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Content by A. Ross
Reviewer Rank: 46
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Reviews Written by
A. Ross (Washington, DC)
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Another Fine Entry in a Great Series, 20 Nov 2009
The simplest thing to say about this book is that if you liked the first four entries in this 1970s-set series about elderly Laotian National Coroner Dr. Siri Paiboun, then you'll like this fifth one. And if you haven't read those (Coroner's Lunch, Thirty-Three Teeth, Disco for the Departed, Anarchy and Old Dogs), go back and read them first, as this book assumes reader knowledge of events from those ones.
The story here involves Dr. Siri's road trip to a useless conference, which leads to his spending some time in a Hmong village. It seems they've got some spiritual troubles and only the legendary shaman that uses Dr. Siri's body as a vessel can lift the titular curse. This allows the author to paint a warm portrait of the Hmong people and give a little lesson in how poorly they've been treated throughout history. Meanwhile, back in Vientiane, Dr. Siri's able assistants narrowly escape being killed by an Royalist adversary from a previous book. Rather than leave it up to the inept police to track down this nefarious villain, Nurse Duti and the gang do some detecting of their own.
As with the other books in the series, the story combines political satire, bawdy humor, cultural history, two whodunnits, and warm affection for the Laotian people in a cozy little mystery. It's full of little touches that are beautifully integrated into the story -- such as the government's replacement of the perfectly functional colonial era refrigeration system for the morgue with a behemoth Soviet-made one whose malfunction inadvertently helps save the lives of Nurse Duti, et al. If you like mysteries with a heart or have an interest in Laos, the series is definitely worth checking out -- I hope it continues well into the future.
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A Nice Trip Back to 1960s Bond, 20 Nov 2009
A few years ago I read about half of the original Ian Fleming 007 series and generally found them quite enjoyable and different than I had expected based on the film franchise. Don't get me wrong, they're not great literature, but they are ripping yarns that reflect their era and are much darker than one might expect. Since Fleming's death, there have been several writers authorized to continue the franchise (including Kingsley Amis!), but I'd never been that interested in trying any of them. However, the involvement of a non-thriller writer like Sebastian Faulks -- whom I've never read, but have heard many good things about -- intrigued me enough to pick this up and give it a whirl.
The first good thing is that the book follows the chronology just of the original Fleming books, taking place after the last one, in 1967. It opens with Bond on extended physical and mental convalescent leave, seriously considering whether or not he's had enough of working in the field and is ready to settle down to the quiet life of a desk agent. M calls him away from this break to help out a new 004, by "talking to" a curious businessman named Dr. Gorner, a Lithuanian who just might be the world's foremost heroin dealer. (This set up is a little odd, unless "talk to" is supposed to be a dry euphemism for "kill" or something like that.) In any event, soon enough, Bond is off to Paris to sniff around Gorner, and the stage is set for a classic Bond adventure. And, it has to be said, that it all feels very much like a blend of the original books and some of the better elements from the films:
* The villain is diabolical and deformed (he has a monkey paw for one hand!)
* Bond and he go mano-a-mano in their first meeting (on a tennis court)
* The story takes Bond to an exotic locale (Iran),
* The villain has crazy military vehicle called an Ekranoplan (which is entirely real and historically accurate, right down to its nickname)
* Bond has a suave, likable local ally on the ground a la Darko Karim.
* Felix Leiter and Rene Mathis both have supporting roles
* There are two beautiful women (twins!)
* The window-dressing is all in place (plenty of descriptions of food, booze, cigarettes, clothing, etc.)
* There's plenty of action, including gunplay, hand-to-hand combat, a car chase, and an exciting action sequence in an airplane.
Indeed, the book struck me as a rather effective imitation of the classic Bond novels from its structure down to the various details. I know some Bond fanatics feel like the Fleming style isn't there, but quite honestly, I don't recall Fleming having much style to begin with. There are some minor missteps in terms of continuity with the Fleming books (likely only to bother the trainspotters among the readership), a few bad Roger Mooreish puns creep in, and rather disappointingly, the villain delivers an extended monologue to the captured Bond explaining his master plan in enough detail to give Bond all the info he needs to thwart it. There's also a "big twist" at the very end concerning the identity of one of the major characters which is unlikely to surprise most readers (even Bond admits that he had worked it out early on).
