More books?

The finally tally for the summer is 36 books, not counting the two laydowns. The winners of the summer are:

Best Fiction:
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowlings
Until I Find You by John Irving
Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin -- winner of the "surprise of the summer" award

Best Non-Fiction:
109 East Palace by Jenet Connan
Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl
Unforgiveable Blackness by Geoffrey C. Ward

I've enjoyed doing the reviews and will probably continue. It'd be nice, though, if anybody's out there. If you're still with me, post a comment so I know you're there. Would be nice to know if you've tried anything off the list and what you thought of it.

Back to Texas

Well, that's it for the summer. Tomorrow its back to the heat and humidity. It's hard to relocate but I guess we're ready except for the weather. Last night, we walked down to the village for a hamburger. I know its August, but we were both in jackets. Not sure it was even 60 degrees at 6:30 in the evening.

We're driving back and tomorrow will, in the course of a few hours, drive home the difference. We'll leave first thing in the morning -- it'll probably be 50 degrees at most. By the time we get out of the card for lunch, usually in Pueblo (an awful place), it'll be almost a 100 degrees! Oh, well. The upside is that college football season starts in a week!

Magic Street

Magic Street by Orson Scott Card. Really pretty mediocre. Too bad because Card is a great writer. His Ender series and the Alvin Marker series are terrific. This book is billed on the cover as the "long-awaited contemporary fantasy novel". Guess people won't be quite as eager for the next one.

Card, a middle-aged, white, Mormon, has tried to write a fantasy novel completely populated by middle-class blacks. It never particularly rings true in spite of his trying to throw a lot of ebonics in. The story is a pretty standard good-vs-evil battle. The premise is that Oberon, Titania and Puck are all real - the king and queen of faeries and their side kick. Oberon has been bound underground for ages and is finally escaping in to the "real" world. Its been before -- and far better.

Skip this one. If you want to read good fantasy stick with others that I've talked about this summer - Rowling, Coifer or Barker.

Freddy and Fredericka

Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin -- this turned in to one of the more pleasant surprises of the summer. The "book jacket summary" is that Freddy and Fredericka are the Prince and Princess of Wales -- he's got big ears and is quiet and scholarly, if a little goofy, while she's gorgeous in spite of her oversized nose, fashionable if a little spacey. Sound familiar? The pair get in to so much inadvertant trouble that Freddy's succession to the throne is called in to question. To determine if he's really king material, the two of them are sent on a quest -- they're parachuted in to New Jersey wearing nothing but rabbit fur bikinis and flight caps. There task is to conquer the United States and bring them back in to the fold of the British Empire.

As a premise, this one sounded a little suspect but, in spite of the books lenght (over 550 pages), I decided to give it a try. It had some great satirical possibilities and might be fun. Helprin has a good reputation as a "serious" writer -- in particular, a book called Winter's Tale.

The early parts of the book don't even try for satire. This is slapstick comedy at its best. It's hard to make slapstick work in print, but I found myself laughing hysterically at both throw aways and elaboarate scenarios. One example of each and then I'll leave to you. A throwaway -- of course, Freddy has to have had a torrid affair with an older woman. Here her name is Lady Boylinghotte. One elaborate and hysterical scene sends Prince Freddy chasing through a village after Fredericka's little dog. As part of this scene, he runs right through a wedding party in the village screaming the dogs name. The dog was named after Fredericka's oriental nutritionist (who died of malnutrition). The nutritionist and dog's name is Pha Kew.

In spite of all the laugh-out-loud funniness in this book, this, in the end turns out to be very different. Not to sound un-macho, but this book turns out to be just plain sweet. Its about self-sufficiency, nobility and, most of all, about love. Watching Freddy prove his worth to be king makes for a sensational and surprising read. You'll never think about Prince Charles the same again.

Two Trains Running

Two Trains Running by Andrew Vachss -- I'm still trying to figure what this book was about. It started as a reasonably interesting story about a small town crime boss under pressure from Mafia outsiders. The local boss was an interesting character -- a wheel chair bound polio victim having a lifelong incestuous affair with his sister. The outsiders are led by a violent, lower tier Mafia member sent from Chicago. Good potential.

By the time you get to the end, though, Vachss has introduced several local teenage gangs, some mysterious government agents (one of whom is nuts), the Klan, a gay neo-Nazi, an underground nascent black power group (including an old man who ran with Marcus Garvey) and a never identified group of gun runners. An these are just he primary plots.

Ultimately, even though the book is well written, there's two much confusions to make this a high-ranking novel.

What the Dormouse Said

What the Dormouse Said -- How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff. This one's going to have a pretty narrow audience, which is a shame since it's the very well told story of the birth of an industry. This is one of a number of books that do an excellent job of documenting the events and, more importantly, the people that created today's world of personal computers and the Internet. See the end of this review for a list of the other good ones in this category.

Markoff's not suprising premise is that the personal computer grew, in part, out of the dramatic shifts in society that came via the 60s counterculture and, in particular, all of the things that were going on in the San Francisco Bay area at the time. He weaves together highly technical stories from SAIL (the Stanford Artificial Inteligence Lab) and Doug Englebart's Augment project, with tales of comunes, sit-ins, anti-war protests and LSD trips. At the time, computers were still huge, expensive, "behind-the-wall" things that only an elite priesthood actually got to touch and use. In addition, the future of computer science was assumed to be in artificial intelligence -- using computers to replace human thought. Both of these flew in the face of the "power to the people" attitude of the times. Eventually, the ethos of the hippie world (and lot of LSD trips for the engineers led fairly directly to capitalizing on the continuous increase in computer power to produce a "one computer per person" world. You can even see, in things like The Whole Earth Catalog, the seeds of the Internet. You definitely see right in front of you in this book, the start of the ongoing "information should be free" versus "information should be a business" that we are still fighting today.

I also have to admit that I enjoy books like this because I know so many of the people that are talked about. I've met many of the characters in the book and a few, like J.C.R. Licklider and Larry Roberts, I knew quite well. I guess you know you're getting along when you remember the things in history books. It's good to know, though, that a lot of these things that are viewed as important history were actually things I was a part of. In reading this book, I, for the first time, have a little regret about leaving MIT for UT after my freshman year. There was an amazing amount of hinge-point innovation that happend in the last years of the 60s that I missed by not being in Cambridge.

If you're in to computers at all or you just have an interest in how today's world became what it is, I really recommend reading this book, along with as many of the following as you can stand:

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop -- I especially like this one since its about one of my mentors - J.C.R. Licklider -- one of the unsung heroes of the information age.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner -- the origins of the Internet.

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik -- great stories about Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) a place where all kinds of things where invented.

No Country For Old Men

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy with his first really popular book, All the Pretty Horses, established himself as one of the best current writers but one with very narrow appeal. This book is terrific, but it continues in the mold of McCarthy's other fiction and most readers won't find it appealing. There are two reasons for this -- his style and his underlying subject matter.

His style is unusual for a modern writer and can be very disconcerting and, to some, offputting. It can best be summed up as "choppy". McCarthy is a big fan of short, often incomplete sentences and, while this makes his book a quick read, it can make the narrative hard to follow. He's also a big fan of unquoted dialog, making it hard to distinguish his voice from his characters. Finally, from a style point of view, he is prone to off stage action. You'll be reading about characters and then, in the next section of the book, discover that something major has happened to them while you weren't looking. You have to pay close attention.

The underlying subject matter in all the McCarthy books that I've read is violence. His books are full of gruesome murders and other acts of violence. In that, he's not that dissimilar to other modern authors. The difference here is that, while not nearly as graphic as somebody like Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs), the violence in McCarthy is described casually, nonchalantly. It a lot of ways this makes it far more disturbing.

