\\ MATT'S 2010 BOOK PAGE This is the page that answers the question, "Matt, have you read any good books lately?" I've been told that I don't really "review" books so much as make comments about them. I've listed here only "new" books I've read lately. ("New" to me is anything printed in 2009 or 2010. If you're remotely interested in what I might likc or might like, why not click on one of the following to see what I've praised and trashed in the past. |
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| Matt's rating system: GO! I liked the book a lot and recommend it to you without reservation. CAUTION I liked it, but your tastes may be different. STOP! I really didn't like this book at all. |
| The Spy by Clive Cussler is a great old-fashioned mystery. MQ (Mayhem Quotient, see sidebar at left) = 23 (Brooklyn Bridge gets torpedoed, vengeful children, evil millionaires, lots of hot women with guns, evildoers from Germany, drinking buddies in what will eventually become the FBI, yachts). In the early 1900's, America is far behind England and Germany in the race to build dreadnought battleships, but a cadre of brilliant young engineers is closing the gap in a hurry. Or at least they were before someone started killing them. Who's behind it all? Germany? Japan? England? All of the above? Someone else? You'll just have to read the book to find out, but relax, it won't take long. You'll keep turning the pages, and the time will pass quickly. (6/20/2010) Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris Each year in March, the swallows return to San Juan Capistrano and the buzzards come home to roost in Hinckley, Ohio. Likewise, the vampires of Renard Parish, Louisiana, return to the bookstores around the beginning of the beach reading season. This is the tenth (!) Sookie Stackhouse novel from Ms. Harris's never-idle pen, and given the success that the series has enjoyed from its wildly popular translation to HBO (as TrueBlood), I suspect that Sookie and her supporting cast of vampires, elves, werewolves, werepanthers, shapeshifters, maenads and attorneys will be with us for quite some time. As you might expect, the series has lost some of its freshness from the early years, but Ms. Harris writes Sookie in such a way that she never becomes off-putting or tedious. And that is a real accomplishment. It seems that none of the socially-challenged werewolves knows a shaman, so Sookie, a "Friend of the Pack", had to be recruited to determine wihch pack member killed another. Mayhem ensues. If you like this kind of stuff--and almost anything is okay in moderation--you'll enjoy catching up with Sookie and company. If not, you might prefer to watch on HBO. (6/15/2010) In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White I don't know if I've shared this with you or not, but now that we know: A) that Social Security will be dead soon; B) that my retirement portfolio retired without me back in 2000; and C) that moving back in with Mom is becoming increasingly less likely; Plan D for my retirement has become commiting a white collar crime and getting sent to federal prison. For that reason--plus the fact that the National Hansen's Disease Center in Carville, Louisiana, used to be on my regular bicycle trail back in the 80's, I was particularly interested in this book by an Ole Miss graduate who did something bad and got himself sent there back in the 90's when the leprosarium also served briefly as a federal penitentiary. I liked the book much more than I thought I would, and while Mr. White does not hold himself out as a paragon of virtue (It would have been tough to do even if he hadn't been sent there as an inmate), he is someone whom the reader can relate as he explores the lives of the patients at the Center who wold have been considered to be outcasts anwhere else in the world. Mr. White walks a fine line in this book, and he does an admirable job of bringing the reader along on his journey. (6/11/10) Light Boxes by Shane Jones represents somethign new in the world. In his acknowledgments, Mr. Jones gives credit to the online community and "independent literature." I assume that means that he wrote the book online without the aid of a publisher. Good for him, but the downside of independent publishing is that it is also "editor-free." Mr. Jones desperately needed someone to tell him that his story makes no sense. What's it about? February (the month) has come to life and oppressed an innocent town. The townspeople respond in the only rational way they can think of--and move underground. To go on would make you contemplate my sanity, so I'll stop here. (6/8//10) April might have been Confederate History Month in Virginia, but at Chateau d'Matt, we're celebrating French History Month in May. I've got a pile of books on the 18th and 19th centuries that it's going to take a month or more to slog through, and I'm as happy as un cochon en merde! Enlightened Pleasures by Thomas M. Kavanaugh Sorry to say that French History Month is off to a slow start. Mr. Kavanaugh is obviously a genius, but I'm not sure he's a very convincing genius. His book is about the evolution of the concept of pleasure (plasir) in 18th century. He plows a cultural field that includes the works of Rousseau and Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses). The concept he's trying to sell is something called Epicurean Stoicism, which to me sounds like the worst (or best) oxymoron since "Oklahoma