John C Summitt
Dennis Lehane can be a good writer when he wants to. There are flashes of his ability in this collection but too often he careens from cliche to self conscious attempts at being literary. The stories aren't bad but the play is frankly embarrassing to read at times. Maybe David Mamet can successfully have characters recite soliloquies that no one in real life would ever say but not Dennis Lehane. Dennis, go back and watch The Wire–Omar never talked like that.
None of he stories in this collection are bad and a handful are really good but for the most part I found them to be just competent. There is a sameness to the stories that is disconcerting considering the page-turning quality of his novels. Worth a read if you like Gibson.
A solid collection of stories by an author who is adept at creating a wide variety of characters and finding those moments of revelation in their lives.
This is the book Dennis Lehane wished he wrote when he wrote Coronado. The format is reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (it even takes place in Ohio). It is a series of loosely interrelated stories that collectively create a portrait of the community of Knockemstiff. It is a collection of sad sacks and losers living dead end lives in a town where the only thing that is happening is entropy. Bruce Springsteen once wrote a song in which the characters suffer all sorts of misfortunes,yet “at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.” The people of Knockemstiff rarely find those reasons, yet they keep on living and there's something compelling in that.
Howard Campbell agrees to act as a spy for his country and in the process becomes a better Nazi than the real ones. Darkly humorous with a parade of offbeat characters that cause Campbell to reflect on the moral consequences of his life as a spy.
A story of a man's hunt for a serial killer in the Soviet Union around the time of Stalin's death. Aspects of the plot are somewhat contrived and implausible but not fatally so and the depiction of how Soviet culture impacts the search for the killer is fascinating.
This book does a great job of demonstrating how the media has ignored the mountain of evidence that puts the lie to the official version of 9/11, and in particular, shows Noam Chomsky's dishonest and systemic (no pun intended) denial of conspiracy while at the same time claiming he knows nothing about the evidence. According to Chomsky the laws of physics have been suspended at Dealey Plaza and the World Trade Center.
This book, a collection of short stories, is written in the same style as Diaz' novel, The Short Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao. While the novel provides the scope for this voice to flower and bloom in spectacular fashion, the stories tend to sound flat and forced as one peters out and another tentatively fades in. To torture the flower analogy the stories are like seeds that could have nurtured into spectacular blooms but once planted, ignored while the next is prepared. Lots of potential here, unrealized.
To read this book is to fall down the rabbit hole into some smoky circle of Hell with Hemingway and Orwell and occasionally Kerouac as your tour guides. War is about death and Dispatches captures the insanity and psychic rot that permeates the landscape of war–particularly, it would seem–this war, and also the fascination and even addiction to it. If one has ever read Hemingway's Soldier's Home and wondered at the disconnect between Krebs and his family and normal life, Dispatches describes what was in Krebs' head. Highly recommended.
Bernard Cornwell is a guy you'd want with you on the desert island; he's the consummate story teller and he's prolific, approaching Steven King proportions. This is the first book of the Richard Sharpe saga. He's considering deserting from the army as they prepare to fight the Tippoo of Mysore. He has a run-in with a certain Sgt. Obadiah Hakeswill, who is one of the great villains for which he is punished. He is spared the the full punishment so that he can undertake a dangerous mission that entails penetrating the Tippoo's capital city. The story is riveting and the setting historically accurateas are the details of the soldier's daily life, the buying of rank for the officers, the manner in which combat was conducted, etc. The epilogue discusses the context in which the battle was fought and is eerily reminiscent of current events. The British, wanting to extend and solidify their empire, found a flimsy excuse to wage an unprovoked war on the Tippoo. Draw your own parallels.
The second book in the Sharpe saga. Cornwell would be a desert island author except for the fact that if you were allowed 5 or even 10 books to take with you there's about a hundred books in the series. In addition to telling a good yarn, Cornwell is steadfast about weaving the plot into actual historical events as seamlessly as possible without changing the facts. And Obadiah Hakeswill is one of the great villains. Another good story from a consistently good author.