The basic plot line in No Country for Old Men is that Moss, a young hunter, stumbles on the aftermath of a pitched gun battle that is clearly a Texas drug deal gone bad. While he ignores the drugs he finds, Moss does walk away with a satchel containing over $2M. The book is about all that occurs as the criminals try to find Moss and the money. Ultimately, the book isn't real about crime and violence. You'll have to read it to find out what I mean.

Our Crowd

Our Crowd, The Greatest Jewish Families of New York by Stephen Birmingham -- Guggenheims, Loebs, Lehmans, Schiffs -- a lot of the names that were synonymous with big money finance in the 19th and 20th centuries are the subject of this book. Its about big money, big family, big society. It traces a lot of these families from the old country through their struggles as new immigrants. The founders of these dynasties, almost exclusively, started penniless. They went initially in to fields where you could started with little or no money -- they were peddlers and junk men. They started far away from the financial centers in New York in places like St. Louis and Birmingham. As they made a little money, they'd move up -- from the goods they could carry on their back they'd earn enough money to buy a horse and wagon. From there, enough to buy a small store.

Eventually, these early pioneers learned that dealing more purely in money -- loans, bonds, stocks -- could make them wealthy. They secured their wealth for the first hundred years or more by keeping the new companies -- Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and others -- in the family. They brought brothers over from the Europe and made them partners. As time went on they added their sons to the rosters.

Once they became wealthy, the book describes how they spent and gave away their money. Some of these families gave away $40-100 million in the late 19th and early 20th century -- a huge amount of money. They also learned to spend -- throwing amazing parties and buying incredible art collections, while still remaining excluded from the gentile high society of people like Morgan and Astor.

The book itself is a little slow at times, but, especially if you're interested in finance, a fascinating read. Its part of a series called "Classic Bestsellers" that is reprinting books that were popular decades ago, so its a little disconcerting to have the book take the perspective of the 60s when it was written. The book concludes before the rash of Wall Street mergers that have taken place in the last few decades so the story is incomplete.

Winning the Future

Winning the Future by Newt Gingrich -- if you've been following this blog since the beginning, you know that, back in June, I went to hear Gingrich speech. He was interesting enough that I bought his new political manifesto, Winning the Future - A 21st Century Contract with America. Whatever your politics, this is a book you should read if, for no other reason, than it is clearly a blueprint for a potential Gingrich run for the presidency in the next election.

I've got to say that I found myself agreeing with Gingrich's statements far more than I expected to! Of course, the devil is always in the details, but a lot of what he says makes sense. I won't go through it all, but here are some examples:

-- Social Security -- this is probably the most honest and forthcoming discussion from the conservative camp that I've seen. Of course, Gingrich is definitely in favor of private retirement accounts. The difference here is that, unlike the current administration, Gingrich admits that these accounts will, in the short run (decades), make the SS system worse. He's willing to admit that benefit cuts, in one form or another, will definitely be necessary unless we're willing to dramatically increase the payroll tax on our children. This is just arithmetic - fewer and fewer payers for more and more retirees, but nobody seems willing to face up the problem - Democrats or Republicans. Somewhere along the line, the "safety net" of Social Security has become an "entitlement". When Roosevelt first proposed this system, the age at which benefits began to be paid was actually above the average life expectancy. How its more than a decade below life expectancy. In only a few years, I'm eligible to draw a social security check -- the system was never meant to pay people who could support themselves.

-- Activist Courts -- I know that, as a liberal, I'm supposed to like the way our courts have worked, but we need to be aware that court biases change over the years. The question is how should our courts operate. There's clearly a fine line between interpreting law and creating law, but there's no question that, since the 60s, the courts have become a legislating body. If you look a the Supreme Court, this means that five people (a majority of the Supremes) can create US law! No matter what your beliefs about the decisions themselves, this is not the way a democracy is supposed to work! I point at the recent "imminent domain" decision as a great example of court gone wild. Something needs to be done.

-- Science and Math education -- Gringrich strongly proposes major improvements in science and math education and recognizes that this is a survival strategy in a world where, in particular, India and China are putting major resources in to improving their ability to innovate. He also shows a willingness to think out of the box. For example, he proposes trying a program where high school kids can actually earn money by doing well in more difficult courses.

Those are just a few examples and there are definitely places where I don't agree with some of the things he's proposed in this book. I should also warn that, if you're a liberal or lean a little left, pick this book up with a thick skin. He blames a lot of problems, in strident tones, on the "left leaning elite".

On the other hand, if you're getting tired of the extreme political polarization and our increasing willingness to get nothing done on principal, you should read through this. Whatever else you may think of Gingrich, this is one smart guy and, given the charisma I saw in his brief speech this summer, he could make a serious run at the presidency. I'm no longer as convinced as I was that this would be a bad thing!

Locked Rooms

Locked Rooms By Laurie R. King -- a lot of authors have tried over the years to continue the most famous detective series of them all -- Sherlock Holmes. I've tried a number of them and have to say that King's "Mary Russell" series is probably the best of them. King's twist is that, late in life, Holmes forms first a partnership and then a marriage with Mary Russell, a woman much younger than him but, in many ways, his intellectual equal. King writes in a style very much like Arthur Conan Doyle and constructs storylines that are nearly as clever as the originals. (Interestly, Conan Doyle rates a couple of mentions in this latest book -- Sherlock doesn't much like him!)

Locked Rooms is the 8th book in this series. Each book stands reasonably well on its on, but significant portions of each book's plotline does depend on prior books. While you can pick this one up, its better to start the series at the beginning.

In the prior 8 books, we've been given only a few glimpses of Mary Russell's past. We know that she's an orphan -- her parents and brother were killed in a car accident years before we first meet her. Mary was a passenger in the car, but was thrown clear and was the only survivor. This book concentrates on filling in this story and the history of her family becomes the crux of the mystery in this latest book. Mary and Sherlock have undertaken a trip to San Francisco to take care of family business issues. Mary learns that in a late codicil to his will, her father has stipulated that no one can enter the family home unless accompanied by a family member and, of course, Russell, close to 20 years later is the only one left. As Holmes would say, with that "the game's afoot"!

Its unlikely that these books will appeal to Holmes purist. The thought of Holmes married would mortify them. But if you want a good fun read, this is a great series.

Skeletons on the Zahara

Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King. An interesting story. This is the non-fiction account of the crew of a ship that wrecks on the coast of Africa around 1815. The crew (and one pig) make it to shore but encounter one disaster after another. They are separated and taken as slaves by the Arab natives. This author studied the journals of two crew members, including the ship captain, that were published shortly after some of the crew made it back to civilization.

The book goes in to great detail about the lives of the crew as, for months, they are slaves to nomads traversing the Sahara Desert. The hardships are pretty devasting and, in fact, it makes the book pretty gruesome in places -- if you're easily disturbed, you want to skip this one or at least skim the descriptions of the physical hardships the crew members go through.

The writing style is a little stilted and, eventually, it gets a little repetitive. Not to be insensitve, but "sold to new owner, beaten, starved, baked in the desert....repeat", gets a little old after a while. That said, to somebody who thinks "hardship" is having to turn the air conditioner colder, this was an eye opener. Its hard to believe this is 200 years ago. Even harder to believe that there are still parts of the world that haven't change from the difficult life depicted in this book.

The Big Over Easy

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde -- Fforde has built up somewhat of a cult following with his first three books -- the Thursday Next series. The premise of that series is that there are ways to jump back and forth between "reality" and books. Next is a detective who solves crimes that involve literary characters like Jane Eyre. The series is good, but you always get the feeling that Fforde is straining to be clever and, by the third book of that series, it was starting to get old.

