Hamfist Over Hanoi

The third in this trilogy of books as Ham trains to fly F-4 fighter jets we are exposed to the more highly technical jargon then ever before. Unless you have some understanding of avionics most of this language will be well over your head. The author isn’t afraid to go into mundane details like the line-up to use the facilities before flight-ops, even 25-year-old hot-shot fighter pilots can’t hold it indefinitely. When flying at Mach 2 things can go terribly wrong terribly fast. Minor slip-ups can become major screw-ups rather quickly. Although the book may be told from the chief protagonist’s point of view he freely admits to being an average fighter pilot and cops to the successes that were pure dumb luck. If you can get past the air force jargon this is a great read.

My Name is Hardly

Living situations defined Hardly’s life. First the couple who gave him life but should never have been parents; then the Father of his best friend who took him in; and finally the Commanding Officer who provided him with his first father-figure. This tiny Scot was fortunate in having a CO who guided him not by meting out punishment for his misdeeds but in leading him toward better choices first away from a life of alcoholism and then with the support of his Scottish buddies to a purpose in life in the attics of Ireland and later as a Lance Corporal in charge of training in Britain. This book is not so much about army life as its affect upon the men who populate its ranks. Hardly whether he knows it or not should be eternally grateful for having had a CO who for whatever reason took a liking to him and ensured his confidence in himself was built, the he remained the ranking officer in his enterprises, and received assignments he could handle. This book is rare in giving a positive outlook on a grunts eye view of the army.

Like so many books I’ve read lately the story does not unfold in a linear fashion but jumps ahead and gives us background through lengthy flashbacks. Although the “Troubles” in Northern Island figure here it is the inner turmoil these characters experience that is paramount.

The Rainbow Trail

A follow up story to Riders of the Purple Sage this book takes a young lapsed minister to the cañons of Utah where he encounters a community of sequestered Mormon wives that includes Fay Larkin. They eventually end up in Surprise Valley with Jane and Lassiter. Not a bad tale if you can get past the polemic against Mormon polygamy.

The Virginian

Owen Wister’s classic 1902 Western tale is told from the point of view of an unnamed Tenderfoot visitor to the Judge Henry’s Sunk Creek Spread near Medicine Bow, Wyoming who is babysat by his host’s Trusted Man the Virginian. We get little description of the Virginian save that he is young and lithe, a giant of a man pretty as a picture and appears tall in the saddle and has shiny black hair. Those who are good at their jobs do them with an economy of motion, with a grace and ease that make what they do look easy until someone else tries to do it. So it is with the Virginian. There’s a confidence and competence that for example let’s fellow card players know when he lays a gun on the table that if forced to he will know how and not hesitate to use it.

The book unfolds at a lazy pace and documents through anecdotes the friendship that develops between the author and the Virginian. The land and the creatures that inhabit it get more detailed descriptions than the people who intrude on it. The demise of open range caused by fences and farming figures prominently. Texas is still a state that requires crop growers to protect their fields from wandering cattle. Interstates are fenced and their ramps protected by Texas Gates.

The author indulges in entire chapters that provide back-story and biographical material on his characters but do nothing to move the story along. One gets the sense that the tenderfoot who narrates the tale is the author himself with his Eastern Civilized Sensibilities. He muses about the brutality inherent in a cattle operation and is scandalized at the fact that some take pleasure in such brutality and ill-treat their animals, particularly their horses. He dwells upon frontier justice at a time when cattle rustling and horse thievery were hanging offences and lynchings were staged in the field lest lawyers and town juries let the miscreants walk. If we find it hard to think that this frontier is only a century behind us we must remember that it was even more recent that a white jury in the South would not have convicted a white of killing a black.

Would it be an offense to reveal that the book ends with a Honeymoon Camping Trip in the Mountains?

Street Cred

As another reviewer has written, free or not, not worth the download. One is forced to believe that if this man still works for the police he writes under a pen name and that the authour photo is faked. The police service he describes is too busy chasing its own tail to fight crime. Given that police services are run by human beings and manned by officers with the same failings this officer sees conspiracy behind every doorway. In the first place it would seem their psychological profiling system has failed them or they would never have hired someone whose childhood years left him as screwed up as this person describes his as being. After reading the first couple chapters I was forced to decided this book just wasn’t worth my time.

