# Cheer and jeer THC as he reads a bunch of books (at least 80) in 2014!



## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Two years ago when I did the first of these threads, I set a target of eighty books because I really didn't know what a realistic goal for the year was! I read almost 100 books that year, and broke 100 in 2013. I found that the numbers caused me to do artificial things to meet them--I found myself avoiding long books the first year, tried to fix that the second year by fixing a goal of five "doorbusters" last year, abandoned that because a lot of books I wanted to read were about 450 pages, and now I'm just going to say I'll read a bunch of books in 2014.

A general goal I have is to read a book about each of the US Presidents, in order. I've started that already, by reading the book about George Washington and Mount Vernon late last year. But I'm not putting a target date or rate on it, and it will probably take awhile. If I read one book a month (and I doubt I will go that fast) we'll have a new President when I catch up to the modern President, so I will be at this awhile.

Similarly, I hope this year to read at least one volume of the huge three book biography of Winston Churchill written by William Manchester. I grabbed the first two giant volumes (about 800 pages and about 1000 pages) when they were marked down over a year ago, but haven't read them yet (and in fact mentioned them as potential reading subjects in my opening post of 2013) so don't hold your breath waiting for me to finish them.

I have already gotten off to a spectacular reading start for the year, and am waaay behind on writing up books (I've read four books already!). So here are the first couple:



15 Minutes: General LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation

Years ago, I played a low-level role in the US Army's nuclear weapons program. Fortunately, my former job no longer exists, and the Army is out of the nuclear weapons business now. But even before I had a job involving them, I was fascinated by nuclear weapons. And although I have very broad interests in military history, my favorite part is when some disruption (usually technological) makes a total hash of the traditional ways of war, and the soldiers (or sailors or airmen) have to figure out how to win and not be killed when fighting with whatever the new weapon or tactic is. So I was definitely intrigued at a book that promised to tell the history of how the Strategic Air Command (SAC) tried to figure out how to fight and win a nuclear war after the first use of nuclear weapons in World War II.

The early days were especially interesting, and I'd never read much about them before. The US Government was quick to pivot from Japan as the enemy to the Soviet Union. Before the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, and weeks before the surrender of Japan, Washington issued General LeMay a lengthy list of possible target cities and suggested routes to them....In the Soviet Union! The original atomic bomb had to be assembled shortly before take off, and didn't remain functional for very long once assembled (and the absolutely final assembly steps had to be taken by aircrew while the plane was in flight to its target). This high-maintenance bombs, and a shortage of technicians and of fissionable materials meant that the initial "formal" plan for atomic war with the Soviets envisioned dropping thirty-four bombs, but took sixty days to do it! Soon after, when production geared up and lessons had been learned (they had soon figured out how to get twice as much explosive force from the same amount of Plutonium), things speeded up to fifty bombs in thirty days. They definitely didn't go straight into a push-button war!

I found it odd that when morale problems and a high accident rate became a problem for the SAC aircrews, Charles Lindbergh of all people, was called in as a consultant to snoop around and find what was wrong. He seems to have done a pretty good job, actually.

When testing an aerial refueling system that required the bomber to fly straight and level but very close to the tanker, they found that the receptacle on the bomber for the refueling boom had to be located OUTSIDE the bomber pilot's line of sight. Otherwise the pilot would inevitably get distracted from the focus needed for close formation flying with delicate planes filled with fuel and nuclear wepons, because he would watch the boom link up to the receptacle on his plane.

The 15 minutes in the title refers to the time that SAC bombers had to become airborne. It was assumed that an incoming Soviet strike would destroy bombers that didn't get away from their airfields and get airborne, so time was essential. Everything was tried to cut down launch time, from making the turns the planes took while taxiing 45 degree turns instead of 90 degree turns (so the planes didn't have to slow down on turns!) to launching big bombers two or more abreast.

Lots of interesting trivia, I'd fill pages of stuff if I talked about everything I highlighted when reading. The book's material was fascinating for me. The author's writing style didn't thrill me, however. The book is something like watching MTV was in the old days. Short self-contained pieces of writing, then move on with no transition to something completely different, often on a totally different subject. The book is divided into chapters, and some chapters at least mostly focus on one subject, but some are just an assemblage of unrelated stuff. I didn't like this, but still found the information made compelling reading. The author had a couple of other habits that bothered me. He loves to end each little self-contained article of information with a stand-alone sentence that changes the tone from what it has before. Sometimes this is innocuous, like "It was June 8, 1955." but sometimes it is something I think intended to be shocking. I found it tiresome. Similarly, the author uses "No doubt..." over and over and over again, sometimes inappropriately. For instance when describing a fire on a bomber, he wrote "No doubt the bomber interior filled with smoke." (this is from memory, but is very close to his words). Presumably he is writing from accident reports or reliable accounts, don't they say whether the aircraft filled with smoke or not? He uses "no doubt..." over and over again, and it becomes a distraction.