Well, with his new book, Fforde obviously decided "the hell with it -- if I'm going to be silly, let's pull out all the stops.". Surprisingly, the result was a very funny, but still well plotted murder mystery. You know right off that this isn't going to be particularly heavy when you learn that the murder victim is Humpty (actually Humperdink) Dumpty! At first, the detectives on the case, Jack Spratt and his sidekick, Mary Mary, suspect suicide. Dumpty had been clinically depressed for years with, of course, Easter being the hardest time for him. Finding the bullet holes after the crushed shell is reconstructed sends the police off in a whole new direction.

I know, I know, it sounds pretty stupid but it was actually very entertaining. Its laugh-out-loud funny in places and it definetely turns in to a page turner by the end. The overly familiar characters are given hysterical new twists that keep you interesting and actually caring about these nursery rhyme people. For example, at one point, Spratt thinks he recognizes the MO of a related murder as being the style of the now-jailed underworld leader, Giorgio Porgia. See what I mean.

This is a good way to waste a day or so -- quick read and fun. Especially if you're tring to tackle some serious reading or school work, The Big Over Easy (get it?) is a good way to take a break.

Until I Find You

Until I Find You by John Irving -- I wish I could do anything as well as John Irving writes novels. From the first page of this book, Irving is in complete control. He tells a great story in this book, but its the emotional control that he holds over the reader that sets him apart from pretty much everybody writing fiction today. You get the feeling that he has outlined his story and then gone back to color code for the emotions he wants to invoke.

A quick warning -- if you're prudish at all, don't read this book. There's a lot of sex in the book - in wide variations. About the first third of the book is about some pretty serious sexual abuse of a child and yet, the parts of the book that should be seriously disturbing are hilarious. Again, Irving's control -- you laugh at at teenagers abusing a 4 year old but, by the end of the book, in a couple of seens that are comic masterpieces, you are practically in tears.

If you've read Irving before, this book is in the same arena as The World According to Garp. It'll take the same kind of screening talent to make a successful movie out of this one, but like Garp, it'll be virutually impossible to make a movie that's better than the book.

The story follows Jack Burns from the time he's 4 until he's in his late 30s. Jack's father, apparently deserted the family right after Jack was born and his mother, an accomplished tattoo artist, drags Jack all over Europe looking for the boy's father. You learn a whole lot, probably more than you wanted, about the world of tattoos -- I can now tell you what parts of the body hurt the most with tattooed and I can tell you what a Rose of Jericho is. This world, while it never takes over the story, is the important back drop that Irving uses to frame the story.

Reading this one is a big commitment -- its over 800 pages long and definitely doesn't move as fast as Harry Potter! However, if you want to see how a true fiction craftsman works, this is definitely worth the effort.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling. Well, like millions of teenagers around the world, I've spent the last 24 hours reading the new Harry Potter book. This review is really pretty pointless. If you're a Potter fan -- teenager or adult -- you've probably already have this book or will soon. If you aren't a Potter fan, you've spent the last few weeks trying to figure out what the fuss is all about!

I'm really biased here. I do believe that the Potter series is probably the most important book series in the last 100 years. It's done what our high school and college Englishes try so hard to fight -- it's created a generation of readers. Before Rowlings, who'd have ever thought that teenagers in the early 21st century would be lined up at midnight for a book! These kids have learned to love reading and will, in all likelihood, be readers for life. That's an absolutely amazing accomplishment -- Rowling should be sainted!

The book itself definitely isn't the best of the series. Most of the book doesn't have the darkness that made Order of the Phoenix (book 5) so sensational, although the second of the book regains some of that mood. Starting at about the 3/4 mark, this book has better action sequences than some of the past books. In spite of that, this was a great book that I couldn't put down. As I've said in the past, Rowling does not right real children's books. I think that's part of what makes her so popular with teens -- she treats them as sophisticated readers rather than as kids.

There are some good plot twists here. The rumored major character death does occur late in the book and the identity of the "half-blook prince" stays cloaked through most of the book. I won't disclose anything so it doesn't ruin the read. There's a lot of back-story in this book, finally giving us more of the story of how Lord Voldemort, the bad guy, started his life. Because of this, the one warning is that you really need to read the Potter books in order. This holds true for all of them. Each builds on the ones before and they won't make much sense taken out of sequence.

Unforgivable Blackness

Unforgivable Blackness by Geoffrey C. Ward. This book, on which the PBS special of the same name is based, is a biography of Jack Johnson, the first black to win the heavyweight boxing championship in the first decade of the 20th century. While there's a lot about boxing in this book, its mostly about race relations in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Johnson, born and raised in Galveston, was, in his prime, probably one of the greatest heavyweights of all time. He would have held the championship for a decade or more had he been white. Most of the major white fighters of the day refused to get in the ring with a black. Ward implies, with good justification, that in a number of cases, this refusal was based as much on fear of losing to Johnson as it was on race. Johnson ended up following the current champion all over the world until, finally, the champion agreed to face Johnson. As expected Johnson demolished him.

Johnson then had the temerity to behave like all other heavyweight champions -- arrogantly demanded large fees, spending a lot of time gambling, drinking and "sporting". In the meantime, pretty much the whole white world joined the search for the "great white hope" that would return the championship where they thought it belonged. As if it weren't unpopular enough for Johnson to be champion, he also refused to "know his place". Traveling with and eventually marrying white women made him especially hated. Eventually, he was convicted under the Mann Act (prohibiting white slavery) of transporting a woman across state lines for illicit purposes - a woman who repeatedly testified that she voluntarily traveled with him. After a prison term, his career never recovered.

Ward makes a point of giving a balanced picture of Johnson. In modern comparisons, reminds you a lot of George Forman -- talented, with a friendly outgoing personality. Unfortunately, he also had a streak of Mike Tyson in him with accusations of physical abuse of the woman who hung around with him. His downfall essentialy was caused, however, by the fact that as a rich, successful man, he refused to accept the limitations that were assumed to apply to him as a black.

Very readable book that gives a good portrayal of not only the man, but the times.

Unholy Fire

Unholy Fire by Robert J. Mrazek. Second lay down of the summer. This book, in the first 20 or 30 pages reminded me why I don't read much about the Civil War. It was an extremely brutal war and the blood and gore was probably more up close and personal that other wars. Most Civil War authors, especially novelists, tend to dwell on the gore. Not for me.

The Blackbird Papers

The Blackbird Papers by Ian Smith. This is a first novel for Smith and, given that, it's not bad. It's a fairly standard thriller/murder mystery. His writing style is crisp and you do get pulled in to the story. What makes a book like this enjoyable is trying to figure out where everything is headed before the author takes you there. This really requires a lot of skill on the author's part and carefully plotting. If the author gives too many clues early, the reader is able to figure out the direction and the book is less fulfilling. If, on the other hand, the author doesn't give you enough clues so that the climax seems to pop out of nowhere, then the reader is just an observer and doesn't get drawn in to the story.

This book falls more in to the former category. Smith does reserve a few interesting plot twists, but even a moderately astute reader understands the backstory and has fingered the primary culprit within the first 50 pages or so. I will admit that the few late plot twists are well grounded in early clues so you do get at least a little feeling that Smith has got something going.

This wasn't a great book, but good enough that, as Smith gets better with age, I'll probably continue to give him a try.

King of the Jews

King of the Jews by Nick Tosches. Uhh.....wow. I'm still not sure what to make of this book. It was billed as a biography of Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein was pretty much the prototype Jewish gambler/gangster in early 20th century New York. Although he was murdered young, he had time to be the mentor to future stars like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. He was also the model for fictional Jewish gangsters like Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby and Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. With that basis, I was expecting a good story about murders and gambling and the fixing of the 1919 World Series.

All of that was there, but so was a lot of unexpected stuff. First of all, this is the first biography I've read where the author is a visible character. Constantly making personal comments and heading off in to rants about the war in Iraq and the terrible things corporate America has done to the world. Its pretty disconcerting.

