Texas Book Lover

The Innocent

2012-02-28T21:43:00.000-06:00

A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel
By Taylor Stevens
Crown Publishers, 331 pgs
978-0-307-71712-2
Rating: 2.5

Vanessa Michael Munroe is back in the follow-up to her debut performance in The Informationist, which I reviewed in December of last year. The mission she is hired for this time is to rescue a child from a cult and return her to her parents. Michael, as she is known, travels to Argentina, last known location for the girl, and sets about recon. She is joined by Miles Bradford, also returning from the first book, who's main function is electronics and, infrequently, bodyguard. Most of the time he's the second string. Munroe is also saddled with a small collection of former cult members, each with a different agenda,who's main function seems to be offering the potential for mission catastrophe.

The Innocent begins promisingly. Munroe is a unique heroine, no one else like her in past or current thriller fiction. Taylor Stevens allows her to be larger than life and I am willing to suspend disbelief for the sheer fun of experiencing a woman in charge, physically and mentally. Michael is a chameleon who would be an asset to any intelligence and/or mercenary agency in the world, except the body count tends to climb when she's around. The story idea is a good one. The author was born into the Children of God and presumably knows whereof she speaks; the descriptions of the cult and it's members and practices are detailed and so strange. So to sum up: 1) great story idea, 2) great main character and 3) details to sink your teeth into, and 4) there's a sub-issue that works well throughout the book involving Munroe's violent nightmares and the dangers represented by her sleepwalking, actually more of a fugue state.

So what is wrong with this book?

1) It's slow. Real action doesn't begin until page 261. This is unacceptable. 2) Munroe is a fabulous character who has been allowed no growth, acceptable I suppose, but tedious. In addition, there are two incidents that make no sense: 1) at the beginning of the book Munroe kills a man in New York during one of the previously mentioned fugue states and this has no apparent effect on anything, and 2) not long after arriving in Argentina she rescues two girls from a couple of men who apparently were buying them but this is never alluded to during the entire remainder of the book. It's as if it happens in a vacuum. Disorienting. Finally, The Innocent could have benefited from better editing. The writing frequently comes across as clunky, repetitive and is filled with odd word choices.

When I reviewed The Informationist, Taylor Stevens' debut, I was impressed. I very much enjoyed that book and gave it a rating of 4.5. Maybe it's the classic sophomore syndrome, suffering in comparison to a widely praised debut. Maybe the debut was a fluke, too early to tell. So while I cannot recommend The Innocent, the author is currently at work on a third book in the series and I am prepared to keep an open mind and read the third installment before making a decision.

To visit the author: www.taylorstevensbooks.com

To visit the publisher: www.crownpublishing.com

2012-02-15T22:51:00.000-06:00

Welcome!

I want to let y'all know that I continue to improve Texas Book Lover. I've added some features and functionality, such as:

Grammar Girl, for all your emergency grammar needs,
A list of Texas university literary reviews (this is where you'll find the brand new stuff that may find it's way into a novel or anthology in the future),
Synopses of my most popular reviews (a shortcut to the stuff viewers liked best,) and
A list of literacy charities, domestic and international, in need of your help. Give until it hurts!

So please take a look at the new stuff, I know you'll find something to appreciate. If you're not a follower of this blog please sign up. There are no emails etc. to annoy you, just support for my blog. Muchas gracias!

This Is Whom You Fear

2012-02-03T23:12:00.001-06:00

First a note: Doug Baum is a friend I went to high school with in Colorado City. I admire him for the ambassador he is to the world. Please consider experience and truth. For more information please see the Texas Camel Corps web site at www.texascamelcorps.com.

This Is Whom You Fear

by Doug Baum on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 9:14am

This Is Whom You Fear

I’ve recently returned home from a three-week trip to Egypt and Jordan, where I work as a tour guide. One day, while shopping in the historic bazaar, Khan El Khalili, a BBC-TV reporter approached me and asked if I would mind being interviewed. The topic would be how I felt as an American visiting Egypt one year after their revolution.

With complete honesty I answered the questions, mentioning I’ve been coming to the region for eleven years, was hopeful for the Egyptian people and had been treated with nothing but warmth and hospitality on each and every trip. As the camera and microphone were set up, a crowd gathered around, listening intently, silent in stark contrast to the nearby Cairo traffic. The thirty-odd folks, mostly gentlemen, were hanging on every word I said and, short of lifting me on shoulders and dumping a cooler of Gatorade on me, I felt like the winning coach of the Super Bowl. It was evident those standing by were pleased with my answers. “Thank you so much for your kind words about our country,” one said. “We’re so afraid people in America only see bad things about Egypt on TV,” another echoed.

It’s not uncommon, as I prepare for a trip to the Middle East, to hear warnings from folks in the US to be safe, to watch out. Be careful. “You know they all hate us.” Now, for those of you who don’t get your information about the Middle East from TV news and Hollywood film, this FB Note is not for you. Bigots, the prejudiced and the ignorant, only, need read further.

Hatred, I believe, is rooted in fear. Humans fear what we don’t understand. Those among us who fear the Middle East inappropriately consider the region a homogenous whole, further mistaking the Islamic world as Arab. Indeed, the majority of Muslims live in Indonesia and Malaysia, non-Arab lands.

In his book Out Of Arabia, author Warwick Ball writes:

“At any time from about 1990 onwards, a visit to virtually anywhere in the Middle East would elicit the almost invariable response of an odd look and the remark, ‘But isn’t it dangerous out there!’ Never mind if one was just visiting, say, Turkey when there was a war in Iraq, or visiting Iran when there was a flare-up in, say, Lebanon, the response would be the same. Tourism in the Middle East certainly suffered accordingly. But a skiing holiday, for example, in Austria or a seaside holiday in Greece during the time of the war in former Yugoslavia would never have elicited the same response: few if any cancelled holidays to Austria or Greece or other countries in the vicinity of war-torn Yugoslavia. In practice, a visit to, say, Iran was just as safe as (or probably safer than) a visit to Greece. In fact it is true to say that one generally experiences more overt warmth, friendliness, genuine hospitality – and less ‘danger’- in the Islamic world than almost anywhere else, media impressions notwithstanding. The difference, however, is purely one of prejudice: Muslim Middle Eastern countries are perceived as self-evidently ‘dangerous’, European countries are not, regardless of whether there is or is not a war.”

Maybe my own simple analogy, based purely on geography, can help. When the Gulf Coast was hit by Hurricane Katrina it was bad. For people along the Gulf Coast. Folks in Des Moines, Iowa kept on shucking corn.

(Psst! Hey! I see you. Yeah, you there, the non-bigot. The open-minded one. Oh well. I probably lost the bigots at “homogenous” anyway. Read on.)

This Is Whom You Fear.

The Egyptian man on the crowded Cairo subway who offered me his seat. And didn’t try to cut my throat and put the video on the internet.

Dr. Khalid Bahrawy, animal physiologist, who was taken care of every afternoon, when just a schoolboy, by a Christian family. Khalid now lives in an apartment building next to Alexandria’s largest Catholic church with Jewish neighbors on the top floor. I’ve spent a number of days with Dr. Khalid in Egypt and in London where we were both speakers at an International Camel Conference. He’s never tried to cut my throat and put the video on the internet.

Mohammed, a twenty-five year old souvenir salesman outside Petra, in Jordan, who, upon learning my name (Douglas), asked, “Like Douglas MacArthur?” TWENTY-FIVE! Mohammed associated my traveling companion, Jimmy, with Jimmy Carter then announced he knew all the American presidents and could name them in order. Jimmy and I stopped him less than a quarter of the way through his recitation, afraid he’d realize we couldn’t disprove him! Mohammed seemed to have no interest in cutting my throat and putting the video on the internet.

This Is Whom You Fear.

Abdel Halim, bakery owner in the same Giza neighborhood, who won’t let me pay for anything I get from his bakery. In addition to throwing in an extra kilo of sweets I didn’t order, he’s never tried to cut my throat and put the video on the internet.

Adel Hamza and his entire family, in whose house I stay (along with groups I bring to Egypt). His wife feeds us, his kids and grandchildren play with us and never, not even once, has he tried to cut my throat and put the video on the internet.

Saleh bin Soliman, Bedouin of the Muzeina tribe, South Sinai, among whose extended family my groups stay while trekking the desert on camels. I’ve known Saleh and his family for eleven years, have seen his kids grow up, get married and become parents themselves and NEVER, despite numerous opportunities while sleeping in the desert, far from civilization, has Saleh tried to cut my throat and put the video on the internet.

This Is Whom You Fear.

Hajja Mileyha, grandmotherly Bedouin in South Sinai, who once treated my winter cold with the most amazing chicken soup without poisoning me OR trying to cut my throat and put the video on the internet.

Maged El Said, owner of a Red Sea beach resort I frequently stay in, who surely has a master key, yet he (nor his staff) never sneak into my room at night to cut my throat and put the video on the internet.

Two “twenty-something” Egyptian brothers who took pity on me when I once sat outside their coffee shop at a bus station in Cairo, afraid I’d miss my bus, so I got there four hours early. After watching me nervously eye each bus that came and went, they finally invited me into their shop, offered me tea and a sandwich (wouldn’t let me pay and insisted I stay in their home on my next visit to Egypt) and wanted to arm wrestle to see if the pork-eating Christian had white muscle disease. One brother took me right-handed, I hammered the other with my left. Neither brother tried to cut my throat and put the video on the internet.

This Is Whom You Fear.

An Egyptian soldier at a bus stop in Nuweiba, South Sinai (I was there early, too, afraid I’d miss that bus). I was asleep on one bench, which backed up to another bench at the bus stop. While I was sleeping the soldier arrived and sat down; I rolled over and scared him. He jumped up and I laughed. We shared a good hour of conversation ending with him, too, inviting me to stay in his home the next time I visited Egypt. Though I’m certain Egyptian army basic training includes hand-to-hand combat, this soldier didn’t try to cut my throat and put the video on the internet.

Abu Hazm, waiter at a restaurant I frequent, who insists on keeping my bags so I can walk around the adjacent shopping area without having to carry armloads of stuff. Never once has he stolen anything out of my bags nor, though surely there are knives in the kitchen of his restaurant, has he tried to cut my throat and put the video on the internet.

Mahmoud, the barber I use in Giza when I’m staying in Egypt, who puts a straight razor (yeah, old-school) to my neck. AND NEVER HAS HE TRIED TO CUT MY THROAT AND PUT THE VIDEO ON THE INTERNET!

This Is Whom You Fear.

Wayward Saints

2012-01-31T19:29:00.000-06:00

By Suzzy Roche
Hyperion, 259 pgs
978-1-4013-4177-0
Rating: 3

(Aside: This book was shipped to me with Wayward Saints as the addressee, causing my stepmother and sister to inquire as to whether I'd joined a cult.)

Saint is the surname of the principle characters in Wayward Saints: Bub, Jean and Mary. Bub and Mary are definitely wayward, while Jean is just painfully inhibited and scared witless. They live in a small town called Swallow which is painted as a stultifying cliche of a hide-bound neo-con backwater. Bub was frequently unemployed and fond of knocking around his wife and daughter. Jean was thoroughly cowed and unable to protect her daughter. Mary, understandably, became a teenager full of rage directed at everyone and everything, eventually high-tailing it out of Swallow at seventeen. Who could blame her? Not me.

Mary went on to form a very successful "alternative" band called Sliced Ham. She found a socially acceptable way to misbehave: rock star. And she lived up to the reputation, forced into rehab after a tragedy, both professional and personal. Mary leaves rehab to find a disbanded band, her manager drops her, royalties are drying up, so she aimlessly withdraws from the planet. Mary's redemption and resurrection happen, of course, in Swallow, where she agrees to play a concert for the high school. She has not set foot in Swallow since she was seventeen, nor has she seen her mother or father. So we come full circle.

My favorite character was Jean Saint, Mary's mother. She began this tale as a beaten and abused mother and wife, always trying to placate a husband who couldn't be. She was bound by convention, scared of the "shoulds," frankly she got on my nerves. Although some of the titles of Mary's songs, such as "Sewer Flower," are not something I would want to discuss with my grandmother. But never mind. As Mary must journey, methodically re-entering the world, Jean is on her own journey but she's on rollerblades. She transforms herself, becoming a smart, independent, funny woman and is such a joy by the end of the book. I love her.

