Review: Mildred Tolbert: Among the Taos Moderns

Mildred Tolbert: Among the Taos Moderns by Robert Bell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



With over 100 duotones from silver gelatin prints taken between the late 1930's and the early 1960's we get a real introduction to Tolbert's art. The book was published in conjunction w/exhibit held @ Harwood Museum, Taos, New Mexico, Sept.22-Dec.30, 2006 and includes an introduction from Tolbert tracing the birth of her career in photography from childhood inclinations to adulthood. The plates of tenements and (mostly) honest, candid portraits are full-age presentations without caption or comment.



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Review: Mildred Tolbert: Among the Taos Moderns

Mildred Tolbert: Among the Taos Moderns by Robert Bell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



With over 100 duotones from silver gelatin prints taken between the late 1930's and the early 1960's we get a real introduction to Tolbert's art. The book was published in conjunction w/exhibit held @ Harwood Museum, Taos, New Mexico, Sept.22-Dec.30, 2006 and includes an introduction from Tolbert tracing the birth of her career in photography from childhood inclinations to adulthood. The plates of tenements and (mostly) protraits are full-age presentations without caption or comment.



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Review: The Confessions

The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

My rating: 0 of 5 stars



Among the reasons I have enjoyed reading Rousseau's obsessively detailed, confessional autobiography is that I recognize in him a fellow book lover. Consider this quote from ""JJ": "I have lost or dismembered numbers of books through the habit of carrying them about with me everywhere, in the pigeon-house, in the garden, in the orchard, and in the vineyard. While occupied with something else, I put my book down at the foot of a tree or on a hedge ; I always forgot to take it up again, and, at the end of a fortnight, I frequently found it rotted away, or eaten by ants and snails. This eagerness for learning became a mania which drove me nearly stupid, so incessantly was I employed with muttering something or other to myself."



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Review: The Monster of Florence

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Wow! What an amazing tale about a series of murders that occurred between 1968 and 1985 and involved couples who were killed while having sex in their cars in deserted lanes around the city of Florence in the Italian province of Tuscany. We learn Tuscany is not a bucolic Eden, but more like a riot of abusive, sex-starved, half-wit criminal Italian hillbillies.

The book tells the story of the inept, often ludicrously/ciminally mismanaged and ultimately unsuccessful 20-plus year search for a serial killer in the vicinity of Florence, Italy. (The story of the search for the Monster of Florence was also worked into the plot of [b:Hannibal|32418|Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter, #3)|Thomas Harris|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327356556s/32418.jpg|2992500] by Thomas Harris who studied the case.)

Preston, an author of fiction and non-fiction books, and Mario Spezi, co-author of the book, collaborate on articles and books about the case. Both became figures in the case when the Italian prosecutors came to suspect them and accuse them of crimes including obstruction of justice ("reticence") and potentially being accomplices to murder. This is part of the cultural exploration of Italy made here which appears a fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Thus we have the fascinating Italian word "dietrologia". An Italian nobleman explained the meaning of dietrologia to author Douglas Preston this way: "Dietro - behind. Logia - the study of...Dietrologia is the idea that the obvious thing cannot be the truth. There is always something hidden behind, dietro. It isn't quite what you Americans call conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory implies theory, something uncertain, a possibility. The dietrologist deals only in fact. This is how it really is." Thus teh fear of being gullible and a belief in hidden motiviations fosters Italian beliefe in Rube Goldberg machinations.

The book recounts the authors' personal experiences while investigating the case and their problems of being accused by the Italian criminal justice system. Preston and Spezi are outspoken critics of the tactics and theories pursued by the Italian police and prosecutors in the Monster of Florence case.

This audio version includes an interview with Preston, which is interesting but really adds nothing not in the book.