The author doesn't hesitate to report on some errors made, and things that seem to be absurd now, but he does seem to respect the people of SAC, and at the end of the book, he praises LeMay. When looking back at things, it is tempting to sneer at some of the things they worried about, but it is important to remember that these guys were living it "NOW" and they didn't know how things would come out, or how strong their opponents were as hindsight allows us now.

Despite some annoying writing habits, the subject and the information was so gripping for me that I have to give the book four and a half stars, and think about five. Highly recommended for those interested in the subject.



The Red Pavilion: A Judge Dee Mystery, by Robert van Gulik

In late January 2013, I read my first Judge Dee book, and liked it. It has taken me this long to get back to them. This book is much later in the series than my first. While trying to travel back home from a summons to the capitol, Judge Dee is arrives in a sort of Chinese Las Vegas, where he diverted by the request of another official to take care of the formalities in investigating a simple suicide. It ends up that the room Judge Dee rents for himself was the site of the suicide, and things become more complicated when Judge Dee discovers a second suicide, committed in the same manner, in this same room when he returns from dinner! Further investigation reveals that there was another "suicide" in the same style in this room thirty years ago! The "simple suicide" might be neither simple nor a suicide....

As usual for a mystery, I will refrain from discussing details, but I liked this a lot. It is a fairly short book (194 pages), and kept me interested enough that I read it in one evening, and almost in one sitting. A solid four and a half stars from me.

I have two more books to cover, but this will hold me for this evening. I enjoy writing these threads, I hope those who follow this new one will continue to enjoy it!


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

I will be watching for updates.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, by John L. Locke

Usually when I buy a nonfiction book, it either is marked down to a few bucks (I monitor such things, and if a nonfiction book I can imagine myself reading someday goes down to three bucks or under, I usually just buy it, even if I have no immediate plans to read it) or else the book is something that has really got me intrigued, and I'll pay more and read it almost immediately. This book is different--I paid $9.99 for it a few months ago, though I remember at the time being interested but not THAT intrigued by it (I see it is now a little higher still). I didn't read it till this weekend. I'm glad I shelled out the $9.99, I really like this book!

This is a serious book, written by a university professor of linguistics, though it is not a research-oriented or academic book. It is heavily-footnoted. This doesn't keep it from being very readable, both in terms of talking about interesting stuff and in terms of having a pleasant writing style. It really is a look at eavesdropping through history, mostly focused on a few specific eras.

The first part of the book talks about what we are able to know about how the most primitive humans lived. Based on studies of the most primitive humans that have been discovered (many of these studies were done in the early Twentieth, or even the Nineteenth Century), the most original living condition was generally a ring of shelters around a campfire and social area. Except in inclement weather, few of these people spent a lot of time in the shelter, which is primarily a storage area, and is quite flimsy. Everyone can see and hear everyone else at nearly all times, and deliberately seeking privacy is considered aberrant or suspicious in most of these cultures. Everyone is fully informed about everyone else's business. Based on studies of social behavior in primates, it sounds like the desire to snoop on our neighbors is inborn in our minds. In such societies, those who don't know their neighbors business are at a disadvantage compared to those who do. But we seem to have kept this prying urge, even as our living conditions changed.

Author Locke explains that the term "eavesdropping" comes from the practice of standing under the eaves of a building to hear and potentially see what is happening inside. Numerous cultures have a similar term. Many Roman comedies from 2000 years ago feature extensive eavesdropping, so the activity is definitely something that has continued even when we moved past our village origins.

Locke talks briefly about blackmail (which often happens based on information gained eavesdropping, and notes that it is unusual since it makes two things that are perfectly legal when done separately (saying something that is known to be true, and asking a person for money) into a crime when done together! Not a big deal, but I'd never thought of it that way.