The gangster theme comes out most clearly in the fact that the author's writing seems like bullets flying around your head in all directions. In the first half of the book, I'd say less that 10-15% of the writing is about Rothstein. We get a whole lot about the origin of religion; etymology of all kinds of words and names; even an involved pitch about how the bible pre-dated monotheism based mainly on the fact that the Hebrew word for god -- elohim -- is actually plural, not singular. There's also, strangely, three or four very brief (one paraphaph) chapters that are extremely obscene and, as far as I've been able to figure, have absolutely nothing to do with anything anywhere else in the book!

When it comes to Rothstein's life, we do get a lot of detail. His family (and his wife's family, his girlfriend's family and some associates' families) are detailed back three and four generations. There is a lot about the battles over Rothstein's will -- he apparently signed an "X" on a revised will while comatose after being shot that cut his current girlfriend in for a piece. We see this mostly through actual testimony transcripts from the various civil lawsuits that sprang up between him family and his girlfriend. (Eventually, the lawyers got most everything as always).

Tosches says repeatedly that, essentially, history is hard to believe. He says any number of times that lies, repeatedly enough times, become truth. He gives a number of examples where he'll give multi-page quotes from reports or other authors that describe details of Rothstein's life and then proceed to use actual contemporary records to show that what is described can't possibly be true even though its universally accepted.

All in all, I'm glad I read this one. I don't know that I know much more about Rothstein than I did to start with, but with Tosches's head-rattling writing style, I at least feel like my brain was excercised.

Speciman Days

Speciman Days by Michael Cunningham. Well, we've finally got the first "lay down" of the summer. I just couldn't get interested in this new novel by the author of The Hours. The story was pretty dumb and this is a writer desparately trying to be "literary". I put it down after about 30 pages.

109 East Palace

109 East Palace by Jennet Connant. With the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima coming up next month, there's been a rash of books about atomic bombs and their development. I think there were three published this spring that focus on Los Alamos in general and Robert Oppenheimer, its director. I decided to try this with having read Connant's previous book, Tuxedo Park.

This is "personal" history at its best. Too often (here comes a rant you've already seen once if anybody's actually out there!), our kids are taught events and dates instead of people. With most high school kids, there's probably a period of at least a few weeks where they can tell that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945. A few might even be able to tell you that the bomb was developed, in part, at Los Alamos, near Santa Fe. Boring, boring, boring!

The reality is that, whatever you think of nuclear weapons, this was probably the most intense, most successful crash scientific program ever undertaken. You might say that the race to the moon in the 60s took its place, but I'd argue that the was largely an engineering project. We had a high degree of confidence that we could get to the moon. The science was pretty well understood, it just had to be applied. With the Manhattan Project, there was no really strong evidence that a so-called "atomic" bomb could even be produced. It was only known that Nazi scientest were pursuing it with all speed and that, if they got there first, the Germans would, in all likelihood, win the war.

Don't be intimidated, however, by the intense scientific and engineering work that make up the project itself. This book is not about science, or even bombs, its about people. At its high point, Los Alamos had thousands of people on staff in a community that, a few months before, had been a small boy's school. There wasn't enough housing, food or water. The scientists, used to the free-wheeling academic world, were confronted by an ultra-secure military operation. Many of them, over a two year period, would only occasionaly get as far as Santa Fe. They weren't allowed to contact their families. Their mail was censored. Their weren't allowed to indulge in off-base entertainment. And yet, they pulled off one of the most amazing scientific feats of all time.

Connant is a terrific writer and manages to get across both the deprivations and exhiliration of these times. Her insight is helped by the her father, James B Connant, was one of the foremost scientific and science policy figures of the day, giving her personal access to countless people who were careful, even decades later, about what they said to whom. To make the story accessible, she homes in on two people, the charismatic physicist, Robert Oppenheimer and the "earth mother" type who takes care of everybody, Dorothy McKibbin.

There are a lot of interesting facts buried in the book. For example, did you know that there were two different designs for the bomb reflected in the two bombs that were actually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, there was so little uranium and plutonium manufactured at the time that one of the two was never tested before it was dropped and the second was tested exactly once, since, whether the test succeeded or failed, there wasn't enough material to try again!

The book follows the project from its inception and, obviously, includes the very intense chapter on the one test that was tried at the Trinity Site near Los Alamos. It then follows the lives of the principals until their death, including the pretty tragic way Oppenheimer was treated in the 50s. The combination of professional dispute with Teller, the red-scare tactics of McCarthy and the personal animosity of Lewis Strauss who served on the initial Atomic Energy Commission, eventually cost Oppenheimer the humiliating loss of his security clearance.

Connant's style makes for an easy, novel-like read. This is the way history was meant to be taught.

The Summer We Got Saved

The Summer We Got Saved by Pat Cunningham Devoto. This is one I wouldn't have ordinarily picked up, although Carolyn might have. However, I had read a previous book by this author called My Last Days as Roy Rogers. Devoto is among the best of the "southern fiction" writers out there. She is a good storyteller who concentrates on small towns in the south, mostly during the 50s and 60s.

This new one is essentially a dual coming of age story about a white girl and a black girl. It provides a good atmospheric view of evolving race relations in the south in the 60s. It brings in enough characters to look at the issues from all sides. While the story focuses on the two girls, the character that drives the story is crazy Aunt Eugenia. Eugenia grew up a family who's history included one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. The plaque in a small town honoring this relative stands in as a symbol for the established ways that the races dealt with each other. You get to see the progressive and reactionary forces in both the white and black communities.

While this story has some pretty dark moments, it still manages to be a sweet story typical of today's southern writers. Not great literature, but an enjoyable read.

Forest of the Pygmies

Forest of the Pygmies by Isabel Allende. This is the third in a series of young adult novels that Allende has written. This'll be short because, unfortunately, it wasn't very good. The story is OK at best -- Alex and Nadia, the teenage heroes of the other books, are off on another adventure with Alex's grandmother, a writer for International Geographic magazine -- not even much orginality there. The story takes place in Africa and includes lots of animals and the overthrow of a village tyrant. As with the others in the series, Allende tries to mix in a little mysticism and a little pseudo-religion.

Allende writes in Spanish so its not clear whether to blame her or her translater for the weak use of language. The lesson of the last decade or so thanks to Harry Potter is that its a bad idea to write down to teenagers and young adults. Potter and others (see the Artemis Fowl post a few weeks ago) don't really make any concessions to the age of their readers. They tell a good story and assume that the reader will rise to the occasion. Thankfully, millions of kids have proven that to be the right approach.

Skip this one.

Let Me Tell You a Story

Let Me Tell You a Story by Red Auerbach & John Feinstein. Pretty fitting that I'm doing this review while sitting here watching the 2005 NBA draft. Once again, if you're not a sports fan, forget it. If you are, Red Auerbach is one of the legends. Red is the Boston Celtics. He spent a lot of years a coach winning the NBA championship almost every year. Since retiring many years ago, he has been either President of Vice Chairman of the Celtics organization. He's responsible for recruiting and coaching amazing professional basketball players like Cousy, Russell, Havlichek, both Joneses (K.C. and Sam), Bird, Parish and a lot of others.

This book is essentially Feinstein making notes as, over a period of years, Auerbach pours out story after story. Because of that, it doesn't have the quality of a typical Feinstein book (see my previous entry about Army vs. Navy). In spite of that, its a lot of fun to read. In my years in Boston, I spent a lot of great nights at Boston Garden watching the Celtics. Even though it was during the time after Red retired, it was still the glory years. I could only afford seats in the rafters, but there's nothing like the Garden on Celtic nights. Unfortunately, the Celts don't play in the Garden any more.