City". Mr. Kavanaugh explains this dichotomy: If the terms Epicurean and Stoic were rarely combined during the eighteenth century, the, it was not because they were incompatible but because Cartesian physics had driven a wedge between them. Damn you, Cartesian Physics! Anyway, Mr. Kavanaugh gives it his best shot. if you want to know more about Epicurean Stoicism (and I don't think it will be around for long), you'll read the book. If you don't, you won't. (5/7/10) Revolutionary Commerce by Paul Cheney tackles what could have been a very interesting topic, namely economics in pre-revolutionary France. Woulda , coulda, shoulda. Unfortunately, Mr. Cheney puts the dismal in the dismal science with a plodding look at his subject. Essentially, he says that France should have worked to become more like England and Holland and less like Spain and Portugal. I can't argue with either his facts or his logic. I can only complain about his ability to interest me in his topic. Unless you are a economics buff and are used to reading stuff like this, I can't really recommend it to you. (5/10/10) Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution by Caroline Moorehead Like mana from heaven, this book showed up un announced and unbidden in a Royal Mail envelope from a publisher in London. I'm sure it's available here--or else, it would have made no sense to send me a copy. Regardless, I was happy to get it. Lucie Dillon, Marquise de la Tour du Pin (it translates to "tower of the pine") was the child of second cousins in the Dillon family of Roscommon and the wife of Frederic, who was a diplomat in service in both the ancien regime and under Napoleon. She might have been a footnote to history had she not taken up her pen and written her own memoirs of the era. Those memoirs, according to the author, have not been out of print since they were published in the early 1800's. So even though Mme de la Tour du Pin seems perfectly able to speak for herself, she now has a wonderful autobiography to fill in the parts of her life that she herself might have haved blushed to speak of. Ms. Moorehead is outstanding writer, and she tells the story of Lucie and her age in a most compelling and readable manner. If you have any interest in the Revolution and its aftermath and would like to know how it specifically impacted the lives of those who fled from it and/or lived through it, I recommend Ms. Moorehead's excellent book to you. (5/17/10) The Unseen Terror: The French Revolution in the Provinces by Richard Ballard The subtitle is misleading; it should have read "The French Revolution in the Province". He only examines one province, Charente Inferieure, one of 83 new departments established during the revoluntion. It had previously been part of Saintonge, and in a self-esteem preserving move, was changed to Charente Maritime in 1941. It lies in southwestern France, and its major cities are Rochefort and La Rochelle. Metternich once observed famously that when Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold. This was never more true than during the Terror and unattractive orders were issued to every corner of France in regard to who should be taken out and shot. Mr. Ballard demonstrates this ably in his book. He doggedly records how every step in the national descent played out in the province. But in the end, it's mostly a book about how people took orders and did what they were told. The real action, as they say, was in Paris. If you're a true student of the revolution, you'll want to check it out, but if you're a casual reader of history, you might find it somewhat claustrophobic. (5/20/10) Russia Against Napoleon by Dominic Lieven They marched from France into the heart of Old Russia, where they starved, froze to death on the side of the road--and were eaten. They were the horses of the Grand Armee, and they were the oil and gas that armies ran on in the 19th century. Mr. Lieven goes to great pains to point out that although Bonapatre could replace the soldiers wo died in the thousands, he might have lost Paris in 1814 because he could not replace the horses who died during the invasion of Russia. This is but one of the interesting points that Mr. Lieven makes in his wonderful book. A more salient point that preoccupies Mr. Lieven is that history--especially Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, and later the communist state under Stalin, did not serve the reputation of the Russian state--especially its military--particularly well during the Napoleonic wars. They had their reasons. Count Tolstoy probably thoguht his book was long enough as it was, and Stalin and his minions didn't want to praise the tsarist regime under Alexander, which had successfully conducted the longest military campaign in human history. Bravo, Mr. Lieven. You make it fun to read history. (5/28/10) Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris by Graham Robb Like most good things, my self -proclaimed Frinch History Month has come to an end. If Russia Against Napoleon was the climax of the month, then surely Mr. Robb's Parisians is the satisfying post-coital cigarette (not that I would know anything about either sex or cigarettes). Mr. Robb's earlier work, The Discovery of France, was much enthused over in these precincts, and his latest work is almost as good. Here, he uses the words of residents--famous and otherwise--in twenty or so vignettes to illuminate the times in which they lived. The