fair amount of shooting and bloodletting. I ts all in the genre but the authors handle it well. Crosshairs doesnt break any boundaries in storytelling but its a competent, diverting read, of the kind that once you start it, you read on to the end.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bluebird, Bluebird (Highway 59); Author: ; Review: This is Lockes fourth novel. The first three all either won or were nominated for prizes. Its easy to see why on the evidence of her fourth. Its set in East Texas, in a miniscule town named Lark. Lark is apparently a real place, though not this one, but its irrelevant because Lark isn't really a place in this book. Its a mood -an angry one, East Texan whites still resenting uppity blacks and outsiders, which means anyone not born and raised there. Blacks survive in Lark by making themselves small, unnoticed. But it doesnt always work because whites notice blacks and sometimes take advantage of them and the blacks have to take it for the most part. Thats the setting for this surface-simple interior-complicated novel about a black Texas Ranger who decided on his own to look into two murders in the nowhere town of Lark. The first is of a black man. That case is buried in no time the locals have done little investigating and reached no conclusion, even as to homicide versus suicide. After all, the dead man is black. Even worse, he was an outsider and northerners shouldnt snoop around where they don't live. The second dead person, two days later, same place, is a woman though. Shes white and a local. Her husband may be a member of the White Aryan Brotherhood, which could mean drugs and connections. Enter Darren Matthews. Hes black, from East Texas. He left the U of Chi law school to join the Rangers. Hes on probationary leave at the moment for intervening in the case of the shooting of a very nasty white racist that may or may not have been committed by an old black man who worked for Darrens family for twenty years. The racist had threatened the old mans daughter two days earlier. Darren carries a lot of baggage. His marriage is in trouble his wife has moved out. Hes drinking, way too much, beset with grief and guilt. He has reservations about the Rangers: his boss seems too concerned to keep the Brotherhood out of the mix in his cases but its the Brotherhood that controls drugs in this part of the state and theres no one more racist or more prone to battery and killing than a Brother. Darrens case starts simple but soon becomes complicated. Past history blends with present grievances as Darren tries to muddle through. The ending adds one final complication. Bluebird, Bluebird (the phrase is from a classic blues song) is an exceptional novel of detection thats really about people and place. We may not live in Lark but it doesnt let us forget this countrys tangled, oft poisoned race relations. Lockes portraits of the various players are understanding and apt: none of them, even the worst, comes across as cardboard. Lark isn't a place Id ever want to visit, much less live there, but it jolts you into remembering that, much as we might like it otherwise, we haven't moved past the days of bigotry and oppression. Locke does this without; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bryant & May: Wild Chamber: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's Christopher Fowler Page; Review: This is the fifteenth installment in the justifiably praised series about Bryant and May, detectives in Londons Peculiar Crimes Unit. The inseparable partners connect in oblique ways, May looking for the logic in a crime and concrete evidence, the much more fey Bryant hauling out odd bits of knowledge and even odder acquaintances to consult with. Its Bryant who usually (always?) comes up with the solution to the grand puzzle but May who provides key parts that make it possible. Besides, May keeps Bryant, if not grounded, at least from drifting off permanently into some netherworld of past fancy. Around the two circle the oddballs who make up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a unit loathed by many in the government, who try repeatedly to close it down. Fowlers fondness for the classical mystery is infectious. This time its a locked room mystery --or rather, a locked park: a woman is attacked and strangled in a locked and fenced in garden park in a posh section of London. You cant get in without a key and theres only one key per suite in the upscale buildings that surround the park, which is essentially private and not open to the great unwashed of the city. What happens from that point on is too complicated to begin to describe. Besides it would take away the pleasure of following along in this tantalizing, offbeat, zany puzzle mystery. By the end, four people are dead, victims of a phantom killer. Bryant solves the case at the last minute as London police mount an assault on the building in which PCU staff is barricaded, the Unit about to be shut down for once and for all. Fowler loves words and history. Bryant hauls out odd bits of knowledge about London and its past, providing the reader with delightful potted summaries of the history of private parks and gardens in London and of past seduction practices therein. A side effect of the medication he takes for other ailments, Bryant is prone to reverie, during which time he encounters and talks with famous personages from Pepys to the current queen. And bored with the limited breadth of modern day epithets, he retreats into the past to express disdain or simply tease: he calls the (ineffective) head of the unit a tappen. Thats a rectal plug: its found in the intestines of bears to prevent an accident while they're hibernating. He calls the unit head tete a claque, ma vieille limace, mon petit Petomane. (Petomane was a performing flatulist). Theres Bryants library as well. Esoteric is not the word for it. It contains volumes like these: Rum, Sodomy & the Lash: My Nights at Tory Party Conferences and Is That Mine Floating or Is That a Floating Mine: Wartime Coastal Humour. Fowler loves to tease the reader with words. A day dawns with grudging apricity, the clouds are flavescent with reflected light and bushes look caliginous. He gives places snarky, faux-trendy names. The detectives old favorite pub, which is no longer around because the building that housed it has been converted; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Protected by the Shadows (An Irene Huss Investigation); Author: Visit Amazon's Helene Tursten Page; Review: This is the eleventh Irene Huss novel and the tenth to be translated. Her novels have been translated into eighteen languages and nine have been made into (Swedish) movies. Huss is an inspector in the Organized Crimes Unit of the national police, a senior, much admired agent within her unit. When someone sets fire to a biker gang, it looks like the start of war between two gangs, rivals for control of the sale of narcotics in Gotheborg. The resolving of that tangle is the first and major narrative line in this book. But Irenes also a wife and mother. Her husband (Krister by name) and daughter are chefs. The second plot line involves her family. Krister, Irene and the daughter are in Kristers new restaurant, the dream of his life, a restaurant of his own, when his car is blown up outside. Krister, not alone among Gotheborgs restaurant owners, has become the target of extortion by a biker gang, which is looking for businesses to take over so it can launder its drug money. Worried that the police cant protect her family, Irene sends them, dog included, into hiding. They cant even to tell her where they're going because another worry for Irenesomeone is leaking information inside the police unit: the gangs seem to have advance notice of all police plans relative to them. By the end of the novel, several people have died spectacularly grizzly deaths and Irene has been knocked over the head, nearly abducted, and been thrown to the ground and battered in an explosion. Theres lots of action, a set of nested puzzles has to be solved, and the detective work is crisp and believable. All of these are reasons why this efficient policier is a winner.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Signal Loss (A Hal Challis Investigation); Author: Visit Amazon's Garry Disher Page; Review: Aussie Disher never disappoints, especially in this series featuring the dynamic duo of sergeant Ellen Destry and inspector Hal Challis. They no longer work in the same unit: Destry has been promoted to head the departments sex crime unit. But they're still linked at the hip, in private as well public. The story is set in the nowhere land southeast of Melbourne, a hard country with little to offer its desperate inhabitants. Drug-related or incited crime is endemic. In this episode, Challis confronts an explosion of meth-related crime, Destry a serial rapist. Disher leaves generous room for other characters inside the station and out, one of them a hyper-competitive senior sergeant in the drug unit who is looking for a boost-up career-wise and cant resist flirting with Destry's man. The book starts with a bang and doesn't let up. There are drug lords and hired killers spice up the mix with the local bad guys. Disher knows his stuff: he trots it out unobtrusively in describing parallel investigations of three separate police units pursuing, respectively, some murders, a missing child and a rapist, and a large-scale drug ring. His heroes are human but admirable people and his villains are credible. The plot is complicated but believable. All told, this installment of Australian noir is well worth the reading.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Baco: Vivid Recipes from the Heart of Los Angeles; Author: Visit Amazon's Josef Centeno Page; Review: Josef Centeno is the founder and owner of four restaurants in Los Angeles. The first to open, Baco-Mercat, was named after his signature flat bread, which he uses as side dish, appetizer or base for the sandwiches-hoagies-tacos that he makes with the most exotic fillings. Next came Bar Ama, with a menu blending together Japanese and Italian ingredients. Then there was Ledlow, a caf-bar with a twist, and lastly the vegetable-focused restaurant, P.Y.T. Centeno still sets the menu for all four restaurants. If you have to categorize him (which is difficult), he is a fusion chef who is also a flavor chef. He builds his dishes from the flavors out and he is a ferocious mixer of food cultures, from Asia, the Near East, Africa, Europe (his training included time in a high-end French restaurant) and Latin America/L.A. cooking. These recipes use lots of herbs, take advantage of rubs, sauces, dressing and marinades, and spice add-ons, which he mixes by himself. The recipes are in most cases quite detailed and take considerable time to prepare --even compared to many of the dishes in Julia Childs classic French cookbooks. Theyre not meant to be daunting he just cooks that way, concerned with balance and contrast in taste, texture, even appearance. But as he says in the preface, you don't have to make these dishes exactly like he does. Experiment! Enjoy! This is an experimenters cookbook, meant for household cooks who have some experience in preparing complicated dishes and meals and who have the time to enjoy the act of cooking olfactorily, physically and intellectually. At 81 and cooking mostly for two people now, I don't see myself attempting many of these recipes in the future but I find the description of them fascinating and the descriptions and the stunningly elegant photographs make my mouth water. Ive thumbed pages on a few of them. I may try them, with one or two substitutions for the more exotic ingredients. (Dont be put off by the exotic ingredients. Most of them are available, either through stores like Trader Joes or Whole Foods [or Penzeys for spices] or the local Asian market. Others can be ordered on line.) Centeno is a good guide to the unfamiliar. As he writes: We should all have the courage to try something weve never made before. This cookbook is not for the faint of heart but it offers many pleasant surprises to the household chef willing to take a chance on something new. (The recipes I thumbed? Red onions pickled with mint, sugar, basil and rose petals. Grapes pickled in rooibos tea. An Italian candied fruit dish called almostarda, made with pitted cherries, mustard seeds and fresh horseradish. A spice-laden coffee rub for roasts. A Virginia peanut and coriander dukkah (an oriental condiment). Make-your-own sriracha, Mexican style. A Turkish yogurt dip called cacik, which is a bit like tzatziki. A Caesar salad made with lightly charred Brussel sprouts. A citrus and dried olive salad. A tomato-dill pasta sauce. A dish with sauted peaches, peppers, goat cheese, cashews and saffron honey. A; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Black Moses: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Alain Mabanckou Page; Review: This is a novel I wanted to like but didn't much although I do appreciate the effort that went into writing it. Its not a Congolese version of Oliver Twist, as some reviewers have asserted. Rather, its a picaresque tale, kind of a Congolese much modernized version of the original picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes. Trickery and brutality intermingle. Its populated with resolutely lowlife characters who are lovingly observed. Plot is less important to the novel than movement one place, then another, one scene, then . Theres a lot of attention to local color. The narrators name translates as Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors. Its the longest name of anyone in the orphanage where he grows up until his teens. Most call him Moses. The orphanage is run by the state. Behind the high-minded Communist slogans, its a scam where the people on top use their power to tyrannize over the children below. Life is hard and deceit, venery and brutality rule within its confines. He escapes as a teenager only to join a gang in the Congolese port town of Pointe-Noir. Hes saved from the gang, kind of, by a Zairean madam who takes him under her wing. She grows tired of him. To get him out of her hair, she has one of her clients gets him a job as a dockhand. Moses is a good worker but oppression is the order of the day there too: any worker suspected of thievery is taken into a small room before he leaves the dock at the end of the work day and lashed with barbed wire until he confesses. Moses lasts ten years, then goes mad. A friend takes him to one healer and then another in an effort to cure him of his madness: the author uses the narration of these visits to parodize both western and native medicine. Neither cure works. Ultimately, Mosess affliction leads to an act of violence and that act leads to Mosess commitment to an insane asylum, where he writes down this account of his sad but colorful life. The storytelling throughout is episodic more than continuous in nature. Characters appear, then disappear, never to resurface. Most of the experiences that shaped Moses fold together by the end but getting there is not an organic process. Many scenes are heart-breaking. Some are hilarious. But, at least for me, the tale did not coalesce. It remains again, for me-- a collection of fragments. Some are brilliant but not all of them are. The book was long-listed for the Man /Booker International Prize.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Warp: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Lev Grossman Page; Review: Twentyish Hollis Kessler has graduated from Harvard but hasn't cut his ties to it yet. He doesnt have a sea to swim in anymore and feels like hes drowning. Always looking at what he does, thinks and says, hes hyper-sensitive to his failings and gaucheries. In college, he had context, friends, a sense of purpose (however fleeting). All have fled now. He still has his old friends but (a) they're drifting just as much as he is and (b) they feel like outsiders, or hes an outsider to them. His way of dealing with this is (a) to hunker down and drift hoping a sense of direction will raise its head sometime and make life meaningful again and (b) to hypothesize fragments of narrative he writes them in his head: paragraphs from a fantasy book or epic, Holden Caulfield-ish post-adolescent angst. Theres a girl he likes named Xanthe. But he doesnt know how to deal with her: she refuses to be tied down and hes not sure hes worth the tying. This is the debut novel of a gifted writer who was still learning his trade. The lapses into imagined narrative don't work all that well: they seem, and are, too self-consciously a literary device. The straightforward narrative of Hollis life is well written but a bit of a downer. After all, Holliss life is a downer. Everything works 2/3s of the way in Warp but comes to 100% fruition twelve years later, in Grossmans magnificent The Magicians (2009), his third novel and an out and out fantasy, but the links between the two books are clear. The Magicians features an even younger protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, who suffers from much the same issues as Hollis. Quentin finds his way out of them through magic. Warp isn't The Magicians but it is artfully written. It sensitively portrays an experience Hollis shares with countless other recent grads, whose moorings have temporarily broken loose, leaving them floating loose in a world they don't quite know how to navigate yet.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Golden Days: West's Lakers, Steph's Warriors, and the California Dreamers Who Reinvented Basketball; Author: Visit Amazon's Jack McCallum Page; Review: Longtime Sports Illustrated feature columnist McCallum knows both the sport and the business of professional basketball. He has contacts with practically everybody involved in it, in both present and past. He is an infectious if uneven writer and clearly a fan of the sport and its players. This book is not as tightly tied together as his bestselling The Dream Team (2012), detailing the making of and playing of the great 1992 U.S. Olympics team, with Michael, Magic and Bird (but no Isaiah Thomas) on board. But that book had a chronological and topical flow that unified it as a composite narrative. This one does, kind of, but McCallum has to force things a bit to make it work. The unifying thread is the presence of NBA Hall of Famer Jerry West, first a player with the 1960s-early 1970s LA Lakers, and by the end of the book, the consultant who as much as any one man brought together the transcendent Golden State Warriors team that currently dominates NBA play. In alternate chapters, McCallum takes us through Wests playing career and the converging careers of two of todays superstars, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, and the talented team of players around them. McCallum is a lively enough and knowledgeable enough writer to make it almost hang together but the books structure still creaks at the joints. There are enough anecdotes about a host of NBA stars to make a basketball nut (like me) drool but it is too often Basketball Lite --zappy comments and tales, not all directly to the point and some of them glib or superficial, and in the chapters detailing the Warriors recent seasons, a feeling that the closing part of the book was written fast to take advantage of an audience eager to read about the new Super Team. The last chapter is a throwaway. Hey, take all my reservations and set them aside! If you like pro basketball and the giant, driven personalities involved in playing it (no one more driven than Jerry West), you will enjoy this book as much as I did which was a lot.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Music Shop: A Novel (Random House Large Print); Author: Visit Amazon's Rachel Joyce Page; Review: English novelist Joyces The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and deservedly so. It was wonderful. So is this book. I don't know how she does it but she excels in capturing the inner soul of decent folk who, for reasons not of their doing, keep their most passionate longings locked up inside their heads, denying how much it hurts not to try to realize them. In Fry, it was the title character, who had always done what was expected of him, leading a risk-free but bloodless life until one day, he simply set off on a walk and discovering a new world, out there, just kept on, and on, and on. What a lovely book it was! So is this one. Frank runs a record store in a rundown under attack section of London. All he sells is vinyl no audio-tapes and no CDs, regardless to a customer and tell them what record, even what cut on a record, that person should listen to. A man comes in melancholy and lost. Frank sells him Chopin. He comes back. This time its Aretha. The combination is what the man needs to jolt him out of his despair over an early=failed marriage. (He came back to the bridal suite the morning after the wedding to find his best friend boffing his new wife.) For the grim, manly tattooist Maud, whose shop is down the street from Franks, its Samuel Barbers Adagio for Strings, eight minutes of music that convinces her not that life is peaches and roses, or even fair, but that its worth living anyhow. Miles and Bill Evans works for a failed priest. But for all his empathy for his customers and neighbors, Frank is shut down emotionally. He skates the surface in his relationships with other people because he cant risk being vulnerable. Loss is too terrible for him to consider gain in human relationships. Then a woman dressed in green looks in the window of his store. She faints on the sidewalk outside. Frank and his fumble-fingered assistant Kit --Kit can break anything that exists, simply by handling itbring her inside, and Franks world turns topsy-turvy. There are many ups and downs that follow and this odd, achingly beautiful love story takes twenty-one years to reach its conclusion. But very quickly you love the made-up people who populate the books pages. They seem real in essential ways and you are rooting for them. All this is told in simple language that isn't so much poetic as something beyond that. True? Is that the word Im looking for?; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Music Shop [Jul 10, 2017] Joyce, Rachel; Author: Visit Amazon's Rachel Joyce Page; Review: English novelist Joyces The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and deservedly so. It was wonderful. So is this book. I don't know how she does it but she excels in capturing the inner soul of decent folk who, for reasons not of their doing, keep their most passionate longings locked up inside their heads, denying how much it hurts not to try to realize them. In Fry, it was the title character, who had always done what was expected of him, leading a risk-free but bloodless life until one day, he simply set off on a walk and discovering a new world, out there, just kept on, and on, and on. What a lovely book it was! So is this one. Frank runs a record store in a rundown under attack section of London. All he sells is vinyl no audio-tapes and no CDs, regardless to a customer and tell them what record, even what cut on a record, that person should listen to. A man comes in melancholy and lost. Frank sells him Chopin. He comes back. This time its Aretha. The combination is what the man needs to jolt him out of his despair over an early=failed marriage. (He came back to the bridal suite the morning after the wedding to find his best friend boffing his new wife.) For the grim, manly tattooist Maud, whose shop is down the street from Franks, its Samuel Barbers Adagio for Strings, eight minutes of music that convinces her not that life is peaches and roses, or even fair, but that its worth living anyhow. Miles and Bill Evans works for a failed priest. But for all his empathy for his customers and neighbors, Frank is shut down emotionally. He skates the surface in his relationships with other people because he cant risk being vulnerable. Loss is too terrible for him to consider gain in human relationships. Then a woman dressed in green looks in the window of his store. She faints on the sidewalk outside. Frank and his fumble-fingered assistant Kit --Kit can break anything that exists, simply by handling itbring her inside, and Franks world turns topsy-turvy. There are many ups and downs that follow and this odd, achingly beautiful love story takes twenty-one years to reach its conclusion. But very quickly you love the made-up people who populate the books pages. They seem real in essential ways and you are rooting for them. All this is told in simple language that isn't so much poetic as something beyond that. True? Is that the word Im looking for?; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Good Day to Marry a Duke (Sin & Sensibility); Author: Visit Amazon's Betina Krahn Page; Review: Betina Krahns new romance doesnt get that far into bodice ripping territory and it doesnt break any formulas but its fun for all that. Its 1890. Silver mining heiress Daisy Bumgarten is in London on the hunt for a titled husband, having dashed her hopes for a suitable marriage in the States by a Colorado-style display of independence at a posh New York horse and hounds hunt. (Mrs. Astor found her untutored and immodest.) Daisy finds her prey in a decidedly unworldly duke who is so absorbed in studying butterflies that he hasn't yet noticed girls exist. Enter trouble. The duke has a brother, a disgraceful but super hot ladies man, Lord Ashton Graham. If Daisy were demure it would be no problem when she meets him although he immediately sets off all the gongs in her. She could just zip up her feelings but Daisy is anything but demure, and she experiences hot flushes whenever he stands too close to her. Shes not completely inexperienced either. The dukes desiccated uncle and aunt want Daisy out of the picture completely. They pay Ashton to do it: either find evidence shes not suitable or seduce her yourself so shell be spoiled goods. For most of the novel, Daisy and Ashton fight. I am better than most men, Daisy snaps at him in the midst of an argument. I am a woman. (Thats the only dose of overt feminism in the book.) Theres the usual language: Ashton kisses her within an inch of her life, his mouth hard and demanding at first, but [it] softened as she responded. His hand goes up her leg to her leg to her knickers and the sensitive curve of her hip. She wanted more his touch on her bare skin, his hands caressing her body, his strength around her, his hardness inside her. Thats as racy as it ever gets but it does get that heated every so many pages because no matter how strongly Daisy resolves to behave around him, Ashtons presence makes her blood sizzle. Nothing is realistic in the story but its not expected to be: its a fairy tale, just one set in historical times. There must be setback after setback before 1. the bad boy shows hes really a good guy, 2. the hero and the heroine get beyond their complicated misunderstandings, and 3. true love emerges triumphant. Krahn promises a sequel to this pleasant piece of fluff, involving Daisys younger sister, also set in London.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Record of a Night too Brief (Japanese Novellas); Author: Visit Amazon's Hiromi Kawakami Page; Review: Pushkin Press has been around for twenty years but has pushed up its game significantly since acquiring new owners in 2012. This admirable publishes high quality literature issuing a mixture of forgotten classics and near-classics and exciting literary debuts by authors world wide. The books tend to be short, short fiction or novellas, and they're issued in low cost paperbacks. The format and art work are still high quality. Theyre books you can walk around with and read with ease. Record is Kawakamis earliest book out of seven: five have been translated into English. It benefits from the nuanced, word-sensitive translation of the exceptionally qualified Lucy North, who specializes in Englishing just this kind of modern day Japanese fiction. There are three novellas in Record. The title story is a string of part-connected fantasies, dreams edging toward darkness. The effect is not so much to tell a story, although a story of sorts does emerge, as to create a mood, and the mood, though it shares some of the characteristics of nightmare (hyper-clear imagery, comic strip simplicity, abrupt ending and anxiety and anticipation rising steadily upwards) isn't so much nightmarish as wonder-struck. Certain images predominate, reappear over and over. The narrator chases a woman, who sheds her hair, shrinks and shrinks until shes almost not there, sometimes vanishes, sometimes dies and is reborn, has mushrooms growing out of her skin. Darkness is a palpable force which eats things or dissolves them. The story doesnt so much end as stop. Missing has more coherence but is equally surreal. An oldest son vanishes just before his engagement is to be announced; a giant urn worshipped by the family also disappears but earlier; son number 1s marriage becomes the marriage of son number 2; son number 1 returns but only his sister can see him; hes lonely. By then, the new wife has shrunk to the size of a doll. The family returns the bride to her family. Then theres the final story. A Snake Stepped On starts off with the narrator stepping on a snake who turns into a man. The story ends with I won't say what! Youll have to read the book! Kawakamis/Norths writing is brisk and powerful. The stories may confuse but the imagery is clear and sharp. If you want a comparison, these stories have elements of Kafka in them but are more like a surrealist reverie.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage (Book of Dust, Volume 1); Author: Visit Amazon's Philip Pullman Page; Review: PULLMAN, Philip. The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage. Knopf. 2017. 451p. $22.95. Heres an example of what makes Philip Pullmans writing so special. Its early in the first volume of his new fantasy trilogy, The Book of Dust. Malcolm, eleven years old and the son of an innkeeper, is the protagonist. Hes rock solid, good and decent, and observant beyond his years. As in the previous trilogy, His Dark Materials, Malcolm, like everybody in this imagined world, has his own daemon, an opposite sex animal familiar tied to him both geographically (if the familiar moves away from her master, the master must follow) and psychically. The choice of animal for ones daemon tells something about ones character. Later in the book, the evil Gerard Bonneville is revealed as having a hyena as his daemon, and unlike the closeness that exists between other masters and their daemons, Bonneville abuses his. Now to the example I promised. Malcolm has just been permitted to see the little baby, six-months-old Lyra, who is being cared for in a nunnery near his fathers inn. Read on. "Malcolm had never seen a baby at close quarters, and he was struck at once by how real she seemed. He knew that would be a silly thing to say, so he held his tongue, but that was his impression all the same: it was unexpected that something so small should be so perfectly formed. Her daemon, the chick of a small bird like a swallow, was asleep with her, but as soon as Asta [Malcolms familiar] flew down, swallow-shaped too, and perched on the edge of the crib, the chick woke up and opened his yellow beak wide for food. Malcolm laughed, and that woke the baby, and seeing his laughing face, she began to laugh too. Asta pretended to snap at a small insect and thrust it down the baby daemons gaping mouth, which satisfied him, making Malcolm laugh harder, and then the baby laughed so hard she got the hiccups, and every time she hicked, the daemon jumped. 'There, there,' said Sister Fenella, and bent to pick her up; but as she lifted the baby, Lyras little face crumpled into an expression of grief and terror, and she reached round for her daemon, nearly twisting herself out of the nuns arms. Astra was ahead of her: she took the little chick in her mouth and flew to place him on the babys chest, at which point he turned into a miniature tiger cub and hissed and bared his teeth at everyone. All the babys dismay vanished at once, and she lay in Sister Fenellas arms, looking around with a lordly complacency. Malcolm was enchanted. Everything about her was perfect and delighted him." Thats magical: simply presented but with an aura of wonder to it. And even as the scene is being set a young boy seeing a baby for the first timemagic (the daemons) intrudes on the scene. You have also a sense of what Malcolm is like and a vague premonition that Lyras and Malcolms relationship; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Chronicles of a Liquid Society; Author: Visit Amazon's Umberto Eco Page; Review: From 1985-2016, semiologist/novelist/essayist and critic Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose, Foucaults Pendulum) wrote a regular column, no more than three pages long, for the journal LEspresso. This is the third or fourth (or more?) collection of those pieces. Alas, with Ecos death last year, probably the last. Obviously, many of them address occasional topics, and some point to issues of Italian politics that may not directly interest American readers. (Eco loathed Berlusconi. What he would have written of Americas Trump?) But the impression one gets from reading these pieces in quick succession is how brilliant a writer, thinker and critic Eco was, and how catholic his tastes. His heroes were many but good: among them, Descartes, Aquinas, Peirce and Popper, Aristotle of course, but also Saul Bellow and Art Spiegelman, the brilliant cartoon novelist who brought us Maus, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin, Bachelard and Brecht, Borges and Arnheim. He wrote appreciatively on Aristotle as teller of a kind of detective story, Euclids mathematics ditto, was partial to Nero Wolfe and James Bond, and couldn't warm up to Salingers Catcher in the Rye. Many essays are about what he saw as the saturation of our consciousnesses by intrusive electronic media. 9/11, he noted, lasted over a month on television, the same images cycling over and over again. No one was sharper in exposing idiocies of language and judgment: in one piece discussing the spread of euphemisms, he scoffs at jobless replacing unemployed in (Italian, I presume) official declarations, and in programmed transition between employments hiding the bare fact of having been fired. A recurring theme is the question: how to filter out the useful from the torrent of trivial information and falsely decorous cover-up terms that dominate public discourse today. He was also no pushover on the big issues: he didn't know how it could be done but he wanted us to push back against the pressures and falsehoods of a world increasingly dominated by multinational entities responsive neither to the people nor even to national governments. And lastly, though not religious himself, he was surprisingly open to the expressing of religious sentiment he didn't surmise wed been born a secular society and didn't see why we had to throw our religious heritage out in order to advance. If Ecos essays remind me of anyone elses, its Menckens. Both men were wordsmiths of considerable force and distinction. I prefer Ecos sly, joking style to his predecessors more ponderous one but both have much of worth to say to us, beyond and behind the ephemeral topics of the articles they published. Viva Eco!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Deadbomb Bingo Ray; Author: Visit Amazon's Jeff Johnson Page; Review: Deadbomb Bingo Ray got his name when he was in a high stakes card game and decided he needed to close it off with a live hand grenade. He wanted to warn the gambler next to him to get out of there but all he could find to write a message with was a tiny bingo card and a red lipstick someone had left in the toilet. There wasn't enough space to write Grenade on it so he wrote two four letter words, Dead and Bomb and when he came back into the room, he slipped the card in the other fellows pocket. When Ray signaled that he was going to do something, his associate left the table and Ray tossed the grenade, sans pin, onto the table and ducked behind another player. who, along with three others, was killed by the blast. After that, there was no doubt that Deadbomb Bingo Ray was a serious Dont Mess with Me kind of guy, and his career as fixer for the terminally illegal was on the way. Now Rays in trouble again, pursued by Tim Cantwell, a crooked hedge fund operator hed taken down. Ray had stripped Tim of his fortune but the snake still lived and hes hatched an elaborate plan to frame Ray and put him behind bars for life, where itll be easy for him to have Ray shanked. The Ray-Tim rivalry is the engine driving the crime caper part of this story, and its a good one, though occasionally whats going on or was going on is a bit (but not a lot) murky. Ray is a seriously bad guy, equally good with his weapons or his wiles. Even when home, he doesnt sleep in a bed. He sleeps in the dining room under a thick hardwood table. Duct-taped to the bottom of the table when Ray sleeps are a Beretta with extra ammo clip, a shotgun and an assault rifle with a night sight. Theres also an old-fashioned tomahawk. Every room in Rays house has at least one gun in it, fourteen in all. Sharpened bicycle spikes lie hidden on the top of each picture frame. There are razors secreted in various places, a four-foot length of heavy chain stuffed up the fire place and a dive knife in a vase on the lintel above the fireplace. He takes the violence business seriously. Everything is serious about him when hes working his cars, his friends, his elaborate backup systems located all over the city, which is Philadelphia, the City (ho! Ho!) of Brotherly Love. Ray is up and running and his objective is not just to foil Tims plan but to get rid of him for good, and in the process, everyone else who is associated with him. This he does with admirable economy of means. He kills lots of people, with no qualms at all and absolutely no hesitation. Wham bam thank you maam and hes done. But parallel to this fire and fury, Ray is in love, perhaps for the first time in his adult life.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters; Author: Visit Amazon's Ursula K. Le Guin Page; Review: Do you realize how many books, and in how many genres, poet-fiction writer-essayist Ursula JK. Le Guin has published to date? Using the listing in the front of her latest collection, there are 23 works of fiction (novels and short stories, some of them extraordinarily influential), eleven books of poems (and a twelfth is mentioned in a piece in this book), and two volumes of translations (of Lao Tzu and Gabriela Mistral). Shes a force! And as in a collection of occasional pieces I just reviewed by polymath Umberto Eco (Chronicles of a Liquid Society), even her most occasional postings have substance. Reaching her early and then mid-eighties, she decides to venture into blogging. She posts sage to pithy comments on a wide range of topics, from the ups and downs of aging (read her assessment of the Harvard alumni survey), to the joys of raising a kitten to adult cathood. She writes: Ive lost faith in the saying Youre only as old as you think you are, ever since I got old. She takes on the current fascination with the two most common cuss words, one dealing with procreation (but not really procreation, really with dominance and battering), the other with excretion. On being a writer, she notes that meaning in art isn't the same as in science: The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics isn't changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains. All I expect of a good potter is to go and make another good pot. There are sage comments on the craft of writing, on how being a woman writer discriminates against one in a still male dominated publishing and critics world. She asks why we never question the desirability of economic growth. And in a follow-up essay asks, when did it become impossible for our government to ask its citizens to refrain from short-term gratification in order to serve a greater good? (This is as close as she comes to an environmentalist critique in these short essays.) There is a lovely doggerel verse for her cat. (His paws are white, his ears are black. / When he isn't around I feel the lack) Praise of a John Luther Adams piece. A visit to the Food Bank in Portland, Oregon. Meditations on a lynx, caged up in a wild life museum. If you like good writing, and following the workings and musings of a sharp, oftimes witty, always observant mind at work, youll enjoy and admire these essays. I know I did.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change; Author: Visit Amazon's Ashley Dawson Page; Review: Dawson (English, CUNY; Extinction: A Radical History, 2016) has published and edited numerous books and essays and is a member of Duke Universitys Social Text collective, which focuses on issues of gender, sexuality, race and environment. From 2010-2014 he was co-editor of Social Text Online and from 2012-2014 also edited the Journal of Academic Freedom. His current work deals mainly with the impact of radical environmental change and issues of eco-justice, the idea that needed environmental reform cannot occur without equally serious social and political reform. In this present book, he argues forcefully that much of current environmental reform efforts fail to address the problems we face because they assume that growth is the only way to a healthy economy, or, to put it another way, that retreat from endangered environmental zones (low lying coastal areas) is not to be considered. One of his examples is Hurricane Sandy, the deadliest and most destructive hurricane in the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season and the second most expensive in history in terms of the material damage it left in its wake. As to cleanup efforts post-Sandy, much of the money and time spent went to rebuild structures in coastal areas at risk of future destruction. (A note: in 20123, 32 million people worldwide were forced to relocate temporarily or permanently as a result of climate damage. That is not a small number, and subsequent years bode fair to be much worse.) Dawson writes of New Orleans post-Katrina, a city low almost at sea level to begin with, its marshlands in rapid retreat, delta sediment deposit dropping and the sea level rising, salt leaking into the very soil on which the city was built. New Orleans, he posits, is the New Atlantis do what you will to save it, it is likely to be buried by the sea not too far off in our future. Current efforts to prevent or ameliorate future storm damage have been blatantly insufficient, argues Dawson. I have noted Dawsons observations on these two American cities but his focus is worldwide with examples from all over the globe. He presents a powerful and convincing case that: neoliberalist ideas get in the way of addressing systemic global issues of environmental deterioration; we radically underestimate the projected rise in global water level and still waste our money rebuilding along the coast in places we cant ultimately protect, using outmoded models that amortize the construction of new high rise buildings and skyscrapers over a single generation (rapid ROI) with no thought for the burden left to our heirs two and three generations on; we initiate reforms piecemeal and timidly. Its hard not to see it all crashing down on us two or three generations off from now. But politicians and investors don't think that far off, only in one or at most two decades. The potential for short term profit obviates the need to consider long term risk. I have to add that there is something I do not like maybe admire is a better word-- about this book. The language could be simpler. Im; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Syriza in Power: Reflections of an Accidental Politician; Author: Visit Amazon's Costas Douzinas Page; Review: Syriza is a Greek adverb meaning from the roots, and thus radically. In Greece today, it stands for the Coalition of the Radical Left, the new and different political party that since January 2015 has held the largest bloc in the Hellenic Parliament and whose party chairman, Alexis Tsipas, is currently the Greek prime minister (January 26-August 20, 2015, and September 21, 2015, to the present). Founded in 2004 by as a coalition of left-wing, green and social activist parties, it has grown like wild fire. And today, as much as pressure from the holders of Greeks humungous national debt permits, it has brought a new brand of politics to Greece. Costas Douzinas is professor of law and director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Londons more radically oriented Birkbeck College. He specializes in the study of human rights, among other areas of research and publication, and was early involved in Britains critical legal studies movement. Although resident in London since 1974, he was elected a member of the Greek parliament as a member of Syriza in 2015. Not knowing how long the radical coalition could hold together or how long neoliberal neighbors, Germany especially, who hold much of Greeces debt, would allow Syriza to continue to govern, Douzinas decided to keep a journal. Out of it, he has written this book, which combines personal and theoretical observations of the governments workings and philosophy. Its an up and down book, some parts better argued than others, but all is worth reading and thinking over carefully, for Syriza offers the hope of a humane option to the aggressive, rapidly depersonalized neoliberalism --growth-as-the-end-of--history capitalism-- that dominates political action in the European Union as well as here in the States. The book is not an easy read parts mix theory and practice in ways not commonly seen in politicians writings and not all of us are cognizant of the ins and outs of recent Greek (and EU) politics but the result is a book with brains as well as emotions and the more worthwhile because of it. Theory and politics: seldom will you read a book by a currently practicing politician (even though accidental) who not only quotes but uses serious theory as his guide posts: hefty doses of Freud, Lacan and Marx, Habermas and Deleuze, and Im sure not where in the book any more but I m sure I read the name Foucault, and behind it all, a new Hegelian understanding of the ironies of history. The European Union: a detailed and distressing story of EU pressures on Greece to contain its new populism, especially through the pressure of creditor agencies like the International Monetary Fund. He writes of aggressive greedy neoliberal capitalism and of EU efforts to force Greece to restrict popular democracy. He concludes: Popular participation terrorizes the political establishment. The people must be kept away from decision-making; they must be confined to the position of obedient subjects and insatiable consumers. In early modernity, the rulers and the wealthy were scared of riots and mobs on the; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: This Is What Happened; Author: Visit Amazon's Mick Herron Page; Review: Early in this elegantly scary book, a nave young woman, Maggie, is duped into doing something she shouldnt have. It goes wrong and shes on the run. From that point on, I really cant say what happens because it would ruin the suspense of this very suspenseful book for a reader new to it. Suffice it to say that Maggie has been played by a man who claims to be, but is he?, an agent of Britains secret service MI5. In the course of the unraveling of events in this complicated creepy crime novel, the perspective switches back and forth among three players (Maggie, the MI5 agent, and whos the third?) and shocking things happen. The reader has entered that very noir terrain previously inhabited by a relatively small number of mystery/crime writers, most notably Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Millar, Minette Walters, and Ruth Rendell. This is good stuff but don't expect even a happy ending really to be happy in a fiction like this.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Midnight Line: A Jack Reacher Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Lee Child Page; Review: Ive read all of the Jack Reacher novels and on the same day I got them. This is number twenty-two in the series. By now the pattern is set but it doesnt stop me from enjoying them still. In this episode, theres a fight (no surprise!). Its six against one but guess who wins? There are two attempts to kill Reacher. Guess who survives? Reacher moves ahead using his learned-in-the-service, honed-in-experience approach: methodical, step by step; planning when he can but anticipating surprise; using observation and memory but even more, a sense of how people in trouble act in a pinch to determine how he responds. At some point the deduction ends and Reacher just kicks a** but there are always real puzzles to solve in these action thrillers and usually pretty good ones. Besides, Reachers 65 and 250 pounds and when he finally does kick a**, its fun. This story starts with Reacher on a bus. His last love affair has just ended who wants to live with a man who cant stay still, never settles, is always roaming? He takes a bus heading west, no particular destination, just following whim. The bus stops en route for a rest break. Hes got a few minutes before the bus boards again so he goes into a pawnshop across from the bus station. There, he sees a West Point class ring in a tray of jewelry. Its too small to be a mans; its engraved with the owners initials. Reachers an Army brat, a West Point grad himself. He knows how hard it was to earn that ring and how hard it would be for the owner to give it up. Hes puzzled enough about what happened to the owner to abandon his bus ride and start out on a hunt to find her and if possible, return the ring to her. Why? Because hes Army, even after all these years. Its a point of honor with him. But once Reacher starts on a quest, nothing stops him. Hes a bulldog. Thus begins the chain of discoveries that propels the story line to its explosive finale. I find the Reacher novels addictive. Three decades ago, I had the same reaction to Dick Franciss race track mysteries. It didn't matter how good or bad one was, I wanted to read it right away! I found this particular Reacher story a little pale in the plotting and action but hey, I still read it and liked it. Whats not to like? Its Reacher!; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Children of the Fleet (Fleet School); Author: Visit Amazon's Orson Scott Card Page; Review: Its been eight years since Orson Scott Card has written about the world of Ender Wiggin, who with his still-children warriors, fought and defeated the Formics, ending the string of wars between humankind and the wholly alien hive creature buggers that was devastating our world. The first in the series, Enders Game, was published as a short story in 1977 and a novel in 1985 and it won virtually every award around in the sci fi/fantasy world, starting with the Nebula and the Hugo Awards. That series ended with mankind triumphant and the subsequent exploration of what it meant to interact with a race as alien as the buggers were. This time, Card writes about Fleet School post-Formic Wars. The world government temporarily united against the buggers has lapsed back into inter-state rivalry. Every country seeks an advantage against every other. If war is the next step, they need military strategists and leaders, and theres no better source for them than among the very young (thus intellectually flexible) children already in training to fight the Formics. There is still a supranatural authority, quasi-military in nature, but its objective now, at least ostensibly, is the colonization of space: mankind must never again be caught with all its eggs in one basket. These two streams come together in the plot line for this novel, which is the first of a new series by Card. Its a novel about the training of the prospective leaders of the deep space colonizing efforts. Its also a novel about the playing out of national and personal rivalries on and off earth. The protagonist is a prepubescent Indian plus something else boy named Dabeet Ochoa, who has always been best in all his classes but is frustrated in his efforts to get into the space program. He gets in at last. The training starts. But hes being blackmailed by some force on earth and has to find a way through between his loyalty to the Fleet, where hes training, and his mother (who isn't even his mother, he finds out), who is being held captive as surety that he doesnt double-cross his blackmailers. As in the previous books about Ender and his colleagues, Card succeeds in capturing what it is like to be inside the head of a super sharp but still unformed young boy, but for the rest this is Robert Heinleins Starship Troopers or Cards own Enders Game or any number of other star fleet/space warriors training novels. This is not deep stuff, its fun stuff, and should be read that way. As fun stuff, its not top shelf but reasonably good second shelf stuff.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lullaby Road: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's James Anderson Page; Review: This is Andersons second novel about reformed boozer, brawler and all around tough guy Ben Jones, who now drives a rig across desolate desert roads in Utahs high desert. In the first novel, he lost a newfound love and almost his life. Awful things happened to him then. Now he just drives. He has the contract to deliver goods along remote, bare and dangerous Route 117, a highway going from nowhere to nowhere, with nowhere in between. He rents out half of his rundown dwelling to Ginny, who at seventeen hadnt expected to be a Mom so soon but now was. She juggles a job, caring for the baby, and going to community college. On the side, she does Bens books, files his tax returns and keeps his schedule. More than that, when Bens home, the noises on the other side of his place a babys gurgles and squawls, the sound of a mothers calming voicekeep him from feeling so alone. The Utah desert is a good setting for a novel like this, which hovers between action thriller and novel of mood and place, because the highway and the dangerous desert that lies around it are as much players in the story as are its human actors. There are whiteouts, gusts and storms, sudden dangers driving. Once, visibility is so bad that Ben has to stop his truck, get out to check the road markers on the side of the road --not man-made signs but the detritus he knows from memory has been left there-- and from that point on, creep forward a few trucks length at a time before stopping again and making another reconnaissance, then forward again, and again, and again, until dawn breaks or the thick, gusting snow finally settles down. The characters Ben meets and interacts with are of a piece with the place. For some, its just the Last Place. An angry divorcee drives her beat up Subaru westward until the car stops and then sets up a kind of business (she makes handicraft things and gives dancing lessons on the cheap to her lonely neighbors) in a leftover town with few people and no prospects. A demented Bible spouting preacher hauls a cross up and down Route 117, a mile at a time, in penance for who knows what unforgotten and unforgiven sins. An ex-doctor, mutilated beyond bearing in some foreign land, looks now only to hide himself until liquor obliterates memory forever. Theyre all like that. In this harsh and inhospitable country, Ben seems a bastion of sanity, even compassion. But underneath, he still has reserves of wildness, anger that flashes out if he doesnt hold it in, sometimes just as mean words, other times fists. There are mysteries to be solved in the book and it has more than its share of violence: dead people, long enough gone to stink; broken bones and hurt feelings; a bird drops a shoe behind as it flees over the desert, the gnawed foot of the child inside it still. Theres a little girl, Mexican, who won't speak.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Colorado Boulevard: A Crush Mystery (Crush Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Phoef Sutton Page; Review: Quirky characters do not a mystery make, even in southern California, as in this action thriller, which is set in Pasadena. This is Suttons third mystery to feature ex-body guard, sometime bouncer Caleb Rush, aka Crush. The previous two made it onto Kirkus Reviews Best Mysteries of the Year list, but I doubt this one will. Crush is okay as a character but almost everyone around him in this book comes across as stock figure or caricature. The plot involves a kidnapping of the nerdish almost step-brother of Crush, who lives in Crushs apartment with a monitor bracelet around his ankle as a condition of his parole; some killings (one old, others newer); a stubborn, maybe no longer wholly rational multimillionaire whos fixated on building a high-speed railway between San Francisco and LA; an AA-like support group for people who know our planet is run by aliens; and at start and finish, the Rose Bowl Parade. Thats right, the Rose Bowl Parade. It appears in this not terribly believable story not once but twice once when Crush was seventeen and the second time in the present. Both times odd things happen. Sutton makes liberal use of flashbacks to enrich present narrative. Flashbacks are a legitimate writing ploy but they need to be used carefully. Here, they're clumsy, seeming often to respond to the authors need to fill in a hole in the story. Nor does the back history to the lead criminals actions seem likely. So! With mediocre plotting and mediocre characterization, and not all that much attention to ambience, whats left? This is a thriller that doesnt thrill much.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Creatures of Will and Temper; Author: Visit Amazon's Molly Tanzer Page; Review: I found this book tedious. The prose is adequate, though stodgy. The characters are unappealing. The first half of the book is slow and almost telegraphs the direction of the plot. (I received this book for review. I have no prior connection to the author or publisher.); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art; Author: Visit Amazon's Sam Wasson Page; Review: This is a really good book. It talks about people who interest you and who are smart, passionate AND funny, and it mixes anecdotal history with a very perceptive analysis of what goes into acting, improvising, getting beyond (phony, artificial) acting set pieces into real reacting and being on stage as a communal act, each performer trusting the others to bail him or her out and when it flat out doesnt work, being willing to tell the audience it isn't and starting new. If you have ever acted, or even been around theater, youll feel when you read this book how exciting a venture it is. The book starts with Nichols and May and progresses through Second City and other improve venues to SNL and SCTV to Tootsie to Stephen Colbert and Tina Fey. Story Theater Paul Sillss mother Viola Spolln is its birth mother and unstable, multiple addicted but brilliant Del Close its primary theorist. Elaine May is both what works in it and what doesnt work at all. A brilliant improv comic and maybe the smartest woman ever to appear on stage, she directed a couple of good movies, then bombed big time with Mikey and Nicky, an interminable improv scene between John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, over a year late, the cost ballooning from a budgeted $1.8 million to an unsustainable $4.3 million and enough film shot for one hundred movies, all ending in a long legal battle between studio and May which May lost. Certain figures stick out in this dazzling array of personalities Nichols and May both together and separately, Gilda Radner and John Candy, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Mike Nichols. But what is ultimately so satisfying about this book is that it isn't a Glitter Story about Beautiful (or at least Fascinating) People. Its a story with lots of amazing people in it but a story, above all, about how an art form emerged, what it took to get it here, and the cost it imposed on its practitioners. This is an exceptional book. Wasson has transcended genre the TV and theater celebrity book-- by writing from within it and by showing how truly extraordinary the evolution of improv theater is in American (and Canadian) culture. (Wasson is the author of Fosse and four other previous books.); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Grandfather's Lessons: In the Kitchen with Shorey; Author: Jacques Ppin; Review: In this delightful and thoughtfully laid out cookbook, master chef Jacques Pepin cooks with and for his twelve-year-old granddaughter Shorey. He shows her how to make curly hotdogs (they don't taste different but they look cool) and prepare a one-dish entre for her mothers birthday. He doesnt talk up to her but neither does he talk down. Rather, he pays attention and takes cues from her tastes and enthusiasms. Having said that, Shorey is no ordinary young woman, if only because of her parentage. Shes heard people talking food all her short life. Her father is a professional chef. Her mother co-hosted two seasons on PBS with Jacques (Cooking with Claudine was the first). Grandmother Gloria, Jacquess wife, ran her own high-end restaurant for years, specializing in Cuban cuisine. Then theres Jacques. He started as a boy working in the family restaurant, served his military service as chef to French president Charles De Gaulle, then moved to the States and opened a successful mini-chain of soup kitchens in Manhattan and after that was chef in charge of the whole Howard Johnson chain, preparing the menus and setting up training routines to transform rough-edged short order cooks into quality chefs so that for the first time in this country, Americans who were traveling could expect to enjoy predictable quality meals anywhere in the country. Read his memoir, The Apprentice. (Back to Shorey: when she was two, her grandfather observed that she loved blueberries. Yes, she replied, because they taste good and they have so many antioxidants in them. Not the standard two-year-olds response to a question about what she liked to eat!) The book starts with a discussion of how to fold a napkin (illustrations provided) followed by a low-key discussion of table manners: laying out a place setting, how to handle fork and knife at the same time, from which side you serve and take away plates and glasses. Pepin comments that Shorey criticizes him for his manners: she says he puts his elbows on the table and sometimes talks with his mouth full. Then the book moves on to preparing food. Pepin has always been a graceful writer and this book is no exception. He doesnt just love his granddaughter, he respects her as a person. It shows. He pays attention to her tastes and uses them to show how much pleasure it can be preparing a good meal. The dishes in this cookbook tend to be a little simpler than the ones in his other books but they show the same attention to efficient, no fuss preparation and to the ultimate determiner: how good they taste. Throughout, Shoreys own asides on food, on her family- are a delight. Above all, this isn't just a book to show young people how to cook. Old dogs can learn from it too: new dishes, insights into technique. Once again, Jacques Pepin has made cooking a gracious pastime.