Category: Book Review Monday

It is a quite staggering reflection that when Cook left Canada for the last time in 1767, he was still a non-commissioned officer. It is also a staggering reflection on the Lords of the Admiralty of the time that, because of their innate snobbish conviction that officers and gentlemen are born and not made, Cook did not quite qualify for a commission. He had been in the despised Merchant Service, he had sailed before the mast in the Navy, he was poor and his origins were obscure. There could have been little doubt left in the Admiralty by that time that in Cook they had the greatest seaman, navigator and cartographer of the generation. But a commission? Hardly. Hardly, that is, until they realised that to send a naval vessel to circumnavigate the globe, in the greatest exploratory voyage ever undertaken, under the command of a non-commissioned officer wouldn't be quite the thing to do. For one thing, it would redound most dreadfully upon the alleged competence of those who did hold commissions, and, for another, it would not look good in the history books. So, belatedly, they made him a lieutenant.

# Permanent link to Captain Cook, the Alistair MacLean version

'Fat smiles on the faces of the husbandmen,' said Hugh Beringar, fresh from his own harvest in the north of the shire, and burned nut-brown from his work in the fields, 'and chaos among the kings. If they had to grow their own corn, mill their own flour and bake their own bread they might have no time left for all the squabbling and killing.'

# Permanent link to Brother Cadfael

This Thursday, June 2nd, sees the publication of Craig Johnson's seventh Walt Longmire novel, Hell is Empty. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I'll be first in line at the bookstore to find out one way or another.

Walt is the sheriff of Absaroka County in Wyoming, which is a lot like Alaska, a whole lot of empty space, except with roads. His best friend is Henry Standing Bear, aka the Cheyenne Nation, an Indian (certainly not a Native American) who talks without contractions, which makes him sound a little like Data. Walt is three years a widower, with a grown daughter whose phone calls he lives for, and is starting to think about retirement.

As The Cold Dish, the first novel in the series, opens, a young man is found dead, shot with great accuracy from a great distance with a Sharps rifle. This particular young man, all agree, is no great loss, as he was one of four who had raped a young Indian woman with FAS and didn't serve near enough time for it. Then the second body shows up and Walt has to call in Omar, the guy with the Nieman Marcus helicopter, for help.

I just love a book with a Nieman Marcus helicopter in it, don't you?

The Cold Dish is filled with a wealth of detail about Western history, Indian culture and gun lore (Ever wonder where the term "sharpshooter" came from?) and wonderful descriptions of the landscape, but the true gift is in the characters, including a lot of good-looking, smart-mouthed women and a lot of good-looking, smart-mouthed men who like them. Vic the ex-pat Philadelphia deputy. Lucian the one-legged ex-sheriff. Dorothy who slings the usual at the Busy Bee Cafe. Vonnie the high plains entrepreneur and love interest. Wheelchair-bound Lonnie Little Bird trying to stay sober so his granddaughter can visit him, um-hmmm, yes it is so.

Even the characters with walk-on parts are whole people, like Jules Belden, the guy in the drunk tank whose beatdown Walt ably avenges, and that near-giant Brandon White Buffalo who makes lovely sandwiches. Hands down my favorite is retired bartender Al Munro who shows up at the second crime scene dressed in floral print swimming trunks, on a mule, martini in hand. It's snowing at the time. The dialogue in these novels is so good you feel privileged to eavesdrop in, sort of John Wayne channeling Samuel Johnson, only better read and more articulate.

In order, the novels are The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished, Another Man's Moccasins, The Dark Horse, Junkyard Dogs, and on Thursday, Hell is Empty.

Note: Somebody must have told Craig that Chopper Jim took a Walt Longmire novel along on his recent plane ride to California, because Craig got in touch to malign my characters' taste in reading. And then he sent me this.

Pretty sure Jim would vote for Walt if he lived in Absaroka County. If he wasn't running against him.

If you like the flavor of modern western novels and want more, try also Robert Greer's Spoon, an updating of the Shane story. Then read Monte Walsh, what I consider to be one of the few perfect novels, by Jack Schaefer, the guy who wrote Shane. Then read Molly Gloss' The Hearts of Horses for a look through a female cowboy's eyes. It's almost a sequel to Monte Walsh, which I did not consider possible. All of these novels share a similar rhythm to their language, as if they are told to us from the back of a horse heading into the sunset. They'll make you nostalgic for a horse you never rode yourself.