There are several detailed accounts of actual eavesdropping in the Middle Ages. We know about these from court records, most commonly for crimes that were particularly opposed by the church, notably adultery. Snooping in this way was even called "Holy Watchfulness" for awhile! The most frequent eavesdroppers changed from women to men over time, and the book discusses why this happened. Even later, court charges began to be filed against women for publicly repeating information they had gained through eavesdropping, usually attacking another woman for alleged adultery with the gossiper's husband. Doing this loudly and publicly was a crime and was aggressively prosecuted for many years. One statute from 1675 define a "scold" as "a troublesome and angry woman _(sex-specific!)_ who by her brawling and wrangling amongst her neighbors doth break the publick peace nad beget, cherish, and increase publick discord." In the two centuries starting about 1370, being a scold was one of the most frequently-prosecuted social crimes. In 1521, Agnes Yve set a probable record. She made accusation s of "whore" so often that forty different women turned up in court to support the accusation of scolding! The author points out that scolding still happens. Overall about one in three episodes of The Jerry Springer Show involved sexual competition or adultery!

Eavesdropping increased as more people lived in villages or even towns, and were around strangers more often. The next heavily-covered topic is much later in the 1700s and 1800s, when migration to the city produced a fad of peoplewatching. Some of the best selling books of the time were "typologies" to guide peoplewatchers in identifying and classifying the different people they saw in the city. Edgar Allen Poe even wrote about it. Polls show that even today, peoplewatching is one of the most common reasons people visit public parks. A poll in the 1970s found that over half the people visiting parks went to people watch, while only about twenty percent said they went to the park to wade, eat, exercise, engage in hobbies, or the reasons you might expect!

The most interesting chapter in the book, in my opinion, discussed spying by servants on their masters. This became a very big deal when large, closed-off manor houses became popular in England in the 1700s and 1800s. Being a servant had become a major occupation, at one point it appears that ten percent of the English population made their living in this way. There are numerous court cases where servants testified against their master or mistress in some matter. Often it was supporting an accusation of adultery. From court testimony, it appears many servants consciously kept detailed records of what they observed in these situations. A 1713 book, The Art of Keeping Wives Faithful, encouraged the Lord of the manor to deliberately buy the the loyalty of his staff in keeping an eye on his wife! There is a lot of discussion on this, and some of the quaint technology we associate with 19th Century manor houses is an attempt by the nobility to defend themselves against being spied on. Since servants must be near to overhear that they need to provide something, the bell pull was produced so servants could be further away but still be promptly available when called. Similarly, dumbwaiters reduced the need for servants to be present while serving drinks or finger food to small gatherings of their lords and ladies. I didn't know what an escutcheon was, but it is this:










The sliding cover over the keyhole was on the inside of a room in these old-fashioned locks. It was specifically to keep people from spying through the keyhole! The book doesn't mention it, but the earliest US spy satellites were referred to as the "Keyhole" series, because of the analogy to looking through a keyhole to see something that wasn't intended for you to see. I understand that better after reading this book.

The final historical chapter covers "virtual eaves" or technological ways that we learn about the private doings of other real or imaginary people (sometimes with the cooperation of the person being viewed). In addition to the obvious social media such as Facebook, written biographies and romance novels are covered. A 1740 novel called Pamela is arguably the first "modern" romance novel, though it was written by a man. These early novels were apparently quite graphic, much more so that most of today's romance novels.

I loved this book, found it extremely interesting, and definitely give it five stars.



Suddenly, the Cider Didn't Taste so Good, by John Ford, Sr.

Another of my occupational memoirs. This one is the story of a Maine Game Warden. There are lots of moments of humor, as the title suggests, but some very serious stuff, including a gunfight while pursuing two prison escapees, recovering the body of a drowning victim, and dealing with a diagnosis of cancer followed by chemotherapy. There are some heartwarming accounts of raising abandoned baby animals. I like the book, though I didn't like it nearly as well as the reviewers, which give it mostly four or five star ratings. I found it a solid three and a half stars. Competently-written, but it didn't grab me enough to get a higher rating.