I wish I loved this book. The characters are well-drawn and the story heartfelt. There are a few too many cliches. The plot sort of meanders around, decorated by specimens as opposed to people. There are no "regular" (cannot for the life of me come up with a better term) people outside Swallow, they are all trying too hard to be strange. I was not invested in this one. It's a nice little book, nothing much really wrong with it. I do want to say that Suzzy Roche has potential. I will gladly take a look at her next work. I expect it will be much improved. However, I cannot recommend a book if it doesn't elicit more enthusiasm than this. What would be the point of reading?

Suzzy Roche is a founding member (with her sisters) of the Roches, a best-selling folk band whose first album was named Album of the Year by the New York Times in 1979.

http://www.roches.com/suzzy/index.html
http://www.hyperionbooks.com

2012-01-30T09:59:00.000-06:00

Congratulations to Autumn Lancaster and Jeri Lee Webb!

They are the winners of the book giveaway contest! They have both won a copy of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret, A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe, by Glynis Ridley. Thanks for participating and supporting TexasBookLover!

2012-01-19T16:01:00.000-06:00

GIVEAWAY CONTEST!

Hi everybody! I am so excited, this is my first book giveaway! I am offering two copies of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret as a giveaway. To win your copy you must:

1) Be a Follower of TexasBookLover,
2) Leave a comment here, and
3) Share this contest on facebook

The contest will last for one week, January 20-27, and then I will choose the winners at random.

GOOD LUCK !

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret

2012-01-19T15:01:00.000-06:00

A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe
By Glynis Ridley
Crown Publishing Group, Random House 291 pgs
978-0-307-46353-1
Rating: 4 - Read This Book!

Jeanne Baret was an 18th century woman, lover, wife, mother, herb woman, botanist, sailor, adventurer, administrator and sometime cross-dresser. Think about that for a minute. Baret was born a French peasant in 1740, a woman who typically would never travel more than 20 miles from the parish of her birth. A country woman at a time when she would have been chattel, she boarded a ship in 1766 with her lover, the imminent naturalist Philibert de Commerson, and sailed around the world, collecting flora and fauna for the glory of the French Empire. Awesome.

Jeanne Baret was born in the Loire valley in 1740 to an illiterate couple, as 80% of the population at that time were, who rose before the sun and worked hard all day. The average life expectancy was 26. Philibert de Commerson was born near the city of Lyon in 1727 to a prosperous lawyer and estate owner. Much to his father's displeasure Commerson was consumed with a fascination for botany and made it his life's work, traveling across Europe collecting. At some point during the early 1760s Baret and Commerson became acquainted and the naturalist began paying the herb woman to teach him everything she knew. They became lovers during this time and he moved her in as housekeeper. Tongues wagged and soon the couple decamped to an apartment in Paris. Imagine again what this experience must have been like for Jeanne Baret. She had gone from dirt floors, no shoes, no heat in winter and no meat to eat, to a lovely apartment in a beautiful, cosmopolitan city in Enlightenment France, with plenty to eat, no privations. How far she had come!

In 1766 Commerson was charged by the French government to join an expedition to sail around the world in search of lands in which to spread the empire and discover new crops. Luxuries such as coffee and nutmeg would be worth millions if France could grow these commodities domestically. It was to be a trip for a duration of two years and Commerson and Baret would not be separated, besides which she was indispensable to their work. Maritime military regulations prohibited women on board, so our conspirators hatched a plan: Baret would bind up and impersonate a man for the opportunity of a lifetime.

This is such a fascinating story. No one teaches this stuff. Such devotion between Commerson and Baret is rare indeed. Especially on Baret's part. I have two quibbles: 1) things move slowly for the first half of the book, but oh the second half! The second half is well worth waiting for. And 2) I have reservations regarding the author's ascribing mental processes and emotions that might reasonably be inferred but could not possibly be known. However, this is an accepted practice and it enables the facts to become something more than that. They become a human story. I do recommend this book, especially for history buffs and women's studies enthusiasts. Bon voyage!

You can find the author here: http://louisville.edu/english/facultyandstaff/department-of-english/glynis-ridley

Please enjoy this trailer for Steplings by C.W. Smith and read my previous review!

2012-01-03T22:51:00.000-06:00

Cartel

2011-12-20T23:34:00.000-06:00

The Coming Invasion of Mexico's Drug Wars
By Sylvia Longmire
St. Martin's Press 246 pgs
978-0-230-11137-0
Rating: Yeah....Okay + 1/2

As an introduction to the subject of Mexico's drug wars, Cartel does a good job. It tells you who they are, what they do, and how they do it. The book reads like a textbook and the data is impeccable. It comes alive at times with anecdotes but otherwise is pretty dry. The author, Sylvia Longmire, was an analyst for drug trafficking and border violence for the state of California, which is why Cartel sounds as if it was written by an analyst. I don't recommend it for someone who has been following the news and National Geographic or lives in a border state (I live in Texas and know a few people who have relatives in Mexico) because you won't learn anything you don't already know. But for beginners it is ideal.

The book begins with a short history of cartels in Mexico from their beginnings to the present day, names such as El Chapo, Arellano, Fuentes, Sinaloa and Los Zetas. Once upon a time a man named Gallardo was the king of the cartel. Then he broke up his own monopoly and created Baby Bell cartels with his people in charge. Seems to me that someone should have foreseen that the result would be competition, and that competition would lead to fights over smuggling corridors in the future. There was a time when the Mexican cartels followed the same creed as the Mafia in this country (not that the Mafia is a good thing.) They negotiated, family members were strictly off limits, violence against law enforcement was to be avoided and necessary violence was kept in-house. Sort of an honor among thieves thing. No more. The cartels in Mexico have flipped their lids. They kidnap, torture, kill and extort. Their victims are everybody. To make matters even worse, law enforcement in Mexico, from the local beat cop to the attorney general, are notoriously corrupt, paid off by the cartels to at best look the other way, and at worst perform an execution or two themselves.

And now these atrocities happen here. Phoenix has had such an increase in kidnappings that they have formed a special task force. Arms trafficking is a growing problem especially in Arizona and Texas which have the most lenient state laws. Straw buyers visit gun shops and shows and purchase several firearms that they then deliver to the guy who will take the guns across the border. This is important because, believe it or not, guns are not easy to buy in Mexico. Serial number searches have proven the link between US firearms and deaths in Mexico and in this country.

The cartels are a business like any other, and as such look for efficiencies. One of these is using US public lands such as national parks to grow marijuana. This way they don't have to try and run the product across the border and risk detection. Two or three employees of the cartel will scout a location; set up camp, which can include generators, irrigation pipes, trip-wires, etc. They are armed and will live with and protect the crop from planting through harvest and processing. Our park rangers and law enforcement are up against much more dangerous criminals than have historically been encountered in our parks. So this is another way that the drug war is spreading north from our border.

Presidents of Mexico and their administrations have failed miserably in the past to crack down on the cartels. But in 2006 Felipe Calderon was elected president and he immediately announced a new policy. He would bring the fight to the cartels with the Mexican Army. He deployed thousands of soldiers, then he fired large numbers of state and local law enforcement for corruption. New officers are hired only after they pass a lie detector test. Judicial reforms have been implemented to make the process transparent to encourage in the public more faith in the system. President Calderon has also floated novel legislation to ease up on criminal penalties for users in the hopes that the drug prices would drop and become less lucrative for the cartels. The jury is still out.

The author puts forward a few strategies and tactics to lessen the flow of drugs into the United States and lessen the danger of the fallout of Mexico's drug wars. She says we need to learn to manage a war that we can't win. We should send more money to the right places, increase use of the National Guard, change some of our own drug and gun laws, etc. Those last two will realistically never be done.

President Calderon has about a billion strikes against him and those strikes are dollar bills. Consider what he's up against. Cartel chiefs have been listed in Forbes magazine's list of the world's top billionaires and Forbes world's most powerful people. Check out El Chapo Which brings up an interesting point. The truth is that the cartels incomes are larger than Mexico's defense budget. Larger. More money than the government. There's an event coming up in 2012 in Mexico which I cannot stress enough the significance. Mexico elects a new president next year. I'll be watching with great interest because cartel influence will make or break the next presidency.

The Informationist

2011-12-13T23:12:00.000-06:00

A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel
By Taylor Stevens
Random House 324 pgs
978-0-307-71710-8
Rating: Read This Book!+ (this is a 4.5 of 5 for readers insisting on a rational rating system)

The Informationist is stunning. It roars like a freight train and sneaks like a cat through 3 continents and some half-dozen countries. There are mercenaries and missionaries, diplomats and gangsters in uniform, Texas oil tycoons and presidents, sacrifice and avarice, revenge and justice.

Meet Vanessa Michael Munroe. We very seldom get to meet a female character in any genre who breaks the rules, all of them. Her past is shady, her future precarious. She reminds me of Nevada Barr's Anna Pigeon on estrogen and without the ethical ruminating. She is a brilliant chameleon and physically fearless. She's got skills. Munroe is fierce.

Munroe's specialty is information. Governments and corporations need information and hire her to get it and they pay handsomely. Information on elections, coupes, espionage both national and business, trade secrets, you name it. Everyone wants the inside skinny for a leg up on the competition. Mainly this boils down to money. Information = money.

The information Munroe is hired to find is the whereabouts of the daughter of a Texas oil tycoon, Richard Burbank of Titan Oil. His daughter Emily went missing in Africa 4 years ago. Munroe grew up in Africa and understands that returning to the scene of her past could be problematic. Add Miles Bradford to the mix. He is a former (?) mercenary Burbank sends along to keep an eye on Munroe. Add to the mix Francisco Beyard, a gunrunner (among other things) from her African past who loves her and is a little angry that she disappeared 9 years ago. Hint: Munroe had to get "out of Africa." Ha ha. Sorry. I find very little to quibble about in The Informationist. In fact only one thing: Miles Bradford seemed to be superfluous a good deal of the time. However this doesn't weigh down the plot in any way.

The Informationist is Taylor Stevens first book and I am so excited to be able to read more. Her next Vanessa Michael Munroe novel, The Innocent, will hit stores this month. Even better, she is currently working on the third story. I confidently and strongly recommend this one. Ms. Stevens has created something special here and I, for one, am grateful. You will be too.

(FYI Taylor Stevens is a Texas author. Yay!)

For more on the author: http://www.taylorstevensbooks.com/author.php

For the publisher: http://www.randomhouse.com/

2011-12-11T23:37:00.000-06:00

Top 10 Cities for Book Lovers

Poachers

2011-12-07T22:45:00.000-06:00

Stories
By Tom Franklin
Harper Collins, 192 pgs
0-688-17771-9
Rating: Read This Book!

Poachers is a collection of 11 short stories. I have gone back to my roots with this one. I "discovered" American regional short fiction 20 years ago and my favorite region is the south. It's all so very Gothic. Spanish moss and kudzu, Appalachia and Gulf coast, alligator and Thoroughbred, Pentecostal and voodoo priestess, plantation and slave quarter. One gets the idea that the primeval is alive and lurking in Mississippi. The juxtapositions of the South are mind-boggling and Tom Franklin captures them superbly. Mr. Franklin is a talent on the same plane with the late Larry Brown, and both are heirs to Faulkner.

These are my favorite stories:

The Ballad of Duane Juarez is about the dissolution of an older brother who has to rely on (or mooch off of) his younger brother's life. These are some of the things Duane accepts and/or takes from his brother Ned: food, drink, rent, Playboy, girls, jobs, electricity. According to Duane he married for love and Ned married for money. Duane's wife divorced him and so the love went away and their was still no money. Ned is still married and still has money so he tries to "help" his big brother Duane. I get the idea Ned sort of likes this arrangement. He doesn't seem to be intentionally belittling, but his off-hand remarks could be seen as casually cruel, as he tosses crumbs to Duane in the form of day-labor assignments. Some of the things that Ned has Duane do for him include: mowing grass, raking leaves, washing his car, cleaning houses, killing cats. Yep, killing cats. Ned's wife Nina feeds a bunch of stray cats and they won't go away. Ned hates the cats and pays Duane to capture them, take them off and shoot them. We find out how Duane feels about the people in his life when he takes the cats off to be summarily executed and starts naming them. This story is not a story with a plot, but is a character study. We get to peer around inside Duane's head, and he needs a good therapist.

