All posts by Lars Walker

Reviews

Book review: Hot Springs, by Stephen Hunter

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Sorry about my silence last night. Wednesday is the day one of my assistants comes in to work at noon, so I took that opportunity to drag myself home and lie down in bed. Later on, for a change of pace, I lay down on the sofa. It seemed such a good program that I chose not to mess it up with blogging or Christmas card writing.

I think I’m a little better today, sort of. Perhaps. I seemed to have more steam to get me through the afternoon, but I think I’ve been spewing toxic aerosol more today than yesterday. Still, I think I’m making my way toward the end of Kubler-Ross’s Seven Stages of the Cold:

1. Tickle.

2. A little sore, but it was probably that hot soup I ate.

3. Oh man, this is serious. What’s in the medicine cabinet?

4. I really feel like staying home from work. Am I sick enough to take a day off?

5. I’m not well enough to go to work, but I’m well enough to drive to the drug store for Sudafed and Ibuprofen. And chocolate, of course (got to keep my strength up).

6. I could go back to work, but I’d be spreading germs to all my co-workers.

7. How come there’s nothing in the fridge?

I read another Swagger book from Stephen Hunter—Hot Springs. It’s a doozy. This is another Earl Swagger story (I think there are actually more Earl books than Bob Lee books, though I’m too lazy to tally them up). It begins in the aftermath of World War II, with Earl getting the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Truman, and then heading home with his new wife. In spite of his hero status, all that awaits him is a job in a sawmill (where, we are informed, everybody loses a hand or an arm eventually). He can’t understand why he’s so miserable, hitting the bottle so hard, but it becomes clear that in his deepest heart he misses the war. The war was his drug. He never expected, or intended, to come home at all.

Then he’s approached by two men. One is an ambitious politician, the newly elected District Attorney in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The other is a legendary former FBI agent, generally considered the greatest pistol shot in the country. They have a job offer for Earl, one more interesting than saw mill work.

The district attorney wants to clean up Hot Springs, which (we learn) is in that time what Las Vegas will be later on. In fact Bugsy Siegel, who will later establish the casino industry in Vegas, is in Hot Springs just at this time, checking out the possibilities.

The plan is to form a flying squad of young men, kind of like Eliot Ness’ Untouchables, but trained the Marine way by Earl Swagger. They will be turned into hard, keen fighting men, experts in all kinds of firearms. Using military tactics, they will shut down vice in the city.

In spite of his wife’s fears, Earl takes the job. What follows is a story of courage and betrayal, and a trip into Earl’s darkest heart.

Because he knows Hot Springs, though he won’t admit it to anyone. He knows Hot Springs because his father, a feared lawman, respected Baptist churchman and brutal, child-beating hypocrite (fortunately, Hunter provides a couple decent Christian characters for balance, so I wasn’t offended), had business in Hot Springs of his own, on a regular basis, before his death.

I hardly need say that in the end Earl Swagger does what has to be done, by thunder, and does it so nobly you just want to build a statue to him.

One of Hunter’s best, I think.

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Post-traumatic stress

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My cold (I’m pretty sure by now it’s a cold) is still with me. The sore throat is better, but I’m more stuffed up today. And yet I went in to work, good soldier that I am. Now I’m home and I plan to lie down a bit after I’ve posted this, and before I get to some more Christmas cards.



There are a couple Minnesota connections to that Colorado shootings story. One is that one of the dead at the YWAM facility was a Minnesota native, Tiffany Johnson. Another Minnesotan, Charles Blanch, was wounded in the leg. And of course you’ve heard about Jeanne Assam, the volunteer security guard who shot and stopped the shooter (who will not be dignified by the use of his name in this post), although apparently he took his own life at the end.

According to this report, Assam was fired from the Minneapolis police force in 1997. This information caught my attention right off, since I can think of many possible reasons why a Christian might be fired in the politically correct climate of Minneapolis city politics today. But apparently she was fired for lying about an incident on a bus where she swore at a driver. Sounds more like a pre-conversion incident, though one never knows.

