Book Blog
September 19, 2021
‘ve been a fan of the African functionalist Wilbur Smith for decades. He writes wonderful books about the continent, both in the modern day and the ancient past. And one of his loose series is about the Courtney family that finds itself settling in Africa after World War One and building their dynasty, accumulating rotters and villains along the way. Legacy of War is no different (a little more about that in my conclusion). This book opens just after World War Two. Saffron Courtney has been Mata Haring all about Europe during the war, doing those crazy resistance things and […]
September 12, 2021
his was another of the CD’s we listened to on our summer vacation drive (a CD can make the miles go by but I fear they will go the way of VHS soon enough). The wife picked this one out. So we listened. The story told starts at what should be the end – Trond Sander is an older man, ready to live out the remains of his life in contemporary times out in the Norwegian boonies. But then he encounters a man who grew up with him when he was a child, back when the Nazis invaded during World […]
September 5, 2021
ill Schutt, an author and Zoologist, has created a very Indiana Jonesy hero with his Captain R. J. MacCready, a special operative in World War Two who is sent in when special forces have failed. If you like your action mysterious, hot and kinda on the weird side, you’ll love his writing. His Hell’s Gate was one I picked up on disk to listen on a long vacation drive. I enjoyed it but my wife drifted off to look at passing scenery. That’s kinda how it always plays with Crichton-esh books. Anyway, this one has an interesting concept. Two German […]
August 29, 2021
here are three Laws of Robotics that all robots must follow: First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. This makes sense – you don’t want robots to kill, yet you don’t want robots to damage themselves (unless to prevent their […]
August 8, 2021
his is one of these books where I wish I was in some college class reading it, so I could understand the meaning better. There is a hint of what I think this is really about. But I’m not sure. So, in The Arrest, main character Sandy Duplessis (see, what’s with that name? It’s almost “duplicitous”, right?) has limped home to his sister’s organic farm in Maine after the world fell apart. The Arrest, from the title, is not an act of civil custody as it is the complete break down of every machine in the world. Now, with the […]
July 25, 2021
‘ll admit that I was desperate for this book to come out. Locked down in the pandemic, without groups of model railroaders to converse with (possibly in the casual debrief after a session) I was building my own Tuscarora Branch Line and desperate to find out how Interlocking Towers worked (these are the towers you used to see all along railroad lines that would allow the operator to set signals and turnouts, often via very crazy series of push-pull rods along trackside). But how the logic of the system worked, how it would lock out and why, none of this […]
July 18, 2021
ecently I rode a bike the length and back of the Van Fleet Trail in Florida, sixty total miles of arrow-straight trail through thick Florida swamps. In the end, I barely made it, coasting over the finish line to collapse in a crumpled heap on a bench. Berlin Alexanderplatz was kinda like that. The novel is told in the whimsical, wandering form of Ulysses, a tale of an ex-con (Franz Biberkopf), released back onto the streets of Berlin in 1928. He makes a go at being honest, really tries by selling newspapers, shoelaces, and joining the Merchant’s Union. However, like […]
July 11, 2021
ntil one of our neighbors down the street from us loaned me her copy of No Man’s Land by Wendy Moore I was unaware of this book and unaware of the history of Endell Street Hospital. Thanks to our neighbor I now have had the opportunity to read it. Per the dust jacket, this is the story of “The trailblazing women who ran Britain’s most extraordinary military hospital during World War I.” The suffragette doctors, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray, set up and ran the Endell Street Military Hospital in the heart of London. The hospital, staffed entirely by […]
July 4, 2021
hat better title to review on this Independence Day than Mr. American, a delightful novel from George MacDonald Fraser, the author of the groundbreaking Flashman novels. The novel begins with Mr. Mark Franklin, a soft spoken Yankee, debarking from a liner in Liverpool in 1909. In his possession are the following curious items: a copy of Shakespeare’s works, an old Mexican charro saddle and two Remington pistols in his battered luggage. And also, it seems a bank note for a large amount of money. Mark journeys first to London and meets the beautiful and vivacious ‘Pip’ Delys, a music hall […]
June 27, 2021
‘ll admit I watch Handmaidens Tale and The Man in the High Castle, stories of fascism and purging that comes to our own United States. And always, as I see the political hero worshiping and the insurrection of January 6th, I think Yes, it could happen here. But that’s still only a possibility, of course, a worst-case fantasy. But if you really want to know what it’s like, and what this powder keg near which our own monkeys play with their matches, The Librarian of Auschwitz gives you a full, total accounting of a state gone mad. This is the […]