Review: The Zimmermann Telegram

The Zimmermann Telegram by Barbara W. Tuchman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While it dates from the late '50s, this work of WW I history is still a vibrant even thrilling read. Good narration from Wanda McCaddon helps, but it is really the text. You have militant, hyperlogical Germans (proto-Nazis, it feels) seeking to foment and support a revolution separating much of the United States away to independent states of people of color by spurring Mexico and Japan... Pancho Villa! Yellow Peril! Woodrow Wilson and public opinion... Pitched and heated (if small) battles - really a Western Hemisphere story of America drawn into World War I by coded cables and unmaked spies with strategic British help over at the London embassy so it can all be "on American soil"

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Review: SuperFreakonomics

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A delightful and enlightening follow-up to Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Like how the earliest Fermi problems seemed to drift to the salty ("What is the volume of human blood in the world?") these two authors offer colorful real-world microeconomics around prostitution, suicide bombers, etc. A lot of currency here with fairly extensive material around climate change with innovative geoengineering visions to fight climate change and though I have heard of it before, I really enjoyed the overview in the epilogue of human-like behavior (including prostitution, again) arises with chimps introduced to a specie-based economy.

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Review: Tokaido: Hiroshige

Tokaido: Hiroshige by Tomikichiro Tokuriki
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Inspired by The Fifty Three Stations of the Tokaido, a series of ukiyo-e woodcut prints created by Utagawa Hiroshige after his first travel along the Tōkaidō in 1832, the author offers colored plates of the ukiyo-e. While in color, these are unfortunately small plates -- a bit smaller than a typical postcard. Added to these plates is retrospective commentary, photography, and commentary. The author looks back from the industrial age over asphalt and automobiles to Hiroshige's pre-industrial depictions of The Tōkaidō road linking the shōgun's capital, Edo, to the imperial one, Kyōto. This main travel and transport artery of old Japan was traversed then over weeks by this intrepid traveler who once spent three years on the road.. We know about this fact of Hiroshige who created some 30 different series of woodcut prints on it due to the biographical and historical addenda which includes techniques to detect frequent forgeries. Often in the commentary, parallels in Hiroshige's composition are drawn to Shank's Mare: Japan's Great Comic Novel of Travel & Ribaldry.

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Review: Mistakes Were Made

Mistakes Were Made by Stephan Pastis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not a genre I gravitate too, but the drawing and bright red cover drew me in. this is darkly, sarcastically hilarious, full of witting and cutting remarks I'd like to use and not give Timmy Failure credit. This was a quick, easy, enjoyable read. I actually like the sort of dark undercurrent here that Timmy has a single mother under employed and sinking into financial ruin.

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Review: The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic

The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic by Darby Penney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had high hopes for this book, having wanted to acquire and read it since I heard of it, due to the photographic opportunities. However, on that front I was disappointed since the photos are few in number, small, and black and white. Still, the patient profiles are detailed and moving. It feels as if these Willard examples are poor unfortunates from an era when even an acute nervous breakdown or even oddball personality could shunt one off for hopeless decades or lifelong incarceration in an uncaring and depressing institution.

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Review: Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James and the Shondells

Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James and the Shondells by Tommy James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this thoughtful, humble autobiography from Niles, Michigan rock teen to star briefly eclipsing The Beatles on the charts to redemption from pills and booze. Some of the most interesting parts were in a sense technical - a category of information difficult to make so interesting - including the mechanics of trade journal drive chart positions at the time (Billboard averaging orders and sales, etc.) and vintage studio techniques as heard in "Crimson and Clover" (varying voltage to affect speed). Interestingly, the oft heard single version of that song is from a radio station bootleg copy....

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Review: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

All the Pretty HorsesA few years ago I hear about the now "scuppered" The Road -- "the man", "the boy", the bleakness and violence, etc. Actually with Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men and on I can imagine a quadrant with an axis of violence and an axis of roving agents of violent evil. McCarthy's output arises from bleak landscapes and crowds into on small area of a quadrant. I am sure I will enjoy reading more throughout my life and look forward to more film adaptations, but it no longer holds much urgency for me.

On this re-reading, the obese bald judge still sticks out in his dancing fiddling, hands-on gunpowder making, and more and he rather reminds me of Oscar Zeta "Brown Buffalo" Acosta. In this audio book, the narrator voices the judge with a hint of Orson Welles, which I think is great.

