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.
All posts by Lars Walker
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'
The sea-road not taken
I suppose it’s about time I started acting responsibly. I’m in my sixth decade, after all.
The other day I was offered this tremendous opportunity to lecture again on a Scandinavian cruise. As you may recall, I’ve lectured on a couple Norwegian cruises in the past, under contract with a company that allows you to buy your cruise at fifty bucks a day (now it’s $65), and you have to pay your own air fare. Not a way to get rich, but if you have a little money to spend it’s an inexpensive way to cruise.
This would have been the cruise of my dreams. Departure from Southampton, England, then oversea to Iceland. Then Norway and the other Scandinavian countries. It would have been the longest cruise I ever did, and an opportunity to lecture comprehensively on all the Viking stuff I’ve learned. And see places I’ve never seen, as long as places I hunger to see again.
But I turned it down, of course. I don’t have much money now, and anyway embarkation is September 1. I have to participate in Student Orientation at our Bible School on Sept. 2.
On top of that, that’s the week I start online classes for my graduate work in Library Science.
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.
In which I play the Library card
Photo credit: Peter Halasz.
I think this is a good time to let you all know that it’s possible (I’m not sure) that there may be a change in my blogging rate for a time.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been accepted into the Master’s program in Library and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, as an online student. I actually start, in a way, tomorrow, with a streamed orientation day. I don’t know what the time demands are going to be, but I feel safe in thinking that they’ll probably be more than I expect.
So some things will suffer, and blogging is likely to be one of them. I’ll do what I can to post on weekdays, as I have up to now. But I expect I’ll miss it more often. I likely won’t have as much time for light reading. Perhaps I’ll find things in my library studies to share with you. That will fit our purpose more than a lot of the things I’ve been blogging about.
In any case, I thought I ought to give you fair notice.
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.