Review: Dallas Conspiracy: Pardon Me, but... #2

Dallas Conspiracy: Pardon Me, but... #2 by Nord William Davis Jr.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For visual clues, instead of starting w/the Zapruder film, this conspiracy research dives into the Altgens photo to build his case that there more shots fired than Oswlad could have done, thus proving his case of conspiracy.



The Zapruder footage is examined in exhaustive detail and he finds not a grassy knoll shooter, and indeed disparages the JFK film, but rather a curb-side shooter with a machine pistol in each hand and in this edition flaty ID'd as Oswald's one-time friend George de Mohrenschildt. From the author's research starting the in 60s this is not necessarily unusual suggestions for the "conspiracy a-go-go" but I think this is where I first read the suggestion Officer J. D. Tippit's body, not a corpse made by Oswald, was used in a bait and switch to obscure the president's actual wounds.

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Review: Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest

Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest by Gregg Olsen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It seems a common trope to kill off adult tenants and continue cashing their checks, but enticing foreigners into slow suicide by starvation while co-opting their estates? That is what went down at "Starvation Heights" and told in this book, which gets a bit tedious with the courtroom details in the final act.

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Review: Honey, I Love And Other Poems

Honey, I Love And Other Poems by Eloise Greenfield
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This Reading Rainbow edition with Diane Dillon and Leo Dillon illustrators is a delightful package. For the poetic content, the initial, title piece is exciting and vibrant with a present voice of joy over a couple of pages that had me re-reading lines with glee. The rest of the material, generally about familial and home 'hood love, is not as strong or resonant.

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Review: Read Between My Lines: The Musical and Life Journey of Stevie Nicks

Read Between My Lines: The Musical and Life Journey of Stevie Nicks by Sandra Halliburton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a quick read covering Nick's career from the road to joining Fleetwood Mac, through that and the reunions as well as her solo career up to the early 2000s. There is enough personal info to please the Nicks adorer and a lot of Mac recording, personnel, and touring details for the Mac enthusiast.

Like almost any famous rocker, she had her substance abuse issues. However, it seems the Klonopin recovery sapped more energy than the abuse. Like with crime where it is often the cover-up not the act, I guess it can be the recovery more than the abuse, at times.

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Review: Read Between My Lines: The Musical and Life Journey of Stevie Nicks

Read Between My Lines: The Musical and Life Journey of Stevie Nicks by Sandra Halliburton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a quick read covering Nick's career from the road to joining Fleetwood Mac, through that and the reunions as well as her solo career up to the early 2000s. There is enough personal info to please the Nicks adorer and a lot of Mac recording, personnel, and touring details for the Mac enthusiast.

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Review: Questions You Always Wanted to Ask About English

Questions You Always Wanted to Ask About English by Maxwell Nurnberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a wonderful and witty, practical and comprehensive guide to English grammar. From hyphens to parallel structure, this is enlightening as well as entertaining. Entertainment comes from taking down famous novelists and prominent newspapers, etc. with examples of inaccurate usage. The frequent self-tests and pretests allow the reader to gauge, and realize both deficiency and progress, but I wish the answers were on the same page. Maybe upside down at the bottom of the page. This is good to peruse or retain as a reference, as I may need to refer to it again to get the whole "who" and whom" thing straight, once and for all.

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Review: The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love and Faith of an American Legend

The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love and Faith of an American Legend by Steve Turner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While this is an abridged version of the authorized biography of Cash, it has this to recommend it: It is narrated in its entirety by Kris Kristofferson himself. (Kris Kristofferson writes the forward the print edition and Rex Linn narrates all other audio versions I know of.)

The abridged version (3 hrs and 21 mins) gets the highlights of Cash's career from humble beginnings, to dizzying heights, to prison concerts, to obscurity, to the Rick Rubin resurrection, to his ultimate demise.