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Review: Chinese Whispers: The 'Missing Manual' to Lady From Shanghai

Chinese Whispers: The 'Missing Manual' to Lady From Shanghai by David Thomas

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Not only is there technical and creative notes on each track to Pere Ubu album 'Lady From Shanghai', but the book has contextual exposition with relevant highlights from the history of Pere Ubu marking 'Mirror Man' as very important point leading up to 'Lady From Shanghai'



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Review: The Book of Hieroglyphs

The Book of Hieroglyphs by David Thomas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Not just a collection of Thomas' Pere Ubu lyrics, but more. The essays on his creative process, magnetic recording (mics, etc.) and more bookending the lyrics are themselves worth the money. Also fascinating (and explained herein) is the lyrics categorization: not my album but pinned to the map of an imagined America.

ISBN: 9781471728204





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Review: Savage Grace

Savage Grace by Natalie Robins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The two authors combine the approaches of an oral hisotry, delivered in paragraph-length quotations and excerpts with a mixed timeline. (The murder and incareration is described intermingled with the events leading up to it, including multiple generations of family history.) The result makes me feel that we are not read a book, but the notes that could have resulted in a very good book. Tony Baekeland is for removed from the inventory of plastics in time that it seems a mere distraction or subject for a different book to explore that as much as is done here.

All that aside, this is not so much as a true crime narrative, but a multi-faceted recollection of Tony Baekeland, an heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, whose greatest hurdles in life come not from the want, but from an incestuous power struggle withhis mother Barbara while absent an engaged father (Brooks Baekeland). Struggling with his homosexuality without family support and desperate for individuation yet lacking the will to leave the stifling fold, Tony goes down the road to matricide, a knife assault on his grandmother after beaureaucratic inefficiency leads to his release and, finally, an ironic if possibly dubious suicide by plastic bag.



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Review: The Ceremony

The Ceremony by David Fischer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



In this slim volume, we have a cursory introduction from Mafia cover agent Pistone about Mafia organization and surveillance. Then, we have transcripts of several inductions done in a row over a single day in the basement of a borrowed home. Interesting and incomplete, all in all, a dozen interesting pages stretched out to a short book.



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Review: Calculus Alive and Applied for Business, Economics, and Life

Calculus Alive and Applied for Business, Economics, and Life by Sherman Chottiner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This textbook is one third pre-calculus (algebra, analytical geometry) and the rest introductory calculus presented in just over four hundred pages of content. The presentation is often overtly jocular. This style could be friendly and even entertaining to some: “Are you having so much trouble with derivatives that you are thinking about jumping from the nearest tall building? Well, stop, because you’ll only come under the influence of other derivatives…” Ignoring the jokes, the book, complete with exercises and examples, is a suitable textbook for a first semester of calculus especially at the high school level. The text integrates with Freemathhelp.com and Calc101.com through suggested content-relevant tasks.

[Look for my full review on MAA Reviews]



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Review: The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation

The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation by James Donovan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



With a title like "Blood of Heroes", I expected a work playing to the semi-legendary status of the last, hopeless, desperate, and near mythical stand that had the seeming impossible attendance of Bowie, Crocket, and Travis. However, especially the first, dragging half earns the book the dry, detailed title of "A Military History of the Texan War for Independence", or something. However, things pick up when the author "cuts to the chase" for the actual fall of The Alamo, the later massacre at Goliad and the ignomious fall of the Napoleonic Santa Anna in discarded slave's clothes. An Afterword gives a long, very detailed discussion of the sources and veracity of Travis' drawn line in the sand and the most famous 'survivor' Louis "Moses" Rose. Brief but detailed life stories of other key survivors precedes this.



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Review: The Case Against Adolf Eichmann

The Case Against Adolf Eichmann by Henry A. Zeiger

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The fascinating little tome came out during or shortly before trhe Eichmann trial in Israel. His capture is mere prologue to a mass of depositions, memoranda, and communications from the Nazi death camps. Among the depositions is a history that testified at Nuremburg and apparently first heard the 6 millions figure from Eichmann himself. Eichmann comes across as a craven bureaucrat of murder so taken with his deadly paper pushing he didn't stop feeding the crematoria and counting its receipts after he himself felt the war was lost (when Roumania left the Axis) and even when Himmler in a pique of feigned restraing ordered the killing stopped. Among the memoranda, regular Wermacht officers send unanswered queries up the chain of command asking if anyone knows these insanse SS are killing Jews (wasting a labor resource) and otherwise directing away military resources better used against the Russians. It ends up in a memo chains passed around Nazi officials that no one can supply a racial theorists with 150 non-Aryan skulls until Eichmann hears of the need and swiftly complies...