What is certainly true is that right now, on top of the trauma of having been involved in a fatal fire fight, and survivor’s guilt, she is facing public scrutiny directed at a past she may have hoped to have put behind her. So a prayer for her, as well as for the wounded and the families of the victims, would not be out of order.

Reading

Notes from an invalid weekend

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I don’t have much for you tonight. I’ve been feeling sub-par since last Friday. I have a bad sore throat (moderated by Ibuprofen), and I feel run down. Flu? There’s no temperature (Seems like I never do run a temperature, no matter how bad I feel. I’m beginning to wonder if I have a defective thermometer). I’m proud to say, however, that I got the majority of my Christmas shopping done on Saturday, in spite of this handicap. (It’s true. I am a genius. Or else I’m past caring. One of those.) Sunday I spent on the couch with a couple books.

One was Forever Odd, the middle book of the three Dean Koontz’ Odd Thomas adventures published so far. Very good, moving and gripping, like the others. I noted a theological problem with the afterlife as Koontz describes it, though. Odd tells us that damned souls generally depart for Hell immediately after death. The ghosts whom he encounters and tries to help on their way are, for the most part, “good” people who have unfinished business, or are too attached to their loved ones, or are afraid of their reception in Heaven. Odd’s message to them seems to be that they’ll be welcomed by God because they’re good.

This is lousy theology. The Cross is nowhere to be seen.

I suppose that if Koontz (who is, I believe, a Catholic) had employed better theology, he’d have ended up writing “Christian fiction” which would have reached only a limited audience, though. I think there’s an element of allegory in the Odd Thomas books, instead of straight doctrine.

Still, it bothered me a little. Liked the book anyway.

I also read A Time to Hunt, another book in Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger series. Like all of them it’s fascinating, richly researched, vivid in its action and characterizations, and satisfying all around.

The books don’t bear much thinking about all at once, though. Bob Lee and his father Earl, also hero of several of Hunter’s books, seem to be falling victim to the terrible doom of the heroes of action TV series—they have more death-defying adventures than can be comfortably believed in, in the aggregate. Earl, for instance, was murdered at a fairly young age, but Hunter has given him so many big adventures that it appears he must have had about one a month all through his short adulthood.

Bob Lee has lived longer than his dad, but he’s around 60 now, and pretty shot up. I hope he can handle all the blood and thunder his author’s still got planned for him.

Another amusing thing about the Swagger Saga is that the stories aren’t consistent with each other. Hunter cheerfully contradicts things he said in other books, and doesn’t apologize for it.

Just like a newspaper man.

They sure are good books, though.

And now, the couch beckons me.

But I’ve got to get started on the Christmas cards.

Publishing

Suing Father Brown

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Here’s an odd, and somewhat troubling, story from my own state.

It seems a boy was killed in 1957 in what appeared to be a car accident. Years later, a priest investigated the matter and decided the boy had in fact been murdered. He wrote a book that claimed to prove his theory, substituting fictional names for the real characters he blamed for the death.

Problem was, it was set in such a small community that the fictionalized characters were easily identifiable.

So the people the characters were based on sued the priest. They have now won a settlement out of court.

I guess that without a judgment, this doesn’t create a legal precedent, but it’s bad news for authors. It should be noted that just changing a person’s name and giving him a different hair color doesn’t necessarily protect you from a libel suit.

I’ve never heard of this book. I doubt it was a bestseller, so there can’t have been a lot of royalty money in the pot. I suppose the priest’s order ended up paying the lion’s share of the settlement.

That must be frustrating. This time (for a change) the priest wasn’t even accused of the crime.

Music

The concert was too short, and so was the hair

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The Sissel concert on PBS last night was great. It was filmed in the picturesque Norwegian town of Røros in wintertime, the music itself performed in a historic church there. Very classy and reverent, I thought. And, needless to say, The Greatest Voice in the World soared through the pure, arctic air, delivering beauty like an angelic UPS truck. Or something.