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The Last Amazon, by A. Bertram Chandler

I've been rereading the entire series of John Grimes science fiction novels, and this one is next. This is a phase of Captain Grimes' life where he is more ground-bound. Swashbuckling space travel doesn't play a large role here. In the last book (The Anarch Lords, which I read last year), Grimes had been recruited by the Federation, his former employers, as a covert agent, and appointed a planetary governor to upend an exploitative government. Grimes succeeded, and as a reward was allowed to leave this unwanted job. He is going to meet his beloved tramp freighter on the planet Sparta, which featured in Spartan Planet, which I covered in these threads a year so ago. Sparta was a "lost colony" out of contact with most of humanity for centuries, which had developed an all-male culture based on genetic engineering with vague references to ancient Greece. In an earlier book in the series, Grimes discovered them, reintroduced them to galactic society, and the idea of women was introduced. That was years ago now, and one of the men Grimes met back then is now ruler of Sparta, but there has been a lot of social turmoil, immigration of many women, and the politics are dicey, to say the least. This time instead of being a revolutionary, Grimes is a counter-revolutionary when there is an attempt to topple the government of his friend. The book is "Old Homes Week", there is only one major character who isn't returning from a previous Grimes story. I liked this one a lot, I'm not sure why it appealed to me so much. But only two brief scenes in a spaceship, so this is not your typical space opera. It still gets four stars from me. The cover above is from my old Ace paperback in the 1980 (or thereabouts) publication. It is available in Kindle form as part of this collection:


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## VictoriaP (Mar 1, 2009)

That book on eavesdropping really does sound fascinating. Thanks for the thorough writeup; I'll have to see if our library has it.


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## Trophywife007 (Aug 31, 2009)

I plan on following as you read through your books this year, THC.  Bon Voyage!


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## heidi_g (Nov 14, 2013)

Yes, the eavesdropping book sounds completely fascinating. It's especially fascinating against the backdrop of what's occurring with today with the NSA and modern technology. Makes me something there's something very primitive/primal driving that? 

I love the point about "seeking privacy as an aberration," mostly because as you pointed out, it was considered very disturbing. I think, on some level, people/society still finds it very disturbing. I never knew, though, that there is a history of that.

The 15 minutes book, also sounds pretty fascinating

Thanks for sharing your reads in this manner. I'll keep this bookmarked and try to keep up with it. Like I said, I want to do this too, but I doubt it will be as detailed!!!!! I read 70 books last year. I'm hoping to read more this year, but setting 70 as my marker. I'm on my 4th book so far, so maybe I'll start the thread this weekend.

Cheers!


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## Kenneth Rosenberg (Dec 3, 2010)

Wow, THC, your reading pace amazes me!  If I read one book a month I figure I'm doing all right.    That nuclear book looks like a good one, no doubt interesting despite the "no doubts!"


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

For anyone who was intrigued by the Eavesdropping book, but put off by the price, it has dropped from over $12 to $9.99. ( Link above )

I had minor surgery last week, which has kept me from posting much, but I'm still reading and will be back here describing more books soon.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

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Galactic Derelict, by Andre Norton

This was a re-read from way back for me. I still own a paperback copy of it (with the exact cover above) that I bought when I was in fifth or sixth grade! It is a sequel to The Time Traders that I read a couple of weeks ago.

I really enjoyed Time Traders when I reread it, and I had similar high hopes for this one. It is a sequel, so hero Ross Murdock from Time Traders is in this book, but he is not the viewpoint character. The heroes are working for the government using time machines, searching for advanced technology from alien spaceships wrecked on Earth thousands of years in the past, trying to keep us even with or ahead of the Russians, who are doing the same thing. They have found quite a prize--A small but intact alien spaceship. The plan is to use their time machine (even that machine is converted alien technology they don't understand well) to move the entire ship to the present, even though this is much larger than anything else that has been moved in time before. Things go wrong, but the ship does arrive in our present time--And some automated system activates the ship to take off and head to other stars on a course apparently programmed by a pilot who has been dead for thousands of years! Unfortunately for our heroes, they are on board when it leaves. The book describes the voyage they involuntarily take, and their efforts to get back home to Earth. If you've read Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, the book had some of that feel for me.

My high hopes weren't dashed, but they weren't fulfilled either. While I loved the first book, this one was merely okay. I give it three and a half stars. The book just wasn't as gripping as Time Traders. Still recommended if you read Time Traders and want more. I complained bitterly about some editing of Cold War references from the original Time Traders. I assume there is some of that in this book, but I didn't notice it, and the Russians are not in the picture in this book.

The book isn't available on its own through Kindle, but it is the second book in this two-book free collection:



There are two more books in the series, which I will be reading by and by.



Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery, by Richard Hollingham

The title gives away the plot here, this is a nonfiction history of surgery. The book apparently was put out to accompany a BBC series I've never seen. We are given a series of short pieces describing different key developments in the history of surgery. Since I had bladder surgery last week, I thought this was very appropriate and timely reading for me! I read a lot of this sort of thing, so had heard of a couple of the stories in this book, but most was totally new and very interesting. As you'd expect from a book accompanying a tv series, it is written for a popular audience and is not technical reading. Lots of interesting details.