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Review: John Cleese: The Inspirational Life Story of John Cleese; Comedian, Public Speaker, and The Movie Star Who Helped Introduce Monty Python to the World

John Cleese: The Inspirational Life Story of John Cleese; Comedian, Public Speaker, and The Movie Star Who Helped Introduce Monty Python to the World by Patrick Bunker
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is just an audio press release style biography and Rebecca Seip (Narrator) does nothing to liven it up. I will avoid any Bunker titles now, if I can.

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Review: If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children

If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children by Gregg Olsen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow, Olsen does an engrossing job of unraveling the convoluted tale of two generations of not-right leading to a father's hatchet and house explosion killing of his two sons in the after math of uxoricide. The telling was economic and still highlighted the human sides of this family and Mormon community tale: the distraught wife documenting her crumbling world, the pained social worker on the phone with 911, etc.

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Review: Dereliction of Duty

Dereliction of Duty by Robert Patterson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Close to Clinton while toting the nuclear "football", author Lt. Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson (Ret.) of the USAF gives an insider's account of Clinton the man - and Hillary the woman. It does not surprise me that Patterson has much to criticize in Clinton-directed military reduction as well as a reluctant military policy and lack of decisiveness. In this foreign policy opinion, this dovetails with In the Arena: A Memoir of the 20th Century which is liberally excerpted in an appendix. Beside these opinions - probably resonant to many considering 9/11 and the follow-on War on Terror - I found most interesting the candid observations of the Clintons' characters. This adds to multiple opinions of Bill as a charismatic misogynist with a generally unprofessional approach to executive position and Hillary as abusive with both treating the military and other resources with a sense of entitlement. A new observation for me was spinning Hillary has a sharp-tongued shrew to Bill as a meek sufferer of her tirades.

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Review: Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism by Thomas Brothers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a very good and enlightening musician biography. I like the music cues for select CDs to go and hear what is being written about. This has a nice balance: career biography and the necessary social biography as this innovator moved through a changing and even dangerous racial landscape. There is a nice seasoning of musicological analysis.

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Review: Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill

Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill by Deanne Stillman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow, I really got into this tale of enemies turned friends and then, like something out of a tragic independent film, drunkenness and evil forces stop a potential life-saving reunion as a besotted Cody is literally directed down the wrong path while Sitting Bull is assassinated.

Lot's here about Annie Oakley too as well as the broader context of postbellum American already mythologizing a rapidly disappearing wild America.

[I received an ARC of this book through Goodreads Giveaways.]

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Review: Alien Rock: The Rock 'n' Roll Extraterrestrial Connection

Alien Rock: The Rock 'n' Roll Extraterrestrial Connection by Michael Luckman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book reads like a hastily thrown together potpourri about UFO aesthetic and dreamy inclination by musicians over the decades. There is not much of a basis for a "connection" here. No evidence that, say, plumbers are not similarly inclined in at least as great a percentage. It seems to be a bit of a pamphlet to a promote a then upcoming "Signal to Space" music festival, a bit of an odd marriage in truth between a music festival and an organization actively trying to make contact with life in the universe by beaming a signal and offering a landing pad in 2006. Did this festival ever happen?

In the rush or maybe some OCR fail, a lot 1980-something dates ended up back dated, such as this about Nina Hagen: "Nina has always tried to link her singing career with UFOs. In 1905, for example, she descended over a concert crowd of fifty thousand people at the Couto Pereira Stadium in Curitiba, Brazil, in a spectacular flying saucer." Wow, she's old!

There is a lot of supposed first-hand encounters detailed credulously, such as this also backdated report: ""Former Kinks star Dave Davies, who now performs backed up by his own four-piece band, said that his latest album, called Bug (as in alien implant), was inspired by personal contact he had with extraterrestrials in 1902"

This did make me seek out the documentary "Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs" and look into the arbitrarily cancelled Out There series.

I didn't expect much, so it met my low expectation. I enjoy reading music history and this delivered on that offering UFO flavor and believes from musicians famous and underground.

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Review: The Confessions of St. Augustine

The Confessions of St. Augustine by Augustine of Hippo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From across fifteen centuries, Augustine's voice is vibrant and alive as he tries to navigate a Mediterranean world in political and spiritual transition. Drawn to a life of piety, he describes the temptations of the flesh in vivid, poetic metaphor:

Toys and trifles, utter vanities had been my mistresses, and now they were holding me back, pulling me by the garment of my flesh and softly murmuring in my ear: "Are you getting rid of us?" (p. 180)

Much of this reads in a "dear diary" tone as he talks directly to God in review of his life and struggles.

