Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

Temporary Duty, by Ric Locke

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First of all, the disclaimer: Although I didn’t get the book free, I should probably note that Ric Locke is a Facebook friend, and has been giving me helpful advice on e-publishing, at which he has been (very deservedly) successful.

I have good and not-so-good things to say about Temporary Duty, but I’ll start with the good.

Considering its length and its price ($2.99 for the Kindle book), Temporary Duty is one of the best reading entertainment values you’ll find today. It’s quite long, and it’s simply lots of fun. If you go back far enough to remember the sheer pleasure of the old space opera novels, like Heinlein’s juveniles, that same pleasure is here in abundance—the wonder of space, the fascination of exotic aliens and strange cultures, the excitement of human ingenuity applied to interstellar challenges. You’ll have a good time reading this book.

For the negative… well, I’ll leave that for further along.

The time is about 40 years in the future. There have been big changes in the world. A terrorist war and a financial collapse have turned America into a highly regulated, rigidly stratified society. The American military mirrors that stratification. There’s very little mobility between the upper and lower ranks.

So when history’s first alien contact occurs, and the aliens—the mercantile Grallt—ask for an advance party to prepare quarters on their ship for the humans who have contracted to join them on their merchant voyage, the Navy asks for two initial volunteers. They are to be lowly Petty Officers, and their duties will be simply to clean the place up and make it ship-shape. Still, John Peters and Kevin Todd are eager to volunteer, partly for the adventure and partly for the (seeming remote) possibility that they’ll be able to better their prospects. Continue reading Temporary Duty, by Ric Locke →

Reviews

DVD review: "Troll Hunter"

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Since I’m in the middle of a course of antibiotics to kill off my bronchial infection, I took the excuse to spend most of the weekend in bed, watching movies on Netflix. Picked off a couple I’d been meaning to get to, the Norwegian movie Troll Hunter being one of them.

This is an interesting movie. The one thing you need to understand when you approach it—and I suspect some people will miss this—is that it’s a comedy. A particular kind of Scandinavian comedy, and an extreme example of its kind.

To a very large degree (and you’ve probably have noted it in my own writing), Scandinavian humor is dry. We love to tell a story that gets increasingly ridiculous, straight-faced. To put it plainly, we may be laughing with you or at you, or both, depending on your reaction. We judge your intelligence by how long it takes you to grasp the absurdity.

That’s what Troll Hunter does. It’s kind of like a cross between The Blair Witch Project and The Office.

At the beginning we are following three Norwegian college students doing a documentary journalism project. They think they’re following a bear poacher, which would be dangerous and ill-advised enough on the face of it. But when they follow him into the woods one night, he suddenly shouts, “TROLL!” and they find themselves scrambling away, with a huge, three-headed creature at their heels. They escape, but one of their members is bitten. Continue reading DVD review: "Troll Hunter" →

Fiction, Reviews

"The Reversal," by Michael Connelly

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I felt what Maggie had tried to describe to me on more than one occasion when we were married. She always called it the burden of proof. Not the legal burden. But the psychic burden of knowing that you stood as representative of all the people. I had always dismissed her explanations as self-serving. The prosecutor was always the overdog. The Man…. I never understood what she was trying to tell me.

Until now.

I still haven’t entirely warmed to Michael Connelly’s “Lincoln Lawyer” character, Mickey Haller, who strikes me as somewhat irresponsible (a useful quality, perhaps, in a criminal defense lawyer).

But The Reversal, “A Lincoln Lawyer” novel, is as much a story of Mickey’s half-brother, police detective Harry Bosch, as it is one of Mickey’s, so I had no problem getting on board. And the story as a whole seemed to me as engaging and sympathetic as Connelly has written in some time.

It begins with Mickey doing something he’s always sworn he’d never do—go to work (on a temporary basis) as a county prosecutor, making and presenting a case against a convicted child murderer. DNA evidence has won the convict a new trial, but the District Attorney’s office still believes they have the right man. The most important element of their case is the eyewitness, the victim’s older sister, who was only a child at the time.

Mickey agrees to do the job—just this once—on the condition that he gets his ex-wife, prosecutor Maggie MacPherson, as his associate. (He wants to improve his relationship with her.) With Harry Bosch as chief investigator, it makes the entire prosecution a family affair.