first story he tells is of Napoleon's adventures among the prostitutes and other rapscallions of the Palais Royale before the fall of the ancien regime. The next to last is of three young boys whose deaths in a power plant precipitated the banlieu riots of 2005. Mr. Robb is a wonderful storyteller, and his enthusiams for his topics are evident in his work. Even the story of the banlieu riots ends with the hope that in another fifty years, the alienated people of the housing projects on the periphery of Paris will consider themselves to be as Parisian as anyone else. In his introduction, Mr. Robb says that his book "was written for the pleasure of thinking about Paris..." It should also be read that way. (6/3/10) Infamous by Ace Atkins As it turns out, I was wrong to have been worried. When Oxford's favorite crime writer's third historical novel, The Devil's Garden, didn't measure up (in my opinion, anyway) to his first two, I feared that we might have been witnessing the beginning a decline of sorts. Now I'm thinking that California just isn't his milieu, because his fourth such work, Infamous, is terrific. With a Mayhem Quotient (MQ) of 12 (1 vengeful child, 1 evil millionaire, lots of sex, 1hot woman with a gun, lots of drinking buddies from law enforcement, 1 private airplane--see saidebar at left), It's the story of a poor girl named Kathryn from Saltillo, Mississippi, who grows up with big dreams of jewels, furs, money and cars--and all she had to do to get them was marry George "Machine Gun" Kelly. While Mr. Kelly may get most of the attention from readers and revewers, it's pretty clear that in addition to great men having great women (and surprised mothers-in-law) behind them, the same is also true of gangsters. Infamous takes place during the last 56 days of freedom in Machine Gun's life in July -September,1933, when he and Kathryn kidnapped an Oklahoma City oilman and went on the run to such places as Memphis, the beach in Biloxi and the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago. The book is written in the rollicking style we've come to expect from Mr. Atkins, and I'm delighted to say that once again, I can't wait to read what he comes up with next (5/3/10) Confederate Reckoning by Stephanier McCurry Earlier this month, the Democrats were giving grief to the governor of Virginia for declaring April to be Confederate History Month in his state. I presume that their aim was to score political points off the notion that only the reddest of necks wold waste one's time reading about The Glorious Cause. Well, the joke's on them. Ms. McCurry has written what can only becalled a feminist history about Confederate States of America, which she calls "an explicitly proslavery and antidemocratic nation-state" dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal. Ms. McCurry actually performs a valuable service in this book by stepping away from the battles and rhetoric. She speaks directly to the roles played by women during the life of the Confederacy. And while she sounds very much like the women's studies professor that she is. ("The gender of the people, unlike the race, was communicated largely by thoughtlessness and indirection and often simply through the saturation of male pronouns.") But from time to time, she rises above the pronouns makes valid points. For example, governors of the more populist Confederate states (like Mississippi) promised to "protect" the womenfolk of the men who were off fighting the battles. For the first time, women formed as a political group to demand that those promises be honored. Ms. McCurry has written a very provocative book about women in the Civil War. If you think you learned all you need to know on that subject from Gone With the Wind, you might not like this book very much. (4/27/10) The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo (Mayhem Quotient (MQ) is 6 (Vengeful Child; Sex with Strangers; Nazis; drinking buddies from the CIA--or in this case, the Norwegian equivalent. See sidebar for explanation.) I don't recall ever reading a Norwegian crime novel before, but I kind of liked this one. The names and places were unpronouncable to my Southern tongue, but the story of an Oslo cop who's about to be bounced off the force for ne-er-do-well-ism, was intriguing to me. He can't technically leave the force until his supervisor gets back from his three-week vacation (This is how you know you're in Europe), so he has time to solve one last serial killer case. And he does, but not before all sorts of red herring leap from the fjords. (4/25/10) Treat Me Like a Customer by Louis Upkins Jr. I am wholly unqualifed to offer an opinion on this book. It's a self-help book on how to have better relationships with your wife and kids. This is a concept so foreign to me that it might as well be about how to disassemble a computer that's trying to run your life. (2001 was on tv the other night.) Generally speaking, he says you should treat your wife like Bill Gates. Makes sense to me. (4/23/10) Hand of Fate by Lis Wiehl Ms. Wiehl is one of the blondes on the Fox News Channel, and after reading her second "Triple Threat Novel," I'm thinking that I want to her to stick to her day job. The Triple Threat Club is composed of three gifted and beautiful women in Portland, Oregon, who went to high school together and have peripheral interests in crime and chocolate. One is a crime reporter on televion; one is an assistant district attorney; and the third is an FBI agent. They're sort of a chocoholic Mod Squad--one black, one white, one blonde. While investigating the murder of a local radio talk show host, one has a miscarriage, one is attacked by a man who'd raperd her fifteen years earlier, and the third develops an addiction to sleeping medications. It's a not a long book, but it's too busy by half. The Mayhem Quotient (see sidebar), or MQ is 4: No national landmarks are attacked, but a beloved talk show host is; 1 vengeful parent; 1 instance of sex with strangers; 1 hot woman with a gun; no evil millionaires or Presidents, but there is a slimy Congressman.) 