Update on June 3rd--Here's the trailer for a pretty good adaptation of Monte Walsh starring Tom Selleck. Worth seeing.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woHix1RrVFM&w=480&h=390]

# Permanent link to Walt Longmire for Sheriff

A while back I taught a science-fiction-as-lit workshop at the Kenai Public Library. Part of the pre-class assignment was to read H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, watch the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Measure of a Man," and come prepared to discuss the definition of sentience. Everyone had an opinion and the discussion was high, wide and handsome.

Little Fuzzy and the two sequels, Fuzzy Sapiens and Fuzzies and Other People are seminal texts in the science fiction canon, as well as thumpin' good reads. In the far future on the distant planet of Zarathustra, miner Jack Holloway comes home from a hard day's work finding sunstones to discover a visitor in his shower stall, a two-foot high biped covered with gold fur who is unlike any other of the native fauna on Zarathustra. As soon becomes evident Little Fuzzy is sentient as well. This leads to consternation at the Chartered Zarathustra Company, as the Company got their charter on the planet because it was adjudged to hold no sentient life and if Little Fuzzy is found to be sentient the Company will lose their charter. There is mayhem and kidnapping and murder and the Federation Space Navy gets involved and it all winds up in a frontier courtroom in a legal battle over the definition of sentience. Piper's style is so natural and colloquial that it feels like he's telling a story about what's going on next door, with an understated humor that keeps you chuckling all the way through.

The three books have been reprinted in an omnibus edition called The Complete Fuzzy, and you should definitely read them. But wait, there's more.

Tomorrow, John Scalzi publishes Fuzzy Nation, what he calls a "reboot" of the first novel. "I took the original plot and characters of Little Fuzzy and wrote an entirely new story from and with them," he writes on his blog. Why? "Because I am a huge fan of the original novel and of H. Beam Piper’s work. It’s a good story and he’s a very good story teller; Little Fuzzy wasn’t nominated for a Hugo on accident, you know. And while the original novel is still, as they say, a “cracking good tale,” I thought there was an opportunity to revisit the story and put a new spin on it to make it approachable to people who had not read the original or did not know about Piper, and also to give fans of the original the fun of seeing some old friends in new settings."

You'll remember Scalzi's Old Man's War? Another thumpin' good read? I can't wait to see what he does with Fuzzies. I'll be getting my copy tomorrow, and I will be unavailable for communication for a while thereafter.

Just for fun, here's the devastating scene from "The Measure of a Man" when Riker damn near sends Data on a one-way trip to the Daystrom Institute, and the following scene where Guinan (Whoppi Goldberg in her best role ever) shows Picard what's really going on. One of the best scenes in TNG, and one of the best sf scenes ever.

And here's the scene where Picard proves indisputably that Data is not a toaster.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PMlDidyG_I&w=480&h=390]

# Permanent link to Little Fuzzy Returns

“...To the east and south, where the predawn light had still not appeared, the black landscape was suddenly defined and given depth by first dozens, then hundreds of flickering orange points of light. At first, Charlie didn’t recognize them as boiler fires. There were so many, and they stretched to the horizon, as far as he could see. The steam engineers of the plains were lighting off their fireboxes for the day, warming up the big boilers to make steam...”

# Permanent link to “Worst of all, it looked as though women were about to get the vote…”

I'm the last person to recommend yet another book about the American Civil War, one of which seems to be published every five minutes, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. You would think by now that every meaningful thing to be said about the War Between the States has been.

But Adam Goodheart's 1861: The Civil War Awakening might be the exception. For one thing, look at the way he sets events then into context with events now. Money quote from a New York Times article adapted from the book, How Slavery Really Ended in America (emphasis mine):

Earthshaking events are sometimes set in motion by small decisions. Perhaps the most famous example was when Rosa Parks boarded a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala. More recently, a Tunisian fruit vendor’s refusal to pay a bribe set off a revolution that continues to sweep across the Arab world. But in some ways, the moment most like the flight of fugitive slaves to Fort Monroe came two decades ago, when a minor East German bureaucratic foul-up loosed a tide of liberation across half of Europe. On the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, a tumultuous throng of people pressed against the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie, in response to an erroneous announcement that the ban on travel to the West would be lifted immediately. The captain in charge of the befuddled East German border guards dialed and redialed headquarters to find some higher-up who could give him definitive orders. None could. He put the phone down and stood still for a moment, pondering. “Perhaps he came to his own decision,” Michael Meyer of Newsweek would write. “Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m. precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, ‘Why not?’ . . . ‘Alles auf!’ he ordered. ‘Open ’em up,’ and the gates swung wide.”