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Reckoning in the Back Country: A Samuel Craddock Mystery; Author: Visit Amazon's Terry Shames Page; Review: This is only the second detective mystery Ive read featuring Jarrett Creek police chief Samuel Craddock and thats my bad, because it looks like there are seven of them, and the two Ive read are really good. (My first was last years An Unsettling Crime for Samuel Craddock.) Everything about this book (as also the last one) is good: the setting, very small-town Jarrett Creek, situated somewhere in rural Texas; the people who live there and the problems they face; and above all, police chief Craddock. Craddock is neither super brave nor super perceptive, but hes a thorough, well grounded, and persistent, and above all, he cares for the people he works for and with, both the citizens of Jarrett Creek and his co-workers. Recently widowed, hes working back into having a steady girlfriend but that gets complicated in this story complicated in a nice way thats fun to read about, so theres a little but too much romance to spice up the mystery narrative. This time, Craddock has to find a physician, Lewis Wilkins. Wilkins isn't a regular resident of Jarrett Creek but an on again off again vacationer but now, just before Thanksgiving, hes gone missing. Missing turns into dead, dead into ugly. (He was tied up and dogs set on him.) Innocent turns into not so innocent as details of Wilkinss life pre-Jarrett Creek emerge. A parallel narrative deals with Craddocks reluctant search for an illegal dog fighting operation someones kidnapping peoples pets and Craddock suspects they're being used to help train fighter dogs. This novel is never over-sweet but it makes you feel good about Craddock, about many of the people who are his neighbors or otherwise help him en route to his solution to a puzzling crime that has the extra could actually have happened. On the basis of the two books Ive read, this is a very good series.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rose & Poe; Author: Jack Todd; Review: Rose, an orphan so poor she doesnt have two pennies to rub together, is impregnated at fifteen by the high school football star, three years older than her and a doctors son. She never expects him to marry her or even admit hes gotten her pregnant, and he doesnt. When she has the child, whom she names Poe after one of the few, maybe the only, poet whose name she knows, everyone ells her to give Poe up for adoption but she refuses. So starts the story of big boned, hardworking, semiliterate mama Rose and gigantic Poe, who stands seven feet tall and is so strong he can lift the front end of a car off the ground, who has eyes of different colors and six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, and who, though he never learned to read or write and cant do math of any kind, is the sweetest man in the world. Poe loves living with his mammy and tending their flock of goats. (Rose makes goat cheese from the milk and sells it for a living.) And he loves Miranda, the daughter of their neighbor, the retired Boston lawyer Thorne. But now Thorne is losing it Alzheimers or something similar. Fantasy intertwines with reality in his everyday living. Hes forgetting things and he has a cane hes carved with totems of all the worlds religions and thinks sometimes that he does magic with it. In short, hes Prospero, Mirandas Miranda and Poe is Caliban. And this is Calibans story, the story of what happens when Caliban/Poe is falsely accused of raping and beating Miranda. of how the town turns against him and his mother even after hes acquitted of crimes he didn't do. Poe and Rose are wonderful characters, fully realized and admirable. So is Miranda and so is Lambert, the aging lawyer who rips the prosecuting attorneys case against Poe to shreds. There is a satisfying enough resolution to the story. The telling throughout is well done. The story could have done with a different introduction, though: it would have been better to plunge straight into the action. Also, the analogy with The Tempest isn't used to the fullest. Still, this a good book. The characters of Rose and Poe will hook you in and the action will keep you reading until its over and then youll be glad youve read it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: White Houses: A Novel (Random House Large Print); Author: Visit Amazon's Amy Bloom Page; Review: One novel by Bloom (prof., creative writing, Wesleyan Univ.) was a National Book Award finalist (Come to Me). Another (A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You) was a National Book Critics Circle award nominee and two others have been on the New York Times bestseller list. She is, to say the least, a writer of big heart and generous gifts. Nowhere do they show better than in this tale, grounded in history, of the coming together of two lost souls. One was a hard-scrabble, straight talking reporter, Lorena Hickok. Dirt poor as a child and sexually abused by her brutish father, she was on her own from an early age. She never had the time or the inclination to develop parlor manners. The other was the nation's First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who however much she wanted to share with other people's discomforts had never known true deprivation. Narrated by Lorena, except for a final chapter musing on Eleanor's death in 1962, the story is told from the perspective of 1945, FDR just dead and Lorena and Eleanor together again but knowing it won't last. Together with Eleanor again, and with the privacy to show their love for each other, Lorena reflects on their meeting, passion and separation. When you read what she has to say about her one true love, you see why Eleanor inspired such devotion in people. She comes as close to a truly good (yet human) person as we can expect to see in our imperfect world. The picture of Franklin is equally on the mark: quick to smile and just as quick to forget, even long held obligations to his assistant and mistress Missy LeHand, but so charming that when you were with him you forgave him or at least forgot to think about his less attractive traits. This love story seethes with passion, elegiac as often as immediate: it's passion sifted through the screen of memory as much as experienced then. Lorena writes: "Every woman is an intimate landscape. The hills, the valleys, the narrow ledges, the riverbanks, the sudden eruptions of soft or crinkling hair. Here are the plains, the fine dry slopes. Here are the woods, here is the smooth path to the only door I wish to walk through. Eleanor's body is the landscape of my true home." Later: "Under our breasts and in the creases, we smelled like fresh-baked bread in the mornings. We slept naked as babies, breasts and bellies rolling toward each other, our legs entwined like climbing roses. We used to say, we're no beauties, because it was impossible to tell the truth. In bed, we were beauties. We were goddesses. We were the little girls we'd never been: loved, saucy, delighted, and delightful." The last note I wrote in the book reads: "What a lovely book!"; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: All the Birds in the Sky; Author: Visit Amazon's Charlie Jane Anders Page; Review: The premise of this delightful fantasy is that at some point, science and magic have to come together to make sense. Not just to make sense of the world, but to save it. Laurence is the techie, an engineering nerd, who at the start of his teens invents a watch that serves as a two-second time machine: twist the dial and you're moved, instanter, two seconds forward in time. It's not the most useful invention in the world but if a bully is about to punch you in the nose, it has its moments. Patricia picks up a wounded bird in the street and it starts to talk to her. Next, she's talking to a cat. (The cat wants to eat the bird. She scares it away.) And next, she's by a huge spreading tree, its branches loaded with birds. It's Question Time, and if she can answer the question asked by the congregated birds, the little bird she found, whose name is Dirrp, and if not, the bird will die. The questions she's asked is a favorite of the birds. It's the Unending Question, supposedly so because you never can figure out the answer. "Is a tree red?" Try as she can, Patricia can't find the answer. Somehow, the scene blacks out. She's back home, can't talk to any animal again, no magic. At least for a while. Laurence's and Patricia's relationship in high school is troubled: they're drawn together, kind of, but mainly because both are seen by their peers as losers, natural born outsiders. Which they both are. Laurence grows up, becomes involved in a Save the World (It needs it!) project that involves antigravity and worm holes and the quest to move at least some humans off earth to a not yet used up and beaten down new planet. Patricia gains back her magical powers. She's a Trickster, which means a Trader, not a Healer, or so she thinks. She does magic in response to gifts given her by the recipients of her magical favors, which includes tricks like dropping the virus level in a terminal AIDS patient so he never quite dies. The magicians think the world is doomed too but have a different solution to it than the techies. The two groups' projects are in head on collision with each other. Something's got to give and when it does, it's because Laurence and Patricia finally find a way around their differences. Sci fi and fantasy aren't every reader's cup(s) of teas but All the Birds is so well written, the characters so appealing, and the action fast and furious that anyone who likes a lively engaging book should find it a pleasure to read. This isn't a science fiction book. Or a fantasy book either. It's just a *book* book and a good one.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Strong to the Bone: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels); Author: Visit Amazon's Jon Land Page; Review: This is the latest in Land's generally successful series of novels about Caitlin Strong, fifth generation Texas Ranger and the first woman Ranger from her family to make into the elite crime fighting corps. Caitlin is a strong character, a great antidote to the Alpha Male syndrome common in this kind of action thriller. Her by now long-standing relationship with former criminal Cort Wesley Masters makes her more than as killing machine. When they come together, sparks fly and bad guys fall. They are definitely not People To Be Messed With. In this instalment of the Caitlin saga, Caitlin and Cort take on (1) a heavily armed biker gang whose boss has organized it along Nazi lines and (2) a creepy financier who may or may not have raped Caitlin eighteen years before. The creep has taken over a pharmaceutical company and the biker boss has a stranglehold over him: the pharma creep may be turning out a deadly bioweapon for the biker boss's use. As if it isn't sufficiently complicated already, every thirty or forty pages, the novel takes us back, in short spurts of narrative, to 1944 and Caitlin's father's pursuit of an escaped Nazi, who has fled a Texas POW leaving behind a trail of bodies. That points to the trouble with this book: the narrative is too complicated. The flashbacks don't satisfy as a narrative of the past. They just slow down the narrative of present events, which is where the action really is. At the end, there's a dramatic revelation which, frankly, wasn't needed and is just hokey. This has been a good series. I hope it isn't starting to suffer under the weight of its past history. There's only so much re-explanation of past events that a new installment can support without it's becoming cumbersome. Stephen Hunter has fallen into that trap with his initially quite satisfying string of novels about sniper-war hero Bob Lee Swagger and his father, grandfather and all the rest of the direct and collateral offspring of the long, bloody line of Swagger Alpha Males.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: March Forward, Girl: From Young Warrior to Little Rock Nine; Author: Melba Pattillo Beals; Review: Whether black, white, brown or sarsaparilla colored, every teenager could benefit from reading this short memoir about growing up black in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1940s and early 50s. In direct and forceful prose, Beals, who was one of the nine high school students originally integrated into the all-white Central High, lays out how terrifying, not just frustrating, it was to grow up under Jim Crow. The best part of this book is also the hardest: why should a five-year-old girl be forced to stand quiet in her own church with the congregation while Klansmen intruders drag in a black man and string him up for an unstated offense? "I was robbed that day of one of the few places where I felt safe," she writes. "The white people in Little Rock were not afraid to kill us. They did not at all fear taking our lives because they didn't think of us as human beings. they treated us like throwaways." How Beals managed to grow to adulthood without hate filling her up, I don't know. But I'm glad she did. She is a national treasure and an inspiration to us all who still have lots to do to improve things. This is an uneven book. Parts are a bit too saccharine in tone for my preference. (But then other parts are horrifying and blunt.) The book is strongest on young Melba's experiences as a young child -her family, role models, but also the slights she suffered, moments of terror. Less space is devoted to the experience of being one of the Little Rock nine who challenged school segregation. But any young person, regardless of his or her skin color, should read this book, if only to see how hateful and soul-draining a hold prejudice had on our supposedly democratic and enlightened country such a short time past. (Melba is seventy-six now. She was fourteen when she entered Central High.); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World; Author: Visit Amazon's Charles C. Mann Page; Review: This is a wholly admirable book: logically organized and exceptionally well written, on a topic of vital importance to all of us today: what is the nature, extent and inevitability of the environmental challenges facing us today, and what the alternative sways of addressing them? Mann doesn't enter the foray as an advocate of any one path out of our mess. He's not a partisan, but rather, a reporter and above all, an explainer, a master explainer, I might add. Following the amazing careers of two twentieth-century scientists, and the antecedents and subsequents to their crusades, he is able to lay out the two possible paths to environmental sanity today. The one man is William Vogt. Born in 1902 and dying (by his own hand) in 1968, he was an ecologist and ornithologist, largely self-taught, with an overwhelming interest in population control. He's the Prophet of the book's title, an Old Testament-style prophet predicting dire gloom unless mankind deliberately scales back: fewer people, less intense use of resources, a husbanding and shielding of nature and natural resources. Mann asserts that as much as any one person, Vogt is the founder of modern-age environmentalism, which, Mann says, is the only enduring new ideology to emerge in the past century. His 1948 Road to Survival was a best-seller, the precursor of Paul R. Ehrlich's even more dire The Population Bomb (1968), which predicted mass starvations in the 1970s and 1980s because of overpopulation. Vogt, friend of Aldo Leopold and inspirer of Ehrlich, is Mann's exemplar of the Malthusian revival of the 1950s and 1960s. The Wizard was Norman Borlaug, born 1914, died 2009, the agronomist who bred a hybrid rust-resistant, high-yield dwarf (less energy and food spent in growing waste stalk, and it won't bend over and break from its own weight and height) corn in Mexico that sextupled crop yield within twenty years of its introduction, and was involved in comparable revolutions, wheat and rice, in India and the Philippines. For his work on "the Green Revolution," Borlaud won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Borlaud's answer to food shortage was: people need to eat so find ways to grow more food. Vogt's was: Nature has limits so accept them; you can't expand forever. Or as Ehrlich encapsulated it: "People pollute." The book is structured so: Early chapters on Vogt and Borlaud and their confreres. Separate chapters talking through the issues around soil and crop growing, water supplies, energy issues, and climate. Then Mann goes back to his principals with a chapter each, continuing the discussion of their differing perspectives. There is a short concluding chapter which is open-ended. The beauty of Mann's book is that he doesn't take sides and doesn't simplify. He's been writing on science for decades. (I didn't realize when I started this book that Mann had co-authored one of the best books on science I've ever read: The Second Creation Makers of the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics. Anyone who can make modern day physics understandable to a layman is a very good explainer.) Here, in this book, he; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Honorable Traitors (A Thomas Laker Thriller); Author: Visit Amazon's John Lutz Page; Review: Lutz has earned his place in the world of detective and spy novels as a dependable, sometimes above average, crafter of thriller fiction. This offering isn't one of his better ones, though. The lead bad guy is almost too much: he's a master of disguise and of all weapons, including his own hands and feet, and a good enough seducer to worm his way into the hero's, Thomas Laker's oh so secret world. Laker, who looks like the ex-footballer he is, is on the books as an employee of the NSA but actually works for a clandestine American spy agency called the Gray Outfit. (Don't look for it in government listings. It's completely under the radar screen, unknown and unnoticed except by the super-competent terrorist like the villain in this story, whose surprise visit to the agency HQs is one of the action highlights of the novel.) This novel starts almost as by accident. Laker is tasked with accompanying cryptographer Ava North on a visit to her dying grandmother who in her heyday was with her lawyer-fixer husband a power behind the scenes in Washington, playing golf with Ike and touch football with the Kennedys. The grandmother has Laker and Ava drive her to her house in Chevy Chase. She wants to collect something she wants to give Ava before she dies. But there's an explosion. House and grandmother are gone. And someone is still coming after Ava, determined to recover whatever it was her grandmother left behind. Ava doesn't know who's hunting her, or why, but scary and then violent things happen around her and Laker is solidly in the mix, now working for his boss at the Outfit but off the map. The action scenes are good except for the final one, which stretches reality a bit. Laker is a good character. Ava is okay but underdrawn and their romance is pro forma for this type of book. The villain has a secret that really stretches things and the whole underplot -why the search, what the villain hopes to do-- seems strained. There's enough good in this novel that I don't feel bad having read it, but knowing what I know about it now, if I were starting fresh, I'd give it a pass.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: If Apples Had Teeth; Author: Shirley Glaser; Review: Age range: 2-8 years. Knopf published this book in 1960. Now, Enchanted Lion Books has brought it again. Hurrah! Hurrah! For this is truly a delightful book, that will be enjoyed as much by the adult reading it out loud as by the little child looking and listening. Each page is a two-line statement: If .. [then] ." Some make sense: "If apples had teeth, / they would bite back." Some rhyme: "If a rhinoceros wore a sweater, / he would look a lot better." And some are just puns or nonsense statements: "If trees were pink, / they would be nevergreens." The accompanying color drawings, by master graphic designer Milton Glaser, fit perfectly. I can see a perceptive two-year-old reacting to this book but it is probably most suited to four or five-year-olds. The humor in it, and the bright imagination it shows, match the responses of children that age. By the time you're done reading together, I bet many of them will be making up their own "If" statements. Children love word play and they love goofiness. They'll love everything about this book. So do I and I'm 81.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Wanted (An Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Crais Page; Review: Crais is a competent thriller writer whose novels about detectives Elvis Cole and Joe Pike are usually great fun. This one's fun too, though a bit sloppier in construction than the best of the earlier ones. Elvis is called in to find a missing teenager. The boy is implicated in a series of high end break-in robberies around LA and his mother wants him found before he gets in even deeper trouble. The problem is: he's already in deep trouble because two terribly efficient and super scary bad guys are looking for him. The boy doesn't know it but he stole something from one of the houses that someone wants back really bad. The bodies pile up. Super laidback Elvis and grimly efficient Pike seem to be always behind the eight ball as bad guys and cops both search for the missing boy and his teenage accomplices. The difference is: the cops want to arrest them, the bad guys kill them and Elvis and Joe simply want to hide the boy until his mother's lawyer can negotiate a best-case deal with the authorities. The bad guys are a bit more generic than most of Crais's villains and there's a major crime resolved in the last few chapters of the books that is, well, let's just say too quickly resolved, and most of it done off camera and then just reported back. Still, the book kept my attention from start to finish and I read and finished it the same day I got it. This isn't one of his best novels but Crais knows his stuff.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Roland; Author: Nelly Stephane; Review: (4-8 years) Roland was late for school so the teacher made him stand in the corner. Bored, Roland took his pencil and drew a tiger on the wall. He said 'CRACK' and it came to life, stretched itself, said good morning to the teacher and when the teacher told it to leave, left. When recess time came, the teacher made Roland stay in the classroom. Bored again, he drew a zebra on a piece of paper, tore the sheet out of his notebook and stuck it on the window. Roland's classmates outside were throwing snowballs at each other. One missed and hit the window. CRACJK, the window broke and the zebras came to life. It ran into the yard and jumped over the wall. Back in the classroom, Roland forgot what the teacher had said to him about no more pictures. He drew twenty fir trees, three brown bears, two chestnut colored bears and a stream and said CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! And they all came to life. Thus starts a stream of progressively more surreal adventures involving Roland, his pencil and the creatures he CRACKs into life. When he says CRACK next to a little girl in a fur coat, her coat morphs into small animals that all run away. She has Roland arrested for stealing her coat. He's put in jail. An animal rescues him and in the end, Roland is reunited with his zebra and makes friends with a pair of donkeys, he makes up with the little girl (by giving her a flat, shining fish he discovers when he falls into the canal) and he makes a little girl with no toys happy. His mother says he can keep the zebra and the two donkeys but not to say CRACK ever again in the house because it's too small for more animals. Much happens in this inspired text but as brilliant as the story line is, the drawings are even more magical. Francois was the major French illustrator of his day, who drew more than sixty covers for the New Yorker magazine. His drawings are sometimes super detailed (e.g., his depiction of the prison where Roland is kept captive) but also childlike -bold, drawn with a vivid but restricted palette of colors, and filled with interesting details. This book was a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the year when it came out in 1958. Thank you to Enchanted Lion Books for making it available to a new generation. This book appeals to children of all ages, even mine.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tess of the Road; Author: Visit Amazon's Rachel Hartman Page; Review: Hartman's breakout book was Seraphina (2012), which I've not read, nor have I read Shadow Scale (2015), the second book set in Seraphina's alt medieval world where humans coexist with two kinds of dragons, full-force ones and the much smaller and weaker quigutl, who are to dragons what cats are to lions. I suspect that familiarity with Seraphina would help in approaching this book, but it's definitely not essential. The author introduces backstory as needed and though it sometimes seems tacked on, it never delays the story for long. Most important, the story of Tess of the Road is a good one. Is principal character, Tess Dombegh, is one you will soon care for and be cheering on. Tess's life hasn't started well. Pregnant at sixteen, out of wedlock --her lover vanished before she could tell him a baby was on the way-- she has spent years in purdah, first serving a maiden aunt and then her younger sister as maid in waiting. Now her sister is about to make a prestigious marriage, and her parents don't want Tess to jinx it. So they decide to put her in a nunnery. Mama, an utterly awful person, tells Tess: "You fell once, and we picked you up. We can't keep doing that." And she quotes St. Vitt, an awful saint who never saw anything of flesh and blood he didn't finds sinful, to her. Tess absconds, accompanied by the quigults Pathka, whom Tess had once saved from death (most people can't speak quigult; Tess can) and Pathka's conflicted offspring, Kikiu, who can't decide whether to love his mother (now father: quigults can change sex with age) or kill her/him. (Quigults frequently kill off their own offspring so the offspring don't have much reason to feel filial toward them.) A variety of adventures happen which show Tess things about herself. She isn't all bad nor are all fleshly feelings bad, regardless of what her harridan mother said to her and though she doesn't know what she wants out of life, she is more and more certain it involves constantly moving forward. The book has a rounded narrative arc that ends at the start of a new adventure. Thus there will have to be another story about admirable Tess and the intriguing quigults who are now her boon companions.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum; Author: Visit Amazon's Kathryn Hughes Page; Review: Victorians Undone won't be everyone's cup of tea (what an appropriate metaphor for a book on the Victorians!) but it packs a good deal of information about the social life, preoccupations and sensibilities of the English upper, middle and working classes in that oh so alien age. It's a type of history I wish more historians would spend time on: seemingly rambling but actually tightly organized meanderings through topics that at first seem inconsequential but when squeezed for the pithy prove insightful and illuminating. In this case, there are five: a young queen Victoria's preoccupation with the rapidly swelling belly of one of her ladies in waiting; Charles Darwin's decision in late middle life to grow a beard (this becomes a disquisition on changes in facial hair styles from early to late century); the question whether novelist George Eliot's right hand was larger and more fleshy than her left; Dante Gabriel Rossetti's fascination with the bee stung lips of one of his models; and an 1867 murder trial involving the cutting up and probably rape of an eight-year-old child. The essays are elegantly written and fascinating in subject and asides, and when you leave them, you know more about the Victorians than you did when you started. That's a pretty good definition of what history should do, in my view. Hughes is professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia and has published The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, (2007, and George Eliot: The Last Victorian (2000).; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Sky Is Yours: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Chandler Klang Smith Page; Review: There's a city. Empire Island, it's called. Abandoned skyscrapers and high rises, boarded up stores, an underground transit system that doesn't run any more, a police department of sorts but not one you rely on and no more fire department, not since the strike where the fire workers refused to follow their boss into a raging inferno. He never came out. Two dragons, one yellow and one green, circle the skies above, sometimes fighting each other (is that what they're doing? or is it a game? a coupling? It's hard to tell), the rest of the time spitting incandescent gobs of magma down on the city. They're the reason there's almost no city any more. People still live in Empire Island. A dwindling elite occupies fortified buildings more like medieval castles than modern skyscrapers. These people don't seem to do much beyond indulging themselves, exotic food combinations, lots of high end video games. Down below, in Torchtown, live their troglodytic counterparts, who have names like Grub and Morsel (two small children who never make it through the book alive) Duluth and Eisenhower Sharkey (a drug lord and the scariest of them all). It's like the two races in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, only exaggerated. The elite families show more intelligence than the Eloi and the lower-class grubs aren't near as mindless as the Morlocks, but the people on high are just as hedonistic as the Eloi, and the ones below are just as debased as the Morlocks. One of the upper crust guys is Dunc, Duncan Humphrey Ripple V is his formal name. From ages 6 to 18, his entire life has been broadcast: "Late Capitalism's Royalty, that was the name of his Toob series, printed in bling at the start of each episode." It's the ultimate reality series and Dunc's the ultimate millennial. For twelve years, the rough edges of reality have never been allowed to intrude on Duncan's self-exploration in front of the camera. But now Dunc is eighteen. His childhood is ending and with it, his freedom. Marriage follows, to the sole offspring of an equally rich family, the Dahlbergs. Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg - "Swanny"-that's his bride-to-be, and though she's perfectly acceptable looking though a bit zaftig, she has had the unsettling habit of teething -sharp, new baby teeth-- over and over and at well over a hundred and fifty teeth coming out of one mouth, she's still not done doing it. Swanny is just as spoiled as Dunc. Just not as clueless. Or crude. Nobody approaches Dunc in those respects. Dunc takes a farewell ride in his brand new HowFly. It's gift from his dad, but it isn't all that well constructed and when one of the dragons collides with it, down goes Duncan and he wakes up on an island of garbage outside the city. A strange young woman is there. She's lived her whole life on island. He's the first human male she's seen and she's fallen in love with him. Okay. That's enough. That's the start, barely, of this sometimes confusing, oftentimes; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Trace: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Archer Mayor Page; Review: You start an Archer Mayor novel and right away feel this is right. Everything falls in place, it's complicated in ways but always human, and it makes sense, is always interesting, and you love the characters who form the backbone of these stories. Joe Gunther isn't the head of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation but that's only because he doesn't want to be. He wants to stay close to detecting and by hook or by crook, he's assembled a rag tag crew of superior detectors who support and enhance him in solving the tough ones: super-bright and super-motivated Sammi Martens, now a mother and paired with Willie Kunkel, father of her child and though the most contrary, also the best detective in the whole bureau, probably the whole state of Vermont except that maybe Lester Spinney, ex-Vermont state police and a perfect crime nerd, is that. Lester is ego-free. Nobody could say that about Willy or Willy and Sammy together, two high pressure egos with damaged, nay ruined childhoods, is a recipe for cooking under pressure. What saves them is that Sammy and Willy really love each other. They just don't trust their ability to negotiate through the landmines of day to day relationship. That's Joe's team, and now he needs them to take over because he has to leave to care for his ailing mother. What happens? Sammi takes over the leadership of the unit and both hates it and loves it. (It's like I wrote above: she's super-competent, even at tasks that make her uncomfortable.) Sammy's got a case dealing with a dead girl, a snarky and very dangerous political fixer out of state, in Albany, NY. Willy's trying to find out the connection between three bloody teeth on a railroad track and an exploded high-tech battery. Ultimately it leads to Homeland Security terrain and a major defense scandal. And Lester is reopening a many years closed case involving a cop who may or may not have been shot in a dual homicide but is in any case, in retrospect because killed in the line of duty, a police department hero. Mayor is a pro at shuffling complex multiple plot lines. Here he does it again with the added fillip of his absence from the scene for most of the action. This is not one of the best Mayor novels. It's a touch too well crafted, all ends tidily tucked in by its finish. It's still a good one. Because Mayor's a consummate pro who does his prep work as a writer. And because he cares about his characters and the people they serve. He never moralizes but there's a deep and strong moral spine in all that Mayor writes. (Good for him!); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke; Author: Jeffrey C. Stewart; Review: Stewart, professor of Black Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of a critical study of-activist-singer-actor Paul Robeson has been writing about Alain Locke since 1983. This book is the summation of thirty years of studies into the life of one of the central, but least known, of the great Black leaders who created, then shaped the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. With 878 pages of text in this 944-page book, there is ample room for missteps. It is a tribute to Stewart's scholarship but equally to his fair judgment that he never goes off track. His judgment is always reasoned. His insights are good: they help you understand a complex man who maneuvered in a complicated and stressful age. And it's all presented in a prose style that draws the reader along: this is a terribly long book in many ways but it's also a very readable one and its judgments on its subject will most likely hold true for years to come. Locke was a complicated man. Not a wholly attractive one either, but then, being black in the very early to mid-twentieth century wasn't a fairy tale ride either. (1) Locke was exceptionally talented intellectually. (2) He graduated with a Harvard B.A. and Ph. D. and the enthusiastic support of any number of Harvard luminaries. Unfortunately, Locke being black, the accolades didn't translate into a position at Harvard or any other white institution. (3) Along the way, Locke became the sole African-American Rhodes scholar, the only one appointed in more than fifty years. His time in Oxford was not an unqualified success and after he left, he lied about having received a degree there. (4) He made his name first teaching at Howard but his stay there (he stayed until he retired in 1953) was not without its stresses and at one point, earlly on, his contract was not renewed for a few years.. (5) His real claim to fame, though, came through his writings and activism in support of a Harlem, and Black, artistic renaissance. (Thus the title of this book, which echoes a volume edited by Locke and including five of his own essays in 1925, The New Negro. One of the helpful insights in this masterful study is how the particulars of Locke's life melded with his esthetic and social stance. He was physically weak -rheumatic fever as a child, 4' 11" and 95 lbs on his entrance to Harvard. He was fixated to his mother. After she died in 1922, he spent the rest of his life (1) looking for a new mother and (2) acting like a surrogate to young African-American writers who benefited from his mothering. (3) He was gay, in a society (Black Victorian, old Philadelphia style) that required him to hide his sexual preferences while still driven by them. Thus, you read of early infatuations and then complex and ultimately unsatisfactory relations with Harlem Renaissance luminary Langston Hughes and later on, Ralph Bunche. Locke does not come across as someone you would love. He was a gamer,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Lost Plot (The Invisible Library Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Genevieve Cogman Page; Review: COGMAN, Genevieve. The Invisible Library. Ace. 2016. 352p. $15 (pb). While surfing Amazon, I came across this new fantasy series and decided to try it. I bought by title, not sequence, and thus came to own the first and fourth (currently last) of the series. I liked both books so much that I have ordered the second and third books in the series and when they arrive, I will probably read them right away. Good fantasy works best either when written in dead seriousness like the Philip Pullman and Lev Grossman trilogies, C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, Tolkien, or when written with a small grain of salt (sometimes) and a big dash of whimsy or humor, like the Harry Potter novels, almost anything by China Mieville -and these delightful concoctions, which mix rational talk and almost rational situations with a non-rational foundation of magic and alt worlds. Irene is a lower mid-level Librarian in a between-worlds Library. Time doesn't work inside the Library, only on the worlds beyond, to which its agents have access by walking through a door in the Library. The purpose of the Library is to save and store books but in a cosmos of multiple, alternative universes, that means not just one version of a book but multiples, with sometimes small but otherwise significant differences. It is the Librarians who venture into these different worlds (where time does work: they age while they're away from the Library, which explains why it's mostly young Librarians, who still have plenty of years left in them, who make these jaunts). Irene is tied to the Library by a large tattoo that scrawls across her back. She can tell when danger is near because her brand heats up. But the tattoo, and her command of the Library's secret language, also give her the ability to command things and people to do amazing things, provided only the request is unambiguously worded and she is asking the object to something that matches its nature. Thus, when being chased by animated stone gargoyles (The Invisible Library), she commands "Granite, be stone, and lie still!", and the gargoyles plummet to the ground, and when it's a pack of wolves on her tail (The Lost Plot) she can command the ground to suck in their feet and then freeze them there. People are harder to command, except temporarily, because they think. Stone, even magicked stone, doesn't, so commands issued to stone tend to persist. Irene has an apprentice, a Librarian in training, named Kai. Super handsome. Enigmatic in indefinable ways. Odd flashes of color, almost scales on his body and skin under stress. Aha, a dragon! Kai's a dragon. In a multiverse, all variations of science and magic coexist. Some worlds are strongly rational, others much more chaotic. There's a logic to all of them but the extent and nature of it varies from one world to another. Kai and Irene are from two of the three principal races that coexist in these worlds: human, dragon and Fae. Fae are chaotic -think, magically narcissistic, bending the worlds; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Green: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Sam Graham-Felsen Page; Review: Green is an exceptional novel about race -a white-black friendship in a predominantly black school in 1990s Boston-but even more about what it's like to be twelve, that desperate age when you're just beginning to forge your own persona independent of your parents' but still afraid to do anything about it when it's challenged. It's about the fear of sticking out, a fear so strong you let bullies walk over you and your friends without kicking back at them. Dave is the narrator. His parents, Harvard dropouts, are as out of tune with the environment Dave confronts every day at his school as it's possible to be. I mean, his dad still wears berkies -in Boston-in the winter" His parents are always off on some crusade for social justice or something and they grow their own vegetables: the food they eat may be nutritious but it's not inviting like, say, Tater-Tots and super-size sodas are. His brother, little Benno, is on meds ever since they discovered his cutting himself was a real problem. To top it off, there's religion. They don't have any but somehow the message got blurred when transmitted to Dave. So Dad's a 'secular Jew' and Mom's a lapsed Christian, but what is he, asks Dave, and will the bodily urges he can't resist condemn it to eternal damnation? Marlon is -soon becomes- Dave's one real friend at school. He's black. He lives in the hood with his grandmother: his mother's on crack, maybe bipolar(?) but certainly screwed up, and she won't take her meds. Marlon's doomed unless he can get out. He wants to go to Harvard. Dave doesn't know what he wants except to fit in. But there are too many bullies at Martin Luther King [Jr.] Middle School for that to happen. These two outsiders, Marlon and Dave, bond over a shared love of the Celtics (post-Bird, Reggie Lewis time now) and their shared loneliness. For a while they're friends. Then life intrudes again. They're twelve. That translates into strong but erratic sexual urges, social confusion and zero confidence in one's own abilities to deal with any of their problems, often not even to recognize them. Their brains are there, they're not stupid, just not sophisticated in their thinking or feeling. The novel is pitch perfect in its evocation of this perilous age, when two young men who used to be children are just starting the climb toward adulthood. Pitch perfect too is Graham-Felsen's take on the barriers to friendship they face across differences in skin color and economic security. (Dave's family doesn't have lots of money. Marlon's is poor.) Graham -Felsen was the chief blogger for the Obama campaign in 2008. This, his first novel, is in its own way as effective and elegant as Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was many years past.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Invisible Library (The Invisible Library Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Genevieve Cogman Page; Review: COGMAN, Genevieve. The Invisible Library. Ace. 2016. 352p. $15 (pb). While surfing Amazon, I came across this new fantasy series and decided to try it. I bought by title, not sequence, and thus came to own the first and fourth (currently last) of the series. I liked both books so much that I have ordered the second and third books in the series and when they arrive, I will probably read them right away. Good fantasy works best either when written in dead seriousness like the Philip Pullman and Lev Grossman trilogies, C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, Tolkien, or when written with a small grain of salt (sometimes) and a big dash of whimsy or humor, like the Harry Potter novels, almost anything by China Mieville -and these delightful concoctions, which mix rational talk and almost rational situations with a non-rational foundation of magic and alt worlds. Irene is a lower mid-level Librarian in a between-worlds Library. Time doesn't work inside the Library, only on the worlds beyond, to which its agents have access by walking through a door in the Library. The purpose of the Library is to save and store books but in a cosmos of multiple, alternative universes, that means not just one version of a book but multiples, with sometimes small but otherwise significant differences. It is the Librarians who venture into these different worlds (where time does work: they age while they're away from the Library, which explains why it's mostly young Librarians, who still have plenty of years left in them, who make these jaunts). Irene is tied to the Library by a large tattoo that scrawls across her back. She can tell when danger is near because her brand heats up. But the tattoo, and her command of the Library's secret language, also give her the ability to command things and people to do amazing things, provided only the request is unambiguously worded and she is asking the object to something that matches its nature. Thus, when being chased by animated stone gargoyles (The Invisible Library), she commands "Granite, be stone, and lie still!", and the gargoyles plummet to the ground, and when it's a pack of wolves on her tail (The Lost Plot) she can command the ground to suck in their feet and then freeze them there. People are harder to command, except temporarily, because they think. Stone, even magicked stone, doesn't, so commands issued to stone tend to persist. Irene has an apprentice, a Librarian in training, named Kai. Super handsome. Enigmatic in indefinable ways. Odd flashes of color, almost scales on his body and skin under stress. Aha, a dragon! Kai's a dragon. In a multiverse, all variations of science and magic coexist. Some worlds are strongly rational, others much more chaotic. There's a logic to all of them but the extent and nature of it varies from one world to another. Kai and Irene are from two of the three principal races that coexist in these worlds: human, dragon and Fae. Fae are chaotic -think, magically narcissistic, bending the worlds; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Close Enough for the Angels; Author: Visit Amazon's Paul Madonna Page; Review: I had a strong reaction to this book but still don't know whether I liked it or not. I suspect that's a sign that it is, though far from perfect, a novel worth reading. To start with, I don't know quite how to categorize the book. Madonna has a substantial reputation as both an author and an artist. This book displays both his strengths: it's not a graphic novel because the many drawings don't follow the story although they do obliquely enhance it. It's a novel novel in the traditional sense: prose passage piling on prose passage to push forward a narrative skein. But not one, three. Back then, in between, and now. The now works best, the back then second best and the in between is sketchy and at times almost irritating in how it interrupts the narrative flow in the two other skeins. Emit, the protagonist, is a twice, maybe three times failed man. By the age of thirty he's had and abandoned successful careers as rock star, author and visual artist, and he's surfing on a wave of self-abnegation and (though hidden) self-loathing. He wrote one good book out of his gut, a second bad one and a third worse one because basically, he had no clue what writing was or how to do it. (Which was pretty much a reprise of his career as rock star.) His identical twin brother Brian, with whom he leads a yin-yang relationship, has retreated into psychic shock, then retreat to Asia and on contact at all with Emit, but he still affects Emit's life, and not in good ways. Emit floats in a cloud of, I don't know what it isn't ennui and isn't self-loathing, although it comes close to the second. He just can't seem to get leverage to start new. From thirty to fifty, he fritters away his life. (He manages a laundromat in San Francisco. How's that for exciting?) Then (1) he meets a woman, just as screwed up by her past as he is, and they click, and (2) there is a renaissance of his writing and his art work in Japan, which yields him attention again and lucre. (3) And then there is a seriously melodramatic late-plot intervention involving a missing love, a past lover of hers turned stalker, and one last intervention by not-all-that-loving twin brother Brian. The worst parts of this novel are the parallel narrative lines to the main one. They seem artificed, not natural, which means they feel like unnatural interruptions in a straight-line plot. In addition, the drawings, though lovely, only partly feel integrated with the story line -pretty drawings but why include them? Lastly, the plot relies a little too heavily on artist-style angst for its motive force. If that's what's bad, then what is good? Mostly, that somehow the result is affecting. It doesn't seem quite real but you want to know what will happen next and there are good stretches of writing along the way. It's a handsome book. It just doesn't all work.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Twenty-one Days: A Daniel Pitt Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Anne Perry Page; Review: If I counted right, this is Anne Perry's eighty-eighth novel written on her own (there are five more books involving multiple authors) and her sixty-first out and out mystery novel. I haven't read all of them but I've read a lot of them (somewhere between thirty and forty) and there are commonalties in them. (1) They're historical fiction: the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels (32) and William Monk novels (23) set in the Victorian era, and a separate series of five novels (which I haven't read) during World War I. (2) They feature paired detectives, not solitary ones. Pitt and Monk have official status in the police and national security apparatus of state and city. Charlotte and Hester Latterly (Monk's partner, then wife) do not but both are indefatigable and inventive snoopers. Charlotte's aristocratic and connections and Hester's connections among the working class ease access to critical information. It isn't the men who solve these cases but both partners equally. (3) In a retrograde but slowly changing society, the women partners campaign for progressive causes. Their male companions support them. Respect matches love in these marriages. (3) The novels tend toward straight detecting, often with overtones of intrigue and sometimes high matters of state. This new book, the start we hope of a new series, features Charlotte and Thomas's twenty-five-year-old son, Daniel Pitt, and he is in all essential respects a chip off the old block(s), which means honorable, respectable and competent, but more than that, caring more about people than abstract ideas. He's a lawyer, apprenticed to an old and respected London firm. He's new to the firm, not yet t=entrusted with the more difficult cases, but absences in the office lead to his being assigned to a troubling case: a man accused of killing his wife and then setting fire to her face and upper body in truly heinous fashion. The man is convicted and sentenced to hang in twenty-one days. (Thus, the title of the book.) That's how long Daniel and the partner he is working with have to find something wrong with the law convicting their client or uncover who, if not their client, committed the murder and desecration of the victim's body. It's 1910. Science is just starting to intrude into the courts. In the first chapters of the book, Daniel overturns a charge of murder against another client by recourse to the newly forensic science of fingerprint identification. He will have to call on science again in this case. And science appears, in the person of an attractive young woman, Miriam fford Croft, who passed all of her exams in chemistry and medicine with distinction at the university (I think Cambridge but can't find the reference in the text) but (because she was a woman) was not allowed to graduate. Miriam becomes Daniel's enthusiastic partner in unraveling this complicated case but all the time, the clock is ticking. To complicate matters further, the convicted man is a biographer of the sleaziest type, who has written a manuscript smearing Daniel's father and his predecessor as head of; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Light: With Monet at Giverny: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Eva Figes Page; Review: Light was one of a trilogy of amazing short novels Eva Figes wrote back in the 70? very early 80s? I bought a new copy to give to our son's partner, sho is a talented painter. She loves it as much as I did. It's ... tactile, I can think of no other way to describe how the author caught the visual imagination that drove Monet to paint day after day in the bright southern France sunlight.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Little Book of Feminist Saints; Author: Visit Amazon's Julia Pierpont Page; Review: There are all sorts of ways you can put down this delicious small book on female icons but who cares? Oh yes, I'd put Grace Slick or Janis Joplin or Chrissie Hynds ahead of Madonna for Saint of Pop, and my favorite would be Nina Hagen, but Madonna is a good choice for the category, and a striver to boot. (Striving is important, given how easily women are slid into second place on any scale of achievement.) And I wish Rosalind Franklin was somewhere on the list, given how important her work was in uncovering the nature and workings of DNA. But in the long run what difference does it make? The important thing is pegging one hundred women who, in their own ways and times, refused to surrender to being second class and thus are object lessons for women coming along after them: these women did this, so now, what are YOU going to do? Each "saint" get two pages, a drawing of her on the one, a page of text -barely an anecdote-on the other. The choice of saints is catholic, transversing globe and time, and the observations about them pithy and pointed. I marked down a few (out of many) that I thought deserved reporting. Ella Baker, Matron Saint of Civil Rights, b. 1903, who became executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Civil Right movement of the '60s, said, "You didn't see me on television, you didn't see new stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up the pieces or put together pieces My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders." (Only a strong person could say that.) Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924) whom I actually met once, as opposed to everything segregationist governor George Wallace stood for, still went to his bedside after the assassination attempt that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Being there cost her political capital because they were rivals but she didn't care. "I know what they are going to say," she said. "But I wouldn't want what happened to you to happen to anyone." Anne and Cecile Richards rejoiced in motherhood and daughterhood and their shared passion for reform. Hilary Clinton is Matron Saint of Nasty Women and when you read about her what you learn is that she's never willing to give up. And the Russian prog rock group Pussy Riot asks, in a recent song: What do you want your world to look like? / What do you want it to be? / Do you know that a wall has two sides? / And nobody is free? This is a good book. Great drawings, text that makes you think. And feel.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Masked City (The Invisible Library Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Genevieve Cogman Page; Review: COGMAN, Genevieve. The Masked City (The Invisible Library Novel). Ace. 2016. 384p. $16 (pb). COGMAN, Genevieve. The Burning Page (The Invisible Library Novel). Ace. 2017. 368p. $16 (pb). Having read and enjoyed novels 1 and 4 in The Invisible Library fantasy series, I ordered numbers 2 and 3: The Masked City and The Burning Page. The Masked City is set in an alt-Venice, despotic Council of Ten and all, in a world so heavy in chaos (vs. order) that it weakens Librarian Irene's apprentice, the (order oriented) dragon man Kai and almost poisons their human associate, the Victorian era Sherlock Holmes act-alike detective Vane, who will be plagued by the chaos taint he picks up in book 2 when he gets to book 3. City is about the kidnapping of Kai by a Fae husband and wife team seeking to use the kidnapping to drag Fae and dragons into a cosmos-rending war. Irene again saves the day but has to pay a penalty (again) for rashly crossing the Library's boundaries of proper (= cautious) behavior. The Burning Page is set, for the most part, in an alt-Napoleonic era Russia. Irene has to cure Vane of his chaos-infection, which is slowly but surely driving him mad. She has again (the first time was in The Invisible Library, 1) to battle against the rogue Librarian Alberich, powerful, dangerous, and vindictive toward Irene for having been foiled by her once before, as Alberich tries to destroy the entire Library. Again, there are Fae and dragons, vampires and werewolves, complicated doings and one after another close shave, but Irene, one of the most attractive and enjoyable heroines in modern fantasy fiction, never ever gives up. There's even romance, Irene's attempts to resist her attraction to not one but two desirable males, Kai and Vale. The better of these two books is The Masked City. For some reason, Irene's continuing battle with Alberich wears thin on me this time around. But the other characters -Kai and Vane, the debauched Fae lord Silver and creepy, scary Alberich-are winners, as is, especially and always, Irene. This is what I wrote in my review of the other two books in the series. It still holds true: "This is one of the best -and best humored-fantasy series I have come across in seventy years of reading them. Cogman can write, she can plot, and does milieu and atmosphere exceedingly well. If she continues this way, and it's clear she intends to write more of her Irene and Kai adventures, she could well become the P. G. Wodehouse of fantasy fiction, than which I have no higher praise."; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Night Trade (A Livia Lone Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Barry Eisler Page; Review: The first Livia Lone novel (Livia Lone, 2016) received acclaim from most sources but I found it wanting --a jolting subject but a bit too formulaic for my taste. I have the same reservation about the second Livia Lone novel. I take seriously the subject -- the international sex trade-but Livia still strikes me as too carefully conceived, every part in place, and the same applies to the action in this and the last novel. It all seems contrived. Yet I share Eisler's obviously sincere indignation -no, fury- that vile things like this are happening in the world. In this installment, Livia travels to Thailand as part of a federal task group seeking to bring down not the little guys in the sex trade but the big ones, the ones who always, always, get away. Livia has her own reason for going. She's hunting down the men who abused her and her long dead sister years past. But, when she discovers that these men are in bed with someone high up in the ranks of American intelligence, Livia's task grows scarier. There's an incident at a nightclub cum sex club. Everything goes wrong there but Livia finds she isn't the only on the hunt there. Thus she meets Dox, the sniper assassin from Eisler's John Rain novels, and together they go to the attack. I've generally liked Eisler's well researched spy thrillers but this one is just not one of my favorites.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Burning Page (The Invisible Library Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Genevieve Cogman Page; Review: COGMAN, Genevieve. The Masked City (The Invisible Library Novel). Ace. 2016. 384p. $16 (pb). COGMAN, Genevieve. The Burning Page (The Invisible Library Novel). Ace. 2017. 368p. $16 (pb). Having read and enjoyed novels 1 and 4 in The Invisible Library fantasy series, I ordered numbers 2 and 3: The Masked City and The Burning Page. The Masked City is set in an alt-Venice, despotic Council of Ten and all, in a world so heavy in chaos (vs. order) that it weakens Librarian Irene's apprentice, the (order oriented) dragon man Kai and almost poisons their human associate, the Victorian era Sherlock Holmes act-alike detective Vane, who will be plagued by the chaos taint he picks up in book 2 when he gets to book 3. City is about the kidnapping of Kai by a Fae husband and wife team seeking to use the kidnapping to drag Fae and dragons into a cosmos-rending war. Irene again saves the day but has to pay a penalty (again) for rashly crossing the Library's boundaries of proper (= cautious) behavior. The Burning Page is set, for the most part, in an alt-Napoleonic era Russia. Irene has to cure Vane of his chaos-infection, which is slowly but surely driving him mad. She has again (the first time was in The Invisible Library, 1) to battle against the rogue Librarian Alberich, powerful, dangerous, and vindictive toward Irene for having been foiled by her once before, as Alberich tries to destroy the entire Library. Again, there are Fae and dragons, vampires and werewolves, complicated doings and one after another close shave, but Irene, one of the most attractive and enjoyable heroines in modern fantasy fiction, never ever gives up. There's even romance, Irene's attempts to resist her attraction to not one but two desirable males, Kai and Vale. The better of these two books is The Masked City. For some reason, Irene's continuing battle with Alberich wears thin on me this time around. But the other characters -Kai and Vane, the debauched Fae lord Silver and creepy, scary Alberich-are winners, as is, especially and always, Irene. This is what I wrote in my review of the other two books in the series. It still holds true: "This is one of the best -and best humored-fantasy series I have come across in seventy years of reading them. Cogman can write, she can plot, and does milieu and atmosphere exceedingly well. If she continues this way, and it's clear she intends to write more of her Irene and Kai adventures, she could well become the P. G. Wodehouse of fantasy fiction, than which I have no higher praise."; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Work: The Last 1,000 Years; Author: Visit Amazon's Andrea Komlosy Page; Review: Komlosky (professor, Social and Economic History, Univ. of Vienna, and an expert on global history and global studies) has written a dense but quite readable primer on the history of work across the last thousand years. The scope of her study is admirable: she tries, as well as can be done in the absence of consistent and universal data, to cover all parts of the globe and she provides, in addition to a phase by phase global history of work an etymology of words used to classify work nation by nation, and an explanation and assessment of various approaches to categorizing work activities: what is included, what not, etc. The framework for her analysis is sensibly Marxian -not at all doctrinaire, but rather using Marx's analysis of the separation of labor from value in the modern world to understand what has happened from the eighteenth century on. In the process, she has many sage comments to make on various scholars' approaches to the history of work. Her book is serious reading, not light reading, and at times drier than, say, works by scholars like Jared Diamond or the livelier Annaliste historians. But it's good, it's solid, and in the absence of anything better (which is unlikely to happen for a while until better data sets have been agreed upon) it is likely to be the best thing written on the subject for quite a while to come.