The "hook" that the authors use to organize the book is the Tuesday lunches at Washington's China Doll restaurant that revolve around Red. Its an eclectic group with a lot of basketball types including Morgan Wootten (coach at DeMatha High School - probably the best high school coach ever), Lefty Driessel (former coach at Maryland and other places), the AD at George Washington and others; some friends and family, including Red's brother; some journalists including Feinstein and Chris Wallace and, for some reason, several secret service agents. The lunches are essentially Red holding court and telling stories.

If you love basketball, read this one.

(BTW, Red probably didn't approve of today's draft with the Celtics taking a high school kid out of Houston).

The Historian

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. You'll probably be hearing a lot about this one over the next month of so. It was just published a few weeks ago and is being widely touted as this year's "DaVinci Code". For those of you who didn't read Brown's book last year, it was what I'd call a historical thriller. It concerns a modern day search for the descendant's of Jesus and Mary Magadelene. It winds through all kinds of interesting, if speculative, information about Jesus's supposed heirs and the secret societies that were set up to protect them. It was a great, fast-paced page-turner.

I suspect a lot of author's are going to try to repeat Brown's success. Kostova is one of them. She, commercially, tries to combine the historical thriller genre with a plunge in to the world of the 15th century warlord, Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler. More commonly, this villain and the legend he inspired is known as Dracula. Yup, its a bloodsucking novel. I'm not particularly into the Dracula legends. I've never made it all the way through an Anne Rice novel or even Bram Stoker's book. I haven't seen all of the famous Bela Lugosi movie or even watched a full episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Maybe, if you're into this kind of thing, you'll enjoy this book more than I did.

However, I'm not even sure thats likely. This is Kostova's first novel and it definitely shows. The long (600 pages+) book would have benefitted from a strong editor who was willing to force trimming of at least 100 pages or so. First of all, the book is reasonably confusing - it blends together four different stories that, eventually all become one. However, the author jumps without warning from one to the other, forcing you to frequently stop and figure out what she's talking about.

Other stylistic issues are just as distracting. I guess since she's taking over a well known legend she didn't have much lattitude, but I got real tired of reading about the "undead". There is one character, a librarian, who follows the hero all over the world and, every time Kostova refers to him, its always the "evil librarian". She also seems to have a hard time sustaining the story and repeatedly resorts to having characters read the letters of others in to the record. In other words, the writing really isn't all that great.

Finally, she has a problem that seems to be common among first time writers, especially ones that write long involved novels with multiple story lines. After about 600 pages, Kostova seemed to realize that things were just going on to long. The primary plot line was wrapped up reasonably well, but now she had all these loose ends hanging there. If she ignored them, at least 3 of the 4 interacting storylines would have been useless. So she hurriedly starts throwing out resolutions. For example, there's one character who appeared briefly and tangentially earlier in the book. This character, for no apparent reason, shows up in the ultimate confrontation scene and dies saving the day. In the last 30 pages of frantic wrapups, Kostova gives us less than 2 paragraphs to explain why this guy showed up at all. Frustrating.

As is common with this kind of book written to be commercially popular, the epilogue seems to leave open the possibility of more to come. Kostova, apparently, wanted to make sure that if she did turn out to be the next Anne Rice, she could extend this story for more riches. Unfortunately, I'll pass on the next one.

Another Break -- Newt Gingrich

An interesting hour this afternoon. Every year, the American Enterprise Institute runs a 3 day event that brings together a number of public figures and policy makers. It was created years ago by former president Ford so, as you might expect, it has a definitely conservative bent. In addition to Ford, who's there every year even at 92, past years have seen folks like Rumsfeld, Cheney and others of their ilk.

One afternoon each year, they have a session that is open to the public. Its usually a panel discussion. The first year -- two years ago -- that I went, the panel included Ford and a guy whose name I can't remember who was an insider on Bush's national security staff. This was just as the war in Iraq had kicked off and we were assured by the panel that, any day, the WMDs would be found in Iraq. So much for that.

This year they switched formats to a single speaker and the speaker at hand was former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. While Newt's not exactly my cup of tea politically, I thought it'd be interesting to hear him, especially if, as expected, he runs for President next time around. He's not much to look at -- fairly short and a little portly with silver hair, dressed in khakis and a casual sport shirt -- so I was really pretty surprised when he turns out to be a fairly charming guy with a ton of charisma.

He's just published two new books - the 3rd volume in his "what if" series about the Civil War and one called "Winning the Future" that is a non-fiction political tome. He started his brief talk speaking about the Civil War book and history in general. He won a lot of points with me by talking about one of my pet peeves -- that history, the way its taught to our kids, is boring. These incredible stories about incredible people are generally thrown over in a quest to get kids to memorize dates and events that have no life. The lucky few will discover a fascination with history on their own later in life, but most people grow up continuing to believe that reading history is boring. Too bad.

I came away from the talk believing that was a really smart guy who could be an interesting part of a true national dialog. Right now the country is so polarized that I'm not convinced meaningful dialog is possible. Both the left and the right push every issue to the extreme. Most people are smart enough to know that reality and solutions lie somewhere between the poles. If a guy like Gingrich could push us towards a civil dialog about the real issues of the day, he could be a real win.

I found myself agreeing with him at least on what the primary issues of the next few decades will be -- security first, but closely followed by health care and education. He urged the audience to recognize that the US did not have its position in the world be divine right. The sooner we recognized that the competition to come from the far east -- China and India in particular -- the sooner we can make the hard choices that will prepare us for that era. I'm not sure how much he and I would agree on (probably more than I would have thought), but I really hope we can publicly face these issues and find real solutions, rather than highly principaled inaction!

Garlic and Sapphires

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl. Much to my surprise, this turned out to be one of the better books of the summer so far. Reichl is one of the top dining critics in the country. This book is sort of her memoir covering the period when, while the restaurant critic of the LA Times, she is approached about taking over the restaurant column of the New York Times. This is considered the highest that a critic can aspire to -- the head food columnist for the best newspaper in the best restaurant city in the country. She ends up taking the job, but learns on her flight from LA to New York that the word is already out that she is coming. Her picture and description have been plastered all over every kitchen in New York. Obviously, it'd be hard to get an objective view of service and food if you were being served by people who knew you were reviewing them for the Times.

That sets off a couple of years of inventing new personas - complete with disguises -- that won't be known in New York restaurants. To make each guise she adopts believable, she has to invent a personality and a backstory to go with it. The people she invents are totally different, but she finds herself becoming the disguise. She learns how differently, at least in some establishments, is the treatment that can be expected by a drab old lady and an elegant younger woman. At La Cirque, for example, she's shuffled off to a corner table in her disguise. The only way she was able to even get a wine list was when other waiters dumped extra copies on the bench next to her. Even then, her waiter actually has the nerve to come up to her and demand the wine list back -- presumably to give to one of the "important" customers. On a return trip, undisguised, with a Times editor in tow, she receives the kind of food and service that you would expect from a four star restaurant. Unfortunately for La Cirque, the "who you are matters" attitude eventually costs La Cirque their treasured fourth star.

This kind of effort gave Reichl the reputation in New York of being the "people's critic". While it cost her some supporters among the hoi-poloi, she gathered a big following among the average joe who might get in to a restaurant like Lespenasse once in a lifetime. She also became known for opening the times to a whole new range of ethnic foods. Before her, French food was about as far afield as the Times' critics ever went. Under Reichl, she reviewed a steady stream of Korean, Japanase (before the sushi craze) and all kinds of other foods.

This book was just a lot of fun to read. One warning though. She describes her meals so lovingly that you can almost taste each bite she described. Be prepared to have a strong craving to find the best restaurants around as soon as you finish this book. If you love to eat (or drink wine for that matter), this is terrific read.

