Swept Away

Written by Mary Connealy who authored the Kincaid Brides Trilogy which I also enjoyed. Book One of Trouble in Texas is offered free once more to hook the reader on buying the other two. The author writes Cowboy Romances heavier on action-adventure than on Romance. The books are well edited and engage the reader from page one. Mind you it's a cliché that the men must be handsome, tall and strong, broad-shouldered, slim-waisted; the women diminutive and pretty. This series is set in Palo Duro on the Texas Panhandle in a time before law arrived so gun-play is an essential part of the scene. As it happens Luke Stone's sister happens to be one of the Kincaid Brides in Colorado. Cowboys ride horses and fight range wars. They also have raging hormones but their amours are handled tastefully.

The Brothers

What led a pair of brothers to bomb the Boston Marathon in 2013? The author did exhaustive on the ground research in Chechnya, Dagestan, Stalin's Gulag, and the Boston area in writing a forensic account of the family's background. The book is well edited and presented but reads like a detective's field notes giving us the facts of the case with no sense of empathy for the objects of her investigation. One senses that the many people who were interviewed must have been left with a sense of having being used.

This was a family who fled Russia because they were victimized there due to their ethnicity, religion, and culture only to arrive in America at a time when the War on Terror made all things Muslim suspect. When we grant refugees asylum they are often confronted with a language in which they cannot communicate, a bureaucracy they don't know how to navigate, customs and morays foreign to them, and a system seemingly designed to act as a barrier to their success. All too often the American Dream becomes a nightmare and children of such immigrants fail to flourish in an environment that seems fashioned to put them down and keep them there.

The story has played out in the lives of Vietnamese refugees supported with limited success by religious groups in the US and Canada. In the life of Omar Kadhr. Having extended the hand of friendship we feel betrayed. Stories such as this present the details of frustrated hopes and dreams and hint at the temptation to exact revenge and descend into lives of crime and drugs. What they fail to suggest is the motivation that led to such bad decisions or the changes that should be made to make the asylum process more humane and workable for those forced to go through it. Explaining what led to the crime in no way exonerates the perpetrators nor does it lead to solutions for preventing its recurrence.

Individual rights to freedom, security and privacy seem to be the first victims of the War on Terror. The fact that the acts of two individuals could lead to an entire city being under lock-down speaks for itself. Could it be that the reactions of security forces are far worse than those of the terrorists who provoked them. Is this akin to burning a house down because there is a mosquito inside. If you provoke your suspects into a shoot-out they spare you the bother of proving them guilty in court and the protracted appeal process that follows a capital sentence.

After reading this book the only thing I'm certain about is that bombs went off in Boston. The recipe for the creation of a pressure cooker bomb was available by direct link in a magazine posted in Wikipedia. That's hardly a spoiler. I'm not so certain as to who set them or why. I do know that police tactics and the court of public opinion probably played a big role in motivating whoever did. Executing a young man over a decade from now may create a martyr but will do nothing to make things better and may even worsen them.

Texas Jack

Like so many books I've been reading lately this one jumps around in time and place mid various generations of the same family. We see Jack as a 10-year-old, as a teenage jock, and as a parent with a son of his own. No one would accuse this of being great literature but the book is well-edited and although at times pedestrian has a certain familial appeal. It gives one an insiders view of a family's life. At times the shifting point of view leaves one wondering who's doing the narrating. The book confronts issues of alcoholism and child neglect. The book has a ready for Hollywood ending.

Saint John: Facts and Folklore

The 190-page book is a series of vignettes and brief articles often a single sentence rather than a history. Goss needs to fire his editor as the book is littered with spelling mistakes and contains boners such as the plague marking the Trafalgar Stairs and a suburb performance. The resulting gaffs have a comedic effect that may not be the intended approach. Many of the allusions are probably of more interest to native Saint Johners than to outsiders such as this reader.

An American Outlaw

Army Vets from Lafayette, Louisiana. Terlinga Texas, been there no reason to return. Alpine--jumping off point for Big Bend. Flashbacks to service in Iraq. The story told from the point of view of former soldiers on the lam after robberies and that of law enforcement tracking them. Bad grammar intentional dialect and poor editing. Despite poor choice of changes to first person the story holds the reader’s attention. Shifts from the Vets to Law enforcement and the past in Iraq can be confusing. What comes through to this reader most clearly is the futility and waste that war represents and the lasting damage it does to the individuals who wage it.

The Raven Boys

Made it fifty pages into this book before I bogged down. The writing style is reminiscent of a newspaper report and the author seems to lack any sense of tense for the verbs she uses making for reading discomfort. The subject matter is fantasy and ESP but the writing style serves to destroy the reader’s suspension of disbelief and therefore fails to draw one in .

