AMERICAN INDIANS and the CIVIL WAR: OFFICIAL NATIONAL PARK SERVICE HANDBOOK by the National Park Service

Published in 2013 by Eastern National

One of the best things about visiting a National Park is visiting the book section of the gift shop. If you visit a Civil War-related site, the book sections are a rare treasure trove of high quality books all gathered in one place.

Nestled in among the books are a series of attractive books printed by Eastern National. They are the official books printed by the National Park Service itself. Physically, they remind me of the old style of National Geographic. They are bound similarly and, most importantly, they are chock full of color photographs like National Geographics were.

The pictures are truly the strong point in this book, however. The text of the book is a series of essays written by different authors from the points of view of several different Native American groups. There is a lot of overlap and a lot of gaps because they are not edited together into a coherent narrative.

Manuelito
(c. 1818 - 1893)

The perspective provided by the book is a welcome one, but the book would have been much strengthened by the inclusion of an essay focusing on the Indian policies of the Lincoln Administration and how it was or was not implemented while the primary focus was on the war that was sometimes being fought just a few miles from the White House.

I particularly enjoyed the essay on the Navajo by Peter Iverson. I found the stories of their leaders Barboncito and Manuelito fascinating.

I rate this compilation 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: AMERICAN INDIANS and the CIVIL WAR: OFFICIAL NATIONAL PARK SERVICE HANDBOOK.

BLACK KLANSMAN: RACE, HATE, and the UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATIONS of a LIFETIME (audiobook) by Ron Stallworth

Originally published in 2014.
Audiobook version published in 2018.
Read by the author, Ron Stallworth.
Duration: 5 hours, 50 minutes.
Unabridged.

Black Klansman is the memoir of Ron Stallworth, at the time the only African American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department (this was the 1970's), wrote a letter in response to a classified ad. It was looking for recruits to the Ku Klux Kan. Stallworth expressed his interest and thoughtlessly signed his own name, rather than an undercover name. Soon enough, the Klan leader called the number and Stallworth found himself being recruited.

Clearly, Stallworth couldn't show up in person so he created a little task force complete with a white undercover officer pretending to be Stallworth, when needed. Eventually, Stallworth had a membership card (!) and having frequent phone conversations with David Duke, the most famous KKK leader in the country.

The premise of the book was, sadly, more interesting than the follow through. The book was written in a very dry style, much like a "just the facts, ma'am" police report. It was easily understood, but it was easy to let my mind wander and not miss much. Some moments stand out, however. The phone conversation with David Duke telling Stallworth how he could ALWAYS identify African Americans on the phone was priceless, as was the time that Stallworth was assigned to be the bodyguard for Duke when he came to Colorado Springs to give a speech.

The author read the book, which was helpful in the sense that the listener could hear Stallworth's voice and understand how he fooled the KKK. But, Stallworth is not a particularly exciting reader. This is a great story, but it would have been better if Stallworth had read an introduction and had the rest of the book read by a professional.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  BLACK KLANSMAN: RACE, HATE, and the UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATIONS of a LIFETIME by Ron Stallworth.

PAST TENSE: A JACK REACHER NOVEL by Lee Child (audiobook)

Published in 2018 by Random House Audio.
Read by Scott Brick.
Duration: 12 hours, 51 minutes.
Unabridged.

Jack Reacher is in New Hampshire and is working his way cross-country to San Diego. As normal, in Past Tense he is hitchhiking. He gets dropped off near the town where his father was born, Laconia. He has never been there and decides to check it out. His father has been dead for thirty years but he might find someone who remembers him.  The more  digs, the more he finds that this father's backstory doesn't quite jive with what he is discovering on the ground...

Meanwhile, a Canadian couple is travelling through New Hampshire on their way to New York City. They are carrying a mysterious cargo in the trunk of their rattletrap Honda. When the Honda dies in the parking lot of a lonely hotel, the owners of the hotel convince the couple to check in for the night and try to find a mechanic in the morning. But, something doesn't seem right...

This book had all of the pieces to make a perfectly good Jack Reacher novel - Reacher's mysterious family problems (a semi-constant theme throughout the series), Reacher rolling into town and finding a wrong that needs to be corrected and clever local people with brave hearts to help him.

But, this book became a tedious mess that just never gels into a consistent plot. It takes nearly 25% of the book for Reacher (or anyone) to get into any sort of action, and that was obviously a plotting device designed to make it difficult for Reacher to stay in town. Eventually, Reacher picks fights with three different groups of people in this small New Hampshire town and its nearby surroundings (there simply must be something in the water to cause all of these problems). Even though this sounds like a lot of action, it was surprisingly slow.

It was almost like there were pieces of three separate books laying around and Lee Child just mashed them together into this book. There are flashes of clever writing and good action, but there is simply too much of watching Jack Reacher perform a genealogical investigation throughout the book. This was a wasted opportunity.