4/19/10 I Thought You Were Dead by Pete Nelson Another great title for a book that sounds like it ought to be about fundraising (see below), but it's not. Paul Gustavson, a thirty-something New Englander who writes things like Windows 95 for Morons and Nature for Morons, has a rich interior life. He talks to his dog, and the dog talks back. As it turns out, Stella, a Lab-Alsatian mix, is challenged in her comprenension of time. When Paul leaves the house for more than a couple of hours, she assumes he's dead. Hence the title. Paul also has other problems. His wife has left him; his father back in Minnesota has had a stoke; and he'san out-of-shape alcoholic. The book folows him as he begins to put his life back together. Nothing too dramatic happens during his journey, but it's a companionable story of people trying to make the best of what they've got. (4/15//10). The Ask by Sam Lipsyte Mr. Lipsyte has apparently had a career in institutional advancement because his first book was a novel written in the form of letters to a university alumni magazine. His new work of fiction has to do with university fundraisers--specifically one down-on-his luck washout who is a development officer at a mythical New York City school of liberal arts. And he's washed out of everything--his job, his home, his marriage, and his relationships with key players from his past. Mr. Lipsyte has the lingo down pat, but his description of the institutional mileu is considerably more given to lowlifes than anything I've come across in almost thirty years in the field. There's a great book that could be written about university fundraising--but this isn't it, and I didn't find it to be particularly enjoyable on any level. (4/13/10) The Infinities by John Banville (Mayhem Quotient: 1.5. One vengeful child and one instance of sex between people who didn't know each other yesterday--although the man is disguised as the woman's husband. As Denise Richards says, it's complicated.) I was this close to punting on this book and not even mentioning that I had read it. I really disliked it about as much as anything I've read lately--maybe ever--and yet the reason I wanted to punt wasn't that the book is awful--actually, I'm not absolutely sure that I could tell you if it is or not. The story is soooo not my thing that I just couldn't connect to it in any way. Maybe you're different. The story unfolds at the English country home of a mathematician who lingers in a coma upstairs as his family and some Greek gods gather to await his passing. Yes, I said "and some Greek gods. " Zeus is there. Hermes. Pan. Zeus is there to diddle the dying man's daughter-in-law. Hermes is there to cover Zeus's tracks. Pan just shows up to be a pain in the butt. As you might suspect, we're in the realm of the Big Allegory. (The dying man's name is Adam Godley, for cripes sake, and the diddled daughter-in-law's name is Helen.) There are also lots of medium-size allegories and a plethora of small ones. It really got to be kind of irritating after a while. But like I said--maybe you're different. (4/8/10) The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel I'm sure I'm wrong, but I'd almost guess that Mr. Edsel's publisher told him, "Bob, you're book has got to be 426 pages. No more. Make it work." While 426 pages is a respectable length for a book, is it enough to hold "the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History?" I think not. Mr. Edsel tells us plenty about the dozen or so Americans who were charged with finding artworks stolen by the Nazis in WWII and returning it to its rightful owners, but he tells us precious little about the art itself--and even less about the Nazis who stole it, unless you're willing to believe that Goering stole all of it himself. The book is fine--as far as it goes. I just wish it had gone further. (4/4/10) The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession by David Grann You've got to admit that it's a great title. Regretably, neither Lucifer nor Mr. Holmes appear in this book, which is a collection of essays that Mr. Grann has written for The New Yorker, Atlantic and other magazines. "The Devil" in the title is a Haitian policitian who earned that nickname by allegedly ordering the deaths of hundreds of his countrymen. Mr. Holmes appears as the obsession of a mystery writer who himself is found dead under unusual circumstances. Mr. Grann--to his credit--is eclectic in his choice of subjects, writing about everything from a thirty-something year-old Frenchman who has survived for years by pretending to be troubled teenage boys to a murder in Poland that was unsolved for years until a fresh pair of eyes looked at the case. My favorite essay is about a marine biologist in New Zealand and his obsession with capturing a live baby giant squid. Mr. Grann's