Poachers is the story of the 3 Gates brothers living in the backwoods of Alabama, who make their living as poachers. There's apparently nothing they won't kill and sell. This includes: fish, deer, dogs, rabbits, possums, turtle, fox. The brothers sell and barter (sometimes for moonshine, white lightnin, bad idea) the fruits of their hunt to regular customers in a netherworld that you have to see to believe, some of these places are so isolated they are accessible only by river; no electricity, no phone, no plumbing. The boys have been on their own since their father shot himself when the youngest brother was 12. He was despairing his wife's death in childbirth and the stillborn baby. So he buried them in the backyard. There is no law here.

The boys live in a ragged cabin deep in the woods; have never gone to school; can't read or write; don't bathe; eat with their hands; have no social skills; never go to town. What they understand is the instinctual. This is Deliverance, second generation. This is the sort of thing that makes the hair on my neck stand at attention. You know what creeps me out? These people have to introduce new blood every so often and so what woman do they kidnap for their nefarious purposes? Eew.

OK, anyway, the Gateses seem to be successfully skirting the edge of the cliff until the day they murder a game warden who caught them with a telephone rig in the bottom of their boat and tried to arrest them. Then they fell off the cliff. A few days later the body of the game warden is found. The sheriff calls the state wildlife commission to report the death and talks to a legendary warden by the name of Frank David, who is ascribed supernatural powers, happens to have been the dead warden's teacher and mentor. When the Gates brothers start showing up dead one by one, the sheriff knows Warden David's handiwork but cannot build a case, prove anything or even find him.

An old shopkeeper named Kirxy had known their father and has spent years trying to help the brothers. He tried to house them, feed them, send them to school, to no avail. He had to finally return them to their cabin because his wife was as freaked out as I am, see? So when Kent, the oldest brother, and Neil, the middle brother, are murdered Kirxy tries to protect Dan, the youngest. We are given a few hints in the story that it may yet be possible to save Dan. Maybe.

So please read this book. It will not appeal to everyone but I'd like to encourage you to venture out of your comfort zone. I love the short story form but I didn't know that until I ventured.

Men In the Making

2011-11-29T19:11:00.004-06:00

Stories
By Bruce Machart
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 190 pgs
978-0-15-603444-9
Rating: Yeah.....okay

Someone or something dies in every one of these stories; more often than not it's a person, sometimes a opossum.

Men In the Making is a slim volume of 10 short stories by Bruce Machart. Each story considers a defining event in the life of a blue collar man. These men pull the second shift at the oil refineries south of Houston; shoot logs through the mills in the Piney Woods; and drive delivery trucks full of bio-waste from a hospital, in one memorable case. These men are trying to figure out how to be blue collar men in a world that finds them lacking. It is no longer enough to be the men their fathers were. Now they have to be that man plus a man that shares his feelings and shops for groceries and takes his daughter to gymnastics. Most of the men in these stories are trying but I don't have much patience for this sort of thing. You know what? Boo hoo, suck it up.

I enjoyed some of these stories but the collection in sum is disappointing. There's nothing new here. Mr. Machart is talented but has a way to go still. I will follow his work. He has potential. That said, there were a couple of stories I liked very much. "The Only Good Thing I've Heard" is about a husband trying to find a path out of the fear, anger and soul-sadness of a late-term miscarriage for himself and his wife. This story is delicate and hesitant and warm and reminds me of honey. The next story I like is "Among the Living Amidst the Trees." This story recalls a horrific crime that took place in East Texas when actual evil showed up and tied a black man to the bumper of it's pickup and dragged him behind it until all that was left of that man was grease. This story explores how a man in the making who calls this town home would face such a horror, especially when the national media arrives and holds a mirror up for him to see.

Empire of the Summer Moon

2011-11-26T18:21:00.000-06:00

Congratulations to the author, Empire is a Pulitzer Prize Finalist!

Empire of the Summer Moon
Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
By S.C. Gwynne
Scribner, 371 pgs
978-1-4165-9105-4
Rating: You Should Really Read This Book!

The Comanches were elemental; earth, air, fire and water. They had no use for a sophisticated civil society, no use for a pantheon of deities, no use for towns or villages. The Comanches were nomads but they did have a home. They inhabited the awesome buffalo plains of a vast land that was not yet a country. I choose "inhabit" deliberately. One of its definitions is "to fill," and that is what the Comanches did. They filled that place and time, not in numbers for the Comanches were never more than 20,000 or so, but in perfect partnership with them.

Empire is S.C. Gwynne's third book, his first book of American history, and I am very impressed. He has impeccable credentials: bureau chief, national correspondent and senior editor for Time from 1988-2000 and executive editor at Texas Monthly. Accordingly, Empire is carefully researched and strictly noted, which we appreciate of course, but just as important for me is his wit and clarity. He does not allow any of the characters, Indian, Anglo, Mexican or otherwise, to pull any punches in his book. He calls "shenanigans."

In 1836 Comancheria stretched from Northern Mexico into what would become Colorado and Kansas. The Comanches had turned back the Spanish, Mexicans, Apaches and many others, from their homelands. In this year General Santa Ana turned Texas into a country and it did not take long for whites to come pouring in after promises of cheap land. The Parker clan settled near the present town of Mexia, just east of Waco, and built an elaborate homestead known as Parker's Fort. On May 19 at 10 in the morning a band of Comanches rode up to the gate. The fight lasted about 30 minutes, by the end 5 men were dead, 2 women wounded, and 2 women and 3 children kidnapped. One of these children was a little blond-haired, blue-eyed girl of 9 years, Cynthia Ann Parker. Her name has gone down in history as the most famous Indian captive of all. More about her later.

The white settlers were in the throes of Manifest Destiny, believing that all of the land even unto the Pacific belonged to them. God was invoked with predictable results. The Comanches were defending their lives and homes against a foregone conclusion. I do not want to romanticize them and turn them into pets. The Comanches were thieves, most notably of horses. They were terrifying warriors. Many historians believe that the Comanches on horseback were the most lethal light-cavalry ever seen. They shot, stabbed, lanced, mutilated, kidnapped, raped and scalped. The whites did their own murdering and mutilating. They were also thieves, entering into bad-faith "treaties,"stealing land, time and time again. But I believe the most vicious, cynical strategy in this war was the whites' unconscionable, cynical, deliberate whole-sale massacre of the buffalo. The Comanches' lives were based on the buffalo, without them they would not survive. The war waged between the Comanches and whites lasted from approximately 1836 until the last band of Comanches rode onto reservation land in 1875, the few remaining warriors led by Chief Quanah Parker.

Chief Quanah Parker was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker and Chief Peta Nocona. Cynthia Ann assimilated into the Comanche world, married a chief and gave birth to Quanah and his sister Prairie Flower. She lived with her Comanche family for 24 years until she was captured and kidnapped yet again, this time by Texas Rangers. She did not want to go back to the white world, family or no, trying to escape on a regular basis. Cynthia and her baby daughter were taken from Quanah when he was just 12. They would never see each other again and each mourned the loss for the remainder of their days.

Quanah is legendary. We Texans learn about him in school. He was physically imposing, taller and heavier than the average Comanche. He was a warrior remarked upon and respected by his people, other tribes, the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army. Quanah was fearless in battle and a brilliant strategist. In 1874 the federal government reached the end of its rope with the Comanche raids on Texas settlers. Colonel Ranald McKenzie was brought in by the U.S. Army to bring them in or kill them trying. Colonel McKenzie was a bold, disciplined and talented officer. He and Quanah Parker were well matched. The battle between the two lasted for a year.

Quanah was not only a military leader, he was also a political leader. He understood by the summer of 1875 that the remaining band of Comanches, his band, must surrender to McKenzie because not to do so would have been a betrayal of the welfare of his people. Quanah proved to be every bit as capable a leader on the reservation. He fought for land, leasing rights, hunting rights, annuities, religious rights. He built a 10 room house on the reservation where he welcomed President Teddy Roosevelt. In the last years of his life he searched for members of his white family. They allowed him to bring his mother's remains to the reservation where he buried her in the Comanche cemetery. Not long after Quanah was buried beside her.

Visit the author: http://www.scgwynne.com/

Visit the publisher: http://authors.simonandschuster.com/S-C-Gwynne/47568884

fathermucker

2011-11-17T19:42:00.000-06:00

By Greg Olear
HarperCollins 312 pgs
978-0-06-205971-0
Rating: Sublime....

"Fathermucker" sounds rather suspect. I feel a touch profane when I say it. Harmless. I am a little confused but nevermind.

"Fathermucker" is the perfect title for this gem. This book is about a father mucking around, trying to hold it together. Josh Lansky is a husband, erst-while screenwriter, and stay-at-home father to Roland, a four-year-old boy with Asperger's, and Maude, a two-year-old girl with a dictatorial bent. His wife Stacy brings home the bacon and travels frequently for her job.

The story begins with Josh and Maude at a play-date with the usual suspects, a group of some half-dozen women and children. One of the play-daters has just told Josh that she thinks his wife is having an affair. Fathermucker takes place in a single day, as we follow Josh through this Friday, the morning before the accusation, and everything that comes after.

Josh struggles as we all do with the most mundane facts of life: breakfast, power struggles with toddlers, pest extermination, petrified french fries in the minivan, lunch, gossipy play-date mothers, snarky play-date mothers, bored play-date mothers, sexually extravagant play-date mothers, nap techniques, politically correct preschool, dinner, bathing, and the all-important if we park a kid in front of Barney for a half hour of peace will they grow up to become serial killers? These things are trying in uneventful circumstances but can you imagine trying to function while wondering if your wife of 13 years is stepping out?

I loved this book dearly, from page one. It is a spot-on observation of life in progress and how we cope, or not, when a wrench is thrown into the works, how our balance is precarious on our best days. Josh wants so badly to be a father worthy of the love and trust of his children. I believe he succeeds masterfully.

Please read this book. Priceless. Truly.

Visit the author: http://www.healygates.com/

Visit the publisher: http://www.harpercollins.com/

PS - The portrayal of Roland's Asperger's was authentic and loving. They were my favorite parts.

2011-11-01T22:20:00.001-05:00

November is National Novel Writing Month So Get Busy!

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

The Great Typo Hunt Author Interview

2011-10-31T21:37:00.005-05:00

Hi everybody! This is the transcript of an interview I did with the authors of The Great Typo Hunt, Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson. Enjoy and please leave me a comment!

1. Do you have a typo "pet peeve" and if so what is it?

Jeff: Unnecessary apostrophes in plural words are the scourge of humanity-- the scourge! They drive me banana's. [sic ha!]

Benjamin: I’d have to roll out the classics: you’re/your, their/there/they’re, and its/it’s. In my own writing, I’ll occasionally go back to make little changes during an edit but fail to properly reconnect everything, introducing a new error. Few things are worse than having to say, “Yeah, I must have made that error when editing,” which Jeff heard me say a few times.

2. What projects are you currently working on?

Jeff and Benjamin: Well, November is National Novel Writing Month, and both of us have done participated every year since 2003. NaNoWriMo fits nicely with our mission because they urge people to feel free to write away, reminding them that they can always edit later, which is where we come in. Recognizing the power of the edit, by the way, is the cure to writers’ block. So we’ll be spending November working on fiction. We can’t promise that either of those projects will ever see the light of day, but we can definitely say that come December 1^st, we’ll each have 50,000 words we’d never dare to show to anyone without some serious editing.

3. What is the first book you remember reading?

Jeff: I have early memories of reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which inspired some preadolescent binge eating in hopes of growing my very own pair of beautiful wings. But the first book to get me excited about words and language must have been The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.

Benjamin: James and The Giant Peach by Roald Dahl kicked off every summer vacation. I know we had a library book club, thirty books over the summer, and for multiple summers that would be book number one.

4. When did you know that you wanted the hunt to become a book? How did it feel to turn Typo over to an editor?

Jeff and Benjamin: As we told people about our mission during the original typo hunt, many of them asked, “Are you writing a book?” Our reply started as “Huh? No,” which soon became “No?” and then evolved to “Maybe, but we’re just concentrating on enjoying the trip,” or “Why? Would you like to read a book like that?” Eventually an agent hunted us down and made the process so easy that it was hard to refuse. Eventually we stopped laughing about people asking us if there’d be a book and starting saying to each other, “Gee, maybe we should write a book.”

