Firefly Beach

An accountant moves to a small coastal community in Maine to become an artist. A diary she accidentally finds renews long repressed memories and sends the reader on a quest to find the writer. A story to satisfy the snoop and sleuth in all of us. Remarkable how much local gossips can miss. Filled with well-characterized small-town eccentrics. After reading several e-Books plagued by typos, missing words, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes it is pleasant to find one that is properly edited. The book is a pleasure to read.

The Sea and The Silence

Set on the coastline of the Irish Sea among Anglo-Irish Catholics at home neither in Ireland nor England. People who send their progeny to private English Boarding Schools ensuring their continued alienation in the land of their birth. Told from a woman’s point of view Iz marries a man who proves to be a ne’er do well who philanders on the side. Irish tempers, red hair and freckles, pubs, priests, fishing, and country estates figure large in the storyline.

Around the halfway point after a significant crisis point we jump back nearly 30 years to Iz in her post-teen years at the time when she met her future husband. Her Father, it transpires, was no better manager of his affairs than her future husband. The question gets asked, should one accept an arranged marriage that assures one financial security, or should one marry for love. The Irish troubles seen from this point of view look different. English landlords given Irish Estates by Cromwell held large tracks of land often lying fallow as was Iz’s family home. Landless Irish peasants clamoured for land reform.

Then as now the promise of youth is squandered in battles on foreign shores. Duty vies with dreams for dubious outcomes. This is an Irish story, not one with happy endings. But it is well-written and worth your time.

Jarvisfield

At the end of book 3 of the Macquarie Trilogy we learn that it is to be stretched to a fourth book. I will not be acquiring book 4. At the end of Book 2 Lachlan Macquarie dies and leaves George Jarvis in charge of Jarvisfield. A few chapters into book 3 George is killed off in a riding accident leaving the estate in the hands of George’s wife and Elizabeth Macquarie the Laird’s widow. Raised without a strong male presence Lachlan Jr falls into the company of a his Godfather’s son and joins him in the army in a life of dissolute gambling and debauchery. Whereas his friend can afford to lose at cards Lachlan cannot and he throws away his inheritance and his happiness in the process. This book is not the engaging read the first two provided. It has its moments and it may be true to life but it lacks the moral compass provided by the two strong leads whose friendship was the driving force in books one and two.

Beneath the Wall

Perky red-haired photo-journalists always seem to fall for tall, dark, handsome narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered Adonises who look like the covermen for Muscle and Fitness and have corded muscles that demand exploring. If you can get past that cliché and the 9 grammatical errors I marked in the first 150 pages this is a great read. Eryn LaPlant has that knack that some writers possess for drawing your interest from page one and holding it unbroken as you flip the pages. There are books one plows through to get past the tedious bits but this one carries you along non-stop and it does it without leading you through non-stop adventure though that’s there as well. Anyone who has read The Bridges of Madison County will recognize the central MacGuffin of adult children discovering after her death that their mother had a past they’d never dreamed of. Few though discover that their frumpy parent spent her salad days dodging bullets in Vietnam and fending off the attentions of Marines starved for female company.

Another cliché of the genre is the arresting cover shot of model Jason Aaron Baca calculated to grab the attention of casual browsers or book store window gazers. There’s even a forgettable book by him highlighting the fact that only 1 in 20,000 wannabes make it in his world. Fortunately the present tome rises above it all to provide book lovers with a very readable action-adventure romance.

Dirty Work

Two of my favourite authors, Larry Brown and Larry Watson. Brown, a smoker who died of a heart attack in 2004, wrote this book a quarter-century ago. Two injured Vietnam Vets end up in adjoining beds in a VA Hospital. One a black man missing both arms and legs has been there for 22 years, the other missing most of his face is a 250 pound white man who suffers from black-outs caused by a bullet logged in his brain. What these two men have in common is what we learn over a two-day period. Somehow I just can’t get away from war lately. This book illustrates the lasting costs of war especially to those forced to participate. This author can make almost anything interesting. The book draws you in and holds your interest throughout. Makes you feel that sixth-grade bully got what was coming to him. Alas for poor working class grunts there don’t seem to be any happy endings.

This Side of Brightness

Set in New York City at the turn of the last century among the sandhogs who hand-dug the tunnels under New York for subways and other traffic and the homeless people who occupy them today. I’ve read and enjoyed McCann’s style in the past. Believe I find the sandhogs more sympathetic than the street-people.

It was Henry David Thoreau who said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” Colum McCann is able to find drama in the most mundane of lives and make us care for their joys and pains. They seem to come alive on the page and enter our field of vision.