subjects are all over teh place, but his writing is uniformly good and compelling. (3/28/2010) Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation by Charles Glass OK. I promise that I'll lay off the books about Paris for awhile. Even I'm starting to get a little weary of them. But I did save the best for last. Lots of people have written about the Nazi occupation of the French capital from 1940 until a couple of months after D-Day, but this is the first book I've seen that focuses on the remarkable Americans who were living in the city at the time and chose not to leave when the jackboots started pounding down the Champs d'Elysses. There are names you know like Josephine Baker and Sylvia Beach, but there are some you might not have heard--most prominently the remarkable General Adelbert de Chambrun and his wife, the Countess Clara de Chambrun. At the beginning of the Occupation, Adelbert was a 70-year-old American director of the American Hospital of Paris and a direct descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette. He worked tirelessly (and mostly thanklessly) to keep the hospital open until Liberation. His wife, Clara, a sister of Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati who famously married Alice Roosevelt, did the same for the American Library of Paris. After the war, their efforts were downplayed in order to appease Charles deGaulle who disapproved of Adelbert and Clara's son's marriage to the daughter of Vichy Foreign Minister Pierre Laval. It's a great book and a compelling read. Mr. Glass has given us a book worthy of its subjects. (3/22/2010) The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova Gentlemen: The Mayhem Quotient (MQ--see sidebar at left) is a woeful 1. Some guy with a knife tries to slash a painting at the National Gallery. The MQ might be 2, if you count a painting of a couple of guys with a swan as a mythical or legendary treasure. There's nothing for you here. I promise you'll like the next paragraph better. Ladies: Jackpot! There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of women kvetching about bad boys who done them wrong. Even though there's not a credible male character in the whole book, you'll love it. This 561-page book has 105 chapters. I think that if you just read the chapters that have "Marlow" at the top--about half the total, you'd have a fairly entertaining book, and you wouldn't miss anything interesting. (3/18/10) The Paris Vendetta by Steve Berry I've stuck with Mr. Berry for his first 800 identical books, but I have to say that his formula is starting to wear a little thin--SO THIN in fact, that he has inspired me to develop a Mayhem Quotient for grading all mysteries. (See Sidebar at left.) As you can see, the MQ for this book is 20, which is about average. The system may not be perfect, so let's see how it pans out in the months ahead. In the meantime, Mr. Berry, now that you've made a couple gazillion dollars perfecting this formula, why don't you give yourself a break and try something else. It might do you good. (3/8/10) For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus by Frederick Brown Remember the movies in which an author and his or her editor would sit around some swanky restaurant in midtown Manhattan talking about the author's next book over martinis and who knows what else? I imagine a similar conversation over this book in which the author says he wants to write about book about the Dreyfus affair, and the editor says, "Dahling, the Dreyfus Affair has been done to death. You need to make the focus a little broader. Throw int the expositions and the Impressionists." And so this book was born. I'm not going to parse the book because with the exception of the Dreyfus Affair, everything in this book is done better in other books further down this page. I will, however, parse the title. First, where the author mentions "culture" wars, he's really talking about religion. With the exception of the aforementioned expositions and Impressionists, almost everything he details has to do with the religious wars in France prior to the ultimate separation of church an state in 1915. Second, like (seemingly) every other historian who's ever written about the country, when the author talks about France, he's really talking about Paris. To a greater extent than any other country I can think of, the capital of the country IS the country. Lots of books have also been written about this phenomenon as well, so I won't belabor it here. I just thought it was worth mentioning. (3/7/10) Safe from the Neighbors by Steve Yarbrough A year or two ago, I read Mr. Yarbrough's The End of California and was much impressed with his ability to recreate Mississippi on the page. Now, Mr. Yarbrough has done something even more remarkable--he's made me reassess key events from my own life. When James Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss on October 1, 1962, I was at home, watching the event on television and hoping my dad, a traveling salesman who always went to Oxford on Mondays, would get home safely. He got in late that night, and it never occurred to me to question why. He said he couldn't get out of town past the troops coming the other way, so I'd like to think that found some place to sit, have a beer and watch the scene unfold. Forty-five years later, I wouldn't be absolutely shocked to hear that he'd been up to no good that night. But back to the book: Mr. Yabrough is