By the time our editor and then our official copy editor saw the book, it had been worked over many times by both of us, and we’d gotten feedback from mothers, girlfriends, and our agent. They still managed to find things to correct, though. Also, we collectively felt we’d entered meta-joke territory when Crown's editors edited the book on adventures in editing. Our wonderful copy editor remarked that it was his “apotheosis as a copyeditor.”

5. The TEAL kit is brilliant. Whose idea was it to send the TEAL kit to reviewers? Have reviewers been inspired?

Benjamin: The original kit was all Jeff. In the lead-up to the book’s release, we were fortunate to have a really engaged publicity team at Crown, and the idea to send out kits to reviewers came from one of the conference calls with that team. Just like with editing, publicity efforts can be improved greatly by suggestions from other folks.

As for whether reviewers have been inspired, you’re more exception than rule in taking kit and camera in hand and joining the effort. For that, we salute you!

6. How did it feel to see your book in a store for the first time?

Jeff: I'd already bullied everyone I knew into preordering the book in the months before the release date, and ogled its listings on all the major retailers' websites, so by the time the book physically appeared in a store, seeing it on a table or shelf was a bit anticlimactic. Still, we were doing a reading in a Borders in Manhattan (now dearly departed) for our debut, and it was pretty cool to have something I'd written for sale in a store in the self-professed center of the universe.

Benjamin: It’s definitely a rush, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I used to go to bookstores all the time (I’m a bit of a book monster), and I’d always stop by the science fiction section to push some books aside, making a little space for where my book would go, someday. (There’s always room in H in sci-fi; I’d be right next to Herbert’s Dune series.) It’s funny to discover that when it really happened, I appeared in a non-fiction section, and also that I’m shelved under Deck.

7. How has Typo changed your lives?

Jeff: Ever since The Great Typo Hunt came out, I've had a greater sense of just how many other people are out there who care about promoting good spelling and grammar. I'm heartened to think about all the other typo hunters scouring the country's text, knowing now that this can be a broader mission beyond us. Never again will it feel like a lonely effort. Oh, and we got to meet Al Roker. I haven't washed my hand since!

8. What will you talk about at your next class reunion?

Jeff: We had our nine-year reunion at Dartmouth this summer (it was combined with other classes' ten- and eleven-year reunions to save money-- hello, brave new economy!) Benjamin came along this time and kept reminding me to keep an ear out in case someone said something that might inspire a whole new book. So far as I can tell, nothing's come of it yet. On the other hand, we did have our book to "talk about" (i.e., mercilessly promote to our hapless classmates).

9. Did you eat more often at chain restaurants or local eateries? Did you have a favorite regional meal and if so what was it?

Jeff: We ate at both chain places and local restaurants during the typo hunt. When stopping mid-drive, it’s hard to find something other than a chain restaurant along the highway. In the cities themselves, we’d usually make an effort to explore the regional cuisine. My companion for the West Coast leg, Josh, especially took a keen interest in finding new places to eat. It also helped when we stayed with friends who knew the area; in Atlanta, Austin, and Seattle (to name a few), great restaurants had been pre-scouted for us. I still dream about the delicious mussels and fries at a place on Valencia in San Francisco, and fresh cheese curds in Wisconsin were awesome.

Benjamin: The fajitas at this little spot on the town square in Santa Fe were amazing--flavors coming at you from every direction. We couldn’t help but mention it in the book.

10. I have to ask this because I am a native Texan. Was Texas different from other states and if so how?

Jeff and Benjamin: My, that’s a mighty big state. A strange Easter visit to Fort Stockton was the break between two of our longest driving days. As far as typos go, we didn’t find evidence of regionally based typo variation; no one state or pocket of the country was more error-prone than the others. So no, while everything else may be bigger in Texas, its errors are not. Texas did offer us our first walking typo in Billy, the Subway “restaraunt” manager.

Muchas Gracias to Jeff and Benjamin for this interview. My first! I hope everyone enjoyed the interview and please leave me a comment. Thanks again, Michelle

Shock Wave

2011-10-30T22:11:00.000-05:00

A Virgil Flowers Novel
By John Sandford
Putnam 388 pgs
978-0-399-15769-1
Rating: Read This Book!

Virgil Flowers is back, our favorite shitkicker detective. This is the OK Corral: not only is he after the bad guys but he's cleaning up the town while he's at it.

Our story begins when a bomb explodes in a Michigan high rise housing the corporate headquarters of PyeMart, a builder of some sort of upscale Walmart things. Three weeks later another bomb explodes in Butternut Falls, Minnesota, at a PyeMart construction site. So the ATF shows up and requests assistance from the state of Minnesota and Lucas Davenport (of the Prey series fame) dispatches "that fuckin' Flowers" to investigate. Lest anyone object, this is a term of endearment and a running joke in Mr. Sandford's Prey and Virgil Flowers novels.

Our hero arrives and finds that everyone in town has an opinion on PyeMart, and almost everyone in town has a stake in the new store. The new store would provide jobs for the people of Butternut Falls. The store would put Butternut Falls merchants out of business from price competition. Some people need the new store for it's new utilities and city services west of town. Some people south of town, where the City originally planned to build, are going to lose big real estate money. When PyeMart came up for a vote in the city council, three members voted yay, three voted nay, and the mayor broke the tie with her yay. Now it seems a few of the people's representatives are skulking around town with a little extra money to spend.

Shock Wave is again a great John Sandford book, a pleasure to read. Just when you become complacent, appreciative but complacent, he serves up a different tale. The bad guy here is building bombs, not stabbing anyone to death or something, so there's a more technical investigation this time. Not as much "guns'a'blazin." I thought this book slowed in the middle but that may be because the author's books are usually more of a macho physical effort. Which I like. Very much. Anywho, Virgil breaks new BCA ground with cyber-sleuthing, and rest assured there are plenty of high explosives to go around. Another way Shock Wave diverges from the formula is that there is no romantic claptrap going on. Why do so many authors insist that the male cop has to fall in love with the female criminal who is beautiful but vulnerable, blah blah blah? Thank the Lord we don't have to do that again. The end is well-and deftly crafted, even elegant. So again I can confidently recommend a new John Sandford novel, Shock Wave. Enjoy!

If you're interested in John Sandford's other books this is the place to look: http://www.johnsandford.org/books.html

Fun extra and he's got this about 80% right: http://www.johnsandford.org/listofsongs.html

The Night Strangers

2011-10-26T23:56:00.001-05:00

By Chris Bohjalian
Crown Publishers 378 pgs
978-0-307-39499-6
Rating - It'll Do and a Half

This is a weird little book. If you are familiar with Chris Bohjalian's work then this will not surprise you. He is a master at New England village life. You understand that his books could not be set anywhere else. There are hamlets in these mainly rural states that remain fairly isolated. This allows all manner of belief and behavior to take hold and hold on. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I rather like his villages. After reading Mr. Bohjalian you will know what "mud season" is. The author has written about midwifery in the hinterlands, which is not at all like midwifery in, say, Boston. There is water dousing going on (Water Witches), transsexuals learning to stretch certain parts (yes, I know), healers and so on.

In Night Strangers we have "herbalists."

Remember Sully Sullenberger who landed his plane in the Hudson River? Geese got themselves strung in and around the engines and down went the plane. Mr. Sullenberger accomplished a truly impressive feat. Unfortunately the pilot in Strangers is not so lucky. I say "lucky" because Chip Linton did successfully land his plane in Lake Champlain, but the wash from a boat created a wave that flipped the plane and 39 passengers drowned. Because Chip has been suffering from PTSD, he is taking a few meds and has been unable to work. His wife Emily has decided that what the family needs is a change of scenery and some peace and quiet. So they buy a big old Victorian in a small village in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire, and move in with their twin daughters Hallie and Garnet.

As they unpack they find odd things hidden around the house, most notably a few weapons and a square-shaped door in the basement practically welded shut by 39 6-inch carriage bolts. 39 drowned passengers and 39 bolts, hmmm...... Anyway, a few of the women in town befriend Emily. They all have these elaborate greenhouses, lots and lots of greenhouses, and call themselves "herbalists." These women seem to have some sort of gardening club going on and they use the plants to cook and for herbal remedies and stuff. So far so good. Until the Lintons notice that these women feed them a lot; they bring food to the house and invite them to dinner parties; they have the twin girls learning gardening and recipes after school. Begins with "C" and rhymes with "oven."

Meanwhile Chip is decompensating at an alarming rate. We don't know quite whether the ghosts are figments of his imagination, a result of his drug cocktail or if he is having delusions from the PTSD. I don't think it matters where the ghosts came from because perception is reality, yes? The problem with the ghosts is what they want Chip to do for them. Hard to say whether Hallie and Garnet are in more danger from their dad or the herbalists. Begins with "w" and rhymes with "hitch."

The end of Strangers is an eye-popping surprise. Maybe not a very satisfying end and by that I don't mean that it should have been a typically happy ending. Neither do I mean that there really wasn't a finale. I just mean that if you are an herbalist you will get to enjoy the story for a long, long time.

The Great Typo Hunt

2011-10-24T00:28:00.001-05:00

Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction At a Time
By Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson
Random House, Inc. 269 pgs
978-0-307-59108-1
Rating: Read This Book!

orthography 1. The art or study of correct spelling according to established usage. 2. The aspect of language study concerned with letters and their sequences in words. 3. A method of representing a language or the sounds of language by written symbols; spelling.

I am nervous. I am about to review a book about typos and I will edit this thing within an inch of its life.

In 2008 Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson formed the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL) and set out to right a great wrong. A great many wrongs. They took off on a road trip, a mission to rescue the English language from dire abuse and neglect, and educate whoever happened to be standing around. They looked for typos, otherwise known as “the black hordes of error,” at each stop and always found what they were looking for. There were countless misspellings, apostrophe confusion, possessive problems, homophones and many more. But finding the typos was only the first step. Mr. Deck carried with him a TEAL Kit, a plastic bag containing the tricks of his trade: markers, Sharpies, chalk, stick-on letters and Wite-Out. He did not pack glass tubing for neon signs but who knew? The thing is, Jeff and Benjamin not only looked for typos, they also corrected them.

I have been supplied with my very own TEAL kit. Here is an example of my efforts.

First off, everyone please agree to ignore the part about Texas dirt. OK. This is one of my t-shirts. I call your attention to the 4th line. “Lets” should be “let’s.” It’s missing an apostrophe. As a contraction of the words “let” and “us” it needs an apostrophe to stand in for the missing “u.” See?

And here is the corrected shirt. I have added an apostrophe as best I could with the black Sharpie in my TEAL kit. In this photograph it looks a little like a fly.

The authors made necessary corrections, both overt and covert, throughout the country. As you can imagine not everyone was receptive of our heroes and their mission. Apathy ran amuck but some shopkeepers, restaurant managers, park rangers, store clerks, museum curators, etc., were friendly, if puzzled. Some were mostly concerned about where the blame for the typo would be placed, certainly not on them. Others were openly hostile. And then there were the criminal charges.

Here let me again offer an example of my efforts. I submit to you the following sign. “Alinement” is misspelled. It should read “Alignment.” I’ve seen this sign every day for years. It rankles. So I’m standing on the opposite side of the street with my camera when a man drove by. Then he backed up in the middle of the street and into the lot next to the building with the offending sign. He came loping across the street and demanded to know why I was taking pictures of his shop. Yep, the owner. Good grief. So I had to explain what I was doing, about the typos and Jeff and Benjamin and my review, etc. So the guy finally says OK he was just wondering what I wanted with his shop. Then he said he had heard of the typo hunt. Kid you not.

The authors did wrestle with larger questions regarding their calling, lest you think this mere fun and games. How strictly do we enforce the rules? Should they be rules or more like guidelines? What about education? The authors visited elementary classrooms for inspiration. Should art be exempt from the rules? What part do idioms play? Should written language be stricter than spoken language? Should quarter be given?

I enjoyed this book so much. It encompassed two of my favorite things, language and road trips. Typos are my pet peeve and have been torturing me for years. I have raised three children whom I harassed about language all the time. I now have two readers and one turncoat. This book has something for everyone: language, anthropology, sociology, geography, friendships, the open road and dark nights of the soul. I laughed out loud and learned some things too.

Our heroes are planning another road trip but have distilled their mission. Next time out they will EDIT. Which is what I’m going to do now.

Also I didn’t know “smoothen” was a word.