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Review: Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency

Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency by Bill O'Reilly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting observation here on sleeping arrangement between Presidents and First Ladies:

Bill O'Reilly says separate bedrooms were used until Gerald Ford, which does not even sound plausible. I happend at the same time to be reading Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies which offers the more believable inside observation quoting Mamie Eisenhower:

“First of all, I’m not going to sleep in this little room. This is a dressing room, and I want it made into my dressing room. The big room”— she indicated with a sweep of her arm the mauve-and-gray chamber next door, where Mrs. Truman had sat listening to baseball games—“ will be our bedroom!” “Prior to the Roosevelts, it had been used that way,” Mr. [Howell G. Crim, Chief Usher of the White House from 1933 to 1957] ventured.

Who to believe? Well, I believe J.B. West, of course, as he was there. I am later given pause when O'Reilly says Sharon Tate was killed on the "second night" of the Manson Family Murders. Well, that was the LaBiancas, Bill. Sharon was killed the night before, the first night of the murder spree. (Maybe Bill is confused since Tex Watson and crew set out on the 8th of August, 1969 and killed Tate et al after midnight. But, the point is that this book reads like it s well researched, but scratch that patina and it does not bear up.)

So, I don't really trust the research here and it feels like a money grab on continuing the Killing... theme, since (spoiler alert), Reagan wasn't killed by his would-be assassin. John Hinckley Jr. didn't have as near as full and rich life as Reagan, so the dual biographies have Hinckley lurching along in short, pop-up chapters with little resonance to Regan's film and political career.

I do give O'Reilly points for taking down the Reagan image a notch through exploration of the damning Iran–Contra affair as well as painting the second term as largely the orchestrated affair of Nancy Reagan and her the astrological guidance of Joan Quigley as Reagan began to succumb to Alzheimer's disease.

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Review: Body Parts

Body Parts by Caitlin Rother
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Some of the victims of this gruesome killer and necrophile are thoroughly examined in this true crime work. This makes stark how easily serial killers ply their trade among the least protected, largely indigent, drug-addicted prostitutes. Many of Wayne Ford's police interviews, notably after repeatedly requesting an attorney, are reproduced here as well as interviews with Ford family members in a book that goes from Ford's childhood to sentencing.

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Review: Fundamentals of Technical Mathematics

Fundamentals of Technical Mathematics by Sarhan M Musa
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

...The scope of content is ambitious in several ways for a textbook of this level. In bringing in much material not in comparable textbooks, this makes more glaring a key exception. There is nearly a complete absence of a set theoretic basis or motivation at any point. For instance, it seems an awkward wording is the result of this avoidance for the “Definition of the solution of equation” [sic]: “A solution of equation is the numbers that produce true statement for the equation [sic].” While this disappoints, this is one of the rare textbooks I see that, especially at this level, introduces the complex plane along with complex numbers. However, why this is done a chapter ahead of introducing the rectangular coordinate system based on the reals I find elusive. In that chapter on the Cartesian coordinate system, distance formula makes an appearance but a chapter ahead of the Pythagorean Theorem. In my experience, going the other way around succeeds better with students...

[Look for my entire review up at MAA Reviews.]

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Review: Scourage: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox

Scourage: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox by Jonathan B. Tucker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a fascinating, enlightening look at the history of small pox. The story is basically three acts, I: in antiquity, II: combating and defeat of small box, and III: political impediments to destroying remaining stockpiles. III is rather tedious and even disheartening. II stood out the most to me with Soviet Russia's successful internationalist instigation for a global effort to wipe out the disease and the engineering solutions of the US Army's jet injector and the bifurcated needle used during the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication campaign from 1966 to 1977.

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Review: The Actual One: How I Tried, and Failed, to Avoid Adulthood Forever

The Actual One: How I Tried, and Failed, to Avoid Adulthood Forever by Isy Suttie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Like Chelsea Handler, but wittier, British, and featuring a bit less drunkenness and a lot less promiscuity. Cute and clever yet still a fairly revealing memoir about drifting in the single life looking back on the 90s.