a fierce writer, so I don't really know why he felt compelled to change the names to protect the litigious in the book. It's clear that he was writing about Indianola, Mississippi, and that when his characters left town to go out to eat at "Mann's Eating Place" in Greenville, they were really at Doe's. Why bother to change it? And with the exception of a key plot point in which the lead character's college-age daughter smells strange perfume in her house and automatically deduces that her heretofore chaste father was having an affair, the story is solid and the characters are compelling. I liked it a lot. (3/6/10) Mr. New Orleans: The Life of a Big Easy Underworld Legend by Frenchy Brouillette and Matthew Randazzo V A few paragraphs below, you'll see what I've had to say about the new biography of Edwin Edwards. How I wish that book could be as interesting and fun to read as this one. (You may find this hard to believe, but sometimes authors google themselves to read reviews of their works. In the event that Matthew Randazzo V is reading this, please, PLEASE, PLEASE consider an unauthorized biography of Edwin Edwards. You are the man for the job. But I digress.) Kent "Frenchie" Brouillette is now a tired, rundown ex-gangster, but to hear it from him, he was once young, beautiful (his words) and--well, an underworld legend in the French Quarter. I always like it when the author addresses the reader as "baby", and Mssrs. Brouillette and Randazzo do that excessively and more to bring you into Frenchie's world. In the first half of the book--and of Frenchie's life--he really gives you the dirt on people he knew from Carlos Marcello on down the crime food chain. It is as he says: if they were still alive, he wouldn't have written the book. Sadly, this revelation also tips you off that the second half--the part that deals with Frenchie's cousin, Edwin Edwards and other who still walk the earth--isn't going to be nearly so interesting. And it's not--which is too bad. But it's still a lot of fun as far as it goes. (3/2/10) The Given Day by Dennis Lehane The Yahoo (sorry I just can't get behind "Yahoo!") folks tell me that during any particular week, about 170 people visit this website. Assuming that no more than 160 of them are Nigerian bankers looking for allies to help them preserve the wealth of the country's ruling families, that means that about ten of you are actually looking for something here. I hope that something isn't whether or not you should read this book. Mr. Lehane has been all the rage recently. His books "Gone, Baby Gone", "Mystic River" and "Shutter Island" have been made into high profile movies. This is the first of his books that I've read, so please forgive me for wondering if: 1) he's starting to write books with an eye toward what kind of movie they will make; or 2) all of his books are written this way. At the end of the War to End All Wars, Calvin Coolidge (the ultimate villain of this book, although he is almost invisible) is the governor of Massachusetts as Boston descends into anarchist and/or communist mayhem, the Spanish Influenza, an impending police strike and the trade of Babe Ruth to the hated Yankees. Mr. Lehane tries to link these four plotlines into the story of an Irish family of policemen and their women--and the blacks who come North from Oklahoma to serve them. Danny, eldest child and aspiring cop, reads like a character made for an action flick starring Matt Damon or Ben Affleck's younger brother. He's a great character, but everyone else is definitely a supporting player. I didn't dislike the book, but you may want to wait for the movie. (3/1/10) The Crimes of Paris by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler Just to be clear, this book is not about either the Trojan War or...wait for it...sequestering a chihuahua in a Louis Vuitton handbag. (Sorry. Had to be done.) It is indeed about evildoers in the City of Light during the period of the Belle Epoque, roughly 1870-1914. The most famous crime of the era was theft of the Mona Lisa in 1912. This subject has been written about several times recently, most recently last year by R. A. Scotti in Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa, and most interestingly by Donald Sassoon in 2003's Becoming Mona Lisa. If you are inerested only in this part of the story, both of those books are superior to this one. The Hooblers weave tales of several of the high-profile crimes of the day and the (mostly) men who resolved to solve them. The story the Hooblers want to tell is indeed a rich one, and I wish they had put a little more flair into their work. (Curiously, although Sherlock Holmes is mentioned frequently in the book--mostly in terms of how Sir Arthur referenced French criminal investigators--not is word is mentioned about the Phantom of the Opera. Pity.) 2/25/2010 Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd has a great premise. Adam, a British climatologist recently returned to the UK from America, is wrongly accused in the death of a medical researcher he never really met. He goes "off the grid" in 21st century London to try to solve the mystery. Most of the pleasure to be had is in the descprition of how Adam actually goes off the grid. (Having all your belongings stolen helps.) He spends his first few weeks under some bushes near the Thames. The great premise begins promisingly, but like--well, living in bushes near the Thames, I suppose, it gets old. The