As the story progresses we move from digging under the ground to high steel and the two story-lines meld into one. When a black man marries an Irish lass their chocolate coloured children arrive with crinkled flaming red hair. Practical minded rather than vindictive when hate messages wrapped around bricks crash through their apartment windows they rent an apartment too high for the bricks to reach.

The Shack

I found reading the book rather heavy going and not because of the heavy theological content. I’ve read Paul Tillich and Viktor Frankl. Guess I prefer my theological arguments straight up rather than in allegorical or fantasy formats. The chief protagonist in this piece is dealing with the abduction/murder of his youngest daughter and is invited to spend a weekend with God in three persons in a remote shack. A great deal of liberal theology gets covered here. If you don’t mind the format then this is a great book. To me a 300-page parable was rather too much of a good thing.

Hamfist Down

I want to thank Amazon for making the second part of this two-parter available as a free download. Read it in one afternoon. Part 2 follows Hamilton Hancock after he bails out over Laos and continues as he completes his deployment in Viet Nam. This is pure action/adventure and carries the reader along for the ride.

The Making of a Messiah

Little is known from the Biblical Record about the childhood of he who was born King of the Jews. In fact the cynical could reasonably claim that the mixed details available in the Synaptic Gospels were manufactured to fit Old Testament prophesy. It would appear that this child did not become self-aware and people start standing up and taking notice until after he began his itinerant preaching around Judea. We are told a great deal about his lineage, angel visitations, and the means of his birth. We hear much about his birth in Bethlehem, Angel Choirs, Shepherds and Wise Men and the events which place his birth around 4 BCE. He is named in the Temple at eight days. There is a flight into Egypt around the time he was two. And then nothing until his Visit to the Temple at age 12 and the trouble he caused his parents by staying behind.

The record is then a blank for the next 18 years until he joins his parents for the wedding to which his family were all invited at Cana. Before or after that he visits his cousin John the Baptizer in the River Jordan and wonders into the Wilderness to disappear again for a period of time. When he reappears for his 3-year peripatetic ministry of teaching, preaching and healing the sick at age 30 he is an old man at a time when life expectancies weren’t much higher than that. The teachings of a younger man would probably not have been given much credence.

In the Gospels details of time and place are often added in an attempt to give verisimilitude to the story. No attempt is made to fill in the blanks in his life story and it must be remembered that the first Gospel was probably written 3 centuries after his death. The present book is an attempt to fill those gaps by means of the anthropological record, other writings from that time period, and gospels that failed to make it into the canon. Since there are no written documents and the Bible in any case is a record of faith not history this needs-must be a work of fiction.

Items of interest:

This is not a childhood biography so aside from a few embellishments little is added to the list of known details I summarized in my opening paragraphs.

Jesus was a southpaw?

We are given a brief summary of Jewish History much as Jesus would have had it related which includes:
A revisionist version of the 10 plagues of Egypt
That Judea was emptied during the Babylonian Captivity rather than the more accepted assertion that it was her leaders and elite that were carried off into bondage, not the entire community.

We learn of Jesus’ moral upbringing and have cause to reflect that this was a very special couple chosen to raise God’s Son.

We learn of the scholarly influences he may have encountered and the philosophical and cultural systems in place during his growing years. Aramaic, Greek and Roman Latin.

The author takes it as a given that Jesus interacted with the Essene Community at Qumran along with his cousin John (the Baptist) taking particular delight in their library. It is also assumed that Jesus and his cousin John had a life-long friendship. John’s father Zechariah was of the priestly class and the knowledge he passed on to his son must have challenged the younger cousin though no mention is made of an interaction between Zechariah and Jesus.

The one issue the author does not confront is that of marriage. It would have been considered a given at the time that any good rabbi would have a wife.

This is not light reading. In a few short pages the author has summarized theological arguments and concepts that have occupied the best minds inside and outside Christendom for a millennium and filled entire libraries with their discourse.

Through Black Spruce

Joseph Boyden seems incapable of telling a narrative story from start to finish; rather he jumps around from the present to various points in the past moving his point of view from person to person. Makes for challenging reading. If you’re up for the challenge he tells a cracking good story. After working on this book for half a decade it finally clicked last night. Set in Moosonee and various points south it is filled with the usual references to alcohol abuse, residential schools, and living off the land. If you hadn’t guessed his subjects are Anishinabe and no attempt is made to varnish the hardships, pride, and challenges of their lives. The profanity somehow doesn’t seem jarring in this context but be ware that it is there.

Unspoke Abandonment

I’m considering another book, this time about WW#2 entitled The Deserters. Soldiers deserted because of fear and battle fatitue, to engage in ciminal black market activities, and out of disgust for the moral depravity of war.