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Review: Zero: A Landmark Discovery, the Dreadful Void, and the Ultimate Mind

Zero: A Landmark Discovery, the Dreadful Void, and the Ultimate Mind by Syamal K Sen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

...Looking back on reading this book, I feel it is as much a monograph on yogic meditation as a mathematical treatise. Consider the title of Section 2.3.11: “God is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient while computer will never be”. In explanation, the authors add, “By the term ‘God’, we imply consciousness.” This framework allows their exploration of self-described “spiritual science” to admit such axioms as “the proof of an event…is experiencing it.” As mentioned here, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Mayans had varying concepts and indications of a zero value. However, the theme of Buddhist and Hindu philosophies forces a focus on the Indian numeral and its positional flexibility over deeper exploration of the concept in other cultures...

[Look for my entire review up at MAA Reviews.]

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Review: The Long Shadow of the Parafinite: Three Scenes from the Prehistory of a Concept

The Long Shadow of the Parafinite: Three Scenes from the Prehistory of a Concept by O Bradley Bassler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Long Shadow assays questions in the history and philosophy of mathematics in an area more often termed the transfinite. It is part of the author’s long-term project rethinking metaphysics in the modern European-American tradition, including examining the work of German philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg. The three “scenes” in the work are: (I) relevant history of mathematics from antiquity, including Greek and Arabic advances, especially as framed by Jacob Klein and Reviel Netz; (II) early modern struggles by Galileo, Leibniz, and others as they confront the implications of infinity as an abstract idea; and (III) more recent post-Cantorian alternatives to considering infinity, especially by Bertrand Russell, Edmund Husserl, and Wittgenstein. More philosophy of mathematics than philosophically aware mathematics, the author suggests various tracks through the text from its worthwhile entirety to a summary appendix to fit each reader’s interest. The author’s use of the term parafinite allows separation of these investigations from traditional transfinite topics: “Cantorian set theory has no place for the parafinite because it is an infinite (or, more appropriately; transfinite) theory.”...

[Look for my entire review up at MAA Reviews.]

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Review: Meaning of Treason

Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a fascinating work in three parts with the first largely focused on William Joyce, AKA Lord Haw Haw, the traitor broadcaster from the German propaganda office. Or, could the American-born fascist be a traitor to Britain, just because he lived there and received a passport without ever formally taking citizenship? This was the basis for his defense and while the legal wrangling is interesting, it is spycraft at home and chilly reception in Nazi Germany that makes for an interesting reading Other traitors round out the book: largely those of the British Free Corps and then, finally, deluded youngsters not yet of the age of majority.

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Review: The Elephant in the Room

The Elephant in the Room by Jon Ronson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This short yet fascinating insight into the rise of Trump is a kind of follow up to Them: Adventures with Extremists where Ronson recalls sneak filming the brining effigy theatre at Bohemian Grove where he bonded with and helped launch the career of Info Wars radical conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Reconnecting with Jones as his inside track to the burgeoning Trump campaign where he explores the bizarre influence Jones seems to have on Trump while both operate with confidante Roger Stone lurking in the background in the role of provacetuer and political tricks.

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Review: Killing Pablo

Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this years ago in the dead trees edition. Then, I heard about this Pablo movie Escobar: Paradise Lost and thought I'd watch it on some streaming media. I did that, "meh" about the movie but in prepping for the movie (which I expected to be more fact-based), I decided to take on the audiobook edition, which is still a great tale of rise and assassination. His immense wealth, power, and lethal sway still impresses. What didn't impress was Bowden narrating his own book: "meh", he should have gotten a pro. Like, maybe pro American snipers took out Pablo, or maybe the accurately placed show was a coup de grâce, who knows?