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dreaming of Manderley (A Riches to Romance Tale); Author: Visit Amazon's Leah Marie Brown Page; Review: I don't read a lot of romances but I do read them on and off and during one stretch in grad school, when my day work consisted of reading fifteenth-century chronicles written in Spanish, French and Latin, reading romances before bed saved my bacon. What I like about formula fiction, when done well, is that the expected elements -the predictability of the enterprise -- make any small narrative and stylistic excellences stand out in relief. But for that to happen, there have to be excellences, and there are none here, in this drab, predictable, dull dull dull little book. Nothing much happens in it. No! That's not true. In the very first chapter, the heroine --who has dishwater blond hair and thinks she's not pretty or interesting, cries a lot and has a tragedy in her past-- almost falls of a wall in Cannes (an archetypally glamorous setting) , where she is attending a film festival (glamorous too) as personal assistant to her sexier, livelier, more attractive college best friend. She's swept up and saved by a mysterious French hunk, who looks and dresses like he had just stepped out of a high-end perfume ad. Then he pursues her. Then he .. Get the picture? Things do happen in this book but it's clichd and never terribly exciting. Even the romance doesn't work. It's predictable -but then, everything's predictable in this book! Even the love scenes flop. As to the love object's dark secret --it lies somewhere between too convoluted to seem real and "why should I even care?"; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Conversations with Friends: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Sally Rooney Page; Review: Frances and Bobbi are a pair, kind of, friends in college, sometimes lovers, and collaborators in performance art, Frances writing pieces and Bobbi bringing them to life in performance with Frances the definite second banana. Frances is the intellectual one, not that Bobbi isn't smart but Frances is super smart and her intelligence, coupled with memories of a disastrous childhood reared by an alcoholic father and confused mother, have led her to keep people at a distance. Not just people, though, her feelings also. When she starts to feel something for the man in this story, she retreats into irony. It's a way not to expose herself. At one of their performances, Frances and Bobbi are introduced to Melissa. She takes photographs. She wants to take their picture and write about them. Bobbi is enamored of her from the start, Frances less so. Enter Nick, Melissa's husband. He's a middling successful actor, stage more than film, and a hunk. Frances can't stop looking at him. It's not clear what's going on between Melissa and Nick? Do they love each other? Does she love him or is he, as she says jokingly one time, her "trophy husband"? It takes time but Nick and Frances end up in bed. They text back and forth, but never wholly seriously. The affair goers on, stops, starts again, and then seems to be part. Then something happens. This is a novel about the coming together of two extraordinarily complicated and sensitive people, who are surrounded by enmeshed in a foursome of equally complicated people -Frances and Bobbi, Melissa and Nick, Frances and Nick, Melissa and Bobbi maybe yes, maybe no. Both Frances and Nick have reasons to remain at arm's length emotionally but the attraction between them keeps undermining intention. Rooney is a young Irish writer with the potential for a great future. She is an exceptionally keen observer and she writes like an angel. This is a novel that will stick with you.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Elysium Fire (Prefect Dreyfus Emergency); Author: Visit Amazon's Alastair Reynolds Page; Review: With the death of Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds is arguably the best 'hard' science fiction writer alive. Like Banks, he creates universes. He and then sets his individual stories within them. Thus a chain of characters and situations, history, trails behind whichever is the current offering. In this case, the prefects, a few thousand strong who police a bubble constellation, the Glitter Band, composed of thousands of encapsulated worlds -spaceships but so large they can house millions of people-are confronted by paired crises. 1. People are dying, their neural circuits shorting out and burning them from inside out. 2. A devilishly clever and charismatic demagogue, scion of the most elite of elite families in the Band, is instigating dissension from the centuries old technology-enhanced democracy that has maintained order in the glimmer Band for hundreds of years. He's persuading ordinary citizens that the prefects, the order keepers of their universe, are the problem: don't trust them and secede from the Band. Reynolds's world is a complicated one. One of the principal players on the prefect side is Sparver Bancal, who is a hyper pig. His colleagues in the prefect force accommodate him in meetings by elevating his chair higher than theirs so his eyes are level with theirs and lowering the seat in social encounters so his feet don't dangle above the ground. Prefects carry tools called whiphounds: "She drew the whiphound's handle from her holster. In its stowed form the whiphound -an autonomous robot whip with enforcement, detainment and evidence-acquisition capabilities- was a black, grip-coated rod about the size and thickness of as truncheon, inset with a battery of twist controls at one end. On sensing its removal from the holster, the whiphound extended its roving filament, pushing out a thin silver tentacle until it made contact with the ground. The tentacle stiffened along its length and formed a snakelike traction coil at the point where it met the floor. A single bright red eye glared from the other end of the handle. The whiphound had gone from being an inert tool in her belt to a thing that was alive" People routinely augment their capacities with neural implants and uploads. (Think Johnny Mnemonic?) and they back their live selves up with beta level replicas which can live on after their dearth in a kind of Valhalla of the Gone. There is an automated torture machine called Painflower. A carryover from the previous novel, The Prefect, two super-AIs, Aurora and the Clock Maker, continue their battle with each other for control of the human species. Aurora actively intervenes in this novel. The result is an intriguing but sometimes overcrowded novel of adventure. At heart it's a complicated, many-leveled detective story but there are moments of desperate action in it, which alternate with stretches of science-y type exposition, some of it good, some of it not only boring but muzzy. The result is as novel that maintains interest but is more up and downy than it is level in quality and interest.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children); Author: Visit Amazon's Seanan McGuire Page; Review: McGUIRE, Seanan. Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children). Tor. 2016. 176p. McGUIRE, Seanan. Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children). Tor. 2017. 192p. McGUIRE, Seanan. Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children). Tor. Jan. 9, 2018. 176p. $17.99. "Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes. Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven't always restricted their travel to the possible." (from Beneath the Sugar Sky) Crack the pages of any of these three books and you'll quickly understand and why the first of the three, Every Heart a Doorway, was nominated for the 2017 World Fantasy Award and swept all four other major awards: Hugo, Alex, Locus and Nebula. Nor are these the first of McGuire's kudos: in 2010, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and in 2013, was the first person ever nominated in five different categories on the Hugo ballot. She is outstanding, both as writer and imaginer. In a genre that practically calls for Purple Prose, she eschews it. Poetic? Yes, her prose is, startlingly so. But it isn't overwritten. It's brutally ironic at places, sometimes lush in description, but she is above all an economical writer. When she puts down a phrase or sentence, there's a reason for it. There is no excess verbiage or extraneous narration in these short, deadly works of adult fantasy. The premise is simple. Some children are unhappy in the world they live in or perhaps in their own bodies, so they find doors. They go through the doors and they're in different worlds. The worlds range from severely Logical to outright Fantasy and can be cruelly harsh or lovingly supportive. If then somehow, something goes wrong and these same children tumble back through doors into our world, they are unhappy and dislocated, because our world isn't sorted out by people's needs. They find that their parents want them back exactly the same as they were before they disappeared, but they're not the same anymore. They have new needs and desires. The children want to return to the worlds they left but they can't find the doors now. There is a place for them though, and it's Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children. Miss West is a Wayward Child herself. But even if somehow she found her door again, she's too old now to return: she hopes against hope that when she gets older yet, nature will make her a child again -inside her head. Then maybe her world will readmit her. In Every Heart a Doorway, Nancy comes back from the World of the Dead. She makes friends of sorts at the Home but all she really wants is to return to the world that matches her and spend eternity teaching herself not to move or breath, to live as a human statue in the court of the King and Queen of the Dead once more. Her earthside friends start to die: one's eyes; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children); Author: Visit Amazon's Seanan McGuire Page; Review: McGUIRE, Seanan. Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children). Tor. 2016. 176p. McGUIRE, Seanan. Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children). Tor. 2017. 192p. McGUIRE, Seanan. Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children). Tor. Jan. 9, 2018. 176p. $17.99. "Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes. Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven't always restricted their travel to the possible." (from Beneath the Sugar Sky) Crack the pages of any of these three books and you'll quickly understand and why the first of the three, Every Heart a Doorway, was nominated for the 2017 World Fantasy Award and swept all four other major awards: Hugo, Alex, Locus and Nebula. Nor are these the first of McGuire's kudos: in 2010, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and in 2013, was the first person ever nominated in five different categories on the Hugo ballot. She is outstanding, both as writer and imaginer. In a genre that practically calls for Purple Prose, she eschews it. Poetic? Yes, her prose is, startlingly so. But it isn't overwritten. It's brutally ironic at places, sometimes lush in description, but she is above all an economical writer. When she puts down a phrase or sentence, there's a reason for it. There is no excess verbiage or extraneous narration in these short, deadly works of adult fantasy. The premise is simple. Some children are unhappy in the world they live in or perhaps in their own bodies, so they find doors. They go through the doors and they're in different worlds. The worlds range from severely Logical to outright Fantasy and can be cruelly harsh or lovingly supportive. If then somehow, something goes wrong and these same children tumble back through doors into our world, they are unhappy and dislocated, because our world isn't sorted out by people's needs. They find that their parents want them back exactly the same as they were before they disappeared, but they're not the same anymore. They have new needs and desires. The children want to return to the worlds they left but they can't find the doors now. There is a place for them though, and it's Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children. Miss West is a Wayward Child herself. But even if somehow she found her door again, she's too old now to return: she hopes against hope that when she gets older yet, nature will make her a child again -inside her head. Then maybe her world will readmit her. In Every Heart a Doorway, Nancy comes back from the World of the Dead. She makes friends of sorts at the Home but all she really wants is to return to the world that matches her and spend eternity teaching herself not to move or breath, to live as a human statue in the court of the King and Queen of the Dead once more. Her earthside friends start to die: one's eyes; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children); Author: Visit Amazon's Seanan McGuire Page; Review: McGUIRE, Seanan. Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children). Tor. 2016. 176p. McGUIRE, Seanan. Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children). Tor. 2017. 192p. McGUIRE, Seanan. Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children). Tor. Jan. 9, 2018. 176p. $17.99. "Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes. Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven't always restricted their travel to the possible." (from Beneath the Sugar Sky) Crack the pages of any of these three books and you'll quickly understand and why the first of the three, Every Heart a Doorway, was nominated for the 2017 World Fantasy Award and swept all four other major awards: Hugo, Alex, Locus and Nebula. Nor are these the first of McGuire's kudos: in 2010, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and in 2013, was the first person ever nominated in five different categories on the Hugo ballot. She is outstanding, both as writer and imaginer. In a genre that practically calls for Purple Prose, she eschews it. Poetic? Yes, her prose is, startlingly so. But it isn't overwritten. It's brutally ironic at places, sometimes lush in description, but she is above all an economical writer. When she puts down a phrase or sentence, there's a reason for it. There is no excess verbiage or extraneous narration in these short, deadly works of adult fantasy. The premise is simple. Some children are unhappy in the world they live in or perhaps in their own bodies, so they find doors. They go through the doors and they're in different worlds. The worlds range from severely Logical to outright Fantasy and can be cruelly harsh or lovingly supportive. If then somehow, something goes wrong and these same children tumble back through doors into our world, they are unhappy and dislocated, because our world isn't sorted out by people's needs. They find that their parents want them back exactly the same as they were before they disappeared, but they're not the same anymore. They have new needs and desires. The children want to return to the worlds they left but they can't find the doors now. There is a place for them though, and it's Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children. Miss West is a Wayward Child herself. But even if somehow she found her door again, she's too old now to return: she hopes against hope that when she gets older yet, nature will make her a child again -inside her head. Then maybe her world will readmit her. In Every Heart a Doorway, Nancy comes back from the World of the Dead. She makes friends of sorts at the Home but all she really wants is to return to the world that matches her and spend eternity teaching herself not to move or breath, to live as a human statue in the court of the King and Queen of the Dead once more. Her earthside friends start to die: one's eyes; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Down the River unto the Sea; Author: Visit Amazon's Walter Mosley Page; Review: Down the River unto the Sea introduces a new character in the pantheon of Walter Mosley heroes. Ten years past, Joe King Oliver (his father loved, just loved jazz) was a cop. Then he was framed, thrown into prison and almost killed there and then he was released, under a deal that made the charges against him disappear but left him without his natural resting place, the police force. The stay in Rikers, coupled with the breakup of his marriage, left him broken. Now he's a private investigator. His teenage daughter helps out in the office whenever she can: she refused to join her mother in condemning Joe. But where once he was sure of himself, now he's not, and where once, he wasn't ashamed to show himself in public, now he avoids the limelight, shadowing adulterers and snapping photos to help in divorce cases. He's hardly the old Joe. Then two things happen. A woman comes to him: she wants him to dig into the background behind an infamous, still hot murder case. A radical black journalist has been arrested and put on trial for the murder of two on-duty police officers. He faces the death sentence for sure -the city doesn't approve of cop killers. She alleges he didn't do it, or if he did, it was self-defense. The cops were corrupt and they were killing off the small band of followers who flocked around the journalist. At the same time, Joe gets a letter from the woman whose testimony against him ten years ago had sent him to prison: she admits she framed him. But there's no indication who ordered the frame or why. Joe takes on the paying case and uses it to investigate his own case at the same time. He has to tread carefully. Whoever set him up has clout and the cops who brought down the journalist have a lot of police brothers who would be all too happy to make life miserable for Joe. There's a fair amount of violence in what happens after that --threats against Joe's family, present and ex, and a near successful attack on Joe himself. His only ally is a homicidally insane career criminal -there's an echo here of Mouse in the Easy Rawlins stories-who for complicated reasons, feels he owes Joe undivided allegiance. Mosley isn't successful in tying all of the story together or making all parts of it equally credible but he's a solid storyteller who writes out of a justifiable bank of anger at the way people with black skins are treated in this country. The ending, not uncommonly for a Mosley crime novel, is morally ambiguous. I greatly admired the early Easy Rawlins stories, but have felt less enamored of some of Mosley's more recent work. I'm delighted to see him back on track with this book and I hope to see Joe Oliver in a book again soon.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The City Where We Once Lived: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Eric Barnes Page; Review: BARNES, Eric. The City Where We Once Lived: A Novel. Arcade. Mar. 13, 2018. 244p. $24.99. "But nothing changed. The end still came." In this near-future world, in an unknown but probably Midwestern, things have finally come undone. Minus the futuristic touches, it reminded me more than anything of Detroit a mere decade or two past. The narrator is one of two or three thousand people still living in the South End of the city, the waterside half of a failed megalopolis. The pols overcommitted. Developers left perfectly usable buildings to build new housing and shopping centers out in the burbs. Soon they too were unoccupied. The narrator writes of the city's sad and avoidable past: "One more story for the paper. One more history of economic boom and eventual decline. a company that made engines for which there is no longer any demand. The decline of people who could not manage the wasted by-products of industrial success. A pool of mercury. Vats of a tan and creamy substance frozen in thick whirls. Abandoned engine blocks too many for me to count, ten by ten by ten is a thousand and the piles I find far exceed any quick measurement I can make. Roads and rail lines and canals ." The roads and levees are falling apart and while the utilities still work in the abandoned part of the city, little else does. The narrator takes photos and writes copy for the one local newspaper. Someone somewhere still delivers rolls of paper and printing supplies to the newspaper and pays the narrator a stipend, which is enough to live on given his reduced needs. He chronicles the South Side house by house, with snapshots and archival research into the history of these old, richly storied and now abandoned dwellings. Between times, he goes out to set fire to abandoned houses. Yes, it's arson but the compulsion ties into his backstory, which is jolting and sad. The city government hasn't wholly abandoned the half where he lives. There's a commission that meets monthly to discuss measures to bring the city back. But there's no money to do anything and really, no interest in doing it, for the commissioners all live in the other half of the city, in gated, safe, fat communities. But now their life there is coming unraveled too. The skies are always overcast, there's no sunlight, trees and plants all die. Untended, the levees are breaking up so there's flooding. When the next to the last levee breaks, the flood waters rise so high that people are drowning in the safe, but level low lands of the "safe" North Side. Its' people flee to the old city, looking for safety in its higher elevations and tall buildings, at least until the water goes down. By the end of the book, there are some hopeful signs, but don't expect much. It's payback time for Mother Nature.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science; Author: Visit Amazon's J. Kenji Lpez-Alt Page; Review: I received this cookbook-plus as a gift from our son and his partner. That was a month and a half ago and I've used it or read in it probably every other day since then. I've cooked several items using it, especially meat dishes, and though I haven't followed all the author's advice (I usually cross reference cookbooks before I start [preparing a dish), whenever I have followed it, the result has been superior. An example: meatloaf. I love meatloaf -so does my wife-but Lopez-Alt zeroes in on the problem with most meatloaf recipes: how to achieve the right balance of moistness, consistency and flavor. Lopez-Alt approaches this dish, as he does others, as much an experimenter as a chef: let's test different mixes of pork, beef and veal to see what works and why, and do you need all the add-ons you use -eggs, milk-moistened breadcrumbs-- to keep the loaf moist and flavorful? The loaf I eventually made essentially followed Lopez-Alt's recipe with some tweaking got accommodate my personal tastes. It was awesome! Not only was it good right out of the oven but it stayed good, day after day, as our two-person household made our way through what, for us, amounted to a meal a day for five days. Now that's a meatloaf! I have made four other entrees from this book and they've been equally good. To sum up, there are several compelling reasons to acquire this book. First, it produces superior dishes. That's the most important reason. Second, it's easy to follow. And third, the copious illustrations all serve a point in helping you to prepare these dishes. Lastly, and very important to me, the book is fun to read. I've always liked good how-to books because they show you not only technique but the logic of a set of actions. the Food Lab is a first-rate how-to book and a highly superior cookbook.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bring Out the Dog: Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Will Mackin Page; Review: Macklin is a veteran Navy officer, twenty-three years in the service, five as a SEAL, with one the side, a substantial education in English, writing and political science. He served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. What I'm saying is that he knows of what he writes. These stories are based on notes he took during his multiple tours of duty. They aren't scattered notes, nor bare bones narratives, but rather intricate reminiscences of a life lived under constant stress, but equally long stretches of boredom beyond belief. Danger and uncertainty --whom can you trust?-- alternate in scary, jarring rotation. The people you connect with are gone and buried a week on down the road. (There's a heart-wrenching story about an attack dog, Mir, and its sudden death, and another about spreading the ashes of the unit's howitzer liaison, Yaz, killed in a violent and sudden confrontation with the Taliban.) This is war with no heart or reason at its core, which may be, I fear, what war is like now. War has always been awful but it may be even more dehumanized in today's depersonalized world.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories; Author: Visit Amazon's Joan Aiken Page; Review: If you mash together M. R. James's turn-of-the-twentieth-century ghost tales, the thoroughly creepy stories of Shirley Jackson, and the unsentimental and macabre children's tales of Roald Dahl, you'll come close to the miracle that is Joan Aiken, who died in 2004 at the age of 79. She wrote any number of novels, alternating between books for children and books for grownup children. She is probably best known for her Wolves series, twelve books published between 1962 and 2005, starting with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. She was taught at home until the age of twelve and she never attended the university but her father was the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Conrad Aiken, her mother had a master's graduate from Radcliffe, and two of her siblings were writers too. She finished her first full-length novel at sixteen. She had her first short story for adults published the next year and she was nineteen when her first children's story was broadcast on the BBC. She published over a hundred books in her lifetime. For all that her novels deserve praise, it is the short story that was her mtier. She was an outstanding short story writer, blending her love of odd words with a feel for the fantastic and an attraction to the odd and exotic in character and setting. This collection, twenty stories in 254 pages, is the ideal place to get to know her. All of the stories are good, the best are mind-blowingly good. They are also, surprisingly given her attraction to the weird, for the most part sunny -though not without darkness or murkiness lying behind in the shadowy corners of the story. Start with the second story in, "A Portable Elephant." Miles, a disenchanted teacher now turned writer, wants to go into the forest. What a forest it is! You need a passport to enter: inside the ground is strewn with abandoned words and sayings, effusive words like "gigantic", "pleasure", "supersonic", and "aggro," and humble words and phrases like "like", "I mean to say", and "cheap". He waits in line for a whole day only to find that to be admitted, he has to have a companion, an animal, weighing between thirty grams and twenty kilos. In the village nearby, pets are being sold at such a premium that cats sell for 500 pounds and dogs a thousand. Mice are even more expensive because they're portable, and poisonous snakes cost slightly less than non-poisonous ones. Not finding anything else, he winds up with an elephant, which is promoted by its owner as "portable." After the sale is closed, the owner admits that it is portable, but only if you have a derrick. Miles is stuck with it so he feeds and grooms it, hoping it'll slim down. A woman from the village wanders up. She stays to help him. He finds that she's a former pupil of his. He disliked her: she always reversed the letters in his name when she spoke to him -Selim instead of Miles. Now he calls the elephant Noel, not Leon, which is its; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy; Author: Visit Amazon's Nicholas Tampio Page; Review: Tampio (assoc. prof., political science, Fordham; author of Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in Contemporary Political Theory and Deleuze's Political Vision) has written a straightforward and eminently clear critique of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, arguing that while there is much to admire in the initiative, its overall effect is to limit educational options, and thus experimentation in education, and weaken democracy. He argues that rather than teach the logic of the several disciplines involved, often it teaches students to game the testing, substituting their ability to manipulate standardized tests (multiple choice questions, short essays, a long but routinely structured longer essay) rather than gain a tactile and experiential understanding and feeling for the subjects under investigation. He cites copiously from articles and books skeptical of the enterprise but his rocks are three: Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, with his distrust of centralizing public policy decision making in one body or at one level; Dewey, with his passionate defense of diversity and of experienced, hands on education; and Hannah Arendt, whose skepticism of Big Government was rooted in the observation that if the center shoves the periphery out of decision making, the result will be atrophied political muscles and less interest in civic involvement at the local (and state, by implication) level. This book isn't a rant. Tampio lays out the admirable impulse and many good results of standardized centralized testing and curriculum reform. But he says it isn't worth it. First, the core standards in many of the areas -most notably, the sciences and American history-are far from value free. The science curriculum favors certain kinds of science -because easier to test? -over others, and in addressing ecological issues, favors technocratic and technology-heavy solutions over other considerations. The American history curriculum is even more obviously vulnerable to ideology. Tampio argues that these choices should be made closer to the parents whose children are being taught. Even if you find the common core initiative a good thing, it is difficult not to worry about its effect on local participation. To put it bluntly, the initiative robs parents of input and of choice. And the initiative's priorities are neither value free nor in all cases proven effective -read scientists' and educators' concerns about teaching toward the STEM disciplines. Besides, do we want an America where all public education marches to the drumming of a single drummer?; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Escape Artist; Author: Visit Amazon's Brad Meltzer Page; Review: The best word to describe Brad Meltzer's The Escape Artist is lame. There's a heroine, Nola Brown. She's supposed to have died in the crash of a plane returning from a military base in Alaska. The crash killed seven people, including the Librarian of Congress, who was a close personal friend of the President. But mortician Jim "Zig" Zigarowski, who preps dead soldiers for burial, knows it wasn't Nola who died. Then he finds out that three of the dead on the plane have false names, bearing aliases dating back a century to the legendary escape artist Harry Houdini. There's a back story about how Zig knows Nola, dating bask fifteen years or so to when his daughter was alive: Nola saved her from maiming or death in a camp fire accident -no matter that a year later, she was dead anyway. There's another backstory explaining in excruciating detail, one drop at a time, why Nola is so aggressive and why she doesn't trust authority. Some early reviewers have compared Nora to Stig Larson's Lisbeth Salander but that's one of the things wrong with this novel. It's too much boilerplate, too little freeform or independent. Larson and Salander, Barry Eisler's Livia Lone -we've seen this story before: talented, feisty heroine with troubled past, abused by one or another authority figure in her past, and still acting out her past in present actions. The problem is that to show the heroine's past, the author must interrupt present the narrative with a string of past interjections, all to the detriment of flow and ease. It's formulaic so quickly. Add to that a somewhat improbable plot with characters who don't have much flesh or seem to appear out of nowhere, and you have a failed thriller. What's the plot? In a nutshell, Zig tries to find Nola and prove she's not dead, Nola's on the hunt to find who brought down the plane and killed seven people. By the end, more than seven people are dead. Dreary, dreary, dreary.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Barbed Wire Heart; Author: Visit Amazon's Tess Sharpe Page; Review: Harley McKenna, age 22, is daughter and heir to southern California crime lord Duke McKenna. Duke smuggles guns, cooks meth, runs a protection racket, and has killed more men than he has fingers and toes. Harley's worked for him since she was sixteen, running his collections. Here she tells her story. Her mother was blown up when she was eight. She saw it happen. Then she saw her best friend shot and her uncle (who wasn't a crook) killed. She was barely a teenager when someone knocked her out and locked her in a car trunk. It took her twenty minutes to figure out how to escape. When she did, there was Duke, standing by the back of the car waiting for her. He'd done it as a training exercise. She needed to learn never trust anyone except family. (Really, her father.) She should always have an escape plan. 22 now, Harley's a deadeye shot and she's tough, and mean when she needs to be. She needs those qualities now because Duke has gone missing, down in Mexico some place, and Harley's facing a double assault: an ambitious gang member she can't trust and a new attack from a rival gang boss. A lot more happens in this novel. Harley runs a safe house for battered women -it was her mother's project; she continues it now-- forty cabins in a gated enclosure. The women's exes are mean s.o.b.s who don't take kindly to a woman, even one as connected as Harley, telling them what to do. Then there's a love story, a pretty good one. There's sadness too as Harley slowly reveals what's really going on with Duke. But the heart of the story is Harley's complicated plan to sideline her rivals and assume leadership of her daddy's gang in his absence. Harley narrates the tale: she's smart, tough and oh my, determined! The narrative alternates between now (Harley's take over) and the past, starting with Harley at eight and moving forward in skips and jumps. The alternation of times hurts the plot: every time her narrative retreats to memory, the momentum of the main storyline takes a hit. But by and large it works, mostly because Harley is an appealing narrator. What doesn't work is Harley's reluctance to kill her enemies when she finally gets them in her hands. Respect and fear are the currency of leadership in her environment: anything less than ruthlessness is weakness. Repeatedly, she resorts to subterfuge to keep her followers' allegiance. It feels phony. It doesn't even seem like her, not the tough, competent drug dealer's daughter that she is. It complicates plot, making it appear less real as well.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart's Path to the God Within; Author: Visit Amazon's Joel F. Harrington Page; Review: Let me start by saying: this is a superb book. Its subject is abstruse, to say the least: the complicated, sometimes hard to decipher teachings of thirteenth-century philosopher-theologian Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-1328). Harington has chosen not to simplify what is not simple, but he does a superb job leading the reader through the mazes and lacunae in Eckhart's thought. He never pretends to have an answer when he doesn't have one. Thus, he leads the reader to see it's alright to feel puzzled at times when reading the eloquent, frequently beautiful but equally often hard to interpret Eckhart's writings, which have suffered long periods of relative neglect (the Church doesn't encourage heresy) and is now growing in relevance again. Although a great deal is missing concerning Eckhart's life, Harrington has managed to piece together what is both a rich and rewarding picture of his life. The Meister was ordained a Dominican monk quite young and spent the rest of his life studying (after fourteen years of study, he earned a master's of theology from the University of Paris, the preeminent university of its day) and writing, preaching to the laity (in German, not Latin), and carrying out the various administrative and diplomatic assignments his very active order assigned to him as its go-to man. Late in life, he was brought before the pope on charges of heresy but unlike many heretics, he neither left and the importance of works as necessary to salvation. The heart of the Master's mature teachings was the concept of gelazenheit (gelassenheit in modern German), which Harrington translates as" letting-go-ness." It's similar in content but antecedent to Nicholas of Cusa's docta ignorantia ("learned ignorance"), the idea that no matter how hard you pursue God through reason, you will never get close to knowing or experiencing Him that way. Works can't do it either, nor can intellectual effort. You can only reach God by letting go, abandoning intelligence and will to His divine mercy. Underpinning this in Eckhart is the notion that God is already within us. There is a spark of the Divine presence in every one of us: ego prevents us from freeing it up to possess us. (One of the pleasures in reading this fine book is the wealth of striking images Eckhart uses to express his ideas: "A man should give all he has for heaven -his own will. As long as he keeps any part of his own will he has not paid for heaven." Likewise, on praying: "Anyone who desires something from God is a merchant." Harrington comments: "Eckhart concluded that until one abandoned all preconceptions about God himself [one could not approach him]. The God most Christians thought they knew was not the true God. To know the uncreated Crestor directly required first unknowing the human-created God, a process known to theologians as the via negativa, or negative way." (Cf. Maimonides: "The one thing I know about God is that I do not know him.") After Eckhart's death, a loosely organized movement, the Friends of God (led by John Tauler and Henry; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tin Men: A Crime Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Mike Knowles Page; Review: Someone killed Detective Julie Owens and ripped her baby's fetus from her womb, only one month away from term. Os knows about her because he was the baby's father, but he never acknowledged it. Dennis knew Julie too. One time years ago, she let him off the hook when she caught him in a car with a transvestite hooker. Os and Dennis are detectives. So is Woody, Os's partner. Woody's an addict, Os is a sadist, and Dennis a blowhard with a jones for male hookers acting like women. All three are tainted cops but they've been assigned to solve this murder and quick. It's a formula for disaster and they oblige in this fast moving, hard as nails police thriller. Knowles has authored six previous crime thrillers featuring a mob enforcer named Wilson. I reviewed the most recent, Rocks Beat Paper, and liked it. Tin Men is his first stand-alone offering and it's even better. Nothing comes out good in this bleak but effective police procedural. Brrr!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Absolute Power: How the Pope Became the Most Influential Man in the World; Author: Visit Amazon's Paul Collins Page; Review: This is a book that every Roman Catholic should read. They won't all agree with it. Many may be furious about it, but every believer has an obligation to read seriously, not antagonistically, seriously presented views that disagree with theirs. Collins is an ex-priest. He left the Church after years of scrutiny over a book he wrote that criticized the direction his Church was taking: the book argued that the Church, and the papacy, had taken a wrong turn -away from pastoralism and the notion of a community of all the faithful toward a church structure and ideology that was insensitive to history and place and that stressed top down authority over shared responsibility. The problem for people who object to this view of the Church is that it matches up to much of the Church's history over the past two hundred years, the period he examines. The story that he tells is easy to follow in the sense that he lays out each step of it and nails down all the pertinent actors, acts and facts along the way but it is less easy in that there is so much detail and though Collins doesn't write badly, he is not a masterful prose stylist. To compound it, once an organization or encyclical has been named, the tends to refer to them by acronym, and even in a continuous reading, which is how I read the book, the acronyms blend together and I forget the referents. That's nitpicking, though. This is a good book with a strong, relevant thesis. Every believer should feel obligated to confront it. Collins doesn't say anything that Church reformers have not said about the papacy in the past century: with two significant breaks, during the papacies of John XXIII (1958-63) and Francis I (2013-present), it worked to stifle disparate views and kill needed reform -of papal institutions, of liturgy, of pastoral emphasis, of the view that the Church used to be and should be a community of believers built up from the base, not dictated from the top down. In this view, John Paul II becomes a media success but a narrow-minded narcissist, still another ultra-montanist who because of his own complicated past growing up and serving in a Communist and atheistic country, identifies the Church with his own suffering, while like his successor Benedict XVI, ignoring the suffering of those sexually abused by their own priests. John and Francis earn high marks in this book but Collins still fears a Church whose direction depends so heavily on a near omnipotent all too human pope. "The problem is," Collins writes, "whether what [has] happened in the past two centuries was what Jesus, the poor man of the Gospel, the man who had nowhere to lay his head, intended." There is a telling passage near the end about Francis's accession, which tells something both about what Collins wants from the Church and his own faith. Just elected pope, Francis steps out on the balcony of St. Peter "smiling but look[ing] slightly shell-shocked." He wears a simpler garb than; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: My Father's Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love, and Die; Author: Visit Amazon's Kevin Toolis Page; Review: It's more than seventy years since sociologist Geoffrey Gorer published his article, "The Pornography of Death" (1955). In it, he argued that death had replaced sex as the subject not examined or spoken of in western society. Jessica Mitford wrote about abuses in the funeral home industry in The American Way of Death (1963; revised and expanded 1998) and Evelyn Waugh satirized the funeral business and our practices of death avoidance in The Loved One (1948, good book; 1965, crappy movie). And in 1987, historian-of-sorts Michael Lesy brought out The Forbidden Zone, a series of essays investigating the mind set and practices of workers in the death industries -slaughterhouse, morgue, hospice, hospital, funeral home, and how our society removes us from the physical presence of death in all its messiness, horror, and, oh yes, let's not forget it, inevitability. Because we all die. Toolis argues in this passionate, poetic, often angry book, that we're the losers by separating ourselves from the physical presence of the bodies and remains of loved ones who have passed away. The occasion for his musings his father Sonny's wake, which takes place in the family home, rundown, almost a hut, which is located on the storm swept, almost vacated (pop. 2,569 in 2011) little island of Achill off the coast of county Mayo in northwest Ireland. Most of the family lives elsewhere now. That's what today's Irish do: they migrate in order to earn a living, to live a life with wider horizons. Toolis moved to London and became a reporter. His one previous book (Rebel Hearts, 1995) was about the IRA soldiers fighting a covert war against the British. A lot of his reporting has been undertaken in danger zones -the Middle East, Africa, Northern Ireland. He refers to it often, unmediated deaths he observed there serving as a touch stone for what he now feels at the death of his own father's. He compares the way his father's wake proceeds: his father's corpse residing in a coffin in the corner of the living room, his dead body washed and primped by the women in the family, dressed in his wedding suit, his hair washed and combed, a rosary placed in his hands, crying, sobbing, and stories told-and then the family men carrying the casket to the hearse and off the hearse into the cemetery for burial -he compares this respectful, above all communal (all the neighbors are there) with what he calls "our Western Death Machine our Whisper Death World", and wonders how we got from the Greek way (Priam risking death to plead with Achilles for Hector's burial, Antigone risking sure death to bury her brother Polynices, left to rot outside the gates of Thebes by her tyrant uncle Creon) to our sanitized avoidance of the realities of death. "Why have we lost our way with death?" Toolis asks. There's more in this absorbing book: how his brother's death, struck down by leukemia in his twenties, shook up the author's perspective on life and fueled a decades long fascination with stories of death; loving; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Match Made in Manhattan: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Amanda Stauffer Page; Review: Match is about the travails of a young professional in the age of social media and on-line dating sites. Alison isn't new to relationships. Shes had two that both lasted three years. But they happened without much that resembled conventional dating no preparing to meet strangers, not much testing out of their shared interests and likes and dislikes or assessing whether they really fit as a pair. Now shes on her own, with no boyfriend in sight. She lives in Manhattan, shares an apartment with two college (Yale) friends and works as an architectural conservator. She could live without her boss but the work is exciting: how many people do you know whove had the chance to walk the cornice of Grand Central Station or dangle off the side of St. Patricks Cathedral? She signs up for a years trial of Match.com and the rollercoaster ride begins. When they meet for drinks, her first date tries to grope her knee under the table, tells her hes been on Match.com for nine years, and when asked to describe his most hilarious matchup, describes the time a woman gave him a lap dance. No one who follows is quite as bad as he is though one comes closebut either (a) theres no spark between them or (b) theres too little in common between them for the match to work. The one who excites her most is great partying at a bar and he looks like hed be great in the sack but he never talks about anything serious and his life is so compartmentalized that they only manage to get together once or twice a week. She doesnt know if he really needs her and when she gives him her No Pants speech (no sex till Im ready), he cools off fast. All of this is detailed in countless texts, emails, and phone calls, with Alisons women friend joining in. Theres a lot of partying and a lot of drinking. Its all mildly humorous but ultimately, thin, shallow and to me at least, rather boring. Match may be a good description of the lives of many young, single and upwardly mobile millenarian women --but so what? Who really cares? Jane Austen this is not.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Woman in the Water: A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series (Charles Lenox Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Finch Page; Review: This is the eleventh book to appear chronicling the career of Victorian era gentleman Charles Lenox, Londons first private detective in an age when the very idea of someone like Lenox (second son of minor aristocracy) dirtying his hands to do such work was seen by his peers as almost dclass. Finchs first Charles Lenox novel won the Agatha Award for best first mystery novel. All ten have been critically acclaimed. As they should be, because they're very good. Number eleven is a prequel to the other ten. Lenox is just twenty-three. Hes in love with his friend Elizabeth, but shes married to another friend. (One of the joys of the series is following his courtship of Elizabeth, later called by her middle name of Jane, and a widow, and their eventual marriage. By installment 10, they have a daughter and as you would expect, are loving parent and still the best of friends.) Lenoxs friend and valet Graham is in this prequel, as are Lenoxs brother, mother and this is a joyhis father, who has just learned of his impending death and copes with the news with predictable equanimity. (These are lovely people.) Charles is just starting as a private detective. The trade doesnt exist in his world. He has to persuade his friends that its respectable work and convince Scotland Yard detectives that he has something to offer. As in the other volumes, Lenox takes on two cases simultaneously. The one is minor: it doesnt take up much space in the narrative. The other is a full-blown late Victorian, thriller mystery a la Wilkie Collins or the Charles Dickens of Drood. Two womens bodies wash up on the shore of the Thames, brutally murdered and laid out in state. After the first murder, the killer sends a taunting note to a newspaper. Charles and Graham come across it. Every day, they read the London papers and clip out notices of potential crimes its their way of learning more about crime and detection. Soon Charles is involved with Scotland Yard police in a decidedly twisty mystery with many surprises ahead. The resolution shows Charles that he has the stuff to be a good detective. Now its up to him to decide if thats what he wants to do with his life. I would rate the Charles Lenox series as one of the three best straight detective series out now, along with Donna Leons novels about Venices commissario Guido Brunetti and Martin Walkers police chief Bruno (Courreges) series, set in the Dordogne truffle region. All three offer good mysteries, vibrant characters, and they drip with ambiance, its so rich. There are lots of little facts about place and time to titillate the mind. Last of all, you like the detectives. Youd enjoy being friends with them because they're civilized, intelligent and at heart kind. How do you get better than that out of a mystery novel?; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism; Author: Visit Amazon's Howard Bryant Page; Review: This is an angry book, but it should be. Theres plenty to be angry about. Bryant, a senior writer for ESPN the Magazine and author of three previous books on the professional sports world, is upset at how dangerous it is to be black in this country especially if you're young and maleand disgusted that people in power are willing to shove the problem under the rug in order not to have to do anything about it. The problem is black people being killed in disproportionate numbers and no redress to it. Bryant argues that since 9/11 cops get a pass in jury trials. Its as though having sacrificed so much ton hat day, they now shouldnt be judged even when they do an egregious wrong. In sports, the problem is a combination of money and prejudice. Sports is big business: nobody wants to rock the money boat. The owners are white: they don't want protest. The fans are mostly white and they don't understand protest. Post-9/11, leagues and teams have promoted an over-strident nationalism that glorifies the police and the military at the expense of legitimate concern about police brutality and governmental neglect. I n this world view, it is unforgivable that a well paid football player like Colin Kaepernick should exercise his constitutional right to protest ---even though he does it peacefully, not violently, and for a good cause: to draw attention to endemic police violence and our indifference to the plight of black citizens. Team owners, league officials, fans they all want athletes to use their bodies to enrich or amuse them. But they don't want athletes to use their judgment to protest. Bodies, not brains sounds like old times, doesnt it? Bryant traces a line of dissent among athletes from Paul Robeson and Jackie Robinson on to Jim Brown and Muhammed Ali and today, concerned athletes like Kaepernick and LeBron James. He inveighs against greenwashing, the corporatizing of black athletes for white profit. OJ Simpson, when asked in an interview about being black, replied: Im not black. Im OJ. And Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, both of whom could have had influence, have fled involvement in protest. (Jordan has lately changed his stance some.) Bryants prose is heated and overblown but thats not a major flaw. He knows what he writes about and he won't let us off the hook on addressing real moral concern.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky: A novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Jana Casale Page; Review: Jana Casales debut novel, The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky is about life as a succession of small to middle sized events, most unplanned for and many going some other way than anticipated. There is no grand dramatic arc to the novel, but by the time its over with, there is a satisfying form to it. It feels real. Its human. Its extremely witty at times but not at the expense of its innate seriousness. Rather, some parts of a life are funny so why not enjoy the humor. But at heart, its about what a life is like. At the start, Leda is a college student, living in Boston and satisfying to be a writer. While getting coffee, she sees a student at a nearby table reading Chomsky: American Power and the New Mandarins. She tries to strike up a conversation with him, even sits down at his table. Conversation fails. She makes an excuse to save face and leaves. But the book intrigues her: as much as she reads, shes never tried Chomsky so she buys a book by him. Doesnt get into it. Puts it aside. Carries it around with her for years, decades, and never gets to it. Thats like her life. She has something close to a life plan at the start but thats not the way her life winds up. Shes accepted into an MFA program in Boston but her boyfriend moves to California and she goes with him. After many bumps and starts, they move back east, marry, she has a baby and then thinks shes going to have another but miscarries. Her daughter grows up, her husband grows old, and she no longer fits into her swimsuit and thus won't go swimming any more. Along the way, one thing after another happens but none of it is of cosmic significance except possibly for Leda. She grows old and dies. Each episode in the book is written in the present perspective but occasionally, the author links them together across time. Leda is walking home alone from the drugstore alone and she picks a daisy to give to her little daughter. Six years later, she makes her a daisy chain, and years after that, a grandmother by now, Leda opens a book and finds a daisy pressed between the pages. She remembers her mother, who cut a fresh bouquet of them for the house every spring. The chapter ends with a reflection: How unaware she was of the little pieces of her life that fit together seamlessly and without touching. It was as spectacular as anything, really, as little as it was anything at all. This woman can write! This is a great novel for women to read not only because its about a woman but because its about a smart, educated woman and how life often works out for women like her. Its a great novel for men to read because it opens up what life might be like for our loving and willing partners, who in a less than equal world, are dragged; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The City of Lost Fortunes (A Crescent City Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Bryan Camp Page; Review: In post-Katrina New Orleans, Jude Dubuisson is scuffling along, hiding his true nature half-man, half-godbecause its too painful to use his magical gift: he finds thing but along with the finding, all the past regrets and longings of his clients flood into his consciousness, wearing him down. Its been this way ever since the storm. Thats when his gift showed itself full strength., Before that hed been a low level street magician, blessed by an amazing string of good fortune but studiously avoiding the lime light of the Big time. Now an old associate calls on him: hes been invited to a card game hosted by Dodge, god of Fortune for the city. Who knows who else will be playing. When he gets there, hes confronted by a zombie, an angel, an old woman possessed by a voodoo god (Papa Legba), and a man with the head of a bird its Thoth, the Egyptian bird god. The game is incomprehensible and nobody ever tells him how its played. In one hand of the game, he loses everything. His cards drawn from a tarot deckare all blank. Everybody owns him now. He leaves and soon after is informed that someone killed Dodge after he left. Maybe it was him? He isn't given a choice: he has to ferret out who killed the Fortune god or die himself. Along the way, he meets other gods, a raven that doubles as a dog and is really a psychopomp (it accompanies people who have been called by the gods to somewhere they probably don't want to go), a zombie musician, a pack of ghouls, Papa Legbas mean brother, and he shares the same body and skull with a dead woman. How he will get out of this without enslaved by as greater god or eaten by a vampire or becoming dead for good is what the rest of the novel is about. Along the way, Jude discovers what he really is meant to be, and the fate of New Orleans, hurting from the wound of Katrina, is resolved. This is Camps first novel and its really good. Especially impressive is how we weaves in the history of all kinds of gods and other supernatural creatures and makes it all fit. Admittedly, New Orleans, with its long tradition of religious syncretism you can worship the Baby Jesus and his Virgin mother along with Baron Samedi and the other voodoo gods and Thoth and Anubis-and Hermes-- all at one time. But Ygdrassil? The Buddha? If Camp continues to write at this level and in this vein, he continues to write at this level, we may be looking at another Neil Gaiman, than which nothing could be more welcome.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Dark Clouds Shining (A Jack McColl Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's David Downing Page; Review: The Dark Clouds Shining is the fourth installment in David Downings excellent series of historical thrillers featuring renegade English spy Jack McColl and his heartmate, the socialist and feminist journalist Caitiin Hanley. It reunites Jack and Caitlin with Jacks nemesis Aidan Brady, an American radical who seems more bloodthirsty than genuinely radical all Aidan is looking for is an excuse to kill someone. The time is 1921. The setting is London (Jack in jail, and then released in return for his agreement to enter Russia again on a secret mission), Moscow (Caitlin working for the great Russian feminist Alexandra Kollontai, Jack narrowly avoiding exposure and hunting for information, Brady heading a rag tag group composed of three Indian radicals, an anarchist and a disgruntled Bolshevik, who just happens to be Caitlins husband), and then across Asia on slow train en route for India and a plot to Well, I cant tell you what Brady plans to do. Youll just have to read the book. But when people are around Brady, their chances of dying go sky high. Hes a magnet for violence. The virtues of this series, and this book, are many. The parts of the history that are true are detailed efficiently. The parts that are imagined are plausible and fit with what is known about the times. Downing is a master at drawing you inside the events and the heads and hearts of the people who are living through them. Jack and Caitlin are wonderful characters and his description of their complicated on again off again relationship is perfect. These are decent, mature people trying to feel their way through the complicated currents of the early and early-middle Russian revolution. The Bolsheviks you meet in the story tend more toward idealism, even humanity, than toward a piggish brutality this isn't Animal Farm. And one of the functionaries, Yuri Komarov, deputy chairman of the M-Cheka, and second to Dzerzhinsky, is a thoroughly admirable man. In a Russia that is slowly falling back toward class differences, where those in power expect preferential treatment, to follow the careers of Kollontai (a real person) and Komarov (made up) is both heartening and enlightening. The Revolution hasn't extinguished their humanity but it has made personal choices harder how much and what must you sacrifice to create a new and better world? Thats Jacks and Caitlins dilemma. Both can feel the change. An age of possibilities and hope is coming to an end. Will there still hope in the age to come? I haven't said it above so let me say it now: Downing is a really good plotter. What hes written here is a thriller that really thrills and a historical novel that illumines the time and place he describes.