Please check out the authors and the famous blog: www.GreatTypoHunt.com
Facebook: Typo Eradication Advancement League
Twitter: www.twitter.com/TEALJeffDeck

Feast Day of Fools

2011-10-18T21:10:00.000-05:00

By James Lee Burke

Simon & Schuster 463 pgs

978-1-4516-4311-4
Rating - Read This!

James Lee Burke is one of my top five authors. By my best accounting he has written 31 books. He is probably best known for the Dave Robicheaux novels that follow the life and times of a deputy sheriff in New Iberia, Louisiana. One of these novels, The Lost Get-Back Boogie, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Mr. Burke has a gift for description that defies description so I won’t try. I’ll just say that you can feel the humidity of the Louisiana Gulf coast on your skin, smell the drowsy summer bougainvillea and taste the craw fish jambalaya. Please everybody try this guy and if you don’t like him I’ll send you a dollar.

Feast Day of Fools is a Hackberry Holland novel. Mr. Holland is the sheriff in a rural southwest Texas county situated in the Chihuahuan desert, somewhere in the Big Bend region. As it happens, I live in West Texas and will vouch for the stark beauty of this land, dramatic vistas in every direction, 6,000-foot mountain peaks, deep canyons revealing a geological story of eons, fuchsia prickly pear blossoms, the lazy Rio Grande known as the Rio Bravo south of the border. Mexico is a pervasive presence, impossible to separate the people or the land here. Mr. Burke takes that raw material and spins a poem.

Back to the story. It begins with the grisly murder of an escaped kidnap victim from Mexico by a scary psychopath known as Krill. This murder is witnessed by an alcoholic Indian by the name of Danny Boy Lorca who believes he has ecstatic visions of his ancestors. And we are off! Sheriff Holland and his deputy Pam Tibbs begin an investigation that will, before it’s over, involve a Russian terrorist, a Chinese woman with a reputation for miracles, a sociopath called Preacher who if I tried to describe you wouldn’t believe me, a guy with a head for physics harboring a secret that very likely could get him killed, and a mobster looking for the guy with the secret. The theme here is absolution and aren't we all searching for that?

I read everything Mr. Burke writes. I would read a book by this author that was just description. His dialogue is spare and true to his characters. My only quibbles with this book are that it was a tad long, I think it could have been edited down some. There’s one character, another preacher, that I don’t entirely understand his function in the story. My other beef is that the plot is so circuitous that I got confused trying to keep all the characters straight in my poor brain and how they were related. Other than that I am a very big fan. Read it!

Snakewoman of Little Egypt

2011-09-27T13:09:00.000-05:00

By: Robert Hellenga
Bloomsbury 346 pgs

978-1-60819-322-6

Submitted by Bloomsbury

Rating: 4

This book makes me want to go back to school.

Jackson Carter is an anthropology professor at Thomas Ford University in Illinois. He has returned from Africa and written a book about his experiences with the Mbuti. Jackson has drawn the disapproval of the anthropological community by "going native;" most spectacularly by taking a girlfriend and fathering a daughter.

Sunny (fka Willa Fern Cochrane) has just emerged from a 6-year stint in prison for shooting her husband Earl, the preacher of The Church of the Burning Bush With Signs Following (henceforth known as CBBWSF), a bunch of Pentecostal snake-handling strychnine-drinking lunatics who are busily excommunicating themselves from the entire world. Earl had forced Sunny to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes at gunpoint and she was bitten. So she shot Earl with his gun and I say good for her. Sunny is determined to change her life and does a 180 when she leaves prison and enrolls at Thomas Ford University where she meets Jackson Carter.

They soon embark on a relationship that is transformative for all involved, including friends, other professors and dead uncles. Earl meets Jackson when he shows up to take Sunny "home." Jackson's anthropologi-ness (which can also kill cats) gets the better of him and he decides to make the followers of the CBBWSF his next research subject. We already know Jackson's propensity for going native so guess what happens next.

Snakewoman is a good book. Mr. Hellenga has done about 3 tons of research and it's a good thing. We learn a great deal about groundhog hunting, timpani drums, catching snakes, recipes, pygmies and France, just to scratch the surface. However I confess that by page 346 I wearied of the instruction manuals. Such exotic material is deftly handled by Mr. Hellenga, never falling into stereotype, which would have been so easy to do. I enjoyed this book very much and confidently recommend it to you.

If you enjoy Snakewoman you may want to take a look at Mr. Hellenga's other works: http://www.roberthellenga.com/

Snakewoman is published by Bloomsbury USA: http://www.bloomsburyusa.com/

Home Truths

2011-09-20T13:29:00.001-05:00

A Deep East Texas Memory

By: Gerald Duff

TCU Press 149 pgs

978-0-87565-435-5

Submitted by TCU Press
Rating: 4.5

Home Truths is Gerald Duff's memoir of a boyhood spent on the Gulf Coast and deep in the piney woods of East Texas. I am a native Texan and I understand volumes by the mere mention of East Texas. I don't even like to drive through East Texas. Although a short trip in terms of geography between the gulf and the woods, the cultures and circumstances are worlds apart. Mr. Duff's father Willie was from East Texas but had moved from that physical world and worked at a good job in the petro-chemical plants of the Texas Gulf Coast. These were dependable well-paying jobs in the years following World War II. He married Dorothy Irwin, the daughter of an oil company manager from Nebraska. Night and day.

The author was born in a hospital which was something to remark upon in that day and age and place. Subsequently he acquired two sisters. Then Willie Duff was fired from his job, what I consider to be a real disaster because in an apparent fit of pettiness and self-wounding pride, he packed up his family and sentenced them to years in an East Texas prison. Not a prison with physical walls but a prison nonetheless, a prison of poverty, bigotry, religion, and ignorance.

This memoir is about how book-loving Gerald Duff survived and escaped with sensitivity and intellectual curiosity and ambition in tact. It is the author's contention that people in these circumstances must believe the lies they tell about themselves and each other in order to survive the psychic wounds inflicted by this culture. Desperation is a ruinous thing. This book is honest and courageous and I recommend it to you all.

http://www.geraldduff.com/

http://www.prs.tcu.edu/

Beast Saves the Brothers and Sisters of the Cosmic I Am

2011-09-16T14:16:00.001-05:00

By G.W. Davies

Smashwords July 31, 2011
Submitted by the author

Rating: 3.5

Paging Tom Robbins!

Beast is a hippie drifter searching for the meaning of life. He finds that meaning in cult leaders Bo and Peep and follows them to a commune in the wilds of Montana where they and their followers, known as the Brothers and Sisters of the Cosmic I Am, are waiting for the imminent arrival of their space alien brethren. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty. Beast shows up at the commune with a small collection of people in tow, many of whom turn out to be certifiable. If they weren't nuts when they arrived they will be in very short order. These include a girl who has recently been de-programed from the last cult; a jazz trumpeter with a raging heroin addiction; and a former Hollywood producer, a raging perv, whose own commune was recently bankrupted by the IRS.

In the beginning the brothers and sisters are all getting along famously, but it doesn't take long for trouble to arrive. The commune is splitting into two factions: one supporting Bo and Peep and the other worshipping Chad, the jazz trumpeter, who keeps losing limbs. Then someone begins stalking and attacking the brothers and sisters and peace and love take a backseat. It is up to Beast to save the day!

I enjoyed this book. It's different, a blend of genres, blurring all the lines. Their is a myriad of sex romping through this book and some of you will find it objectionable. Otherwise, if you're a Tom Robbins fan, you will like this one too.

The Old One

2011-09-09T14:37:00.000-05:00

A Pacific Northwest Horror Story

By Todd Brabander

Smashwords Edition

B005FQN3AI

Submitted by the author

Rating: 3

A stranger passing through town on his way to somewhere else is waylaid by mud slides blocking the roads. With nowhere to go and nothing better to do, he hangs out and collects stories at the local watering hole and all of these stories seem to contain a note of menace, of poorly concealed fear. So, of course, just as in the movies where the teenage girl walks through the unexpectedly open door of her home, when there's a storm outside and all the electricity is out and the phone line has been cut and her boyfriend has mysteriously disappeared, when obviously there is a psychotic serial killer lying in wait, the stranger decides to investigate. He recruits a few of the locals and they get a little ambitious: "...that was what they planned to do; save the world. It sounded simple enough."

This tale is spun with promise by Todd Brabander. It is clearly in the tradition of Stephen King. In my opinion, Mr. Brabander should keep at his writing, especially of the horror genre.

Please visit the author at : http://www.todd13.com/

And Smashwords at: http://www.smashwords.com/

P.S. He did a marvelous job with the ending, just the right tone.

The Redemption of George Baxter Henry

2011-09-09T13:52:00.000-05:00

By Conor Bowman

The Permanent Press 140 pgs

ISBN: 978-1-57962-220-6

Submitted by The Permanent Press

Rating: 3.5

re-demp-tion [re demp shuh`n] noun
1. an act of redeeming or the state of being redeemed.

2. deliverance; rescue.

3. Theology . deliverance from sin; salvation.

4. atonement for guilt.

5. repurchase, as of something sold.

George Baxter Henry is a middle-aged attorney from Boston. He is married to Pearl. Their college-age son Billy is in a band being wooed by record companies. Iska is their 14-year-old daughter. Muriel is Pearl's mother. The entire family is on vacation in a small village in France.

OK, now try this. George is having an affair. Pearl is mostly clueless. Billy is a cocaine addict. Iska is obsessed with apples. Muriel, who discovered George's paramour, hates him. The entire family is on vacation in a small village in France for some bonding in an attempt to save themselves from themselves and each other.

It was refreshing to see an author treat this material as a farce. After all, with this material, Mr. Bowman could have chosen to write just another teleplay for Lifetime. George is not a sympathetic character but he is the center of attention, so you have to put up with him. In fact he's fairly appalling but he is an original voice, often hilarious, and offers no apologies. He is who he is. This book tells the story of how his family learns to put up with him. In the spirit of farce all issues are resolved by the conclusion of this novel, one way or another, and tied up in a neat package.

This book puts me in mind of second chances. Because that's what redemption gives you, right? A second chance.

Check out The Permanent Press for other offerings: http://www.thepermanentpress.com/

P.S. I loved Iska and the apples

Super Freakonomics

2011-08-26T21:08:00.000-05:00

Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Harper Perennial 320 pgs
978-0060889586
From my library
Rating 2

I read Freakonomics, the predecessor of this book, 5 years ago and loved it. It was totally original, never seen anything like it. It was a run-away hit and sold 2 billion copies on 6 planets. Who would've guessed that a book could turn so many people onto economics? So when I saw Super Freakonomics I was excited. I cleared my calendar, rounded up a Dr. Pepper and my smokes, and prepared to be impressed.

It's not that I didn't like this book. There are plenty of interesting and funny anecdotes and head-scratching asides. Unfortunately this book is just more of the same and I probably should have expected that. I would have liked a new spin of some sort, a new dimension, something fresh. It took longer to read this than it should have. It was frequently slow, plodding along. But there were parts I liked.

Such as Chapter 2 "Why Should Suicide Bombers Buy Life Insurance?" It's my favorite. The answer to that question is fascinating. I suggest that you read chapter 2 first, or maybe only chapter 2. This is also the chapter with lots of good points regarding medicine, birth, death, etc. All the biggies.

Chapter 1 is a rehash of statistics and anecdotes about the costs of being a woman: hookers, witches,
Title IX, Realtors, etc. Don't read Chapter 3 "Unbelievable Stories About Apathy and Altruism." It's depressing. I don't remember what Chapters 4 and 5 were about. You might want to pay some attention to the epilogue. There are some disturbing monkeys in there.

I think this book suffers from sky-high expectations. So my final comment on Super Freakonomics is that the authors tried too hard to duplicate the success of the first book. This book could have been as big a success with a different spin. But it's not. So if you're looking for something to read check out the reviews below. There are plenty to choose from.

You can read about the authors at: http://freakonomicsbook.com/

Life

2011-08-24T15:08:00.003-05:00

By Keith Richards
Back Bay Books 576 pgs
978-0316034418
From my library
Rating: 5 - Sheer Perfection

Full disclosure: I am hopelessly in love with Keith Richards

OK, now that you know that I'd like to talk about rock and roll for a minute. Rock and roll is a force of nature. It can and does work radical change on every culture it touches. Remember back in the day when parents were horrified by it and teachers warned of a break down in discipline and preachers were calling rock and roll the devil's music? Everyone was running around hyperventilating and claiming that this music was all about sex and the ruination of western civilization was at hand. I always thought that claim about sex was utterly ridiculous. But you know what? It is about sex. It's sexy, exciting, feverish, sweaty and little dirty (come on you know it.) Hedonism personified. So is Keith Richards.