story runs out of gas about thirty pages before the book ends. Some of the characters, including Adam, are interesting, but others--like many people in general, I suppose--just take up space. (2/22/10) The Honor of Spies by W. E. B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV There's not much here, and frankly, I'd be more interested in a book about two people named W. E. B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV. (I wonder if they're related?) You'd think that a book whose characters include Howard Hughes, Allen Dulles, Adolf Hitler and Eva Peron could hold your interest at some level. Sadly, these folks are all on the sidelines while the story revolves around a forgettable American, a couple of uninteresting Nazis and an army of Argentine bureaucrats. There's always room on the bookshelf for a good Nazi spy novel, but this isn't one of them. (2/19/10) Elvis My Best Man by George Klein Among people who grew up listening to Memphis radio in the 60's, there were two kinds of people: people like me who listened to Rick Dees on WMPS (before moving to Los Angeles and going Disco Duck on us), and those who listened to George Klein on WHBQ. (Actually, there were three kinds of people: the third kind was called "black people", and they listened to WDIA, but I digress.) I was a Rick Dees person, and I never had much use for George Klein. But Mr. Klein did, however, have his admirers--chief among them being Elvis Presley. Mr. Klein was also the voice of the Lakeland Drag Strip and wrestling at the auditorium, so I kind of considered him to be a notch or two below Rick and the WMPS crowd. I've always thought that Mr. Klein has made a living over the last forty years being a "Friend of Elvis", capitalizing on his relationship with the King. He's done a Elvis-themed radio show each week, and he's been a fixture at Dead Elvis Week in August. So I wasn't surprised when he finally go around to writing a book about his relationship with Elvis; what surprised me was that I kind of liked it. Mr. Klein clearly idolizes Elvis--but that's OK. he doesn't really have any new dirt to dish--and that's even better. Frankly, it was kind of refreshing to be albe to read something about Elvis that presents Elvis as a person first and an icon second. (2/12/10) Edwin Edwards, Governor of Louisiana: An Authorized Biography by Leo Honeycutt Forty years (almost to the day) after the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Huey Long by T. Harry Williams was published, Leo Honeycutt, a Baton Rouge journalist and photo-journalist, has turned out an authorized biography of Edwin Edwards, who once said that he would like to be buried on the grounds of the State Capitol in Baton Rouge near Huey's tomb. While Governor Edwards might have been Huey's equal in terms of political skills (and I personally think he was), Mr. Honeycutt is no T. Harry Williams (nor, probably, would he claim to be). This is, after all, an authorized biography, and although Mr. Honeycutt has bent over backwards to be as fair as possible to his subject and his subject's detractors, it's still pretty clear that the point-of-view is rather slanted--not that there's anything wrong with that. Edwin Edwards is a fascinating character in Louisiana and American politics. Mr. Honeycutt seems to think that he hand in Jimmy Carter's downfall in 1980, but I just can't imagine a typical American voter north of Mooringsport checking a ballot for someone who had already attracted the attention of the FBI on a couple of occasions. I also can't imagine a typical American reader north of Mooringsport buying this book. On the whole, Mr. Honeycutt has done an admirable job. It could have been much, much worse--but it also could have been better. (OK, since you asked, here's my Edwin Edwards story. Prior to the formal beginning of the gubernatorial campaign in 1983, both Dave Treen and Edwin Edwards had been asked to speak to a trade group that was meeting at the Chateau Country Club in Kenner. It wasn't a debate: both candidates just showed up, made their remarks and left the business folks to continue their business. On the front steps, Governor Treen and I were waiting for the trooper to get the car, and Governor Edwards was waiting for his ride as well. To break the awkward silence among the three of us, Governor Treen said, "Matt, have you met Ed Edwards?" "Ed? Has anybody ever called this man,'Ed'?" I asked myself. I said that we'd met and went on to babble about a couple of other things. On the way home, I wondered to myself if Governor Treen had ever really met "Ed" Edwards.) 2/11/10 Honolulu by Alan Brennert As I write this, the East Coast is under blizzard conditions, North Mississippi has received six inches of snow this morning, and more is expected later this week. What a perfect time for a nice little book called Honolulu. Apparently, being a guy is no impediment to writing chick lit--which Honolulu certainly is. It's the story of a young woman from Korea named Regret who comes to Hawaii as a "picture bride" to be wed to a man she has never met. Naturally, he's a skunk, and Regret spends the next forty years building a better life for herself with the help of the loyal friends she met on the way from Korea. It's a pleasant little story, and along the way, she meets interesting people like the hooker who was the inspiration for Somerset Maugham's Sadie Thompson, and the Honolulu cop who inspired Charlie Chan. If you love