One final aspect of the book that's worth mentioning is how Faulks, as Fleming did in many of the original books, takes an issue contemporary to the time (the rise of heroin) and uses it as the catalyst for the adventure. And although the villain's plan is as insane and grandiose as any Bond villain's, he weaves in quite a number of historical British colonial atrocities as justification (Opium War, Potato Famine, the Malay and Mau Mau rebellions), which Bond has no response to. All in all, a completely satisfying return to the 1960s, when Bond had to save the world without the help of computers and cell phones!
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Pre-Depression Black D.C., 19 Nov 2009
The first thing to know about this book is that it basically has no plot -- it's more a series of loosely connected vignettes that, when taken as whole, combine to give the reader an impression of African-American life in the 1920s in a particular neighborhood in Washington, D.C. So, while the book does open with a beautifully rendered chapter in which the 12-year-old protagonist's sister drowns in the Potomac river, that tragedy doesn't lead to the kind of linear story with clear resolution many readers might expect.
In that respect, the book is a bit of a failure -- but to my mind, it more than makes up for it by presenting a compelling roster of leading and supporting characters who bring alive the social history of pre-Depression black Washington. To be sure, the little girl's death hovers over the entire book, and the author does a great job of showing how the community rallies to support the family, but it's really about the community, not the tragedy itself. We get little peeks into everyday life, rituals, habits, social mores, and so forth. And of course, racism and it's economic and social consequences are woven throughout the book in a seamless manner.
Ultimately, it's a very personal book -- the author lost her child to an accident, and it's hard not to read the book as part of her grieving process. Also, her parents grew up in Georgetown during the era the book describes, and the book began as a story based on their reminisces, so in that sense it honors their history. It's definitely a book worth checking out if you have a connection to Washington, D.C. or just want a good fictional glimpse of African-American social history -- just don't expect much of a story.
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Serviceable Thriller, 19 Nov 2009
"Workmanlike" is probably the adjective that best fits this thriller, which hopscotches back and forth between the present and WWII. The story is appropriately convoluted for the genre, involving a naive anti-Nazi resistance group in Berlin, the impending collapse of the Third Reich, OSS activities in Switzerland, and how all these connect to the present. And rest assured they do -- as Dr. Nat Turnbull, a semi-distinguished professor of modern German history at a small liberal-arts college, discovers when he is hired to track down some old OSS files hidden by his mentor at the college.
Turnbull (like pretty much every character in the book) is a stock figure, he's the anonymous academic who gets sucked into a great intrigue with national security implications (paging Dr. Jones, Dr. Indiana Jones to the front please, your country needs you to fight Nazis). It seems these old missing files have something to do with present-day nuclear weapons proliferation, and since the FBI apparently doesn't have the expertise to find them, they enlist Dr. Turnbull. This is a pretty flimsy way of setting up a kind of "everyman" protagonist, and it only continues to be unconvincing as the story moves along. But you just have to accept the premise and move on if you want to have any hope of enjoying the book.
What follows is a treasure hunt that takes Dr. Turnbull all over the place, from Baltimore to the National Archives outside Washington, to Florida, Switzerland, various parts of Germany, and so on. Tagging along with him for parts of this quest is his unreliable ally, a mysterious German academic with her own agenda. Meanwhile, alternating chapters take us back to wartime Germany and the relationships among members of a feeble resistance cell. The historically-set material is much more interesting than the contemporary chapters, as we get a real sense of how certain parts of German society were trying to position themselves for the inevitable Allied victory. Alas, the characters of both eras are types rather than people, and there is plenty of quite creaky dialogue throughout.
The story is full of twists and turns and deceit, all of which work perfectly well but somehow feel rather formulaic. You could spend your whole life reading nothing but thrillers revolving around Nazi Germany, so it takes a lot to stand out. (For example, this book has little of the detail that bring Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy to vivid life, nor do they have the striking atmosphere of Alan Furst's excellent spy novels). The book tries gamely to provide that big twist at the end that readers expect from thrillers, unfortunately I saw it coming a mile away (in the first third of the book I had a pretty good idea that an assumption had been made regarding a certain character that would be revealed at the very end to be untrue, and I was right). In the end, I can't say I'm glad I read it, but neither can I say it's not worth reading. It's a serviceable thriller that passes the time pleasantly enough, as long you keep your expectations lowish.
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Sounds Good -- But Is It Really This Simple?, 13 Nov 2009
I'm not usually a reader of business or management books, but since I was just promoted to be the branch manager of a public library, I figured I should start dipping into some of the more accessible literature out there. This "fable" (ie. business lesson dressed up in fiction) by a well-known management "guru" (for lack of a better term), seeks to address the fact that most people aren't happy with their jobs. The idea is that even those with seemingly perfect jobs (high-paid athletes, actors, models, etc.) can often express just as much job dissatisfaction as the lowliest burger-flipper. The author seeks to get to the bottom of this workplace problem by outlining the causes and possible solution in the breezy fictionalized story of a retired manufacturing CEO who decides to get involved in running a small Italian restaurant.