Lizardskin

Carsten Stroud writes police procedurals from the perspective of the patrolman on the beat. They encounter life at its rawest and most primal and the author does nothing to spare the reader the gory details of man’s inhumanity to man. The present opus was published over 2 decades ago. Somehow I cringe at the Female District Attorney’s admonition that if you’re going to be forced to shoot a perp, shoot to kill and spare the county the cost of settling the ensuing lawsuit out of court; burial costs are cheaper.

Like so many books written since the arrival of computer word-processors this one suffers from word-bloat. The author waxes lyrical describing landscapes and people and how they dress. He digresses frequently at length to pages of background history which tends to make the story drag. It often takes him a long to get where he intends to go. A less is more approach would tauten the storyline.

Code of the West

[Some may consider some of this content spoilers.]

Texan Jimmy Goodnight makes a name for himself by pulling an ax out of an anvil at the fair winning $1000 prize money. Roping a one-ton buffalo doesn’t sound very smart but having your buddy tie your feet to your stirrups after you get paralyzed when the beast knocks you off your horse doesn’t sound too intelligent either. Life in Early West Texas was rough and ready but certainly not boring. The bulk of the novel is set in a caňon along the Red River which forms the border between Texas and Oklahoma in the East. Palo Duro Texas State Park marks the location.

It is said that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did on the dance floor but she did it backwards. Given the nature of dance that could hardly be avoided but making a woman ride side-saddle seems unnatural for both the horse and the lady, isn’t that why God made culottes for women? Taking an Eastern Lady and putting her in the middle of a gang of ranch hands 100 miles from the nearest settlement is quite something else.

The camaraderie of the bunk house among grown men one hundred miles from the nearest civilization may not have attained to the extremes of Brokeback Mountain but the relationship between the less than good looking Jimmy and the stunningly handsome Jack attained at least to brotherly love. That Jack is the better cowboy in every possible way makes his playing second fiddle a strain. Bringing a beautiful wife into a situation where isolated men lived in close quarters seems an act of cruelty. That Jimmy fails to see the attraction between his beautiful wife and the lady’s man Jack that drove the latter away seems hard to believe. [The book description refers to Arthur and Lancelot.]

The canker that has eaten away at Jimmy’s soul throughout his life is finally revealed in a flashback 2/3rds of the way through the book. We come to learn that’s Jimmy’s white family was largely killed in a Comanche raid on their stockade when he was ten and he was carted off as one of the spoils of war and eventually adopted by a Medicine Man. Seven Years later as a young brave he is spared when a white army and Texas Rangers wipe out another Comanche Raiding party. Years later his past comes back to haunt him. By this circumstance he was deprived of two families and eventually adopted by a surviving Uncle.

Five hundred pages is a long read and the first couple hundred are the most engaging. The book contains the rough language of cowpokes, graphic descriptions of their work, and of rape and cruelty. None of it is gratuitous.

If you don’t like the Arthur and Lancelot analogy Othello and Iago come to mind. Every great empire including cattle empires seem to have the seeds of their demise planted from the beginning.

Federico Garcia Lorca: Collected Poems

When writing in Spanish, a language where most nouns end in either an 'a' or an 'o' the greater challenge would be the attempt to avoid rhyme. In English his translators make no attempt to duplicate his rhyme scheme. I look forward to hearing this poetry read in its original Spanish. In English one gets only a sense of the poet's thought. The poems are deeply personal and reveal a rather depressive personality of one who is self-absorbed and obsessive. One begins to understand why he would not keep silent for his own good when he returned to Spain. Like so many dissidents before and after him he might have survived in exile but separation from his native soil would have been intolerable. Some men seem to be born to be martyrs.

There are notes supplied in an end appendix but since the poems are not numbered and there are only rough page references following them is not easy. I claim no expertize in Spanish but in rendering the title La balada del agua del mar rather than Seawater Ballad or Salt Water Ballad I’d have said Sea Chanty. These may be Lorca’s Collected Verse but what they most reveal is a rather undisciplined cluttered personality leaving many versions of the same poems with no definitive indications of his preference or even completed versions of most poems. An editor’s nightmare it would seem.

Lorca was born to wealth and privilege but was not ashamed to associate with the local peasants in the countryside surrounding Granada though beyond writing about it no mention is made of his efforts to improve their lot.

Everything about this book is monumental including the sixty-four page introduction. In paperback the binding cannot survive the reading of it.