I’ve read, and reviewed, one previous Steve Dancy western adventure/mystery by James D. Best – Murder at Thumb Butte. I found it a well-written tale with good, but somewhat irritating, characters.
The Return, another Dancy story, is another well-written tale. But it turned me off the series, not because of the writing, but because of one of the themes.
Although technically a western, The Return is actually set mostly in New York City. In the first, shorter section of the story, Steve and his friend Jeff Sharp are closing out their business in Leadville, Colorado. They’ve made a lot of money, and now they want to go east to see their friend Edison, hoping to secure distribution rights for his electric lights for use in mining. They have a little trouble – the kind you handle with a gun – before they go, but they take care of that with the help of Virginia Baker, a storekeeper with whom Steve finds himself, unexpectedly, in love.
Going home, they find that Edison is having some trouble with sabotage in his project to electrify a section of New York City. With the help of Virginia and their old Pinkerton friend, McAllen, they start investigating, and soon find themselves in danger.
It was a subplot of The Return that irritated me. Dancy is the son of a wealthy New York family, and his surviving parent, his mother, is a tremendous snob on top of being deeply involved in political corruption. She is shocked that Steve is sharing a hotel room with Virginia, and the author devotes a fair amount of time to making sure we know how hypocritical and judgmental her attitude is. Steve’s ability to defy her through premarital cohabitation is presented as a sort of moral triumph.
I’m too old-fashioned for that kind of newfangled, Victorian morality.
Category Archives: Reviews
Film review: Whit Stillman's 'Damsels in Distress'
The first time I watched Damsels in Distress, Whit Stillman’s most recent (after a twelve-year hiatus) film, I thought it was very funny and full of great, surreal dialogue (Stillman’s characters talk like people in books, but then so do I, so I feel right at home), but I wasn’t sure it succeeded as a total work of art. After a second viewing, and a third with the commentary track on, I’m now convinced that it actually works very well, taken on its own terms. In fact, it’s now my favorite of Stillman’s movies.
The film (set, like much of Stillman’s work, in a universe a little loosely moored in time) starts with Lily (Analeigh Tipton), a transfer student, enrolling at Seven Oaks College in New York State. She meets the Girls With Flower Names, and accepts their offer to let her move in with them. Their leader is Violet (Greta Gerwig), who speaks with great conviction and eloquence, and is wrong in almost every factual statement she makes. But she has a great heart, and has devoted her life to helping others. She and her friends run a campus suicide prevention center, where they offer donuts and tap dancing lessons to the clinically depressed. Her great dream is to benefit mankind by starting a dance craze, like the Charleston or the Twist. She prefers to date guys who are neither especially good looking nor especially bright, feeling she can help them achieve their potential, if any. Continue reading Film review: Whit Stillman's 'Damsels in Distress'
Sheepdogs: Meet Our Nation's Warriors, by Rogish and Grossman
If you have no capacity for violence, then you are a healthy productive citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.
I review a lot of books on this blog, and among those books a very small number genuinely move me – bring tears to my eyes. It was a bit of a surprise that a children’s book, Sheepdogs: Meet Our Nation’s Warriors, by Stephanie Rogish and Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, was one of those.
The passage quoted above doesn’t come from the body of the book, but from Col. Grossman’s famous essay, “On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs,” which is printed in the back. The bulk of the book (which I got free for review, for the record) is aimed at school children. It pursues the sheep/wolf/sheepdog metaphor in an extended manner, to help kids think about force and how to respond to the sheepdogs (police, soldiers, legal concealed weapons carriers, etc.) they may encounter. I didn’t care greatly for the illustrations, to be honest, but the text works very well.
If you’re the kind of parent (or teacher) who believes that guns are inherently evil, and that there is never any excuse for violence, even to save children’s lives, you won’t like this book.
If you’re a parent who wants your children to understand the legitimate and illegitimate uses of force, and who would be proud to see them grow up to be sheepdogs themselves, you will want to have it and share it with them.
You can order it from the US Concealed Carry Association here.
Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave
I feel guilty about the savaging I’m about to deliver to the novel Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave. It’s clearly a labor of love. Musgrave attempts to craft a mystery in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, in which his hero, post-Civil War detective Pat O’Malley, seeks to learn the truth of Poe’s own death back in 1849, when he was found apparently drunk and dying on the streets of Baltimore.