Mr. Richards is living quite a life and shows no signs of slacking off after some 50 years as a guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and co-founder of the Rolling Stones. He spent his childhood in Dartford, England as an only child. He joined a boys' choir and sang in Westminster Abbey for the queen. Then his voice began to change with puberty and that was all she wrote for that choir. They kicked him out. Keith was devastated. It was a betrayal. And so he turned into a delinquent, sort of, and to this day carries with him a deeply felt contempt for anyone or anything claiming authority. His grandfather Gus gave him a guitar.

Keith discovered rock and roll while listening to the radio late at night in his room under the covers because he was supposed to be asleep. "Heartbreak Hotel." Then he began to hunt down rock and roll and it's predecessor, American blues. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf. He taught himself to play these songs. Then one day he happened into a man on a train platform with a couple of these records under his arm. Mick Jagger. They began to get together to play and Mick knew a couple of other guys and pretty soon they had a band. They played covers of rhythm and blues songs. The Stones played the club circuit where they were very successful. The band had accomplished what Keith and Mick had envisioned: they were a highly successful London rhythm and blues band. Then along came Andrew Oldham. Turns out that old story about his locking Keith and Mick in a kitchen until they came out with a song is true. "As Tears Go By."

And then Toad's Wild Ride.

Keith's personal relationships have been tumultuous, let's say. A decade long relationship with Anita Pallenberg gave him two children, Marlon and Angela. Another baby died as an infant of CIDS. Keith doesn't say much about that and I wouldn't either. His relationship with Anita finally fell apart due to a devastating heroin addiction. Keith finally got clean and Anita couldn't. A few years later he met and fell in love with Patti Hansen, a model in New York. They have been married for almost 30 years and have two daughters, Theodora and Alexandra.

This book is also deeply satisfying. It is candid, the good and the bad, the ugly and the sublime, and as a reader you are grateful for that. Keith is not a tease. My conclusions in the end are that this is a moral man. He knows right and wrong in a cosmic sense. He gives and demands loyalty most of all. And he is a loyal father, son, husband, band mate and friend. In the end the best thing about this book is the style in which it is told. There's a riff behind the words. Life is written as if you were sitting at the kitchen table having a drink, a smoke or two, and telling stories.

Please visit the author: http://www.keithrichards.com/
And http://www.rollingstones.com/

Shadow Tag

2011-08-23T14:19:00.000-05:00

By Louise Erdrich
Harper Perennial 272 pgs
978-0061536106
Rating: 4

This book is excruciating. Also spellbinding. You will be appalled by the mind games being played but you will also come to understand them. At first you won't believe that you would ever play these games. But then you will begin to reflect and wonder if you haven't played some of these games yourself. I enjoyed this book greatly. It is a pleasure to read. Just be forewarned.

Irene and Gil are married and have 3 children. Gil is a successful artist and Irene is supposed to be working on her thesis. Irene has been keeping a journal since their first child was born. There are many of these red bound journals. She has recently discovered that Gil is reading her journal so she has bought another journal, a blue one, and it is the real journal. She has gone so far as to rent a safe deposit box for this blue journal. So far so good but Irene keeps writing in the red journal. She is writing for Gil.

Gil is an almost completely unsympathetic character. He never exhibits any kindness that is not corrupted by self. He so desperately needs to keep this family of his together that he is moved to ever more inspired heights of cruelty. The majority of Gil's work are portraits of Irene in many poses, all graphic images of different stages of body and life. His portraits are an attempt to maintain control over Irene. Almost as if the old Native American belief that a picture takes some of your soul is true. Gil takes pieces of Irene's soul.

Irene seems a much more sympathetic character. But then you realize that you may have made a mistake. There are deep, very dark currents at work in this marriage. Irene begins to resent the portraits Gil has painted of her over the years. She begins to feel those pieces of her soul as they go missing. In big ragged chunks. So since Irene has discovered Gil's disrespect and invasion of her privacy she begins writing fiction for Gil to read.

This is how the plot spins out of control for everyone. As Gil and Irene each struggle for control of the other they take no prisoners. Shadow Tag is sort of a thriller and the tension builds and builds. The twist at the end shocks. And then again it doesn't. You saw this coming even if you didn't. And it tells you all you needed to know about Gil and Irene.

Please visit Louise Erdrich's book store: http://birchbarkbooks.com

*Note that many people believe this book has autobiographical elements. You can take a look at this short bio of Ms. Erdrich's former husband Michael Dorris and make up your own mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dorris

A Visit From the Goon Squad

2011-08-22T15:28:00.002-05:00

Jennifer Egan
Anchor 352 pgs
978-0307477477
From my personal library
Rating: 5 - Sheer Perfection

Goon = Time

And in the immortal lyrics of Don McLean's American Pie: Can music save your mortal soul?

A Visit From the Goon Squad says yes it can. Visiting the present and the past and back again, this infuriating and lovely novel is about the ravages of time and how it affects a cast of characters whose lives swoop and dart and intersect each other at the most unlikely points along the way. Just as importantly this book is about music, rock and roll and how it transports and transcends and heals.

Let's see if I can get this straight. As a teenager Sasha is a drug user and kleptomaniac who is a passionate devotee of music and of Bennie and his high school band. Years later Sasha is an assistant to Bennie who has become a music executive famous for discovering a band called The Conduits and starting his own record label. He was in a high school band with Scotty who has been down and out and possibly a little mental. Years later Scotty becomes a successful musician with Bennie's management. Stephanie is Bennie's ex-wife. She works as a publicist for Dolly who has a daughter named Lulu. Years later Lulu is an assistant to Bennie and hires Alex, who had a one night stand with Sasha, to promote Scotty's first concert in 30 years. Sasha eventually reconnects with Drew, her college boyfriend. They marry and have a daughter who confounds Sasha by keeping a diary using Powerpoint.And any number of various characters.

The question is what happens between A and B? How do you get from back there to right here? How can you tell if the journey was successful? This set of criteria is put forth for your consideration by Jules, Stephanie's journalist brother, while he was in prison:

How to evaluate the relative success or failure of a life: "Marriage or lack thereof, children or lack thereof, professional success or lack thereof, healthy bank account or lack thereof, contact with childhood friends or lack thereof, ability to sleep peacefully at night or lack thereof, fulfillment of sprawling, loopy youthful ambitions or lack thereof, ability to fight off bouts of terror and despair or lack thereof..."

Now these are all good questions. But can any of us come out in the black on all of them? At any given time? I don't think so. And neither do these characters. But they do get from A to B and they are moving along to C D E.....

If you'd like to visit the author: http://jenniferegan.com

In the Land of Believers

2011-07-24T21:58:00.000-05:00

An Outsider's Extraordinary Journey Into the Heart of the Evangelical Church

By Gina Welch

Picador 333 pgs

978-0-8050-8337-8

Rating: 3.5

Gina Welch writes "...And you're never more like Christ than when you're forgiving the unforgivable."

She also writes "...You can see anything you want if you've already decided what you're looking at."

These are my favorite lines from Gina Welch's cultural experiment. Ms. Welch was raised a secular Jew by a single mother in Berkeley, California. She is a Yale graduate. She teaches English at George Washington University. She is a practicing atheist. I just wrote that last sentence and I'm not sure what it means. All of which I point out simply to say that she is not a typical attendee at church. And certainly not an evangelical Christian church. And never a member of Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church (TRBC.) But she was. She went undercover in the temple of the Moral Majority in Lynchburg, Virginia in the guise of a seeker.

Ms. Welch successfully pitched the book idea for her to go incognito into the land of Evangelical Christians and return to tell the tale. Which I find a little weird because after all they aren't vegetable cult worshippers or something. Nevertheless, Believers is the story of her experiences at TRBC. Ms. Welch spent years at this endeavor. She was baptized; learned to appreciate Christian rock; studied her bible; joined the singles ministry; made friends; even went on a mission trip to Alaska.

Gina Welch surprised me. This book is not the book I thought it would be. Ms. Welch expected to dislike the people she met. She expected to dislike the teachings. She expected to dislike the theology and doctrine. She expected to disagree with the politics. Ms. Welch also surprised herself. Her beliefs did not change fundamentally. But she made friends. She came to enjoy the sense of belonging. She felt the concern of people who genuinely practiced what they preached. She came to appreciate the teachings of a historical Jesus; a man whose values already meshed with hers.

And then she had to confess to her pastor and her new friends that she was an impostor. This is the story of Ms. Welch's exploration; her answers; and the questions yet satisfied.

This is a good book that could have been better. Ms. Welch is good at description: of people, places and sensations. I got bogged down now and then. The pace picked up during the Alaska mission trip. I found some of the claims of guilt feelings over her dishonesty to be unmoving. But some of these people were a pleasure to spend time with and know that they exist and are doing good in the world.

I'll include this again because I like it. "...And you're never more like Christ than when you're forgiving the unforgivable."

Steplings a novel

2011-07-21T10:30:00.001-05:00

Coming September 2011 from Texas Christian University Press
By C.W. Smith
TCU Press 268 pg
978-0-87565-437-9
Submitted by Taylor Made Press
Rating: 4

You know when some horrible accident occurs and you can't look away? Something that commands your reluctant horrified attention? Like a train wreck, plane crash, volcanic eruption? Meet Jason Sanborn. He is that train.

But it's not as if he doesn't have his reasons: his mother died of cancer; his father fell off the wagon after 15 sober years and married a woman he met in AA; he now has an eleven-year-old stepsister; he has a court appearance coming up on an assault charge; he dropped out of high school and his beloved Lisa is going off to college in Austin.

Critical mass is achieved when Jason gets a Dear John letter from Lisa. He throws a few things in his pack grabs his guitar and takes off to hitch to Austin. As he is walking out the door his know-it-all stepsister Emily shows up with her own pack. She is painfully unhappy with her mother for moving her to Mesquite and away from the father she adores in Austin. Jason and Emily begin their adventures together hitching their way across Texas. Meanwhile all hell breaks loose at home involving Amber Alerts and TV news vans parked across the street as Jason's stepmother accuses him of kidnapping. So now the police are looking for them.

This novel takes off during the second half. The characters take on vivid personality and the relationships deepen in a delightfully believable way. We follow Jason as he desperately tries to contact Lisa and Emily discovers that her father is not the saint she had believed. The two make page-turning strides toward responsibility and maturity as they learn what an awesome task it is to take responsibility for each other.

For more information please take a look at the following:

www.facebook.com/Steplingsthenovel

http://www.cwsmiththeauthor.com/

Saving Max

2010-09-26T18:22:00.002-05:00

by Antoinette van Heugten

Mira 375 pages

978-0-7783-2963-3
Submitted by Phoenix&Phoenix
Rating 4.5

Have you ever wondered how far you would go to save your child?

Danielle Parkman is an up-and-coming litigator in a New York law firm which expects much from her. She is also a single mother of Max, a teenager with Aspergers Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. Max has recently become more physically violent and Danielle has caught him using drugs. What has prompted the emergency appointment with Max's psychiatrist is the journal Danielle has found under his bed with detailed suicide plans. The psychiatrist recommends that Danielle commit Max to Maitland, an internationally renowned hospital.

Shortly after Max has been admitted he begins to exhibit psychotic and violent behavior. His treatment team holds a meeting with Danielle to tell her of Max's diagnosis. The diagnosis is grave and Danielle doesn't believe it; this is not the Max she's ever known. So she sets about to prove the diagnosis wrong. Then a few days later Danielle finds Max huddled in the corner of another boy's room. The boy is dead and Max is covered in blood and clutching the murder weapon.

Danielle, barred from her son and charged with a few felonies, sets out with the help of her attorney and his private investigator to prove that her son is innocent. She adds another few felonies to her record as she slips her ankle bracelet and travels across the country to gather evidence against the person she is convinced is the real murderer.