Hawaii as I do (don't get me started), you'll appreciate the opportunity to reconnect" with the islands in a vicarious way. At the very least, it will keep you warm on a cold night in February. (2/8/10) The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson In some relatively recent year, Germans were polled about the greatest tragedy in the history of their country. The leading response--ahead of World War I, the Third Reich and the vurious infatuation with David Hasselhoff-- was the Thirty Years War. The war is arguably the bloodiest in history. Whereas 10 percent of Europe's population died in WWI, and 12 percent died in WWII, fully 20 percent of the people of the Holy Roman Empire died perished between 1618-1648. Plague and famine were the leading causes of death, but bloody battles also took their toll. Some have called this the definitive English history of the Thirty Years War. They may be right, but this is not The Thirty Years War for Dummies. It is a vey difficult read. The author admirably tries to hack the war down to bite-sized pieces, but those pieces are arranged in a way that disrupt the flow of the story. A timeline would have helped a lot. Also, there is a list of maps in the book, but the maps themselves were not included. (I understand they are downloadable from the book's website.) This was a huge impediment to making sense of the story. Finally, a list of the Dramatis Personae would have been a big help to this 17th century history novice. If you are a student of history, this book may appeal to you,but if you are only casually interested in this interesting chapter of European history, you might be better advised to start your search elsewhere. (2/8/10) The Imperal Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James Bradley. Late last year, I read Douglas Brinkley's Wilderness Warrior, a (very long) commentary on Theodore Roosevelt as an early environmentalist. Now, Mr. Bradley is treating readers to Theodore Roosevelt as an early water-boarding racist Nazi warmonger. I really can't thnk of enough bad thngs to say about this book. (Well, I can, but it's not worth my time.) First, there's nothing "secret" about this history. You've read most of it elsewhere, better written and without Mr. Bradley's atavistically cretinous opinions ladled on top of it. If you're really interested, you can go to amazon.com and read reveiwes that catalog the multitudinous factual errors. I'm just outraged by the author's use of sloppy fact-checking and pejorative language to back up his poorly-considered opinions about Amercian imperialism in the early 1900's. Boo. Hiss. (1/23/2010) The Help by Kathryn Stockett I've been putting off reading this book for a while now. For some reason, I just wasn't ready to pick up a book about Mississippi in 1962. But I finally have. I want so much to judge this book by my remembrance of 1962, but I know that I should not. My experiences, after all, weren't really much at all like what is depicted in these pages. Then again, I was nine at the time. I didn't have a dear old family retainer to "raise" me. People all over the country have asked me have asked me about the book. People all over, that is--except for Mississippi, that is. I'm sure I've met people in Jackson who have read the book, but I haven't met anyone who wants to talk about it. I don't really know what that means, but I'm guess that it means that--to some extent--the author has hit her mark. (1/19/2010) UPDATE: In a literal example of life imitating art, the world of this book--Jackson in 1962--has become my world. The book is being turned into a move starring Emma Stone and Viola Davis, and some parts of it are being filmed on the street in front of my house. The stores along my little strip of North State Street have been repainted to appear as they did in 1962, and even the old Capri Theatre down the street has a new sign and marquee--advertising Cleopatra with Taylor and Burton. Sadly, the theatre also has a sign on the side door reading "Colored Entrance". (10/1/2010) |
| Matt's Mayhem Quotient (MQ) for Rating Mysteries |
| When I read Steve Berry's The Paris Vendetta, I had a deja vu-y sense that I'd read the book before. Well, of course I had: All of Mr. Berry's books seem to follow the same formula. Then I had the not-very-original revelation that ALL mysteries pretty mucy follow the same formula. Taking that assumption to its logical conclusion, it occurred to me that if all mysteries could adhere to a formula, they could also be reviewed by a formula. So here's mine. I grade on ten components: 1. National Landmarks or World Heritage Sites Trashed 2. Legendary or Mythical Treasure 3. Vengeful Children, Parents or Siblings 4. Evil millionaires or Presidents of the United States 5. Sex Between People Who Didn't Know Each Other Yesterday 6. Hot Women with Guns 7. Evildoers from Germany South Africa or New Orleans 8. Stolen Government Secrets 9. Old drinking Buddies from the CIA 10. Yachts or private aircraft Using this scale to score, for example, The Paris Vendetta, we'd have 2 world heritage sites trashed (the Musee Cluny in Paris and the Hotel des Invalides); 2 mythical treasures ("Rommel's Gold" and "Napoleon's Cache"); 1 vengeful parent; 8 evil millionaires; no sex (who has time?); 1 hot woman with a gun; 1 South African evildoer; no government secrets that I recall; 3 old drinking buddies from the CIA; 1 yacht and 1 private plane, for a total MQ of 20. |