The Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson

February 05 2007 (04:02:00)

The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid. A Memoir.
Broadway Books 2006 270 pages.

Bill Bryson was born in 1951, right between my wife and myself. This book is a celebration of growing up in the 50s and 60s, and of course that's when we grew up, so this is a guaranteed nostalgia hit for us.

The Fifties was a time when the United States of America was at a sort of peak of universal belief that we were Right, that we were the Best, and that God had caused this to happen directly with His own power. It was also a time when some of that belief was shaken, by such events as the Russian success with Sputnik and the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy.

Bryson points out how unusual, how rich with unique occurences was that time, and quantifies differences between now and then.

"Apart from baseball's greatest home run [and the author's birth] ... 1951 was not a hugely eventful year in America... The war in Korea was in full swing... Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had just been convicted... Oliver Brown sued the local school board ...

"America in 1951 had a population of 150 million ... no interstate highways ... about a quarter as many cars [as today]... Men wore hats and ties almost everywhere. Women prepared every meal ... from scratch. Milk came in bottles. The mailman came on foot. Total government spending was $50 billion a year, compared with $2.5 trillion now."
(page 11)

Bryson describes his youth, his home town of Des Moines, Iowa during his youth, his life with his parents (they were a bit unusual, both worked for the Des Moines Register newspaper), his education (not much of a student by his own account), the mischief (some of it felonious) gotten into by his friends (names changed), many other details of the times, and the adventures of The Thunderbolt Kid.

The Thunderbolt Kid is a fantastic superhero, a personna assumed by Bryson when he wishes to imaginarily zap some offensive adult into a pile of carbon, see through women's clothing with his x-ray vision, or commit some other super-feat not possible for an ordinary mortal. He credits his discovery (or invention) of The Thunderbolt Kid to his discovery of an old partly-motheaten sweater in the family basement. This sweater (depicted on the dust jacket of the book) featured a large yellow zig-zag of cartoon lightning affixed to the chest.

I'm not sure that the Thunderbolt Kid thing worked for me. I have the idea that the book would have been just fine, maybe better, without it. But that's just my opinion.

The Thunderbolt Kid was a pleasing foray into nostalgia, and a thought-provoking reminder of the time when my contemporaries were children -- our truly formative years.

East of the Mountains, by David Guterson

February 02 2007 (00:59:00)

Although I've lived in Western Washington for over 30 years now, I still remember that I am a transplant. One of the first things I learned to say was "East of the Mountains." This phrase has a very specific meaning here. It refers to the part of Washington State that lies East of the spine of the Cascade Range. Its other three borders are with Canada, Idaho, and Oregon. East of the Mountains is the miracle of drying winds that have transformed the Earth on either side of the Cascades to be so different that it never ceases to amaze. A short drive (if the weather is cooperative) from Puget Sound Country is a land so dry, so brown, so different, that it could be on another planet.

On the West side are rain, fir trees, ferns, moss, greenery, water, flowers, fish, all types of small animals, and millions of people. Cities march down the trough from Canada, starting with Bellingham in the North, then Mount Vernon, Marysville, Everett, Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia; and much farther south, Vancouver, Washington.

East of the Cascade summits is a land of desert, or steppe, watered only sparsely by the Columbia River and boldly by the work of man in the 20th century. This is a land of sagebrush, rattlesnakes, sand, and wind. It is dry, and colored in shades of brown and tan. Some cities dot the desert: Yakima, Ellensburg, and Wenatchee in the Western-Central portion; Spokane, Moses Lake, and the "tri-cities" of Richland - Pasco - Kennewick are scattered about the map.

Dr. Ben Givens is a man at the end of his life. He is a retired thoracic surgeon, and has been diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. He knows better than most that he has no chance of survival. His wife passed on about a year and a half before the story begins.

Ben has decided to end his life in Eastern Washington, in apple country, where he grew up. Instead of a slow, suffering death that will torture him and his family, he'll go well into the dry fields under the pretense of bird hunting and create a plausible accident. He's thought of everything, he doesn't want to burden his family with the spectre of suicide.

Ben's encounters disaster almost immediately as he sets out on what is to be his last journey. On I90, headed for Snoqualmie Pass, he is involved in an accident that wrecks his car and leaves him battered and bruised. Some young people come along and help him, and his journey continues with their assistance.

As he continues on, determined to carry out his mission, he encounters more people, good and bad. Some of them need him, some of them are needed by him.

The Eastern country is described beautifully, and the tone of the text sets the proper mood for this tale of a lonely, sick old man returning to this lonely land where he grew up. Just being in the sagebrush invites introspection; there is no noise but the wind, and a man can walk a long way without encountering another person.