What I actually like the most is the incidental glimpses into daily life in antiquity. As a teacher myself, this vision of an unruly classroom jumped out to me:

At Carthage, on the other hand, the students are disgracefully out of control. They come breaking into a class in the most unmannerly way and, behaving almost like madmen, disturb the order which the master has established for the good of his pupils. (p. 100)

Preparing to marry, the old goat finds losing his bed-buddy to be an emotional loss more than a physical one:

The woman with whom I was in the habit of sleeping was torn from my side on the grounds of being an impediment to my marriage, and my heart, which clung to her, was broken and wounded and dropping blood. (p. 133)

Even this casual, urban encounter jumps off the page with life:

I was going along one of the streets of Milan when I noticed a poor beggar; he was fairly drunk, I suppose, and was laughing and enjoying himself. It was a sight which depressed me, and I spoke to the friends who were with me about all the sorrows which come to us because of our own madness. (p. 119)

Even back then, bar snacks were salty:

There is no pleasure in eating or drinking, unless the discomfort of hunger and thirst come before. Drunkards eat salty things to develop a thirst so great as to be painful, and pleasure arises when the liquor quenches the pain of the thirst. (p. 165)

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Review: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first act of this book was so disappointing to me that I felt certain I would be giving this book 2 stars here. First, there is all this build-up about the absconded material in addition to the Pentagon Papers only to find it washed away in a hurricane and we'll never read it. Then, all this about the loose handling of nukes while so detailed was so much rooted in Ellsberg's first-hand '60s experience that it reads as very dated and possibly irrelevant. Things heat up - get interesting - with the details on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dropping grenades on nuclear armed Soviet subs while tens of thousands of in-place troops hold tactical nukes within reach of a trigger-happy Castro. Did we bring a knife to a gunfight, or what? Every time I read of that event I realize more how close we came to nuclear conflict there and in our own hemisphere. For the final act, Ellsberg really lays out the case that we have a Doomsday Machine too much like that "imagined" (documented?) in Dr. Strangelove vis-a-vis the Russian Dead Hand 'Perimeter' system and the natural inclination to formally or informally delegate nuclear responsibility to guarantee response, even in the even of a successful decapitation strike. The more I consider nukes I think some enlightened stage of humanity will treat it like smallpox: encircle, contain and eradicate until the last is gone. Or, something as simple as a false alarm will initiate a civilization disrupting nuclear event due to human or machine response based on the wrong data...

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Review: Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11

Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 by Thomas L. Friedman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book felt like two, disparate parts: A compilation from his New York Times columns and then a travelogue of encountering people in Saudi Arabia reacting to his writing. The first part I found very uninteresting. The columns I found poor; the snarky and jokey attitude and multiple mock letters seemed to trivialize and provided not real insight. They were not illustrative or enlightening, at all. I would give that two stars as its own book. I would give four stars to the second half where Friedman reported his interactions with ruling class and middle class Saudis hindered by their beliefs that "Jews run everything" in America and their own cultural issues resulting in unemployed, bigoted males and a feeling that Israel is diabolical and Palestinians scapegoats that can do no wrong. Behind these black and white and unsupportable attitudes, some very intriguing reflection arose, largely in some personal communications beyond the veils that may obscure women of the stripe that will someday lead The Kingdom into a more balanced future.

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Review: The Hobbit

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Inevitably, I compare his listening of this dramatization to the recent Pete Jackson movies. Personally, I think this 1968 BBC Radio 4 dramatization hold up quite well. The various voice actors seem to exude even a joy with bringing to life this English language classic. It is really only fair to compare the dialog and audio features of the two adaptations. This BBC adaptation for me meets or exceeds the Jackson films on key scenes and even surpasses for charm and entertainment in two places: (1) the overture-like character introduction when Bilbo has unexpected company in a hobbit hole-full of Dwarves and (2) when Gandalf goes Scheherazade telling stories to Beorn while introducing the company slowly by twos.

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Review: Misery Obscura: The Photography of Eerie Von

Misery Obscura: The Photography of Eerie Von by Eerie Von
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Subtitled "The Photography of Eerie Von" this is really more a compendium of photos of Eerie Von chronologically documenting Misfits, Samhain, the first Danzig albums, etc. That is photos by Eerie and of Eerie with plent of text telling those story of his journey through conceptual horror rock.

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Review: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a moving and detailed study of the great internal migration of African-Americans from the Deep South from WW I through the '70s. This work is made all the more personal and affecting by biographies of specific and varied participants. This includes the plucky sharecropper’s wife Ida Mae Gladney who left Mississippi after a family member was nearly beaten to death over the disappearance of a white man’s turkeys. She and her family end up in Chicago where she sees things she never imagined including the banality of crime in a declined South Side.