I aver this book was severely edited and reissued since I last tried reading it.

How to describe The Raven Boys. The boys of the title attend a swank private school for boys. The book combines elements of teen romance, paranormal, murder mystery, fortunetelling, and even a ghost who seems almost live. Somehow the author pulls it all off and makes it seem plausible.

Little Brother

This review does not contain spoilers.

First off I should thank the author, Cory Doctorow for offering this book for free download. The book is meant to be disturbing. It is a cautionary tale of Security Forces run amuck. Media coverage of terrorist events have bred a sense of apprehension in the populace which is empowering repressive security agencies to infringe on individual rights and freedoms such as privacy, presumed innocence, freedom from search without just cause. The electronic devices which have come to make our lives so much more convenient also leave us vulnerable to government surveillance.

It has been known for years that checking certain books out from the library will trigger a report to the FBI or similar agencies. Police are supposed to get a court order before they wiretap your phone or obtain a phone log. However we are learning that our online activities and E-mail seem to be fair game for any domestic spy agency with a desire to track us. The transponders that allow us to cross bridges and use toll roads leave a record of our travels. Credit card records tell another tale and store loyalty cards add a wealth of information on our preferences. Electronic health and pharmacy records add more details. Transit passes reveal our every move. Red light cameras track who crosses an intersection and security cameras are everywhere--smile for the camera. Cameras in space can determine the denomination of a coin dropped on Red Square. The computer in your car can reveal the speed at which you’ve been driving and how often you’ve used your brakes in panic mode.

It is little comfort to be told that you’ve nothing to worry about if you’ve done nothing wrong. Tell that to black teens in any major American City. Bill C51 is presently before the Canadian Senate and would grant authorities sweeping powers to surveil electronic communications. Who is reading your E-mail? What happens if some functionary decides you fit a dangerous profile?

Post 911 $635,000,000,000 has been spent on security in the US. Cross any border and learn the sweeping powers of border agents. Board any plane and feel treated like a criminal. Know that most of this so-called security is mainly for show and does little to make us safer. In Canada we are still dealing with the fallout from head taxes for Chinese immigrants, WW#1&2 internment camps for Japanese and German citizens, residential schools for Native Canadians, disputes over expropriation. Do we really trust the government to protect our rights given that track record?

Reading this book is meant to leave you feeling uncomfortable and looking over your shoulder. What percentage of eligible voters exercise their franchise? Can we afford to be complacent?

I’m assuming that most of the grammatical errors were intentional to represent youth speak. I think it’s great the author acknowledges great bookstores though putting the descriptions at the head of each chapter somehow distracts from the flow of the narrative. Including Chapters/Indigo and Amazon among the independent bricks and mortar stores whose demise they are causing some may find disconcerting. Amazon has no base from which to stage a face to face book signing.  

[Spoilers Follow]

This is a book aimed at a younger audience. In explaining computer and internet technology in some detail it may leave those of us of an age scratching our heads. I’ll leave defining that age to others. The biggest surprise comes when the ending that seems inevitably foreshadowed is abandoned in favour of a typical “Hollywood” happy ending. This was the one sour note in an otherwise well constructed plot. Forgive the irony here.

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. In spite of this with a map of the city in hand the book gives you a sense of the history of the city and its constituent parts. Street names occur up to three times around the various former communities and no attempt by common council has been made to harmonize this confusion.

Collected Poems of WH Auden

This is not a deluxe edition of the poems though at nearly 1000 pages one that gave each poem its unique page would create a wrist sprainer or require two volumes. Nevertheless there are times when the poems feel crammed. Any time one starts reading a new poet understanding his/her handling of the language, their allusions and metaphors is a challenge. Any writer is a child of their own era. Auden is a master of poetic language, his lines read so naturally one can forget they are actually rhyming but the ideas expressed go far beyond prose expression. Since my reading is not for academic purposes but rather for pleasure I don’t feel obligated to comprehend every allusion. After reading Ginsberg the expression of romance and love here is not lascivious or crass and the points made far less brash and strident.  Unlike a similar volume of WB Yeats I’ve assayed this one lacks any annotations so none of the allusions and dedications are explained. In the later poems he starts to use arcane and made-up words that have the reader reaching for a dictionary or going online to research the derivation of words no longer in common useage.