Artemis Fowl, The Opal Deception

Artemis Fowl, The Opal Deception by Eoin Colfer. Back to the teenagers aisle (and no, I have no idea how to pronounce the author's name). This book is the fourth in a series about Artemis Fowl, the teenage villain. This is good solid fantasy -- fairies, elves, centaurs and a great farting dwarf character. This series is "Harry Potter" level good. They move fast. They're clever. They're extremely well written.

In this episode, Opal Koboi, the renegade fairy, who we met in the last book, has been avoiding jail time by being in a coma for over a year. She manages to escape and starts her plot to expose the underworld to the human world assuming, of course, that the humans will destroy the underworld races and she will rise to the top and rule the human world.

Our heros, Holly Short, the fairy soldier, and Artemis, the brilliant human teen, team up again to defeat the bad guys. Interestingly, Artemis is starting to grow up a little and, throughout the book, tries to decide whether to go straight and become a good guy. As always, with Colfer, Artemis's decision is a little off and funny.

These books are great reads. If you like fantasy or have a teenager who likes to read, definitely try these. They're filled with action, humor and are just fun to read.

Empire Rising

Empire Rising by Thomas Kelly. I'm a sucker for the period of time covered in this book. It's about New York in the 30s -- the depression, prohibition, Tammany Hall. A time of the declining influence of the immigrant Irish and the rising influence of the immigrant Italian -- in both politics and crime. In this really excellent book, Boss Tweed and even Silent Charlie Murphy are long gone. The clownish Jimmy Walker holds the mayor's office.

The book focuses on a couple of recent Irish immigrants -- an iron worker named Mike Briody and a young bohemian woman named Grace. Mike operates a rivet hammer and is one of the crews laying the frame for the Empire State Building. In the story, the building is the slightly heavy handed, if apt, symbol of the new New York rising out of the old. Even the construction workers who fall off the structure to their death are symbolic of the many deaths in the beer wars and the painful transistion from one set of controlling organizations to another.

In this book, you'll not only see the Tammany driven way that graft and corruption operate in New York, you'll also see how the war for Irish freedom moved across the Atlantic Ocean in the early decades of the century. You'll see godfather-like gangsters try to find their way out of the life as a new generation of even more ruthless underworld characters take over.

I've read enough history of this period to come believing that, while only some of the stories in the book are based on actual events, nevertheless Kelly did his research. You learn a lot about the flavor of the times, while enjoying a great page-turner of a story. Highly recommended!

Velocity

Velocity, by Dean Koontz. Every once in a while you just feel like a Big Mac. That's what Koontz writes -- you know they're junk, you feel a little guilty about enjoying it, but boy are they good! Lots of dialog and short chapters so, even though its about 400 pages long, this is a really fast read.

One warning, though, this book is much more like Koontz's recent stuff. Its not at all a horror novel -- much more of a serial killer/slasher novel. Its pretty gruesome in parts, so, if you don't like that kind of thing, then skip this one.

For a change for a Koontz, this book actually makes you think a little. The book focuses on Billy, a bartender. One night, after work, Billy comes out to his car to go home and finds a note under his windshield -- "If you don't take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher somewhere in Napa County. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours." And just like that, Billy has to no choice but to become an accomplice to murder. So, what would you do?

The book then takes off as an elaborate dance between Billy and the unknown killer. The murders pile up and Billy gets pulled deeper and deeper in to the hole that the killer wants him in. As Billy works to figure out who the killer is and how to stop him, the story takes any number of abrupt shifts in direction that will keep you turning the pages.

Definitely a fun, if brutal, bread. You'll enjoy but, like the Big Mac, you'll feel a little embarrassed by the fact that you do!

Let's take a break -- Vegas

We did take a few days off from the grueling pace we're setting here in Colorado. It's easy to get exhausted when you have to do everything we've had on our list up here. Like... well, then there's.... OK, so we didn't need the break, but it was still fun.

Saturday, Cole and Sarah drove up from Phoenix and Sunday, we took off for three days in Vegas. Matt and Christie flew down from northern California to join us. We stayed at our favorite hotel there -- the Bellagio. Great rooms, great location, great service.

As always, when people travel with us. Cole, Sarah, Matt and Christie had to get used to the idea of eating our way through Vegas. As soon as we got there, we headed straight over to the Paris Hotel to have a late lunch at one of our favorite places -- Ah Sins -- only to find out its now only open for dinner (more later). We ended up at one of the other places at the Paris. Not great, but not bad.

That night, we all went to see the first Cirque d'Soleil show -- O. Carolyn and I have seen this one five times now and have enjoyed it every time. This was the kids first Cirque show and its a good one to start with. This is a typical Cirque production except that water plays a big role. The specially constructed theatre ($90M we're told) has platforms that come and go. For example, there are spots on the stage where, one minute, people are running around and dancing and, literally a minute later, somebody is diving on to that spot from 2 or 3 stories up. This is really a spectacular show -- highly recommend it.

Then, back to food. Dinner at Olive's, another restaurant at the Bellagio. Hard to get used to eating dinner at 10 o'clock, but the food was good so it was worth it. Afterwards, Carolyn crashed, I headed to the tables and the kids all set off to explore Vegas.

Monday saw me back at the tables for pretty much the whole day, while everybody else headed out to shop and see the sights. The kids headed over to New York, New York to ride the rollacoaster. Christie and Sarah seemed to really like it, but Matt spent the whole ride hanging on with his eyes closed and Cole came back with bruises all over is neck and shoulders from being bounced around. All of this, of course, worked up a big appetite (what else) and in the evening, we all headed to the newest restaurant at the Bellgaio -- Michael Mina's. He's apparently a well known celebrity chef from San Francisco. The food was just fantastic -- way more than we should have eaten -- but fantastic. We all started with a giant platter of cold seafood -- lobster, shrimp, oysters and clams. Christie decided she wanted to try foie gras, too and they had an appetizer that had it done three different ways. Somehow, the rest of never got to taste, but she and Matt seemed to have become big foie gras fans my the time the plate was clean. The entres were huge -- I'll just describe mine. Four small Kobe beef filets, each with a piece of grilled lobster on it and topped with a dab of hollandaise sauce. If that weren't enough there was then a dish of lobster mashed potatoes and vegetables. That dish was then topped with, of all things, a short rib and then it was topped with piece of foie gras. At this point, we're all groaning, but, of course, with this crowd, you're never done until you've had dessert. And of course, we all ordered, not just dessert, but dessert "samplers". a plate to share with small portions of 7 different desserts! We could barely get up from the table, but dispersed the same way -- Carolyn to bed, me to the tables and the kids to the strip until 4 in the morning.

Wednesday, a learned that the kids are buffet fans. The Bellagio has a great one, but I almost never get to go since Carolyn hates buffets. So we jammed ourselves full of all kinds of food and then back out to "real world" or as close as you can get to it. Even Carolyn headed to the slots this time, coupled with more shopping. Since we were headed to another show that evening, we had made arrangements to meet at 5:30 for dinner. Fortunately, we got to talking on the way to the restaurant and, after the buffet at lunch, everybody was still stuffed and just going along to keep everybody else happy. We decided to head over the MGM and hit a bar before the show and try to find dinner afterwards.

The show that night was KA, the newest Cirque show in Vegas. Things got off to a good start in the lobby. As we passed through, several actors in elaborate costumes climbed up to a platform above us. Up there was an enormous musical instrument -- sort of guitar like with strings that stretched across the lobby and were connect to gigantic (20 feet tall) sound chambers. The two actors proceed to play the instrument by stroking the strings -- pretty incredible. The theatre itself was absolutely amazing -- kind of like the mining pit scenes from Lord of the Rings -- with 4 story towers all around. As it got close to show time, characters started running around the towers and their platforms -- flying on bungie cords over the audience. The show itself was a lot darker and much more theatrical than a typical Cirque show with a lot less "thats impossible" acts than we've come to expect. That said, however, the show really was pretty amazing. A moveable, tilting stage made for some incredible acts like a big martial arts battle that is done on a vertical platform. The big finale was a huge onstage fireworks show. I'm not sure I'd rank this as one of the better Cirque shows (although I think Carolyn probably disagrees with me), but its absolutely worth seeing. After the disaster of Cirque's other new show in Vegas, Zumanity, it was good to see that they've still go the touch.

