James Lee Burke. Feast Day of Fools. © 2011
This is a sequel to Rain Gods,
which featured Hackberry
Holland, former lawyer, sot and rake, who is one tough sheriff. He again takes
on the Thompson sub-machine gun toting psychopath Jack Collins, but there are a
host of other bad guys as well. There’s a Russian pornographer and arms dealer,
a self-righteous American arms dealer who has reneged on a deal with the
Russian and tried to take him off the board by reporting him to the IRS, and a
little band of Mexicans who kidnap useful people and sell them. In this case it’s a drone designer who is
wanted by both Al Qaeda and a large Mexican drug operation. About everything happens including a burial
alive and a crucifixion with a nail gun.
Collins gets away again. One of
the good guys is a Chinese woman who used to work for Air America and it now helping
Mexican illegals to avoid detention after crossing into Texas. Now I guess I’ve read enough James Lee Burke. April 2015
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Cory Doctorow. Pirate Cinema. © 2012
Trent McCauley, a teenager living in Bradford in the north of England,
has a passion for downloading films and editing bits and pieces of them to make
his own original films. The novel is set
few years in the future when copyright laws are even stricter than now. He gets caught and his whole family loses
internet access for a year. His mother
can’t draw her disability payments without going to a central office, his
father loses his job working at home for a call center, and his little sister
can’t do her school work. Trent runs
away to London. He meets Jen, who has
mastered the arts of begging, feeding himself out of skiffs (dumpsters) and
living in squats. They find an abandoned building which once had a pub on the
ground floor and move in. Trent starts
to make films again. He meets a girl
activist named Twenty-six and together with some other film makers and assorted
weird people they start producing film showings in cemeteries and abandoned
buildings and tunnels, including a cavernous room with a vaulted ceiling in a
Victorian era sewer. Trent calls himself
Cecil B. Deville. There is general
agreement that his films are great, but eventually he gets caught and sued by
the film moguls for 78 million pounds.
Trent and the others along with one MP and some serious adult activists
try to get the onerous law repealed.
They fail. Few MPs show up for
the vote and the party whips threaten the few who do show up with expulsion if
they vote for repeal. The pro-repeal MP
submits a private bill to try to get some relief for the young filmmakers. After an intense lobbying effort it looks
like the bill hasn’t got a chance, even though an election is coming and
thousands of people have visited their MPs to express support for the bill. Prospects look dim. Trent has made a new 2 ½ minute film that
makes their case, and they think they could win if the public could see
it. Unfortunately, the judge for his
case has forbidden Trent from getting on the internet, and he will go to jail if
he does. Twenty-six comes up with the
idea of projecting Trent’s film on the side of the Parliament building. With equipment from Aziz, who has built an
enormous inventory of electronic parts by scrounging around in skiffs, they
mount a projector and mirrors at three different locations and are able to project
the film onto Parliament off and on for a whole night without getting caught. Others pick it up and put it on the internet
and by morning they have 80 million views. The bill passes. Trent’s world looks wonderful, until
Twenty-six tells him she’ll be leaving for Edinburgh to study law. After a while, he starts making films
again. Now it’s legal. This is a story that’s well told. Getting it by ear narrated in what I assume
is an authentic Northern accent wasn’t my favorite part of the experience. Beyond this being a good story, I value this
book for its discussion of how copyright rules can affect our lives, how the
internet has become essential to daily life, and how younger generations have
adapted to technology and let their lives be shaped by it. May 2015
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Ken Follett. Code to Zero. ©
2000 I read Eye of the Needle shortly after it came out in 1978, but later,
after I had discovered works like Pillars
of the Earth and the Century Trilogy,
I seem to have forgotten that Follett also wrote thrillers. In this one it’s 1958 and each chapter starts
with a brief description of some aspect of the construction and launching of a
Redstone rocket. A man wakes up in a restroom
at Union Station in Washington dressed like a vagrant and with a terrible
hangover and no memory of who he is.
Another vagrant tells him he is Luke and leads him off to breakfast at a
mission. Over breakfast he sees an
article about a countdown at Cape Canaveral.
It sort of rings a bell. After
Luke leaves the mission, he gets a feeling that the other vagrant is sort of a
minder and ditches him. Then he
discovers he’s being followed by a team of professionals. His wartime OSS training kicks in. He loses the tails, finds a way to clean
himself up and acquire some decent clothes and then sets out to find out who he
is. Up to here this is a book you can’t
put down, but not so much from here on.
Luke eventually finds that his memory was wiped at a hospital the
previous evening (something that is not actually possible) and that he knows a
lot about rockets. He crashes a meeting
of rocket scientists at the Smithsonian and lots of people know him. He is Dr, Claude Lucas, rocket scientist at
the NASA facility in Huntsville, Alabama.
A countdown has started for a critical launch, and Luke has to figure
out why he is in Washington instead of at the Cape. What he doesn’t know is that he had
discovered a plan to prevent a successful launch by triggering the self
destruct mechanism remotely during the first stage after liftoff and had come
to Washington to expose the plan.
Anthony, Luke’s closest friend at Harvard, is now a senior operative at CIA and also a Soviet spy. He was the one who arranged the memory wipe
and, now that that has failed, sets out to kill Luke. It’s all very thrilling but unfortunately
also rather preposterous. I read a bunch
of reviews. Some people liked it, some
didn’t, some gave up on it. Follett is a
master of action and suspense, but I was disappointed. April 2015
.