And then there are the many who stick it out and collapse mentally and physically after their return due to post traumatic stress, Gulf War Syndrome, Battle Fatigue, or any of the many other names given the inability to cope after exposure to the battle environment. Some become Adrenalin Junkies and sign up to go back rather than attempt to cope with their new civilian lifestyle. Some repress their feelings so deeply they come to feel like actors in their own lives. And some become violent and take it out on others. Those affected are not only the vets but also their wives, families and children for in a sense they too go to war.

Bryan A. Wood, there is also an Australian Rules footballer and a graphic artist by that name, looks in his press photo as if he belongs in Junior High School. As we meet him he is working in Florida as a police officer. He then takes us via his journal to his experience in Afghanistan. The notes reveal a caring empathetic human being caught in an inhuman situation. He reaches that point where every day seems repititious and nothing that he would want to remember happens so he stops writing. All he wants is to get out of it all alive and return home. An injury sends him home and horror of horrors the rehabilitation centre is worse than the war. But he makes friends and gets some help.

Home is so frighteningly normal and the same as he left it but inside he has irrevocably changed. Everyone wants to hear about an experience the vet is desperately trying to put behind him. There are the usual nightmares and panic attacks, a wife who feels distant and explosive feelings bottled inside a man too strong to admit he is hurting and needs help and unable to find it. He tries to build a wall around the hurt and pain and anger and in so doing blocks out those around him but in attempting to run cannot escape from what is bottled up inside.

The author describes how writing about it worked for him and admits this book came out of that process. He manages to take the reader along for the ride. We get to feel the catharsis along with him.

This book has been unavailable for purchase in any format for a while now. Hopefully that means someone is giving it a thorough edit as the version I downloaded last April has a homonym error, missing word, awkward sentence structure, bad grammar, or spelling error on almost every page.

Rolling Thunder

It seems de rigueur for the writers of Vietnam Era literature to pepper their stories with technical jargon and acronyms. Chapter headings here read like military communiques. Having just read a Hamfist novel the contrast is striking. Whereas one is essentially an action adventure piece this book spices things up with the occasional bit of flight ops just to keep it interesting but is primarily concerned with ground-based operations, the men who make it happen, and the politics of war. The airforce jockeys want to believe they are fighting a winnable war, that their sacrifices and the deaths of their comrades count for something. The brass know that they are maintaining a holding pattern and that civilian political interference is making it impossible to pursue a winning strategy. They lack the cart blanche given a General Schwartzkoff years later to execute a ‘shock and awe campaign’. In other words the assertion is that America lost the war in Vietnam. There is no better summation of this than the following quote:

"Sir, respectfully, I must point out that as a target officer you are unschooled in basic Douhet principles; principles which clearly stipulate that piecemeal application of airpower is imprudent. Coupling that lack with the use of airpower which lacks mass, surprise, and consistency and you have a situation that wastes lives and money. This, in turn, fosters further contempt for this non-war in the opinion of the American people, and those of the rest of the world, while accomplishing exactly nothing."

Whether or not a Pentagon Official ever said this to his Commander-in-Chief the words pretty much sum up the “War in Vietnam”. After 37 years working for a Canadian Bureaucracy I have a saying of my own, “Why should reality interfere with policy.” It was similar control of the Grand Banks Fishery by politicians at 1500 miles remove that led to its collapse and a Newfoundland moratorium on fisheries.

Whether or not I believe America should have ever entered into a conflict in Indo-China by tying the hands of those in the field who knew better the politicians in Washington guaranteed that the effort would fail and thousands of lives were lost and forever maimed and damaged. Even more discouraging is the fact that we’re doing it all over again in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

As the book ends four returning vets are met by protesters shouting “Murders” who throw red dye at them. It is at this point that I learn there are four more books in the series. Don’t believe I’m ready for 1800 more pages of Vietnam though I believe the writer may have felt the need ot get it out of his system. The electronic copy of this book needs considerable editing to remove typos, missed words, and spelling errors.

The Cloud Seeders

Thomas and his little brother Dustin inhabit a dystopian Orwellian World in which malevolent forces control the weather and water is as scare as it was in Frank Herbert’s Dune. Water cops enforce water conservation and issue fines or worse. Their parents, a scientist and a poet, the secret of whose death Thomas keeps from his brother, left behind the means of climate manipulation and a book of their mother’s poetry one of which prefaces each chapter.

The writing style feels awkward and it takes considerable time to warm to the characters and get involved in the story. As a book for young readers it contains too much profanity and sexual innuendo. The book’s strengths lie in the unfolding relationship between the brothers and to a lesser degree that between Thomas and his enigmatic girlfriend Jerusha as they embark on a treacherous road trip.

