Books

BOOKS 2012

This is the page that answers the question, "Matt, have you read any good books lately?"
I don't really "review" books so much as make a few snarky comments about whether I liked them or not.

I've listed here only "new" books I've read lately. ("New" to me is anything printed in 2011 or 2012.)

Click here for
2006 BOOK COMMENTS

Click here for
2007 BOOK COMMENTS

Click here for
2008 BOOK COMMENTS

Click here for
2009 BOOK COMMENTS

Click here for
2005 BOOK COMMENTS

      Matt's MAYHEM
    QUOTIENT (MQ)
   for Rating Mysteries

   Sometimes, it seems as if all
   mysteries follow a formula.
   Therefore, I've decided that my
   comments about them will also
   follow a formula. I call it the
   Mayhem Quotient, or MQ for
   short.So here it is.

   I grade on ten components,
   providing a score of 0 (so lame that
   it's awful) to 25 (so good that it's
   awful).

     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 Before
          Yesterday

     6. Hot Women with Guns

     7. Evildoers from Germany, Russia,
          South Africa or New Orleans

     8. Stolen Government Secrets

     9. Old drinking Buddies from law
          enforcement agency(ies).

   10. Yachts or private aircraft

Click here for
2010 BOOK COMMENTS

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.

Click here for
2011 BOOK COMMENTS

Throw Them All Out: How Policiticians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison by Peter Schweizer (2011) Last night, I sat down and wrote out my monthly check to Entergy, the local electric company. (In case you were wondering, it was $41.25. It's been a very mild winter.) Later I read in Mr. Schweizer's excellent book that spooky dude George Soros owns over a million shares of Entergy.   Mr. Soros' investment is but one of the hundred or so so examples that the author provides the impropriety of crony capitalism.   The title of the book says it all, and Mr. Schweizer, while focusing on Democrats like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry, does not overlook Republicans who have profited from their Washington experiencs.   In one instance of former politicians who have brought members of their families into lucrative lobbying and consulting positions in DC, Mr. Schweizer mentions that Trent Lott's son was managing a Domino's franchise before he joined his father's business in DC.   If you're ready to be outraged by your elective representatives, I urge you to buy the book and read it today.   Or if you want to borrow my copy which has only a few vomit stains, give me a call.   (2/21/2012)

Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie   (2011)   Have you ever not read a book because you were afraid that it might not be as good as you hoped it would be? OK, that sounds stupid, but you get my point.   Cate the Great has been sitting on my nightstand for a couple of months. I've always been a huge fan of Mr. Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra (1967) and Peter the Great (1981).   They were two of the best books I've ever read.   It's been thirty years since Peter the Great, and I was afraid that Mr. Massie might have been coasting on his laurels in this most recent effort. And while Catherine is not as spot on as the earlier works, I think it's fair to say that Robert Massie writing at 80 percent is still better than almost anyone else at full strength. Mr. Massie's book is insightful and entertaining at every step.   And although he does seem to wander off on tangents from time to time (there's a two-page divergence about the modern use of the death penalty that has nothing to do with Catherine and not much to do with anything or anyone else), but it's a minor inconvenience for the pleasure of having Mr. Massie's wonderful grasp of history at hand.   As her personal and public lives were so intertwined, it is impossible to try to separate one from the other, and Massie is right not to try.   Equal attention is given to both the reforms she attempted (and did not attempt) and to the dozen or so lovers she took during the course of her adult life.   If you love history, don't wait to read Catherine the Great.   (2/20/2012)

The Time In Between by Maria Duenas   (2011)   and The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano   (2011)   Beyond the notion that both of these books deal with Spain and Nazis, they couldn't be more unalike.   In the excellent The Time in Between, a young Madrid seamstress finds herself stranded in Morocco while Civil War rages in her homeland.   Events and spymasters collude to provide her with opportunities to provide aBritish MI6 with intelligence about the German communities first in Morocco, and later at home in Madrid during WWII. Ms. Duenas is a fine writer, and this is an interesting book about a young woman who finds a way not merely to endure, but to prevail.   As different as possible in every way is The Third Reich, which was written in the 1980's and published after Mr. Bolano's death.   I'm not familiar with any of Mr. Bolano's dozen or so other books, but I'm guessing there's a reason why they were published while he was still alive, and this one was not.   It's the story of Udo, a German "gamer" who plays elaborate war games with others around the world who are as obsessed as they are. In this book, the central character--he's not much of a hero--goes to the beach (somewhere near Barcelona) with is girlfriend, where they meet an entirely unpleasant assortment of trashy German tourist and surly locals. As the vacation progresses, not much happens until it does, and Udo plays his war game in his hotel room. Nothing that happens inside or outside the room is terribly interesting, and by the end of the book, you're so disconnected from the story that the only thing that interests you is whether or not Udo's simulated invasion of the UK will be successful.   (2/6/2012)

The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 by Ian Kershaw   (2011) Mr. Kershaw has previously written a couple of award-winning books about Hitler, and in this book, he examines why the Third Reich remained a functioning entity until the bitter end (Hitler's suicide) while the country was confronting unmitigated catastrophe on all fronts.   Generally speaking, Mr. Kershaw claims that those reasons include but are not limited to the renewed commitment to the Fuhrer after the failed assassination attempt by Count Claus von Stauffenberg and others in July 1944, the lack of a functioning that might have opposed Hitler in the last year of the Reich, fear of the Soviets and "the continued readiness of civil and military leaders to continue to do their duty after all was obviously lost." Mr. Kershaw's work is richly detailed and painstakingly sourced. Even so, the story is told in an engaging way. I predict more awards in his future. (1/30/2012)