Along with the adventures of the present, we learn about Ben's past, his World War II service, his romance with his wife of so many years. He becomes a person that I will remember for a long time.

How Ben's journey progresses and to what end he comes is worth your time to discover in this very well-done novel.

The Warlord's Son, by Dan Fesperman

December 29 2006 (07:28:00)

Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf. 320 pages.

This is an adventure novel for our times. Set in Pakistan and Afghanistan late in 2001, the story involves a reporter named Stan Kelly, or "Skelly," and his "fixer," Najeeb. Najeeb is the character of the title. His father is a great malik in the mountains across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, but Najeeb is estranged from his father. Having been educated in America but brought up in the Pashtun tribal world, Najeeb is hired by journalists to interpret, guide, and protect them from dangers they can only partially understand. He is a fixer, and without a fixer a Western journalist will perish in this jungle.

Skelly is sent to Pakistan in the hope that he can get into Afghanistan and report on the developments there. Osama Bin Laden, that most wanted criminal of the Western world, is said to be at large in the mountains. This could be the story of Skelly's career, and he is excited to be after it. Skelly's been moldering stateside trying to live a more normal life than that of a foreign "hack." The life of a foreign correspondent, however uncomfortable and inconducive to success with one's family, has gotten into his blood, and he yearns to be back in the thick of danger and intrigue.

Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, couldn't be a more dangerous or intriguing place. This is the small, backward nation of warlords and the Taliban, the underdeveloped third-world country that -- in spite of its poverty and lack of modern technology, bled the Soviet Union for years as it tried to dominate this land. Afghanistan may have been a much more powerful force than the saber-rattling of NATO, Reagan, and the Free World in causing the demise of the hammer and sickle. But the United States of America, having suffered the unforgiveable obscenity of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, seemed to have no choice but to take action against the Taliban. The Taliban could be seen as the protectors of Osama, and as such they were a valid, organized enemy that could be militarily attacked and definitively beaten -- at least in theory -- while Osama seemed and seems today like a foul smelling cloud of smoke: offensive, harmful, fatal, yet elusive and impossible to grab, grasp, confine, or destroy.

Skelly and Najeeb manage to get a ride into Afghanistan with the rear guard of a returning warlord. Almost immediately they are involved in a firefight, things fall apart, and begin to get truly complicated. As the plot progresses, Najeeb's family is involved, old resentments are brought to the surface, and a layer of intrigue is added. Added to the mix is the presence of certain shady American characters, Hartley and Pierce*, who remind us of the involvement of our own political and industrial interests and the role they play in the larger tragedy engendered by Western Imperialism, the clash of cultures, and the disingenuous liars on all sides.

Meanwhile, back in Peshawar, Najeeb's girlfriend is trying desperately to escape the bonds of purdah and escape to rejoin her lover. A series of mysterious threatening notes to Najeeb and the death of a malang, a sort of Pashtun holy recluse, by murder, make another frightening subplot. And I haven't mentioned the involvement of shady characters from the ISI, a very loosely defined Pakistani intelligence-gathering organ.

I turned these pages rapidly, and enjoyed The Warlord's Son immensely. I see that Mr. Fesperman has written a few others. I'll have to give one or more of them a try.
Notes

*It's interesting to get a glimpse into the fiction writer's mental process. "Hartley" and "Pierce" are names given to certain electronic oscillator circuits. Mr. Fesperman may have a little engineering in his background, or perhaps it's just a coincidence. But the observation is just too irresistible.

For more information about Hartley and Pierce oscillators, read Sine Wave Oscillators, by J.B. Calvert, an article posted on the University of Denver's website.
More Information

* Pashtuns of Afghanistan, an article at Afghan-Network.net
* The Rise and Fall of the Taliban, an article at Afghanland.com
* Pakistan Maps, and Afghanistan Maps at the University of Texas at Austin

Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll

December 24 2006 (04:05:00)

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small,
And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all,
Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall.
--White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane.

If you haven't read Alice and/or Through the Looking Glass, don't put it off. If you have read it, do it again. It doesn't take long, that's for sure. I found this old paperback on a rainy Sunday afternoon and was soon lost down the rabbit hole.

There's plenty written about these works and little that a person of my education and experience would be able to add to the critical analysis of Carroll's whimsical fiction. It's well known that these stories were written primarily to entertain children, some of them very specific children with whom Lewis Carroll (the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was acquainted, including young Alice (Liddell) herself. And it's also common knowledge that there are other levels, and jokes, to the stories, more accessible to adults and particularly to adults of the time, culture, and social class in which Carroll lived.