This likeable CEO-turned-restaurant-manager refines his beliefs of employee job satisfaction into three principles:
Anonymity: Employees who aren't known and individually appreciated by their managers will not be fulfilled in their jobs.
Irrelevance: Employees who don't know how their work impacts the lives of others will not be fulfilled in their jobs.
Immeasurement: Employees who can't assess their own level of performance and success will not be fulfilled in their jobs.
He then tests these principles at the restaurant, trying to improve the highly ineffective staff (and yes, not everyone will be left standing at the end). It's all handled at a pretty basic, simplistic level, but it's hard not to feel like he's on to something. (As an aside, an interesting novel to read in conjunction with this is Stuart O'Nan's excellent "Last Night at the Lobster", which is about the mostly disaffected staff at a Red Lobster franchise.) Lest anyone be skeptical of the theory's application to the world of "real" business, following his success with the restaurant, the semi-retiree is headhunted to be the turnaround CEO of a sporting goods retail chain. There, after assessing the situation on the ground, he rolls out his job satisfaction solution and demonstrates the kind bottom-line results that make true believers out of everyone.
In the end, I'm torn. While I am a big believer in some of the importance of some of the "touchy-feely" aspects of management, and appreciate this high-profile attempt to delve into one of those areas, I'm also suspicious of any simple fix. I can actually see how I could apply this to my new staff and try it out, but at the same time, I instinctively feel that the issue of job dissatisfaction is much more complex than this fable makes it out to be. Still, there's something here to chew on, and the presentation is reasonably well done, so I guess if this is a topic that interests you, check it out.
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Beat the Reaper
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by Josh Bazell
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: £9.06 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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Sopranos + House/Scrubs + Pulp Fiction, 13 Nov 2009
Whew! If you want a fast-paced page-turner with plenty of blood and guts, well, this is the book for you. Others have described it as The Sopranos meets House/Scrubs meets Quentin Tarantino, and I have to admit that's pretty good shorthand for it. The story follows a day in the life of an intern at a busy Manhattan hospital -- only this intern just happens to be a former hit man for a mafia lawyer, and is now in witness protection. Unfortunately, he runs into a former "associate" who is in for an operation, and that goombah arranges for his new identity to be blown if he doesn't make it out of surgery alive.
As with all stories of this kind, complications ensue, and the action is fast and furious as the pill-popping doc tries to dodge the goons sent to round him up. Meanwhile, the story is intercut with plenty of flashbacks showing how the protagonist ended up in his current predicament. Every scene is shot through with authorial confidence, as the first-person narration takes you on all kinds of side trips, from a gun show to buy handguns and silencers, to Auschwitz to see where his grandparents survived, to the shark tank of an aquarium and more. The author is apparently a doctor, which gives all the hospital scenes behind-the-scenes veracity that goes a long way toward making this book stand out from the crowd.
The tone of the story is an effective mix of black humor and dark violence, heavily seasoned with graphic violence, a little graphic sex, and loads of profanity. And no, it's not meant to be realistic -- a point that detractors of the book seem to have entirely missed. Similarly, the protagonist/narrator is not meant to be particularly likable, just compelling, and throughout the course of his harrowing, hectic shift he certainly is. Yes, the witness protection plotline is a well-worn one, but this is a very entertaining example for those looking for something fast and furious, tinged with humor and odd insights.
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Blazing Combat
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by Archie Goodwin
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: £13.79 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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Graphic Illustrations That "War is Hell", 6 Nov 2009
As someone who's not a comics buff, I'd never heard of Blazing Combat until I stumbled across this book's arresting pop art cover in the library. Since I like graphic storytelling and military history, I picked it up and took it home. If you're familiar with the four original comic books (or rather "magazines," as this title was published) which appeared over the course of ten months in 1965-66, then you know what to expect. If you never saw those, then you're in for a treat, 'cause here are unsanitized stories of war from throughout (mostly) American history. In the interviews with the original writer and publisher that appear at the end of the book, they both cite Harvey Kurtzman's 1950s war comics as the primary influence on Blazing Combat. The concept was not to be anti-war (as many have accused the stories of being), but to represent the reality of war -- mainly illustrating the adage that "war is hell."