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Review: The Sick Bag Song

The Sick Bag Song by Nick Cave
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Roger Waters conceived the album The Wall during Pink Floyd's 1977 In the Flesh Tour, when his frustration with the audience became so acute that he spat on the audience. As much of that allegorical opus explores the psychology of distance in extensive touring, The Sick Bag Song is an exploration of love, inspiration and memory shaped around the events of Cave’s 2014 tour with dates covered here in England, Canada, and the U.S. I myself was at the Detroit stop where he was supporting Push The Sky Away, an album that has grown on me. I can attest that this delightful, personal & moving collection of airplane sick bag notation facsimiles and recollections is a great way to spend a snowy afternoon, as it is so internal it lends to the enforced interior consideration. Cave teases out the significant moments, the people, the books and the music that have influenced and inspired him, and drops them fantastically into his Sick Bag. I have enjoyed his recent documentary films and like looking about the scene for books and art that must be part of his inspiration. Here much of that is laid bare. Here are poetry, lyrics, memories, musings, fanciful notions and more in the style of journal entries. The exquisite physical edition reproduces in full colour twenty-two sick bags, each hand-customised by Nick, that are integrated throughout the text much like the 120 page replica of Nick Cave’s handwritten, hand-stamped, and hand-glued notebooks in the Push The Sky special edition, here on Goodreads as Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Push The Sky Away.

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Review: All Hands Down: The True Story of the Soviet Attack on the USS Scorpion

All Hands Down: The True Story of the Soviet Attack on the USS Scorpion by Kenneth Sewell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Detailed in research in taut in the telling, this is a breath-taking, further revelation of how close 1968 came to seeing The Cold War turn hot and nuclear.

Diesel-electric powered submarine of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, K-129 sank on 8 March 1968. It was one of four mysterious submarine disappearances in 1968; the others being the Israeli submarine INS Dakar, the French submarine Minerve (S647) and the US submarine USS Scorpion (SSN-589). This book is about how the Scorpion was lost on 22 May 1968, with 99 crewmen dying in the incident. We have since learned K-129 went rogue ( Red Star Rogue, by the same author ) and how close was that to nuclear conflict? At the time, the Soviets did not think it anything other than a loss to American aggress and begin to plot revenge. Part 1 was getting navy crypto gear and manuals off the USS Pueblo in an operation where Russia backed North Korea. Part 2 fell into the Soviet lap when spy John Walker as a walk part of his family spy ring provided them with the keylists and manuals to listen in crucial navy communications. This allowed them to be on top of the Scorpion and torpedo it.

One other thing that stuck out to me was how the bereaved families lost resources and roofs in how they were rather callously handled by the Navy once the sub was declared lost.

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Review: What Don't Kill Me Just Makes Me Strong

What Don't Kill Me Just Makes Me Strong by Stewart Francke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A fascinating look at the sudden onset and eventual survival (triumph?) over acute myeloid (or myelogenous) leukemia (AML). Michigan musician Francke decorates the chapters with positive affirmation epigraphs and often lyrics to songs he wrote during this tribulation. People who have a similar cancer experience, or know someone that has, will relate to and fine value in this wide-eyed medical memoir about treatments, pitfalls, and a path to physical, personal, and spiritual recovery.

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Review: The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Uproariously funny memoir of life in remote Kiribati in the Gilbert Islands. This title is prominent on CNN's 15 funniest travel books ever written (in English) and deserves the attention. For a while my wife lived in St. Kitts attending school and with that experience of visiting there often I can relate to the oppressive heart, lack of creature comforts, and prevalence of pestilential creatures - though, of course, not to the extent suffered by Troost on the remote island of Tarawa.

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Review: Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I very much enjoyed this autobiography of teen partier to Jewish scholar in The Holy Land to prison librarian. Obviously by the title, this jail job is the meat of the book and the tale is of inmate interactions, being a book lover on the inside and how after positive and negative interactions with cons and COs he got pushed out of this strange role back into the strange world.

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Review: 8 Ball Chicks

8 Ball Chicks by Gini Sikes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author embeds with female gang members and their larger gang and non-gang associates to go as far as she can (short of being present at crimes) to report on the activities, motivation and challenges of female gang members in LA, San Antonio, and Milwaukee. In LA it is a world matured since 60s zoot suit riot days, etc. while at stages of unacknowledged maturity in Milwaukee and a latent, emergent threat to the community in San Antonio. Gini gets very closes, as in friendship close, to some of her subjects and her close reportage with little fact checking or big picture makes for compelling, personalized reading (these miscreants and survivors are real people) obviously suggests issues of the impact of researcher involvement. Are they just talking and acting big because a journalist is in the room? What if they did not know they were being observed?

