Category: Book Reviews

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The Crêpes of Wrath

By Sarah Fox
ISBN: 042528509X

Tags: Mystery, Cozy

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

When Marley McKinney’s aging cousin, Jimmy, is hospitalized with pneumonia, she agrees to help run his pancake house while he recovers. With its rustic interior and syrupy scent, the Flip Side Pancake House is just as she pictured it—and the surly chef is a wizard with crêpes. Marley expects to spend a leisurely week or two in Wildwood Cove, the quaint, coastal community where she used to spend her summers. Then Cousin Jimmy is found murdered, sprawled on the rocks beneath a nearby cliff, and Marley finds herself up to her short-orders in figuring out whodunit. Continue reading “The Crêpes of Wrath”

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50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed to Know

By Mickey Z
ISBN 1-932857-18-4

Publication Year: 2005

Tags: Political, History

Rating: ★★★☆☆

In this small volume, “professional iconoclast” (Newsweek) Mickey Z presents fifty of what he considers to be American revolutions — actions and events that were considered to be dangerous precedents of social protest and rebellions against the status quo. Among these is Thomas Paine’s creation of Common Sense; Eugene Debs campaigning for President from his prison cell; Muhammad Ali refusing to be drafted into the military; and American Indians occupying Alcatraz Island. Presented in brief articles of perhaps a thousand words each, the information here is often glossed over or even go unmentioned in modern history texts. Continue reading “50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed to Know”

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If God Wanted Us To Travel…

By David Brenner
ISBN 0-671-70113-4

Publication Year: 1990

Tags: Comedy

Rating: ★★★★☆

David Brenner (1936-2014) was one of America’s best-known and best-loved comedians in the 1970s-1990s. Considered a master of observational comedy, he was the forerunner of and influence upon Richard Lewis, Paul Reiser, Jay Leno, David Letterman, and many others. This book is a collection of “outlandish tips and hilarious anecdotes” collected over decades of crisscrossing the U.S. on his many tours of his stand-up comedy. This is a book written by a guy who always remembered to “bring the funny”. Continue reading “If God Wanted Us To Travel…”

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The Secret Sharer

By Joseph Conrad
ISBN: 042528509X

Publication Year: 1909

Tags: Classic, Seafaring

Rating: ★★★☆☆

An unseasoned sea captain, feeling a virtual stranger to his command and his crew, generously offers his hard-working crew a chance catch up on their sleep, taking the anchor watch of his own ship until after midnight. During that watch, he rescues a naked man who says that he has fled from the hold of a ship anchored nearby, where he has been held for accidentally killing a crewmate. The captain helps the man hide in his stateroom, where the man’s whispered story helps the captain find himself and his destiny. Continue reading “The Secret Sharer”

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The Four Agreements

By Don Miguel Ruiz
ISBN: 0-965-046365

Publication Year: 1997

Tags: New Age, Philosophy

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

I’m willing to admit that I may not “get” this volume simply because I don’t agree with several of the ways in which these Four Agreements are described. The basis of the concept has been described in many similar volumes over the years: This consciousness is not All There Is, and what we call “reality” is, in fact, a sort of unconscious agreement as to what is “real”. Ruiz refers to all this as a form of “domestication”, being changed from a “truly free person” into a sort of societal “pet”. This occurs, he says, because we learn and “agree” with all the things we’re taught, regardless of whether or not such “agreements” actually help us. This, Ruiz, explains, is our prison in which we live our lives, all the while imagining that we are “free” when we are in fact devoutly unhappy. Continue reading “The Four Agreements”

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Deadeye Dick

By Kurt Vonnegut
ISBN13: 978-0-38-533417-4

Publication Year: 1982

Tags: Absurd, Satire

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

As a child, Rudy Waltz acquires the nickname of “Deadeye Dick” for accidentally killing, through nearly impossible circumstances, a pregnant woman. He lives his life as a “neuter”, having no particular emotional attachments, not even to the part of his life lived in Haiti nor to his hometown of Midland City, Ohio, which during his absence is destroyed by a neutron bomb. The novel, like his life, is viewed through this detachment from empathy with the world. Continue reading “Deadeye Dick”