Ulysses S. Grant. Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. First published in 1885 by Mark Twain. The print version came in two volumes. The recorded version that I listened to on my
Kindle Fire comes in three parts. Grant
wrote this memoire to earn enough money to support his wife after his death. He was in severe pain for much of the time he
was writing and died of throat cancer at age 63 nine days after the book was
finished. 300,000 copies were printed
and it earned $450,000 for the Grant family.
The book is written in the first person and the reader, Peter Johnson,
makes you feel like you are listening to Grant himself. Grant comes off as a very down to earth and
worldly person without pretensions or hang ups. It’s
also clear that he was extremely smart and the best military man to be leading
the union forces. As a young man his
aspiration was to become a professor of mathematics. He often expressed sympathy for the slaves and
for the needs of working people, and he tried to take good care of his soldiers. If he were alive today, he would certainly be
considered a liberal. My favorite quote
in the book is this: “In school I repeated ‘A noun is the name of a thing’ so
many times that I came to believe it.”
Grant was born in Ohio April 27, 1822 and left there for West Point when
he was 17. On the way he traveled east
on the Erie Canal until he reached a railhead.
The train averaged 12 mph and sometimes hit 18 mph. It seemed to him that it was “annihilating space.”
He graduated from West Point and began
a routine military career. He describes his
service in the Mexican War, one he considered unjust, and left the army
sometime afterwards and worked at various things until he was recalled for the
Civil War. Then it’s one engagement
after another. Grant had served earlier
as a quartermaster, and what struck me was how difficult that job was, i.e.,
getting the right amount of food, forage and munitions to the right places at
the right times. Troops and material had
to be moved over rail lines that were constantly damaged by rebel forces or
over terrible roads, which were also sometimes damaged by the enemy. Along with fighting men and supplies, the
staff had to move engineers and their equipment to rebuild bridges or construct
new ones. Grant seems to have been able
to keep it all in his head. His genius
at moving men and material seems to account for much of his success in the West
and with the Army of the Potomac. Along
with these skills, Grant seems to have had a keen understanding of the
strengths and weaknesses of his fellow officers. It was Grant who recognized the abilities of
Sherman and Sheridan and unleashed them on the Confederacy. As I was “reading” along, Grant mentions that
he noticed the abandoned Confederate field hospital after he overran their
position at Shiloh. My great grandfather,
Michael Beshoar, was the Confederate surgeon at that hospital. When the hospital was about to be overrun by
Union forces, he buried his papers and his amputation kit at the site. Two years later when he was a paroled POW in
St. Louis, the amputation kit still in its rosewood box was returned to him by
a Union officer. Last year I donated
that kit to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, where it is on display
from time to time. April and May 2015.
John Ransom. Andersonville Diary. 1881 I read MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Andersonville
shortly after it came out in 1955. I
don’t remember much other than that it was a horror in the same league as the
Nazi death camps, Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and the stockades into which
the Soviets confined German prisoners until they starved to death. Ransom was a printer from Jackson MI, who was
a sergeant in the 9th Michigan Cavalry when he was captured. He was first imprisoned at Belle Isle near
Richmond and then transferred to Andersonville, where he almost died of dropsy
and scurvy. He was saved by two friends
who held him up in the ranks between them as prisoners deemed well enough for
transfer to another camp were marched out of Andersonville. The sick were left behind and over three
months one third died the first month, then one half and finally another
third. His group was taken south close
to the Florida border, and he was hospitalized for a couple of months until he
was well enough to serve as a nurse to other prisoners. He says that the doctors there were as kind
as the guards at Andersonville were cruel.
He escaped from that camp for six days and then was recaptured. While his new group was being transferred from
that camp on flat cars, he and two new friends, the Buck brothers from Ohio,
rolled off their car and escaped. With
the help of slaves and Union sympathizers they were able to survive in the
woods until Sherman’s army overran the area on its march to Savannah. The diary in three volumes written with stub
pencils is an almost day to day account of his experiences. It seems a miracle that he was able to keep
all three volumes through three camps and two escapes. Throughout the narrative he remained upbeat
and optimistic, except when he was near death towards the end of his time at
Andersonville. Perhaps it was his
optimism plus his resourcefulness in getting bits and pieces of food that kept
him alive. Reviewers have commented that
despite being untrained his writing is excellent. Perhaps they forget that he was a printer by
trade. I almost gave up in the early
chapters, because the narrative was so grim.
I’m glad I stayed with it. May
2015
Daniel Silva. The Fallen Angel. © 2012
Daniel Silva never disappoints.
Mossad agent Gabriel Allon is
retired again and working at the Vatican to restore Caravaggio’s Deposition, when he’s asked to take a
look at the body of a woman, a presumed suicide who has fallen from the
viewers’ gallery in St. Peters. It’s
immediately clear to Gabriel that this is no suicide. The Pope’s counselor asks Gabriel to take
time out from his restoration work and try to figure out who killed her and
why. What follows is a tour through the
underworld of the stolen antiquities trade, money laundering at the Vatican
Bank and an Iranian plot to blow up the Temple Mount and launch a third
intifada that would destroy Israel. April 2015
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