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Perfect Shot; Author: Visit Amazon's Robin Yocum Page; Review: The bad guy in this book, Little Tony DeMarco, is an enforcer for the mob in the southeastern Ohio steel town of Mingo Junction. He likes the job a lot. Its not just the money and attention. He likes hurting people. Hes killed a bunch of them. His brother-in-law is the good guy, Nick Duke Ducheski: hes married, not happily, to Tonys twin sister Nina. Duke is Mingo Junctions most famous citizen. Almost twenty years ago, he almost single-handedly won the state basketball championship for his high school team, sinking a series of last minute shots climaxing in the jigger and trigger, Duke signature move, a dribble behind his back, a fake to one side and then drill it, winning the game for Mingo Junction with three seconds to go. Nothing Dukes done since matches that. Ninass unexpected pregnancy and a shot gun marriage took away the chance of college. Hes worked in the mills since then. Thats what his dad did too until he took ill and died. (Young.) Duke wants out of the marriage but Nina won't have it and Tony won't let him. Hes been squirreling away money on the side, money Nina doesnt know about. He uses the money plus some from a friend to open his own restaurant bar, Dukes Place. Its his chance to escape mediocrity. If he can stay out of the hands of the mobs loan sharks, he should do well. Everybody in Mingo Junction loves Duke. In no time, hes in trouble. Tony walks into his place one night and kills Dukes best friend. Tony had reason but that doesnt change a thing. Then Tony puts the screws to Duke. Soon Dukes Place is Tonys place in all but name. Duke starts working on a plan, a plan that if it works will get the mob and Tony off Dukes back forever. Theres one qualification: Duke will have to leave his town and place and friends forever and never look back. The rest of the novel narrates the unwinding of Dukes plan and its consequences. Yokums been nominated for an Edgar for at least one of his previous crime books and he brings a solid background in crime reporting to his work. He lives near where he writes about and it shows: in the realism of the details and the authors sympathy for the confined lives of the people who work and live in this depressed corner of southern Ohio. Duke is an attractive and believable hero, Tony equally believable and a monster. The players around them are all real people, not caricatures. And while I wouldnt want to live in Mingo Junction. I feel I know it now after reading this attractive novel, in which a good an gets a second chance to un-screw up hisl ife after he had gotten fairly badly screwed over.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Resurrection Bay (Pushkin Vertigo); Author: Visit Amazon's Emma Viskic Page; Review: Caleb cant hear. A childhood illness has left him functionally deaf. That hasn't stopped him from running his own security firm, done together with his partner, ex-alcoholic and cop Frankie. Theyve got a client and a case, involving a break to a warehouse. They bring in Calebs childhood friend, another cop, Gaz. Now Gaz is dead, tortured, ripped apart, and Caleb and Frankie don't know why. The cops are on the case too. They think Gaz was dirty. Caleb knows he wasn't --couldnt have been, not Gaz. What does Frankie think? Who knows? Shes missing, likely captured by her drinking habits again. Caleb feels responsible for his friends death. Its important to him not only to catch who killed Gaz but to clear Gazs reputation. The stakes escalate. Caleb is almost killed, then again a second time. Frankie surfaces but something is wrong, nothing clear and obvious, but something is eating at her. The cops who are looking into Gazs death -are they straight or are they crooked? Caleb knows that at least one cop involved in this investigation is rotten he tried, but failed, to kill Caleb. So who can Caleb, or Caleb and Frankie, trust? Calebs ex-wife, sure. But his brother? Hes an ex-junkie. Is he clean now? Resurrection Bay isn't a perfect mystery -some points never become clearbut its a darned good one and Caleb, fighting to circumvent his physical failing, his hearing, is a darned good detective hero. His relationship with his ex-wife is delicately and respectfully presented: shes a Koori, from an aboriginal line in New South Wales oh, did I forget to mention this takes place in Australia?and no matter how beautiful and talented she is, shes still black in the minds of many of Calebs associates and hes still white rather than Koori in the eyes of her formidable doctor mother. The result of all this is a well written detective novel that also says good things about people and how they relate, even through prejudice. This novel won awards in Australia. Viskic is already working on a sequel to it which I, for one, look forward to.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Galactic North (Revelation Space); Author: Visit Amazon's Alastair Reynolds Page; Review: In general, Im not a lover of science fiction or detective short stories but this collection of short and mid-sized pieces by premiere hard sci fi writer Alastair Reynolds is quite good. Intelligently, he has elected to arrange them in chronological order, the first story set a bare two hundred years ahead and the final one starting in 2303 AD and ending ca. 40,000 AD. They are unequal in quality one or two show their origins in pulp fiction magazines but overall, the quality is quite high. Writing sequential future history, with all the stories set in the same universe with the same common past is challenging: by the final stories, the weight of past events is palpable. But Alastair, an adept plotter and always a whiz at anything scientific or technological (he does have a Ph. D. in astronomy), manages it without apparent strain. True, these are gimmick stories a collector who buys alien species and then exploits, even tortures them, out of vanity, finally gets his comeuppance; a man is pulled out of deep sleep by a hologram of his wife in order to perform an emergency operation on a space ship headed way, way out, but is surprised to find out who hes really operating on; two space ships pursue each other across space and centuries of time, only to find their vendetta superseded by a manmade biotech menace that is blotting out sentient species all across the universebut Reynoldss gimmicks are exceedingly well put together and they're grand, dealing with cosmic matters. Reynolds isn't terribly good at characterization but when you read him you remember why science fiction thrills you when you were young. With the passing of Iain M. Banks, no one does this as well as Alastair Reynolds does.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Devil of a Duke (Decadent Dukes Society); Author: Visit Amazon's Madeline Hunter Page; Review: In this diverting Regency romance, Amanda Waverly is amanuensis, accounts keeper and companion to the eccentric Lady Farnsworth. (Lady Farnsworth is considered radical for her outspokenness and her support of womens right to use their talents. I mean, who else in those conservative times would think of hiring a woman as her secretary?) But Amanda has a secret, about both her past and about her present activities. Shes leading two lives and only one of them is respectable. The hidden one puts her on a collision path with the rakish but extremely attractive Gabriel, Duke of Langford. (Hes extremely rich too. He isn't even sure how many houses he owns --twenty, maybe twenty-five, he says.) He wants to seduce her, a profession hes become very good at. She wants to escape him but oh, he is alluring! This was an age when apparently, a kiss on the wrist, followed by one on the inside flesh of her elbow, was enough to reduce even the strongest-willed woman to jelly. The prose bristles with phrases lubricious enough to signify that theres hot stuff going on but obliquely enough expressed to avoid seeming crude. With the third press of his lips, he found a spot that sent an intensely sensual shiver up her arm. He kissed downward toward her wrist... His consciousness darkened Tropic of Cancer its not, but the effect is the same. Just more refined. You know, the books a piece of fluff but its fun to read and in the end, everybody makes out okay except for the bad guy.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Can't Help Myself: Lessons & Confessions from a Modern Advice Columnist; Author: Visit Amazon's Meredith Goldstein Page; Review: Every morning, I get up and even before breakfast, check out the Post on line. I read all the headlines and sometimes but not always, some but not all of the articles. But I always, I mean always, read the advice columns. Caroline Hax, Ask Amy, Miss Manners, and on Yahoo, Ann Landers. Its my guilty little secret. So when I saw Meredith Goldsteins amiable memoir of her life as an advice columnist available for review from Amazon Vine, I snapped it up. For light reading, its surprisingly enjoyable much like a good advice column is. She alternates writing about her own life with extracts from her column, Love Letters, in the Boston Globe. Her gimmick is to print a letter along with her own advice and a plea for readers to supply their advice as well, and then she prints the letter, her advice and readers comments, all in one package. She started the column just as she herself was passing through a (pre-)midlife crisis, a breakup with a boyfriend shed never thought of as forever material but still didn't want to lose and after he was gone, couldn't stop thinking about. To complicate it more, he was a colleague of hers at the Globe. Soon, she and her sister Brette were dealing with another issue, their mothers cancer. As Goldstein writes about her own life with all thats going on with her mom will she ever have time and energy to date again? She knows she should cut her mom slack but she is so irritating at times! -- she parallels it with examples of letters whose writers concerns echo her own. The format is a little too easy at times and I don't think her advice is always as good as, say, Caroline Haxs is, but it works. You see an attractive young middle-aged woman addressing life and maybe learning from it, and not too hung up on her own importance. This isn't really my kind of book its just too lightbut I liked it a lot and recommend it heartily. Just don't expect anything to learn anything of cosmic importance from reading it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts; Author: Visit Amazon's Tessa Fontaine Page; Review: You want to read a great book? Read this one, Tessa Fontaines The Electric Woman. She was twenty-seven when her mother had a life-changing stroke, a cerebral hemorrhage that put her in a coma for months, paralyzed one side of her body and left her without speech. For months, then years, they weren't certain she would make it. Through it all her many years companion Davy had faith in her. Theyd always wanted to go to Italy. Davy wanted to show her the magical spots he had discovered in the sixties when he had gone there a young man. He was still planning for it but now theyd be accompanied by her motorized wheelchair, Bubbles, and by bags and boxes of adult diapers, sanitary wipes, pills and ointments and AA batteries for the devices that made Tessas mothers life, sans mobility or voice, possible. Thats the backstory for Tessas memoir of her season with the World of Wonders, the worlds last traveling freak show, after two and a half years of traveling back and forth to be with her mother, now on her own (as was her mother now too), one hundred and fifty days on the road. The narrative switches back and forth: Tessa with her freak show friends, two years and then one year and then now with Davy and her mother, her mother and Davy off on an ocean liner and then in Italy, Davys rapturous messages and videos back to Tessa and her brother telling then how much Tessas mother loves it and in the process, showing how much he loves her and her him. On the road, Tessa learns the easy things first: acting as bally girl (i.e., delivering the pitch, the come on, for an act), changing a one-dollar bill to a five, snake charming, fire breathing. Later, the four-legged woman. Later still, and the electric woman, who sits in a real electric chair and lights lamp bulbs by sticking them in her mouth. Though she gets better at it, she never masters sword swallowing and shes just learning the whip act when the season ends. She learns a good deal about herself and, blessedly, as much about her complicated, often fraught relationship with a mother who had made her the strong woman she has become but who also was not always easy to live with. This list barely hints at all the wonders in this book about a dying world, the world of freaks and outsiders who become a family of sorts through a shared life. That the author seamlessly weaves this narrative in with the story of her mother is also admirable. This is Ms. Fontaines first book. Shes in a Ph. D. program in writing now. I cant imagine what shell be like with a few more decades of writing under her belt! But for now, shes the Real Thing.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe; Author: Visit Amazon's David I. Kertzer Page; Review: Its difficult to imagine a pope less prepared to meet the demands of his age than Pius IX. The longest reigning elected pope, from 1846-1878, Pius (born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, seems to have been elected pope as a compromise between hardliners and more moderate cardinals: he was known to have a sweet temper but a weak will and thus would be amenable to their manipulation. He fumbled his way through his first two years as pope by mouthing sentiments that seemed to take note of his sues concerns --the suppression of dissent in the papal states, corruption among the churchmen running things. He created advisory councils to aid him in governing but did not give up any of his prerogatives as absolute ruler and he employed a few a very few- laymen in administrative roles. Then came 1848. Revolutions. Popular uprisings. Pressure on the pope to support popular movements and ideas. Pius wobbled, then came down firmly on the side of the ultra-conservatives. His popularity in Rome plummeted. He fled to Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples and fell ever more deeply under the influence of the reactionary cardinal Antonelli, who would henceforth dominate papal policy. Most of Italy in uprising and the Great Powers of Europe jockeying for influence over him, the pope became more and more bitter. Brotherly love was squeezed out in his temper by vengefulness. When he returned to Rome, the city liberated by French troops, it was to settle scores and to ensure papal power forever. His 1854 encyclical, Ubi Primum, confirmed the virgin birth of Mary, Mother of God. His 1864 Syllabus of Errors condemned any and all forms of liberalism, modernism, secularization or separation of church and state. Worse was yet to come. I n 1869, he convened the first Vatican /council, which accepted the dogma of papal infallibility. Kertzer rightly sees this as a move by Pius and Antonelli to assert the top down nature of the Church. Efforts to canonize the pope after his death raised controversies that delayed the process until John Paul II, also a critic of modernism, first proclaimed him Venerable and then beatified him in 2000. Pius may have been a gentle, sweet soul in private but his public actions and inactionmake it fair to say that seldom in modern times has a candidate for sainthood less deserved the title. As you would expect from a scholar of the standing of Kertzer, who is professor of social science at Brown University and the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Pope and Mussolini (2015), the scholarship in this book is impeccable. Yet though the details are interesting, the book is a slow read. The fault isn't Kertzers. He makes the best of a not terribly interesting subject, a dithering pope who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It will be interesting to see if Kertzer publishes a second volume taking up Piuss history after his return to Rome in 1850. In this volume, the events of the following twenty-eight years appear only in a brief epilogue, eleven; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Star of the North: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's D. B. John Page; Review: This is Johns second book he co-authored Hyeonseo Lees memoir, The Girl With Seven Namesabout her escape from North Korea, and his first novel. It is in all respects superior. In alternating chapters, he narrates the stories of three characters. Jenna Williams is an assistant professor at Georgetown University. Years before, her twin sister disappeared from a South Korea beach. Everyone believes her dead but Jenna. Now she has been approached by the CIA half-Korean and half-African American, she speaks flawless Korean with a North Korean accent; is a fast track scholar who wrote her dissertation on the Kim regimes power tactics; and she was a finalist in junior league taekwondo and runs. More than that, she wants to find her sister because she knows inside her that Soo-min is still alive. Somewhere, doing who knows what to stay alive. Story line 1 is the tale of Jennas growing involvement in the CI A and the discoveries she makes about her missing sister. Eventually her discoveries lead her into North Korea --she even meets the Great Leader in a private interviewand to greater risks than she could have anticipated. In North Korea, Mrs. Moon discovers a balloon carrying goods. Rather than turning over its contents to the authorities as required, she hides the goods and uses them to finance her career in the black market. What starts well ends in disaster. In North Korea also, a high ranking official, Colonel Cho, discovers a horrible secret, just on the eve of his greatest triumph. He knows it won't stay hidden long from the regimes industrious police services so he decides to escape. His plans too fail but not before his path crosses Jennas. Later, all three are connected in surprising but logical ways. (For all the high action in this novel, it is never hyperbolic nor does anything in it seem unreal.) But there are four, not three characters, in this book, for the country and its regime is a character too. The picture that emerges is even more chilling than that painted in newspapers and magazines: a country where all depends on the whim of an infantile and despotic ruler, people hear sing songs with titles like Ten Million Citizens Will Become Bullets and Bombs, a country where you are guilty of not only your own offenses but of the crimes (real or imputed) of your parents and grandparents -you can go to prison, to work hard labor in secret camps, you may even be shot ,for the crime of not knowing that your ancestor was a criminal in the eyes of the state. Here are some of the phrases I jotted down while reading the book: sealed off, extreme and persistent paranoia, total surveillance. A math problem in a childs book reads: In one battle of the Great Fatherland Liberation War, three brave uncles of the Korean Peoples Army wiped out thirty American imperialist bastards. What was the ratio of the soldiers who fought? This novel is high adventure the highestbut it is also, and necessarily, wrenching to read: we believe; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: False Witness: A Novel (Detective Cooper Devereaux); Author: Visit Amazon's Andrew Grant Page; Review: This is Grants second detective thriller featuring flawed but effective police detective Cooper Devereux. Its generally a good one about the hunt for a killer who targets women just turned twenty-one. He abducts them, rapes them, kills them, wraps their corpses in bedsheets and leaves them for the police to find. This part of the story is well handled: Devereux and his partner progress step by step through a maze of misdirection and missing information. Along the way, they both face boldly harm and Devereux risks death to save a man caught inside a burning house. Alongside this narration there is a second story told and this one works less well because (1) it relies too much on what happened to Devereux in the previous book and (2) it is just too complicated to follow at times its not that you cant figure out whats happening, but it slows down the narrative thrust of the book. Devereux is an appealing hero. Hes a detective who doesnt play games with the truth, but he has a shaded past. Hs father used his own position as a police detective to hide his off-duty activities and proclivities: he was a serial murder who liked to play games with his victims before he dispatched them for good. Devereux lost the love of his life and mother of his daughter when she learned of his past but gained her back when he saved her from harm in the earlier book. Now, she has reservations about him again and they are being fed by a dying cop who was buddie with Devereuxs dad and now swears he has evidence that he wasn't guilty of all he was accused of. This part shows again how treacherous it is can be carry over a major plot element from one novel to the next. Subject to this reservation, though, Witness is in most respects a satisfying whodunit with enough thrills and twists to satisfy the most picky reader.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Grey Bastards; Author: Visit Amazon's Jonathan French Page; Review: At the core of a successful fantasy adventure is a well constructed world. Terrain, players, motives, history and actions they need to fit together and not seem phony. On all counts, Jonathan French succeeds admirably. Bastards is a gripping novel of intrigue and betrayal, violence and bloodshed, wizardry and full-blooded and half-blooded races humans (theyre called frails because they're weak compared to the others) , orcs (super big and super strong), elves (fast, elusive, hard to stop, and hidden abilities), centaurs (they go on blood rampage whenever the Blood Moon rises), half-orcs (our hero is one), plus oversized hogs that have been bred to serve their masters as steeds and killing machines, rokhs (rocs), and sludge (elf-created tar-like blobs that rise up out of the swamp and bury their victims inside themselves). There are wizards too. The Grey Bastards are a brotherhood of half-orcs. They live on suffrage in The Lots, a border land between orcs and human, accepted by the humans because they protect them from orc attacks. But that doesnt stop the frails from despising them. Jackal, the hero of this novel, isn't the smartest in his hoof (= brotherhood) but hes better than all the rest in ways that become clear as the novel progresses and Jackal is forced to make choices that make him grow as an ethical being. Hes not just a thug with an underbite (tusks). He has a conscience, cares about other people and the future of his hoof. Somethings going really wrong with the Bastards. It starts with their head, Claymaster, whos making choices that are costing them. But with the primitive decision system they use, if you disagree with your leader, you better have the votes to defeat him, because if you lose, you are forfeit to his whim. If this sounds like Sons of Anarchy, its because it is like Sons of Anarchy. A motorcycle gang is the perfect analogy to the Bastards, only instead of LA, its the Lots, just outside the kingdom of Hisparthia, and half-orcs instead of human bikers, and and If you want to find out whats going on in Jackals world, and what happens to this very appealing and formidably able hero, you need to read the book, which will not, I assure you, disappoint you. There are moments in midstream when the plot gets muddled, but they don't last long and even then, characterization and setting remain constant --nothing is cookie cutter. In short, this is not a videogame redone. Its a real novel and, if you like fantasy thrillers, a good one, on a par with Richard K. Morgans trilogy of novels about Ringil Eskiath (2008s The Steel Remains, etc..), which is high praise. If you know your fantasy categories, this book falls into that of grimdark, and currently, George R. Martin is its patron saint.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Never Deceive a Viscount (The Infamous Lords); Author: Visit Amazon's Renee Ann Miller Page; Review: I survived my first years of graduate school on a late-night diet of detective, spy and sea stories, and Regency romances Georgette Heyer, Clare Darcy It was a welcome change after days spent slogging through the fifteenth-century chronicles that were my dissertations lifeblood. (My dissertation advisor said it was too exciting. He suggested reading Tudor-Stuart court records instead. Thats what hed done when he was writing his dissertation.) In the process, I developed respect as well as affection for formula fiction done well. And in Renee Ann Millers Never Deceive a Viscount, we have formula fiction done exceedingly well. Theres nothing, absolutely nothing, in it that is original. Even the surprises are predictable. Everything moves along in well established ruts. The heroine is of respectable common, not aristocratic, stock. Her name is Emma. Emma has had to fend for herself since the death of her parents and she has a younger brother and sister who depend on her. She is brought into contact with a devilishly handsome, impeccably dressed (broad shoulders displayed to advantage in well tailored clothes) aristocrat. He has a bad correct that, very badreputation with women. For reasons that gradually unveil themselves, he has been unlucky in love, or has had an unfortunate experience in his own family, and it has soured him on women. He doesnt mind a mistress. He can get rid of her and besides a mistress doesnt engage your heart. That is the essence of it: hes hearthurt. Hes closed his heart to love because he no longer trusts. His name is Simon, Simon Marlton, Viscount Adler. The trouble starts with Emmas hoydenish twelve-year-old sister Lily, who lives on a diet of penny dreadful whodunits. Lily sees what she thinks is a murder at the house next door and sneaks into the neighbors house to search for clues. Embarrassed, Emma goes after her to bring her back but the man in the house, who is Simon, shows up unexpectedly. Emma hides under a bed. He finds her. Hes pulling her out to question her when theres a sound in the backgrounds its Lily trying to sneak out the door. Emma has to stop Simon. So she kisses him. (Its not logical. It just happens.) The obligatory soft sex description follows: Uttering a deep, raspy noise, his mouth moved hungrily against hers. He tasted like brandy and sin, and the wicked way he kissed her made her body heat. Everywhere. She fought the urge to arch against him. While Emma and Simon are kissing, Lily bops Simon on the head. Emma escapes. Simon wakes up with a headache and a strong desire to find out who did this to him. Theres an equally improbable second meeting that convinces Simon Emmas hiding something and he sets out to find out what it is. He needs to get closer to hershe paints portraits, doesnt she? He engages her to paint his. What follows includes of a missing piece of jewelry that is of great importance to Simon, a gaggle of servants in Simons and Emmas houses who take; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Gathering of Secrets: A Kate Burkholder Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Linda Castillo Page; Review: An eighteen-year-old Amish boy, with no enemies in the world, is locked in a barn stall and the barn set on fire. He dies in the blaze, a harsh, cruel death. Its evidently arson and just as likely murder. But who did it and why? In this engaging mystery set in Amish country, in the small town of Millersburg, in a state unspecified, police chief Kate Burkholder sets about unraveling a puzzle that becomes more mysterious the more she pursues it. Raised Amish but Amish no longer, Burkholder understands the closed in ways of her people: they share secrets reluctantly and prefer to hide their shame inside their own houses. The more she discovers about the victim, the more his Golden Boy status falls away. He had his own secrets and they were dark and ugly. In the course of the investigation, Burkholder puts her own life at risk not once but twice and more deaths follow the original one. Castillo writes about her subjects with compassion while crafting a compelling mystery story which never slows down, never cheats on the evidence and in the end, is a win for police chief Burkholder, a wholly satisfying creation as both bloodhound and human being.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety; Author: Visit Amazon's Donald Hall Page; Review: Carnival is poet Donald Halls follow-up to his 2014 Essays After Eighty. Hes 89 now, turning ninety in September. He announced several years back that he was no longer writing poetry. He tires sooner thats a theme in some of these occasional essays on various things, people and memories. One section of this book is entitled The Selected Poets of Donald Hall. Its not a critique of the poets selected, although in some cases, he comments on their poetry. Its more in the nature of personal reminiscences when he met them, what they were like, fond and less than fond memories of them. Seamus Healy was a charmer. He had good times with Robert Creeley. James Dickey lied a lot and had an inflated ego and lied a lot (the best liar I ever knew). Allen Tate always looked grumpy. (Thats all he has to write about Allen Tate) He loved Richard Wilbur, both the poet (so do I) and the friend. His one encounter face to face with Cummings was not a success. Slight as some of these pieces are, they humanize these demigods and are elegantly and economically written, making for delightful reading. He reflects on mistakes made when he was younger, remembers happy moments, as always is positive about his years with his poet wife Jane Kenyon, gone now 23 years. Theres a lovely reminiscence of his turns on Garrison Keillors Prairie Home Companion. His third time on the show, he was no longer able to walk on stage. They manhandled him into his seat. Keillor kneeled down beside him to chat and then the poet read some of his poems out loud on the air. A young singer, Inga Swearinger, came on and sang Summer Kitchen, a twelve-line poem Hall had composed about Jane. The singer made up the melody as she sang. The radio show stopped at seven but Keillor didnt. He walked around the audience and talked with people for two and a half hours, ending by singing, with their help, variations on Im tired and I want to go home. Hall closes the essay by writing: Then everybody went home. Hall doesnt minimize the attacks age makes on us. He describes his problems with his false teeth (they keep falling out, he keeps losing them), the adjustments hes had to make to clothing (t-shirts and sweat pants, easy on, easy off). He makes the point that he doesnt have the stamina to write long anymore. Seven hundred words is a worthy goal for him now. But he still writes well and poetically, mining his past for memories and still making keen judgments. Hes old but mentally and emotionally agile. Theres a lovely piece, Walking to Portsmouth, that captures his strengths using small details to capture large feelings and seeing the links between one event and another so that by the time hes done writing, he has illumined a larger piece of the landscape than first expected. The essay starts with the memory of ac cousin but segues in the first paragraph to a reflection of; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: If You Love Me: A Mother's Journey Through Her Daughter's Opioid Addiction; Author: Visit Amazon's Maureen Cavanagh Page; Review: How is she now? Today is a good day. The writing in this memoir varies in quality but the story told is harrowing. A daughters behavior changes. Her friends become dubious., She drops out of normal things. Then items go missing in the house --soon, all, all, of her mothers jewelry. The mother confronts her. She admits drug use. But she won't go into treatment, won't give up her boyfriend, who loves her and is not responsible for anything, even though its obvious they're both users. By the end, the daughter has been arrested for soliciting sex, and twice for possession of narcotics. She has overdosed thirteen times no, did we count that one time? maybe its fourteenand has gone through forty different treatment centers. In the process, her mother has almost tanked her insurance business, which pays for all of this. Her relationship with her boyfriend comes under severe strain but her relationship with her ex-husband, who is by her side through all the stress, actually strengthens. She has founded Magnolia New Beginnings, which provides companionship and support for families and loved ones of addicts. AS for her daughter, shes clean now but you can feel that its not automatic for the author to say that it will continue. Life after addiction is life on a knifes edge. Theres only one statistic mentioned. Its an experience. In 2017, Cavanagh attends a commemoration of International Overdose Awareness Day in Marlborough, Massachusetts. There are 1,531 purple flags planted on the lawn in front of the building where they assemble, one for each person dad because of drug overdose in the state the previous year. Thats one state. The figures vary for the nation in 2016, the last year for which I could find reasonably complete numbers, but some 63,000 people dead of drug overdoses that year. Thats more than all of the soldiers killed in Viet Nam or those lost to AIDS during the AIDS pandemic. This wasn't a book I wanted to review but I felt I had to. Living in Ohio, I hear more than I want to about the opioid crisis in our state. I taught high school here fifty years ago. There were problems then but nothing like this. We have to we all have tofocus our attention on what is happening before it destroys us. There are a lot of urgencies in our troubled world but this is one we cannot let go of or our children and grandchildren won't have a world worth living in after weve passed. At 82, I worry about that.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Robots of Gotham; Author: Visit Amazon's Todd McAulty Page; Review: This is McAultys first novel, and its a humdinger of a one, a hard science thriller that never lets up. The liner notes state that he was project manager at the startup that created Internet Explorer and he now works for a machine learning company in Chicago. Its good background for a novel that revolves around questions of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and that demands familiarity with internet communication protocols and methods. The novel unfolds via a series of blogs, written by two parties, the hero, a Canadian businessman named Barry Simcoe, and a created intelligence who calls himself Paul the Pirate. Pauls blogs backfill the history and structure of the time the story takes place, 2083. Barrys tell the story of a life and death, hell for leather race to identify a fast acting, nearly always fatal pathogen that starts killing people and is moving in on Chicago, where the story takes place. The news is even worse once its identified: the pathogen was almost certainly developed by a Supreme Intelligence, the highest level of AI machine, whose goal is to wipe out mankind. From then on, its a race to the finish line with Barry and his two allies, a Russian doctor name Sergei and an AI named 19 Black Winter, at constant risk, though never as much as Barry, who rockets from one crisis point to the next, with the chances of him surviving, much less succeeding, reducing each time. All this happens in a fragmented world dominated largely by machine intelligences. Most human-led nations have become machine-run: the distinctions that count now are friendly to humans or not and elected sovereigns (though they are generally machines now) or dictators. The United States isn't any more. After a devastating war, there are different zones in what used to be one country, from the machine-governed Kingdom of Manhattan to the United States Free Zone (it still has a human president), the Union of Post-American States (not explained in this novel but part of the background) and the Occupied Zone, policed by a multi-state force but largely Venezuelan. (Venezuela is governed by a fascist machine cabal.) Barrys in Chicago and Chicago is in the Occupied Zone. Venezuelan soldiers and spy drones police the city and are an on again off again threat to Barrys and Sergeis efforts to produce and distribute an antigen to the coming plague. AI machines come in levels of autonomy and intelligence. The highest is Supreme Intelligence. They have personalities: machines have perfected a form of machine sex which allows them to merge and create new AIs, who go through their own gestation periods and develop their own personalities and preferences. One of them a very powerful one, even among Supreme Intelligencesis behind the plot to decimate mankind and thus is Barrys very deadly enemy. So how do you outsmart a thinking machine that can calculate odds, assimilate and coordinate information and access i sources better and faster than you could ever conceivably do these things on your own? (There is an answer. It involves a; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rough Animals: An American Western Thriller; Author: Visit Amazon's Rae DelBianco Page; Review: Animals is interesting enough but I found it hard to engage with. Part of it is language. Much of what is written is strong but it occasionally over-reaches, is too self-consciously poetic. I also found it hard to believe the boy would have taken off after the girl who shot his cattle on what at first seems close to a wild goose chase. I felt that Del Bianco loaded too much into the book but she is a talented writer. I'm still mulling over the book in my mind and may give it a higher rating when I 'ver thought about it some more but for now, I 'd have to rate it no more than fair.; Rating: 3.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Rubbermaid 4D06 Configurations 23-Inch Foldable Laundry Hamper, Natural; Brand: Rubbermaid; Review: I love this basket, sooooo much better than the tall plastic store bought ones I have - the plastic store bought ones, the handles all cracked and broke off, now the tops are all jagged, the fabric ones have lasted 6 + months and is still as good as the day I bought it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Steamfast SF-435 Compact Fabric Steamer; Brand: Steamfast; Review: Works good, removes all wrinkles from clothing.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: DHP Ava Metal Daybed Frame with Round Arm Design, Twin Size, Black; Brand: DHP; Review: Nice bed, bought it for my son, bought some over sized pillows too to put a One the back so he can use as a couch during the day and take them off at night when it's time to sleep, great amount of storage space under the bed, can fit large bins underneath to hold toys and other things.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Household Essentials 5277 Laundry Valet Garment Rack | Drying Rack | Bronze; Brand: Household Essentials; Review: I DOUBTED OTHERS WHEN THEY SAID IT WAS STURDY, ESPECIALLY AFTER I PUT IT TOGEATHER AND IT WAS TALLER THAN ME! BUT IT IS VERY VERY STURDY, EVEN WHEN I STARTED TO REMOVE THE CLOTHING TO PUT AWAY, I CLEARED ON SIDE FIRST LEAVING THE OTHER SIDE THAT HAD MY HUSBANDS (WHO WEARS XXL) CLOTHING THE ONLY THING ON THE RACK, I HAD ABOUT 5 OF HIS SWEATERS AND SEVERAL SHIRTS ON ONE SIDE AND THE RACK WAS STILL SUPER STEADY AND DID NOT SHAKE OR SEEM TO BE TIPSY AT ALL, THIS REALLY IS A VERY NICE PRODUCT.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sunbeam Hot-2-Trot 800 Watt Compact Non-Stick Soleplate Travel Iron, GCSBTR-100-000; Brand: Sunbeam; Review: WORKS GOOD, JUST LIKE THE NORMAL SIZED IRON I HAD, JUST A BIT SMALLER.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Con-Tact Brand Clear Covering Self-Adhesive Privacy Film and Liner, 18-Inches by 9-Feet, Frosty White Lace; Brand: Con-Tact Brand; Review: very nice window film, goes up really easy - much easier than the cling/no adhesive ones, and better to work with too.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Con-Tact Brand Con-Tact Creative Covering Multi-Purpose Self-Adhesive Contact Paper, 18x9, Frosty Diamonds; Brand: Con-Tact Brand; Review: very nice window film, goes up really easy - much easier than the cling/no adhesive ones, and better to work with too.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: IKEA Bygel Containers, White, Orange, Red, Green, Black (5 total Containers); Brand: IKEA; Review: Bigger than I expected; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: LinenSpa Shredded Memory Foam Pillow with Gel Memory Foam, Queen; Brand: Linenspa; Review: I also bought some regular memory foam pillows but I prefer this one much more, I will not use the sold ones they are to hard, this one you can adjust a bit because of the shredded pieces if it is to thick for you which is awesome; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Home_and_Kitchen |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: NOS4A2; Author: Joe Hill; Genres: thriller, crime, paranormal, fiction, fantasy, mystery; Review: Love Joe Hill's style of writing....His dad, Stephen King, is my fave, but he sure comes in at a close second. This one left me sitting on the edge of my seat! Good read :); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Joyland; Author: Stephen King; Genres: history, young-adult, mystery, thriller, romance, crime, paranormal, biography, historical fiction, fantasy, fiction; Review: I loved this book. Stephen King has always been my favorite author an I own all of his books. This one did not dissapoint me :); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mistress; Author: James Patterson; Genres: thriller, crime, fiction, mystery; Review: A political thriller with many twists. A good read.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Walk in the Woods; Author: Bill Bryson; Genres: history, biography, historical fiction, non-fiction, fiction; Review: Bill Bryson takes hiking the Appalachian Trail to a whole new level. A humorous look at his personal adventure. Bill tells the history of the trail, describes breathtaking views that makes you feel a part of his journey and introduces you to the colorful, sometimes foolish people he meets along the way. I loved this book. Oh, and the bears!!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Snow Blind (Monkeewrench, #4); Author: P.J. Tracy; Genres: thriller, crime, fiction, mystery; Review: Excellent book full of twists and turns. It's book #4 in the Monkeywrench series. All great books so far.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Thief of Always; Author: Clive Barker; Genres: young-adult, mystery, thriller, comics, children, crime, paranormal, graphic, fantasy, fiction; Review: This has always been my favorite Clive Barker book. The story of 10 year old Harvey who is bored by the long winter and finds a place where every day is special....also evil as it turns out. Written as almost a magical fairytale of a story, Clive Barker makes this adventure come alive.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Charlotte's Web; Author: E.B. White; Genres: young-adult, children, paranormal, fantasy, fiction; Review: A childhood favorite of mine that was magical from beginning to end. I always smile when I see someone with this book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Love, Stargirl (Stargirl, #2); Author: Jerry Spinelli; Genres: romance, children, young-adult, fiction; Review: Loved the first book "Stargirl".....Loved this second book just as much! Stargirl is quirky and fun and puts a whole new perspective on how you look at life!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane; Author: Neil Gaiman; Genres: young-adult, children, paranormal, fantasy, fiction; Review: Read it in one sitting. This mysterious story just pulled me in. Love where Neil Gaiman takes you.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hard Eight (Stephanie Plum, #8); Author: Janet Evanovich; Genres: mystery, thriller, crime, romance, fiction; Review: Read this with my husband. I've read all of her Stephanie Plum books, but this was his first. We shared many laughs. Now he wants to read them all :); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Saving CeeCee Honeycutt; Author: Beth Hoffman; Genres: history, biography, historical fiction, fiction; Review: The life of CeeCee Honeycutt.....tragic, touching and funny all at the same time. An incredible journey for an incredible little girl set in the south with a slew of colorful characters. A great read!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dark Places; Author: Gillian Flynn; Genres: thriller, crime, fiction, mystery; Review: Lizzy is 7 years old, her mother and two sisters were brutally killed, her 14 year old brother Ben is arrested and the killing is labeled as a Satanic ritual killing. Lizzy is the only survivor. 24 years later Lizzy finally confronts her demons by being asked to speak at a Kill Club for people who follow different murder cases. She finally visits her brother in prison 24 years later and even though her testimony put him there she doesn't feel he may have been the killer. He doesn't say he was not the killer, but she feels he may be hiding the truth. This book was gruesome, but I couldn't put it down. Many twists and turns and I wasn't expecting this ending. Definate 5 star. Reading it for an online book club and it's a book Stephen King, my favorite author recommended. I can see why! WOW!!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The PMS Murder (A Jaine Austen Mystery #5); Author: Laura Levine; Genres: thriller, crime, fiction, mystery; Review: Cute, fast, fun read with a little bit of murder and who done it thrown in and lots of laughs.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Green Angel (Green Angel, #1); Author: Alice Hoffman; Genres: young-adult, children, paranormal, fantasy, romance, fiction; Review: Love Alice Hoffman's writing in "Green Angel" this magical book of hope; and it's sequal "Green Witch" Two quick reads that have always been favorites. Her books always send me to an enchanted place full of heartbreak and happiness.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Silver Star; Author: Jeannette Walls; Genres: history, young-adult, biography, historical fiction, non-fiction, fiction; Review: I loved this book! Jeannette Walls pulled me in from the first page. This would be a good read for a book group. Loved the characters and the flow of the book. The sisters were brave, the mother was unreliable. They set out to find their uncle across the United States when their mother didn't return, going from California to the deep South and found out that life was a whole different game. When things happened and the girls fought for what they believed in, others in town just turned a blind eye. I was not expecting the ending, but it was very fitting.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas, #6); Author: Dean Koontz; Genres: thriller, crime, paranormal, fiction, fantasy, mystery; Review: Odd Thomas is back and meets the mysterious Edie Fisher, an 80 something year old lady who seems to know just what is needed for every situation. Oddie uncovers an evil plot and he receives some unusual help from Mr. Alfred Hitchcock and Oddies own ghost dog Boo. Good book.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Don't Breathe a Word; Author: Jennifer McMahon; Genres: young-adult, thriller, crime, paranormal, fiction, fantasy, mystery; Review: A haunting book that makes you think....it's not real, it's real....is it real?!?! Like how it went from present day to their story as kids 15 years ago. Liked the writing style and the characters. Ready for the TR Library book discussion. It should be an interesting one. The ending I did not expect. I like that :); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Shoes To Die For (A Jaine Austen Mystery, #4); Author: Laura Levine; Genres: mystery, thriller, crime, romance, fiction; Review: A fast, fun cozy mystery. Easy to read in an afternoon. I like the little emails from her mom and dad their drama is like a little story within the story. Makes me laugh. I never guess who the real killer was, she always throws me off at the end because of course who you think it might be never is. Her character is very down to earth and easy to relate too and laugh with. A good choice to lighten the mood (even though it's a murder) between other books.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Doctor Sleep; Author: Stephen King; Genres: thriller, crime, paranormal, fiction, fantasy, mystery; Review: The Shining was always a favorite of mine and sometime I wondered...what would have happened to Danny Torrence after the Overlook? What did the future hold for him? Now i know.After finally getting his life back together....he works at a hospice and has the knack for helping people cross over....hence the name Doctor Sleep. His. shine picks up someone else in the area who needs help. Young Abra shines brighter than Danny and sees glimpses of a group of bad people called the True Knot. Modern day vampires who feed not on blood but on people who can shine. A true battle of good vs evil in true SK style. Loved this book!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Graveyard Book; Author: Neil Gaiman; Genres: young-adult, mystery, thriller, children, crime, paranormal, fantasy, fiction; Review: A story of a baby raised by ghosts in an ancient cemetary after his family was killed. Neil Gaiman always has the ability to stretch your imagination to new levels. He succeeds once again. Intriguing and touching.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ready Player One; Author: Ernest Cline; Genres: young-adult, romance, thriller, crime, paranormal, fiction, fantasy, mystery; Review: Amazing! I loved every page of this book and wished it never ended. This would make a phenomenal movie!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Between the Lines (Between the Lines, #1); Author: Jodi Picoult; Genres: young-adult, romance, paranormal, fantasy, fiction; Review: I loved this book written by Jodi Picoult and her daughter!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Cross My Heart (Alex Cross, #21); Author: James Patterson; Genres: thriller, crime, fiction, mystery; Review: A fast paced Detective Alex Cross book that did not disappoint! Heart breaking at times and an ending that left you needing to know what happens. Can't wait for his next Alex Cross book!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: No One Else Can Have You (No One Else Can Have You #1); Author: Kathleen Hale; Genres: young-adult, mystery, thriller, crime, romance, fiction; Review: Murderer set in the ficticious town of Friendship Wisconsin :); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Mourning Hours; Author: Paula Treick DeBoard; Genres: thriller, crime, fiction, mystery; Review: Good read with vivid characters. Interesting since it was set in Manitowoc County. Gripping story!; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | goodreads |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: The Lost Years (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic); Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Higgins Clark Page; Review: The "who done it" in this book is what makes it so interesting. There's never a dull moment when it comes to a Mary Higgins Clark book!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Gypped: A Regan Reilly Mystery (Regan Reilly Mysteries); Author: Visit Amazon's Carol Higgins Clark Page; Review: I just love the Regan Reilly mysteries! This was another good, quick read! I'm looking forward to the next one!; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Big Bad Wolf -- 2004 publication; Author: Patterson; Review: Although I love James Patterson & the Alex Cross series, this is my least favorite book thus far. I couldn't get interested and I took forever to finish it. On to the next one...; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Mary, Mary; Author: Visit Amazon's James Patterson Page; Review: This one hit the mark for me! It was an excellent, fast read! I'm excited to see what's next for Alex Cross!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cross Country; Author: Visit Amazon's James Patterson Page; Review: This one was a bit hard for me to get into, but I finally did about half way through. Not my favorite. Looking forward to the next one!; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: I, Alex Cross: (Alex Cross 16); Author: Visit Amazon's James Patterson Page; Review: This one kept me guessing right from the first chapter! I couldn't put it down & couldn't wait to see how it ended. On to the next one...; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Top Secret Twenty-One (Stephanie Plum); Author: Visit Amazon's Janet Evanovich Page; Review: Another awesome, page turning book! Janet Evanovich sure knows how to write them! I literally laugh out loud while reading these Stephanie Plum books! Excellent!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tricky Twenty-Two: A Stephanie Plum Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Janet Evanovich Page; Review: Fantastic page turner just like every other Stephanie Plum book! Definitely know it's great when I find myself laughing out loud!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Motor Mouth (Alex Barnaby Series #2); Author: Visit Amazon's Janet Evanovich Page; Review: Janet Evanovich never disappoints and this book is no exception! Lots of laughs! Another good read! On to number 3...; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Baby Thief; Author: Visit Amazon's L.J. Sellers Page; Review: I stumbled upon this book and I'm happy I did. It was a good read. Twits and turns kept me intrigued.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hardcore Twenty-Four: A Stephanie Plum Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Janet Evanovich Page; Review: Laugh out loud funny, as always! My only issue is, I always read these books too fast, they're that good! Already looking forward to twenty-five!!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hearts That Survive: A Novel of the Titanic; Author: Visit Amazon's Yvonne Lehman Page; Review: Good book. I've always been fascinated by the tragedy of The Titanic. This story delivers love, heartbreak, New beginnings, hope, and faith. It went a bit long in parts and too fast in others, but overall, I enjoyed it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Giada's Feel Good Food: My Healthy Recipes and Secrets; Author: Visit Amazon's Giada De Laurentiis Page; Review: Easy to follow directions. The ingredients are new to me and oh, so good. Try it, you'll like it! Love the personal tips as well.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: How to Pray When You're Pissed at God: Or Anyone Else for That Matter; Author: Ian Punnett; Review: Great book; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 1979 Book of Common Prayer: Wine Vivella; Author: Church Publishing; Review: print is a little light; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: 1979 Book of Common Prayer: Green Vivella; Author: Church Publishing; Review: print is a little light; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: NIV, Recovery Devotional Bible, Paperback; Author: Visit Amazon's Zondervan Page; Review: I bought this Bible for my daughter. She uses it daily as it deals with the various emotions dealing with recovery.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Dreams & Co. Women's Plus Size Long Ultra-Soft Fleece Hoodie Robe Denim; Author: ; Review: Feels great; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Author: Visit Amazon's Daniel James Brown Page; Review: Fantastic history review as well as a history of the human spirit.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Adam Men's Genuine Italian Calfskin Leather Dress Belt 30mm Wide Polished Buckle; Brand: Belts.com; Review: Nice! Hard to find a black belt with a gold buckle. So this did the trick!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Carhartt Women's Leather Jean Belt; Brand: ; Review: Nice belt! I am soooo glad I read the reviews because I would have ordered a medium and it would have been way too big.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Carhartt Women's Leather Jean Belt; Brand: ; Review: Love it! Arrived faster than I thought it would!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Anti-theft Woman Backpack Purse PU Leather waterproof Rucksack Travel Bookbag And Handbags for girls; Brand: EGOKEE; Review: Too big for me. I didn't like the closure because when it fell off my car seat, everything fell out. Might work well for others, but didn't fit my needs. The strap adjustments were very good.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Fossil Women's Vintage Oval Buckle Jean Belt; Brand: ; Review: Great belt. True to size. Beautiful buckle.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: FitKicks Men's Active Lifestyle Footwear; Brand: FitKicks; Review: These are the best for ease of washing and to put on. The stitching comes out around the toe protector.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Carhartt Women's Perforated Belt; Brand: ; Review: It fits well but its not as good looking as I thought it would be.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Aladin Unisex Small Leather Credit Card Holder with 26 Plastic Card Slots; Brand: Aladin; Review: Nice size but the pages tore TOO easily; Rating: 3.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Aspen Pet Porter Heavy-Duty Pet Carrier; Brand: Petmate; Review: Great build. Easy to put together. Would but again if I needed to.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: MidWest Homes for Pets Deluxe Pet Beds | Super Plush Dog & Cat Beds Ideal for Dog Crates; Brand: MidWest Homes for Pets; Review: This is great. My puppy immediately loved it and made it her own.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: KONG Chase-It Wand Squeaking Dog Toy, Assorted Characters; Brand: KONG; Review: Great toy. My puppy really enjoys running around after it. Great for tiring her out at the end of night. The only flaw is the way the toy connects to the rope.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Multipet Duckworth Duck Large 13"; Brand: Multipet; Review: bigger than you would expect. but great toy; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Rawhide Express Beefhide Chew Chips Peanut Butter Flavored (Great Reward or Treat) 1 Lb; Brand: The Rawhide Express; Review: my dog gets tired of these after a couple hours. cant give them to her for a few days or else she won't touch them; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: KONG - Ziggies - Teeth Cleaning Dog Treats - Chicken Flavor (Best Used Classic Rubber Toys); Brand: KONG; Review: my dog loves these. great treats and doesnt upset her stomach.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Nylabone Just for Puppies Bacon Flavored Double Action Bone Puppy Dog Teething Chew Toy; Brand: Nylabone; Review: my dog has been chewing on this for months now. great!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: IRIS Pet Training Pad Floor Tray; Brand: IRIS USA, Inc.; Review: We purchased this product because we thought it would be large enough for bigger pee pads. It was. However, the base of the tray is very slick and the pee pad slips around (even if the pee pad is securely fastened). Our poor little puppy slipped on it and hurt her hind leg. She limped away in pain. If I could give this a negative rating, I would. This is VERY UNSAFE. Buy with caution.; Rating: 1.0/5.0 | amazon_Pet_Supplies |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Unforgiven Snap Case; Brand: Clint Eastwood; Review: Classic movie.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Silence of the Lambs VHS; Brand: Jodie Foster; Review: Great movie!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Silence of the Lambs; Brand: Jodie Foster; Review: Great movie!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Last Outlaw VHS; Brand: Mickey Rourke; Review: Not good; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Deep Impact VHS; Brand: Robert Duvall; Review: Not sure that is how it would go.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Interview With the Vampire; Brand: Brad Pitt; Review: Classic; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Haunting in Connecticut; Brand: Virginia Madsen; Review: Ok; Rating: 3.0/5.0 | amazon_Movies_and_TV |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: WEE-WEE Four Paws Puppy Housebreaking Aid; Brand: WEE-WEE; Review: It may work. Don't get it on your hands..; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Petmate Top Entry Litter Pan Liners; Brand: Petmate; Review: Perfect to keep the small dog out of the little.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dr. Elsey's Cat Ultra Premium Clumping Cat Litter ( Pack May Vary ); Brand: Dr. Elsey's; Review: Cat likes it better than the walnuts.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Nylabone Puppy Chew Toy, Petite; Brand: Nylabone; Review: Dog chews it and swallows little pieces.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Petmate Top Entry Litter Pan Cat Litter Box Brushed Nickel/Pearl White; Brand: Petmate; Review: Keeps the dog out. Just what I needed. Little small for my cat.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Blyss Pets Klean Paws Indoor Dog Potty, No Torn Potty Pads! Keep Paws Dry! Protect Floors! Easy Cleanup On; Brand: Blyss Pets; Review: Works well except the dog shreds the edges of the inserted pad.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ASPCA Microtech Striped Dog Bed Cuddler, 28 by 20 by 8-Inch.; Brand: ASPCA; Review: Does wash well.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Goodlife Adult Cat Real Chicken And Brown Rice Recipe Dry Cat Food 22 Pounds (Discontinued By Manufacturer); Brand: The Goodlife Recipe; Review: Our cat really likes it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Pet_Supplies |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Auberge Saint Antoine; City: Quebec City Quebec; Review: Auberge St-Antoine (a Relais & Chateau) is an outstanding destination in the Québec City region. The rooms are very comfortable with excellent fittings, comfortable beds and high end bathrooms - heated floors, jacussi etc. The restuarant (Panache) is generally considered one of the top 2-3 in the city. Room prices include a generous breakfast in this attractive room. Parts of the building are very old and are part of some of the earliest buildings in North America. At every turn there are small wall cabinets displaying ancient artifacts found by archaeologists during the digging of foundations - and this history of the building is showcased wonderfully. Staff is very friendly, and they are evidently proud of their hotel and its place in their wonderful city. We were given a complimentary tour of some historic aspects of the building by a knowledgeable manager who was genuinely happy to show off his establishment. The hotel is owned by a well-to-do family that has been prominent in Québec for many generations, and their loving touch and continued involvement is evident in the service, the quality of the rooms and the engaging staff. While not an economy option, the price was worth it, and we will go back and recommend Auberge St-Antoine to everyone we know.