What attracts me to the story of Alice and her adventures in the Looking Glass world is that this is part of the quintessential English literature of childhood. Along with the Chronicles of Narnia, Baum's Oz classics, and others, these books find some place in most English-speaking children's mythology -- or at least I think they still do! -- and their landscapes and population are ever in our imaginations. When one sees an impatient, harried person checking his watch, one thinks of the White Rabbit: "Oh dear...I shall be late..." Imperious self-important tyrants always have something of the Red Queen about them, and who has not been in a conversation that reminded him of the one between the Hatter and the March Hare, with the Dormouse sleeping between them?

"Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English."

Through the Looking Glass, the second work, is said to be understandable as a complete chess game. It is also obviously rich with puns and inside jokes, and probably a great deal of humor at the expense of personages long deceased. This is all a great monument to the genius that called himself Lewis Carroll, but for me I value its capture of the time of life when we have the leisure and openness of mind to contemplate and observe the world that exists in our mirrors, when we think about whether the flowers mind being tethered to the ground, and when we have the imagination to conceive of a Rocking Horse Fly, "...made entirely of wood, and gets about by swinging itself from branch to branch..."
More Information and Where You Can Read the Books:

* The entire text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, courtesy of the Gutenberg Project.
* This site is sort of an Alice fan-club site, I suppose; there's a lot of Alice-related information and much evidence of her influence on the world in which we live.
* Lenny's Alice in Wonderland Site seems a good resource for background and analysis of the work, nicely designed with great respect for the tales. Lenny is not above referring to the Disney movie that has no doubt been responsible for introducing millions to Alice and her adventures.

Gone, by Jonathan Kellerman

December 24 2006 (04:00:00)

This is the most recent I have read in the Alex Delaware series. In it, Delaware and Milo Sturgis are faced with a bizarre series of killings and an extremely strange set of people, all against the backdrop of Southern California's glitz and highways.

The romance between Robin and Alex seems to be rekindled in this story.

A good, entertaining read.

Vanish, by Tess Gerritsen

December 07 2006 (00:54:00)

401 pages. Ballantine Books, 2006.

In the lunchroom at work we have a "free" table. Items placed on this table are free for the taking. I think there's a couple of t-shirts and a pair of shoes on it right now. Sometimes there's food. I have recently gotten some Jasmine rice and some tea there. Often people leave books. I frequently take advantage of the books. Once they've been read at home, I usually take them back for someone else. I try to make my own contributions to this table from time to time.

A couple of weeks ago I found Vanish on the table, and took it home with me. This is a very effective thriller, which I read in about 5 hours. Great literature, it's not -- but it has the quality of suspense and excitement that allowed me to suspend disbelief and criticism and get wrapped up in its plot and characters sufficiently to devour its pages in one long bite on a cold November Saturday afternoon-evening.

The story begins with a description of some illegal aliens from Eastern Europe being smuggled into the USA from Mexico. It then jumps to the city of Boston, where a busy medical examiner discovers a live person accidentally delivered to her morgue's refrigerated storage. It picks up speed, includes a very pregnant police detective and her FBI-agent husband who quickly become involved in the hostage-taking which is central to the plot.

I thoroughly enjoyed Vanish and will read another Gerritsen when I get the opportunity. I see that she is the author of Body Double. I assume that the film of the same name was based on that novel. I saw that film several years ago, and dimly recall it as a strange and suspenseful experience.

Having recently been roundly critical of another thriller that I didn't read nearly as fast as this one, I have to point out at least one defect in Vanish. While the mechanism of having the live person discovered in the morgue is certainly a frightening attention-grabber, I fail to see why it is a necessary part of the plot. Indeed, it's never really fully explained -- unless I missed that in my breakneck scan of the text. And what about the title? Surely a better one could have been chosen. The Die is Cast? Playing for Keeps? I don't know.

But don't let these minor details keep you from reading Vanish. I recommend it.

The Templar Legacy, by Steve Barry

November 30 2006 (21:39:00)

480 pages. Ballantine Books, 2006.

I hardly ever read books that I don't like. If I do, it's usually for work or a requirement for some course I'm taking. I started out reading The Templar Legacy, and considered putting it down unfinished. What do real book reviewers do? I guess they finish whatever they're reviewing, whether they like it or not. And in many cases they may not. Partially as an exercise in feeling like a professional reviewer and also to satisfy my curiosity about the book, I did finish it.