Lee Child is the Mariah Carey of hack writers; in the course of his story he hits every cliche in the Bad Writing Inflictionary. I suspect the manner in which some of the characters meet their grisly end faithfully depicts the way he creates his characters and plot with equally gruesome results. If you like your bodies stacked like cordwood, stick with James Ellroy.
Cayce Pollard has an acute sensitivity to logos and advertising. She uses her sensitivity as a consultant who can determine the effectiveness of corporate logos and advertising. After a business meeting she is hired by her contractor to seek out the origin of something called the footage, a mysterious film that is being released piecemeal in random sequence on the internet. Case, who has been avidly following the footage and the attendant speculation of its origins and meaning agrees to the task.
When I read William Gibson I sometimes feel like I've been dropped in a dark alley and I'm following Gibson's footsteps with the hope that if I catch up I can grasp all that is going on in the story. I say this not as a criticism because Gibson creates such a vivid world that the reader (or at least this reader) intuits the story from context. Definitely worth a read.
David Benioff's City Of Thieves is proof that a familiar plot, if told well, can be transformed into a compelling story. Two characters, one being the narrator, are thrown together are given a herculean task to perform in order to escape death. Without giving away the plot I had a general sense of what would happen to the characters early on in the story but read on because the author did an excellent job of creating characters worth caring about. It's a story that's been told a million times but the author has done it exceptionally well.
Solidly written examination of the rise of Blackwater literally from the primordial right-wing ooze of North Carolina to its heights as the praetorian guard of the Neocons in in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans.
Although wrapping itself in the flag of patriotism and basking in the light of god, Blackwater's true purpose was profiteering, in particular milking the tit of the illegal wars of the Bush administration. Between greed and incompetence Blackwater managed to managed to get their own people killed on more than one occasion, most notably in Fallujah. Nonetheless Blackwater fit perfectly in the Neocon plan to privatize the military to maximize profit and minimize accountability.
While not exactly a potboiler, the book is organized clearly and concisely and written in a straightforward manner that reads quickly.
My interest was piqued after I heard an interview with the author on the radio. The story of a cop who is what we would call Internal Affairs intrigued me.
Malcolm Fox is an inspector in Complaints and Conduct, the Scottish version of IAD. After finishing one assignment he is given another, investigating a cop who is involved in child porn. At the same time the abusive boyfriend of Fox's sister turns up dead. Chaos ensues, all is not what it seems.
The story is satisfying but it is the author's deft depiction of the characters that really shines. In economical prose the author breathes life into his characters and they ring true. Based on this serendipitous discovery I suspect there will be more Ian Rankin books in my future.
A penetrating look at poverty in Paris and London based on the author's experiences. Although the subject matter is bleak the book is not; in fact at times it is hilarious. Orwell's prodigious powers of observation and analysis are matched by his ability to put thoughts to the page in a manner that flows effortlessly for the reader. A good primer for imminent oil depletion and global systemic economic collapse.
As the title says, this is the Gospel according to Biff who is Jesus' best friend and has his back. The book covers the lost years of Jesus in which Joshua and Biff set out to the east in search of the three wise men so that Joshua can learn the knowledge and wisdom he needs in order to be the messiah.
The book is often hilarious but there are lulls in the laughs, a problem that might have been solved if the book was shorter. Also I got the impression that the author pulled his punches for fear of offending someone. Bill Hicks never puled his punches and he was FUNNY. A worthy effort, worth another half star but not enough to round upwards.
When I was young my grandmother used to come visit and I played Scrabble with her. She'd sit at the table for what seemed like hours, lips pressed together, arranging and rearranging her tiles. Finally with an expression of triumph she would lay down most of her rack of tiles to form some absolutely beautiful word that netted her, oh, ten points or so. Dan Simmons finally gets around to letting us in on the mystery surrounding Hyperion but too often he is writing beautiful passages instead of winning the game. This triumph of style–and he is good–over substance leaves the characters falling short of qualities that allow reading empathy and identification and make the aesthetic digressions tedious to bear. The material in this book and the preceding Hyperion would have made one fine shorter novel; as it is it's like a beautiful Christmas tree with too much glitter and lights.
