Review
”Rebel Island,”By Rick Riordan
Bantam Books ($6.99 paperback, 330 pages)
It’s just a measure of how well endowed the mystery bookshelves are at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library that I am just now getting to read anything by Rick Riordan, a New York Times bestselling mystery author from my old stomping grounds of South Texas.
When the new library opened up, I reveled in the old books — S.S. Van Dine, Brett Halliday — that used to be hidden away in the stacks.
That’s my excuse for not being up on the latest mystery bestsellers, and I’m sticking to it.
But I’ve clearly missed some fun, because this latest Riordan opus has enough twists and action and interesting characters to definitely make me want to go back and peruse his previous work in the Tres Navarre private eye series.
In this case, Tres Navarre has officially given up his private investigation business to work as a full-time faculty member at the University of Texas at San Antonio (whence my nephew graduated — he’s now a Texas State Trooper). And Tres has just married his so-pregnant-she’s-ready-to-pop lawyer girlfriend, Maia, who happens to be a Chinese American.
50 States of Literature, Adventure, Bestsellers, Mystery, New in Paperback, Review, Suspense
When “Six Feet Under” was alive and well on HBO, it was “my show,” as in, “I can’t leave my television on Sunday night because my show is on.” Once, during a random online search to find out what a bird was doing on Brenda and Nate’s wedding cake (Season 5, Episode 1), I found Television Without Pity, where M. Giant was the casually cruel voice behind SFU recaps. Before M. Giant, I think I had, pathetically, started to suspend disbelief in the characters beyond the hours I was watching the show, and to forget that SFU was just a black comedy about the social psychoses of America, circa 2000. TWP was a bracing slap in the face.
So I was happy to run across “A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know From Watching Television” (Berkley Books, $14), by Jeff Alexander, aka M. Giant.
The chapter topics give you a good idea of how the book is organized , starting with “Saved by the Bell: School on TV” and “I’ll Be There for You: Friends on TV,” and progressing eventually to “Moving On Up: Unreal Estate” and “To Boldly Go: Outer Space and Science Fiction.” If you’re unfamiliar with Alexander’s work (he also has a Web site, velcrometer.blogspot), the introduction gives you a pretty good idea of Alexander’s tone: “Remember what your parents used to say to you about watching too much television? The exact words? Of course you don’t, because they weren’t spoken by famous actors in a funny way.” Read the rest of this entry »
“Blood Trail,”By C.J. Box
2008, G.P. Putnam’s Sons
$24.95 hardbound, 301 pages
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Here’s a book that probes some of the less-noticed wounds of America’s culture wars with all the delicacy of a 105 mm howitzer.
It’s part of a series of eight detective/mystery novels about a Wyoming game warden, Joe Pickett, who works directly for the governor — a Democrat, oddly enough — named Spencer Rulon.
In this story, someone’s killing hunters and mutilating their bodies in particularly nasty ways. With a state economy that depends so much on the hunting industry, Rulon gets Pickett involved in the hunt for the hunter who hunts hunters.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
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“One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story,”
By Janis Karpinski with Steven Strasser (2005, Hyperion, $24.95 hardback, 242 pages.)
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If you’ve ever wanted to know what it would be like to achieve all you ever hoped, then to have it all ruined before your eyes, this book can fill you in.
Janis Karpinski is the ill-starred (ahem) general of the 800th Military Police Brigade, of whom a few soldiers apparently cooperated in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
This past Thursday, Karpinski spoke of these and other events at an event arranged by the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center.
Leading up to the Abu Ghraib scandal, she had a remarkable military career, of which her book supplies a comprehensive precis.
In 1960, during the Eisenhower administration, at the age of seven, she decided she wanted to be a soldier — after finding World War II mementos of her father in the attic of her Rahway, N.J., home.
“I put the the had on my little blonde head and stood up straight, feeling as tall and proud as my father had in the flush of victory after a great European war,” she writes. (P. 1)
Little did that child know how hard it would be for her to achieve anything like the military accomplishments she envisioned.
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The writer spends his life in a solitary landscape of desk, typewriter and window through which he gazes out at the world to recharge his creative battery.
At least he used to.
Now, it’s probably more Mac, Starbucks and iPod. Nevertheless, writing is a solo and, mostly, lonesome pursuit. Paul Auster pours this feeling of seclusion out onto paper and into novels populated by rich, though solitary, characters.
In his latest, “Man in the Dark,” (Henry Holt and Co., $23) 72-year-old August Brill has recently moved in with his daughter and granddaughter after an accident that has left him somewhat incapacitated.
The house is one of sadness and loss, his granddaughter Katya having lost her boyfriend less than a year earlier to a horrific crime, the details of which we get in only the last few pages of the book.
Brill and Katya spend hours upon hours each day watching and discussing movies to move the time along and redirect their emotions. Brill spends his sleepless nights lying awake in the dark, creating stories to forget Katya’s pain and the pain he feels at having lost his own wife not long before.
It is one of these stories (which takes up a majority of the novel) that we meet Owen Brick, a man who travels into an alternate world, an America where there is no 9/11 tragedy, yet one where a civil war has broken out after the chaos of the 2000 presidential election. Brick is sent to this alternate America to take his instructions; to be sent back to his own world to kill the man who has developed the story of the civil war in his mind, to kill a man he’s never met, a man named August Brill. The intricate tale touches reality, the author asking for death from his subconscious.
“Man in the Dark” is reminiscent of Auster’s previous book, “Travels in the Scriptorium.” In fact, it almost seems as if the latter was a writing exercise for the former, that was accidentally published.