Possibly the most detailed subject here - at least the one that stands out for me - is Robert Joseph Pershing Foster. This 1953 transplant to Los Angeles from Monroe, La. overcame prejudice in and out of the military to acquire the famous patient Ray Charles. Charles would record a song about Dr. Foster’s way of running off with Mr. Charles’s women. (Wilkerson misidentified the writer of the song about Foster. While the song, “Hide Nor Hair”, was recorded by Ray Charles, who also commissioned it and suggested its subject matter, it was written by Percy Mayfield.) This ambitious surgeon who sought to escape the caste system of the South performed surgery for the United States Army but was not permitted to do a simple tonsillectomy in his hometown hospital. He eventually rose to high society in Los Angeles and became a friend to Charles, but was tragically drawn in to gambling and other vices. Foster deserves a book of his own!

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Review: Into the Storm: A Study in Command

Into the Storm: A Study in Command by Tom Clancy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Perhaps this deserves more stars for the mountain of detail and research contained herein. But, I wanted a thrilling overview of the Desert Storm tank battles, etc. and I got a textbook on military strategy employed by co-author Gen'l Fred Franks, Jr.. Of course, this is great since he was there directing the WWII-scale tank battles and enveloping pincer movements that overran the Republican Guard divisions and their support. Also, there are many point-by-point responses to how on the second day of the ground war, Norman Schwarzkopf publicly expressed frustration over what he characterized as VII Corps' slow pace, and other shortcomings Schwarzkopf declared with Franks in his memoir memoir, It Doesn't Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. More of my complaints are like the prevalence of military acronyms mires the reading and the text moves from Clancy to Franks speaking with, at times, insufficient warning. Finally, in this era of military vs. terrorists and asymmetric warfare, the large scale land battles envisioned and accomplished by Franks seem outdated, even quaint. The overview of his post-Desert Storm careen with

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Review: Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table

Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table by Malory (Thos.) / Keith Baines
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the second time I have read this and I have really pushed myself through. It is just not engaging as a story. I think my favorite part is the introduction by Robert Graves. While he details the multiple sources of the Arthur legend, he also highlights this readable prose in this version is miles away from the amplificatio described in The Arthur of the Iberians: The Arthurian Legends in the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds as "a very rhetorical style, typical of sentimental fiction..." Maybe it would be better that way and this is like trying to hum rap. While this builds to the few pages at the end describing Arthur's death ("Or did he!?"), Arthur is merely a background context to most of these tales. After bursting on the scene and grabbing swords and Camelot, much more is devoted to the tragic loves Tristram and Launcelot (the spelling here) as well as the quest for the Holy Grail and the rise of Sir Galahad.

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Review: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow. This is a really affecting, even horrific tale of Hmong refugees trying to deal with their daughter's epilepsy across a cultural and language divide. Henry Ford said, "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own." I was also reminded of that value in reading How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer: "The qualities he Valued Were Curiosity, Sociability, kindness, fellow-feeling, adaptability, intelligent reflection, the ability to see things from another's point of View, and 'goodwill'..." This is an epic tragedy and cautionary tale of when that ability is absent on both sides. Personally involved in the investigation the author tells the story well here although I feel the parts about the epic travails of the Hmong from Laos to (post-Vietnam War) America would be better told in the beginning, chronologically.

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Review: Man-Eater: The Life and Legend of an American Cannibal

Man-Eater: The Life and Legend of an American Cannibal by Harold Schechter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Just the other day, while reading this, l reviewed a photo and other Alferd Packer memorabilia at the Museum of Death in New Orleans. This detailed and engrossing (pun intended) investigation of this American prospector who confessed to cannibalism during the winter of 1874. He and five other men attempted to travel through the high mountains of Colorado during the peak of a harsh winter. When only Alfred reached civilization, he claimed that the others had killed each other for food in the style of the survivors of the shipwrecks of the Essex and Méduse also in the 19th century and the Donner Party. Packer confessed to having lived off the flesh of his companions during his snowbound state and to having used it to survive his trek out of the mountains two months later. After his story was called into question largely because of the way he also lived high off their specie, he hid from justice for nine years before being tried, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death. Packer won a retrial and was eventually sentenced to five counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 40 years (8 years for each count). This book covers the details of expedition, first trial, second trial, publicity building during imprisonment, eventual parole and life in public. Beside the actual crime – which this study convinces me was intentional, if even a crazed, starvation-induced frenzy – this book covers the legal implications (the time sentenced was far and above that of similar and more heinous cases) and the folklore that grew up around Packer as both folklore bogeyman and sort of antihero legend, even among Republicans for ingesting so many Democrats.

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