Pat O’Malley is a decorated Union Army veteran working as a private detective in New York City. Because he knew and liked the poet Poe, and because he happens to be renting the cottage where Poe once lived with his doomed young wife, O’Malley decides to investigate the reported circumstances of his death (which were indeed questionable). He interrogates a series of Poe’s associates and acquaintances (including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), and begins to suspect a cruel plot. This puts him in danger for his life. Continue reading Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave
Political Thought: A Student's Guide, by Hunter Baker
Order is not any kind of moral ultimatum. The only reason to desire order is to make something else possible. Order is a means to an end. If what order gives us is not good, then we should not continue to uphold that order. For example, a dictator may give us order, but his order may not be worth preserving as we perceive ourselves to lose more by it than we gain. This takes us in the direction John Locke went with his work. Order is there only to secure something else, and something more than mere protection from violent death. What is that something more? Is it freedom? Is it justice?
Mark Twain once wrote a story called “Political Economy,” which is what they called Political Science in his time (in that more humble age political thinkers didn’t pretend to be scientists). I memorized it at one point and used to recite it to my friends when we got together, in a bargain-basement Hal Holbrook style. It told how the author sat down to write an essay on the subject (“the dearest to my heart of all this world’s philosophy”) but kept getting interrupted by a lightning rod salesman, who eventually prevailed to the extent that Twain bought his entire stock of rods and had them mounted on his roof, so that all the lightning in that region of the heavens was attracted to his house, setting off the greatest pyrotechnic spectacle ever seen.
Our friend Hunter Baker has written a short book called Political Thought: A Student’s Guide. Though not as funny as Twain’s story, it’s one of the more lively books you’ll find on the subject. Instead of doing a historic overview, telling how philosophical ideas developed through the work of various thinkers, he starts with things that most readers have experience with – families. He describes his own and his wife’s families, and how their different habits of interaction and discipline worked in different ways. Then he imagines two very different kinds of families – a tyrannical family and a loving one – and relates them to the ideas of the great political thinkers of history, especially Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke.
If you’re looking for an effective Christian primer on politics for young people, you could hardly do better than this. In fact, even I learned a few things, and it’s well known that I know pretty much everything. The only fault I can find with this book that I’m not quoted in it, a failing common to a surprising number of books on Political Science (or Economy).
Recommended.
Henry Wood Detective Agency, by Brian Meeks
You’ve probably noticed that, from time to time, I review a novel and tell you that I admired the writing, but did not like the book, either because of the characters or the values, or just the author’s attitude.
Henry Wood Detective Agency by Brian Meeks presents precisely the opposite situation, and I don’t recall this happening before. I didn’t think the writing was great, but I liked the book immensely, like a friend who never combs his hair and isn’t very articulate, but is still a lot of fun to be with.
The story starts on New Year’s Day 1955. Henry Wood is a Manhattan private detective. He’s a quiet man whose great pleasures are reading and woodworking.
A beautiful young woman comes into his office and asks him to help her find a journal belonging to her father, an accountant who has disappeared. He takes the case. Soon after another beautiful young woman comes to him and asks him to find the same journal. She’s the daughter of an inventor, who has also disappeared.
This is kind of fishy, but things are about to get fishier still. There’s a mob connection, and there’s a fire and a murder, and cryptic clues lead to strange – make that improbable – discoveries.
There’s also a science fiction – or fantasy — element. Henry has a closet in his house which periodically dispenses “gifts” – magazines dated in the future, woodworking tools, even a DVD player with a disk (and, thankfully, instructions).
It’s all very bizarre. I kept being reminded of Alice in Wonderland, though this isn’t the same kind of story at all. Through all this strangeness Henry Wood maintains his quiet, earnest character. He does right, and he works most of it out in the end.
Brian Meeks’ writing style is odd. It’s extremely understated. That could be a brilliant stylistic choice on the author’s part, though a fair number of common writing errors scattered through the story suggest that it isn’t. But I wish more new authors would opt for plain, simple prose instead of trying to dazzle us and failing. The dialogue is odd – the characters generally avoid contractions, saying “I will” instead of “I’ll,” and “do not” instead of “don’t.”