This is an enjoyable book, a good read. The plot is deftly executed. The action begins on page 1 and never flags. The resolution is in doubt right up until the last few pages. The characters ring true except possibly parts of Danielle's defense attorney but not other parts, so I'll let you readers make that call. It is my opinion that the thriller genre loses something due to the obligatory romance. I usually find these to be extraneous and a gnat you want to slap. Mercifully, this one is quickly relegated to the back burner so we can get on with the story. The thriller parts as well as the courtroom parts are believable and well drawn. I read for hours at a time to know how it would end. You will too.

I look forward to more from this promising author. I give this a 4.5 on a scale of 5.

Antoinette van Heugten, author of Saving Max, is certainly qualified to write this story. She has two autistic boys, one of which has been hospitalized, and Ms. van Heugten also had problems accepting her son's diagnosis. She too was an attorney. For an interview with the author click on this link http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/44014-a-parent-s-worst-nightmare-pw-talks-with-antoinette-van-heugten.html

2010-09-23T16:08:00.000-05:00

Banned Books Week 2010, Sept 25 - Oct 2!

The main event will be held in Chicago. Please check out the web site http://bannedbooksweek.org/index.html

Everyone please read a banned book this week - it'll be good for your soul

2010-09-23T15:59:00.002-05:00

Let's All Celebrate the National Book Fest, Washington DC, Sept 25!

What Would Keith Richards Do?

2010-09-21T22:12:00.000-05:00

On Decisions:

"It was one of those moments where you have to make a decision: take it on the ribs or take a shot to the temple on the desk. All part of life's rich pageant."

-regarding his fall in his library, where he was suddenly attacked by, and buried under, the Encyclopedia Brittanica

Truck a love story

2010-09-12T20:08:00.000-05:00

by Michael Perry

Harper Perennial pages 281

ISBN 978-0-06-057117-7

Rating: 3.5

Michael Perry is an interesting man. He leads the life that so many nameless drones in the city think they would trade a left arm for: bucolic, picturesque, wholesome. I'm sorry if that seems somehow snide because Michael's life is all of those things. It certainly is a good life. Although I can't shake the thought that his life is a special order from NPR. And he has been on All Things Considered, more than once.

The author returned home from the city after twelve years. Those drones should take note right here: Michael can work from home. He is a writer so he can work with a modem. He has an impressive catalogue: Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time; Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg; Truck: a Love Story; Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting; Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets and Gatemouth's Gator; and Big Rigs, Elvis &the Grand Dragon Wayne and Why They Killed Big Boy and other stories, collections of his essays.

I find this book difficult to review. I think it's not necessary to review the book because I can just describe the author's life. It's the same thing. Michael Perry's writing is funny and warm and certainly evocative of small town America. But it is sentimental, sometimes a little precious. In this book the truck stands background for a year of his life. During that year Michael obsesses over his backyard garden, leaves for book tours, reports on various family members, saves people from house fires and car wrecks because he is a member of the volunteer fire and rescue, hunts deer and gets married. You are all correct that these things are usually mundane, with maybe the exception of the married part or maybe not. It's Michael Perry's talent and skills of observation that make the reader listen to see what he will say.

In addition to the list of books above Perry does live reading events. He is also a member of a band whose music is a mix of straight-up twang and churchly harmonies, according to his web site http://www.sneezingcow.com/ .
The first album is titled HeadWinded - Michael Perry and the Long Beds and the second is Tiny Pilot - Michael Perry and the Long Beds.

I didn't figure out how to rate this one so I am giving it a 3.5

What Would Keith Richards Do?

2010-09-01T12:30:00.002-05:00

On Inner Demons:

"He's still around. Without the dope, we have a bit more of a chat these days. It's been more of a truce."

Travels With Charley - In Search of America

2010-08-14T21:57:00.000-05:00

by: John Steinbeck

A Bantam Book July 1962

9780142000700

From my personal library
Rating: 3.5

First off, Charley is a dog. You would think that John Steinbeck would have a manly dog, a lab, a retriever or maybe a shepard? Well you would be wrong. Charley is a poodle and he is blue.

Steinbeck decided that he didn't know his country anymore. He felt he was writing about things he no longer knew so he decided to take a road trip around the country. He put a camper on a 3/4 ton truck and stocked food, water, plenty of liquor and dog food. He vowed to stay out of large cities, he would sleep in camp grounds, trailer parks and next to various streams. When he decided he was ripe enough he would spend a night in a motel for the shower.

Steinbeck began his trip in Connecticut, made a great loop around through Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, missed Minnesota due to a pathological fear of traffic, North Dakota, Montana which he claimed as his great love, a short dogleg to Yellowstone which he pronounced nature gone nuts,
Washington where he did not recognize the Seattle of his experience, a sweet little city of hills and gardens beside a beautiful harbor, with its freeways and tract housing, thankfully Oregon with its 300 foot redwoods was still a religious experience, California where he was born and raised, Texas (disclaimer: I am a native Texan but notice that I do use quotes to bolster my snobbishness) where he discovered that "Texas is a nation in every sense of the word," and "Texas is the only state that came into the Union by Treaty and the only state that retains the ability to secede at will." 'Nuff said, and finally New Orleans suffering the birth pangs of a sea change in race relations.

He met all sorts of people: a submariner, various storekeepers, farmers, crop pickers, waitresses, camp ground owners, police officers of several varieties, cooks, actors, veterinarians, barkeeps, ranchers, reporters, preachers, and Republicans. Steinbeck invited several of these people into the camper for a drink or two and good conversation.

A couple of things made me stop and consider and make a note to look at later. Here they are:

Prescient environmentalist: "...I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness - chemical wastes in the river, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move."

On nostalgia for the good 'ole days: "Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched
only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, sudden death from uknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance." So when someone waxes nostalgic you should consider the options.

I recommend this book for John Steinbeck fans. There are portions where the story tends to lag some but not for long. Others may find it entertaining if you like travel books or Americana.

2010-08-04T14:50:00.000-05:00

My apologies to family, friends and fans for my lack of posts recently. I have had medical issues that demanded pretty much all of my time. As I continue in this process my posts may be tardy but I will try to post when I can. Thanks everybody - Texas Book Lover

What Would Keith Richards Do?

2010-07-27T20:18:00.000-05:00

On Identity:

"You've gotta be cool with yourself. If you've gotta think about being cool, you ain't cool."

2010-07-27T20:15:00.001-05:00

I just want everyone to know that you can now find me on LibraryThing. My handle (does anyone remember CB radios? Breaker-breaker 19) is TexasBookLover. Please check it out. Thanks to all! http://www.librarything.com/

What Would Keith Richards Do?

2010-07-23T21:37:00.003-05:00

"If they hadn't come smashing through my front door, no one would've known what example I was setting." - on being a bad example for society

The Glass Rainbow: a Dave Robicheaux Novel

2010-07-18T13:10:00.003-05:00

by James Lee Burke

Simon & Schuster July 2010

978-1-4391-2829-9

From my personal library
Rating: 5 of 5 - sheer perfection

Have you ever smelled the magnolias, tasted the gumbo, seen the Spanish moss strung like Christmas garlands in the live oaks, heard the rain play on a tin roof, felt the damp salt breeze off the Gulf of Mexico? And the fleeting visions in the corner of your eye are indeed ghosts of an antebellum past, in the land of Marie Laveau. James Lee Burke's gifts are such that you will experience all of these things right there in your own home or in the coffee shop or on the evening train, even if you have never made it to New Orleans (NuOrlans) or south to New Iberia Parish.

Mr. Burke is the recipient of two Edgars (Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel of the year), awarded by the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), the only author to win more than one. In 2009 he was named a "Grand Master" by the MWA. He also received the Louisiana Writer Award presented by the now Governor of Louisiana Kathleen Blanco. Mr. Burke is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Bread Loaf Fellow and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow (NEA). The Lost Get Back Boogie, his fourth novel, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He also taught creative writing at Wichita State University.

The Glass Rainbow is the best James Lee Burke novel, the best Dave Robicheaux tale. The novel begins with the investigation of the deaths of seven girls and young women. There is a list of suspects: an heir to a plantation fortune turned author of historical novels; an ex-con turned author of a novel about his prison time (one of those people made famous by an affluent "sophisticated" readership living vicariously on illicit thrills); a swamp-wise dealer/pimp/entrepreneur who preys expertly on desperate people with dreams of a significant life; a nouveaux-riche millionaire and his wife with old money pretensions, under investigation by the IRS and the SEC.

Dave Robicheaux, New Iberia Parish Sheriff Detective, Vietnam vet and recovering alcoholic who harbors no illusions about his fellow man, is conducting the investigation into the young women's deaths. As always, best friend and private investigator Clete Purcel, Vietnam Vet, disgraced former cop and alcoholic with a death wish (who is somehow adorable despite these things), has his back (sometimes in the form of ag assault and maybe justifiable homicide.)

The extra ingredient in this mix is the presence of Dave's daughter Alafair, home for the summer between college and law school. She is also writing a novel (there's a lot of writing going on here) and becomes involved with Kermit Abelard, aforementioned plantation heir from our suspect list.
This brew comes to a boil with results that I did not see coming. I kept counting the pages because I did not want it to end. This novel changes everything. Nothing in Dave and Clete's world will ever be the same. By the climax of The Glass Rainbow I was holding my breath with tears in my eyes.

What Would Keith Richards Do?

2010-07-14T19:08:00.003-05:00

Keith Richards on Women:

"There's nothing more disturbing than two chicks whispering to each other."

Mia Takes a Nap

2010-07-08T20:53:00.002-05:00

Mia Meets the Neighbors

2010-07-08T19:28:00.002-05:00

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

2010-07-07T20:14:00.006-05:00

By Timothy Egan

Houghton Mifflin Company

340 pgs

ISBN 978-0-618-34697-4

From my personal library

Rating: This is my first 5 of 5 rating and I am so excited!

The Worst Hard Time won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2006 and this award is well deserved. The New York Times said of this book "This is can't-put-it-down history." and I heartily agree. The Dust Bowl spanned the years of 1931-1939 and effected parts of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. Meteorologists still consider this to be the nation's worst prolonged environmental disaster. Drought contributed to this giant mess, however drought was not unusual in the High Plains. The ruination of the plains was not due to climate change. It was due almost entirely to the actions of man.

The High Plains were considered to be the best grassland in the world. In 1804 Lewis and Clark pronounced this land to be "well calculated for the sweetest and most nourishing hay." The Comanche, the Lords of the Plains, lived and hunted there. They chased on horseback the great bison herds over the plains and used them for everything from dinner to teepee hides, used the stomachs as canteens and the tendons for bow strings. This land was perfect for grazing antelope and buffalo. They fed on the grasses but left the stubble and root systems intact. This allowed the grasses to hold down the soil so that they endured and came back each year for millenia.

The settler farmers changed all that. In 1820 Stephen Long, a government engineer, explorer and surveyor, declared this land "...almost wholly uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture..." His advice was heeded by no one. The federal government removed the Comanche from the land (as they always did - after breaking a treaty) to free up the land for farmers. The farmers used their plows and then tractors to turn the earth under, pulling up the grass. The farmers planted wheat during a time when Russia was not exporting wheat so the price was sky high. Then Russia began exporting again and the price of wheat dropped like a rock. To make up for the lower price the farmers plowed yet more acreage which further destroyed the grasses and set the topsoil free. I am a native Texan and I know all about how the wind blows on the High Plains: 24/7 and so it stole the unprotected topsoil and left behind dust. It is estimated that 80,000,000 acres of soil disappeared. Wheat won't grow in dust and neither did anything else.

Then the dust storms began. They sometimes topped out at 10,000 feet. The National Weather Service had no name for the phenomena. They weren't just simple dust storms or sand storms. No one had ever seen anything like it. The farmers called the dust storms "black blizzards," so named because it was frequently dark as night at high noon. The many effects of these blizzards were sometimes brutal. The storms generated static electricity so strong it shorted out cars and sparked with human contact such as handshakes and hugs, and electrified barbed wire fences. They caused dust pneumonia which was sometimes fatal. The flying dust blinded people and animals alike. Farm animals died from internal suffocation and starvation because their stomachs were full of dust.

The people tried all sorts of things to deal with the dust. They hung wet sheets over doors and windows and mud brown water ran in rivulets to the floor. When it was really bad they soaked towels in water and put them over their heads - inside. The Red Cross handed out face masks and people applied Vaseline to their nostrils in an effort to trap the dust before it got into their lungs. Homes had to be swept continuously because the dust always found a way in. It sifted down the walls like flour; often you needed a shovel to dig out of your home.