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Review: Chats

Chats by Elian-J Finbert

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



While I can't read the with introductory text in French, the 175 mostly full-page photographs in black and white of cats is a treat for any cat-lover. Some are loosely themed, such as cats with their young. I especially like the interspecies ones: a cat with its bird, a cat meets a snake, etc.



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Review: Robert Strange McNamara The True Story of Dr. Strangebob

Robert Strange McNamara The True Story of Dr. Strangebob by Liberty Lobby

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



The publication is from the Liberty Lobby's (see [b:The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture|977126|The Liberty Lobby and the American Right Race, Conspiracy, and Culture|Frank P. Mintz|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348079009s/977126.jpg|962022])campaign against Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, Robert Strange McNamara (famously tackled by Errorl Morris in 'Fog of War'). It focused contemporary right-wing distaste for McNamara and draws upon a number of well-known conservative sources when it accused him of being a unilateral disarmer and attacked him for lacking the will to win in Vietnam as well as 'reverse racism' through affirmative action enlistments for his promotion of racial integration in the armed forces, ineptitude, corporate welfare, etc.



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Review: Inside Delta Force: The Story of America's Elite Counterterrorist Unit

Inside Delta Force: The Story of America's Elite Counterterrorist Unit by Eric L. Haney

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is a really incredible, revealing look from a many part of Delta Force from its beginning Panama (Noriega), and beyond. Beyond includes a summary of his feelance efforts and commentary on the post-9/11 world. The meat of it is a Delta Force history that is a different view from that of [b:Shadow Warriors|397245|Shadow Warriors|Tom Clancy|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347401333s/397245.jpg|5054756]. Clancy's book now strikes me as an administrative history, told from, the point of view of management, whereas Haney tells it from the NCO level. Case in point: I got the impression from Clancy's book that Special Forces (SF) was an untutored, vestigal appendage of U.S. military units with no counterterrorism (CT) capability and this led to the Desert One disaster. Haney documents a thoroughly prepared and successful CT force that was led down by gutless Navy pilot without the nerve or equipment for the nearly successful mission. Haney points to [b:The Guts to Try: The Untold Story of the Iran Hostage Rescue Mission by the On-Scene Desert Commander|144318|The Guts to Try The Untold Story of the Iran Hostage Rescue Mission by the On-Scene Desert Commander|James H. Kyle|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1172162900s/144318.jpg|139240] as further support for this point of view. Here may have been the seeds of Haney's growing disatisfaction with American military policy extending to the purposeful wrecking of missions to recover POWs in Laos, with the complicit help of Bo Gritz. Later in South American missions, Haney's confidence is further eroded.



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Review: Enola Gay

Enola Gay by Gordon Thomas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is really one of the best WWII books I have ever read. In a very modern style, it tells the story from several points of view, cutting back and forth: Tibbet's crew and the 509th Composite Group, the submarine captain that will sink the Indianapolis after it delivers A-Bomb parts, Japanese soldiers and civilans in and around Hiroshima. This also goes into detail on things I only knew of briefly, such as the American POWs in Hiroshima and the (overblown) insanity developed later by an Enola Gay crewman. It really seems from this book Japan was definitely on the ropes at the time of the nuke attacks: A growing dove coalition, inability to mount an effective air defence, and the impending entry of Russia into the Pacific Theatre, along with growing awareness of the futility of the Japanese war effort. Also, in telling the engineering side of the story, nuclear bombs were definitely "in the air" and an unfortunate next step in military technology whether the United States developed them or not or needed them to either defeat Japan or send a message to Red Russia.



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