The narration switches back and forth from Mickey’s point of view (presented in the first person) and Harry’s (in the third person). The alternation makes an interesting counterpoint. Mickey is all about tactics and strategies, intuiting the Defense’s moves on the basis of his own considerable experience on that side of the courtroom. Meanwhile Harry runs down leads and dogs the suspect in his accustomed, obsessive way, his focus always on his duty (or vocation), as an officer of society itself, to see justice done and the evil removed from our midst.

This being fiction, of course, even the best courtroom strategist can’t foresee, or prevent, the big surprise that takes the story’s climax out of the safety of the courtroom and into the perils of a city full of innocent bystanders.

The Reversal is an excellent thriller from a master storyteller. Recommended for adults. Cautions for language and icky stuff.

Reviews

DVD review: "Buck"

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Full disclosure: This should probably be called a Netflix review rather than a DVD review, but I can’t link to Netflix on Amazon.

Full disclosure number two: I’m not a horseman. I’ve ridden some, and generally managed not to fall off, and my brothers and I had a pony when we were kids. But I know I’m a tenderfoot. I qualify in no way to evaluate the horse training methods discussed in this excellent documentary.

It sure makes a good story, though.

Buck Brannaman, the subject of Buck, is one of the most famous proponents of what might be called the “new school” of horse training, an approach that concentrates on understanding the horse’s fears, calming those fears, earning the animal’s trust, and then becoming its thoughtful master. Buck seems to be able to take all but the most damaged animals, and fairly quickly to gentle them and get them doing what he wants them to do.

He was one of the inspirations for the book The Horse Whisperer, and served as technical consultant and stand-in for Robert Redford’s movie adaptation. Nowadays he travels the country nine months out of the year, conducting four day seminars on horse training.

The most remarkable and moving aspect of this film is its treatment of the abuse Buck and his brother suffered at the hands of their father, after their mother’s death. Fortunately they were removed from his care and placed in a loving foster family where they gradually learned to trust grownups again. Buck explicitly links this experience to his approach to horse training, feeling that he understands the horses’ fears (they’re essentially afraid that we’re predators trying to eat them) on a profound level.

With all I’ve heard of “Horse Whisperers,” I was half prepared for a lot of new-agey, PETA-style sentimentality and romanticism in the the film’s treatment of horses. I’m happy to report that there’s none of that here. Buck still considers himself a cowboy, and an important part of his technique is getting the horse (and its owner) to understand who’s supposed to be the boss. A dangerous horse must be put down, for the sake of humans.

This is a fine, moving documentary. I recommend it. I think there’s a little rough language, but I don’t have a strong recollection of it.

Fiction, Reviews

Suicide Run, by Michael Connelly

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Harry Bosch is not my favorite among Michael Connelly’s continuing characters. That honor goes to Terry McCaleb, whom Connelly killed off a few books back (McCaleb makes a welcome appearance in one of the stories in this book). But I appreciate Harry more than Connelly’s replacement for McCaleb, Micky Haller, the “Lincoln Lawyer.” Not that there’s anything much wrong with Haller. He’s just newer and (to all appearances) less damaged by life than the others. It’s the scars and calluses on the older characters that make them interesting to me.

Suicide Run is a collection of three short stories starring Harry (Hieronymus) Bosch, Los Angeles police detective. Warning: It’s a short collection. Much of the bulk of the book is taken up by a preview of Connelly’s next novel, The Drop. Since I never read such previews (they only frustrate me), I was a little disappointed in that.

But I enjoyed the stories nonetheless. In “Suicide Run,” Bosch investigates the murder of a beautiful Hollywood starlet, disguised as a suicide. In “Cielo Azul,” he goes to visit a killer on death row, in an attempt to persuade him to reveal the burial site of one of his victims. In “One Dollar Jackpot,” he tackles the murder of a famous female poker player, shot to death in her automobile.

The genius of the Harry Bosch stories, in my view (and in all Connelly’s work), is the compassion at their heart. Harry, like a character in a painting by the artist he was named after, lives in a world filled with horrors and apparent irrationality. Yet his personal vocation is to speak for the dead, to do them the last possible service through seeing that their killers pay the price.

For me, the outstanding story here was “Cielo Azul,” a bittersweet tale in which Harry goes on a seemingly hopeless quest to learn one truth before it’s too late. I don’t know what author Connelly believes about God or the afterlife, but he asks the right questions here, and that’s something.