But reading Henry Wood Detective Agency was a very pleasant experience. The prose was almost incantatory. It relaxed me.
I enjoyed this book and plan to read the others in the series.
Recommended. It has subdued violence, no sex, and one obscenity that I noticed.
Viking Warfare, by I. P. Stephenson
A few years back, an author named Paddy Griffith wrote a book called The Viking Art of War, which has since been cordially disliked by Viking reenactors all over the world. Griffith held an essentially low opinion of Viking tactics and strategies, and (as I recall) of Viking intelligence in general.
Now I. P. Stephenson has written a new book on the subject, Viking Warfare. Paddy Griffith ought to welcome its appearance, since it will provide a new target for the hate. Reenactors will hate this book just as much, but for different reasons.
Stephenson’s first sin (in my view) is to utterly reject the Icelandic sagas as a source of historical information. If he has read Prof. Torgrim Titlestad’s defense of saga reliabiliity, he dismisses it out of hand. The sagas were written centuries after the events, he says, for the purpose of glamorizing the authors’ ancestors. For that reason they cannot be trusted at any point.
But he nevertheless maintains that we have enough information to provide material for a book. Unfortunately, he fails to demonstrate that contention. He analyzes the history of Viking activities, their battle strategies, and their equipment, and all the way through he ends almost every discussion with the equivalent of, “But we don’t really know for sure.” If you enjoy seeing an author admit his ignorance over and over, this is the book for you.
He also makes a number of summary judgments which I, as a reenactor myself, find doubtful. Shield walls were only loose formations, he tells us, not solid lines of overlapped shields. The “swine” formation was a simple column, not a wedge. Leather helmets are purely fictional. Scramasaxes were seldom carried. Hundreds of reenactors around the world, me among them, will disagree on several of these points, not on the basis of academic research, but through experience on the field.
It’s only at the very end, where he examines the Battle of Maldon, that Stephenson breaks out and actually makes an interesting contribution to the historical discussion. He does his best to rehabilitate Byrhtnoth Byhrthelmsson, the English commander at the poetically immortalized battle, whose leadership was condemned by no less a scholar than J. R. R. Tolkien. Stephenson argues – persuasively – that if you consider the battle from the perspective of Byhrtnoth’s primary objective – to prevent the Vikings’ escape – everything he did makes good sense. He just had the bad luck to get killed.
Scholarly types will want to read Viking Warfare just for its unconventional arguments, but I don’t think it has much useful to offer the average reader.
Unlimited, by Davis Bunn
Simon Orwell is a bartender who used to be an electrical engineer. When we first encounter him in Davis Bunn’s novel Unlimited, he’s in a Mexican ditch, fleeing an assassin, trying to protect a device he helped invent.
Simon had a promising career before he self-destructed and betrayed his closest friend, a professor from Mexico. Professor Vasquez’s great dream was to find a way to salvage the energy wasted in electric generation and transmission, to provide cheap energy for the poor. Now he’s been e-mailing Simon, telling him he’s made a breakthrough and wants him to come and join him with his version of the device.
Simon was eager to come. Not so much for the project, though that interests him, but for a more personal reason. To ask Vasquez’s forgiveness.
When he finally reaches his goal, the village of Ojinaga just south of a desolate stretch of the border, he finds that Prof. Vasquez has been murdered. Injured and still pursued by the assassin, he finds refuge in a Christian orphanage, where the director, Harold Finch, a former NASA scientist, has drained his personal fortune caring for the children. He’d like to see Prof. Vasquez’s dream realized as a way to subsidize the orphans’ care. But as much as that, he’d like to see Simon find the answer to his personal torment.
Simon is also befriended by two of Harold’s co-workers, Pedro and Sofia, both of whom grew up in the orphanage. Pedro is assistant to the town mayor, a rising politician who is dating Sofia. Sofia feels obligated to marry the man for the sake of the good he can do the orphanage. But she doesn’t love him, and gradually – against her will – she finds herself drawn to Simon, whom she doesn’t even trust.
Meanwhile drug cartels are interested in Prof. Vasquez’s device for some reason. Simon finds himself in a cross-fire, terrified that he’s bringing danger on the first people to care about him in a long time. And he’s not even sure he wants to go on living, bearing the weight of guilt and self-loathing. His new friends offer an answer, but could there really be a power so unlimited?