Both are good reads, though not breezy beach reading. They allow us into the artist’s mind to wrap ourselves in loneliness and despair, and to learn where fiction might find its origin. Reading Paul Auster can be a bit like watching sausage made, though in this instance we can’t help but devour the ingredients as we await the final product.
“The Black Hand: A Barker & Llewelyn Novel,” by Will Thomas
(2008, Touchstone, 289 pages, $14, paperback)
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At last, I find a new story and cast of characters after my own heart — albeit with a Sicilian dagger.
This is the fifth in a series of historical mysteries set in England in the 1880s. The heroes, Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn, would have been contemporaries of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson (no relation to yours truly, although that happens to be the same name as my father, and my grandfather was a doctor — of veterinary medicine). Also, Barker and Llewelyn bear a surface resemblance to the venerable duo.
But while Holmes shows his remarkable mental acumen (e.g., concluding people’s activities from pet hair on a pant-leg) regularly throughout a story, Barker, who plays the lead sleuth in this series, spends much of this story, at least, teaching his apprentice, Llewelyn, about the sociology of London’s underworld.
And that’s just fine with me.
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Adventure, Historical Fiction, Mystery, New in Paperback, Review, Suspense, Uncategorized
“Spook Country,” by William Gibson(2007, Penguin Group, 373 pages, $15, paperback)
I confess that I’m one of many people who have not read William Gibson’s first novel, “Neuromancer,” so I had little more than the cover art and blurbs on which to build preconceptions when I sat down to read this book.
“Neuromancer,” according to Wikipedia, is one of the seminal works of cyberpunk science fiction, some of which I’ve enjoyed very much.
But “Spook Country” is not science fiction. In fact, it more resembles highly tech-oriented noir.
The book begins with a former rock musician — still famous in the story — named Hollis Henry, who is trying to get started as a journalist. In her first big assignment, she visits the scene of River Phoenix’s death with an artist who asks her to don a visor that looks like a welder’s face-guard. She then sees a three-dimensional virtual-reality recreation of Phoenix’s death scene.
This brings us into the concept of linking virtual reality with global positioning systems, creating the possibility of somehow inhabiting a world that is not at all what it seems.
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“The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World,” by John Perkins(2007, Penguin Group, 365 pages, paperback, $15)
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If you had a hard time relating to Michelle Obama’s modesty with regard to American accomplishments, this book may surprise you.
In this tome, you get a crystal-clear peek at how rapaciously U.S. corporations have exploited and abused peoples and resources on every continent of the planet — except Antarctica and Europe.
Here’s a story told to Perkins by someone claiming to be “jackal” (a CIA-sponsored mercenary) named “Brett”:
“I walked into El Presidente’s office two days after he was elected and congratulated him.
“He sat behind that big desk grinning at me like the Cheshire Cat.
“I stuck my left hand into my jacket pocket and said, ‘Mr. President, in here I got a couple hundred million dollars for you and your family, if you play the game — you know, be kind to my friends who run the oil companies, treat your Uncle Sam good.’ Then I stepped closer, reached my right hand into the other pocket, bent down next to his face, and whispered,’ In here I got a gun and a bullet with your name on it — in case you decide to keep your campaign promises.’
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Walter Kirn certainly got up on the curmudgeon’s side of the bed the day he wrote his review of James Wood’s new book, “How Fiction Works” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24). The cover of The New York Times Book Review is generally reserved for raves, but on August 17, Kirn came out swinging. His disdain barely conceals his rage. Que pasa?
This is the first review I have read in which the reviewer mocks the author of the book about literature and writing for being too well-read. Wood, a well-known literary critic, essayist and reviewer who writes for The New Yorker, mentions at the beginning of “How Fiction Works” that the books he cites (94 novels and a handful of short stories) are from his own library; he didn’t go to a public or university library or order anything from Amazon, a fact that seems to inflame Kirn’s sarcasm. “Wood’s study must be vast, with well-stocked shelves, judging by [Wood’s] inarguable erudition,” he writes, making erudition sound like a particularly loathsome STD. Wood, says Kirn. “drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed.” How one could compose a book about how fiction (or anything else) works without using quotations and references defeats my imagination, and I would certainly hope that the author of such a book knew what he was talking about and possessed the background in reading and thinking — call it erudition — to write convincingly.
Having “the whole Western canon at his disposal, apparently” and conveying a “tone of genteel condescension,” the “vicarish” and “sequestered,” Wood, who possesses “a donnish, finicky persona,” “flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic.” Ouch, talk about condescension! This is getting really personal. I Googled as hard as I could but I couldn’t find evidence that Wood, known for damaging reviews, attacked one of Kirn’s novels or dissed him personally. No, Kirn just freaking despises Wood and his book, and he makes no distinction between them.
Among Wood’s sins is that his author-heroes are “semimonastic introverts” like Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, writers who refuse to “let themselves be distracted and overwhelmed by the roar of the streets, the voices of the crowd,” in the way that one of Kirn’s heroes, David Foster Wallace, does (according to Kirn). I have to say that, having struggled through David Foster Wallace’s turgid prose and sophomoric satire, I think his writing bears as much resemblance to the authentic roar of the streets and voices of the crowds as Dr. Scholls does to Dr. Faustus. And what nonsense this is when Wood happily praises the exuberance of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, the sneaky wit of Jane Austen and Muriel Spark.
”Indiana Jones and the White Witch,” by Martin CaidinBantam Books (paperback, 1994, 329 pages).Those of you who saw my review (which you can see HERE) of a previous installment in this series of adventures based on the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg movies may remember that my standards aren’t very high.
I don’t ask for much.
Just don’t bore me.
This one failed on that score.
Btw, these paperbacks were reissued this spring to capitalize on the latest movie.
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