The Spy Who Jumped Down from the Screen by Thomas Caplan, with an Introduction by President Bill Clinton   (2012)   It would be interesting to know who the author had in mind when he was describing as he was writing this tale of a former special forces officer who is injured in Afghanistan, is discovered by a movie director in the veterans hospital, and over time becomes the number one movie star in the world. (I'm not making this up.) I'm guessing that he was imagining someone like a young Tom Cruise, but I kept picturing cartoon secret agent Sterling Archer.   As you might imagine, this is not a reasonable way to go about taking this mystery seriously.   (MQ = 12; Gibraltar trashed, vengeful children, evil millionaires, sex, hot women with guns, Russian evildoers, stolen government secrets, drinking buddies, yachts and private aircraft.) Mr. Caplan is a fine writer, but he just can't make you suspend disbelief long enough for any of this to sound like anything but middle-age fantasy.   It also doesn't help that the story is preceded by an introduction by the author's old college dorm mate, Bill Clinton.   The president had a few uninteresting things to say about his love of thrillers, and he made a noble plea to the reader to consider the threat posed by nuclear weapons. However, asking a former POTUS (as we say in thriller-land) to write an introduction for a book like this is like asking Jimmy Carter to write an introduction for Paula Deen's cookbook. (1/24/2012)

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin   (2011)   You'd think that a 19th-century kind of guy like me (and an Anglophile to boot!) would be all over this book--but not so much.   I will say that it's a very readable and enlightening look at the life of the "Greatest Novelist of the 19th Century." However, I think that as a child, I was overexposed to his most treacly works, from repeated viewings of the Alister Sim version of A Christmas Carol, which I hated, to the god-awful musical Oliver! to the compelled reading of A Tale of Two Cities in high school, which left me cold. I just hated them and feared that the rest of the books would be more of the same.   When I finally got around to Great Expectations and Nicholas Nickleby, I was grateful for the restraint, but not overwhelmed. At some point along the way, I heard or read somewhere that he had visited the United States before the Civil War and had hated the South. That just reinforced by lack of interest in the works and their creator. (In case you're wondering, he really didn't like the South. When he came back to America for his second and last reading tour, he avoided it altogether.) But back to the book.   The author mercifully spares a detailed analysis of his work and gives us a sense of why and how he was so generally beloved by most of the people he knew.   We have a very good sense of what drove him as a person and of his general frustration with being born with the wrong parents, marrying the wrong woman, having the wrong children, working for the wrong publishers, and for the most part, living the wrong life.   If you're not still traumatized by Oliver! ("Please sir, may I have some more?"), check it out. (1/16/2012)

A Game of Lies: A Hannnah Vogel Novel by Rebecca Cantrell   (2011)   My reservations about this book lie in the title: it's a Hannah Vogel novel.   So who's Hannah Vogel, and why don't you like her, you ask. Ms. Vogel is a Berlin crime reporter at the advent of the Nazi era in the 1930's.   In earlier books, she kidnapped and apparently adopted (!) the son of Ernst Rohm and had other adventures. She seems to be catnip to the fellas because there are several of them who want either to care for her or rape her in this book, and some guy named in Boris in Switzerland whom we never meet in this book and whom Hannah may or may not love.   We do, however, get all we want of Hannah in this book--which isn't a lot.   She's kind of a pill--charmless and itrritable throughout, but we're suppose to balance this against her resolve and dedication to exposing chinks in the Nazis' armor.   In other words, she's someone we're supposed to admire, rather than actually like.   Which is too bad.   I read novels because I want to like someone in it.   The most likable person in this book is an SS Sturmbannfuhrer--and that's not good. MQ (see left panel) = 6; vengeful children, evil millionaires, sex, hot women with guns, evildoers from Germany, stolen government secrets, well-placed drinking buddies.   (1/15/2012)

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War by Tony Horwitz (2011)   Are you one of the millions who read Confederates in the Attic? I'm not, but I'm guessing that if it is anywhere nearly as engrossing as this book is, it's a fine read. Midnight Rising concerns John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Brown's intention was to instigate an uprising that would result in the freeing of all the slaves in the South, but in actuality, it merely got himself and a few others killed--and oh, by the way, might have hastened the horror that turned out to be the American Civil War.   Mr. Horwitz is a fine writer, and he tells the story in a way that does not romance it, but simultaneously makes you think that Brown was able to capture the imagination of his followers, plus a number of well-to-do New Englanders who were his silent backers, and others like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau who were his unvarnished admirers. It's a great book, and I think that any student of history would find it to be a ripping read. (1/10/2012)

Heinrich Himmler by Peter Longerich   (2012) So. How were your holidays? Good? That's great. Me? Thanks for asking.   I spent most of them reading a very dense and immaculately researched biography of one of the worst Nazis of them all. Mr. Longerich is a professsor of Modern German Studies at the Royal Holloway University of London, and he has tapped what seems to be reams of previously unpublished texts to provide a compelling examination of a mass murderer and how he got to be that way.   Although he tries mightily, Mr. Longerich can find nothing he can put his finger on to suggest how a rather young middle-class, well-educated, church-going, parent-respecting child in Bavaria could become a monster.   Reading Heinrich Himmler is not a project for the casual student of history.   It's dense, detailed and thorough--perhaps, too much so.   This particular devil is so deep in the details that you sometimes you lose sight of the enormity of the evil that is being recorded.   That, however, is a very minor gripe about what otherwise is bound to stand as one of the finest of the history of National Socialism. (1/8/2012)