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Caravel Sorrento; City: Sant Agnello Province of Naples Campania; Review: We spent 7 days in this hotel. Our room was generous by European standards, and very clean and comfortable. The staff was extremely helpful, and everyone we encountered spoke quite reasonable English. The food was quite good, and was oriented towards their substantial British clientèle - Italian food that was recognizable by Brits and North Americans. I suspect everyone would be very satisfied at the Hotel Caravel in Sorrento.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bed Breakfast Rudy; City: Rome Lazio; Review: This B&B is in a well kept apartment building near the Termini train station. The room was quite small, but adequate, and we felt the price was right. Everything was spotless, the bed was comfortable, the ensuite bathroom was great and there was free WiFi. Things were quite quiet, and the kettle with coffee, tea etc in the hallway was much appreciated. We would go back in a minute. We found this place through Corss-Pollinate - a very reliable source for accommodation in Rome, Venice, Florence, Paris, Barcelona and London. The breakfast was a voucher for a close by café. This is not why you choose Rudy's, but it is OK. Breakfast is a fine cappucino or expresso and a quite good croissant. Not what a North American or Brit calls breakfast.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: La Barde; City: Vitrac Sarlat la Caneda Dordogne Nouvelle Aquitaine; Review: ; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Adolesce; City: Amsterdam North Holland Province; Review: This small 2-star hotel is just wonderful. The building is an old narrow house on an Amsterdam canal, a short walk from many of the important parts of the city. The area is quiet and rather up market. The owner and host – Kees Wuurman – is friendly and helpful and makes his guests most welcome. He is a terrific gentlemen, and an added part of the charm of this place. The room we were in (#3) was huge (and included ensuite bathroom and shower) – it occupied the entire width of the house, with a view over the canal. It was furnished comfortably with furniture that was in perfect keeping with the 2-start rating. There was included cable TV and free WiFi. The stairs were narrow and steep, which is common to these houses, and necessitated by the narrow architecture. They were more of a surprise than a problem – but these buildings are not wheelchair friendly. An important advantage of Hotel Adolesce is a range of simple food that is available 24 hours/day. There is bread and rolls and butter, a range of fresh fruit, milk, cheese and juice, breakfast cereals, cookies, and coffee, tea and hot chocolate. The expectation is that guests will use the breakfast room and complimentary food for just that, and in our case a self-made cup of tea and cookies late in the afternoon was very nice indeed. This is a terrific place – we would/will return to Amsterdam soon and we would not bother to consider any place other than Hotel Adolesce. Tell Kees that Mary and Michael say hello.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Carlyle Restaurant; City: Port Hope Ontario; Review: We had dinner at the Carlyle Inn & Bistro recently and enjoyed ourselves very much. They have a variety of dining rooms, some with different menus. The smaller dining room was occupied with a party when we arrived, and were put into a larger and somewhat more formal room. When we asked if we could have a selection from the menu from the occupied dining room (we had seen it on line), we were accomodated with a smile. The food was very good, tasty and presented with the right balance of style without being pretentious or snooty. The service was professional and attentive – without being to much in evidence. The meal was served promptly, and the waitresses were unobtrusive, but there when needed. Clearly very well trained and managed. The price was middle of the road, and quite a good value. An excellent meal, alltogether. Easy to recommend. We did not sleep here, so can't comment.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mackechnie House Bed and Breakfast; City: Cobourg Ontario; Review: MacKechnie House is a lovely B&B in Cobourg, Ontario. The house is on a side street in a residential area that is very quiet and attractive, and quite simple to find. The house is large and gracious, and the bedrooms are beautifully furnished in keeping with the 1880s epoch of the house. The bedrooms (and our bed) are comfortable, the bathrooms are modern and up-to-scratch. The public rooms are tastefully furnished and comfortable, and everything gives a sense of being cared for and well maintained. The breakfast was provided in an impressive dining room, and was generous, imaginative and tasty – Katherine Thompson (the owner) is also a professional caterer and her skills and style are evident. She is friendly and welcoming, and the whole experience was very positive. We would go back and can recommend MacKechnie House with confidence and pleasure. Cobourg is a quiet town, somewhat off the beaten track, whose heyday was perhaps 75 years ago. It is now a semi-rural town with a charming downtown, a lovely marina and beautiful new condos – it looks like a great retirement destination – not far from Toronto or Montreal, with a pace that is dialled down from these large cities.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Oasis; City: Nice French Riviera Cote d Azur Provence Alpes Cote d Azur; Review: Hotel Oasis is located quite centrally in Nice, a short walk from the historic old part of the city. The Hotel is a mid-range establishment. Rooms are small-ish by North American standards, but average for modest hotels in Europe. The rooms are simple, but clean, comfortable and in good condition. The en-suite bathroom was excellent – clean, modern and in very good condition. There is good on-site parking in an attractive courtyard. There seems to be a Russian connection – apparently both Anton Checkov and Vladimir Lenin stayed at the Hotel Oasis in bygone days. Whether that translates into anything more than a historical footnote today is not clear. Staff were friendly and very helpful – we arrived very early (7:00 am long before normal check-in time) but after a little investigation and rejigging, we were given our room immediately. The from desk staff speak enough English to make communications easy. WiFi works well, but requires a password (from front desk) that changes daily. Not a serious problem. We would go back – the value for money was good and we were quite satisfied.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hotel delle Rose; City: Bonassola Italian Riviera Liguria; Review: Hotel Delle Rose is located quite centrally in Bonassola, a short walk from everything in the small resort town. Bonassola is just north of the Cinque Terre villages, and is a MUCH better place to stay while exploring this part of Italy than the five famous villages. The excellent regional train system is by far the best way to get around. The Hotel is a mid-range establishment. Rooms are reasonable by North American standards, but a good size for modest hotels in Europe. The rooms are simply appointed, but clean, comfortable and in good condition. The en-suite bathroom was excellent – clean, modern and in very good condition. Everything worked and there were no issues at all. Breakfast was available on the top (4th) floor terrasse – the spead was generous, with cereal, an assortment of meats and cheeses and baked goods. There is a terrific coffee machine that produces very credible espresso and cappuccino. Dinners (part of our deal) were simple and quite good. There was a limited choice (usually 2 starters and 2 mains), which we were asked to choose at breakfast time, so the chef could plan. The choices offered were never controversial, so it would be unlikely that anyone would not find something to happily choose. This is a family run hotel and the dinning room is not a restaurant with an extensive menu. Staff are very friendly and helpful – they have considerable business from the UK, and reasonable English is spoken. One small highlight – we were invited to a pasta making demonstration by the Chef. He took us through the whole process, and it was evident that the pasta we were served was made fresh in the hotel’s kitchen. WiFi works very well. They say only in the main public areas, but it worked fine in our room. We would go back – the value for money was excellent and we were more than satisfied.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Old Rectory B B; City: Salisbury Wiltshire England; Review: The Old Rectory in Salisbury is a terrific spot. Rawani and Simon are warm and welcoming hosts – they are particularly helpful with parking arrangements – parking is on the quiet residential street, but finding a spot is a challenge. Rawani’s help was a huge asset. Our room was large and comfortable, and the ensuite bathroom was clean and attractive. The bed was comfy and everything was of a high standard. The free WiFi was an important plus. Breakfast was delicious – lots of fruit and juices, and the cooked “full English” was outstanding. Sausages, ham, bacon etc. – I don’t remember everything, but is was very good indeed. The Old Rectory is a 12 minute walk from the centre of Salisbury – which is a very attractive town. The big attraction is the Cathedral, which is spectacular. In addition, the Cathedral owns one of four original copies of the Magna Carta, which is on public display. It is worth seeing – this is the best copy in existence (I have seen two others). Salisbury is worth visiting, and staying at The Old Rectory is a perfect choice. The old rector left it in good hands.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Kyriad Prestige Bordeaux Ouest Merignac; City: Merignac Bordeaux Gironde Nouvelle Aquitaine; Review: The Kyriad Merignac was a hit. It was a very solid and reliable experience. The rooms were clean and nicely furnished, the bed was comfortable and the bathroom was modern and very clean. The free WIFI worked perfectly. We stayed one night (Sunday), which was very quiet. The dining room was closed (never open on Sunday), but the receptionist in charge found us some very nice food, which was served to us on a table in the edge of the sitting area of the lobby. The food was light and good, and the attention/service from the receptionist was friendly and most helpful. We chose this hotel because it is close to the airport – getting to the airport from downtown Bordeaux takes close to an hour and we did not want to get up very early for an early flight, with the uncertainties of traveling from the city centre. The hotel has a terrific shuttle service that was prompt and saved us about 30 euros in a taxi. The Kyriad Merignac was just what we were looking for – a reasonable price, clean and comfortable, with excellent service – I can very happily recommend it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hotel de Charme La Maison des Peyrat; City: Sarlat la Caneda Dordogne Nouvelle Aquitaine; Review: Nestled in the hills above Sarlat-la-Caneda, La Mason des Payrat is an absolute charmer. An old stone building converted into a small hotel, La Maison des Payrat offer generous and comfortable rooms, with ensuite bathrooms, comfortable beds and simple but elegant decorations. The location and the hotel are simply wonderful. The setting in the hills is beautiful, and the breakfast and the breakfast rooms are outstanding. There is also a pool, which my wife used in May, and the grounds are akin to a rural park. It is a short-ish walk down into Sarlat (we drove), but the hike back would involve a little exercise. Nothing too serious, but the roads are hilly. The owners are friendly and most helpful, and the family dog is an important addition to the charm of the whole place. We enjoyed ourselves – Sarlat is lovely and La Maison des Payrat is a place to return to, and to recommend.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mara Ngenche Safari Camp; City: Maasai Mara National Reserve Rift Valley Province; Review: Mara Ngenche was wonderful. We were there on a 3-night safari (½ day, 2 full days, ½ day), hoping to see the wildlife of eastern Africa. Our hopes were more than fulfilled. The accommodation was luxurious – each “room” consists of a large tent (20x20 feet), with a bathroom tent adjacent with a modern flush toilet, and claw foot bathtub, and a shower stall. There was also a small plunge pool – useful when the day got very hot. Useful since there was no swimming in the Mara river (there are some very large crocs that were only slightly smaller than the hippos). The tent was furnished with a 4-poster bed (with mosquito netting), two easy chairs and all the accoutrements of a luxurious hotel suite. The food was terrific – the menu generally consisted of choices of 2-3 meats, and a vegetarian option. The food was well prepared and tasty – the chef was clearly trained in the skills of European and North American kitchens and the meals showed it. Sophisticated and flavourful. Service was a high point. Everyone was friendly and knowledgeable, and it was easy to start affable rapport with everyone at ease. Our guide on our game drives (Milton) was outstanding. His knowledge of the Mara, its wildlife and birds was beyond impressive – we never had a question he could not answer, and his ability to spot interesting situations added immeasurably to our experience. His ability to read the mood of animals was impressive. On one occasion, he drove us into the middle of a herd of 200 Buffalo (grumpy and dangerous animals) – the Buffalo were evidently not feeling aggressive and Milton knew what was what. Milton was also magnificent in driving us around the Mara. The savannah is laced with tracks that substitute for roads. He knew every track and could spot lions, cheetahs, elephants, zebras and buffalo when there appeared to be nothing there. Milton and our Toyota Land Cruiser (amazing vehicle) made the entire experience beyond memorable. The whole experience of Mara Ngenche – Paul the Manager, Milton the guide, and James the headwaiter – was outstanding. Not cheap, but excellent value for money. Recommended without any reservations whatever.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Radisson Blu Hotel Zurich Airport; City: Opfikon Zurich; Review: Radisson Blu The Radison Blu (Zurich airport) is a terrific hotel. Modern, clean and comfortable, it is everything desired in an international hotel. We planned an overnight stay during our travel between Nairobi and Montreal. To our surprise, the airport location was ideal. The Zurich train system makes a trip into the city center a 15 minute matter – so staying in an airport hotel causes no problems whatever when touring to city. In fact it was very convenient for us – we had lots of luggage which we didn’t want to carry into the city, so a trolley from the airport terminal to the hotel was a matter of 2 minutes, and a short ride into the city (without bags) was a simple matter. Ideal for us, and many others I suspect. Our room was a good size, the bed very comfortable, and the bathroom perfect. Service was friendly and knowledgeable. Everyone spoke quite good English (the local first language is Swiss German) and some French. While not cheap (Zurich and Switzerland are expensive), the price was reasonable in the context. We were very pleased, and I think everyone would be.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Auberge Fleurs de Lune; City: La Malbaie Quebec; Review: Very nice spot. Clean and comfortable, room was cosy. Next time we would likely spring for a slightly larger room, but no complaints at all. Views of the river from the gallery were terrific, and breakfast ($10) was very good indeed. A nice feature – this is very close to Les Quatres Vents, if that is your destination. Owner was very welcoming and accommodating, with good restaurant suggestions and reservations – we had a good time.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Woodstock Arms Bed Breakfast Bar; City: Inistioge County Kilkenny; Review: Woodstock Arms is a nice B&B in the village of Inistioge, close to Kilkenny. Our room was comfortable, with a large and comfortable bed, and a small but fine bathroom with a shower stall. Woodstock Arms is over the local pub. We were afraid that noise would be a problem, but this was not an issue. The night we stayed, the pub was jammed due to a hurling match on the TV – the local team won, and joy abounded. But shortly after the game ended, the place cleared out and calm reigned. The pub food was good – simple and tasty, and the Irish beer was terrific (it always is). Breakfast was good – excellent choice of cereals, juices, yoghurt and eggs and bacon/ham/sausages, all served in an attractive room. One oddity – the bedroom had no screen on the window. There was a small sign warning to open the window only with the lights off – to avoid a swarm of midges. So we got ready for bed, turned off all the lights and only then opened the window. No serious problem, and no midges.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Trinity College Campus; City: Dublin County Dublin; Review: A one night stay in Building 30 was generally OK. The room was Spartan, but clean with two comfortable twin beds. There was a good ensuite bathroom – clean and functional. Check in staff were friendly and helpful. While there was nothing amiss, we would likely not return, since we found the deal rather expensive for what was on offer. Another hotel in Ballsbridge (a few days earlier) was a much better deal for about the same money. Nothing badly wrong - but the room was not a contender. The advantages were the wonderful location – this is the heart of Dublin – and the beautiful campus.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Oldchurch House B B; City: Kenmare County Kerry; Review: We recently spent a night at Old Church House in Kenmare. Excellent experience altogether. Our room was large and comfortable, with good ensuite bathroom. Breakfast was great – good selection of cereals and juices, plus the famous “full Irish”, with loads of bacon, sausage, eggs etc. Our welcome was warm, and touring advice was useful and friendly. It was a short walk into Kenmare where there are fine restaurants and stores. We had a great time, and we can easily and happily recommend Old Church House and Kenmare (and all of Ireland).; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Knocklyon House B B; City: Ennis County Clare; Review: We stay for one night in Knocklyon House – a great experience altogether. The ground floor room was well appointed, including a very comfortable double bed. The ensuite bathroom was a little small but more than ample – and squeaky clean. Breakfast in the gracious dinning room was generous, with a wide variety of juices and cereals, plus the “full Irish” cooked breakfast the could have been the meal of the day. For dinner we took our hosts recommendation and walked into old Ennis and found an excellent restaurant much to our liking. The walk was about 15 minutes – no problem with our hosts’ good directions. When in Ennis Knocklyon House is a very good choice – excellent accommodations, great breakfast, gracious and friendly hosts and easy access to the city and highways. A great place that we would go back to in an instant.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Roxford Lodge Hotel; City: Dublin County Dublin; Review: Roxford Lodge was a great choice to stay in Dublin. Situated in Ballsbridge, it is on very useful bus routes (they are a very short walk away), and if you are inclined, walking is possible (a little far for us). It is, in fact, a short walk to the Grand Canal and the wonderful Merrion Square. It is also close to the stop for the airport bus, which was very convenient since this is definitely the best way to get to the airport. Our room was a generous size, modern, very clean and comfortable. The en suite bathroom was excellent – a high-end unit with all the mod cons. Included in the room was an Android device for guests use – google maps was very useful in getting around, providing the best bus lines etc. etc. This is the first time I have stayed in a hotel offering such a service. Breakfast was in a beautifully appointed dining room. There was a generous continental breakfast as well as the “full Irish”. While neither was free, the price for the continental was quite acceptable. The “full Irish” was more but for us it was far more than we needed or wanted. The staff we encountered was friendly and competent. There was also a sign saying that they accept Bitcoin – but apparently no one has ever used the service. The price was reasonable – for Dublin, which is generally an expensive city. We were very pleased and can happily recommend Roxford Lodge. We will certainly return.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Up2date Fashion 3 Satin Caftans Combo Pack,Solid Colors, Special-24; Brand: Up2date Fashion; Review: I love these caftans, lightweight and soft, and great for sleeping or lounging, and the price is fantastic!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Up2date Fashion Satin Caftan in Desert Nights Print, Style Caf-22C2; Brand: Up2date Fashion; Review: Luv my moomoo's!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jerzees Men's Adult Crew Sweatshirt; Brand: Jerzees; Review: Fits good; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: UltraClub Men's Classic Wrinkle-Free Short-Sleeve Oxford; Brand: UltraClub; Review: Gift for Dad; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Moulin Women's Slim Metal Rhinestone Watch #18255.75815; Brand: Moulin; Review: Worked for 2 hours, don't waste your money; Rating: 1.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Americas Best Value Inn Georgetown Lodge; City: Georgetown Colorado; Review: Intrigued by some of the bad reviews, and desperate to avoid being caught on a motorcycle by the approaching thunderstorm, I got a room here. The front desk attendant was overwhelmed and unable to multitask. Between answering the phone, checking on the status of housekeeping, and yelling at guests to stop touching the glass protecting a map of Colorado, I had to remind him where we were at least half a dozen times. But he came through for me. The room was adjacent to I-70 with all the associated traffic noise. The interior trim around the door is coming off, with large nails clearly visible in the gap. The barnboard wainscotting is water stained two inches above the floor. Odd, since this is high ground. The bathroom is tiny, and the stall for the commode so narrow one must do the butt shimmy so you don't accidently rip the toilet paper dispenser off the wall as you seat yourself. There are more runs in the wall paint than I've seen since kindergarten. There are teeth marks on the inside of the door. All this I can handle, since as a Marine I've slept in far worse locations. The amount of trash on the grounds is most impressive! It is now July 2017. One of the plastic bags caught in the brush outside has a Subway receipt from Oct 2015. I may leave a bit of my own trash behind and come back in a year to see if it is still here. I cannot comment on the quality of the breakfast as on the way to my room I saw (and smelled) several large boxes on the loading dock oozing some sort of oily fluid. The food prep area is on the other side of that door. To summarize: this property is delightfully creepy. From the front desk attendant who looks and sounds a lot like Richard Pryor on crack, to the smell of old french fries that permeates my room. To call oneself a truly adventure traveler, one simply MUST stay a night in a place like this.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Holiday Inn Denver Cherry Creek; City: Denver Colorado; Review: I checked in late one afternoon and was helped by Dutch, who went out of his way to help get me settled, parked, and relaxing with an excellent IPA. He was so pleasant and helpful it set the mood for my entire stay! The room was okay, but people like Dutch, the bartender, and the breakfast server the following morning really make the place!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Microtel Inn Suites by Wyndham Naples Vernal; City: Naples Utah; Review: The facility was very nice, I suspect it had recently been renovated. Everything was spotless, all the fixtures were modern, everything worked, and breakfast was ready before promised. But the woman who checked me in was so incredibly rude and uncaring that I actually felt unwelcome. She never greeted me nor returned my greeting, never made eye contact with me, and never once looked away from her computer...even while placing my room key on the counter. Service like that makes people like me go elsewhere. I only reduced the score by one point though, as everyone else seemed hard working and eager to please.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Noor Hotel; City: Torrey Utah; Review: It's not a chain with all the standardization that comes with. It's not the most modern hotel. But it's clean, has all the services you need, is next to a fantastic restaurant, and is extremely convenient to both Torrey and Capitol Reef NP. The staff was great! When I asked where the laundry room was, instead of giving me directions the front desk attendant walked me there. The views off the backside, especially from the second floor deck, are stunning! The room was large and had plenty of outlets for all your electronics and chargers.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: La Quinta Inn Suites Salt Lake City Airport; City: Salt Lake City Utah; Review: This dog-friendly hotel near the airport was absolutely immaculate inside and out. It is surrounded by lush lawn and shade trees. My room was well layed out, with plenty of outlets for my electronics. The staff was friendly and very knowledgeable about the area, public transportation, and a host of other topics.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Super 8 by Wyndham Findlay; City: Findlay Ohio; Review: It was a clean room. The staff was efficient if somewhat mechanical. Breakfast was the usual Costco items. But the hotel is adjacent to some long term inn and those folks walked or drove past several times during my stay, checking out the vehicles in the parking lot. I didn't have a good feeling. Also, when I was packing the motorcycle the next morning the security lights went out at 5:30am, leaving me fumbling around with a flashlight to make sure everything was secured. Across the big parking lot is a nice little market with pretty much everything you might need on a trip. There is one seafood place and several fast food chains within walking distance. The noise from the nearby Interstate is considerable; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Red Roof Inn Cleveland Medina; City: Medina Ohio; Review: This property was a pleasant surprise! It's built like thousands of others of similar ilk, but the place was absolutely immaculate! When they noticed my service dog was startled by the incredibly loud exhausts of the adjacent Harley Davidson dealer, they made sure to put me on the opposite side of the building. I was greeted with a smile and a bottle of cold water. Really nice people!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Super 8 by Wyndham Gilman; City: Gilman Illinois; Review: Four stars only because of the VERY active train tracks nearby. I counted four noisy freight trains per hour at one stretch. The hotel has no say in that, and is a well-run property. The restaurant in the adjacent truck stop is phenomenal!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Apple Tree Inn; City: Indianola Iowa; Review: I stayed here for four days. The inn is a bit dated, but has all the features needed. Great AC, plenty of outlets, mass quantities of ice, and very responsive staff. A plus for early risers like me is breakfast opens at 5am with sausage patties, eggs, waffles, biscuits with gravy, cereal, and assorted pastries and bakery items. It's on a busy road, but oriented so the noise of traffic isn't noticable. Mom n Pop inns are hit or miss, but this one's a hit; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Gran Hotel Delfin; City: Benidorm Costa Blanca Province of Alicante Valencian Country; Review: came back from the define yesterday had 14 nights there and enjoyed every one of them. loverly hotel superb staff .food very good and so clean .location could not be better just yards from super beach.wonderfull bus service into Benidorm old town .really recommend this hotel; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: White Horse Hotel; City: Rottingdean East Sussex England; Review: Had two nights here. Booked a supperia room it was huge overlooking the sea from a large bay window . Superb breakfast lots of choice. Had dinner on the first night all very nice.We will be returning soon; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Catthorpe Manor Estate; City: Catthorpe Lutterworth Leicestershire England; Review: A superb country house hotel that has been completely refurbished .Only reopened in February. We had a king room huge bed and very comfortably really nice staff' . Food was really good if a little on the smallside .We will be back soon.Must just add the furniture and decorations are beatifull; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Gran Hotel Delfin; City: Benidorm Costa Blanca Province of Alicante Valencian Country; Review: This is the fourth time we have stayed here .Wehave allways enyoyed it.Loved al lthe staff. The entertainment is a bit repetertive.but having said all that we still enyoyed it .Have aready booked for next year.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Meadow Farm; City: Redditch Worcestershire England; Review: a very nice hotel at a really good price, and the best selection of real ale I have seen ,10 hand pumps all working.The food was quite good but all at two for the price of one not very good if there are three of you; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: White Horse Hotel; City: Rottingdean East Sussex England; Review: This was our second time hear its a very nice hotel. A lthough the food is much the same as most pubs the staff are all very nice but not enough of them only one girl behind the bar trying to serve drinks and taking food orders on a beatifull summers evening with vast amount of people; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Outward Hound Hide-A-Squirrel Puzzle Plush Squeaking Toys Dogs; Brand: Outward Hound; Review: dogs loved it; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Outward Hound Kyjen 31007 Egg Babies Dinosaur Plush Dog Toys Squeak Toy Dog Puzzle, Large, Red; Brand: Outward Hound; Review: dogs loved it; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hartz Home Protection Gel Dog Pads; Brand: Hartz; Review: they worked really good i would recommend them to people; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Outward Hound Kyjen Puzzle Plush Replacement Animals; Brand: Outward Hound; Review: dogs loved them; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Flea Away All Natural Flea Repellent for Dogs and Cats; Brand: Flea Away; Review: works good; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ClearQuest Puppy Pads, Hold 2.5 Cups, Scented to Attract Puppies; Brand: ClearQuest; Review: good; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Providence Engraving Pet ID Tags | 8 Shapes & Colors to Choose From | Dog Cat Aluminum; Brand: Providence Engraving; Review: love it; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Majestic Pet Villa Apple Pet Stairs; Brand: Majestic Pet; Review: love it; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Novartis Capstar Flea Tablets for Dogs and Cats; Brand: Novartis; Review: no good; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Pedi Paws Dog Nail Grinder by BulbHead; Brand: PediPaws; Review: really good; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Pet_Supplies |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Andromaco Palace Hotel; City: Taormina Province of Messina Sicily; Review: Breakfast poor. Portion control. Orange squash for 2 days then ran out for rest of the week. Waiting for supplies from Palermo! Ham only, cheese only available on request, if they had any! General standard of service poor; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Saint Christophe; City: Calvi Haute Corse Corsica; Review: Hotel in lovely setting, breakfast excellent Downside was the size of the bathroom, which was so small the door had been removed from the toilet and the bath was set in the corner, which was very difficult to get into and out of. 47 rooms with two persons per room equals 94 hotel guests but we counted only 23 beds around the pool area and the usual guests leaving their towels on unoccupied beds all day didn't help. You needed the room key to get into the pool area, out of the pool area to go to the toilet, out of the pool area to get to the rocks and sea and back in again of course. Why anyone not staying at the hotel would want to go to the pool area when you have to queue for beds beats me!! Too many rules and regulations! Weren't allowed to keep your own bottled water in mini bar etc.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Mediterranean; City: Rhodes Town Rhodes Dodecanese South Aegean; Review: THE HOTEL WAS NOT DIRTY, the bedroom was cleaned daily by three maids, one cleaned the bedroom, one the bathroom and the other the balcony. As far as cleanliness, the only criticism was the toilets in the basement - beach tunnel. The pool area was on a narrow side of the hotel, the only beds backed up against the wall of the hotel and faced a fence with litte space to walk by. There were a couple of tables anc chairs around the pool and these places were taken well before breakfast by the "towel on the beds brigade" Although the hotel was near the beach, many people prefer the cleanliness of a pool to swim in and the convenience of sitting round a pool. The pool looked like it had been squeezed on the side of the building as an after thought.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pestana Casino Park; City: Funchal Madeira Madeira Islands; Review: Stayed here for two weeks, excellent breakfast, nice big bedroom and bathroom. Best rooms overlook the pool area with good view from the balcony of the fireworks in June. Plenty of restaurants in the area without going into the town, two highly recocmmended in Rue Imperatriz is Casa Villa (next to hotel) and Dona Amelia. Just off this road is Casal da Penha with extensive menu and good selection of vegetables and very friendly staff. Just off the main road to the left of the Garage is Cafe Inn.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Barcelo Corralejo Bay; City: Corralejo La Oliva Fuerteventura Canary Islands; Review: Excellent hotel and friendly staff. Attractive pool area and corridors to hotel rooms very unusual as they were light and airy with palm trees. Good breakfast Good pool bar Could find no fault with the hotel with the exception of Activities Club, which could be disruptive at times, the second pool was used for water polo etc. If you only wanted peace and quiet to soak up the sun and read your book this became a little tedius.The girls and boys were only doing their jobs, but the continual request for joining in games was a bit much.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Speech House Hotel; City: Coleford Forest of Dean Gloucestershire England; Review: I booked dinner and room for one night as a birthday suprise for my husband. Dinner was excellent, although restaurant quiet, albeit 31 October halloween night. Breakfast was excellent, very large cooked breakfast - but we were only people in the restaurant at 0900 am Large room and bathroom Because it was a cold, wet day on arrival we didn't want to go out for a walk so spent the afternoon in a cold room - apparently the heating wasn't due to be switched on in the rooms. We have travelled all over the world, and still find hotel accommodation in the UK not up to the standard we are used to; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Old Lodge; City: Stroud Stroud District Cotswolds England; Review: Out of the other food club restaurants in this chain, the food here is superiors. Although I like the Fleece.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Quayside Hotel; City: Brixham English Riviera Devon England; Review: Very good hotel, beautiful view across Brixham harbour Breakfast very good; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hoposa Daina Hotel; City: Port de Pollenca Majorca Balearic Islands; Review: Third visit to Puerto Pollensa and going again next year Perfect evening sat on your balcony watching the world go by Large bedroom and bathroom, unusual in a hotel Best breakfast I have had in a hotel Very friendly staff, reception, bar etc; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rock House Hotel; City: Lynmouth Exmoor National Park England; Review: Celebrated my husbands birthday with a few days in Lynmouth. This was our first visit to the Rock House Hotel and will visit again in the near future. Very friendly management and staff at this small hotel, surrounded by sea. Very good food, including breakfast Nice clean rooms Would recommend this hotel; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Holiday Inn Gloucester Cheltenham; City: Gloucester Cotswolds England; Review: When is a manicure and a pedicure - not a manicure and pedicure - when it is in Spirit Spa at the Holiday Inn. In fact it is nail painting only. This was very expensive day out. Coffee very expensive and lunch takes such a long time to arrive, you are still waiting for your lunch when you should be keeping your appointment for your next treatment; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Melia Salinas Adults recommended; City: Costa Teguise Lanzarote Canary Islands; Review: This hotel was surrounded by a beautiful garden. The rooms were a good size Breakfast was excellent Restaurant also excellent, although expensive There were beautiful swimming pools, but unfortunately June is very, very windy and not warm enough to swim. The wind so strong it was uncomfortable to sit around the pool. Only shelter was on your own balcany; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hoposa Daina Hotel; City: Port de Pollenca Majorca Balearic Islands; Review: Back for our third visit to this hotel, but there is a few things that could be done to improve the accommodation. The glass shower guard over the bath needs a new seal as the water runs over the bath onto the floor. Even better get rid of bath and put in proper shower unit. The safe in the wardrobe is too high and when the door is open the sliding doors bang in to it and knocks out the connection with the batteries. Most visitors need to wash a few underclothes during a two week holiday and a small clothes dryer would avoid washing being strung across the balcony Albeit these few minor improvements all the staff and chambermaids are very helpful; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: The Gospel According to Mark (2nd Ed.) (Ignatius Catholic Study Bible S); Author: Scott Hahn; Review: Thoroughly written, great exegesis yet easy to read and follow. It's a buy for the ages which I highly recommend.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Hobbit; Author: Visit Amazon's J. R. R. Tolkien Page; Review: An enduring, magnificently crafted piece by one of the most profound authors of all times on the magical world of fantasy with extraordinary lessons and applicable analogies for our fragile world that endure the passing of time.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hobbit; Author: Visit Amazon's J. R. R. Tolkien Page; Review: An enduring, magnificently crafted piece by one of the most profound authors of all times on the magical world of fantasy with extraordinary lessons and applicable analogies for our fragile world that endure the passing of time.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: THE LORD OF THE RINGS Trilogy - (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Return of the Ring, The Two; Author: Visit Amazon's J.R.R Tolkien Page; Review: An enduring, magnificently crafted piece by one of the most profound authors of all times on the magical world of fantasy with extraordinary lessons and applicable analogies for our fragile world that endure the passing of time.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hobbit and Lord of the Rings Trilogy - Boxed Set of 4 Books; Author: Visit Amazon's J. R. R. Tolkien Page; Review: An enduring, magnificently crafted piece by one of the most profound authors of all times on the magical world of fantasy with extraordinary lessons and applicable analogies for our fragile world that endure the passing of time.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Fellowship of the Ring (Lord of the Rings Part 1); Author: Visit Amazon's J. R. R. Tolkien Page; Review: An enduring, magnificently crafted piece by one of the most profound authors of all times on the magical world of fantasy with extraordinary lessons and applicable analogies for our fragile world that endure the passing of time.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, Revised and Enlarged Edition; Author: Visit Amazon's Viktor E. Frankl Page; Review: A must read for everyone, every time. I could say volumes about this masterpiece: please, read it!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Hotel Vishnupriya; City: Udaipur Udaipur District Rajasthan; Review: One of Best hotel in Udaipur with great interiors.Best service with competitive price, polite staff, good food,centrally Located.The Staff was understanding and couteous. Nicely situated hotel with great view of City Palace.Thanks to make a memorable trip. Thanks Vishnu Priya; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Thamla Haveli; City: Udaipur Udaipur District Rajasthan; Review: One of Best Budget hotel in Udaipur with great interiors.Best service with unbeatable price, polite staff, good food,centrally Located.The Staff was understanding and supportive. Nicely situated hotel by the banks of Lake Pichola with great view at rooftop.Thanks to make a memorable trip. Thanks Thamla Haveli; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Golden Hotel; City: Jaipur Jaipur District Rajasthan; Review: One of Best hotel in Jaipur with great interiors.Best service with unbeatable price, polite staff, good food,Located near to station..The Staff of golden hotel was understanding and supportive. Thanks to make a memorable trip. Thanks Hotel Golden; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Paradise Resorts; City: Kumarakom Kottayam District Kerala; Review: Interiors were good..Service and Food was excellent.Centrally Located..Staff was courteous and helpful.Food was really awesome,delicious.Hotel is centrally located with Lake view ,artificial canal was created around Cottages Room were neat,clean and luxurious.Swimming pool facing the Lake is awesome.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hillview Munnar; City: Munnar Idukki District Kerala; Review: Interiors were good..Service and Food was excellent.Centrally Located..Staff was courteous and helpful.Food was really awesome,delicious.Hotel is located in Lap of Nature.Room were neat,clean and had a traditional yet modern look.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: TSK The Golden Nest Serviced Apartments; City: Calangute North Goa District Goa; Review: Overall Good Experience as rooms were spacious,Interiors were good. Place is located in a quiet and a peaceful area. Good facility. Ideal place for travelers with budget. Cons: However no Gas or induction was provided for cooking food or Oven to warm food.Hot water available only after 8 AM.; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: EnergieHotel Berlin; City: Berlin; Review: The hotel was good, both in its service and the quality of the rooms. The Rooms where very modern and clean plus you could get wired internet out of the back of the phone. Wireless however was poor on the second floor. The price both for the room as well as for the breakfast were good as was the breakfast in itself. The downside however was the very loud railway line. Thus I woke up at 4 and couldn't sleep afterwards due to the noise. Plus: - Price - Connection - Rooms - Breakfast Negative - Noise - English and German isn't spoken to well by some of the staff; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Ibis Basel Bahnhof; City: Basel; Review: The hotel is bigger and better equipped then many higher class hotels. The rooms where spacious, clean and fairly modern even so the furniture looked a bit cheap but was well maintained. The bathroom was very nice, bigger then usual, and the WLAN could be used everywhere in the room. It was also nice, that you got a free pass for the public transport with the room. Service was fast and even let me check out late and on short notice, as one of my appointments was canceled on similar notice. When asking about the snacks they were honest enough to say, that they were microwaved and rather meant for someone with a jetlag who wants to go to bed immediately, so they even recommended a restaurant. Breakfast was ok, but nothing special.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Grand Hotel Amrath Amsterdam; City: Amsterdam North Holland Province; Review: As expected the general settings where up to the expected level. The Room was good and the spa clean and well kept. However when looking into the details the hotel was only partly up to the standard, which you would expect from a 5 star hotel. While some may say, that these are only small things, you might want to remember that the delux room is around 230€. Plus Side: - Competent and Friendly concierge service - Quiet and nicely decorated room - Spa with clean hot tub, steam bath, 3 saunas and pool Depending on the day - Friendliness of the Reception varied greatly during the stay. While we were welcomed to an extremely cold atmosphere on arrival, the one on the second day was very friendly and immediately called the room service to have our one big blanked changed against 2 single ones when asked. Down Side: - Breakfast was nothing special and prepared very loveless. If you don't get it as a special offer included in the room price, don't get it. - The room had many dents on the furniture. While non of them dangerous, they were noticeable and not the kind of scratches, which would give a nice atmosphere. - The cleanness of the room only reached the visible area. The hair dryer was very dusty, and below the faucet of the bathtub, noone had ever cleaned, which is extremely bad as it is visible if you sit in the tub. The bedside drawers were also rather dusty. - 300 € safety deposit!!! The room was booked through the amex platinum service and prepaid. However the policy is to take a 300 € deposit in case you use services and then disappear. All in all I'd say only the price, the spa and the concierge is 5 star. The rest is missing the details which turn 4 or 3 into 5 stars.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Strandlust Vegesack; City: Bremen; Review: Having stayed here in May 2013 before and after my wedding for the wedding night. As such we had one of the suits and some exceptional Service. The room was of a great quality and, beeing one of the tower rooms, had a wonderful view over the Weser, harbor and ferry. While I know that in some of the other rooms you could hear the ferry, we were lucky enough to get a recently renovated one, so the windows were new and sound proofed. Breakfast on the next day was exceptionally good but be sure to reserve a table on Sundays as apparently everyone comes between 10 and 11. Only downside is the T-Mobile hotspot for 4.95 €/day with exceptionally bad connections both in the room and in the lobby. Also it doesn't have a pool or spa, if you require those.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Colombo; City: Marghera Veneto; Review: Considering that we payed very little for our rooms I din't expect any luxury. After reading some of the reviews I was also prepared with a bedbug tester and to walk out of there is the rooms were not clean. However the room was clean, een so it was very small. The bathroom was also clean and was also cleaned during our stay, which is not always done in Italy. The furniture had a slight neglect on them and had the "charm" of the sixties. The service was somewhat ok, being rather busy with his IPhone then with helping customers. WLAN was only available in the lobby. After entering the breakfast room and looking at the offers, we decided to not waste money on it, as we have never been friends with powders and you could still see some swimming on the "juice". The selection also wasn't worth it and Italy has great cafes.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Villa Rossa Hotel; City: Chisinau Chisinau District; Review: We stayed at the hotel with 5 people in 3 rooms for 4 nights. The service given to us was considerable different with each receptionist. In general the ones, who didn't speak English and only a little Romanian/Moldovan but only Russian was considerable more friendly then the ones who spoke more languages. She was also the only one, who took our complains about the noise from the sauna serious. As said we had the experience, that you could hear the noise from the sauna in Room 19. This didn't only include the traditional singing but also other "activities". We got a bottle of Champagne after complaining, but it would be better, if they would just close the sauna at 11pm. The overall state of the rooms was good. The furniture looked new and well kept. The cleaning in the beginning was good, during the stay they pay more attention. We basically had a different state after each cleaning (ones toilet not cleaned, ones shower not cleaned, ones no toilet paper) but different orders in the 3 rooms. The breakfast was good. The fresh vegetables are what Moldova is kind of famous for. The minibar is from price comparable to Europe and up to 10x of what you pay at the kiosk across the street. We didn't try sauna and pool as the surcharges are very high for Moldova.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Mercure Hotel Aachen Europaplatz; City: Aachen North Rhine Westphalia; Review: The hotel is a bit outside the city center in a not so nice neighborhood. But well reachable by car and bus. As such I wouldn't recommend it, if you are planning to do lots of sight seeing in aachen or don't have the budget for the taxi to the nice restaurants in the city. The rooms itself are clean and modern but lack the decoration of other business hotels. You can clearly see that they are focused on the efficiency needed to handle large bus groups and you shouldn't be surprised to see a bus or two outside the hotel. The rooms where always properly cleaned and stocked with tea and coffee. There, however, is no minibar but only some coin wending machine, which is unhandy if you live of a credit card and only have larger cash. The selection of dishes for breakfast is huge but doesn't include anything special. The quality also varies by cook and number of guests at breakfast. Be sure to be before or after the big groups as the number of tables is to sparse for such a large hotel. Complains about it are normally brushed away in a slightly cold, even for Germans, manner. All in all pretty average and a good value for a business trip.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: San Francisco Marriott Marquis; City: San Francisco California; Review: First of all the location of the hotel couldn't be better, it's right in downtown SF, so you don't need a car and with the high parking fees you also don't want one. The staff was friendly and helpful and had good recommendations on what to do and see and where to find good restaurants. The rooms where mostly clean, but if you are a bit taller you'll look down the lamps and see all the dust. The bathroom could do with some updating, as the yellowish white went out of fashion 20 years ago and the room furniture could use new layer of paint to cover the scratches. The pool is likewise out of date. What was mostly annoying were all the hidden fees, like 7$ for the changing room in the gym, a 20% "restocking fee" on top of the high levels at the mini bar and the price for the internet, both wifi and wired, are just some examples. Also no slippers or bathrobe provided. All in all if you don't need any amenities, but a good location in the middle of town with friendly staff, this might be a good choice otherwise the costs and annoyance levels add up.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Boulderado; City: Boulder Colorado; Review: The Boulderado looks like one of the grand hotels from the turn of the 19th century. It has a great flair and tries to preserve it. The rooms are very comfortable but still look authentic, with charming furniture and the modern amenities, like the TV, neatly tugged into the wardrobe. The rooms were well cleaned and the reception staff was friendly. Located in the heart of Boulder it only takes one block to reach Perl Street, the central pedestrian area. One of the must see highlights is the old elevator in the main building which is still manually operated by an elevator boy. All in all a delightful stay; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Prizeotel Bremen City; City: Bremen; Review: The staff was very friendly and the hotel is well insulated against the surrounding noise. The rooms have a very modern appeal. On the downside, the rooms are horrible bright at night and the curtains do little to stem the flow of light into the room. Both the train area behind the hotel as well as the square in front are brightly lit and you can see it inside the rooms. Upside, no need to turn on the light to go to the bathroom. For a single night and if you take the train the next morning the hotel would be good. If you are sensitive to light, take something different.; Rating: 3.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Merlin: Season 1; Brand: Colin Morgan; Review: In order to a Merlin fan you need the first season DVD in order to acquaint yourself with all the key characters. A must buy. From then on you're hooked. The writers are incredible and the actors play their parts perfectly with emotional expressions. They really care for one another. The special effects just get better as the series goes on. Season two is now available on Amazon which I will purchase on Amazon. And season three should be coming along soon. There will be a season four on TV in the fall. I can't wait for it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Buddy Hackett Live And Uncensored At Resorts International In Atlantic City 1983 VHS; Brand: Buddy Hackett; Review: I recorded this off my TV back in 1983. I'm glad I did as the cost for the VHS is out of sight! It's a great show and I'm hoping it comes out on DVD. I keep checking Amizon to see if it's on DVD. But so far it hasn't. A truly great one of a kind comic as pasted. A class of his own. We miss you Buddy.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Gettysburg VHS; Brand: Tom Berenger; Review: If you like facts about the Civil War you will like this movie. I learned even more about the plans each side for the battle that most history books don't tell you. It's an over 4 hour movie but worth your time.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Merlin: Season 4 Region 2; Brand: Colin Morgan; Review: This is one of the best series so far. The Sword in the Stone parts 1 & 2 are terrrfic.. The Blu-ray is magnificant. The picture and audio are great. Wish all the previous series had Blu-ray at the time I purchased them I saw the final series on line from England. As of this review it's showing on SyFy. This final series comes out on Blu-ray in April thru Amizon. You must get it The acting of these three young actors is truly great. Colin will make you cry in the last episode. It is very very touching. Nice to see Colin Morgan win the NTA award for best dramtic actor. I met Colin last July at Comic-con. Was lucky to talk to him one on one. What a great young man he is. Told him he is a teriffic actor and he thanked me. This series is very good and the next final series is exceptional. It's great entertainment for the whole family. Not many TV shows today are. Merlin is the best entertainment a family can have. Buy it! You won't regreat it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Merlin: Season 5; Brand: Colin Morgan; Review: The journey for Merlin and Arthur continues for the fifth and final series. The first 11 episodes are good entertainment. The last two are very good. If you've been following the series from the beginning, the last episode is very emotional. SPOILER: According to the legend Arthur is killed by Mordred. But Merlin doesn't tell Arthur he has majic until this last episode. The writers had many chances to let Arthur know in previous episodes. We never get to see Arthur rule with Merlin's majic at his side. They never show Arthur as the once and future king of Albion. Other than that the DVD is still a very good one. Colin Morgan won the National Television Award in England for best actor in a dramic series. I had the privelege of meeting Colin last summer at San Diego Comic-Con 2012. What a terrific actor and also a very nice guy.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Toy Story (Mandarin Chinese Edition); Brand: John Lasseter; Review: I bought it for my niece and she just loves it. She watches it over and over again as all kids do. I would recommend it to friends.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Merlin: The Complete Series 3 2010 Region 2; Brand: Colin Morgan; Review: I am truely a Merin fan. I was lucky enough to meet Colin Morgan at SDCC 2012 one on one. A terrfic person and brilliant actor. He won the NTA in London last January, 2013 for being the best dramatic actor. The Third season it great and the fourth and fifth are just as good. I recommend it to all Merlin fans. You won't be disappointed.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Day the Earth Stood Still VHS; Brand: Michael Rennie; Review: A brilliant classic! Recomend for all ages.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Christmas Story VHS; Brand: Peter Billingsley; Review: A true Christmas classic. Reminds me of some of the things that went on back when I was a kid. Like the snow suit that was so stiff you couldn't move in it. And the buckle boots. We had a kitchen sink like they had with the wooden cabinet below it. The bedroom furniture just like what my brother and I had. It brings back many good memories.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: W.C. Fields Comedy Favorites Collection; Brand: W.C. Fields; Review: Very good CD. The Bonus feature is well worth the set.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. 1: 1934-1936; Brand: Moe Howard; Review: Good quality DVD set and very funny.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Merlin: The Complete Series; Brand: Various; Review: I have the DVD set, but had to get the Blu-ray set. Just love the series. Best I've ever seen. Especially since it has the 2012 Comic Con panel video in the bonus section. As I was there sitting only 15 feet away from Colin Morgan. Then later bumped into him and had a one on one conversation with him. A terrific actor as I told him and a very nice guy. He will go far as an actor.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Frequency (DVD); Brand: Dennis Quaid; Review: Movie is excellent. There is even a TV series on it now, because the subject can be built on.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Movies_and_TV |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: The Longest Raid of the Civil War: Little-Known & Untold Stories of Morgan's Raid into Kentucky, Indiana & Ohio; Author: Visit Amazon's Lester V. Horwitz Page; Review: I loved this book, I've been writing a historical based fictional noval about people in the Civil War, who fight against Morgan's raid, although the noval's foccus isn't primarily on General Morgan, nonetheless I bought this book a few months back to learn more of him and his famous army. I have to say it fasinated me, all these amazing and sad stories that most of us will never know unless you're writing a noval about it. I thank God that I'm a book worm. ^_^ And hey, it have cost me a little but it was sure worth it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Julie and the Eagles (American Girl Collection); Author: Megan Mcdonald; Review: I understand that saving an eagle is important, I don't mind that, the eagle is our national symbole after all. But I believe the woman who wrote this put too much emphasize on saving the earth. I'm a Christian, I believe we should take care of the Earth, but at the same time we should care for people more. I saw this as a Earth worshipping book, I wouldn't want my child reading this.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Pollyanna; Author: Visit Amazon's Eleanor H. Porter Page; Review: I think the Pollyanna novel is a book we should all read and learn from. Life is always hard, and we should be grateful for things that we have. Pollyana, a young girl who has just lost her father, does that in a soft way that encourages people to be glad, without completly condeming them for their bitterness. This "glad game" is not just for kids, its for adults as well. Being thankful for the little things: family, freedom, and others is important, and we always take that for granted in America. I would recommend that you not listen to the nay-sayers about this noval, they seem like embittered happless people. They don't seem to understand that this book is teaching a vaulable lesson. Overlook them and read the book for yourself, you won't be sorry you did.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Addy: An American Girl/Boxed Set (American Girl Collection); Author: Connie Porter; Review: I think this was one of the best American Girl Collections. It describes the life of people and slaves had during the Civil War, and for me, a person who is writing a novel about the Civil War, this is helpful. It also describes the hopeless relality of salvery for any human being that I find portrayed well. The only thing I wish is that there had been a little more interaction with white people. Make it clear not that all of them were racists and establish the fact there could a be real friendship between them. I mean white soliders went to fight and die for them, can't they appreciate that more? Of course not, they don't want to admit that. Other then that, I liked the season very well.