The 29 stories do so, ranging from the American Revolution through the Vietnam War that was just starting to heat up during the time the stories were originally published. Each tends to focus on a lone soldier and his own struggle to survive and cling to humanity, or in some cases, turn away from it. Some do tell "heroic" or inspiring stories, such as the Battle of Britain, or the amazing career of World War I Canadian ace Billy Bishop (72 confirmed kills!), but others show the darker side of war, such as a WWII G.I. prying gold fillings from dead bodies in the Pacific theater, or the terror of fresh troops. Almost every story is told from a soldier's point of view, a notable exception being "Landscape" -- a Vietnam story that shows the war's effect on a peasant farmer, in a remarkably prescient critique of all the problems of that benighted war.
All the stories were authored or coauthored by longtime comics writer-editor Archie Goodwin, and as such, have a fairly uniform voice. At times, they sometimes drift into cliche, such as the ones whose closing panels are a dead soldier's open wallet photo of wife and child, or a dead GI's valentine, and other such maudlin touches. There's also the regrettable abundance of explanation points, which appear at the end of practically every other sentence. But at roughly 5-8 pages each, they have a consistent rhythm and are generally solid enough little dramas. The one outlier is "Survival," a stellar Twilight Zoneish tale of a man trying to stay alive in a frozen post-nuclear war landscape.
As with pretty much every book I've seen published by Fantagraphics, the production is outstanding. High-quality matte paper retains the detail of the artwork (which was reproduced from the original films), beautiful printing, binding, etc. The range of artists ensure that there's a nice mix of styles throughout, which keeps the book from getting visually stale. Almost all are quite good, and special mention has to be made of Russ Heath's work in "Give and Take," which stands heads and shoulders above the rest. The only quibble I have is that the four covers to the original comics appear only as a small spread at the back of the book. These were amazing paintings by Frank Frazetta, and it's a real shame they couldn't have gotten their own full page each. On the whole though, the book is an amazing value, and makes a great gift for anyone interested in American military history or the history of comics.
NOTE: For those who are interested, I tallied the settings: American Revolution 1, American Civil War 3, Spanish-American War 1, World War I 4, World War II 10, Korea 3, Vietnam 4, Misc. 3 (US Cavalry vs. Indians, Post-Apocalypse, Thermopyle). Similarly, almost all the stories are of ground combat, with a handful of aerial combat tales and a single submarine story.
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Sex Dungeon For Sale!
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by Patrick Wensink
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: £6.66 |
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| Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks |
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Surreal Skits, 6 Nov 2009
Each of the eleven short stories in this small collection are built on a lone imaginative premise, upon which the story succeeds or fails. They can be breezed through in about an hour, and while I found myself chuckling at almost every piece, they're so thin that they generally fail to leave much of an impression. They remind me of the micro-fiction and humor web sites that friends periodically send me links to. Momentarily amusing and diverting, with pleasantly skewed sensibilities, but not developed enough to really tell if the author's got the ability to pull off a fully realized short story, as opposed to an amusing skit.
For example, the title story is basically a real estate agent's narration of a home tour in which the seller has installed a sex romper room in the basement. The humor is all in the premise, and the execution of it doesn't move beyond the obvious. Similarly, "Chicken Soup for the Kidnapper's Soul" is the title and all you really need to know about a parody of the saccharine bestselling "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series. "The Many Lives of James Brown's Capes" riffs on what happened to the dead soul singer's personal effects that were sold at auction. You get the idea.
Which is not to say that some of the pieces aren't a little more biting than others. For example, "Wash, Rinse, Repeat" is a decent little satire involving washing machines with a "Kill" setting, and "Donor 322" uses email exchanges to throw a dark light on sperm donation. My favorite of all is "My Son Thinks He's French," which takes the titular concept for a spin, only to execute a twisted and hilarious punchline in the last paragraph.
Ultimately, if you have a taste for the somewhat twisted, dark, or surreal, you might want to check this out. For me, it's the kind of writing that if a friend showed me, I'd be impressed and encouraging -- but it's not quite ready for prime-time. Some good stuff here, and hopefully it's just the first taste of bigger things to come from the author.