When Franklin D.Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 he thought the desperate situation of the farmers in the High Plains should be treated as a matter of relief. He dispatched Hugh Bennett, the director of a new agency within the Interior Department, to assess the situation and report back. When Bennett returned with his report FDR realized the extent of the disaster. The government put in place several programs to try to restore the balance in the High Plains. Among other things, they planted trees and grass. They bought up land and livestock. They paid farmers not to plow.

There are places in the High Plains that have yet to recover from the damage done to them by human hubris. But there is good news. There are now three national grasslands in the High Plains run by the Forest Service. The grass has come back in part thanks to the restoration and conservation efforts put in place by FDR. The antelope are back and there is a plan underway to reintroduce buffalo as has been done in other parts of the plains.

The Worst Hard Time is history at its most readable. It is never dry and there are no lists of dates. It's a collection of personal stories of the families that lived through this time that made me want to read this book as I would normally read a thriller: cover to cover in a couple of days. For those of you who don't like histories I recommend that you give this a try. I give it a 5 of 5: sheer perfection.

Bonus: The federal government's Resettlement Administration commissioned a film in 1936 to play for audiences in the rest of the US in order to draw public support for their policies. The result was The Plow That Broke the Plains starring a reluctant Bam White whose story is recounted in The Worst Hard Time. You can see the film (25 minutes) here:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1119800966783091956#

What Would Keith Richards Do?

2010-06-30T22:11:00.004-05:00

On God: "You never know what the sound's gonna be like in those stadiums. You're relying on God, who joins the band every night in one form or another."

What Would Keith Richards Do?

2010-06-25T21:22:00.004-05:00

On Inspirations and Influences:

"'A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a lop-bam-boom.' For me, the world then went from black-and-white to Technicolor. Just like that - there it is! That's as concise as I can put it. It's the best bit of English I've ever heard."

Sizzling Sixteen (Stephanie Plum Series #16)

2010-06-25T21:20:00.004-05:00

By Janet Evanovich

Published June 2010 by St. Martin's Press

309 pages

ISBN 9780312383305

Rating - 4 Really liked this one

Read this in approximately 24 hours and really enjoyed it. The last couple of installments in this series seemed to be lacking and increasingly preposterous. With Sizzling Sixteen Ms. Evanovich is back in good form. That's not to say there's no preposterousnous (that can't be a word) here.
Stephanie Plum is up to her neck in crocodiles, of course, except in this case it's an alligator.
Steph has inherited a lucky bottle from her Uncle Pip and spends the rest of the book trying to decide if it's good luck or bad luck. We all know the sorts of situations she gets into so the bottle couldn't possibly be good luck. On the other hand, she always manages to pull it out in the end so maybe that's the good part. Steph really needs some mega-good luck in this one. Her cousin Vinnie, owner of the bail bonds office and her boss, is missing. Vinnie has been kidnapped on account of owing oodles of money to his bookie. Steph attempts to hunt down a couple of regular skips with predictable results but spends most of this book trying to rescue Vinnie and pay his ransom. She enlists the help of Connie, the bail bonds office manager, who is really good with stink bombs, and Lula, file clerk, former 'ho and Steph's right-hand woman, who is really good with doughnuts.
Ranger, mystery stud, and Joe Morelli, unmysterious stud, reprise their roles here as well. Ranger plays a larger role in this novel and is atypically loquacious for him. This is a surprise and there is a bigger surprise in store on this subject. As for Morelli, he does his usual thing, shows up right after one of Steph's escapades to check on her. Can anyone count the number of destroyed vehicles in her wake? I am left wondering how long Ms. Evanovich can keep up the tension between Steph and these two men.
In the end, rescue comes from odd and unexpected places and we find out what's up with that lucky bottle.

BONUS!! Exciting news for Stephanie Plum fans! One For the Money, the first book in the series, is being made into a movie starring Katherine Heigel. Of course, the fun is over for all of you (and this includes me) who were making a game of casting the movie...

http://www.themovieinsider.com/m1037/one-for-the-money/

What Would Keith Richards Do?

2010-06-24T19:50:00.005-05:00

On Fashion and Style:

"I love books ... a well-dressed mind!"

How To Talk To A Widower

2010-06-24T16:15:00.005-05:00

Jonathan Tropper

Bantam Dell A Division of Random House, Inc.

Published July 2007, 341 pages

ISBN 978-0-385-33891-2

From my personal library
Rating: 4 - Really liked this read

"I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she's gone. And so am I."
This is Doug's mantra. He is 29 years old. He had been married to Hailey for 2 years when she died in a plane crash. Hailey has been dead for a year now and Doug is trying to cope with himself, her house in suburban Westchester and her teenage son Russ, both of which he inherited. He is pretty much making a hash of things. He self-medicates: drinks a lot, smokes a little weed, eats nothing but frozen artery-clogging food and hides from friends and family.
Then one day his twin sister Claire arrives on his lawn and announces her plans to patch him up and push him out into the rest of his life. Doug reluctantly agrees to the plan.
What happens after this is usually hilarious and often bittersweet, involving
Russ, Doug's boss and job, his family, a few blind dates, a wedding and a shooting. But relax, the comedy is not irresponsible or disrespectful. Doug does not suddenly snap out of his depression but evolves realistically over the course of another year. This is a satisfying read. You don't have to work too hard but there's still plenty of substance. It will leave a smile on your face.

What Would Keith Richards Do?

2010-06-23T19:38:00.004-05:00

"If I choose one, I'll be killing all my other babies."
-when asked to name his favorite song

What Would Keith Richards Do?

2010-06-22T19:05:00.005-05:00

I recently read a book by Jessica Pallington West about Keith ("Keef") Richards, guitarist, songwriter, singer, record producer and co-founder of the Rolling Stones; known to the world as "The Human Riff." The book was mainly a collection of quotes and a timeline of Keith's life and times. As such I didn't think the book lent itself to reviewing. Instead I have decided to post a quote each day featuring the wit and wisdom from one of rock's greatest personalities.

I have been looking for reasons to do this on my blog and have come up with the following: Keith is a Lord Byron figure. He is a bookworm and collector. Photos of his library have been featured in magazines. He has declared that "... the public library is a great equaliser." Keith has also been known to leave favorite volumes bedside for his guests. I am looking forward to his autobiography, titled "Life," which will be published in October.
Also, I have a serious crush and that, my dears, is all the reason I need. So here we go, our first Keith Richards quote. On Creativity and Invention:

"A painter's got a canvas. The writer's got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence."

Vacation Pix

2010-06-22T11:49:00.002-05:00

Excuses Excuses

2010-06-21T17:56:00.002-05:00

Hey everyone - I'm back! I have been on vacation for the last 10 days and made no updates to this blog the entire time. Caleb and I went to my parent's condo on Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. We met Joshua and Kiersten, his wife, at the lake and had a wonderful time. We boated, fished, jet skied, tubed, skied, etc. And of course the ladies went shopping! Leaving was sad because it will be the last time we see Josh before he leaves for Afghanistan. I'll keep everyone apprised of his time in country beginning in September. Anyway, I am back now and I have a review that I am currently working on and should post in the next few days. I hope everyone is having a great summer solstice! Michelle

American Salvage

2010-06-03T21:36:00.004-05:00

Stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Published 2009 167 pages

Wayne State University Press Detroit

ISBN 978-0-8143-3412-6
Rating: 3 - Pretty good

American Salvage, a product of the Made in Michigan Writers Series at Wayne State University Press Detroit, is a collection of fourteen short stories written by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

Each of these stories is set in down-and-out rural Michigan. Most of the characters are damaged by poverty. Some of these families are laboring under poverty so exhaustive that it seemingly offers no hope for a better life. Simple things can be a crisis for these families: the gas bill, dinner, school shoes for a child. These things rise to the level of crisis because the characters cannot conceive of the long term because the short term necessarily commands all of their effort and attention. For the most part this is all they have ever known. They believe that they are doing all they can but not gaining any ground. Consequently, they fall into a belief that they are at the mercy of "others," whether it be the family, the boss or the government (Y2K!) They feel powerless against these forces.

This is best illustrated by a young girl from The Inventor. "She has long imagined her future spreading out before her, gloriously full of love and discovery; she has been waiting for the future to arrive like a plate full of fancy appetizers in a restaurant, like a lush bunch of roses placed in her arms, like the biggest birthday cake with the brightest candles, baked and lit by people who love her." This is a response and an accommodation of poverty; not imagining she could go out and create a future for herself, difficult as it would surely be.

My two favorite things:

This is my favorite quote from the collection: "It landed with a resounding clang on the pile of catalytic converters- mostly they were dirty and rusted from the slush and mud and road salt, but each of their bodies contained a core of platinum." This is from King Cole's American Salvage. The character in this scene performs back-breaking labor outside in all types of weather, for little money, in an auto salvage yard, but he has plans and determination and resolve to make a better life for himself. This may sound odd to compare human potential to a catalytic converter but I take the quote as a metaphor. Some of us don't look like much on the outside but there's a valuable core of promise.

My favorite character is Jill from Boar Taint. She has discovered a way of coping with her economic circumstances. She indulges herself by buying gourmet chocolate bars one at a time. She keeps them in her underwear drawer and breaks off one square each night until the bar is gone. Then she goes out and buys another. This small act says that Jill still believes she is valuable; that she does indeed have a core of platinum.

American Salvage has won an impressive number of awards: 2010 Michigan Notable Awards, 2010 National Book Critic Circle Book Award, Stuart and Venice Gross Award for Excellence in Literature from SVSU, 2009 National Book Award Finalist, and the 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year Award. If you are a fan of realist American regionalism (as I am) and a fan of short stories (ditto) then you may find many things to like in this collection. However, if you are not a fan of these genres then you should probably pass by American Salvage. It is not for the faint of heart.

I give this a 3- pretty good.

And remember that love does not conquer meth!!

Storm Prey by John Sandford

2010-06-02T19:31:00.006-05:00

Published May 2010 408 pages
Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
ISBN 9781101187715
From my personal library (read in Sony Reader format) Rating: 4 - Really liked this
Storm Prey is number twenty in John Sanford's Prey series. Rules of Prey, published in 1989, is the first book in the series. It introduced our hero Lucas Davenport, a Minneapolis cop. Davenport is my favorite character in the mystery genre. He's intelligent, funny, sexy, fearless and perfectly smooth. Davenport is a man of appetites.
Storm Prey was published 20 years after Rules of Prey and finds Davenport promoted to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. His wife is Weather Karkinnen - the most fabulous name ever, yes? She is a plastic surgeon and saved Davenport's life a few books ago by performing an emergency tracheotomy in the middle of nowhere on a frigid Minnesota winter night.
Storm Prey begins with the robbery of a pharmacy in the hospital where Weather practices. As the robbers are making their escape from the parking garage Weather pulls in and gets a good look at them. The robbers decide to eliminate the only witness. Lucas calls in all of the old characters, Shrake, Del, Virgil Flowers, Jenkins, to protect Weather. At this point the book takes off and the suspense doesn't let up as Lucas and his merry men take off in pursuit of the bad guys.
There is a subplot involving an operation to separate conjoined twins in which Weather is a key member of the surgical team. I'm not sure why this subplot is necessary. I found it a little distracting. The author is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and obviously did his homework regarding the separation of conjoined twins. A little research of my own finds that Sandford published a book in 1989 titled Plastic Surgery: The Kindest Cut. Perhaps this is where he got his inspiration.
My favorite thing about these books, besides my crush on Davenport, is the dialogue. It is quick, funny, smart and fun to read. Sandford describes the robbers as "hard men." Spare but enough. In the context of that scene you know exactly what he means. Another hallmark of the Prey books is the bad guys. They are multi-dimensional. They have pasts and personalities and you can see the pathology of their thinking. The author spent a month at a prison in Minnesota interviewing inmates. He came to the conclusion, stated in an interview, that most criminals turn out ultimately to be mundane; nothing special, although they would dearly like to believe they are.
I highly recommend this book (and the entire Prey series) for fans of quality mysteries. And for what it's worth I would read the Prey series again and that's very rare for me.
Also, as a cool tidbit, I have included a link to a list of Lucas Davenport's favorite songs from Sandford's web site. Enjoy! http://www.johnsandford.org/prey16x1.html