Recommended for adults.

Fiction, Reviews

The Shakespeare Manuscript, by Stewart Buettner

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This disappointing novel is another book I can bury in my “not very good, but at least I got the e-book free” file.

I was drawn to Stewart Buettner’s The Shakespeare Manuscript because of the remarkable (though surely coincidental) parallels between it and my own novel, Blood and Judgment.

Both books deal with the discovery of a lost Hamlet manuscript—in my story an original draft, in this one an original of a lost prequel, “Hamlet Part I”.

Both involve the relationships and frictions involved in the production of a play—in my case an amateur company, in this case a professional one.

My book, however, was a fantasy. This book is… I’m not sure. It seems to be a sort of mystery, but the stakes are never raised high enough to build much tension, and the only death that occurs turns out to be natural.

And that’s the problem with The Shakespeare Manuscript. A lot of people run about doing things and irritating each other, but there’s no real dramatic arc.

The book starts with a New York rare books dealer, Miles Oliphant, on a trip to England, being mugged. While he’s unconscious in hospital and still unidentified by the police, a box of manuscripts he sent home is opened by his daughter, April. She finds a manuscript among the papers which, she soon realizes, looks very like a lost play of Shakespeare’s, in his own hand. Continue reading The Shakespeare Manuscript, by Stewart Buettner →

Non-fiction, Reviews

Endless War, by Ralph Peters

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[Personal update: I stayed home from work again today. Still no voice. Maybe I’ll make it in tomorrow. I really don’t want to pass this nightmare on to the students, though.]

The conviction prevails, in privileged circles that, if we study history without reshaping it to our contemporary prejudices, history will corrupt us. May I suggest that the opposite is true?

…Those who deny history die of myth.

In that quotation from his Introduction, Ralph Peters sums up much of the lessons he propounds in his 2010 collection of essays and columns, Endless War. The first section of the book consists of a series of essays on early Islamic victories in the historic struggle with the West, followed by a series of Western (dare I say Christian?) victories as Muslim civilization went into decline. Then he draws conclusions, and proceeds to analyze various aspects of our contemporary “War On Terror” (a designation he loathes).

Our great mistake, as I read him, is our insistence on “understanding” our opponents. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but the way our academics and academically-trained soldiers do it is so informed by postmodern secularism that they end up violating both fact and logic. Better than academic anthropology and political theory, these people should read original historical and religious texts, and myth. Our enemies are fighting for a dream, not an ideology.

Peters (who is also the author, under the name Owen Parry, of the Abel Jones novels which I’ve often praised in this space) expresses some iconoclastic opinions on our current struggle. Contrary to what you’ve read, he says, Iraq was the “good war,” and Afghanistan (following the original incursion, which should have been more massive) is a waste of time. Afghanistan, he says, has no strategic importance, is impossible to govern, and was only the base for the 9/11 terrorists because they’d been kicked out of every other safe haven. In Iraq, he maintains, the terrorists chose to make their real stand, and Saddam Hussein was genuine military threat. Control of Iraq also gives us considerable strategic advantages.

Having read Endless War, I feel a little better informed than I was, though the whole question remains Endlessly Complex.

The only major problem I had with the book was one essay (can’t find it now) in which he said he was as afraid of Christian fundamentalists as of Muslim fundamentalists. That’s a remarkably “conventional wisdom” kind of observation for a thinker of Peters’ originality. He doesn’t repeat it, so perhaps he thought better of it later.

Full disclosure: I got this book free for my Kindle through a special offer.

Endless War is an extremely readable, highly original, and penetrating analysis of the struggle between East and West. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

Redcoat, by David Crookes

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Here’s another book I uploaded to my Kindle for nothing, and it was well worth the price. Not a great novel, Redcoat was certainly entertaining, and it held my interest.

The time is the 1870s. The hero is Jeffrey Guest, a young British officer in South Africa. The son of a poor Cornish farmer who sacrificed to purchase a commission for him, Jeffrey encounters the condescension of a senior officer, the sadistic Spencer Shackerly. When Shackerly is paralyzed and left comatose by a mine cave-in, Jeffrey, also injured, is sent home, where he proposes to his sweetheart.

But Shackerly regains consciousness, and blames Jeffrey for causing the accident. When soldiers come to arrest him, Jeffrey flees, first to America, then to Canada (where he joins the Mounties), and then to Australia. Wherever Jeffrey goes, Shackerly’s agents, sometimes assisted by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, are dogging him.