Templar is a "thriller," that is, it's in the genre that includes books by Ken Follett and Robert Ludlum. In my mind, a thriller is not exactly a novel about espionage, or war, nor is it a mystery -- although there is usually some type of mystery involved -- or crime novel. Generally these books will involve unlikely people caught up in large events that may affect much of the world, if not all of it. International travel is frequently involved, and as a result the writers of these novels are often travellers themselves, and there will be much description of various far-off places, and a great deal of atmosphere imparted from various locations. Successful thrillers -- that is, successful in entertaining me -- include good, complicated, multi-dimensional characters that we become very involved with. Ludlum often uses "ordinary" people who get caught up in big events, events that force them to act heroically in dangerous, exciting conditions. There is suspense, and it keeps us turning the pages.

There's a mugging and a suicide in The Templar Legacy's first chapter, so the action starts right away -- after a disturbing prologue that describes some grisly events from the 14th century. We are introduced to Cotton Malone and Stephanie Nelle right away, and we begin to understand that there are major issues at stake. The plot has to do with an ancient order of monks who defended the route to the Holy Land after the Crusades, their lost treasure, arcane knowledge of the true nature of Jesus Christ, resurrection, and redemption. It's probably got something in common with The DaVinci Code but I can't say for sure, as I haven't read that book. But I sense that DaVinci has some pretty attractive coattails, and Berry wouldn't be the first writer to see such an opportunity and take advantage of it -- but that really isn't what I didn't like.

What I did not like about Templar is that the writing is just too thin. The characters are not believable, and I didn't feel involved with any of them. There is some real tragedy mentioned in the plot, such as the suicide (or murder) of a man who was husband to Stephanie, and the father of her son, Mark. Perhaps this is a reflection of excessive sang-froid on my part, but I just didn't care about them. Cotton Malone should be, during the reading of such a novel, like my old friend -- warts and all, but an old friend nevertheless. He wasn't. I just didn't care about him, either. They all reacted strangely, and their dialog was unnatural.

And how about the main bad guy? First of all, I couldn't help waiting for the punch line that must have been set up by his name: De Roquefort. The big cheese? Granted, I betray my pedestrian tendencies in pointing this out, but Mr. Berry would have been well advised to name his villain something that doesn't make me want to snicker every time I read it.

There are too many distractions in this book. Several times, Berry puts an illustration on the page of some mysterious tombstones and versions of a cryptogram that his characters eventually must decipher. If the cryptogram was as simple as he represents, it would have been solved five hundred years before and saved his characters a lot of work and trouble. Malone is, we are told, possessed of an eidetic memory. "Not photographic ... an excellent recall of details that most people forgot." But it seems that Mr. Berry forgot -- if this remarkable asset figures in the plot again after it is mentioned, I totally missed it.

I am learning something about book reviewing here: it is much harder to write a negative one. I really just didn't like the writing, but that's not a good thing to say. I need to show you exactly what I mean. So I have to go back through the volume now, looking for examples. This is a lot like work.

"He carried the book to one of several club chairs that dotted the store, settled himself into the soft folds, and started to read. Gradually, a summary began to formulate."(page 59)

"The first assailant lay sprawled on the floor. The other man was likewise prone and still... he spotted something at the back of one of the necks. He bent close and plucked out a small dart, the tip a half-inch needle.

"His savior was privy to some sophisticated equipment." (page 70)

Ideally in a novel like this I shouldn't really even notice the writing -- it should be hard-wired to my brain and I should be turning the pages too fast to analyze sentences and wrinkle my nose at phrases like "privy to some sophisticated equipment." Templar lost its grip on me too often, and I was too tempted to pick it apart.

"...'the mayor said the grave was in danger from treasure hunters.' She shook her head. 'So a few years ago they dug the priest up and moved him into a mausoleum in the garden. Now it costs three euros to see his grave ... the price of a corpse's safety, I assume.'

He caught her sarcasm. (page 113)

An easy catch.

There are loose ends in this book, a thing to be abhorred in a genre chiefly based on intricate, suspensful plotting. For example, on page 135, Malone and Stephanie Nelle read a note to the deceased Ernst Scoville that warns "prend garde l'Ingeneur. 'Beware the engineer...'" We are later introduced to an unbelievable and fantastic character named Cassiopeia who is identified to be this engineer. There is, however, never any reason to beware her, nor is this warning ever sufficiently explained.

I probably should have been taking notes while reading this book, it would make the task of explaining what's wrong with it much easier. The next time I decide to finish a book out of professionalism, I'll get a pencil and paper.

Don't pay money for this book, but if you need something to read on a plane and it's available for free, it's probably fine. Sorry, Steve Berry -- I'll admit up front that you're a better writer than I am, but then nobody's paying me.

EL