Sagebrush

Disingenuous of Amazon to simultaneously have for sale a paid and free edition of the same book especially when you have to scroll down to find the free edition. Since 12-year-old Michael is orphaned and isolated from other human contact for 6 years in hostile Indian Territory during pre-settlement times the story needs-must be told from his point of view at least in the opening chapters. But as others have complained the writing style is highly clinical much as one would expect if one were reading about a modern-day atrocity in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. The author reports that a 12-year-old boy witnessed the murder of both his parents and their wagon train party, felt 18-year-old lust when he meets his first pretty Indian Girl, and precedes with the revenge killing of the four braves who butchered his parents with little or no emotional involvement in the experience. This detachment from his own life leaves the reader feeling detached as well.

It is difficult to believe that anyone, especially a 12-year-old, could survive 6 years of solitary confinement without irreparable emotional harm. The only literary equivalent would be Ayla in Clan of the Cave Bears. As the book progresses it becomes more a typical Western Oater with certain striking similarities to Carmac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. The story has an all too typical happily ever after Hollywood ending.

Hamfist Over the Trail

Read this book as light reading after the Mandela autobiography. This is the first in a trilogy periodically offered for free to get one hooked. An airforce procedural it will introduce you to more acronyms than you can keep track of. The ‘Trail’ in question is the Ho Chi Minh Trail between North Viet Nam and the South. Half-way through the book Hamilton Hancock call sign Hamfist is still in training but already charged with disposing of his former room mate’s personal effects. The military presents the usual examples of hurry up and wait, intelligence, superstitions, and foul ups however this is Viet Nam and the bullets and artillery are real and people do die and get injured or worse captured by the enemy. Told matter of factly in the first person the story is fiction.

Just finished book one in a single day. This isn’t a three volume story, it’s a single story split in three part one ending a crisis point in the story to suck the reader into buying volume 2.

Long Walk to Freedom

Went looking for this after encountering the CBC's synthesis of the 50 hours of tapes recorded by Nelson Mandela before writing the book broadcast on Ideas. As in public life so in his own private biography Madiba is self-effacing, candid about his own short-comings, loyal to his supporters over the years. As the story continues we meet many of the people who would be active in the African National Congress in the future and his partners seeking freedom for Africans in South Africa.

At 658 pages in paper binding this is no light read but Mandela's writing style is engaging and serves to carry one along. We see his growth from a rural tribal background to life in a tribal chief's home. His friendship with his adopted brother, their mutual escape from their home to Johannesburg where Mandela begins his struggle to become a lawyer, copes with being an African among whites, and becomes politically aware. Any great man makes it to the top on the backs of others; it is good to see this man remember and acknowledge those who helped him reach that pinnacle.

By page 150 or part 3 we have reached Mandela’s political awakening and the beginnings of his involvement with the African National Congress, the ANC. Mandela expresses his own reluctance to get actively involved in politics and the advice of his legal mentors to stay out of it. His writing style somehow reflects that reluctance as at this point the book becomes clinical and less engaging.

Things pick up as we enter the middle section of the book. His political internship over he swings into gear as an orgnaizer and speaker. The screws of apartheid are tightened on Black South Africans and on those who would oppose it. It would seem the authorities were smart enough to realize that actually killing leaders would create martyrs so they ‘ban’ them restricting their ability to travel and attend meetings. Over 150 ANC members are rounded up and their trial for treason takes years to unfold. Mandela’s first marriage breaks down and he meets Winnie. Interestingly a man who promoted non-violent resistance practiced boxing as a means of blowing off steam and keeping fit.

The print version of this book obviously has dense text, after reading for hours one makes little headway percentage-wise in e-Book format, I note it is printed in two volumes in PB. Mandela goes on the lam to promote the militant wing of the ANC. Even before prison he suffered long periods of separation from his family. It is when he goes abroad in Africa that he learns that it is not enough to have good intentions, the perception of others is equally important. The competing PAC, Pan African Congress, are winning the publicity war because South Africa's Black neighbours are suspicious of the ANC's association with Whites, Coloureds, Indians, and the Communist Party. On the other hand a freedom fighter takes aid from whatever port he can obtain it and some of his neighbours are despots, they just happen to be Black despots. It is interesting to see how he describes these people.