The story is acted out on a broad stage, and there’s plenty of action. Unfortunately, the author, David Crookes, doesn’t develop his hero as a hero deserves. Again and again, the really decisive actions are taken by Jeffrey’s friends and family, while his uniform response (until the very end) is merely to run away. He’s likeable, but he’s one of the least interesting personalities in the book.

Crookes also shows great weaknesses as a stylist. He falls back on clichés again and again (“mind like a steel trap,” “scarcer than hen’s teeth”), and his prose can be highly infelicitous:

“Angered and hurt, Lucy glowered contemptibly at her daughter.” (The word he wants is “contemptuously,” and “glowered” by itself would have been even better.)

“French showed his rash impatience once again….”

“…a lengthy article exulting the new force of brave young men who were to bring law and order to the untamed Canadian west.” (The word he wants is “exalting.”)

“The most contributing factor to their malaise was the rapidly dwindling supply of food….”

That’s just lazy writing. Such a thing is not uncommon among self-published writers, and Crookes is one of those.

Still, the story moved along and delivered plenty of spectacle and action. I recommend it as an entertainment for readers with a tolerance for mediocre prose. Profanity and adult themes are minimal.

Fiction, Reviews

Blind Pursuit, by Michael Prescott

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I found Blind Pursuit by Michael Prescott a very satisfying thriller. It’s one of those out-of-print novels that has begun to show up cheap in e-book format. I’ve had some good surprises with those.

The main characters are twin sisters, Erin and Annie Reilly, one a psychologist and the other a flower shop owner, who live in Tucson. The action starts fast with Erin’s abduction in the night.

Because the author follows her in the car trunk after she is taken, I was worried I was going to have to watch her murder, and I was ready to drop the book if that happened (I have a low tolerance for the on-stage killing of women). But the kidnapper’s plans for Erin are much more complicated than a simple sex killing. His plot is almost (not quite) beneficent and admirable, and his motives are a complex tangle that gets sorted out strategically for the reader, the enlightenment increasing with the dramatic tension.

The characters intrigue, the suspense is genuine, and there’s even a nice twist at the end. Also there’s romance for the ladies.

I enjoyed Blind Pursuit, and recommend it for adult readers.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

A Cry For Justice, by Shelley Hundley

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As you’re aware if you’ve been following my posts for a while, I have a personal interest in the subject of child abuse and recovery. I got Shelley’s Hundley’s A Cry For Justice because it was free for Kindle. I won’t say it wasn’t worth the price. It might even have left some ideas behind in my head that someday could be of use to me. But all in all I was disappointed with it.

Shelley Hundley grew up as a missionary kid in Colombia. If it wasn’t bad enough to be exposed to the daily violence of Medellin, where her family lived, she was also the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a minister, a trusted family friend.

She repressed all memory of the abuse for some years, she tells us, until she was about to go away to college in the U.S. Then everything flooded back, and she angrily rejected God and became a vocal atheist on a Methodist college campus. She suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts, and it was only by what seems like a miracle that she was prevented from throwing herself from the roof of her dormitory one night. After that followed a period of institutionalization, culminating in a dramatic encounter with Jesus which began her process of spiritual and psychological healing.

There are some good insights here. I was particularly impressed when she pointed out that Peter, James, and John, the “inner circle” of Jesus’ disciples, are distinguished by being the ones about whom we know the most embarrassing stories. Apparently Jesus appreciated followers who weren’t afraid to jump in with both feet and make fools of themselves. That’s a tremendous truth, but much as I appreciate it, it doesn’t help someone like me much.

Hundley’s message of healing centers on seeing Christ as both Bridgroom and Judge, as Lover and Avenger. This, I think, is entirely sound and useful.

The bulk of the book, though, is not actually about dealing with the scars of abuse, but with what Hundley (who works with the International House of Prayer in Kansas City) considers her prophetic calling to turn America back to Christ. She lost a great deal of my interest in that part of the story, as I’m very leery of people who claim to have prophetic words for the church. I can believe that God may give someone a word for an individual or a congregation, from time to time, but claiming to have a prophetic message on a par with Scripture is something my church body does not believe in, and I (based on some experiences in my youth) agree wholeheartedly.

So while A Cry For Justice has some value, I can’t really recommend it.