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The Tourist
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by Olen Steinhauer
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: £12.32 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Your Typical Modern Spy Thriller, 5 Nov 2009
I'm not sure why I still bother to read any modern espionage books -- they never seem rise above decent beach reads (like Dead Spy Running), and all-to-often wind up being miserable duds (like A Most Wanted Man). This falls somewhere in my ambivalent middle, a serviceable, but ultimately disposable tale of yet another weary warrior in the game of shadows. Here, the spy is Milo, whom we meet in an opening section set in pre-9/11 Europe, where he works as a "tourist" (ie. black ops agent) for the CIA. Faced with the meaningless life of the post-Cold War, pre-War on Terror spy, he flirts with suicide. It's a bit of a shock then, when the next section opens some six years later with him as a desk jockey in the CIA's Manhattan office, where he collates reports from current "tourists" into intelligence. More impressively, he seems to have forged a new life as husband and father, with the obligatory Park Slope home.
The complicated plot defies summary, but involves a legendary hit man Milo has been tracking for years, bureaucratic battles between the CIA and Homeland Security, a dead agent or two in Europe, missing millions, Chinese interest in African oil, a Russian pedophile, another apparently benevolent Russian, a vacation to Disneyland, Milo's dead revolutionary mother, plenty of double-crossing, and a possible mole at the CIA. Steinhauer does a reasonably good job of keeping all these balls in the air, although the story slips inexorably toward the rather tired "wanted by his own people" plot. And on it slogs through the familiar spy tropes: Whom can Milo trust? Whose identities are real, and whose are false? Who's behind it all and why?
To the author's credit, he doesn't dumb down the material, and relies on the reader's ability to keep track of the rival interests of a decent-sized cast, many of whom are sporting multiple aliases. Alas, the most crucial secret of all, the one secret that is meant to be the big reveal at the end, is going to be glaringly obvious to most readers who are paying attention. There's a moment in the first third of the book that should trigger a question in the reader along the lines of "Wait a minute, how did he learn to ____?" The only answer that makes sense is the one that's revealed at the end, so for me, the payoff falls kind of flat -- especially if we're meant to believe that no one else in the story ever stopped to ask that question.
So, it's not a bad book, but neither is it a good one. There are some nice action set pieces, as well as some nice dialogue scenes, and the locations are all well described. However, none of the characters move beyond being types, and the entire enterprise lacks life. I've heard this may be turned into a film at some point, and I suspect that if done right, this might be one of those rare cases where the film is better than the book, as the right directors and actors might be able to inject a note of originality into this lukewarm tale.
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A Most Wanted Man
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by John le Carré
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: £3.99 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Erratic and Enigmatic, 4 Nov 2009
I have to admit I haven't read any Le Carré in years -- and after this book, I doubt I will for years to come. In simple terms, it's the story of a half-Chechen illegal immigrant in Hamburg who is trying to lay claim on the considerable loot his dead father (a Russian military officer) salted away in a private bank. He manages to find legal aid in the form of a humorless, well-connected female lawyer, who acts as his intermediary in discussions with the 60ish English banker who controls this "dirty" account. At the same time, it tells a parallel story of competing German intelligence agencies seeking the Chechen as a possible terrorist, and the eventual involvement of British and American espionage agencies.
Actually, that description probably makes the book sound better than it is. The big flaw is that several of the key characters, especially the lawyer and the Chechen claimant, are both thinly drawn and really annoying. For the majority of the book, the Chechen is erratic and enigmatic, and I kept waiting for Le Carré to do a big reveal and let us in on what his true nature is -- alas, this never happens. That's kind of the problem with the whole book -- it builds very very slowly, almost teasing the reader with its deliberate pace and shadowy corners, only to climax in an incredibly weak ending.
Which is not to say the book is totally without bright spots. The banker character is reasonably sympathetic and compelling, as is the main German intelligence agent (both are assisted by coolly able women, who are fun supporting cast members in their own right). And despite the thinness of many characters, Le Carré still manages to do a nice job getting at the psychology of the post-9/11 intelligence community. One insight that's particularly striking is how quickly our principles can be dismantled by cynical and efficient state security apparatus. And the workings of that apparatus are fairly interesting to observe, in a procedural way. Unfortunately, since we never care about the characters, it's not that dramatically compelling when they are levered away from their principles.
The book's other major flaw -- the ending -- is difficult to discuss in a way that won't spoil the book. Some have complained about the abruptness of it -- but for me the jarring lack of narrative closure it imposes is actually a canny choice. The real problem is that while it's an ending that is true to the reality of some of the worst excesses (crimes even) perpetrated under the guise of national security in the post 9/11 era, it's also a gratuitous and unsophisticated one. You could argue that the contrast in tone between the body of the book and the ending is a deliberate one, but it all feels more rushed than anything else.
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