OK -- shows over -- back to food! We walked back over the Paris to try to make it to Ah Sins and were able to get in. Its a great place, especially for a late night dinner. They have a sushi bar, a satay bar and a bunch of entrees too. Whenever we go, we always just order a bunch of food and put it in the middle of the table and graze. No exception. Food was terrific and we almost got Sarah to try sushi. Maybe next time.

Three days is about all we can take in Vegas -- you eat to much, stay up too late and walk way more than normal. We did really have a great time. It was good to be able to share some time with the kids -- a great group to travel with.

Oh yeah -- on the gambling front everything went as it usually does. Carolyn gambled for about a half hour and doubled her money. I, once again, got my tail handed to me. There's always next time.

The Wild Girl

The Wild Girl by Jim Fergus is getting a lot of press lately. It seems to have been adopted as one of the book-club selections and is being pushed by a lot of small bookstores. Given that, I guess I was expecting a little more.

This is essentially a western. It takes place in the Sierra Madres and is a fictionalized account based on a few real events -- in particular, an expedition made out of Douglas, Arizona in the 30s to try to recover a Mexican boy who had been abducted by the last of the wild Apaches. The "wild girl" of the title is one of the Apaches who is captured by a contract hunter. She is then used as a possible trading piece by the expedition to get the boy back.

Even though its a western, its definitely got some modern touches to it. Don't think there are many Zane Grey or Louis L'Amour novels that feature (a) a female anthropologist working on her PhD and (b) a flamboyantly gay leading character -- or a "sissy" as he's called in the book. Especially the second character makes for some funny scenes like when he shows up for the expedition in a complete safari costume including pith helmet or when he rides to the rescue in matching long fringe pants and jacket.

The book is good but not great. The writing keeps you moving but he uses a lot of standard cliches -- e.g. a row of crows that look like monks. Once you're about 30 pages in, the story becomes pretty predictable. While I didn't give up on it, I wasn't thrilled by it either. Oh well, not everything is going to be spectacular.

A Civil War - Army vs Navy

John Feinstein is the best sports writer around period; end of story. This is an author that Dan turned me on to several years ago. His modus operandi is to pick a sports topic, spend a year living in the system and then write these incredible books about the sport and, more importantly, the people that live them. His most well known book is called A Good Walk Spoiled about golf although I haven't read that one yet. He's tackled subjects like a year in the life of ACC basketball and, in what I think is his best book, The Last Amateurs, a year of Patriot League basketball -- the last college league that did not allow scholarship athletes.

Army vs Navy is -- surprise, surprise -- about the rivalry between West Point and the Naval Academy. As always, Feinstein, essentially lived with the teams for a year culminating in the 1995 Army/Navy football game (or as its called in Annapolis, the Navy/Army game). There is a lot of detailed discriptions here about the 20 or so football games the two teams played, but most of this book lets you get to know the players on these teams. In the last 20 years or so, the academies have not been terribly successful in football. They are both schools with high academic standards and your education requires at least a 5 year commitment to the military after graduation. On top of that, the environment is very difficult. About 80% of entering football players don't remain on the team until graduation. This means that the best high school football players, i.e. those with NFL hopes, can't qualify or aren't interested in the academies. The flipside is that those players who do end up here, are totally dedicated to their teams, knowing that this will probably be the last football they ever play.

One of the best stories in the book is about Shaun Stephenson, a kid who ended up at the academy in a somewhat backwards way. He did quite have the grades to qualify coming out of high school so, like his older brother Dion, joined the Navy. While in Iraq during Dessert Storm, Shaun learns that his brother has been killed by, what they later learn, was friendly fire. Shaun escorts his brother's body home and, when he gets ready to return to Iraq, learns about US policy to avoid sending a deceased soldier's brother back in to a combat zone. Shaun is told he can have any other assignment and asks for admission to the Naval Academy. After moving up the chain of command, he eventually gets a phone call from the President Bush telling him that he'll be going to Annapolis. I pull this one guy because its a good illustration of where the emphasis in Feinstein's writing is. While Shaun appears throughout the book, its a story of his struggle through academics and injuries that has him waiting until his senior year to play and then only playing a few plays in a few games.

Reality is this book is probably only going to appeal to hardcore sports fans and that's really a shame. It's a book made of great stories about interesting boys and men. Those of you who are married to sports fanatics would probably understand a little better why we're fanatics by reading a book like this.

Never Let Me Go

Just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It spite of the name, Ishiguro is British and the author of books like The Remains of the Day. That book was made in to a movie by Merchant/Ivory that starred Anthony Hopkins as a butler in the 19th century. A very "stiff upper lip" kind of movie.

In reading this latest Ishiguro book, though, I'm more reminded of books like The Handmaiden's Tale or Donna Tartt's The Little Friend. This is an extremely well written book that, at bottom, is a fairly horrible and disturbing story. I'll tell you later why its disturbing but that'll be a giveaway so I'll give you some warning so you can skip the end my comments if you want.

This book is narrarated by Kathy H one of group of students at what appears a British boarding school called Hailsham. She is one of three very tight friends that make something of a triangle -- Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. The story is told as a reminiscence by Kathy near the end of her life and describes the threesome from the time they were very young -- 4 or 5. It reads like a coming of age story and, like Remains of the Day, seems to be a proper British novel. You slowly come to realize that nothing is what it seems and, clue by clue, you realize whats going on. Ishiguro writes well -- keeps your attention although this feels like one of those books that should be read aloud -- and in a quiet voice.

Other than by implication, the story never gets gruesome but, as I said, its addresses a major 21st century issue in a way that makes it very human. If you're easily disturbed by complex moral issues, you probably want to skip this one.

I actually wrote the "plot spoiler" section of the review and then deleted it. Although I did know going in, based on a review I read, what was happening, it probably would have been a better read if I hadn't known and had things slowly revealed. Try it that way.

Freakonomics

Don't blame me. That's the name of the latest book! The sub-title is "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything". Its by Steven Levitt (the economist) and Stephen Dubner (a journalist). Levitt is a major, up-and-coming economist at the University of Chicago who's won the "best young economist" award several times. His approach is pretty interesting. The typical "what will the market do? what will the dollar do?" economic studies don't interest him very much. What he does is apply economic analysis tools to random questions that he finds interesting.

He made a big splash in the news last year on a topic that's included in detail in the book -- his assertion that the unexpected drop in crime that started in the mid-90s was primarily a result of the legalization of abortion, not better policing techniques or a better economy as others have claimed. His work is pretty convincing, but I'll leave you to draw your own conclusion.

To give you an idea how broad his interests are, some of the things he discusses include:

• cheating by teachers in giving standardized exams
• cheating among Japanese sumo wrestlers
• why so many crack dealers still live with their mothers
• why who you are matters more than what you do when it comes to parenting.

In general, he achieves his goal of making you question whether to believe the "conventional wisdom" about just about everything. The book gets a little dry towards the end but, all in all, an interesting read.

Catching Up - The books so far

A good part of what we do in Colorado during the summer is read. Couple that with the fact that we've already been here a week and a half and you can figure that I'm starting this blog a little late. So, this posting will be a little dense with mini-reviews of the eight books that I've already gone through. Nice thing is there hasn't been a true clunker yet! Putting them all together like this will also make it pretty clear that I don't stick to any one kind of book.