Mandela is finally caught and imprisoned for 27 years or 10,000 days as the song goes. On Robben Island in solitary confinement, under hard labour, and in the company of fellow political prisoners he suffers isolation from the outside world and limited visits with family. Finally he is brought back to the mainland where a damp prison cell leads to tuberculosis. Finally he is released to less confined locations and allowed contact with his family and supporters and begins his negotiations with the White Apartheid Government of South Africa. However calculated or humane this process was when he is finally released the press of his cheering supporters scares even his military prison driver.

With the start of negotiations traditional tribal rivalries come back into play and in particular the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party it is suspected supported by White Minority Police stage attacks on ANC townships. Mandela finally acknowledges the breakdown of his marriage to Winnie. While struggling to reach a consensus within his own party Mandela faces the divide and conquer tactics of the DeKlerk Government. Oliver Tambo dies of stroke and Chris Hani is murdered.

After all that reading the story seems to come to a rather rapid ending with Mandela’s election as president. After some reminiscence the book ends without covering his period as president. I had been hoping to discover if there was any veracity to the storyline followed in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus.

Historic Saint John Streets

My first surprise was the fact that the authors supplied no maps to locate the streets they were talking about. The book is useless for anyone intent on taking a walking tour because the entries are in alphabetical order meaning that there is no logical order for locating the streets on the ground by neighbourhood. Unless you already have a fairly good working knowledge of the city the book leaves you lost.

The Devil's Star

The Devil's Star

by

Jo Nesbø

A Norwegian Author of a series of Harry Hole books set in Oslo and translated into English.

I can claim no knowledge of real life but fictional detectives seem to tend toward alcoholic, divorced, eccentric loners who do not play well with others and have odd tastes in popular music. Think Ian Rankin's John Rebus. The reason their superiors put up with them is the results they get. Can't comment on the quality of the translation but will note that the author makes frequent jumps to totally new venues and unknown characters leaving the reader hanging and wondering, did I somehow jump into a different text? The reader of hard-copy book would just turn it

over and glance at the cover, not so easy in e-Book format. 

The book picks up after one gets accustomed to Nesbø's writing style and acclimatized to the setting and the characters. At 530 pages it takes a while to get engrossed in the storyline. As murder mysteries go this has the usual plot twists and red herrings. If Mysteries are your schtick you'll probably want to read more in the series and subsequent books should make the reader feel more at home.

A Death on the Wolf

Since I've been reading two much longer and heavier books decided to try something lighter. Was not expecting to encounter another story involving young men coming of age with issues of homosexuality. Nearly 16-year-old Nelson is coming to terms with the fact that his best friend loves him, in the Biblical sense that Jonathan loved David. Nelson, on the other hand, is coping with his first infatuation with the blind girl spending the summer with his Aunt next door. In the Mississippi of 1969 where the word 'nigger' was still thrown around with impunity and hippie was a term of derision Nelson fears for his friend's safety. Nelson is blessed with enlightened parental guardians in a part of the world where this was unusual at the time.

The book captures the daily drudgery of the routine on a working farm without itself seeming boring. Owning your own wheels as a means of getting out and being independent is a priority. You depend on your neighbours in a rural setting of necessity, whether you like them or not. And then there's the issue of being responsible for a younger sibling. Given the details the writer goes into about appearance and clothing I had to check to determine that GM Frazier was a male, not a woman. By coincidence I find myself reading this novel at the same time that I'm watching Michael Burk's The Mudge Boy which in a similarly rural setting reverses the roles. Frazier handles his material in a much less awkward fashion, but then Duncan Mudge's father is anything but understanding.

The historical events worked into the storyline help ground it. If everyone had a dad like Nelson's the world would be a far better place.Throwing in Free Masonry and the Presbyterian Church helps broaden the background. The forty-year later epilogue was a nice touch.

James Herriot: The lfe of A Country Vet

This book by Graham Lord rates 5 stars, all negative, or five road apples--horse turds for the uninitiated. I began this book with anticipation and was sorely disappointed; the book is still-born from the beginning. This was obviously not an authorized biography and the writer would seem to have been no friend of his subject. Although reference is made often to the journals Alf Wight kept from his earliest days it rapidly becomes apparent that the writer had no access to these diaries and other papers. Lacking this access the author consults the public record and Alf's contemporaries pestering them it would seem with repeated interviews. All this would be fine if the research had been synthesized into a readable biography of the subject. Unfortunately what we get is a history reporting the writer's research which comes off as turgid, stodgy, boring reading. The writer begins by poking fun at the inaccuracies promulgated in previous attempts and then proceeds to commit his own. You will note that I've studiously avoided using the word authour in describing this book. If this be an example of the quality of the man's writing style one is left to wander why any publisher wasted the paper on his 18 other books. After plowing through

over a hundred pages of this book I decided that life was too short to waste on such mush.