Slow Storm by Danica Novgorodoff

A rather depressing tale

Published in 2008 by First Second.

Slow Storm is a rather depressing tale of a sexually-harrassed female firefighter with family issues in Kentucky that encounters an illegal alien named Rafi during a thunderstorm that has spawned tornadoes. Rafi's home gets burned due to a lightning strike.

That's about it for the plot with the exception of some clever writing comparing sneaking across the border to climbing over the "pearly gates" to get into heaven, this is an entirely forgettable graphic novel.

I rate this graphic novel 2 stars out of 5.

This graphic novel can be found on Amazon.com here: Slow Storm.

Reviewed on October 5, 2008.

Bleachers (audiobook) by John Grisham

Change of pace for Grisham

Published by Random House Audio in 2003.

Read by the author, John Grisham
4 hours, 22 minutes

Unabridged.

I, for one, am not especially enamored of Grisham's legal thrillers but I do enjoy Grisham's foray into non-legal fiction.

Bleachers was read by the author. Grisham's southern accent and good ol' boy style are sometimes helpful but his occasional odd emphasis and flat read can be distracting.

The book features a Bobby Knight/Woody Hayes type of small-town high school football coach. He is cruel, petty and completely breaks his players as he builds them into his mold and makes them successful teams year after year after year. His teams have won 13 Texas state championships.

The coach is dying of cancer now and his players are returning home to honor him and await his funeral. They meet several times on the bleachers of the field they played on and discuss their memories of school, football and of course the coach. Thus, the title.

We see the reunion of players through the eyes of Neeley, a former All-American quarterback who suffered a career-ending injury in college and never reached his full potential as a player. Although Neeley is our window to this world, he is not the true focus of the book - it is the coach and the love/hate relationship his players and the town have with him.

An interesting book. This Indiana University graduate couldn't help but wonder if the alumni of Bobby Knight's basketball program have had similar discussions about him.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Bleachers by John Grisham.

Reviewed on October 7, 2008.

Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots by Rod Dreher

Neat idea but bad follow through

Published in 2006 by Three Rivers Press.

I grabbed Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots on impulse as I was leaving the local purveyor of books. You see, I am a "Crunchy Con" of sorts, being an avid recycler. But, this book really failed to reach me. In fact, I felt like I was being preached at with certain topics being outright hammered into my skull due to their repetitive re-occurrence.

Pluses:

-The book addresses the fact that the conservative movement is not monolithic and their are a variety of reasons for people to espouse conservatism.

-Embraces a belief in buying local - something I try to do when I go out to eat or shop whenever reasonably possible.

-Points out how silly it is to apply big business agricultural regulations to family farms.

Negatives:

-What the heck is "crunchy"? Search the internet and you may get a reference to "Crunchy granola", which basically means being hippie-like. Or, you may get a reference to this book, or you may get a reference to some sort of street drug.

-Dreher gets too preachy, too mystical about the virtues of organic farming and quaint old neighborhoods that time forgot in the inner city. Plus, he goes on and on for dozens of pages about these topics with multiple interviews that do little but reinforce the points already made.

-Dreher repeats the old worn line that we in the West should be more like the East: "...in the West, economics is built on philosophically materialist assumptions, but in the East, the whole person is taken into account." (p. 49) Really. The East, home to the Khmer Rouge, sex slavery, the caste system and foot binding. Besides, which "Eastern" philosophy are you going to follow? Confucianism? Daoism? Sikhism? Samurai Bushido? There really is no "Eastern" philosophy. Let's admit it - no society, East or West has all of the answers.

-Dreher's answer to the un-competitive nature of organic farming is a decidedly un-conservative one, have the power of the federal government choose in favor of the organic farmers "and encourage through tax incentives the development of small-scale, locally based agriculture." (p. 86) This is especially odd considering his prior exhortation: "We object to the idea that there's nothing wrong with our country that a new tax or a government program can't fix." (p. 10)

-Dreher waxes poetically about homeschooling. For page after page we hear about how his family does it and how others do as well. He drags up quotes from the 1800s and the 1920s about how the philosophical underpinnings of public schools are inherently anti-family. He offers only two choices: A) immoral public schools who are only out to indoctrinate your children (pp. 136-139) or B) perfect family homeschoolers. 

To be fair, you should know that I am a public school teacher that does not believe in the inherent goodness of public schools (or any other human institution, for that matter). I've seen families do homeschooling right (some of our family's best friends do it right), but I've also seen it done so poorly that when their kids finally come to school they are functionally illiterate.

While sympathetic to many of his points, the most I can say about this book is "disappointed."

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots.

Reviewed on October 13, 2008.

Note: Rod Dreher has gone off the deep end politically since I have read this book. My 2/5 star review isn't much of an endorsement to begin with, but I wanted to make it clear that I do not agree with his embrace of Viktor Orban of Hungary.

Trader of Secrets (Paul Madriani #13)(audiobook) by Steve Martini

Paul Madriani continues fighting terrorists and never enters the courtroom

Published by Harper Audio in 2011.
Read by Dan Woren.
Duration: 10 hours, 57 minutes.
Unabridged.

Steve Martini completes a trilogy within his Paul Madriani series that does not have attorneys Paul Madriani and his partner Harry Hinds even enter a courtroom. Instead, Madriani finishes a three book fight against terrorists (both foreign and domestic) in Trader of Secrets.