Here we go --

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell -- Cornwell is known for writing a whole lot of historical fiction. In fact, his series about King Arthur is one of the best on the subject. This one is also historical -- about 9th century England in the days leading up to the reign of King Alfred the Great. Like Cornwell's other books, The Last Kingdom doesn't glamorize the era. The book focuses on a boy, Uhtred, whose family is killed by the invading Danes. He survives and is raised by a Danish lord and, essentially, spends his early years deciding whether to be truly Danish or return to his English roots. There's lots of action and some good history -- Cornwell is well known for his research -- but I found the writing style a little below Cornwell's standard. It felt like he was trying to write for a teenage audience even though most teens I know who read this kind of book are pretty sophisticated readers (thank you Harry Potter!). All in all a good read, but not one of Cornwell's best. A warning -- you don't realize until almost the end of the book that this is the first of a new series so be prepared to committ to 3 or 4 books. The first book of the summer reading seasons was good, not great.

Rage by Jonathan Kellerman -- OK, I admit to being biased. As soon as either Kellerman, Jonathan or his wife, Faye, publish a book, I'm there. This isn't literature, but they're well written thrillers with terrific plots. This new one, Rage, is one of JK's Alex Delaware series. Delaware is a child psychologist who works a lot with the LAPD. In this one, an old, and fairly brutal, case that Delaware had worked on comes back when one of the perps is released from prison and fairly quickly murdered. This reopens the case and takes you through all kinds of twists and turns. Its a good, quick read -- you know you're not reading the classics, but this falls in to the "guilty pleasure" category. If you like character-driven mysteries, this is a great one.

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson - strange, strange book. Ronson a young documentary film maker who likes to uncover things. This books details the things he uncovers about the attempts, inside the US intelligence community, to develop super-warriors with paranormal abilities -- walking through walls, stopping the enemies hearts with your thoughts -- things like that. He manages to find some retired high-ranking military folks who were pushing psychic projects when they were active. There appears to have even been a lab where hundreds of soldiers were assigned for years trying to do "distance viewing" and thought control. They tried to play a part in the battle against Noriega in Panama. There's not a lot of success to report although he does find a guy who claims he can make a goat fall down with his mind! You feel like you're reading some of the better conspiracy theory books, but Ronson seems to have facts and interviews to back up his claims. Still....

A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell -- I've been waiting for a good 10 years for Russell to come out with something new. Her first books, The Sparrow and Children of God, were "thoughtful" science fiction about an order of jesuits who head out in to space. A Thread of Grace was not the book I was expecting. Her topic this time is definitely earth-bound without a trace of sci-fi -- the plight of refugee Jews in WWII Italy. Her style of writing is still stellar and the story she tells is fascinating following a small number of Polish and German families as they try to escape the Nazis. Russell does a great job of making the stories come alive and especially making clear that there were many, many small heroes among the Italian people. Its the holocaust so this is not an upbeat story. Russell makes you care about characters who aren't going to make to the end of the book. Thread of Grace is a fairly complex novel with lots of characters to follow but, this is the first unqualified recommendation of the summer.

The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King by Michael Craig -- a quick warning -- if you don't like poker, skip to the next review. If you do play or watch or at least appreciate poker, try this one. There have been a rash of books lately trying to capitalize on the poker craze, but this is a pretty good. Its a non-fiction look at what happens when a billionare, Andy Beal of Dallas, comes to Vegas with boatloads of money and a desire to go against the best poker has to offer. All the gods of poker are here -- Brunson, Lederer, Binion, etc. There's a lot of high-stakes Texas Hold-'em being played here with pots containing millions of dollars, but there's great stories about what it takes to be a poker player at this level. Mini-bios of poker heroes are scattered through the book, too. Makes watching the World Poker Tour on TV much more fun and really has me stoked for next week's trip to Vegas! Again, if you're in to poker, you'll love this one. If you're not, you'll think that reading this is a complete waste of time.

Abarat, Days of Magic/Nights of War by Clive Barker -- and now for something completely different. I still read a lot of fantasy and most of the best, these days, can be found in the teen or "young adult" sections. Clive Barker is an extremely successful horror writer (who I actually don't like very much), who is now trying his hand at fantasy. This is actually the second book in his Abarat series, the story of a girl who finds another world where everything is different. Barker really just let his imagine completely run wild in this book. You can almost here him chuckling as he makes up character names like Cindy Quackenbush (the heroine) and Malingo (her geshrat sidekick -- don't ask). While not the best writing -- he is aimed at 13 year olds -- the story is a wild ride. Barker also decided to illustrate this one himself so there are pictures of strange scenary and characters every few pages. Usually I don't like illustrations to intrude on my own visualizations, but they really do add something to the book. While you need to read the first Abarat book before this, I do recommend this, especially if you've got a teen who likes to read fantasy or an adult who still likes to read like a kid.

1776 by David McCullough -- by now, you're getting the drift that, genre-wise, I jump around a lot. McCullough is one of my favorite historians. His biographies of Truman and John Adams are classics and both won Pulitzers. This book veers from his norm in a couple of ways. First, its pretty short coming in at under 300 pages, about half the length of his typical book. Second, it focuses on a time period instead of a person or, in his older work, an event. This was a pretty eventful year and most of the stories tend to be left out of the history books. The year begins and ends well for the Americans - starting with the battles around Boston and ending with Trenton, but, for most of the year, it really looked the whole "United States" thing was going to come crashing down. McCullough does a good job of spending part of the book looking through British eyes -- some good detail of George III and his generals, but, as you'd expect the focal point of the book is Washington. At this point in his career, Washington's personality made the U.S. possible, but certainly not his military skill. Washington definitely comes across as more human than god-like the more you read about him, but never less important. I highly recommend reading lots of things about the American Revolution. I'm not sure there was ever a period in history where so few men, extraodinary though they were, changed the world quite so much. In high school, we're taught the facts of the revolution and, frankly, we're mostly bored by it. The story is, in fact, pretty incredible. That said, if you haven't read on the revolution, save this book for later. It's a little too focus for a general history. You'd be better off starting with books like Founding Brothers or the excellent recent biographies of Washington, Adams, Hamilton or Jefferson. But if you haven't read about his period and you like history at all, definitely learn more.

The Portrait by Iain Pears -- this is a tiny novel (about 200 pages) by the author of "An Instance of the Fingerpost", an absolutely incredible book (even though it may have the worst title I've heard). The Portrait is the kind of book I usually don't like -- its told completely as a flashback as the narrator, an artist, paints a picture of his former best friend, a powerful art critic. The book is essentially the monologue given by the artist as, over a period of a few weeks, he paints the critic's portrait. Sounds dull? It definitely started that way. If I hadn't read Pears before, I'd have probably put this book down after the first few dozen pages. If you pick it up and are inclined to quit, don't! You feel like you're riding a train that slowly -- very slowly -- accelerates, but by the end you're flying through this book in totally unexpected directions. Pears is a "literary" author - he's never tried to be a bestseller -- and this book is no exception. Its language is a little stilted, but, if you can get through, this one is terrific. Best of the summer so far.

And just like -- we're caught up. Hopefully, I'll make entries every day or two now and only talk about one book in each posting.

Please add comments! Even if its just to let me know there's somebody out there. But I'd especially like to hear if you've read one of the books and agree or disagree or if, based on the few words here, you decide to try it yourself. Finally, if, based on what you see here, there's some "must-read" that I should know about, let me know.

Welcome to Colorado!

June Snow - 3
Originally uploaded by mseriff.

We made the switch to Colorado about 10 days ago and I'm already on my ninth book. The next post will catch you up on the list so far, but I had to share the day with you. OK, so maybe its rubbing it in a little. Even though its the first week of June, we woke up this morning to about 6 inches of snow! Its starting to slow down, but its been snowing steadily for about 4 hours now.