This is the first audiobook in the post-Dick Hill era. Dick Hill read almost all of the previous 23 novels and the assorted short stories and I enjoyed them thoroughly. Scott Brick is a solid choice to replace Hill (Hill has retired from reading audiobooks). I am sure that my dislike of this book was not due to Scott Brick. It's too bad that his debut book was this dud.

So, this is my worst rating of a Jack Reacher novel - 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: PAST TENSE: A JACK REACHER NOVEL by Lee Child.

FLAWED DOGS: THE NOVEL: THE SHOCKING RAID on WESTMINSTER by Berkeley Breathed

Originally published in 2009.

I am a big fan of Berkeley Breathed and have been for 35+ years. I have multiple volumes of his Bloom County books, I enjoyed his movie Mars Needs Moms so much that I went out and bought it after I had rented it. I love his children's book Pete and Pickles.

This book, however, is a rare misfire.

To begin with, the book assumes that you read an earlier childrens book called Flawed Dogs: The Year End Leftovers at the Piddleton "Last Chance" Dog Pound. This book is like a catalog of dogs that no one will adopt because of their flaws. The dogs from the first book are thrown into the Flawed Dogs: The Novel with little or no introduction - just a pack of dogs with names and skills and oddities that the reader had better remember. No character development, no real chance to get to know any of them. There was a whole dog that I had no idea was even in the book until he was shown in an illustration.

The main character of the book is a dachshund named Sam. Sam loves his human, a girl named Heidy who doesn't like dogs because her parents were killed by dogs in some sort of horrible accident that the book was never quite clear about. Sam is slated to participate in the Westminster dog show, but another dog is so jealous that he mutilates himself and sets Sam up so that it looks like he attacked a human baby. Heidy's uncle shoots Sam. But, Sam doesn't die. Instead, he ends up at the "Last Chance" Pound. That is the first half of the book.

Spoiler alert************

The second half of the book is very rushed and features Sam getting his foot in a badger trap, Sam getting hit by a car, Sam spending three years in a laboratory being mutilated for science and Sam being put into a dog fight by his second human owner to pay off a debt. Sam hatches a big, complicated plot (that was vague except for a gag that I have seen done on cartoons ranging from Donald Duck to Scooby Doo) to get even with the poodle that took him away from Heidy.

This book commits too many "sins" - it is a hurried, gruesome mess.

I do not dispute that all of the atrocities that happen to Sam in this book happen to real dogs every day (except for being framed by a poodle.) This book should have been a whole series of books with each book featuring Sam and perhaps a couple of new dogs from the "Last Chance" Pound confronting a new horrible thing that people do to dogs. Not light reading, but made informative and tolerable because they would feature the indomitable dachshund Sam coming to the rescue.

End spoiler alert************

I rate this book 1 star out of 5. If you must read it, it can be found on Amazon.com here: FLAWED DOGS: THE NOVEL: THE SHOCKING RAID on WESTMINSTER by Berkeley Breathed.

BEING THERE by Jerzy Kosinski

Originally published in 1970.

I did not know this was a novel until just a few months ago when I found my copy of this book in a thrift shop. I was familiar with the 1979 movie starring Peter Sellers in an Academy Award-nominated performance, but had no idea it was originally a book.

A little research has told me that this book has a troubled history. The author, Jerzy Kosinski, plagiarized the book. The original book was a Polish author from the 1920's and 1930's named Tadeusz Dolega-Mostowicz.  He died at the beginning of World War II while fighting the Soviet Union during the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland in 1939. His book was called The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma. 

Being There follows the adventures of Chance, an uneducated gardener who works for an elderly rich man. Chance is probably on the autistic spectrum and has grown up in the rich man's household. He knows nothing about the outside world except for what he has seen on television. However, he has an intuitive understanding of gardening and nature.

When the old man dies, Chance is evicted from his home by the estate's lawyers and heads out into the wide open world for the first time in his life with a suitcase full of fine suits taken from the rich man's closet. When he is struck by a car, he tells the car's owners that he is Chance the gardener, but they think his name is Chauncey Gardner and assume he is a rich businessman on a trip based on his clothing and his suitcase.

When asked anything, Chauncey can only answer with what he knows - gardening. His observations on the comings and going of the seasons and how they relate to the relative health of his garden are interpreted as sophisticated commentary on politics and economics and soon he is catapulted to the heights of politics.

The movie is pretty faithful to the book. I always think of Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardiner when a new politician breaks onto the scene and people throw their support behind him or her based on a few words and the assumption that they share a similar world view. I think our last two presidents made a lot of political hay out of this phenomenon.

This is a short book with a powerful lesson about confirmation bias (hearing what you want to hear when confronted with new information so that it confirms what you already believe).

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: BEING THERE by Jerzy Kosinski.

MOSBY: GRAY GHOST of the CONFEDERACY by Jonathan Daniels

Published in 1959 by J.B. Lippincott Company.