If you are looking for a good courtroom drama, this book will surely disappoint. However, if you are looking for an international chase over 3 different continents, traitors, spies, secret agents, international assassins, a good and loyal dog, secret government agencies and a conspiracy that may kill millions...well this is your book.

What are Madriani's qualifications for chasing international terror plots? Hardly any. He is too old, too slow and doesn't really carry a weapon. However, he has a good sense of right and wrong and an international assassin is out to kill his daughter because she can identify him. So, Paul tracks the international assassin "Liquida" the "Mexicutioner" and the ever-gruff Harry Hinds comes along to offer lots of smart comments and a measure of physical intimidation, should it be required. Paul's new love interest, Joselyn Cole comes along, too.

Steve Martini

The trail leads to an international conspiracy against both the United States and Israel. Paul, Harry and Joselyn know that they cannot wait for the FBI to save the day so they must act. To Martini's credit, he does not morph these middle-aged lawyers into special forces soldiers that shoot first and ask questions later. Instead, they use their heads and if that fails, the front bumper of a car works too!

I have no idea how realistic any of this stuff actually is, but Trader of Secrets was a great bit of summer entertainment.

Reader Dan Woren does a solid job. He has a lot of accents to attempt and he does a solid job with that. He captures the voice of Harry Hinds perfectly.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Trader of Secrets by Steve Martini.

Reviewed on July 8, 2011.

The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher

A wonderful sci-fi trilogy

Trilogy originally published in 1967 and 1968.

The White Mountains is just the first in a trilogy of sci-fi adventures aimed at young people. This classic trilogy was a childhood favorite of mine and I was fortunate enough to have rediscovered them. I re-read them after 20+ years and still find them to be engaging and really quite good. The second book is called The City of Gold and Lead and the final book is The Pool of Fire.

The premise of The Tripods Trilogy is that an alien race called the "Masters" have taken over earth, destroyed its great cities and control men's minds with a device called "the cap". All people are capped at age 14 and human beings live in small villages at a near-medieval level of technology.

The main characters are Will, Henry, Beanpole and Fritz who are all young men who question the practice of capping and the presence of the Tripods - giant three-legged machines that enforce the capping and are worshipped by some and feared by the uncapped. These characters head off for the White Mountains (actually the Alps) where free men are rumored to live. Eventually the series focuses on the struggle of the free men (as they begin to recover some of mankind's lost knowledge and technology) versus the Masters.

During the boys' travels we get to see the author's vision of a destroyed world, especially Europe, and how mankind reacts to the imposed (brain-robbing) peace and harmony of the Masters. The Masters are truly alien - we have very little concept of their motivation, how their bodies work, their technology or their society. These are not your garden-variety Star Trek humanoid-style aliens, and I think that it one of its great strengths.

Later, Christopher wrote a prequel called When the Tripods Came. You may click on the TRIPODS or John Christopher tag below to see my review of that book.

I give this trilogy 5 stars out of 5.

This series can be found on Amazon.com here: The Tripods Trilogy.

Reviewed on June 9, 2006.

The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War by Howard Bahr

An excellent beginning to a promising career.

Originally published in 1997.

First off - The Black Flower is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It follows a group of Confederate soldiers during and after the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee (November of 1864), especially an educated Private named Bushrod Carter. I will not go into great detail, for fear of ruining the plot for others.

For a first book, this is a remarkable work. The characters are well-written and "feel" like real people. They have weight and depth, a feature that many readers and writers on this forum have decried as missing in most of modern literature. They speak in dialect that is easy to read and does not take much decoding (as opposed to some of Twain's). I am a Civil War buff, and I can testify that the historical aspects of the story ring true.

Confederate Soldiers

This book reminded me very much of The Red Badge of Courage, but not in its theme or its plot. It reminded me of Crane's battle scenes - the confusion and the noise and the smoke and the pain and death are so well-described in both books. The "Black Flower" the title refers to is a metaphor for battle - a battle is a black flower that opens up and brings death, a wondrous and fearsome thing.

I can do this book no further praise than just quit writing about it.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War.

Reviewed on June 8, 2006.

The American Revolution in the West by George Macgregor Waller

General history of the American frontier during the Revolution.

Published in 1976 by Burnham Inc Pub

Synopsis: 

The American Revolution in the West is designed to be a general review or introduction to the American Revolution in what is now Kentucky, Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. At that point in time, that was the American West. It features George Rogers Clark prominently.

George Rogers Clark (1752-1818)  accepts
the surrender of Vincennes

My review:

This is a decent history. Nothing great, nothing terrible. I would recommend along with it the historical fiction book Long Knife by James Alexander Thom and a good biography of Daniel Boone to get a better understanding of the warfare along the frontier. I would also recommend a book I also reviewed entitled The Red Heart by Thom for an impression of the war from the American Indian's point of view.

I give this book 3 stars for being neither great nor awful. It was simply a history.

If you are not familiar with Clark's story, I urge you to read the short history on the National Parks Service's site from the George Rogers Clark National Historic Site in Vincennes, Indiana - hopefully it will encourage you to read more. I personally find the story to be most amazing - Clark is one of the few outright heroes I have in my study of history.

I will leave you with a quote from Clark that was featured in the book: "Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted."

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The American Revolution in the West.

Reviewed on June 8, 2006.