Roses are Difficult Here

W. O. Mitchell is the writer of Jake and the Kid. He writes about small town and rural prairie life but his modest settings belie a social analysis as sophisticated as that of the sociologist that in this novel is studying the people of Shelby, Alberta. The book is filled with the kind of characters that thrive in small towns and also the claustrophobia that such a closed environment can lead to. But there is also comfort in small town life.

Hate List

The story of a high school mass-murder suicide told from the point of view of the perpetrator’s girlfriend in its aftermath. Two things stand out as I read this book. The need to fight bullying and name-calling in our society and in our schools in particular. And the heavy price America pays for making guns readily available.  As one who was bullied and called names in school I can understand the wish to strike back. Not everyone is able to slough it off with the knowledge that they are better than the miserable cowards who feel they have to engage in such behaviour because of their own feelings of inferiority and lack of self-worth. I don’t condone murder but I can sympathize the feelings that motivated it. Did those kids who engaged in ridicule and bullying get what they deserved? Was revenge worth losing one’s life or wrecking it? Should we think twice before we marginalize and ostracize others?

The Big Rock Candy Mountain

We all know guys like Bo Mason. Whether products of their upbringing or their inborn nature they aren’t specifically lazy or shiftless, they just feel cooped up working inside and feel the need for open spaces, they tend to rebel when authority figures try to tell them what to do. That said it doesn’t make them easy to live with or particularly dependable. They tend to move around a great deal.

We all know guys like Bo Mason. Whether products of their upbringing or their inborn nature they aren’t specifically lazy or shiftless, they just feel cooped up working inside and feel the need for open spaces, they tend to rebel when authority figures try to tell them what to do. That said it doesn’t make them easy to live with or particularly dependable. They tend to move around a great deal.

Wallace Stegner’s book becomes quite readable after one works one’s way through the first few pages. The family moves to the Saskatchewan Prairies. WW#1, wheat farming, weather, the influenza epidemic, prohibition all figure in the storyline. Since Bo is ever restless and always looking for the main chance no matter what side of the law it may take him the family is always moving. He operates best in places the law hasn’t yet reached. In Salt Lake City they change houses 8 times in 4 years. Should we be surprised that when it comes to his son Chet the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree?

"Big Rock Candy Mountain", first recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928, is a folk music song about a hobo's idea of paradise,....

 One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fires were burning,
Down the track came a hobo hiking,
And he said, "Boys, I'm not turning
I'm headed for a land that's far away
Besides the crystal fountains
So come with me, we'll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land that's fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
And the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall
The winds don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around it
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
The jails are made of tin.
And you can walk right out again,
As soon as you are in.
There ain't no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws nor picks,
I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
....
I'll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

[Fortunately Anon cannot sue for copyright infringement.]

The Orenda

The Life Force in Wendat. Religion is tied to a people’s world view and forms part of their cultural experience. It is expressed in the language of the people who live it. In bringing a theology born of a foreign culture to aboriginal peoples I question whether missionaries did them any favours. It served to make them uneasy and out of step with their way of life. By living among them the Crows or Black Robes brought European disease to Native Peoples that decimated their numbers and caused further break down of tribal life as it attacked the strongest in their prime of life.

The book is written from the point of view of one of the Crows Father Christophe, Bird--a tribal warrior, and  Snow Falls--a girl he captures on a raiding party. The setting appears to be a thinly disguised St Marie Among the Hurons.

As mentioned in other discussions these people lived a brutal lifestyle in which the torture of one’s enemies formed an integral part. Death was by exsanguination, starvation, or blunt force. The body’s intinct for self-preservation betraying the desire for release from pain. The authour uses his tribe’s own words for people and place names.

The Purchase

The players

Daniel--the father
Rebecca--his wife who died in childbirth

Ruth Boyd--the orphan housekeeper taken as Daniel’s wife at 13 or 14
Mary--eldest daughter and surrogate mother to:
Isaac--9 years old
Benjamin--4 years old
Jemima--2 years old
Joseph--the baby

Miss Patch--a chestnut mare
Mulberry--a lesser lame mare

Tick--the cow

Onesimus--the slave, an inadvertent purchase at auction 13?


Ostracised by his Quaker community when a housekeeper remains under his roof after the death of his wife Daniel takes his family into Western Virginia by wagon.

Owning a slave presents problems for a Quaker not least of which are the moral issues. Simus breaks his leg needing the aid of a native healer from an adjoining farm. Then the girl gets pregnant those parts of the lad seemingly working just fine.

The book demonstrates the cruelty and injustice of slavery poisoning the lives of both owned and owner. It also points the finger at Christianity that observes the letter of the law but shows not love.