My only unhappiness concerned Sissel’s hair. As is so often the case.

I care about women’s hair. It has something to do with an experience I had once, which it would be lugubrious to recount now (I suspect I’ve already told the story in this space, or on the old site, anyway). But I’ve always had strong opinions on women’s hair.

If you look at pictures of Sissel in the early stages of her career, you’ll see a lovely young girl with long, thick, honey-colored hair. That’s how she looked when I first became a fan, and that’s the image I imprinted on.

But it all changed around the time of the Winter Olympics in Norway in 1994. There she appeared, suddenly, and to the great shock of most, at the opening ceremonies with short, dark hair. Her hairstyle has changed constantly in the years since, but has generally been more or less that sort of thing.

Since her marriage broke up she seems to have grown it out a little, but for the concert she appeared in some kind of avant-garde coiffure that looked both oily and swirly. It was not becoming, in the eyes of this obsessive fan.

Why do women do this? I don’t know a lot about women, it goes without saying, but I’m pretty sure they tend to be more insecure about how they look than men are. That being true, why do they consistently put themselves in the hands of hairdressers of ambiguous gender, and trust them when they say, “Oh, darling, we’ll just streak your hair with purple, and lacquer it, and make it stand out straight from the left side of your skull so you look like a character from Anime! You’ll look divine!”

Any man can easily tell you what we want in a woman’s hair. Like most things about men, it’s very simple: “Long. Grow it as long as you can. Never cut it. Split ends? What are those? Dry, fly-away hair? Who cares?”

Show me a woman who wears her hair extremely long, and I’ll show you a woman who understands men deeply.

Of course a woman who wears her hair extremely short probably understands men deeply too.

Which sort is wiser, I’m not qualified to say.

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Did you borrow my dictionary?

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As long as I have a post idea I haven’t used yet, I feel rich in material. What I always forget is that my idea bench is usually about one player deep.

I’d been meaning to do a post about how Christians have gone from complaining about the commercialization of Christmas to complaining about being left out of the holidays entirely, for some time. Last night I used it, and tonight I find myself swept and garnished of topics.

Which won’t stop me from posting. I’ll just write about myself. Haven’t tried that in, oh, a day or two.



I’m in the midst of a Christmas card crisis. I’m one of those tedious people who send a Christmas letter with their cards, and I have an annual protocol for it. First I write the letter. Then I translate it into Norwegian, so I can send it to my friends and relatives in the Old Country first, since mail takes longer to get there.

An indispensable tool for me over the years, in setting those letters in Norwegian, has been a book I acquired (oddly enough) during my sojourn in Florida. It’s an English-Norwegian dictionary, where you can look up the word in English and find the Norwegian equivalent (“Boat,” for instance, is “båt.” “Tree” is “tre” [which also stands in for “wood.”]. Squirrel, oddly enough, is “ekorn” in Norwegian. I’m not kidding).

But this year I’m being handicapped by the complete disappearance of my dictionary. It ought to be somewhere right around here by the computer, since I always leave things where I last used them, and never straighten the desk up. But I’ve been through all the piles and it’s nowhere.

I blame the elves (“nisser” in Norwegian).



Speaking of Norwegian, I see that my PBS station is broadcasting the new musical production, “Northern Lights: An Evening With Sissel” tonight. Chances are your PBS station is broadcasting it too, one of these nights, during the sacred Pledge season. I’m no great booster of PBS, but this is your chance to discover why I’ve been promoting this woman all these years. I expect you to watch it. You will be tested on the material.

Religion

Silent Night and Day

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More coming tomorrow. Snow, I mean. My old bones tell me we’re getting an inch or two more snow.



That’s a lie, by the way. My bones are indeed old, but they’re as surprised by the weather as I am most of the time. I get my weather off the radio and the internet these days, and those portents agree that it’ll probably snow tomorrow.