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Julie: An American Girl (American Girl Collection); Author: Visit Amazon's Megan McDonald Page; Review: I dislike many elements of these book, particulary the divorce of Julie's parents. I know divorce is common, and was common back in the 1970's, but I still hate it. Okay, if one parent was extremely abusive, I see the good of divorce, you need it then. My problem though, is that Julie's parents seem like good people who equally love their girls, so I'm left wondering why they needed a divorce. They attempt to send a message in these books that Julie finds a new way of being a family and it makes her stronger, but I hardly find that to happen in real life! Divorce shatters kids, it can ruin their lives, especially when their parents try to act as if the family can be normal again. I've known kids whose parents divorced, they did not end up "stronger" like Julie! It really hurt them to see their parents split and to have to split their time among each of them, always traveling from house to house. Really, if you think about that, its a sad thing that not much good comes from. Many of the drug users, and people with broken lives started down their road because of their divorced, broken famlies. It is linked, people. I've seen it. Another thing I don't like is the sneaky Liberal feel to these books, like the environment. I'm all for the enviorment, but the Liberals tend to worship the it, and place it above human life. They have a section all about enviorment in the back of the book, "Julie and the Eagles", and the author talked all the indangerment of the enviorment, yet failed to warn against putting it above people. Does this not ring alarm bells? I'm a Conservative, so I wouldn't want my child getting brainwashed into this way of thinking. I feel like these books displace many values of America, and I don't want to read that. I like books with the values that America was founded on, ones that are written into our Constitution. You all may like these books if you wish, but I'm a Christian who really belives in Conservative values, so I found these books disatisfying.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Little Clearing in the Woods (Little House: the Brookfield Years); Author: Visit Amazon's Maria D. Wilkes Page; Review: This a wonderful series, I enjoy it so much. Caroline, her mother and siblings struggle to live in their new home in a clearing in the woods is memorable. I also adore this new guy they introduce who graciously helps their family time and time again, Mr. Holbrook. I'm writing a book, and this man reminds me of the main character in my noval in his quiet, yet kind personality. I'm glad I got this book for only 3.00 dollars. I got a miracle on that, considering the way the prices for this book range. I hope they republish it soon, its ridiculous how these prices go.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: New Dawn on Rocky Ridge (Little House Sequel); Author: Visit Amazon's Roger Lea MacBride Page; Review: Well, I have to say I'm very dissapointed in Rose in this book. I fear that either Laura didn't give her the respect a growing girl needs, or Rose just grew rebelious by the influence of her peers, I'm not sure. But something happened to her in this book, and she begin to see Laura as a child/irritaion and old-fashioned. I'm concerned that Rose was influenced by the wrong crowd in this book, and it made me very sad to see her acting the way she did towards Laura and Almonzo. And look what at where her attitude got her! It really is a lesson to listen to your parents, they know about danger. She almost humilated herself in front of the whole town when she went traipsing through the town, without her parents knowledge, with a flirtsy town girl and met a man she barely knew. Not only that, she helped her new "friend" by pretending to flirt with this man, and oh the terrible consequenes that coul've happened! I flinched to see the foolishness of her, and the total rift between Laura and her. It seemed like Laura and Rose never quite were that close to brgin with, and it really became evident in this book. I don't know....maybe they ended up being closer later in Rose's life, but in this book I was just sad to see how Rose acted to Laura.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: On Top of Concord Hill (Little House Prequel); Author: Visit Amazon's Maria D Wilkes Page; Review: In this particular book, Caroline is 9 years old. About a year or two after moving into their new house near Concord, Caroline and her siblings struggle to survive in their new home, hoping they will fair better then in their first year. One of the changes they have to face now is a new step-father, Mr. Holbrook. Now, the two things I have to complain about this book are 1: when the whole family gets sick with the disease Cholera in the middle part, the author either didn't give Cholera 2 seconds research or she didn't explain that the family thought it was Cholera when we can see its not. The symptoms of Cholera are not at all what she described, it doesn't produce fever at all, it dehydrates you, and it kills quickly in severe cases. Their sickness seemed to linger for days, that's not accurate, they'd be dead if it was Cholera. That disease sounded more like the Flu. If the family did think it was Cholera when it wasn't, the author should've explained what the disease really was. I was dissappointed by that, and she could've done better then that, even for a kids' book. Complaint 2: I think it was silly for Caroline's new stepfather to talk like a slightly uneducated southerner. People in Wisconson don't talk like that, and he is supposedly from the North, lived in the North most of his life, and lived around people who from the North also. I just didn't find his accent accurate, and she did the same thing with other characters in other books of this series. Overall though, I did love this book! I encourage anyone to read this series. Just remember that disease is not Cholera, and you won't get confused.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Little Town at the Crossroads (Little House Prequel); Author: Visit Amazon's Maria D Wilkes Page; Review: This book was great, it was a little more interesting then the first one, and has many enjoyable chapters I think. I find all the characters in the Quiner family cute and enjoyable expect for the oldest sister, Martha. I also admired Caroline's mother's strength as he strives to run her family after her husband's tragic death. Her detirmination, her never ending courage and love really make me fond her and her entire family, particulary at he end of the book when they learn they are going to have to move from their home. The mother and everyone really show courage and I like that. I'm glad I got this book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Little House in Brookfield (Little House: the Brookfield Years); Author: Visit Amazon's Maria D. Wilkes Page; Review: While I agree with most people that this book may not have the charm of the Laura Ingalls books, I will also point out that this volume is written by a different writer, not every writer is a Laura Ingalls. And the book is describing with Caroline and her family after the death of her father. Its not going to be a typical Laura Ingalls book from the first chapter. The purpose of the book is to show the life of Caroline Quiner after her father's death and her family's struggle to cope without him, so the whole book is going to explain that. It has no real mysterious or tantilizing plot yet. It was boring the first time I read it, and often explained details about their chore that we already now, I admit the writer was sometimes trying too hard to be Laura and didn't do such a good job, but the series gets better as it goes along I think. I think you should read this book to get the idea of Caroline's life.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Little City by the Lake (Little House Prequel); Author: Visit Amazon's Celia Wilkins Page; Review: In this book, Caroline Quiner goes to college in Milwakee, Wisconson in order to get a teacher's license. While there, she stays with her Uncle Elisha and his family. In the city, she experiences some mordern conveiniences and earns a few friends and enemies among the girls in her in her new school. Being in the city causes Caroline many doubts and surprises but along the way Caroline learns as well. She discovers more about her Uncle Elisha and his job as a printer and valient abolitionist, and learns from him a deeper side to her long-dead father. As her time in the city progesses, she begins to wonder if living in the city is the life for her.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Little House of Their Own (Little House Prequel); Author: Visit Amazon's Celia Wilkins Page; Review: This one was so wonderful, I don't know how acurrate it is, but nontheless I love it. This book is about Caroline's years as a young woman teacher, and her courtship with Charles Ingalls. I was endeared to everything, particulary the stories of her teaching terms. She helps this child of a drunk, whom is a student of hers, and desperatly wants to learn. I really see the kindess and compassion of Caroline's nature come out here, and I love it. I also like Charles Ingalls and his respect for Caroline, I just loved the entire book. I'm glad it the first I got.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Across the Rolling River (Little House: the Brookfield Years); Author: Visit Amazon's Celia Wilkins Page; Review: This book was fun. It takes place about a couple years after Caroline's mother remarries a man kown as Mr. Holbrook. Caroline, now nearly 12 years old, is kept busy at her family's farm and is excited about the year's events. She is particulary excited because for the first time, a school will open in Concord, Wisconson and her family is expected to board the new schoolteacher. She also begins a friendship with a new neighbor, Charles Ingalls. Charles is charming, and she likes him very much. Now, the only complaint I have about this book is that the writer was foolishly inaccurate with the accent of Wisconsin and displayed it as a southern, uneducated drawl. She also made several silly grammar spelling mistakes and I would think a writer would know better. Anyway, the whole book story is very interesting and enjoyable. I'm glad I got it at the Laura House.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: These Happy Golden Years (Little House); Author: Visit Amazon's Laura Ingalls Wilder Page; Review: I love the Laura books, I can remember my mother reading them to me when I was young. Since then, I've read then again and it never ceases to delight me. My only complaint though, is that the illistrations are pathetic. They don't even look real, so I had a hard time seeing Laura as a real person. For me, when I see lifelike drawings, it really makes get in touch with their character. The drawer, Garth Williams, is someone I wouldn't want to be doing my book! I like the illistrations for The Caroline Years. Oh well...still love the books.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Brookfield Days (A Little House Chapter Book; Caroline #1); Author: Visit Amazon's Maria D Wilkes Page; Review: I don't want to be mean here, but I have to speak my thoughts. This book "Brookfield Days" is only a much lesser shadow of the book "Little House in Brookfield." I'd rather get my money's worth and buy the whole book of "Little House in Brookfield", then waste it on a book that only has a few chapters and not only that, abridges them into short versions. I suppose they made this one for younger readers, but I'd rather let the child read the whole book then a shorter copy, its much more exciting. I think this one was dispointing, and pointless.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Old Town in the Green Groves: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Lost Little House Years; Author: Visit Amazon's Cynthia Rylant Page; Review: As to the claims that this book is "voilating Laura's privacy", I would say you people need to calm down and realize there is NO right to privacy of life. You all claim that Laura would be upset and its a part of her life that should've been left alone, the hard truth is, and you all need to hear this wether you like it or not, nothing can stop an author from writing about the sadder parts of another person's life, particularly if that person is no longer living. If Laura read this book, yes she would be sad because it would remind her of darker times, but she couldn't stop the person from writing it. Its called freedom, people. My advice is don't make privacy in issue, because its not. What matters is what you think of the book. As for my review of this book, there was alot of sadness in it, but it was telling about the time when Laura's brother was born and died and many other things. Its not going to a normal Laura book. I, however, wanted to know some of the stuff, this is part of Laura's life after all. And this illustrater should have done the Laura books! I swear, I wish they could re-illustrate the entire series of Laura. THESE drawings look real.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Molly: An American Girl : 1944 (American Girl Collection); Author: Visit Amazon's Valerie Tripp Page; Review: Its not that I hated Molly McCintire's character, although I thought she and her siblings needed to be kinder to one another and I wondered why her mother allowed them act like that, but the problem is her books are so...boring. I don't find myself very excited about her story. It would've been more interesting if she did something exciting for her country! Her story takes place in war, right? And another thing, why can't the news of the war affect Molly a little more? Why can't she stand up strong for her country? I know exciting things were short to come by because she's not really in a battlefield, but come on, make the books more tantilizing! I have trouble finishing them when I read them, I just can't force myself to stick to it! I am in no way saying other people can't like it, you can like it if you want, its your choice. But for myself I found this collection so bland.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Bachelor Girl (Little House: the Rocky Ridge Years); Author: Visit Amazon's Roger Lea MacBride Page; Review: My complaint is that they should've gone on with Rose's life! I mean, they should've talked about her marriage to that man who abandonded her, they should've mentioned about how he left all alone in California in huge debt and how she paid it off by using her smarts to sell off land and other things! They left the book off at a sad part where she never married Paul, and that left reader so anguished over that. They should've really made another book or two that talked about her struggles and her triumphs. That was a pathetic ending to this series because it only showed the begining of her life! She had so much more happen to her, and maybe it would've been less heart-breaking for me if they shown what she did and how she learned lessons after she left Paul. But in that book all I was left think was of how stupid Rose was. She was very foolish, really. I wouldn've been happier if they had been more closer to the real truth, and shown more of what happened to her later. It really left you at a hanger. This series could've and should've been longer.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Little Town in the Ozarks (Little House Sequel); Author: Visit Amazon's Roger Lea MacBride Page; Review: In this book, Rose Wilder and her parents move from their farm at Rocky Ridge, into the town of mansfield. Rose has many exciting things happen to her, such as near death illness, as well as dealing with her growing feelings towards her childhood friend Paul, and with the snobbiness of townspeople. I for my own part, feel sorry for Rose's lonliness that she seems to constantly feel, and how it seems to grow even in town. I also feel a little strange about her love-like feelings with Paul. I don't know.....she seems to take her feelings about Paul so seriously, and I don't know whether people back then truly allowed their emotions to florish or Roger Mcbride just added that little fiction, but I just feel that love for Rose was too soon. As for the plot, its exciting, kinda sad and dramatic. I recommend reading it.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Little Town on the Prairie (Little House); Author: Visit Amazon's Laura Ingalls Wilder Page; Review: I am rating thisbook in reference to the abridged edtion this is. The Laura Ingalls books are classics, and its sad how they are cutting them short in these cheap imitations.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: A Tale of Two Cities (Collins Classics); Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Dickens Page; Review: I can't say much else about the book besides I love it. There are complaints this book is anti-American and I would like to address that. I am a very patriotic American but I didn't find the content about that disturbing. Please do not throw away the chance to read the book just because of what critics say. If you just ignore any part about Americans, Dickens never really denounced them in his own words anyway in here, this book is great! Who cares if he didn't like America when he visited and portrayed some Americans not so flatteringly? Do you readers know how much he denounced England? He drew attention to so many sins and injustices of thiers! They had much more reason to hate him and they did! And he denounced France too, in Tale of Two Cities. He did so much damage to them, why should we get ruffled about us? I for one don't care what Dickens or any other person thinks of America, he changed his mind later in his life anyway and apoligized for his critisicm. Anyway, if there is any complaint about this book, please just throw away the American stuff and enjoy the book itself.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Oliver Twist (Penguin Clothbound Classics); Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Dickens Page; Review: I can't say much else about the book besides I love it. There are complaints this book is anti-American and I would like to address that. I am a very patriotic American but I didn't find the content about that disturbing. Please do not throw away the chance to read the book just because of what critics say. If you just ignore any part about Americans, Dickens never really denounced them in his own words anyway in here, this book is great! Who cares if he didn't like America when he visited and portrayed some Americans not so flatteringly? Do you readers know how much he denounced England? He drew attention to so many sins and injustices of thiers! They had much more reason to hate him and they did! And he denounced France too, in Tale of Two Cities. He did so much damage to them, why should we get ruffled about us? I for one don't care what Dickens or any other person thinks of America, he changed his mind later in his life anyway and apoligized for his critisicm. Anyway, if there is any complaint about this book, please just throw away the American stuff and enjoy the book itself.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Great Expectations By Charles Dickens - The Franklin Library (Hardcover - 1979); Author: Visit Amazon's Charles Dickens Page; Review: I can't say much else about the book besides I love it. There are complaints this book is anti-American and I would like to address that. I am a very patriotic American but I didn't find the content about that disturbing. Please do not throw away the chance to read the book just because of what critics say. If you just ignore any part about Americans, Dickens never really denounced them in his own words anyway in here, this book is great! Who cares if he didn't like America when he visited and portrayed some Americans not so flatteringly? Do you readers know how much he denounced England? He drew attention to so many sins and injustices of thiers! They had much more reason to hate him and they did! And he denounced France too, in Tale of Two Cities. He did so much damage to them, why should we get ruffled about us? I for one don't care what Dickens or any other person thinks of America, he changed his mind later in his life anyway and apoligized for his critisicm. Anyway, if there is any complaint about this book, please just throw away the American stuff and enjoy the book itself.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1); Author: Stephanie Meyer; Review: You can buy it if you want, you have the freedom. But to me, these books are why I hate modern novels. They're so tasteless and they do not draw me. I only liked Jacob.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: A Far Better Rest; Author: Visit Amazon's Susanne Alleyn Page; Review: The plot itself was interesting, I wanted to like it but I can't stand a modern writer writing Dickens when they do not duplicate his style. A dicken's Historian should have done this book. His style was art and not to follow in its steps when you're writing a sequel for his book is disappointing. Also, I didn't like the plot twist where Sydney and Darnay related at the end. It may be logical to some people but I just don't like it.; Rating: 2.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Who I Am (FireNine) - Kindle edition; Brand: S. Q. Williams; Review: There was a lot of background information about Roy and the band. I don't know, it just didn't flow for me. I expected a little bit more than what we got I guess.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: It Was Us (Abby & West Book 3) - Kindle edition; Brand: Visit Amazon's Anna Cruise Page; Review: This was a cute romance, but it was very predictable. I loved West's devotion to Abby! Great read for an afternoon; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Unbearable (The Port Fare Series Book 3) - Kindle edition; Brand: Visit Amazon's Sherry Gammon Page; Review: It's a great book! I love all the port fare series, ducky's story is still my favorite, but this is definitely a close second! Warning, tears may be shed!!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Breathless Magic (Star-Crossed series) eBook; Brand: Visit Amazon's Rachel Higginson Page; Review: This didn't add much to the series. I love Eden and Kiran, but this just got a little repetitive for me. There was really no new scenes, it was basically the end of Jericho's book told from their perspective. I gave it two stars because I love Eden and Kiran, but the novella was a little unnecessary in my opinion.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Years Between-Jessie & Will (Sister Series, 1.5) - Kindle edition; Brand: Visit Amazon's Leanne Davis Page; Review: The characters in this book are one dimensional because it's a follow up book from "The Other Sister", which you probably have already read if you're reading reviews for "The Years In Between". It's a great novella, takes an hour or two to read. I loved reconnecting with the main characters, it was a great conclusion to "The Other Sister".; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Love, in Duology: The Love in English and Love in Spanish Bundle - Kindle edition; Brand: Visit Amazon's Karina Halle Page; Review: I loved this book/novella. The characters are not predictable, they're passion driven which makes for a fairly interesting plot. Now, be aware that cheating is a big part of this series, but not in the way you might think. This is not Thoughtless by S.C Stephens (you really should read that book,it's great even if the cheating makes you want to kill the characters), its entirely different. I am not pro cheater, I generally hate books about cheating (the Thoughtless Series excluded) but Karina Halle makes it impossible not to fall in love with Vera and Matteo as they figure things out. This package deal is even better because it provides a follow up through the end (kind of) of Vera and Matteo's story. Read it, you won't regret it :); Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Kindle_Store |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: The Most to Lose; Author: Visit Amazon's Laura Landon Page; Review: Really a good book. I didn't want to put it down. One of them I didn't want it to end.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Homecoming Ranch (Pine River); Author: Visit Amazon's Julia London Page; Review: I got bored. It did not hold my interest. About half-way through, I give up and quit reading and started another one.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Sapphire Blue; Author: Visit Amazon's DeAnn Smallwood Page; Review: I didn't want it to end. It held my interest all the way through. I kept hoping there was more books for a series.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: New Mercies: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Sandra Dallas Page; Review: The book was rather boring. It did not hold my interest.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Wee William's Woman (The Clan MacDougall); Author: Visit Amazon's Suzan Tisdale Page; Review: I really enjoyed the book. I didn't want to put it down.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: From Russia with Love (Heartsong Presents #417); Author: Visit Amazon's Colleen Coble Page; Review: beautiful story. I really enjoyed the book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: When the Heart Cries (Sisters of the Quilt, Book One); Author: Visit Amazon's Cindy Woodsmall Page; Review: Great series. I didn't want to put it down!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: When the Morning Comes (Sisters of the Quilt, Book Two); Author: Visit Amazon's Cindy Woodsmall Page; Review: Great series; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: When the Soul Mends (Sisters of the Quilt, Book 3); Author: Visit Amazon's Cindy Woodsmall Page; Review: Great series; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: I'll Stand By You (Blessings, Georgia); Author: Visit Amazon's Sharon Sala Page; Review: Great book I didn'the want to put it down. Would love to read more of her books.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Notebook; Author: Visit Amazon's Nicholas Sparks Page; Review: Great book . I didn't want to put it down. Beautiful love story.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: All About the Angels; Author: Visit Amazon's Paul O'Sullivan O.P. Page; Review: This is a wonderful, easy to read book about angels and their work on earth, great for kids and adults alike, inspirational, gives much hope and consolation.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Belly Dancer; Author: Visit Amazon's DeAnna Cameron Page; Review: "The Belly Dancer" is enjoyable reading with as many twists and turns as the belly dance itself! The character (Dora) is like a flower unfolding, through the book,and the suspense and spice of her experiences is wonderful to read. We (women) can all relate to Dora! Diane; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Spitfire; Author: Visit Amazon's Bertrice Small Page; Review: the very first book I ever read by Bertrice Small, and became an avid fan. The reading is lavish, descriptive, tasteful romantic scenes, no bad words, but very descriptive and enjoyable romantic scenes., in which dignity is protected. This book will take you away on a journey and you will enjoy every minute!! I actually read only a few pages each night so I would look forward next day to what came next !!!!!!!Loved it !! and a nice happy conclusion to the book made it sweet.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bianca: The Silk Merchant's Daughters; Author: Visit Amazon's Bertrice Small Page; Review: A good read but not too adventurous. still, good story and nice plots, wonderful people in them. and very sweet; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Selected Poems of Rumi (Dover Thrift Editions); Author: Jalalu'l-Din Rumi; Review: You will feel exalted, peaceful, and serene while reading these exotic poems by Rumi. You will be transported to another plane made of curtains of kindness, joy and love. Most delicious reading !; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Essential Rumi; Author: Jalal al-Din Rumi; Review: this book is like a rich meal. take it slow and digest well. very nourishing to the spirit and enlightening !! can make you feel very elevated !; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Confessions (Penguin Classics); Author: Saint Augustine; Review: A very engrossing book. Inspires feelings of humility.because if even a great saint had sins, we are all in the same boat. and God is merciful; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Confessions of Saint Augustine; Author: Saint Augustine; Review: A very engrossing book. Inspires feelings of humility.because if even a great saint had sins, we are all in the same boat. and God is merciful; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Aesop's Fables; Author: Jacob Lawrence; Review: very sweet old stories you never get tired of and beautiful cute pictures; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Aesop's Fables; Author: aa; Review: very sweet old stories you never get tired of and beautiful cute pictures; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Batman: Arkham City / Includes Batman Arkham Asylum - Two Guides in One! (BradyGames Signature Series; Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Lummis Page; Review: hubby loves it I got it for him !; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings: Prima Official Game Guide; Author: Visit Amazon's Alicia Ashby Page; Review: got it for My Hubby he loves it !; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jewelry & GemsThe Buying Guide: How to Buy Diamonds, Pearls, Colored Gemstones, Gold & Jewelry with Confidence and Knowledge; Author: Antoinette Matlins PG FGA; Review: excellent book about gems and diamonds. and metals. the author goes into details about how to buy intelligently . and how to get the right price. wonderful pictures too; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Keys Cuisine: Flavors of the Florida Keys; Author: Visit Amazon's Linda Gassenheimer Page; Review: very happy to find a genuine "Keys" recipie book. most special is how the author tells a little story at the beginning of each recipie. and I recognize the places and streets she mentions. since my own father was a natural Conch.! great book for anyone who loves the Keys in Florida and the foods.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing; Author: Visit Amazon's Coleman Barks Page; Review: beautiful book; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: The Alpha's Surrogate; Author: Visit Amazon's Angela Foxxe Page; Review: I really enjoyed reading your book the story line held my interest and I can't wait to read more; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: A Shift in the Air (Elemental Shifter) (Volume 2); Author: Visit Amazon's Patricia D. Eddy Page; Review: I could not put this down. I read the whole thing in one sitting. It was very well written and the story line flowed smoothly. I definitely recommend this book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Wild Time; Author: Visit Amazon's Lilly Pink Page; Review: Really enjoyed reading this.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Tigers Shared Mate; Author: Visit Amazon's Bonnie Burrows Page; Review: Very well done. Storyline flowed seamlessly with very believable characters. Loved that they got to know one another before the steaminess began. Have recommended this book to friends.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Scrooge McFuck (Some Girls Do It); Author: Visit Amazon's May Sage Page; Review: I love a story that has spice but a storyline that builds and flows. Caracters that are well rounded. This has it all. I really enjoyed reading this.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Hill'S Ideal Balance Grain Free Dog Food; Brand: Hill's Ideal Balance; Review: This is the best dog we have ever bought for our 2 Shih Tzus. It is healthy for them and comes in small bites. They love it and gobble it up. Other dog foods, after about 2 weeks they got tired of it and woukdnt eat it anymore. Our vet suggested this one & I went online to Amazon & got a better price & if I put on auto-delivery; got another discount. We will be sticking to this nutritional dog food! Highly recommend it! Cindy & Mike; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jardin Night Reflective Pet Dog Saver Life Jacket, Small; Brand: Jardin; Review: Cute / prob could have used med for both but the velcro tightens them up good. Recommend for dogs on boats.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jardin Night Reflective Hound Pet Saver Life Jacket, Medium, Orange; Brand: Jardin; Review: Cute / prob could have used med for both but the velcro tightens them up good. Recommend for dogs on boats.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Furrever Oatmeal Shampoo and Conditioner for dogs; Brand: Cardinal Laboratories; Review: This is the best dog shampoo . I have two shih tzus and one is white and prone to sores. This helps so very much to clear up her skin and keep that way!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Alfie Pet by Petoga Couture - Set of 3 ROS Silicone Pet Expandable/Collapsible Travel Bowl - Size: 1.5 Cups; Brand: Alfie; Review: I love these collapsesble bowls bec they are perfect for travelling.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ganlikon Dog Whistle to Stop Barking, Adjustable Pitch Ultrasonic Training Tool Silent Bark Control; Brand: Ganlikon; Review: Great product. We rescued a moving pit bull. He wasn't aggressive, but just kept running off. After using this collar, he doesnt leave our yard now. So happy we have control now even without using it now.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Pet_Supplies |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Never Go Back: A Jack Reacher Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Lee Child Page; Review: Another fun read. Warning though, once you start, you can't put it down. I looker ward to the next book.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Center of Gravity: Star Carrier: Book Two (Star Carrier Series); Author: Visit Amazon's Ian Douglas Page; Review: A very technical read. Needs more human interaction, less details about space travel. Give us some sex and back stabbing.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Innocence; Author: Visit Amazon's Dean Koontz Page; Review: It's not what you think, it is not what you expect, but by the end you are in tears of joy.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mission of Honor (Honor Harrington, Book 12); Author: Visit Amazon's David Weber Page; Review: it was boring and dull till the last 4 chapters, it was forced reading! like Shakespeare in high school! enough all ready!; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Janissaries: Book One of the Theogony (Volume 1); Author: Visit Amazon's Chris Kennedy Page; Review: Fun and easy read, as the characters develop, this series will be interesting, providing of course they don't kill off all the good guys first.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: They Also Serve (Society of Humanity, Bk. 3); Author: Visit Amazon's Mike Moscoe Page; Review: What happens when machines stop thinking ? They die! Hopefully at the hands of ray long knife! Fun read, looking forward to more!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hellfire (Theirs Not to Reason Why); Author: Visit Amazon's Jean Johnson Page; Review: Enjoy the story , ignore the science. Read on so that the games may continue! Thanks for a great read!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Veiled Threat (A Rylee Adamson Novel) (Volume 7); Author: Visit Amazon's Shannon Mayer Page; Review: Fun easy read, tight heartfelt characters. You are in the thick of the battle with Tyler. I wish I had those powers!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Silver Ships (Volume 1); Author: Visit Amazon's S. H. Jucha Page; Review: I enjoyed this book and look forward to the at of the series. Characters are fun and interesting. Good read!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Silver Ships: The Silver Ships, Book 1; Author: S.H. Jucha; Review: I enjoyed this book and look forward to the at of the series. Characters are fun and interesting. Good read!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Seven Apparel Hotel Spa Collection Popcorn Jacquard Bath Robe, Pink; Brand: Seven Apparel; Review: I really like this rob. It is perfect size and it feels great. The price also was pretty reasonable. You won't be able to find anything like this with this price at any store. I highly recommend.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ZANZEA Women's Sexy Off Shoulder Chiffon Boho Ruffle Sleeve Blouse Mini Dress; Brand: ZANZEA; Review: This top on the picture looks great but when you actually see it, it does not look the same at all. I am 138 pound and decided to get the medium size. It is huge for me and the length is almost to the knee. Overall not happy with this purchase.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Liang Rou Women's Ultra Thin Stretch Cropped Leggings Black Lace Trim; Brand: Liang Rou; Review: I really like it. Soft and comfortable. Will get another one.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Romwe Women's Summer Spaghetti Strap Sundress Sleeveless Beach Slip Dress; Brand: ; Review: This is a nice dress for the price. Good quality. I am 5.2 and 130 pounds so I got Medium size, however it is way too large and the straps also don't adjust. I am returning the item but as I said for the price it is a cute dress with good quality material.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: GBSELL Vintage Hippie Boho People Embroidered Floral Lace Crochet Mini Dress; Brand: GBSELL; Review: For the price, this is a really nice top. If you can figure it out what to wear under it, then I highly recommend it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ca Flower Style Turquoise Fashion Women's Jewelry Ring Red ¡; Brand: CAFA; Review: The ring was delivered yesterday. This is a very cute ring. It is pretty. However I can already see a little bit of yellowish color on the side of the ring which tells me that eventually the silver color will turn yellow. However, again, it is a cute looking ring. Hopefully it will take a while before changes color.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Choies Women's Ruched Off Shoulder Spaghetti Strap Tie Front Loose Blouse; Brand: CHOiES record your inspired fashion; Review: This is a gorgeous top. I get so many compliment when I wear it. The color is beautiful red too. I love to get it in black color as well but they only offer size small . I am 5.2 and 130 pounds and I order a medium which fits great. Highly recommend.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mytys 2 Tone Intertwined Crossover Statement Ring Fashion Chunky Band Rings for Women Men Gold Silver Rose Gold Plated 18mm; Brand: Mytys; Review: It just arrived and it is a very pretty looking ring. It also came in a nice package. I hope it does not change color but for now I really am happy with the purchase. Thank you.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lux Accessories Pink Rectangle Stone Pave Crystal Cocktail Statement Stretch Ring; Brand: ; Review: This is a very cute ring. The reason I gave it two stars is because when I received it few days ago, the silver color already was changed to yellow color.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: HaoDuoYi Womens Sparkly Sequin Spaghetti Strap Party Club Top Shirt; Brand: HaoDuoYi; Review: I received it today and I like it. I got the black one and in M size. I am 5.2 and 130 pounds. It fits well. It is a pretty looking top. I most likely will get another color.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: OURS Women's Summer Off Shoulder Ruffles Chiffon Top Blouse Short Sleeve Casual T Shirt …; Brand: OURS; Review: This is a gorgeous looking top. Great fit and the material is very good. It is beautiful. I ordered two more. I am 5'.2" and 130. I ordered Medium and fits great. Highly recommend the top. It is beautiful.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: CaseCrown Ace Flip Case for Amazon Kindle Fire Black Smoke; Brand: CaseCrown; Review: Great product- very stylish and practical. My Kindle Fire is safe and secure in this case. I would recommend this as a good way to keep it safe,; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Kaito KA200 Pocket AM/FM Radio, Black; Brand: Kaito; Review: Great little radio to listen to my Pirate games. Dials are a little small but, it fits in the pocket and no one notices it. Sound is clear and stays steady- my last radio tended to fade out. Nice purchase for a great price. Very light weight.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: TechOrbits New Laptop Battery for Dell Inspiron 1525 1526 1545 1546 1750 1440 PP29L; Brand: TechOrbits; Review: Works perfectly- easy to install and charged per instructions, don't know why i waited so long to get it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Fintie Keyboard Case for Amazon Fire (Previous 5th Generation, 2015 7 inch); Brand: Fintie; Review: Very nice does what it is supposed to. Love the color. Only 4 stars as the stand could be sturdier.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Bargains Depot (2 Pcs) [New Upgraded][0.18-inch Small Tip Series] 2-in-1 Stylus/Styli 5.5-inch L with 10 Replacement Rubber Tips -Black/Black; Brand: Bargains Depot; Review: Great price- does the job! Will purchase again.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Generic Touch Stylus Pen for iPhone 5/4s/4/3GS, iPad 3/2, iPod Touch, Samsung, HTC, 12-Pieces - Non-Retail Packaging - Multi; Brand: Yesker; Review: Keeps a stylus in reach when ever needed. Fits my LG fine and I like all the different colors.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Electronics |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Shivalik View; City: Chandigarh; Review: Although the property is nice, but maintenance is not up to the mark. Overly hyped place. I stayed there twice, food is good. Rooms are pretty decent. Staff is also courteous. Nicely located closer to sector 17.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Sayaji Hotel Raipur; City: Raipur Raipur District Chhattisgarh; Review: Very nice property to stay in Raipur..away from noise. Perfect exquisite destination for anybody looking for comfort, luxury, good food and hospitality of-course. Staff is very courteous, ambiance of this hotel is superb.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sunbeam Premium; City: Chandigarh; Review: Hotel is nicely located..rooms are quite luxurious and spacious. Food was great, well maintained restaurant. Had stayed for 2 nights and really enjoyed my stay. Pretty much convenient to travel from this hotel.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Sara Hotel; City: Narkanda Shimla District Himachal Pradesh; Review: Good hotel in low price. Very close to Bus Stand. Nice view from the balcony. Food was good. Staff was courteous. Found this hotel out of nowhere. Had no hotel booked in Narkanda, and there i found this property nice and elegant. Immediately booked and enjoyed the night.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Andaz Shimla; City: Solan Solan Tehsil Solan District Himachal Pradesh; Review: Lovely place to stay...mesmerizing view from the balcony. Supporting staff. A perfect getaway from stress, noise and people. Very much on the road. toy train station is just 5 minutes walking. Excellent property i must say.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: 1 World Sarongs Womens Hibiscus Flower Swimsuit Sarong in your choice of color; Brand: 1 World Sarongs; Review: Item as described. Soft & comfortable.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 1 World Sarongs Womens Hibiscus Flower Swimsuit Sarong in your choice of color; Brand: 1 World Sarongs; Review: Item as described. Soft & comfortable.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ASICS Men's GEL-Nimbus 16 Running Shoe; Brand: ; Review: My husband is now an basics fan. Would like to sample others for in depth review. Highly recommend.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: BOBS from Skechers Women's The Menace Flexy Fashion Sneaker; Brand: ; Review: Nice shoe. Not what expected. I have another pair, very similar. This fabric is nylon or polyester. Thought they would have been canvas. I should have read description better.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Under Armour Men's UA Playmaker V SL; Brand: ; Review: Grandson loved them.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 20to30 New Water Skin Shoes Aqua Shoes Fitness Shoes Yoga Shoes Pool Beach Swim Shoes; Brand: Unknown; Review: These keep my feet from being scuffed while performing exercise in the pool. Highly recommend.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Premier Womens/Ladies Coolchecker Short Sleeve Pique Polo T-Shirt; Brand: Premier; Review: Many compliments when I wear this shirt.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Western Chief Boys Waterproof Printed Rain Boot with Easy Pull On Handles; Brand: ; Review: Cute; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with news articles as follows:
Title: Turkey attacks biker stopped at traffic light; Abstract: Hailee Young was stopped at a traffic light in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, when something strange happened. A lost turkey appeared in the middle of a road, headed in the direction of a biker. The animal started circling the motorcycle,and attacked the biker!; Category: video
Title: ISIS Rears Its Head, Adding to Chaos as Turkey Battles Kurds; Abstract: The Turkish invasion of Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria raised new fears of a resurgence of the Islamic State on Friday, as five militants escaped from a Kurdish-run prison and the extremist group claimed responsibility for a bomb that exploded in the regional capital.; Category: news
Title: Turkey attacks Kurds who battled ISIS with US forces just days ago; Abstract: Trump's abandonment of Kurdish allies fighting ISIS shocked members of the U.S. military and left it scrambling to protect American forces in Syria.; Category: news
Title: Officer escapes serious injury after truck spins out of control; Abstract: A truck lost control and struck the officer's vehicle as an officer responded to a crash in heavy rain on Utah's I-15.; Category: video
Title: These Stunning Photos of Fall Foliage Remind Us Why We Love Autumn; Abstract: Warning: serious fall vibes ahead.; Category: lifestyle
Title: The Chinese companies taking over the world; Abstract: Despite the intensifying trade dispute with America and controversies surrounding firms such as Huawei, Chinese companies many of which are state-owned are absolutely smashing it internationally, expanding aggressively into all corners of the globe.; Category: finance
Title: Allies believe Trump gave 'green light' to Turkey despite US denials; Abstract: President Trump betrayed the Syrian Kurds by allowing Turkey to launch a destabilizing offensive against U.S. partners, according to diplomats and analysts unpersuaded by U.S. claims that he had no choice.; Category: news
Title: Hawk Can't Understand Why This Little 'Bunny' Isn't Scared Of Him; Abstract: This fearsome bird of prey has clearly never met a bunny nearly as brave as this one.; Category: lifestyle
Title: Why it's so hard for planes to land on water; Abstract: When US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson river all 150 passengers survived. Landing a plane on the water is called ditching. Ditching is more common in smaller private planes, not large planes from companies like Boeing or Airbus. But the Miracle on the Hudson isn't the only time an aircraft has been ditched. And despite that success, landing a plane on the water can be extremely dangerous.; Category: video
Title: Where America gets its cocoa and 20 other agricultural imports; Abstract: Think you know where your favorite food products come from? Stacker looked at some of the most common foods the United States imports from abroad.; Category: finance
Title: Russia says Kurds complete withdrawal from Turkish border; Abstract: Russia's defense minister said Tuesday that Syrian Kurdish fighters have completed their withdrawal from areas along the Syrian border, in line with a recent Russia-Turkey deal. Sergei Shoigu said Russian and Syrian troops have moved into the border zone following the Kurdish withdrawal.; Category: news
Title: Dog kicks cat out of his bed; Abstract: Ranger is fed up with his cat friend, Tux, always laying on his bed! So he decided to take action and use a more "forceful" approach to get rid of the feline.; Category: video
Title: Syria's Assad says Kurdish controlled northeast Syria must return to state authority; Abstract: SYRIA-SECURITY/ASSAD-KURDS (UPDATE 2, PIX):UPDATE 2-Syria's Assad says Kurdish controlled northeast Syria must return to state authority; Category: news
Title: Michigan Begins Accepting Applications For Recreational Marijuana Businesses; Abstract: (WWJ) -- The state of Michigan has received more than a dozen applications for the licensing of recreational marijuana businesses. Friday, Nov. 1 was the first day that those looking to run regulated marijuana businesses could submit applications after the Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act was passed last fall, paving the way for recreational pot shops alongside medical marijuana operations. The Marijuana Regulatory Agency, created to...; Category: news
Title: Inside the world's largest plane, which has a wingspan longer than a football field and a mysterious new owner; Abstract: The Stratolaunch is 238 feet long, 50 feet tall, and has a 385-foot wingspan. It made its first flight in April.; Category: news
Title: Inside the Sheikh of Dubai's 800-acre Kentucky horse farm; Abstract: I got a tour of Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai's 800-acre horse farm in Kentucky, where horses live in immaculate barns with skylights and personal fans.; Category: finance
Title: 45 Amazing Facts About Airplanes That Will Make Your Mind Soar; Abstract: Why do they really dim the lights on a plane? What's the safest airplane seat in case a crash? These amazing flying facts might just surprise you.; Category: travel
Title: How a military family honors the memory of wife's fallen first husband; Abstract: "Never let his memory fade away": How one war widow's life came full circle in love and loss; Category: lifestyle
Title: Man lost his house over $8.41 in unpaid property taxes; Abstract: He miscalculated the interest on an old bill the county treasurer foreclosed, sold the house and pocketed the proceeds; Category: finance | mind |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Chuvora 925 Oxidized Sterling Silver Detailed Midnight Owl with Crescent Moon Ring - Nickle Free; Brand: ; Review: Bought this ring for my granddaughter who loves owls! Ring fits perfectly. The ring is of good quality, and my granddaughter was very pleased. The ring has charming details, and looks very good on. The ring is dainty enough for a small hand.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Reebok Women's Daily Cushion RS Walking Shoe; Brand: ; Review: I was pleasantly surprised with the shoe being a bit large, My toes are not rubbing on the seam. I wanted a comfortable walking shoe, and this is it for me. The wider shoe gives me better balance.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Clarks Women's Clarks Morse Tour Sandal; Brand: ; Review: I HAVE SCAR TISSUE ON MY BIG TOES FROM SURGERY, CAN'T STAND PRESSURE ON IT. I NEED A SANDAL WITH SUPPORT. THIS DOES IT ALL!! MOST COMFORTABLE SANDAL EVER, LOVE WEARING THIS SANDAL. I HAVE EXCELLENT SUPPORT, COMFORT, AND LOVE HOW THEY ARE STYLED!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sorel Men's Manawan Slipper; Brand: SOREL; Review: Good quality, perfect fit, very warm and comfortable! Have purchased more expensive slippers, and less expensive, this is the one slipper to give it all. It's a perfect gift!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Intimo Women's Printed Microfleece Pajama Pant; Brand: ; Review: I ordered a pair for myself, I'm 68 yrs old and this was a fun thing. I love these pants! They are soft, warm and when my teenage granddaughters like them, I ordered 3 more pairs for them for Christmas!! I then bought a pair for my 78 yrs old sister, she loves them. The price is good, everyone seems to love and enjoy these pants. They are comfy, warm, fun, and put a smile on your face!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Fiskars 100580-1002 Procision Rotary Bypass Trimmer, 12 Inch; Brand: Fiskars; Review: This is a nice cutter and I like how it folds for storage. I also bought the Dahle 561 Guillotine when I purchased this one... and for cutting chipboard... I like the Dahle best. I'll probably use this Fiskars for those times that I need a more portable cutter.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fine Tag Attaching Tagging Gun BONUS KIT with Amram 5 Needles and Amram 1250 2" Fine Attachments Fasteners Barbs; Brand: Coda Resources; Review: This listing is not accurate. I ordered 2 Tagging Guns at the same time... One Standard Size and this one here for Fine Fabrics... both with comfort grips and both by Amram. I picked Amram brand since the barbs are readily available on Amazon unlike the other brands. I received the Standard Gun in a Box labeled with Amram as the Maker... and it not only has Comfort Grip Labeled on the Tagging Gun but the Grip does actually have a cushion grip. This Gun for Fine Fabrics is purple like the one pictured but does not have a cushioned grip and the brand C&M is labeled on the Gun on both sides. If you look closely at the picture it appears to have been doctored to erase the C&M since on the gun itself you can clearly see the brand on both sides. Why do this? A reviewer posted a picture of his gun (review on August 22, 2015) and that's what I received only mine is not scuffed up. I feel deceived since I can't imagine why they just didn't make it an accurate listing with the correct brand. The box or gun doesn't have Amram anywhere on it... so maybe it's actually made by another manufacturer? Having said all that, I did receive Amram needles that do fit this C&M tagging gun and the Tagging gun does work.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: NATIONAL Analysis Pad, 4 Columns, Green Paper, 11 x 8.5" 50 Sheets (45604); Brand: National; Review: Great Item at a Great Price. Comparable to Staples brand.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Smead 14837 Fastener File Folder, 2 Fasteners, Reinforced 1/3-Cut Tab, Letter Size, Kraft, 50 per Box (14837); Brand: Smead; Review: I love this type of folder! Using the 2 hole puncher with these folders keeps your paperwork nice and tidy.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Smead Hanging File Folder with Tab, 1/5-Cut Adjustable Tab, Letter Size, Standard Green, 25 per Box (64055); Brand: Smead; Review: This is a great product... and I love Amazon's price!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tach-It MR35 3" Wide Desk Top Multi-Roll Tape Dispenser; Brand: Tach-It; Review: I didn't believe the other reviewer that said that the blade was sharp. Well... it's true. I have several different kinds of these multi size tape dispensers and I thought to try this one since it was cheaper and it looked a lot like the blue ones. Well this one is truly dangerous. I promise you that you will sport band aids using this unit. I won't return because it's a hassle for such a low cost item but this is going in the trash.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Brother Monochrome Laser Printer, HL-L6200DWT, Duplex Printing, Mobile Printing, Dual Paper Trays, Wireless Networking, Amazon Dash Replenishment Enabled; Brand: Brother; Review: This printer picks up 2 sheets when you try to print labels so you end up with half of the label on one sheet and the other half of the label on the 2nd sheet. A total waste of expensive in label paper. It doesn't usually jam the printer when both label sheets go through but sometimes it does. To print labels you have to open the paper drawer and only insert 1 label sheet at the time. I only use full label sheets and 30 label sheets so this is the only 2 style label sheets that I use. If you don't have to print labels then it works find with general printing on paper. But if you are in an office or warehouse environment when you have to do mailings or shipping and/or inventory label printing then save yourself some frustration and choose a different printer. This printer wastes so much time feeding label sheets one at a time.; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Scotch Transparent Tape, Narrow Width, Engineered for Office and Home Use, Trusted Favorite, 1/2 x 2592 Inches, 3 Inch; Brand: Scotch; Review: I use tons of this. Great Product.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Office_Products |
Given the interaction history of a user with news articles as follows:
Title: Texas police officer shoots woman to death inside her home; Abstract: A Fort Worth police officer checking out a residence with an open door opened fire on a 28-year-old woman inside her home.; Category: news
Title: Patrick Day in coma after suffering brutal knockout; Abstract: The junior middleweight underwent emergency brain surgery after being knocked out by Charles Conwell.; Category: sports
Title: Jalen Ramsey trade rumors: Rams acquire cornerback for three draft picks; Abstract: Jalen Ramsey finally got his wish. He will be playing for a Super Bowl contender.; Category: sports
Title: Mexico convulsed by second mass shooting in two days; Abstract: Fifteen people were killed in a gunfight in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero; Category: news
Title: ALCS Game 4: Yankee Stadium in October no match for Houston Astros; Abstract: ; Category: sports
Title: Millennials are swamped in debt, and it's not just student loans; Abstract: Mortgages are millennials' biggest debts. And nearly as many millennials have a mortgage as undergraduate student loan debt.; Category: finance
Title: 49ers survive sloppy conditions to beat 'Skins, stay unbeaten; Abstract: ; Category: sports
Title: Four flight attendants were arrested in Miami's airport after bringing in thousands in cash, police say; Abstract: Four American Airlines flight attendants were arrested at the Miami International Airport and charged with money laundering after bringing large amounts of cash into the country, police said.; Category: news
Title: Yardbarker's Week 8 NFL picks, game previews; Abstract: Only two games in Week 8 match teams with winning records, but both are intriguing. Do the Chiefs have a chance in Green Bay without Patrick Mahomes? Can Carolina knock off San Francisco? Yardbarker's Chris Mueller previews all games.; Category: sports
Title: Air Force's X-37B space plane lands after record 780 days in orbit; Abstract: There was no doubt that the US Air Force's X-37B was going to break its own record for time spent in orbit, but it's now clear by how much. The mysterious Boeing-made space plane has landed at Kennedy Space Center after 780 days in orbit, comfortably surpassing the earlier record of 717 days, 20 hours and 42 minutes.; Category: news
Title: Your weekly horoscope: October 28th - November 3rd; Abstract: Find out what's in store for you this upcoming week and make it a great one!; Category: lifestyle
Title: Top 25 plays at halfway mark of 2019 season; Abstract: Check out some of the best plays of the 2019 NFL season through Week 8.; Category: sports
Title: Grading each NFL team at the halfway mark of the season; Abstract: With about half of the NFL season in the books, the 2019 outlook for each team is clearer. We handed out grades for each team through eight weeks of the season.; Category: sports
Title: California man arrested on suspicion of arson as wildfires continue to rage across the state; Abstract: An alleged arsonist has been arrested for sparking a small blaze in California, where a series of wildfires continued to threaten homes and businesses late Thursday morning.; Category: news
Title: 5 charged in alcohol poisoning death of UC Irvine fraternity brother; Abstract: Five young men have been charged in connection with the death of their fraternity brother, who succumbed to alcohol poisoning after a booze-soaked party this year.; Category: news
Title: Ben Affleck has a new girlfriend after using the Raya dating app, plus more celeb love life news for late October 2019; Abstract: Meg Ryan and John Mellencamp call it quits, Halsey and Evan Peters get serious, James McAvoy weds, Meghan King Edmonds accuses hubby of cheating and more.; Category: entertainment
Title: Insiders predict: NFL Week 9 winners; Abstract: We're officially at the midway mark of the 2019 season. After the conclusion of Week 9, each of the 32 teams in the league will have completed at least half of their schedule. The trade deadline came and went with virtually zero action only one transaction was made when the Los Angeles Rams sent Aqib Talib to the Miami Dolphins in a salary dump. Two teams remain undefeated the New England Patriots and the San Francisco 49ers.; Category: sports
Title: Opinion: Separating NFL's pretenders from contenders at midseason; Abstract: Midway through the season, the NFL's better teams have begun to distinguish themselves. A look at the pretenders, contenders and potential X-factors.; Category: sports
Title: The 2019 NFL midseason MVP rankings; Abstract: The 2019 NFL regular season is now half-complete, and the MVP race is wide-open. November is here, but at least half a dozen players continue to be in contention for the league's ultimate individual award. Here's how we rank the current candidates.; Category: sports
Title: The News In Cartoons; Abstract: News as seen through the eyes of the nation's editorial cartoonists.; Category: news
Title: Felicity Huffman Smiles as She Begins Community Service Following Prison Release; Abstract: The 56-year-old actress was released from prison last month.; Category: news
Title: Ex-NFL player Winslow Jr takes plea deal before rape retrial; Abstract: VISTA, Calif. (AP) Former NFL player Kellen Winslow Jr. pleaded guilty Monday to raping an unconscious teen in 2003 and to sexual battery involving a 54-year-old hitchhiker in a deal that spared him the possibility of life in prison. Winslow initially hesitated and seemed to agonize over his decision. "I'm sorry. I'm just not thinking very clearly," Winslow told the judge at one point. He asked the judge for more time before he finally entered...; Category: sports
Title: New Delhi's toxic, polluted air chokes city's 20 million people, and the haze can be seen from space; Abstract: Toxic air is choking New Delhi, closing schools and colleges, forcing cars off the road and prohibiting planes from landing at the airport.; Category: news