The Iron Curtain did not unravel at that moment, but that night the possibility of cautious, incremental change ceased to exist, if it had ever really existed at all. The wall fell because of those thousands of pressing bodies, and because of that border guard’s shrug.

In the very first months of the Civil War — after Baker, Mallory and Townsend breached their own wall, and Butler shrugged — slavery’s iron curtain began falling all across the South. Lincoln’s secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay, in their biography of the president, would say of the three slaves’ escape, “Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war.”

Power to the people. I'm sold.

If you haven't seen it, Ken Burns' Emmy Award-winning series, The Civil War, is still the most comprehensive, most insightful, and most heart-wrenching account of the American Civil War ever made, and it may even be the best documentary ever made. I've seen it all the way through twice, and I could watch it again. Video clips here on the PBS website.

# Permanent link to Power to the People

In At Large and At Small, essayist Anne Fadiman (she of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader fame, one of my favorite books about reading) writes a dozen exceptionally well-written essays on such disparate subjects as coffee, mail and a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Allow me to allow her to speak for herself.

In "A Piece of Cotton," an essay about the American flag, Fadiman writes, "In the weeks after September 11, I saw for the first time that the flag...has multiple meanings....The red, white, and blue turban worn by the Sikh umbrella vendor a friend walked past in Dupont Circle, not far from the White House, meant Looking like someone and thinking like him are not the same thing....The flags brandished by two cowboy-hatted singers at a country fair we attended on the day the first bombs fell on Afghanistan meant Let's kill the bastards....The flag in our front yard meant We are sad. And we're sorry we've never done this before."

In "Moving" she writes, "We move more than anyone else. In a typical year, one in five Americans relocates, whereas in Japan it's one in ten, in Britain one in twelve, and in Germany one in twenty-five....(Traveling is always thought to be more enjoyable than moving: we envy foreign correspondents but pity army brats)."

In "Procrustes and the Culture Wars" she writes, "If I had to step into a polling booth and vote on Homer's sexual politics, I'd pull the NO lever strenuously. I am therefore very glad that the Odyssey is a poem, not a referendum." I read the Iliad last year for the first time since college. Me, too.

I skipped over the one on catching butterflies but the rest of these essays are engaging and informative. A delightful read.

# Permanent link to Coffee, Mail and a Biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I think Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana would be better read on the ground he covers. The amount of detail about the towns (living and dead) and buildings and monuments he visits is overwhelming when you're reading it with your feet up at home, but it would very likely be amazing if you were standing in front of what's he's describing: "At Hamadan we eschewed the tombs of Esther and Avicennna, but visited the Gumbad-i-Alaviyan, a Seljuk mausoleum of the twelfth century, whose uncoloured stucco panels, puffed and punctured into a riot of vegetable exuberance, are yet as formal and rich as Versailles--perhaps richer considering their economy of means; for when splendour is got by a chisel and a lump of plaster instead of the wealth of the world, it is splendour of design alone." (p.51)

I know now that the two major features the Muslims contributed to the world of architecture were the dome and the arcade. He also spends a great deal of time looking at towers with caps that make them look like penises, which gets a little tedious.

But there are sit-up-with-a-jerk historical echoes in the present day, too: "In 1885 the military came to the rescue after all. Russian troops were massing on the north-west frontier of Afghanistan, and the Government of India could not stop them because neither it nor the Afghans knew where the frontier was."(p 92)

And there is also great writing: "No Persian would venture to entertain a single guest, much less give a party, without carpets. When dancing began, the floor rose like an angry sea, and not until several couples had been wrecked were nails employed to quiet the woolen breakers."(p 173)

There is a new preface by Rory Stewart, who wrote The Places in Between and was responsible for bringing this book back into print, and an introduction by the fabulous Paul Fussell (I strongly recommend his Thank God for the Atom Bomb).

# Permanent link to “Russian troops were massing on the north-west frontier of Afghanistan…”