The Boundless

The Boundless is another fine product of Kenneth Oppel’s fertile imagination. Cornelius Van Horne, Donald Smith, and Sam Steele are historical figures and Smith’s flubbing of the Last Spike on the CPR line through the Rockies at Craigellachie were real events. Sasquatches remain mythical creatures and it is doubtful a single-engine train the length described ever made it through the inclines of the Rockies. Oppel is probably too young to have known that first class cars were normally placed at the rear of a train away from the noise, smoke and dirt of the engine and tender cars and the freight cars up front, the reverse of his description. The tension between a son’s dreams and a father’s expectations is a universal story.

All the Light We Cannot See

Begins in Jacques Cartier’s home of Saint-Malo, Brittany, France as the island fortress is about to bombed into oblivion. Having begun near the ending the book retraces its steps to document the lives of people resident on the island at the time. There are two principal characters, blind Marie-Laure, daughter of a museum curator in Paris; and Werner who with his sister Jutta is a German orphan. It seems to be out of fashion to tell a story from beginning to end these days. This one jumps regularly from childhood memories to adulthood and points in between and from place to place. Somehow it is easier to follow than most I’ve read lately. What is most poignantly evident here is the utter futility of war and the unspeakable things people will do to survive. Living or dying is random. The story is well told, the content can be rather harrowing.

Wild

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Setting out on a strenuous 1100-mile wilderness trek as a means of finding oneself seems a rather capricious thing to do. If nothing else one will find out things about oneself. Muscles you didn’t know you had, blisters and calluses, and aches that shouldn’t appear until decades hence. As one who walked for a living it amazes me that people who have never walked any distance on flat ground or camped in other than an organized park set out on these challenging treks. Little wonder emergency staff frequently have to rescue these less than intrepid hikers.

The book begins by introducing us to the writer’s family and spends the first chapter describing her Mother’s death from Cancer. A 22-year-old doesn’t expect to be burying her 44-year-old mother. The next four years it would seem disappeared in a haze before jumping off in the Mojave Desert. Five hundred miles on and 70 pages from the end of the book the lass is at a rest area along the trail tarted up and looking for casual sex.

The author rages at her mother for dying, for the mistakes she made in life, all the while making many of the same. These passages are not the strongest sections of the book. She looks at a handsome male and can’t seem to resist fantasizing sex with him. The fact that men find her attractive seems to re-enforce her sense of self-worth. Or to put it another way her self-esteem is at a low ebb.

The 323-page book is well-edited and for the most part eminently readable. Once the reader gets started the text seems to flow. Your personal feelings about casual sex will colour your opinions about the book, I expect my own are obvious.

The Book Thief

--Spoiler Alert--

Takes a while to warm up to this book but then the reader has 433 pages to do so. Takes even longer to figure out exactly what is happening, who is doing the acting, and to whom it is happening. The narrator would appear to be the Grim Reaper who continues the story throughout. Just what part the book thief plays in all this is not immediately apparent. Transpires we are transported to a small working class enclave in a suburb of Munich at the outset of WW#2. Hitler’s treatment of the Jews plays a large part in the story. Interesting to learn the experience of ordinary German citizens during the Allied carpet bombing of Germany. The writing style and formatting would probably be best appreciated in hard copy rather than as I read it in e-Book format.

The Burning of Brenham by Sharon Brass

Essentially a boosterish history of 19th Century Brenham, Texas, the great fire of 1866 being a significant milestone. Texas was not the site of fighting during the Civil War but having fought on the Confederate side it came under Federal Reconstruction, The Freedman’s Bureau, and Federal Troop occupation. To this day Texans do their best to ignore the existence of a Federal Government and the imposition of Sheridan’s Black troops was not well received.

The success of any community depends on existence of men who can make things happen and rally others behind them. In Brenham the name Giddings stands out. The Railway they helped build gave local products access to a world market. The system of cisterns and fire-fighting was ahead of its time and a model that has yet to catch on in the rest of Texas. The local newspaper man is a model for many a frontier movie opus.

It is obvious that the writer had access to and permission to use well-preserved archives. This 70-page booklet stands out among so many examples of its genre in having been printed in colour. The quality of the reproductions is exemplary.

When Everything Feels Like the Movies

Cross-dressing Jude/Judy’s Mother is an exotic dancer with enhanced bosom. His step-father doesn’t get Jude and favours Ray the son he fathered. When Jude isn’t spaced out on alcohol and drugs he lives in an imaginary world in which he is a film star. He shares his basement bedroom with a pet cat name Stoned Hairspray. The book is written from his point of view and makes extensive use of movie references and hip language that will probably date quickly. It fantasizes sexual encounters and has other adult situations and some violence.