Title: Couple Cancels Wedding, Keeps $30K as "Donation" for Honeymoon Instead; Abstract: In a viral Facebook post, a couple announces they're canceling their wedding, but keeping the $30,000 in gifts for a honeymoon instead.; Category: lifestyle
Title: NFL teams reportedly believe Browns could trade Odell Beckham if struggles continue; Abstract: The Browns are teetering on the verge of complete disaster, and that could lead to some major changes this offseason.; Category: sports
Title: Halle Berry, 53, flaunts chiseled abs on Instagram: See the pic; Abstract: Halle Berry is trying to motivate her social media followers with her incredible abs.; Category: movies
Title: Celtics' Smart fined $15K for public criticism of officiating; Abstract: Boston guard Marcus Smart has been fined $15,000 by the NBA for public criticism of the officiating.; Category: sports
Title: 50 Weird but Wonderful Facts That Will Leave You Totally Amazed; Abstract: There's no doubt that the world is a weird place. Here are 50 weird facts about historical events, celebrities, and animals.; Category: lifestyle | mind |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Denver Marriott West; City: Golden Colorado; Review: Bid on priceline and was placed at the Denver Marriott West. This was definitely a pleasant surprise. We only stayed one night, but I got a great deal on this three star hotel. The staff were very friendly and even gave us connecting rooms. The bed linens were so soft and the beds slept great. This Marriott is older, but it is well kept. The bathrooms were a little small, but they had Bath and Body amenities. The main restaurant was not open, so we ate in the Sports Bar and Grill. Great atmosphere and service. Would definitely stay here again.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rosehill Inn; City: Wilmington North Carolina; Review: This inn has new owners as of October 2006. Tricia and Bob Milton were wonderful hosts. They have embraced this property and are very excited about owning the inn. Our room was very clean and well appointed. Breakfast was fantastic. Tricia continues to try out new recipes to please her guests. The location is perfect for enjoying the historic Wilmington riverfront. Would defintely stay here again in the future.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Craddock Terry Hotel; City: Lynchburg Virginia; Review: I stayed at the Craddock from 10/13-10/17 on business. My room was very clean and well appointed. I was in room 509, premium king. Yes it was near the train tracks, but the hotel beside the train tracks. A white noise machine is available by request at the front desk for those that cannot tolerate the train noise. I learned to live with it through the week. The bed was so comfy. Very soft sheets and pillows. I ate at both restaurants onsite during the week. Waterstone has great casual food. The pizza is wonderful. Shoemakers was excellent also, but pricey. Hopefully, Lynchburg will add more dining and entertainment options downs so that this can be a hotel to visit for a nice weekend.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Frisco Inn on Galena; City: Frisco Colorado; Review: We were on our way back from Aspen and needed two rooms for one night. How pleasantly surprised we were with our choice. The innkeepers were very friendly and the breakfast was wonderful, especially the coffee and the homemade bread pudding. For around the same price, why would anyone stay at the Best Western or Quality Inn? The rooms were clean and the beds were very comfortable. We will definitley be staying here again in the future.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Acqualina Resort Spa on the Beach; City: Sunny Isles Beach Florida; Review: We stayed at this wonderful resort from 5/26-5/30. We had a Deluxe City View/Intracoastal View suite on the 18th floor. We enjoyed the Sunsets at night. The suite was HUGE. Loved the separate bathtub. At check in, We were greeted with a welcome cocktail and given a tour of the resort ant then escorted to our room. The staff went above and beyond to provide excellent customer service. Beach staff was wonderful. Pool staff was wonderful. Waiters were wonderful. We ate breakfast at the hotel two times. It was pricey but yummy. I can't wait to come back to this piece of paradise.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Hampton Inn State College; City: State College Pennsylvania; Review: Stayed overnight before an early morning session at Penn State. The staff member behind the desk was very helpful with campus info and accommodating. He even remembered my name the next morning, not something you often find at this level of a hotel. The eating area was quite nice....the picture online doesn't show everything. The 'hot special' was sausage patties and waffles. Only had the sausage(pretty good) and a bagel(typical frozen type). There were many cereals, muffins, pastry, fruit, etc. It wasn't gourmet, but you definitely will enjoy the breakfast! Our room was pretty basic.....and not very large. Since there was no closet, a wardrobe unit was provided and it housed and iron and ironing board. The bathroom was clean and water pressure very good.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Margaritaville Key West Resort Marina; City: Key West Florida Keys Florida; Review: Let me preface my review with the fact that I used mostly Starwood points to pay for this stay. If I had to pay the astronomical price for the room we stayed in,I don't believe i would have been as happy because it was certainly not worth 350-400/nite. Check-in: Friendly and quick. Room: Almost completely re-furbished. Modern furniture,very contemporary feel. Regular( not flat screen) tv,with very bad reception- we didn't watch it very much anyway. No Art work in the main living area. Beautiful lamps. Bathroom area VERY nice! Nice towels and robes. Starbucks coffee and Tazo tea. When they did not replenish the tea, I called to ask for some.....they arrived within 5 mins with about 10 tea bags of 4 different varieties . A truly Heavenly bed that was sooo comfortable we had a hard time leaving it. Facilities: Pool area was very nice. Lounge chairs had thick, comfortable cushions on which I easily fell asleep....and I NEVER fall asleep poolside! Sunset deck-perfect location to view a sunset , IF you get their early enough to catch a front row seat. Bartender did not put Liquor in the drink I believe. The Strawberry Daiquiri was awful!!! The gym looked great.....about 4 treadmills and a few ellipticals. Conceirge: AWFUL!!! Now I did read some negative comments about this, but you don't realize how important this can be until you stay somewhere without a knowledgeable person It is even MORE pronounced at this Westin, since the main part of the hotel is in a different area from where you sign in. So....we finished our sunset cocktails and was looking for a restaurant to grab a bite to eat.....concierge gone by 8(remember sunset was at 7:45). I had a list of suggestions but the girl in the gift shop who sincerely tried to help gave us the wrong directions to what was apparently a very popular spot. We walked a couple of miles and finally had to settle for some sports bar someone told us about because all the other restaurants were no longer serving. But, my BIGGEST complaint was about how they tickets to Sunset Key are handled. The Westin sets aside a limited number of passes to Sunset Key daily. The girl in the gift shop said that I should be fine at 8:15, but I decided to get tot he concierge desk by 8. There was a line of about 5 people in front of me. I knew that they set aside 20 passes , so I figured I was ok. When she gets to the guy in front of me....she looked at the both of us and said ....I don't know what to do since I have only one ticket left......I guess I can extend the number by one and sell you two. Now I am staying at a 'high-end' resort and it was obvious that everyone standing on that line at 8 am was there for one reason and at no point while she is filling out forms/tickets does she give any indication that the number left was; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Ridin Hy Ranch Resort; City: Warrensburg New York; Review: Disclaimer: My very first time was in the 1970's when I was just a kid!! Then, skip to the end of the 80's when my oldest was just a toddler. Onto the 90's when they were 'just kids' . We were lucky to be joined by my brother and his family for most of those years. Others joined us from time to time for family fun....friends, brothers, grandparents. Its just that kind of place!! The one constant has been the family run business that understands its customers. You don't come here for a high-gloss vacation spot with every amenity possible. What you get are beautiful surroundings that behold a variety of fun activities for everyone and the enjoyment that comes with an 'all-inclusive'. For the few things that aren't included (alcoholic beverages, and a few activities) you never feel that you are being soaked dry. The charges are VERY reasonable. You can even bring your own cooler and enjoy your preferred beverages at your room. A myriad of activities are offered, but there is NO pressure to do, do, do.....unless you want to! The central focus...at least for most of my family...is the horseback riding. In these litigious times, one can still get the thrill of the fast ride an experienced rider seeks or the serenity of walking through the scenic Adirondack s a 'beginner' can appreciate. Of course, there is plenty for the rider in between. In addition to the riding, you can enjoy the many activities 'on the lake', such as waterskiing, banana boating, fishing, rowing, paddleboating....you get the picture!! The no phones or TV's in the room may at first seem archaic, but in these 'constantly connected' times, it is a reprieve from overstimulation..... so you can appreciate the simple things in life. We recently came back. from a trip with our twenty-something children, their significant others, as well as my brother and his family of twenty-somethings. It had been four years since our last visit. Each and everyone of them commented on how nice it was to be 'phone-free'. They all LOVED Ridin' Hy !!! It looks like the new generation will be making their 'family history'.....its just that kind of place.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Le Meridien Phuket Beach Resort; City: Karon Phuket; Review: We stayed at 5 hotels over the two weeks we were in Thailand. I've had some time to mull over my experience at Le Meridien. Arrival My daughter and I took what we thought was a metered taxi from the airport. I had my 'ticket' in hand and the driver said 350BHT to our hotel...which matched what I read on TA. Everything seemed good. I could tell the driver was 'fishing' for business, but we had everything booked before arrival. Perhaps, that is the reason for our experience upon arrival at the hotel. Obviously, the hotel had nothing to do with the driver I chose....the problem was how they handled a horrible situation... from the bell hops to the manager. When the two of us got out of the cab I gave the driver 350 + 50 tip for a total of 400BHT. The driver angrily responded to the cash saying the cost was 600BHT...I figured he was trying to rip me off, especially since I had a van, not a car, booked for the transfer of 4 people on the way back for just 200 more. Now I knew that was a total rip-off for the two of us and said that was not the correct price. He made a scene. I had to tell him he needed to remove my luggage. Reluctantly, he removed the luggage and it was placed on the luggage rack by the hotel staff. He grabbed my half of the receipt and this is when things went bad to worse. He would not leave and this is where the staff was wrong....they 'invited' me to check in while my luggage was only two feet from this angry man. It was obvious to me that some foul play was going to occur. I explained that I would not leave until my luggage was safely put away. The bell staff made a feeble attempt to make it look like they were taking my luggage but it seemed to travel only 5 feet before they stopped and again invited me to check in. This whole time the cab driver was there taking a more and more threatening and aggressive stance. No one really made any move to settle the problem. I KNOW what I heard at the airport, so the question was, what kind of involvement did the hotel staff have, especially since we were two women. I offered 50 more BHT. Still no change. Instead he was allowed to follow me into the lobby. Eventually, my luggage was moved but ONLY because I would not leave and watched them as it disappeared out of sight...yes, they stopped again and again. It was obvious that this driver was going to do something to it. In retrospect, maybe the staff was also threatened by this man. The manager also was of no help, even when I told him I was becoming scared of this guy. All he tried to do is compare the cost to their cost....this coming from a place that charges $100USD for breakfast....should I have used their; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Park Central Hotel New York; City: New York City New York; Review: My husband surprised me with an action packed day and an overnight in the City. While he went back and forth on a few choices this hotel seemed to be the best. The Good Location - close to Central Park in better weather this would be a great plus -close, but not too close to Times Square -easy access to subways- if only the E train was running the weekend we went! -since it was on 7th Avenue cab fares didn't add up to too much -walking distance to the theater district- its not easy to get a cab after a show lets out -very close to Carnegie Hall and a couple of decent restaurants Hotel =general -nice lobby -helpful reception- the man at check-in was the nicest! He was friendly, interested in pleasing his customers and easily engaged in conversation- great first impression! -luggage drop was close to the front desk and manned by 2-3 people for good service. We arrived long before check in at 12. We were able to leave our bags and go--this was great! -small shop with wine, drinks, sandwiches , cheeses, snack right in the lobby with a pleasant and helpful lady working the counter. Yes, it was quite expensive....but you pay for the convenience. -elevators- a bit small and little slow for a hotel of this size, but still fine Room Positive - - sleek, clean and modern with a pretty design bathroom - large with an updated and sleek design -rain showerhead with great pressure had a small refrigerator comfortable bed and pillows with a nice duvet nice and comfortable chair great use of space, BUT -NYC hotels have notoriously small rooms. While the design team obviously gave some great thought in making the best possible use of available space, the space between the bed and the dresser, desk, bench was so narrow that we could barely walk by without turning our bodies sideways. This definitely got annoying after awhile and if we had been staying for more than a night or two at the most, it would have driven us totally bonkers! My husband did get a great rate through Priceline, so this may have attributed to the given room choice (although we were staying in an upgraded room). While we we checking out I peeked into two other rooms that were getting cleaned and they were much more spacious. Negative Nothing really stood out here. My only comment is that the concierge ladies should act a bit less snooty. The attitude was subtle, but there nonetheless. It was 'let me listen with a fake smile, give a very quick answer along with the 'eyes' so they will hurry away and let me finish my conversation' I guess this stood out even more because every other hotel employee we had contact with was genuinely nice and helpful Would I go back again....absolutely! Would I recommend it to family and friends....absolutely -with the tight quarters warning just in case.; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Logitech - LS21 2.1 Stereo Speaker System; Brand: Logitech; Review: Door nails were called dead because they were bent to make removal impossible. The speakes are dead and won't power up. Inside the wooofer rattles. It won't power up. It is useless; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Indoor Digital Tv Antenna (Discontinued by Manufacturer); Brand: Philips; Review: Works perfectly, and will help you cut the cable. I live in a rural area about 15 miles from most of the transmitters and this one works much better than the more expensive ones.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Audiotek - Output 12A Amp Mobile 13.8 Volt DC Power Supply AT-PS12; Brand: Audiotek; Review: It isn't as good as my old ASTRON, but for the price it can't be beat, even though it is a switching power supply it is nice and quite unlike a lot of that style, it works great with my 2 meter rig and my 440 rig.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: AmazonBasics 3.5 mm Coiled Stereo Audio Cable - 6.5 feet (2 Meters) Stretched Length; Brand: AmazonBasics; Review: Works wonderfully, it is nice that is coils up and keeps the cord from getting under my feet while driving as the hump holder isn't that deep.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Amazon 5W USB Charger (also compatible with other android and iOS devices); Brand: Amazon; Review: Really handy; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: BlueRigger High Speed MicroBlueRigger High Speed Micro HDMI to HDMI cable with Ethernet (10 Feet) - Support 4K- UltraHD,; Brand: BlueRigger; Review: Great cable, you can spend much much more but his on is a wonderful value and it gives me a wonderful image on my TV from my tablet. You don't need gold contacts for most things and this one is hard to beat. Well made, great transfer rate, and really inexpensive for the quality; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sotek Indoor Hd Tv Antenna 35 Miles Range with 13 Feet High Performance Coax Cable White/black; Brand: Sotek; Review: It is quick picky here to get the stations an inch or two can mean stations, but it works better than my amplified one as that one over loaded the TV's receivers front end with the towers for two station being only 3 miles from me. The pads kept letting go so I added more other than that it worked quite well. '; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: GOgroove Mini Phono Turntable Preamp Preamplifier with 12 Volt AC Adapter , RCA Input for Vinyl Record Player; Brand: GOgroove; Review: A great little preamp for my turntable. It seems to have a nice flat balance and doesn't color the music, It really seems to be flat over the range and very little distortion.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Apple iPod 20 GB White (4th Generation) (Discontinued by Manufacturer); Brand: Apple; Review: The only thing I disliked it the battery appears to be weak. I will take it and get a new battery put in and it will be perfect; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | amazon_Electronics |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Child of a Dead God (Noble Dead: Series 1, #6); Author: Barb Hendee; Genres: paranormal, romance, fantasy, fiction; Review: Why I consider this series a guilty pleasure, I don't know. I have always really enjoyed the authors' style, the tone, and the world they created. It's a little weird how often in this book the two main characters are viewed from the perspectives of others, but it is also refreshing to see a different take. Without spoiling anything, this book brings to a close the longest running plot line of the books and sends the characters off in a new direction for what will be the next leg of the series.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Elegance of the Hedgehog; Author: Muriel Barbery; Genres: young-adult, fiction; Review: I haven't had a book that I felt like was a chore to read in a very very long time. The book is light on plot and is 90% philosophical pontificating, but the characters are irritating and narcissistic I couldn't bring myself to care what their opinions were. I love books that play with language and use a wider vocabulary, but this just felt like a combination of arm-chair psychology and hipsterness. Gah; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Don't Turn Around (PERSEF0NE, #1); Author: Michelle Gagnon; Genres: young-adult, mystery, thriller, crime, paranormal, fantasy, romance, fiction; Review: First and foremost my biggest gripes with this book are the technology gaffes, Macs don't have replaceable video cards and unless my knowledge of hackers has fallen out of step they tend to favor computers they can build and customize, not Apple computers that are designed to be as is. On top of that it suffers a bit from then"computers are magic" syndrome, where they are constantly doing things they aren't really capable of, or are doing them faster than they actually could. Once I was past those irritations the novel became engaging, plot wise, it moved quickly and I became caught up in wanting to see the resolution. Though I never really connected with or cared much for the two main characters. They two often went from supposedly super hackers, to whiny, to kind of incompetent a bit too much. I know they are teenagers but come on.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Wormwood, Gentleman Corpse, Vol. 2: It Only Hurts When I Pee; Author: Ben Templesmith; Genres: comics, paranormal, graphic, fantasy, fiction; Review: I love this series, Templesmith's art is superb as always and this volume maintains the delightful wackiness and morbid humor that is the series bread and butter. My edition also came with Segue to Destruction, which has one of my favorite moments in, the Four Horsemen on Segues.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 30 Days of Night: Night, Again; Author: Joe R. Lansdale; Genres: comics, paranormal, graphic, fantasy, fiction; Review: I like the 30 Days of Night series and I was excited to see an entry by Joe R. Landsdale, but this ended up being only sort of OK. I'm not sure if I missed a volume or if this intentionally started in the middle of the action, either way I felt a bit lost to who some of the characters were. A lot of them are going to die, but damn it my thought should be something other than "who was that?". Aside from that there is the whole element of the Golem, interesting in introducing something that can go toe to toe with the vampires, but overall it feels under utilized and I don't know how well I feel it fits in with the rest of the 30 Days canon, which is most vampires not affected by holy things. Overall, not bad, just some missed opportunities.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Falling Kingdoms (Falling Kingdoms, #1); Author: Morgan Rhodes; Genres: young-adult, paranormal, fantasy, romance, fiction; Review: Overall this book is a page turner, none of the issues I had with it made me want to put it down. In fact I kept reading it when I should have been reading something else. That said, I have issues, the world building is weak and every character suffers from moments of "fucking really?!" Everyone makes stupid mistakes, but it can get really hard to believe when everyone keeps making them. A noble murders someone and that event is causing unrest, engagement to my daughter will fix that! Ugh. There were also moments where the character's dialogue started way to close to modern teen speak. The book could have used some more time focusing on developing the plot, world, and characters, because the potential is there and that is largely what kept me reading.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Rebel Spring (Falling Kingdoms, #2); Author: Morgan Rhodes; Genres: young-adult, paranormal, fantasy, romance, fiction; Review: I'm continually bothered by the rebels freaking out about dying. WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK IS GOING TO HAPPEN DURING A REBELLION?! Besides that this book is much like the first, dialogue that feels out of place, the plot feels a lot like the setting, too small for what the author intends. Some characters seem to escape certain death quite a bit, only once with a plausible explanation. It's still a fast read that I was compelled to keep reading but never really loved.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Army of Darkness: Army of Light; Author: Mike Raicht; Genres: graphic, comics; Review: To say I love Army of Darkness is a gross understatement, and this arc made me nearly set the series down. The writing and art are at an all-time low for the series.; Rating: 1.0/5.0 | goodreads |
Given the interaction history of a user with businesses as follows:
Title: Albertsons; City: Boise, ID; Review: Albertsons has great quality and selection. I would give it 5 stars if it had better prices. It is a clean and good looking store. The customer service is superb. We never one stop shop at Albertsons because we can buy any alcohol (wine or beer) for $3-$5 cheaper at other stores. For example, Peroni at Rite Aid is $14 for a 12-pack compared to Albertsons who carries a 6-pack for $10.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Costco Wholesale; City: Boise, ID; Review: Like all Costco's I've been to, quality products, good prices, and good service. I'm glad Costco branched out from my home town of Kirkland.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tin Roof Tacos; City: Boise, ID; Review: I travel around North/South America for work, and this is my favorite taco restaurant. Yummy and great quality food for a good price. I'm very picky about meat quality, and this place has never disappointed me. Many in house items are put into their food, including the tortillas and sauces. Friendly staff and clean restaurant as well, which is very important.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Whole Foods Market; City: Boise, ID; Review: This review is for customer service. I walked to this store this morning to get a couple items, one of which was juice in a glass jar. When I was almost home the paper bag handle broke and my bag fell to the sidewalk smashing the glass juice jar. When I went back to buy the juice again I had the same teller, Logan. When he recognized me and heard my story he generously said the juice was "on us." That is the kind of service that makes me want to go back. Thank you Whole Foods and Logan for your excellent customer service!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Albertsons; City: Boise, ID; Review: Albertsons has great quality and selection. I would give it 5 stars if it had better prices. It is a clean and good looking store. The customer service is superb. We never one stop shop at Albertsons because we can buy any alcohol (wine or beer) for $3-$5 cheaper at other stores. For example, Peroni at Rite Aid is $14 for a 12-pack compared to Albertsons who carries a 6-pack for $10.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Form & Function; City: Boise, ID; Review: Coffee is delicious but you have to be really patient to wait for it...even if there is no line. We live right above this place, and average wait time is at least 10 minutes. If one person is in front of you, add 5 minutes.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Blindsource; City: Meridian, ID; Review: Very positive experience starting with the front desk, to the designer, and then to the installation. Good options for all budgets and very well installed. I appreciate how quickly, quietly, and cleanly the blinds were installed. Thank you Blind Source!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Das Alpenhaus Delikatessen; City: Boise, ID; Review: Love this place. It's my go to for German bier and a yummy sandwich. They have a good selection of wine and food also. Friendly people, usually. The owner is a joy to interact with. I recommend this place to my friends all the time. If you want anything that is imported from Germany, Austria, or Switzerland this is the place for you. So convenient and fun to have in Boise!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | yelp |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Maidenform Women's Comfort Devotion Embellished Bra; Brand: ; Review: comfortable; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Camellias Womens Gothic Steampunk Tesla Steel Boned Underbust Waist Training Corsets Vest; Brand: Camellias Corsets; Review: good fit. just what I was looking for.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Camellias Womens Gothic Steampunk Tesla Steel Boned Underbust Waist Training Corsets Vest; Brand: Camellias Corsets; Review: good fit. just what I was looking for.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Camellias Womens Gothic Steampunk Tesla Steel Boned Underbust Waist Training Corsets Vest; Brand: Camellias Corsets; Review: good fit. just what I was looking for.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lolli Couture Forever Link Faux Leather Lace up Long Combat Style with Heel Knee High Long Boots; Brand: Lolli Couture; Review: soft feel, good look. ive had many compliments; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Vans Authentic; Brand: Vans; Review: My grown children loved receiving these for Christmas. Brought back many memories of their childhood competitions.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Vans Authentic; Brand: Vans; Review: My grown children loved receiving these for Christmas. Brought back many memories of their childhood competitions.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Vans Authentic; Brand: Vans; Review: My grown children loved receiving these for Christmas. Brought back many memories of their childhood competitions.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: DC Comics BATMAN & ROBIN Set of 2 Pairs Knee-High SOCKS with CAPE; Brand: DC Comics; Review: These are so cute. My adult children giggled when they pulled them out of their Christmas stockings.... then immediately put them on.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: WOSTU Women Tennis Bracelets Luxury White Gold Plated Bracelet with Sparkling Cubic Zirconia Xmas Gifts for Her; Brand: WOSTU; Review: This is really a beautiful bracelet. Don't hesitate to purchase it. :); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bria Lou Cubic Zirconia Oval Halo Drop Leverback Earrings (4 cttw); Brand: Bria Lou; Review: These are gorgeous. They are large enough that they are noticeable without being dangle earrings.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: TUI SENSIMAR Oceanis Beach Spa Resort; City: Psalidi Kos Dodecanese South Aegean; Review: I sometimes wonder whether some people have logged on and reviewed the wrong hotel when I read some of these reviews. For example the pool rooms in the shade...well ours had sun until at least late afternoon from first thing in the morning. Drunken louts.....never saw one! Service in both restaurants....no problem. Always attentive and food over the two weeks....no problem! Room very comfortable and I don't really understand the door thing in the bathroom. Yes no door to the entrance to the bathroom area but the toilet certainly had a door! Always room around the pool. Very amusing to see towels being collected off beds which had been put on to reserve! Anyway I could continue but I have nothing negative to say. We had two weeks of glorious sunshine and relaxation and would definitely go back if it wasn't for the fact that there are so many other places in the world to visit.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hampton by Hilton Liverpool City Centre; City: Liverpool Merseyside England; Review: Very good position with great view over Albert Dock and the wheel literally just over the road. Very good breakfast choice, yes it can be a little hectic and if you are someone who needs to be able to sit at a table straight away and lack patience don't bother. We went down at the busiest time each morning and soon found a seat. Free wifi was great and the room was very comfortable with a great bathroom. Easy accessible car park under the hotel. Would not hesitate to stay again.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: St James s Club Villas; City: Mamora Bay Saint Paul Parish Antigua Antigua and Barbuda; Review: Not sure whether some of the past reviews are for a different resort so would comment as follows whilst still here: Little or no wait at breakfast Very large comfy bed with abundance of towels Several pools and the one we are at mostly has often been to ourselves Beach buggy drinks came around twice in the hour we were there this afternoon! Canoes, boats, wind surfers and boards and pedaloes on the beach bay side and safe beach area for children. Yes one of the restaurants is closed but this is low season and let's face to these have to be done at some point!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Locanda La Corte; City: Venice Veneto; Review: This is a great little place to stay. Simple but good breakfast with very friendly staff. We had a canal view room which was very comfortable, but would also have been happy with a courtyard view. Very good position for visiting all of Venice.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Silberhorn; City: Lauterbrunnen Jungfrau Region Bernese Oberland Canton of Bern; Review: Great room with view of the waterfall. Lovely breakfast and dinner. Very friendly staff who were always willing to help with anything. Close to the station and cable car with great walking areas in all directions. Would highly recommend for families and couples.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rendezvous Resort; City: Castries Castries Quarter St Lucia; Review: What was great.... Seaside suite (our room, but all rooms looked good), cleanliness, pools, river, beach, sea, gardens, food and drinks, all inclusive package, staff, activities offered, taxi transfer from the airport, kittens, low season uncrowded atmosphere, weather....rain showers were fun, often a release from the heat, summer breezes.... What was not great....ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Forest Holidays Thorpe Forest; City: Thetford Norfolk East Anglia England; Review: Lovely comfortable lodge for two in a very good position. We enjoyed good food at lunchtime and the retreat was a great place for a relaxing hot chocolate, a beer or a glass of wine. We enjoyed autumn walks through the woods around the site followed by relaxing dips in the welcoming hot tub. A great place for couples and families alike with friendly and helpful staff.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sandals Grenada Resort and Spa; City: Pink Gin Beach Saint George Parish Grenada; Review: We have just got back from two weeks in paradise. We stayed in a south seas hideaway walkout junior suite which was a step away from the very quiet pool outside at which we had no problem getting chairs each day. We had a later check out for this room with no extra charge which was also great. When we walked around the resort each morning before breakfast there were always chairs around both of the main pools despite the butlers and on the beach if we had wanted to sit there. We usually finished our afternoon at the beach which was lovely, I was actually amazed at how few people were at the beach later on in the day. The water was crystal clear and it was a treat to have fish swimming around you. We also had no problem getting seats in all of the restaurants that we chose to go to. I know a lot of people rave about the butlers, but we certainly did not feel second class because we didn’t have one and as far as we saw everyone was treated exactly the same by the very friendly staff. On another note some people complain about aircraft noise. It was not a problem and actually quite interesting to walk behind the lovers lagoon rooms to a lovely landscaped area, to see planes taking off. Five minutes away from the airport rather than an hours trek in a taxi was a great bonus.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Beausite Park Hotel; City: Wengen Jungfrau Region Bernese Oberland Canton of Bern; Review: Excellent hotel with fantastic service. We had a brilliant room on the third floor with great views of the Jungfrau from our balcony and from our bed. Whilst we were there it was the Swiss National Day and our balcony was perfect for watching the fireworks in Wengen as well as listening to the Lauterbrunnen display echoing in the valley. Food was superb. We were on a half board option with a rate when we booked of only CH 20 for the 5 courses which were very varied and all delicious. We also made good use of the indoor pool and my husband particularly enjoyed the outdoor pond. All the staff were very friendly and helpful and we would not hesitate to go back for another magical holiday in this region.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: The Sims 3: Design and Hi-Tech Stuff; Brand: Unknown; Review: i love my sims tool packs and expansions a few were cheesy but in general i do love everything sims3 .the only game i play and like.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Sims 3: Fast Lane Stuff - Expansion [Download]; Brand: by
Electronic Arts; Review: i love my sims tool packs and expansions a few were cheesy but in general i do love everything sims3 .the only game i play and like.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Sims 3 Outdoor Living Stuff - Expansion [Download]; Brand: by
Electronic Arts; Review: i love my sims tool packs and expansions a few were cheesy but in general i do love everything sims3 .the only game i play and like.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Sims 3: Town Life Stuff [Download]; Brand: by
Electronic Arts; Review: i love my sims tool packs and expansions a few were cheesy but in general i do love everything sims3 .the only game i play and like.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Sims 3: Katy Perry Sweet Treats; Brand: by
Electronic Arts; Review: i am anal about buying all or none of some collections wether i like it or not. this add on is stupid and very little use to me,; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: The Sims 3 Diesel Stuff Pack [Instant Access]; Brand: by
Electronic Arts; Review: i love my sims tool packs and expansions a few were cheesy but in general i do love everything sims3 .the only game i play and like.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Video_Games |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Forsaking Home (The Survivalist Series); Author: Visit Amazon's A. American Page; Review: Great series, great references for the average prepper, as a bonus.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter); Author: Visit Amazon's Laurell K. Hamilton Page; Review: Not so sexy time as her later books in the series. A nice reprieve.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Living End (Daniel Faust) (Volume 3); Author: Visit Amazon's Craig Schaefer Page; Review: Great combination of Elmore Leonard, McGyver, and Oceans Eleven, with a little magic thrown in. Daniel Faust can untangle the most obtuse of Gordian knots without giving the end game away. Bully read! Patiently awaiting for #6. I hear the spin-off series featuring Harmony Black contains some spoilers for Faust fans, so I will wait until after the next Faust book to start that series.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Glimmer of Hope (Large Print Edition); Author: Visit Amazon's Ryan King Page; Review: All books in this series are well-wrought.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Helmets and Lipstick: An Army Nurse in World War Two; Author: Visit Amazon's Ruth G. Haskell Page; Review: Good subject.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy) (Volume 3); Author: Visit Amazon's Victor Methos Page; Review: Good number of twists, and fast-paced. Very unpredictable all of the way through, and the author spares none of the characters.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners; Author: Visit Amazon's Therese Oneill Page; Review: Please mention this book to someone. It is clever and oh so innocently sly. If I ever get to time travel, this book will remind me to pack a few essentials.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Maude; Author: Visit Amazon's Donna Foley Mabry Page; Review: This took me back in time, and reminded me what life was like for the women in my family who came before me. I have often wished to go back in time and talk to them, and this was the next best thing. This will remind every child that their mothers, aunties, cousins, sisters and grandmothers gave up so much for their families, and often expected so little in return.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The World Walker; Author: Visit Amazon's Ian W Sainsbury Page; Review: The characters are new friends now, and I worry about them. The bromance between the first 2 Sebs, and their protective instinct towards Seb3 and Meera make them more human than the alien that Seb is. Gotta read 'em all.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Plain-Dealing Villain (Daniel Faust) (Volume 4); Author: Visit Amazon's Craig Schaefer Page; Review: Best yet, Faust the master of twisty witchy plots within plots with added plots, plenty to go around. The beloved family members that make up his posse have their well-deserved solos, and as usual, everyone gets what they deserve except Faust, setting us up for the next round. Truly, the wicked get no rest, because the truly wicked don't need any. Onward...; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust) (Volume 5); Author: Visit Amazon's Craig Schaefer Page; Review: Faust isn't the only one being set up for another bumpy ride. We are. I want shotgun-from a Fausty fan; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mission One; Author: Visit Amazon's Samuel Best Page; Review: Loved the plot twists and character development. Enjoyed the interplay of technology and corporate needs and how they influenced the story.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse); Author: Visit Amazon's Dennis E. Taylor Page; Review: Bob bob bob, bobbobbobbob. Oh bob bob bo-on. Oh bob bob bo-ob. Bob bob bobbobbobbob bob oh bob oh bob oh bob.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2 (Volume 2); Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Meredith Page; Review: This is an Apocalyptic version of GOT. No one is safe and no one ends up the way they seem. It is gritty and oh, so real, even the woo-woo parts. Five stars and you will not be bored. On to #3!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3 (Volume 3); Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Meredith Page; Review: Best sistas ever. The least likely to survive are the ones who will save the world from the Zs and even worse, the strongest who are surviving through sheer evilness.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with businesses as follows:
Title: Scotty's Brewhouse; City: Indianapolis, IN; Review: I love their French Salad Dressing and I'm pretty picky! I ate there this Sunday and sure enough, you could see the shadows of bugs crawling in the light fixture right above our table and shadows of dead bugs! I should have asked to be reseated and I tried to not think about it. I did inform the waitress when she brought our bill. If we do go back, I will make sure to check the lights or make sure I'm sitting in a different area!; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Pizza King Of Carmel; City: Carmel, IN; Review: I was raised on Pizza King in the small town where I'm from. I had never been to this location before, so I figured it was worth a try. I ordered a half Stromboli, add pepperoni. Oh my word. So freaking good. Plenty of toppings. It even came with chips and a pickle! Quick. Friendly. I'll definitely be back. Probably today. :); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Yats; City: Carmel, IN; Review: If I could marry the B&B, I would. Definitely get extra bread too. I've never been to New Orleans, but Yats makes me want to go. From the cute hipster dudes working behind the counter to the funky, chic décor to the incredibly delectable vittles....Yats has it going ON.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ocean Prime; City: Indianapolis, IN; Review: Let me start by saying that I am not savvy in the way of seafood. Like, I'm down with McDonald's Filet O'Fish, heavy tartar with some fries on top, not savvy. So when my Bossman said that he was taking all of us to Ocean Prime for our holiday party this year, I was nervous. I arranged our company's reservation. Table for 12. Two weeks before Christmas. Getting seated was flawless. They were ready & waiting for us in one of the back private rooms! Most of the gals ordered the impressive cocktail, Bubbles and Berries. It involved some dry ice and fruity schtuff. I opted for the Whiskey Clover. So. Delicious. Actually, too good. I think I ended having 4 or 5 of them. Our waiter, Jeremy was attentive and kept them flowing, without being in our faces all night. The Calamari was amazing. It had some sweet sauce that was very complimentary. They also had candied cashews on them. One of girls in our party had a nut allergy and ended up having a reaction. The staff ran to the store to get her some benedryl! We were so thankful for that! The white truffle deviled eggs were kinda weird. I'm old school and prefer some pickle relish in mine! :) I told the waiter to surprise me. I was having an open adventurous mind to trying seafood! I'm sure the whiskey clovers helped that!! I ended up getting the Blackened Snapper. It was flaky and delicious! It had some jalapeño corn tartar sauce that really tasty and not spicy like you would think jalapeños would be. For sides, the waiter brought Mac and Cheese and potatoes au gratin. Oh my word. I could have just eaten those for my dinner and been happy as a lark. My coworkers had the filet and the Chilean sea bass, Oscar style. Those looked legit AF also. Since Bossman was paying, I also went with the baked Alaska dessert. Because why not?! It was huge!! The meringue on top was lightly toasted. The ice cream and pound cake melded together magically. I was very impressed with the whole operation. We were kinda high maintenance and everyone had a great time! Well done Ocean Prime!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Philly Phlava; City: Tampa, FL; Review: Every time I come to Tampa, I MUST get Philly Phlava. The cheesesteak is so flavorful & cheez whiz is decadent. I've had the Chef Salad, mozzarella sticks, fried ravioli, bacon ranch cheese fries. All amazing. The people working there are chill AF also. The delivery is always pretty quick. I'm totally a Philly Phan for life. Please come to Indiana!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mini Doughnut Factory; City: Tampa, FL; Review: Incredible experience. The variety of doughnuts is excellent. So many unique and different flavor combinations!! You can see the doughnuts being made!! Dropping from the vat into the fryer and coming out on the conveyor belt. There's a secret menu too!! Cheesecake. Fudge brownie. Cookie dough. Oh yeah. And the doughnut milkshakes?! Good god. So delicious.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Burritos & Beer; City: Fishers, IN; Review: I live for their nachos. Wide variety of fresh ingredients. Super fast service. Great selection on local beers.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pasquale's Pizza; City: Indianapolis, IN; Review: My small pepperoni pizza was hot and fresh, right from the oven! Plenty of cheese and there was something quite tasty about the sauce! My only disappointment was that it didn't look like the picture of the pizza on the Yelp review. Mine had sliced pepperoni and it looks like crumbled/diced in the review. The price was right and the service was fast. I love supporting local businesses, so I'll be back!!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Taps and Touchdowns; City: Indianapolis, IN; Review: I sprung for VIP and it was my first beer event, so I had no expectations. I enjoyed the early entry, special seating / service and food vendors as a perk of being VIP. I thought the variety was good, but I am no beer snob. As someone new to craft beers, it was a nice entry point. Not overwhelming. Looking forward to next years event!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Fancy Nails II; City: Fishers, IN; Review: This salon is close to my home and I have always had quality nail work. I have acrylic gel nails and get them filled regularly. I also get pedicures approx. 1x per month. The pedicure massage chairs are divine. They don't make the water too hot also. I get the Orange scrub service that includes removal of hardened skin on the heels. The leg massage is wonderful also. For the acrylic nails, I love a rounded, short shape. Yen did a great job last time and took her time to do the job right. She carefully removed my old nails, as they were splintered and applied a new set. They make me feel welcomed and comfortable. I've been to many salons in Hamilton County. This one is my favorite because they are the best.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Wild Eggs; City: Fishers, IN; Review: I mean, I did roll up hungover and looking homeless to pick up my carryout brunch. My order was wrong. I made a build your own omelet. The gal read my order back and it was correct. I got all the way home. Friggin mushrooms all up in it. Big. Black. Slimy. Mushrooms. Awwwwe hellz nah. No. Can. Do. I called them up and marched this fungus bomb back in there. They made me a new one. If imma pay $26 for food, it needs to be right. Especially when I have a raging headache. My cats really enjoyed playing with the carryout bag. So there's that.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Taqueria Zamoritas; City: Indianapolis, IN; Review: Stopped here on a whim. Delicious, authentic chicken tacos. Corn tortilla. Cilantro. Diced onions. Lime. Mmmmmmmmmmmm!! Rice and beans, just like my abuelita used to make. Wish I could give this place 500 stars. The señora working was super nice too!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Nine Lives Cat Cafe; City: Indianapolis, IN; Review: I called before I stopped in both times I've been here, just to be sure i could get it. But you should probably reserve a time online to ensure your time/space. You'll sign a waiver saying you read and will follow the rules. Kitties are most playful in the morning and evening. So if you want to hold a sleepy cat, go mid-day! There's an attendant always available. You can tell they love the cats and have their favorites. They move pretty quickly through to adoption too. So there's always a fresh variety to play with. The cafe section looks tasty, but I've never ordered anything. I have a one track mind to snuggle & play with the kitties!!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | yelp |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Alex and Ani Hummingbird Charm Expandable Bangle Bar Bracelet; Brand: Alex and Ani; Review: This was my first Alex and Ani bracelet and it is adorable! Its comfortable and easy to wear. I can't wait to order more because they look great in multiples!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Alex and Ani Charity by Design Peace of Mind Bangle Bracelet; Brand: Alex and Ani; Review: I ordered this bracelet for my daughter and is was perfect! She loved it as soon as she saw it and it joined her growing collection of Alex and Ani!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Alex and Ani Womens Because I Love You Charm Bangle; Brand: Alex and Ani; Review: I Love Them all!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Alex and Ani Charity By Design Let Creativity Rule Bangle Bracelet; Brand: Alex and Ani; Review: I love them all!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: var aPageStart = (new Date()).getTime(); var ue_t0=ue_t0||+new Date(); window.ue_ihb = (window.ue_ihb || window.ueinit || 0) + 1; if (window.ue_ihb; Brand: Forum Novelties; Review: It's an inexpensive wig. You get what you pay for.; Rating: 3.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Park Lodge Hotel; City: Tobermory Isle of Mull The Hebrides Scotland; Review: The breakfast was brilliant and the service was very good but the hotel is ageing a bit now and it showed in the room and bathroom. This hotel is fine if you're having a short stay in Tobymorey and you want a relatively cheap BnB.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Santa Maria Hostel; City: Funchal Madeira Madeira Islands; Review: This was the first time I'd stayed in a hostel and I was very pleasantly surprised. The building itself was full of character - an old school whose big rooms suit being used as large suites/dorms perfectly. We stayed in the Wine Suite which is a very large, well decorated private room with an en suite bathroom and views of Ru De Santa Maria (the famous historical tourist street in Funchal) which I loved and couldn't fault. At about 7pm this street takes off and you get the buzz of activity down below which produces a rather nice ambient noise. If you're a light sleeper like me I'd recommend taking ear plugs though. The hostel has a couple of nice communal areas (a terrace at the back and a really nice kitchen with facilities and communal and private food). Cooking our own evening meals in this kitchen took the edge of the cost of the holiday. A nice breakfast is included too.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Aqua Natura Madeira Hotel; City: Porto Moniz Madeira Madeira Islands; Review: I spent a night here on holiday with my girlfriend after a stay in the fabulous Hostel Santa Maria in Funchal. The hotel has all the mod-cons you could hope for including a brilliant jacuzzi (which we had to ourselves for about half an hour) and the rooms have brilliant sea views. When looking out into the Atlantic ocean it's so easy for your mind to wander and this made for an unforgettable experience. My only criticism is it felt a little bit clinical after the aforementioned hostel (the rooms were nowhere near the size of the hostels suites either). Lovely breakfast. Overall highly recommended.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Les Patios du Marais; City: Paris Ile de France; Review: The gardens in the centre of this cubic compound are lovely - it's like a little oasis of greenery in the centre of Paris that you wouldn't even know existed walking along the street outside. My girlfriend and I chose this place with a criteria of a kitchen, a nice room and pleasant surroundings. The room itself (The Bollywood Fox) is nice and has all the basic amenities for cooking, a nice Samsung HD TV and a comfy bed. Paris is a bit like London though in that you don't get a lot of space for your money - the Bollywood box might be a better name for the room. I'm not complaining though at about £40pppn for central Paris.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Cancun Plaza Condo; City: Cancun Yucatan Peninsula; Review: These apartments are located on the beach front about a half an hour bus ride away from the Zona Hotelera (the place with Coco Bongo and most of the big hotels). My room was big with a nice bed and a really nice shower. There is a reasonably priced shop in the compound and a nice pool. The area of beach just outside the hotel is lovely too - a very relaxing place. I had no issues with this place, I just wasn't blown away compared to Krystal Cancun which I stayed in the week before. Saying that you will save about £20 per person per day even when food is factored in compared to staying at Krystal Cancun,; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Krystal Cancun; City: Cancun Yucatan Peninsula; Review: What worked out at about £110 a night got me a luxurious stay in an excellent hotel in a brilliant location. The quality of the food served in the restaurants was excellent and the styles on options available were diverse. I was surprised by how good the service was considering how no cash is exchanged in the restaurants and bars. On that note tipping will generally get you the best service so take a few $1 notes and 20 peso notes. The gym in the hotel requires special mention because it is excellent, as are all of the other communal spaces and features in the hotel. This hotel runs smoothly and probably employs somewhere in the region of 100 staff in jobs ranging from the manual (like room service) to the professional (sales and marketing). You could do a lot lot worse than staying here,; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with movies/shows as follows:
Title: Reservoir Dogs (1992); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dogma (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Igby Goes Down (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Frida (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mean Girls (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Clerks (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ray (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Man on Fire (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 50 First Dates (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Being John Malkovich (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Super Size Me (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Bourne Supremacy (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Napoleon Dynamite (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Last Samurai (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Motorcycle Diaries (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Garden State (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Shrek 2 (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Road to Perdition (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Italian Job (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Love Actually (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Runaway Jury (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rushmore (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: I (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sling Blade (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Bourne Identity (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Starsky & Hutch (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Collateral (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Spanglish (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Usual Suspects (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: In the Bedroom (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Catch Me If You Can (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Butterfly Effect: Director's Cut (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cold Mountain (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The School of Rock (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pulp Fiction (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Manchurian Candidate (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Big Fish (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Lost in Translation (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Good Girl (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mystic River (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Two Weeks Notice (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Monster (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Day After Tomorrow (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Real Women Have Curves (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Matchstick Men (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 13 Going on 30 (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Waiting for Guffman (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Gift (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: American Splendor (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Maria Full of Grace (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Terminal (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Run Lola Run (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: American Beauty (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: National Lampoon's Vacation (1983); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Beverly Hills Cop (1984); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Family Man (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Flatliners (1990); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Footloose: Special Collector's Edition (1984); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bowling for Columbine (2002); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Erin Brockovich (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Overboard (1987); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tommy Boy (1995); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Friends: Season 3 (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Raising Helen (2004); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Memento (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Fight Club (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Apocalypse Now (1979); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: My Best Friend's Wedding (1997); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Windtalkers (2002); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Forrest Gump (1994); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A League of Their Own (1992); Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Final Destination (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Coming to America (1988); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Never Been Kissed (1999); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Basic Instinct (1992); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The First Wives Club (1996); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Firm (1993); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Big Lebowski (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Remember the Titans (2000); Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: The Green Mile (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Magnolia (1999); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Anger Management (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Devil's Advocate (1997); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Legally Blonde (2001); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hostage (2005); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Nip/Tuck: Season 2 (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Catwoman (2004); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Be Cool (2005); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Godsend (2004); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Calendar Girls (2003); Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Tao of Steve (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 4 (2005); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Friends: Season 5 (1998); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Friends: Season 9 (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Bone Collector (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: South Park: Season 1 (1997); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Chappelle's Show: Season 2 (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sex and the City: Season 3 (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Elektra (2005); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Sex and the City: Season 5 (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Boondock Saints (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Schindler's List (1993); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Troy (2004); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Swingers (1996); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: You Can Count on Me (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Jacket (2005); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: King Arthur (2004); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Sopranos: Season 1 (1999); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hide and Seek (2005); Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: My Left Foot: Special Edition (1989); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sex and the City: Season 6: Part 1 (2003); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dogtown and Z-Boys (2002); Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Before Night Falls (2000); Rating: 5.0/5.0 | netflix |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Magic Aqua Rock Gardens; City: Benidorm Costa Blanca Province of Alicante Valencian Country; Review: Just back from the Magic Rock, good rooms, nice and clean, only downside is there are no balconies, food fresh, hot and a good choice,we were upgraded to a gold card which means you can have all international brands including bottles of Estrella. Family of four which included 2 x 17 year olds who had a brilliant time in Beachcomer, you can use the facilities of the other magic hotels, the Villa de Bendiorm is in the centre right next to the morgan tavern, watch out for the gypsies though, they are working in groups, targeting lads who are drunk and stealing gold jewellry from tourists necks, and they dont even know its gone until its too late, they work quick, hire a safe and only take out money what you need for that night, there are tramps in the park opposite which when you arrive you think its shocking but after a couple of days they are quite entertaining to watch and dont bother you at all, the british drunks bother them more than they bother you, lots of stag do's and groups of lads but didnt see any trouble at all, the old town is nice to walk to and if you are that way you can have lunch in the Fencia or Cristal Park, so if you are looking for a cheap holiday use there all inclusive package too. The drinks are really cheap about 1 euro or 1.50 euros a pint, eating out is cheap too. Would recomend the Magic Hotels to anyone, staff are really helpful and will accomodate if need be, a bit of an incline to the Magic Rock so you need to be able, weather was really good, overall had a good week, used A to B transfers which only cost £8.00 return from Alicante, on time with no problems at all and can be booked using Travel republic. Hope this helps.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: XQ Vistamar; City: Puerto Rico Gran Canaria Canary Islands; Review: Just arrived back from the Vistamar apartments, travelled with 2 x 17 year olds, lovely 2 bedroom apartments, plenty of room, excellent views, immaculate and just across the road from the beach, the pool area does not open until 10.00 a.m and there is a mad rush for sunbeds,not a lot of sun bed availabilty however you can cross the road to the beach so not a huge problem, if you require a late checkout this will cost 35 euros and you can only keep the room until 3p.m so quite expensive for 3 hours, a safe deposit box will cost 12 euros per week, each room has a ceiling fan and if you have a 2 bed apartment its not too noisy if you sleep with the large window open, it gets a nice breeze, there is a large fridge freezer, a spar down the road should you need anything, fill the freezer with ice pops from the spar, saves paying 2 euros each time for ice lollies, charliez bar is next door to the apartments and the staff are really friendly,a pint of lager will cost anything from 1.50 euros to 3.50 euros, depending where you go, if you head for the shopping centre try MIAMI Steak House, you can have a sirloin with chips and salad costing 7.50 euros, we had a few meals here and they were all excellent, the shopping centre comes alive after midnight, would not think twice about booking these apartments again.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Handlery Union Square Hotel; City: San Francisco California; Review: Stayed in this hotel, lovely room, central location and great breakfasts. Staff are really friendly, have to tip everyone so make sure you have one dollar notes with you, visit the cheesecake factory located in maceys store .; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Bay Horse Inn; City: York North Yorkshire England; Review: We stayed at the Bay Horse Hotel for one night, the manager was there to greet us on arrival, and very pleasant, we were allowed into the room immediately, the rooms are clean with tea, coffee and biscuits, we were given a key to the back gate and the back door incase you are late back in the evening, breakfast was good served between 9 - 10 a.m. There are parking facilities at the back of the hotel and the location is good for the centre of York. We visited the Designer Outlet by catching the number 7 bus which runs every 10 minutes, grabbed a few bargains, nothing too much trouble for the manager, would definetly return to this hotel.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Mont Park; City: Benidorm Costa Blanca Province of Alicante Valencian Country; Review: We travelled to Benidorm and stayed in the Mont Park on 27th December, most of the male receptionist were miserable other than one, hotel was clean and the rooms were basic, you could only get Spanish channels on the TV not even sky news, pretty quiet hotel, the food was basic and luke warm, restaurant staff were pleasant, the location was fine. When we were there the hotel was full of Spanish and very few English, maybe better other times of year.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Haven Guest House; City: Blackpool Lancashire England; Review: We visited this hotel as two couples for a weekend stay, Mitchell was there to greet us on arrival, rooms lovely and clean, trendy, warm and welcoming, lovely breakfast with excellent service, would recommend this hotel to anyone visiting Blackpool, not the normal run down bed and breakfast. Nothing a problem. Would definitely stay at this hotel again.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Apartamentos Ros; City: Santa Eulalia del Rio Ibiza Balearic Islands; Review: The Ros apartments are in a great location, very clean, british channels on TV, free wi fi in rooms, spacious and everything you need, excellent air con, staff helpful on bar area/reception. Only 50 metres from the beach and a 5 min walk to the main centre, would recommend these apartments to anyone.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Gran Cervantes by Blue Sea; City: Torremolinos Costa del Sol Province of Malaga Andalucia; Review: Central hotel, clean, staff helpful and efficient, when all inclusive you are only allowed a half pint at a time which shows in the cleanliness of the hotel as there is hardly any empty cups lying around and you never have to wait to be served again,, the meals are average but you can always get something to eat, the times of the restaurant are quite lengthy, there is slush and a popcorn machine for the kids, the rooms and the balconies are spacious with air con , safes are about 21 euros to hire a week, animation team needs a little attention but suppose they try their best, the pool area does not open till about 9.00 which restricts the usual suspects of putting towel on beds, you can easily get a sunbed during the first week of September, not sure what it would be like during peak times. 100 metres around the corner from the hotel is a lift which takes you to the beach for 50 cents, the train station is nearby and runs direct into Malaga airport and to Belamedena. The hotel is right in the main centre and there is a Dealz shop(same as Poundland in UK) where you can purchase four cans of San Miguel for 150 euros, there is also a fridge in the rooms for anyone on a budget.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Centro Barsha; City: Dubai Emirate of Dubai; Review: We visited Dubai for 3 nights, the hotel was well situated, really clean hotel and good friendly efficient staff. The emirates shopping mall is about 5 minutes walk where you can catch their metro link around Dubai, you can get a return ticket for a few pounds. We were told it was expensive to eat put but we didnt find it expensive, we had a meal in the butchers grill in the emirates mall which worked put about 25 british pounds, would recommend Pauls pattiserie for deserts. The marina is lovely on an evening and reasonable to eat, if you like an alcohol drink take it with you from duty free as its £12 a pint by the pool, the breakfast in the hotel is varied and good, we only had a pizza at lunch time which was good and about £7 I would not hesitate to stay at the hotel again. Well done to the staff at Centro Barsha .; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Centara Karon Resort Phuket; City: Karon Phuket; Review: We visited the hotel for 6 nights, could not fault the hotel, clean, well kept grounds, pleasant and efficient staff. You can add 10,000 baht onto the hotel and they give you 5000 baht free. We ate in the hotel every night and had drinks and a couple of lunch time meals during the day and when we left only owed a couple of £ had lovely meals every time, they are a little more expensive than eating in the street but at least its clean, more than i can say for the street. Wi Fi is in reception free but if you sign up for the Centra card this gives you wi fi in the bedroom and surrounding areas. We visited Pattong on a night the hotel has a bus which takes you there for 100 baht. Worth a visit to see lively Thailand with lady boys and plenty bars and a large shopping centre. We booked a tour in the street with Todds tours, Ronnie the guide was funny and helpful taking us to the big buddha, visit the elephants etc only half a day for about £20 we also had pedicures, manicures, hair done and massages, i even left my washing and ironing with them too. So would recommend Todds for all of this. Kae in the beer garden was always cheerful and efficient making us laugh, I got a late checkout until 6 pm although the first pregnant receptionist said it was full, didnt even look, and said I could not keep my room on, i asked another one later on who gladly done it, this was my only complaint about the hotel. The weather was really good and excellent for a winter holiday. Well done to all the staff at the Centara Karon, what a good job you all do.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Globales Apartamentos Verdemar; City: Santa Ponsa Calvia Majorca Balearic Islands; Review: We stayed in a studio with a sea view, the view from the balcony was stunning, good location to square and beach, the blonde girl on reception was very efficient. We arrived at about 13.00 hours but couldn't have access to our room until 14.00 hours. The studios are fine for 2 people they are quite small and hardly any wardrobe/drawer space but we managed as there was just two of us. The sunbed costs 3.50 euros per day for one sunbed, but are more expensive on the beach. We had a couple of meals at pacos restaurant across the road which was excellent and would recommend a visit, we got the special which was a starter, main meal, sweet and a bottle of wine for 17.95 euros, the t bone was excellent. I would have no hesitation in recommending these apartments.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Centara Karon Resort Phuket; City: Karon Phuket; Review: we arrived at the Centara Karon Phuket on 4th March 2017 on arrival at the hotel we were met by pleasant hotel receptionist to had a cold drink ready, we were upgraded to a better room by the pool, we were put on a buggy with our cases and taken to the room. The hotel offer a reward card, if you put on ten thousand bhat on they give you five thousand free which we did to spend on food and drink, although the meals are more expensive than eating out of the hotel, we never had a bad meal, all were presented well, excellent service in the Lotus restaurant especially "Kae" who goes out of her way to ensure the service is second to none. The entertainment team work very hard. We used the hotel taxi service which was no problem at all, we emailed them in advance and they were waiting for us when we arrived. There is a small café bar down the street called " The living rooms" a lad from Sheffield runs it, we had a good breakfast there and would recommend a visit, Craig helped us sort out a taxi for half a day and even negotiated the price for us, we visited the elephants which costs about 900 bhat for two people and then to tiger kingdom which was about the same price to go into the cages for about 10 minutes to have photos taken with the tigers . This is the second time we have visited this hotel and will definetely visit again, Well Done Centara hotel team. The Temple market is worth a visit but they have changed the days to Tuesdays and Fridays but if there is a burial, they cancel the market days. Hope to see you all soon; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Riomar; City: Santa Eulalia del Rio Ibiza Balearic Islands; Review: We stayed at the Riomar for one week, the hotel is immaculate but quite basic, if you want to hire a fridge it's 50 euros a week, a charge for air con, although our room was facing the street it did have a ceiling fan and was quite hot on an afternoon, we bought a cool box from the Eroski supermarket which is a few minutes walk for 17 euros which we took to the beach everyday - we just bought two bags of ice each day. If you want to upgrade to a sea view it's 100 euros per week and a late checkout is 50 euros. The restaurant is quite small and you share your table with another room number but we didn't mind that at all.The food was fine other than one day, tables cleared really fast and the restaurant staff work really hard. Out and about the resort will cost you about 4.50 euros for a decent pint of lager and 2.20 for a water although you can get a pint for 3.20 but the lager wasn't as nice. The sun beds on the beach are 5 euros a day and an umbrella is the same price. The location of the hotel outweighs any of the bad points of the hotel, I would definetly stay again even if it was just for the location.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Presidente; City: Sant Joan de Labritja Ibiza Balearic Islands; Review: We stayed in the Presidente all inclusive, the hotel in general is in need of a refurbish, however it's not the end of the world, all areas are still clean. The food had a good variation and you could always get a table as they were cleaned by the restaurant staff quickly and they work really hard. There was never a queue at the bar for drinks so no problem there. The wi fi in the hotel is really bad and you cannot get a signal. You have to pay if you require a fridge in the room, the late checkout is a bit overpriced at 48.50 euros and the courtesy room is only available 2pm till 7pm with a 20 min slot. Aircon is free in the room but once switched on lasts for 2 hours and you can't switch it off but that didn't bother us at all. You could get a sunbeds anytime you went to the pool area, there is about a quarter new sunbeds but the other three quarters are falling apart. Entertainment most nights in hotel. All staff seemed to be friendly and efficient in their roles. THE RESORT - lovely scenery and beaches but no where to go if you like shops or if you like to go for a walk, the hotel is on a steep incline when you return from the beach, very quiet resort with not much there.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Royal Decameron Cornwall Beach; City: Montego Bay Saint James Parish Jamaica; Review: We stayed at the hotel for 11 nights, the check in was really efficient and speedy after a 5 hour delay, all rooms have a sea view with a king size bed, the rooms are nicely decorated and the bathrooms have a shower only with a hairdryer, the rooms are very spacious with a free safe, iron and ironing board. The pool is one of the cleanest that I have ever seen and is kept immaculate by Petroy Grant who is so passionate about his work, a credit to the hotel. There is one pool bar and a lady called Antoinette works on this bar, you never have to wait long for her to serve you. The entertainment team, Stacey, Rio and Travis work so hard within the complex day and night trying to keep people entertained, some of the bands and singers in the lobby are really good, although on the downside would say it's not a very good place for singers/bands as it's situated just outside the restaurant. There was lots of choice in the Restaurant, tables were always cleaned very quickly and the waitresses brought drinks immediately and no waiting for tables. You never see any rubbish around the complex. The beach is kept clean with sun beds/sun canopies available to use free of charge, the water sports are free other than the motorised ones, we done trips to Dunns river falls and Splash of Reggae which was a good day although you do feel obliged to tip everyone, we also done Dolphin Cove which was an experience of a life time. We were a bit apprehensive in going to Montego Bay after the publicity but there was really nothing to worry about. Well done to all the staff at the Decameron Cornwall Beach a credit to the Company .; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Now Amber Puerto Vallarta; City: Puerto Vallarta; Review: We arrived at the Now Amber March 2019 check in was speedy and the bell boys were on hand to take your case, we were in a room on the same floor as the reception, the rooms are really big with a king size bed, lounger and jacuzzi bath and seperate shower, views of the ocean were great,mini bar stocked with fizzy drinks, corona and water, very impressed. There are a couple of swimming pools and the grounds are kept immaculate, there are plenty of sun beds around the pool and beach. The waiters at the pool are very efficient especially Oscar F who keeps asking if you want a drink even though we didn’t tip him until the end, Americans tend to tip throughout the day, there are lots of Americans and Canadians at this hotel but not lots of English but we bet some great friendly people. The beach is clean with umbrellas and sun beds and vendors selling in the beach who have to stay behind the part sectioned off. The sea was lovely although not many swimming as the TUI rep had gave us a letter when arriving advising us that there had been incidents with crocodiles previously, these ca n be seen in the marina about a 10 min bus ride away resulting in us not going into the sea. Also reports are on Utube There are a few restaurants, Carnival is an international buffet, the staff are excellent the food was great with excellent service, there is also a Mexican, Asian, Italian, Fish all of which were really good and no need to book. You can’t fault the food or service in either of them although I preferred the Italian which is the only dress one, the others are casual. There’s a coffee shop which is open 24 hours which sells panini and cakes which was excellent food and service. All the staff are friendly and a credit to the hotel. There are a few shopping centres outside the hotel which are really lovely and a large one called Liverpool by the Marina, all worth a visit and only one dollar on the bus, which takes you there and back, the locals help you with this, the shopping centre Isla was in walking distance and nice to visit. If you turn right out of the hotel it’s more traditional with shops restaurants and bars, worth a visit too. Now the negatives which could easily be addressed by the hotel but would NOT stop me returning, when we returned home in an evening, my husband would empty his pockets of loose change and although only s couple of dollars, this was taken by the person turning back the bed when not for her but they must assume it’s a tip, hence the reason why we did not tip her so if you have any money put it in the safe or they just pick it up, the towels are taken by the cleaner on a morning and never replaced until late afternoon, these need to work following; Rating: 4.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Clover Round Extra Small Yo-Yo Maker; Brand: Clover; Review: If you've every made a yo-yo the old fashioned way, you know what a job that is. This item is fantastic. Easily makes yo-yo's!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Clover Round Large Yo-Yo Maker; Brand: Clover; Review: If you've every made a yo-yo the old fashioned way, you know what a job that is. This item is fantastic. Easily makes yo-yo's!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bananagrams; Brand: Bananagrams; Review: Love this game. It is fun and quick. The rules can be tweaked to keep it fun and interesting. I highly recommend!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Scrabble Flash; Brand: Hasbro; Review: It's a really fun game. Portable and perfect for 1 person. Great way to pass time while waiting on the kiddos.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Winning Moves Games Pass the Pigs; Brand: Winning Moves Games; Review: Trying to figure out what is what should be done first. Come to an agreement on what each position is worth and then the game is fun!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Rhythm Band Handle Castanet, Multi; Brand: Rhythm Band; Review: This is a fine handle castanet, but nothing to write home about. It's sound is not stellar and it's very plain.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Nino Percussion NINO502 5" Kids Small Natural Wood Claves, Pair (VIDEO); Brand: Nino Percussion; Review: These small claves make a nice sound. They are sturdy and have held up to months of music making in our house.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hohner Kids Percussion Blocks, inch (S2203); Brand: Hohner Kids; Review: This percussion block I both love and hate. It's well made and for the most part makes a wide variety of great sounds. There is, however, one place on the block that makes a sound that is so irritating I want fling it. Hence the title.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics Classic Xylophone; Brand: Fisher-Price; Review: This little xylophone is a classic for a reason. Well made, brightly colored, with good sound. Highly recommend for your musical little one!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hohner Kids Musical Toys S2266 Percussion Blocks; Brand: Hohner Kids; Review: This is a fun instrument! It makes a great rhythmic sound and is well made. It looks beautiful, too. Recommend!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: 8" Rhythm Sticks, Pair; Brand: Westco; Review: These are a good addition to our percussion instruments. They are a good size for small hands and make an interesting sound.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hohner Kids HO378 Puppy Slide Flute/Whistle; Brand: Hohner Kids; Review: This little puppy slide whistle is cute and the sound it makes is fine. It is more a toy than an instrument.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Nerf N-Strike Elite Dart Refill Pack (75 Darts); Brand: Nerf; Review: nice quality and plenty of ammo! fun for all!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Toys_and_Games |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Putco 401265 Chrome Trim Turn Signal Rings; Brand: Putco; Review: It fits great and looks great. It was easy to install in just a few minutes. It makes the front stand out.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Putco 401267 Chrome Miscellaneous Trim Accessory; Brand: Putco; Review: It didn't fit well. The tape was not thick enough to hold it on good. I had to go and buy more tape. I double the tape and it fit better.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Gibson 617303 Stainless Steel Split Rear Dual Exhaust System; Brand: Gibson Performance Exhaust; Review: Great muffler and installation was easy.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Jeep Wrangler Spare Tire JACK BASE BOOSTER, OE Mopar; Brand: Jeep; Review: Great product for a lifted Jeep to use the factory jack.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Synergy Manufacturing 8066 Brake Line Kit; Brand: Synergy Manufacturing; Review: These worked great on my 2012 Jeep Wrangler in which we put a 3 1/2 inch lift on. These worked better than using the drop down bracklets.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Automotive |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse 7000 Mac/Win USB; Brand: Microsoft; Review: I specifically searched for a mouse that had a smooth (non-ratcheting) scroll wheel. This scroll wheel is very smooth and does not bother or irritate my finger. One of the few mice that has such a smooth scroller which is great.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Saicoo USB 3.0 4in1 Digital Memory Card Reader/writer - with a 13cm flexible USB cord and dual SD; Brand: saicoo; Review: Product works well so far.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Carson MiniMight 6x18mm Pocket Monocular with Carabiner Clip (MM-618); Brand: Carson; Review: excellent; see my comparison review between this and the Roxant mini scope.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: AmazonBasics 3-Button USB Wired Mouse (Black); Brand: AmazonBasics; Review: this mouse wheel has a rachet mechanism so your finger feels these; I hate that as this causes more irritation on the mousing finger. Please make a SMOOTH scroll wheel mechanism please.; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Roxant High Definition Ultra-Light Mini Monocular Pocket Scope - carrying case, neck strap cleaning cloth are included; Brand: Roxant; Review: I compared this Roxant monocular to the Carson mini monocular 6x18. This Roxant is 7x18. Both are very good. I used both to look at a car license plate a considerable distance. Both of them are virtually the same in terms of clarity and magnification although again the Roxant is 7x whereas the Carson is 6x; I tried hard to see if there was a noticeable magnification difference that I could tell visually and I really could not see a difference. However I noticed that the eye lens opening (diameter) is slightly larger on the Roxant which gave it a slight edge in more quickly visualizing a target. The Carson is heavier than the Roxant; this has some benefits. I noticed that the image was shaking a little more using the Roxant, mainly because it is lighter, so the heavier Carson helps slightly in this regard. The Carson has a slightly nicer feel in the hand but that is subjective. The Carson monocular is less expensive. The case for the Carson is slightly better quality. My final verdict is somewhat too close to call; I recommend buying both of these, then you can determine your preference yourself. Have one in your car glove compartment and another one in your day bag or every day carry bag. For their small size, both of these are amazingly good at allowing you to read a car license plate or look at people at a pretty good distance. I was a little surprised that the Carson ergonomics and slightly heavier weight seemed to allow for a less shaky image and that is why I call this a tie, despite the larger eye lens opening of the Roxant.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: ROXANT ROX-GS Authentic Grip Scope HD Wide View Monocular; Brand: Roxant; Review: excellent field of view and clarity; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Video Security Surveillance Sticker Decals Sign for Home/Business (4 Piece Set) Self Adhesive Vinyl Stickers for CCTV,; Brand: Signs Authority; Review: Perfect; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: YI Home Camera, Wi-Fi IP Indoor Security System with Motion Detection, Night Vision for Baby / Pet; Brand: YI; Review: Setup went well with my wifi and I got it working okay. However it would not accept the 32 gb microSD card, and this was the card that came with it. I also tried a new different microSD card with the same problem. I had to unfortunately return it even though I wanted to like it. Maybe I just got lemon. I think this company is close to a very good product but they need to make the camera higher quality to avoid these issues. I would gladly pay more money for this camera if the quality was better. These tech companies need to take a page from Apple's playbook in this regard. Produce a high quality product and even if it is higher priced, people will buy it if it works well.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Anker Powerline+ Lightning Cable (3ft) with Pouch, Nylon Braided Charging Cable for iPhone, iPad and More (Gray); Brand: Anker; Review: Works fine; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Wake Up Light Sunrise Alarm Clock with Multiple Nature Sounds Sunrise Sunset Simulation; Brand: monochef; Review: Great case; I like the magnetic slots and I like the fact that my iPad goes to sleep consistently every time I close the cover. I had a previous cheaper case that would not sleep my ipad when I closed the cover. This is more expensive than other covers but definitely worth it.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hyperglide Mouse Skates for Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer 3.0, Intellimouse Optical 1.1a, 1.1SE, 1.1 and Wheel Mouse Optical 1.1a, 1.1; Brand: Hyperglide; Review: These work great; you can put them on a mouse even if it does not have the exact matching size of feet. You can just stick them over the old worn out skid feet. The sliding motion is very smooth and Greatly reduces friction and is similar or even slightly better than the original mouse feet. I tried a different brand of mouse feet and after I put them on, there was more noticeable friction and drag which I did not like. I am planning on buying more of the Hyperglide skates.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Electronics |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Lego Kids' 9001192 Star Wars Darth Vader; Brand: LEGO; Review: I bought these for my son and and he wears them to school. He loves playing with Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi. This is a perfect gift for your boys.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tommy Hilfiger Men's 1791062 Stainless Steel Watch with Blue Silicone Band; Brand: ; Review: I love this watch because I can wear it on casual days or even at the office. I like it because it's stainless. It is combined with a silicone strap. What I don't like most is that the silicone straps sweats on my wrists easily. Nevertheless, it's a good watch.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Dockers Men's Classic-Fit Short; Brand: ; Review: I love the fit. The color looks great and the fabric is not too thick. I can move freely with these shorts!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Timex Men's Expedition Field Chronograph Watch; Brand: Timex; Review: This is a very handsome watch. I love the chronographic movement. Some brands may have prices expensive than this one so I am glad I saw and bought this.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: PUMA Men's Front-Zip Hooded Jacket; Brand: ; Review: I was trying to find a hoodie jacket that has no zip with Puma brand but unluckily wasn't able to find one that suits my taste. This is a temporary substitute until I can find one but this fits me perfectly and is pretty handsome on actual than picture.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: Peachy Clean Silicone Gap Cover (Color: Black, Set of; Brand: Peachy Clean; Review: Only works if your stove and counter are exactly the same height. Otherwise it's just too narrow to make it work.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: EZE Homegoods conical burr mill hand coffee grinder; Brand: EZE Homegoods; Review: Sturdy, not complicated, easy to adjust coarseness...; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Stainless Steel Beverage Dispenser Replacement Spigot; Brand: TWI; Review: Wow what an excellent quality little spigot. We use this instead of those cheap plastic ones that come with the 5gallon water dispensers. Easy installation and very professionally made.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: HUJI Extra Fine Mesh Stainless Steel Non-magnetic Lead Free Tea Infuser Strainer Steeper with Lid (2, Stainless Steel); Brand: Huji; Review: Great little steeper. We buy loose leaf tea and are impressed by this steeper. It works well and the extra large capacity allows you to make a cup or a pot! That's nice because then you don't need multiples of the same gadgets.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lorell Magnets, 12 Sm/12 Md/ 6 Lg, Clear Tub, 30/PK, Assorted (LLR21557); Brand: Lorell; Review: Wow you get a lot of magnets for the price. They are strong enough to hold papers to a metalic surface. They do not fall apart and are easy to handle. Watch out if you have little kids who eat stuff... There are some smaller ones that could be swallowed.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Tinksky Red Latex Metallic Balloons, 12", Pack of 100; Brand: TINKSKY; Review: Excellent quality balloons. These are all red pearly finish. They are opaque. Very durable and can hold a lot of air. The package is an excellent deal. I got a discount on it so I would promise to give feedback for the product but I am honestly loving these balloons for the kids. Don't know what it is about balloons but my kids love them and will play with them for hours!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Acrodo Space Saver Travel Bags for Clothes - 10-pack for Compression Packing Organizer & Storage; Brand: Acrodo; Review: Great idea! I tested these right when they arrived and found them to be very easy to use. It is important not to overfill. We are planning to use them to pack items for trips.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Home-Complete HC-7002 Heat Powered Fan for Wood Burning Stoves or Fireplaces-Quiet and Low Maintenance, Disperses Warm Air Through; Brand: Home-Complete; Review: Very fast shipping. Great price. Light weight. Looking forward to seeing how it compares to our other one.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cafe Break-Resistant Plastic 20oz Restaurant-Quality Beverage Tumblers | Set of 16 in 4 Assorted Colors.; Brand: US Acrylic; Review: Not commercial grade but good price for kid glasses. They are made of cheap plastic and I cannot imagine them running through hundreds of hot washes in a commercial setting. Many of ours are already cracked because of the dishwasher. Maybe I'm being overly critical or I got a bad batch?; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: Home-Complete HC-5100 Large Ice Molds-Silicone Tray Makes 8, 2”x2” Big Cubes-BPA-Free and Flexible-Chill Water, Lemonade, Cocktails, Or Any Beverage,; Brand: Home-Complete; Review: Actually got these to make and freeze baby food. Perfect size and great deal. Thanks!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Home_and_Kitchen |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Wilde Riders (Old Town Country Romance) (Volume 1); Author: Visit Amazon's Savannah Young Page; Review: Really great story loved it cooper is great now on to Tucker than Hunter last but not least Jake the snake ha ha; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Worth The Trouble: (Texas Trouble, #9); Author: Visit Amazon's Becky McGraw Page; Review: I have read 11 of the greatest stories ...Really good reads loved them all..just one more to go..can't wait. Start with # 1 and go straight thru # 12. You will not regret it; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Wicked: The Complete Series; Author: Visit Amazon's Lily Graison Page; Review: All four of these stories were great loved all the characters accept the reverend he was awful a cd had no forgiveness and was not a Christian too opinionated and cruel; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Girl from Montana; Author: Livingston Hill Grace Livingston Hill; Review: A great story loved it loved it loved it a must read for free I would have paid to read it but going thru a rough time. So I really appreciate the free ones right now; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sagebrush; Author: Visit Amazon's William Wayne Dicksion Page; Review: Great reading loved it loved it loved it. A must read book. Now on to "puma son of mountain lion. Who is sages son to Morining star.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Puma Son of Mountain Lion; Author: Visit Amazon's William Wayne Dicksion Page; Review: Absolutely great story loved it loved it loved it. This was book two both were fabulous. Must read books don't miss these two books. Thank you William wayne division...; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Branded for You: Riding Tall; Author: Visit Amazon's Cheyenne McCray Page; Review: # 1 really great now # 2 thru # 8 are all $3.99. How about some package deals...I can't afford 7times that amount I love the story and the style and hope to continue on also it was a lot of work to get the list in order had to do research cause seven came up couldn't find five.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Last Stand; Author: Visit Amazon's Duane Boehm Page; Review: Great story loved it loved it loved it...... a must read....Really different...kind of true to life.... I want to read more of Gideon and Mary please let me know if more is written and how to find it....; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Her Lucky Love (Holiday, Montana); Author: Visit Amazon's Carrie Ann Ryan Page; Review: Great reading loved it loved it loved it. A must read like the first three brothers in the three pack now I'm on to the last brother can't wait ...love these stories ...I'm like a dreamer ..I like the magic; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dreams of Ivory (Holiday, Montana); Author: Visit Amazon's Carrie Ann Ryan Page; Review: The first e brothers stories are all fabulous great reads loved it loved it loved it I'll be watching for Anything more on holiday montana; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Guarding Suzannah: Book 1 in the Serve and Protect Series (Volume 1); Author: Visit Amazon's Norah Wilson Page; Review: Great reading loved it loved it loved it a must read book already read book 2 saving Grace both are good writing and great story a can't put down books two must read books. Susannah first and Grace second..you will not be disappointed ......; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Heart of Steele (Hot Country) (Volume 2); Author: Visit Amazon's Randi Alexander Page; Review: Book 1 Chase and seduction great story. Now book 2 heart of steele was so good loved them both. Now I'm on to book 3 rough rider can't wait; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Cowboy Collection: an inspirational romance cowboy anthology (Heart of Oklahoma); Author: Visit Amazon's Lacy Williams Page; Review: Two brothers and a cousin great guys great stories loved them loved them loved them all a must read three novellas one better than the others; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Lady and the Mountain Doctor (Mountain Dreams Series) (Volume 2); Author: Visit Amazon's Misty M. Beller Page; Review: Great story I loved it a must read book; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Bear On The Bike; Author: Visit Amazon's Amy Star Page; Review: Really great story loved it loved it loved it Just the best written and the characters and everything about this was great; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Rock Him; Author: Visit Amazon's Rachel Cross Page; Review: Great story loved it a must read book; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Save Me; Author: Visit Amazon's Heidi McLaughlin Page; Review: Great loved it loved it loved it a must read book; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Shifted Under Construction; Author: Visit Amazon's C.E. Black Page; Review: Great story line loved the ending; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Simply Bears; Author: Visit Amazon's Amira Rain Page; Review: Great storylines great characters great plots and especially great ending Loved them all...; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Bear By Blood; Author: Visit Amazon's Amy Star Page; Review: A great story love the characters loved the plots a d definitely loved the ending...great job ...I love my bear shifters. Wish I could meet one who wanted a 75 year old who looks 60 or 65 I'm told. Ha. Ha. Maybe some day I'll find a in who could fill the bill. Dream on huh!!!!! Think you; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Heart of Falcon Ridge: The McLendon Family Saga Book 1 (Volume 1); Author: Visit Amazon's D.L. Roan Page; Review: Great I loved it. Loved the characters loved the endings fr sure. Great writting; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Ride: A Bad Boy Romance; Author: Visit Amazon's Roxie Noir Page; Review: Three great stories loved them all. Loved the characters loved the plots and loved the endings thanks for some very good reading; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Renegade Heart's (The Kinnison Legacy) (Volume 3); Author: Visit Amazon's Amanda McIntyre Page; Review: All 3 books were great great characters great plots and great endings. Loved them all are you going to continue with others in this series???; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: All I Want for Christmas (Kinnison Legacy); Author: Visit Amazon's Amanda McIntyre Page; Review: Great characters great plots and great endings l loved all the kinnison stories I. Need. A list of an y other books to do with the kinnisons; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Thief; Author: Visit Amazon's Alexa Riley Page; Review: Thief good reading loved it loved it loved it good characters great ending...the best book in a long time awesome; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Her Polar Twins; Author: Visit Amazon's JJ Jones Page; Review: Great plots great ending loved it loved it loved it this one was rea! ly different. Great story.... !ove the happy endings; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Last Journey (A Gideon Johann Western) (Volume 6); Author: Visit Amazon's Duane Boehm Page; Review: Like the other five gideon Johann books all great reading loved them. Many great characters I guess there is to be another one for video s daughter and Jake I bold; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Spawned By The Bear; Author: Visit Amazon's Amira Rain Page; Review: Great book loved it loved it loved it good reading really great characters and great ending... Really enjoyed this book; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Shifters in the Spring: Sixteen New Paranormal Romances of Secret Babies, Frisky Shifters, and Fertile Surprises; Author: J.K. Harper; Review: Every story was great a must read book loved it loved it loved it. Great story great book I'm characters great endings. Couldn't get enough; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Accidentally Hers (Sterling Canyon); Author: Visit Amazon's Jamie Beck Page; Review: Great characters great ending great story I really enjoyed this book. Loved it loved it loved it... Now on to book #2; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Unexpectedly Hers (Sterling Canyon); Author: Visit Amazon's Jamie Beck Page; Review: Great characters great story great really enjoyed this book. Loved it loved it loved it a good reading experience. Really happy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Shifter: Thorn (Bears of Burden); Author: Visit Amazon's Candace Ayers Page; Review: Great book great ending great characters. Loved it loved it loved it a must read book. Really enjoyed this story; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The BEAR Gene; Author: Visit Amazon's Amira Rain Page; Review: Really enjoyed this book great characters great ending loved it loved it loved it. A must read book. Great job great story; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Shark (Forgotten Files); Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Burton Page; Review: A really great book loved it loved it loved it ...a must read book great characters great ending good Job; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Dollmaker (Forgotten Files); Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Burton Page; Review: Great book great characters great books. Loved, them loved it loved it. A must read book. I am off this read book ##3; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The Hangman (Forgotten Files); Author: Visit Amazon's Mary Burton Page; Review: Great really great characters great ending. Loved it loved them loved this book. A must read. All three books are terrific .loved them all; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: In Farleigh Field: A Novel of World War II; Author: Visit Amazon's Rhys Bowen Page; Review: A great book great characters great ending .it did confuse sometimes jumping around. But itwas a good story .I guess the end was kinda vague.but I think they might get together. Ihoped more info on the others in this story; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Issued to the Bride One Sniper (Brides of Chance Creek) (Volume 3); Author: Visit Amazon's Cora Seton Page; Review: Good as the other two books can't wait for book 4 . Great characters great stories great ending loved it loved it loved it a must read book; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A SEAL's Pledge (SEALs of Chance Creek) (Volume 3); Author: Visit Amazon's Cora Seton Page; Review: a good story a must read series good story great ending great characters...very happy endings loved them loved them loved them...; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A SEAL's Consent (SEALs of Chance Creek) (Volume 4); Author: Visit Amazon's Cora Seton Page; Review: All the seals books 4 so far were great five stars i loved them and am patiently awaitlng # 5; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cocky Soldier: A Military Romace (The Cocker Brothers of Georgia) (Volume 6); Author: Visit Amazon's Faleena Hopkins Page; Review: A great book loved it loved it loved it a must read book. Great characters really great ending great job; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: A Honey Badger X-Mas: A Sexy Christmas Novella (Cocker Brothers) (Volume 7); Author: Visit Amazon's Faleena Hopkins Page; Review: This book was very different than any I ever read.loved it great characters really great ending good job Writing. Loved it; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Crazy for Her (A K2 Team Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Sandra Owens Page; Review: A great story I loved it great chatacters great ending. Loved it loved it loved it. A must read book..; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Falling For Her (A K2 Team Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Sandra Owens Page; Review: I am off to read the rest but I want to thank you for many hours of very enjoyable reading; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Someone Like Her (A K2 Team Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Sandra Owens Page; Review: Have read books1-2-3 of K2 novels I am off to read 4&5 next. Loved them loved them loved them. They are MUST read books; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Saving HER: A Brother's Best Friend Fireman Romance; Author: Visit Amazon's Mia Ford Page; Review: I loved all the stories in this book. Great characters. Great endings. Loved them loved them loved them loved them a must read book; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Only Her (A K2 Team Novel); Author: Visit Amazon's Sandra Owens Page; Review: Great job loved this book as well as#1-2-3-&4. All must read books. Great characters great we best reading ever!!!! More please...; Rating: 3.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with movies/shows as follows:
Title: Dr. Dolittle (1998); Genres: Comedy; Rating: 1.5/5.0
Title: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003); Genres: Adventure, Drama, War; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Midnight Cowboy (1969); Genres: Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Red Violin, The (Violon rouge, Le) (1998); Genres: Drama, Mystery; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Out of Africa (1985); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hulk (2003); Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi; Rating: 1.0/5.0
Title: xXx (2002); Genres: Action, Crime, Thriller; Rating: 1.5/5.0
Title: America's Sweethearts (2001); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 2.0/5.0
Title: Babel (2006); Genres: Drama, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Hours, The (2002); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Little Rascals, The (1994); Genres: Children, Comedy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989); Genres: Animation, Children, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: Once (2006); Genres: Drama, Musical, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Bamba, La (1987); Genres: Drama; Rating: 2.5/5.0
Title: Kinsey (2004); Genres: Drama; Rating: 3.5/5.0
Title: Ten Commandments, The (1956); Genres: Adventure, Drama; Rating: 3.5/5.0
Title: Shawshank Redemption, The (1994); Genres: Crime, Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Godfather, The (1972); Genres: Crime, Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Schindler's List (1993); Genres: Drama, War; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Casablanca (1942); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: City of God (Cidade de Deus) (2002); Genres: Action, Adventure, Crime, Drama, Thriller; Rating: 4.5/5.0
Title: Lives of Others, The (Das leben der Anderen) (2006); Genres: Drama, Romance, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Sunset Blvd. (a.k.a. Sunset Boulevard) (1950); Genres: Drama, Film-Noir, Romance; Rating: 4.5/5.0
Title: Dark Knight, The (2008); Genres: Action, Crime, Drama, IMAX; Rating: 4.5/5.0
Title: 12 Angry Men (1957); Genres: Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Amelie (Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, Le) (2001); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: M (1931); Genres: Crime, Film-Noir, Thriller; Rating: 3.5/5.0
Title: Matrix, The (1999); Genres: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Life Is Beautiful (La Vita è bella) (1997); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance, War; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Silence of the Lambs, The (1991); Genres: Crime, Horror, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: American Beauty (1999); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Inception (2010); Genres: Action, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, IMAX; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Princess Bride, The (1987); Genres: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance; Rating: 3.5/5.0
Title: American History X (1998); Genres: Crime, Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The (2003); Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama, Fantasy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Modern Times (1936); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: On the Waterfront (1954); Genres: Crime, Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pulp Fiction (1994); Genres: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Cinema Paradiso (Nuovo cinema Paradiso) (1989); Genres: Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Grand Illusion (La grande illusion) (1937); Genres: Drama, War; Rating: 3.5/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001); Genres: Adventure, Fantasy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Vertigo (1958); Genres: Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Citizen Kane (1941); Genres: Drama, Mystery; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lawrence of Arabia (1962); Genres: Adventure, Drama, War; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (2002); Genres: Adventure, Fantasy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Taxi Driver (1976); Genres: Crime, Drama, Thriller; Rating: 4.5/5.0
Title: Apocalypse Now (1979); Genres: Action, Drama, War; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Fargo (1996); Genres: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Thriller; Rating: 4.5/5.0
Title: Departed, The (2006); Genres: Crime, Drama, Thriller; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Graduate, The (1967); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Raging Bull (1980); Genres: Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Amadeus (1984); Genres: Drama; Rating: 3.5/5.0
Title: Annie Hall (1977); Genres: Comedy, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Sixth Sense, The (1999); Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery; Rating: 4.5/5.0
Title: Braveheart (1995); Genres: Action, Drama, War; Rating: 4.5/5.0
Title: King's Speech, The (2010); Genres: Drama; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Pan's Labyrinth (Laberinto del fauno, El) (2006); Genres: Drama, Fantasy, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Pianist, The (2002); Genres: Drama, War; Rating: 4.5/5.0
Title: Singin' in the Rain (1952); Genres: Comedy, Musical, Romance; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Some Like It Hot (1959); Genres: Comedy, Crime; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Hotel Rwanda (2004); Genres: Drama, War; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Requiem for a Dream (2000); Genres: Drama; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: WALL·E (2008); Genres: Adventure, Animation, Children, Romance, Sci-Fi; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: 8 1/2 (8½) (1963); Genres: Drama, Fantasy; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Good Will Hunting (1997); Genres: Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch) (2000); Genres: Drama, Thriller; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Donnie Darko (2001); Genres: Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller; Rating: 3.5/5.0
Title: Inglourious Basterds (2009); Genres: Action, Drama, War; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre) (1999); Genres: Drama; Rating: 4.5/5.0
Title: Moonrise Kingdom (2012); Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance; Rating: 4.5/5.0 | movielens |
Given the interaction history of a user with books as follows:
Title: Elizabeth Street; Author: Visit Amazon's Laurie Fabiano Page; Review: This book tells the story of an Italian family in the early 1900s starting with their lives in Italy, their immigration to America through Ellis Island and life in "Little Italy" NY. The story and characters are interesting and I enjoyed the history of this time period. If you are a fan of Adriana Trigiani, you'll enjoy this book.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: LEGO Friends: Brickmaster (Lego Brickmaster); Author: Visit Amazon's DK Publishing Page; Review: This was our granddaughter's first Lego set and she loves it. She was intrigued with building the sets to exactly match the instruction book. She liked the story line and the dolls. A good value.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion; Author: Flagg Fannie; Review: If you enjoyed "Can't Wait to Get to Heaven", you'll enjoy this one too. It's a wonderful blend of southern crazy and funny but still rings true. I fell in love with the main character as she faces a rather life changing discovery. The background story of the WWII "WASP" - Women Airforce Service Pilots - was fascinating. The story of the women pilots who ferried airplanes from factories to military bases was classified and sealed for 35 years by the government. A quick search on google gives all the details of these women's amazing story. This book made me laugh till I cried and I hated for it to end. I would love to have "Sookie" as a friend - life would never be dull!; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Takedown Twenty (Stephanie Plum); Author: Visit Amazon's Janet Evanovich Page; Review: You know what to expect when you read a Stephanie Plum novel and this one is no exception. The whole cast is there and the usual antics ensue when she tries to bring in a suspected murderer who is related to half the burg. But the familiarity is enjoyable. Some fun twists toward the end spice it up and as usual there were parts where I laughed out loud. Evanovich may not exceed expectations, but she always delivers.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: The Lightkeeper's Daughters: A Novel; Author: Visit Amazon's Jean E. Pendziwol Page; Review: Loved this book about a family who lived in a lighthouse in Canada on Lake Superior in the early 1900s. The story alternates between past and present with many unexpected twists and turns. I had to reread the ending to be sure I had it straight. It was very hard to put down. Hope the author writes another one soon!; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_books |
Given the interaction history of a user with hotels as follows:
Title: Holiday Inn Mulhouse; City: Mulhouse Haut Rhin Grand Est; Review: The Location is a bit on the outskirts of mulhouse, in a mixed business district/ housing area. The location is close to the highway so it suits people that are using this hotel as a hub for further tours in the Alsace or southern Germany. The hotel is brand new and very modern designed with design classics as furniture highlights in the lobby. Being an Intercontinental Royal Ambassador we received a free upgrade to an executive level room. The room was for an executve level rather small but had a king size bed, big flatscreen and nice bathroom with shower and bathtub separated. Noise from the road was minimal and cleanliness of the room was excellent. Breakfast was very good except the srcambled eggs, they tasted bitter.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Mercure Hotel Wuerzburg am Mainufer; City: Wurzburg Lower Franconia Franconia Bavaria; Review: The hotel was an average experience. it was clean but not perfect. It was modern but not new. Service was ok. This hotel is ok for a one night stay or for a business trip. If you want to do sightseeing i would rather take a hotel closer to the city center.; Rating: 3.0/5.0
Title: The Ritz Carlton Wolfsburg; City: Wolfsburg Lower Saxony; Review: The hotel is located in Wolfsburg, City of the HQ of Volkswagen AG. The Hotel is in the volkswagen group "theme park" Autostadt. The Hotel is less then 10yrs old and is very well maintained. The Spa is located in a small harbour and has an outdoor swimming pool. Food was excellent even though we checked only " The GrilL" and not the 3 Michelin Star restaurant Aqua. Overall the Hotel appears to be rather a business hotel, but relaxation in the Spa and strolling through the Autostadt makes it appear like a resort, too.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Empire Riverside Hotel; City: Hamburg; Review: If you book a room in this hotel make sure you choose river view category. The views are great and it is not much more. The rooms have basically a 270° view. The beds are not so good, the matresses were too soft and only loosely fitted to the bed and easily slide of the bed. Air conditioning/ heater are very noisy. Also if you travel with family be aware that the hotel is very close to the red light district!; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Kempinski Hotel Beijing Lufthansa Center; City: Beijing; Review: I have stayed multiple times in this hotel within the last two years. It is conveniently located so that one can reach the airport easily and access the city as well. I enjoyed the restaurants in the hotel and really like the breakfast buffet. The rooms have been updated and are very clean as is the whole hotel compared to other locations I have been in Beijing.; Rating: 4.0/5.0
Title: Althoff Hotel Am Schlossgarten; City: Stuttgart Baden Wurttemberg; Review: At first glance not such a nice place. But room, view, food and service made this a true 5 star experience. It is not so easy to find a hotel with a direct park view in Stuttgart. Rooms are very modern and quiet. The breakfast buffet is excellent as is the service.; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Shangri La Hotel Ningbo; City: Ningbo Zhejiang; Review: I was really impressed by the outstanding service of the front desk after I forgot my credit card in the atm. The front desk manager helped a lot and made sure everything went well. The standard rooms are quite large and modern. Cleanliness was excellent. The location is very nice. Rooms with river view are preferable.; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | hotelrec |
Given the interaction history of a user with products as follows:
Title: LEE Men's Stain Resistant Relaxed Fit Flat Front Pant; Brand: ; Review: Great; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: LEE Men's Stain Resistant Relaxed Fit Flat Front Pant; Brand: ; Review: Great; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Skechers for Work Men's Soother Work Shoe; Brand: ; Review: Great; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Skechers Men's Relaxed Fit Memory Foam Superior Gains Slip-On; Brand: ; Review: Great; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Knocker Mens Plain Dress Socks Black 12 Pairs (Many Colors Available); Brand: Knocker; Review: Great; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Skechers for Work Men's Mountrek Slip Resistant Work Shoe; Brand: ; Review: Great; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dockers Men's Society Slip-Resistant Slip-On; Brand: ; Review: Great items; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Dockers Men's Set of Two Leather Belts; Brand: ; Review: Great items; Rating: 5.0/5.0
Title: Yougao Men's Vintage Pu-Leather Moto Coats Jacket; Brand: Yougao; Review: Great Jacket; Rating: 5.0/5.0 | amazon_Clothing_Shoes_and_Jewelry |
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