This book is a well-written account of the events and circumstances that are likely at the heart of the JFK assassination. Shocked at how closely the world had come to the disaster of nuclear annihilation during the Cuban missile crisis Kennedy escalated his efforts to reach out to both the Soviet Union and Cuba with the hopes of ratcheting down the cold war tensions and ultimately moving toward world peace. This put him increasingly at odds with his own government, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. The author makes a strong case that Oswald went to the Soviet Union in the employ of the CIA and demonstrates how he was set up along with the Soviet Union and Cuba to take the fall for the assassination. The author follows the two narratives to their ultimate collision course, along the way discussing the case of Thomas Arthur Vallee, a troubled Marine who was going to shoot Kennedy in Chicago until the plot was exposed by a whistle blower named Lee, and the legion of Oswalds that were running around Dallas shooting up the rifle ranges, leaving the TSBD alternately by bus or by car, being escorted out both the front and rear of the Texas Theater, and my favorite; driving in to work with different people on different days while in possession of curtain rods. One set was likely German and the other Italian. Check it out; it reads like a thriller so even the coincidence theorists will be entertained.
A worthy sequel to the author's previous book, Child 44. He is adept at creating a believable world for his characters to act, in this case postwar Soviet Union. At times the plot strains credulity–lots o' stuff happens to Leo over the course of two books–but the pace is quick (the cattle are hustling to Abilene).
A plodding tale of a plodding man whose wife, who looks like Granny Clampett and has the personality of Dick Cheney, drives Frome into the arms of his wife's cousin Mattie Silver. Well, not quite because Ethan Frome doesn't have the wherewithal to pull the trigger and go to the arms of Mattie Silver. In the end he and Mattie try to pull a Thelma and Louise that fails miserably, ultimately leaving Ethan, Mattie, and his wife Zina conjoined in a menage a trois from Dante's Inferno, reminiscent of the two Lazeruses (Lazeri?) in the original Star Trek. On the plus side, the book is nowhere near as long as Moby Dick.
In this book Orwell recounts his time fighting for the POUM in Spain and observes the Byzantine nature of leftist politics in Spain and its intersection with the culture. He deftly handles the twists and turns of the myriad alphabetized organizations with a style so clear and vivid that you almost want to be there in spite of the dirt and the lice and the stray bullets.
The night was dark and stormy. The revelers sat around the campfire when one said, “Bill, tell us a story.” So Bill said, “The night was dark and stormy...”
Dan Simmons is a talented writer and somewhere in this book is a good story but the Canterbury Tales motif is contrived and leaves the reader feeling he is taking one step forward and two steps back. There are compelling passages such as the wickedly funny section where Martin Silenus discusses the nine word vocabulary to which he is reduced after suffering a stroke but these moments are islands floating in the horse latitude of tedium. Beyond that, there is a sense of style transcending substance. The reader is mesmerized by the verbal agility of the writer rather than riveted by the story. Still and all it's worth a read.
In this book Randy Shilts tells the story of Harvey Milk and his path from a closeted gay man with conservative values (he supported Goldwater) who stumbled through a good part of his life without direction until he moved to San Francisco and found his calling in advocating for gay equality and striving toward his vision of a a time and place where gays and straights could coexist peacefully. Though most widely known for his gay advocacy he was a populist who, among other things, pushed for district elections of supervisors in an effort to wrest political power away from the downtown business interests and put it back in the hands of the city neighborhoods.
As a grassroots populist Harvey Milk's improbable rise in city politics put him at odds with the moderate gay politicos who preferred working within the system and ultimately the cronyism of the existing political machine. Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, once the gay movement gained some power and achieved a measure of respectability the movers and shakers absorbed the methods of traditional politics and became insiders themselves.
Many familiar names have cameo appearances: Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown, Jimmy Carter, Anita Bryant, Art Agnos, Jim Jones, and of course, Dan White, the man who shot Mayor George Moscone and Milk. There are a number of possible motives that may have led Dan White to kill Moscone and Milk; the most unlikely of which was his alleged manic depression exacerbated by Twinkies and Coke.
The book is a well written fascinating account of Milk, the trajectory of his life, and the events in San Francisco during his short time there.