It looks very much as if our White Christmas is secure for 2007. Or “White Holiday,” as they say nowadays. I suppose singers make it, “White Season,” so it’ll scan. Anything to avoid the embarrassing, shocking word, “Christmas,” containing, as it does, the foul, profane syllable, “cris,” which must be kept at all costs from the ears of our children. (Or your children, anyway. I’ve done my bit for carbon neutrality and the maintenance of the gene pool by keeping my DNA to myself. No need to thank me. Just send a present.)

I’ve noticed there’s been some uproar from Christian groups over the Christmas advertising of the Kohl’s department store chain. The Kohl’s commercials (which star a very attractive woman who’s got a sort of Terri Hatcher thing going, I couldn’t help noticing) feature trappings and symbols that look Christmas-y in a generic, non-sectarian sort of way, but the music they use (to one’s amazement once one realizes it) is Cole Porter’s “De-Lovely,” hitherto never considered a trademark of the season.

All in all I disapprove. But I can’t help noting a certain irony in the situation.

Because I’m old, as mentioned above, and I can remember back in the 50s and 60s, when all the stores had Christmas sales, and Christmas decorations, and they played Christmas carols over the loudspeakers—and some of them even had crèches in their display windows.

And you know what? Christian leaders hated it. You’d hear it in their sermons, and read it in their letters to the editor. “Christmas is a holy festival of the Faith!” they’d say. “How dare these merchandisers hijack this blessed season for sordid gain!”

Which should be a lesson to all of us to be careful what we ask for.

Because the merchandisers have now done just what we wanted them to. They divorced their business entirely from our religious festival.

And we’re not happy at all with the result.

Reading

Weekend reading report

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We got more snow today. I’m not sure how much. Three inches, maybe. It looks likely to be one of those ol’ fashun winters, like we used to have when I was a kid, back in the Later Pleistocene. One of my earliest memories is of going out of the house with Mom and my brother Moloch, through snow about waist high (considering that I was about three feet tall at the time), to my Dad’s old, World War II-era car. Might have been a Studebaker. He had one at some point along there.

The only thing is, that isn’t a real memory. Or rather, it’s a memory, not of the actual event, but of the film of it that Dad was taking with his Brownie movie camera that day. I’ve seen the movie enough times that, in my mind, I think I actually remember being there. But it’s all a construct.

Memory fascinates me. Especially my early memories. I have this idea (probably picked up from that quack, Freud) that if I could just pull the right memory up into God’s light, I’d solve all my problems.

Well, not the problem of making it through another winter, but other problems.

This weekend I read two books which follow up other books I recently reviewed, so what follows isn’t really meant to be a couple of reviews, just reader’s impressions.

Odd Thomas is the first of the three Odd Thomas books by Dean Koontz published to date. It was a hard read in a way, because I already knew (from Brother Odd) how it was going to end.

Nevertheless, Koontz completely blindsided me with the climax. And thinking back, I realize he telegraphed it from the beginning.

Well done!



Dragons From the Sea is a sequel to Judson Roberts’ Viking Warrior. Both are extremely well-written Young Adults about a young man in 9th Century Denmark who rises from slavery to become a warrior, and gets drawn into a grim drama of murder and revenge.

I enjoyed this volume almost as much as the first one. My only reservation is that in this episode Halfdan, the hero, joins a major Viking attack on France. Although the leaders justify the action as a necessary preemptive strike (I don’t think Roberts has a contemporary political message in mind here; he’s following history pretty closely), the realities of the thing are pretty brutal, and Halfdan does things it’s hard to root for.

(I pretty much dodged this problem in my Erling books. I sent Erling on one raid, but had it happen off-stage. Generally I kept him busy with politics and magical enemies.)

I still recommend Dragons From the Sea. It might not be for the more sensitive of the younger readers, though. (The violence isn’t gratuitous, and there’s no sex.) Good book.