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Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer, The

By Douglas C. Jones
ISBN: 0-684-14738-6

Publication Year: 1976

Tags: Historical Fiction, What-If, Native American, Military History

Rating: ★★★☆☆

George A. Custer, ranked as a General in the War Between the States but who was returned to the rank of Lt. Col. during his time commanding the 7th United States Cavalry, died at Little Big Horn. This what-if historical novel considers the question of Custer’s survival, and what a court-martial might find of the evidence presented to it of Custer’s actions that lead to a head-to-head battle of several hundred cavalrymen against several thousand Native Americans — or as they’re called in this book, with both historical accuracy and a conqueror’s prejudice, “Indians,” “renegades,” or “criminals who wouldn’t stay on the reservation”). Continue reading “Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer, The”

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Beyond the Boardwalk

By Rod McKuen
ISBN 13: 978-0-9103-9801-8

Publication Year: 1976

Tags: Poetry, Beat Poets, Lamentations

Rating: ★★★☆☆

My paperback copy of this book has McKuen’s autograph, from 1976, displayed in prominent Magic Marker (and dated) on the front cover. My friend, who was working for the now-defunct Waldenbooks chain, got the book and autograph for me when the poet toured; Russ knew that I’d been a fan since I first discovered McKuen’s work in 1968 (I was 10 at the time). I only recently re-discovered it – I had preserved it so carefully that it was lost in some of my older boxes.

This is the first of McKuen’s works (to my knowledge) to comment on his then-newfound fame in the Introduction. He observes, “If I sell five copies of a book, [critics] are unanimous in their praise. If I sell ten, I can expect one dissent. If the number grows to ten thousand, my reviewers will always be ‘mixed.’ At ten million, I have detractors of every persuasion, most notably those reviewers who read the statistics not the books. …I say again, the poem is me. I lived, or am living it. I accept no advice on how it could or should be lived.” (p.11 of this edition) Continue reading “Beyond the Boardwalk”

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The Boy on the Bus

BoyOnTheBusCoverBy Deborah Schupack
ISBN 0-743-24221-1

Publication Year: 2003

Tags: Pretentious, Avoid-At-All-Cost, Pointless

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

A Vermont housewife finds that the last boy on the bus, the boy who hasn’t left the bus because he doesn’t seem to know that he’s arrived at his home, both is and somehow is not her son Charlie. He looks mostly right, sounds mostly right, but he is different; rather than being a severely asthmatic weakling, this boy seems more robust, even more mature. No one — not the bus driver, the sheriff, the neighbors, the husband, the older daughter — can tell if this is really Charlie. Each falls back upon the strange, perhaps inexplicable observation, “You’re his mother; you should know.” Continue reading “The Boy on the Bus”

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Death is a Lonely Business

By Ray Bradbury
ISBN 0-395-54702-0

Publication Year: 1985

Tags: Detective, Writer, Golden Gumshoes

Rating: ★★★★★

The year is 1949. A young writer of pulp fiction struggles with the feeling of death that surrounds him as the city tears down the great amusement pier in Venice, California. There will be no more rides, no more side shows, no more games of chance, no more fortune tellers and snake-oil salesmen. The huge movie marquee, where great names like Fairbanks, Chaney, Garbo, and Hepburn once lent their grace, reads only GOODBYE.

Death hits closer to home as well. Four bodies turn up – one trapped in a lion cage that lies submerged in the Venice canal, one in a cheerful flophouse, and two others in houses across town. The deaths could be natural, or they could be accidents, but our unnamed writer (Bradbury himself, at age 29, as he would have been in that year?) doesn’t think so. It just feels wrong. And although he claims to believe only in facts, Detective Elmo Crumley has to admit that he, too, doesn’t trust the appearances of innocence that surround the deaths. Unfortunately, it will take clues and facts to solve the crime – if there is one – and no one seems to have a motive of any kind. Continue reading “Death is a Lonely Business”