Unlimited genuinely moved me. The story, if you accept its science fiction premise (which is not that outlandish), is believable, and the characters live and breathe. I wouldn’t rank Bunn in the top tier as a stylist. It seemed to me that time and again he chooses almost the right word, rather than the right word that would really have sung. But your taste may differ. I also suspect that Mexican government corruption, though certainly addressed in the story, is underestimated.
Recommended. Unlimited will go on sale September 1. (A movie of the same title, starring Fred Thompson, is scheduled for release in October.)
Full disclosure: I received a free advance review copy of Unlimited.
Last Chance Lassiter, by Paul Levine
I’ve reviewed one or two of Paul Levine’s Jake Lassiter novels before. The books irritate me a little, but they also entertain me a great deal, and I generally recommend them.
Last Chance Lassiter is a prequel. It goes back to tell the story of how Miami lawyer Jake Lassiter came to be in practice on his own.
When the book begins, he’s a round peg in a square hole. A former pro football player whose lasting fame comes from making a wrong-way run on national TV, he’s earned his law degree and joined a high-priced firm, which values him primarily for his contributions to its touch football team. He refuses to dress like a lawyer, refuses to decorate his office like a lawyer, and is not beyond getting physical with a prospective client who offends him.
Soon he’s no longer working for that firm.
So he sets up in a tiny, windowless office in a parking ramp, and screens a string of unpromising clients. Then a woman comes in, the granddaughter of a famous but impoverished blues singer, asking him to help them sue a rap star who seems to have plagiarized one of the old man’s songs. This is a case Jake believes in and he throws himself into it, even though he’ll be up against his old employers, and knows them to be smart, ruthless, and very well capitalized, unlike himself. Jakes first case just might be his last.
Last Chance Lassiter was a fast read, and I enjoyed it a lot, even though I wanted to slap Jake upside the head occasionally. His “loose cannon, plays by his own rules” act has been done a thousand times, and I grew bored with it long ago. Jake even sets it up as his professional motto: “I live by no laws but my own.” This is moral hooey. It never seems to occur to him that his corrupt former employers live by exactly the same motto.
Still, plenty of fun, and lots of fighting for the underdog. Cautions for language and sexual situations.
The Vikings: A History, by Robert Ferguson
But, while all of these [various morally relative assessments of the Viking Age] are entirely valid perspectives, the pendulum may have swung too far: as one modern historian puts it, the revisionist view has come close to giving us an image of the Vikings as a group of ‘long-haired tourists who roughed up the locals a bit.’ Among the aims of this book is to restore the violence to the Viking Age, and to try to show why our understanding is incomplete without it.
I’ve already referred to Robert Ferguson’s The Vikings: A History twice on this blog, here and here, having found it an informative and instructive book. If I’d been disappointed or offended, I’d have more to say. As it is, I’ll offer a short review of quite a good general history of the Viking Age.
Why a new history of the Vikings? Because we keep learning stuff. You’ve got to run to keep pace with our knowledge of the early middle ages nowadays. People like me, especially, who take it upon ourselves to lecture on the subject, need to take the initiative to keep our reading up. I thought what I learned about the Oseberg ship, linked above, was worth the price in itself.
Author Ferguson makes the considerable contribution of including something I’ve written about here before, and which was perhaps introduced in English-language history books by my friend Prof. Torgrim Titlestad, in a work that didn’t get the attention it should have – the new (actually old) theory that the Viking raids were initially sparked by Charlemagne’s brutalities against the Saxons. Having shared that useful idea, Ferguson does little more with it, which I think is appropriate. It seems to me that, even if the original spark was religious, the Viking raids continued for plain reasons of profit. There are no images of peace-loving, put-upon Viking victims here, and that suits me just fine.
Ferguson spends what seems to me adequate time, within the limits of a single (if long) volume, following the activities of the Norse through all their major fields of activity around the world, and through the three centuries of that activity. I caught one or two small errors of fact, ones I knew to be fact, but that’s inevitable in a work of this scope.
Highly recommended for all who are interested in the subject, and especially for curious newcomers.