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Review: About Jenga: The Remarkable Business of Creating a Game That Became a Household Name

About Jenga: The Remarkable Business of Creating a Game That Became a Household Name by Leslie Scott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book by the woman that created, marketed, and launched Jenga. It has elements of the movie Joy and much enlightening about not only game design (she designed many other games), running a small business internationally (including getting taken advantage of ... by Canadians), and life in Ghana where the game developed within her family living in one of the farther reaches of the British Empire, but real tennis, undergorund libraries at Oxford, and showy displays in would-be mating animals as part of the author's rich life and musings on her creation Jenga.

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Review: Witness: For the Prosecution of Scott Peterson

Witness: For the Prosecution of Scott Peterson by Amber Frey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A short, easy read detailing Frey's involvement with Scott Peterson from meeting him to media circus to the trial to his conviction and sentencing. The transcripts of conversation with a mendacious Peterson may be the most interesting thing here, on the case. The rest if the difficulty one would expect when it starts to dawn on Amber that her lover is not only married, but a liar, and a murderer. Through this she has inordinate press attention to deal with and another, follow-up non-ideal relationship.

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Review: The Long Shadow of the Parafinite: Three Scenes from the Prehistory of a Concept

The Long Shadow of the Parafinite: Three Scenes from the Prehistory of a Concept by O Bradley Bassler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Long Shadow assays questions in the history and philosophy of mathematics in an area more often termed the transfinite. It is part of the author’s long-term project rethinking metaphysics in the modern European-American tradition, including examining the work of German philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg. The three “scenes” in the work are: (I) relevant history of mathematics from antiquity, including Greek and Arabic advances, especially as framed by Jacob Klein and Reviel Netz; (II) early modern struggles by Galileo, Leibniz, and others as they confront the implications of infinity as an abstract idea; and (III) more recent post-Cantorian alternatives to considering infinity, especially by Bertrand Russell, Edmund Husserl, and Wittgenstein. More philosophy of mathematics than philosophically aware mathematics, the author suggests various tracks through the text from its worthwhile entirety to a summary appendix to fit each reader’s interest. The author’s use of the term parafinite allows separation of these investigations from traditional transfinite topics: “Cantorian set theory has no place for the parafinite because it is an infinite (or, more appropriately; transfinite) theory.”...

[Look for my entire review up at MAA Reviews.]

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Review: Freedom Summer

Freedom Summer by Doug McAdam
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Beside being an important analysis of race relations in America, this reminded me of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age in another way. Like it, there is a lot of dry, scientific, textbook like data analysis. Heck you can get the Logint Regression details in an appendix! Good stuff, really - very good that that is all here. What comes through is the work of the volunteers up to and including the 1964 Freedom Summer in voter registration and other efforts in racially tense Mississippi. Some things I learned is about how this spawned the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as a threat to the traditional Democratic Party. This, for me, shades LBJ's motivation - SNCC and company were really shaking up the establishment! Also, the sexual mores of volunteers in the trenches, their radicalization, and the impact they had taking their commitment and organizing skills to other areas is detailed. The core data here is with over 200 volunteers that participated and some that applied but did not participate.

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Review: England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton

England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton by Kate Williams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Covering the late 18th to early 19th century there is a fascinating backdrop to a women that rose from penury and prostitution to be the toast of the world and the companion to elites to find being the mistress of Horatio Nelson Nelson and mother to his daughter Horatia only was the beginning of a frustrating slide to destitution after his death at the Battle of Trafalgar. Against this backdrop is the reaches of the British Empire then, the rise of Napoleon, and the limitations and opportunities afforded a woman of pluck at that time.

Oh that Youtube had existed then so we could see her stunning, rapid transformations in the popular dramatic poses known as "attitudes"!

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