Back in the 1950's and 1960's several publishing houses put out series of biographies aimed at upper elementary students. The most famous of these was Random House's Landmark Series. They were small hardback books with thick pages and lots of line drawings. They were long on action and short on analysis.

This book is similar in every way to that series except that it was printed by the J.B. Lippincott Company.

There is literally nothing about John Mosby's childhood in this biography, which is a little odd since there was a similar series at the same time, with the same physical format called Childhood of Famous Americans published by Bobbs-Merrill.

John Mosby was a Confederate cavalry officer in the Civil War who became a Partisan Ranger. Partisan Rangers were irregular forces, not really part of the armies they supported and able to take shares of any spoils of war that they captured. This book does not discuss any of the moral issues of recruiting an army that fought for spoils (much like the Confederacy's privateer navy), but it makes it clear that Mosby did not take any shares of goods captured.

Confederate Colonel John S. Mosby
(1833-1916)

As I stated above, this book is long on action and short on analysis. There is perhaps one sentence about slavery (Mosby was against it). There are also only five pages about Mosby's life after he put away his uniform. But, there are lots of stories of horses racing down back roads and fighting Union soldiers. They are not organized particularly well, which makes it sort of a confusing to tell if the stories were all part of certain campaigns or were all separate incidents.

This book was aimed at 10-12 year olds, an age group that particularly values fast-moving stories with lots of action over analysis and an over-arching cohesive story, so with that in mind, it hits the spot. If this book were an adult's only introduction to John Mosby, it would be deficient.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5, mostly for the confusing way it told about his campaigns. It can be found on Amazon.com here: MOSBY: GRAY GHOST of the CONFEDERACY by Jonathan Daniels.

Here is a link to another book I have reviewed on John Mosby (with way too many details, ironically): Gray Ghost: The Life of Col. John Singleton Mosby by James A. Ramage. 

THE YEAR of FEAR: MACHINE GUN KELLY and the MANHUNT THAT CHANGED the NATION (audiobook) by Joe Urschel

Published in 2015 by Macmillan Audio.
Read by Jeremy Bobb.
Duration: 9 hours, 4 minutes.
Unabridged.

In the early years of the Great Depression, kidnapping became a fairly common crime, especially in the Midwest. It was viewed by some as a safer alternative to bank robberies, especially since unsuspecting victims were often not armed.

The most famous kidnapping of the era was the Lindbergh baby case. It ended tragically, but did result in a Federal anti-kidnapping law. That law got its first test when George "Machine Gun Kelly" Barnes and his wife Kathryn planned the kidnapping of oil tycoon Charles F. Urschel (no relation to the author of The Year of Fear, but he admits to initially researching the topic due to the victim having the same last name as his). Urschel was taken from his home in Oklahoma to a farm in Texas. The moment they crossed the border, the kidnapping became a federal crime.

Machine Gun Kelly started out his career as a bootlegger, but his new wife Kathryn wanted more for him. She bought him his machine gun at a pawn shop and made him practice with it. She gave him his nickname and bragged to everyone that he was so adept with his machine gun that he could spell his own name out as he fired it. With that, a relative small-timer acquired a catchy name and a reputation that would eventually secure him a place in the public's imagination.

George "Machine Gun Kelly" Barnes (1895-1954)
 and his wife Kathryn (1904-1985)

The Urschel kidnapping became the first major case of the fledgling FBI (it wasn't even called the FBI yet) and it's new director, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover's men cracked the case fairly quickly (Urschel was a tremendous help - he worked very hard to remember everything that he could while he was kidnapped and even participated in a raid) and conducted a nation-wide manhunt for Machine Gun Kelly and his wife. When Kelly surrendered it was widely reported that he shouted, "Don't shoot, G-Men! Don't shoot, G-Men!" and forever gave FBI agents that nickname.

Kelly left another legacy as well. The federal government felt that some of their prisons were vulnerable to super-criminals like Kelly and Al Capone so they were moved to the newly built prison on Alcatraz Island near San Francisco that was designed to be escape-proof. Kelly was among the first prisoners moved there and spent 17 years there.

This audiobook was read by Jeremy Bobb. He did a very good job, including making special voices for some people, such as Machine Gun Kelly. However, the book was written in an uneven manner. The first half of the book includes a fascinating look at the crime wave that gripped the Midwest in those days. The tale of the Urschel kidnapping is told so well that it felt like I was listening to a crime novel more than a history. But, the story becomes tedious when re-telling the cross-country trips of Machine Gun Kelly and his wife Kathryn. Even worse, the story of the trial had too much cutting and pasting of trial transcripts. There was a lot of overblown grandstanding on the part of the prosecutor and it was often a challenge to listen to.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. The first half is excellent. I trudged through the post-kidnapping part of the book just to see how it ended.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE YEAR of FEAR: MACHINE GUN KELLY and the MANHUNT THAT CHANGED the NATION.