Surgery in the mid 1800s was a dangerous thing. Sir Robert Liston, one of the premier surgeons in Britain, had a fatality rate of about one in six in sixty-six operations he conducted over a six year period. At St. Bart's, considered a leading hospital, the fatality rate was one in four. Before anesthesia, doing things QUICKLY was considered paramount, because of difficulties in controlling a struggling agonized patient, and the need to close off blood vessels before anyone bled to death. This lead to blunders like amputating the wrong leg, lopping off fingers of surgery assistants, and the like. One operation killed the patient, an attending medic, and an observer (reportedly died of shock!) for a three hundred percent fatality rate!

In the 1800s, women attended by midwives had a much lower fatality rate than those attended by the leading surgeons, who had often just come from teaching a class dissecting a corpse in the morgue to attend a childbirth! Word of this got around, and women tried to get assigned to midwives rather than surgeons. The hospital responded not by trying to reduce mortality among surgeons, or see what they could learn from the midwives, but tried to keep women from working the system to avoid physicians....

I was old enough to barely be aware of the first heart transplants almost fifty years ago, and I am shocked and a bit saddened that the physicians seem to have been choosing transplant patients and choosing when and who to operate based on getting media coverage as well as patient welfare. Much earlier, Charles Lindbergh (yes, the aviator!) was involved in some early transplant research that didn't bear fruit. Transplants were invariably unsuccessful until drugs to suppress the immune system were developed. A handful of successes using identical twins and partial successes using close relatives didn't really change that a tissue transplant was an act of desperation.

Some of this stuff is creepy or disturbing. There are some graphic details in a few of the accounts, but for me the most disturbing thing was a scientist who had modified bulls to be responsive to commands sent by a radio transmitter. Scarey!

A giant electromagnet was brought into an operating room in an attempt to help remove shrapnel from wounded soldiers. This hadn't been thought through, and when the magnet was turned on, the lights dimmed, the EKG went crazy, and every surgery scalpel and operating instrument in the room went flying to the magnet. It is a wonder nobody was seriously injured, and this was not tried again! Military surgery was important in making heart surgery possible. For many years, surgeons refused to operate on the heart no matter what the need, the failure rate was too high and the consequences of failure too grim. But in removing shrapnel from hearts, and sewing up the damaged hearts, the techniques of operating on living hearts were developed, and these were used to repair non-military heart trouble after the war.

Lots of fascinating stories, and highly readable. Very much recommended to those with an interest in the subject. A solid four stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Summer Lightning, by P. G. Wodehouse

Wodehouse is the author of my beloved Jeeves books. Till now, I had only read two of his non-Jeeves works, with middling results (abandoned A Damsel in Distress when I tried it a couple of years ago, and considered The Swoop! Or How Clarence Saved England acceptable only as a historical curiosity/absurdity--I covered The Swoop in an earlier 80 books thread, 2012 I think). This is part of a series of books about Blandings Castle, an English manor house peopled with a good-natured but dim Lord of the Manor and several of his colorful relations. The serving classes are also represented, and there is a butler who is a significant character, but he is definitely no Jeeves.

The general plan of the book is much like a typical Jeeves book, without Bertie or Jeeves. There are a couple of big-picture crises to be resolved, and obstacles to several romances (objections of family members and spats amongst the lovers) to be overcome. Here, the big crises are that Galahad Threepwood, an older family member who has been a solid citizen for many years, but had a wild and riotous youth, is writing his memoirs, and has pledged to reveal embarrassing stories best left untold about youthful antics of all sorts of important community members. Everyone is scheming to get the one handwritten copy of his manuscript. The other big crisis is that the apple of the Earl's eye, a huge prizewinning pig, has been stolen. These, as well as the romantic difficulties, are all resolved with a happy ending. In a Jeeves book, Jeeves would cut the Gordian knot of all the situations with one brilliant scheme that resolves a host of separate problems. In Blandings Castle, these problems are ground out on an individual basis. I didn't find this method as pleasing as Jeeves' work. I still liked the book, and the highlight is the brilliant Wodehouse Way With Words(TM). Overall, I give it four stars out of five. For your reading pleasure, here are a few brief excerpts that pleased me:

She felt, as she often felt in her brother Galahad's society, as if foxes were gnawing her vitals.

A keen observer might have noted a defensiveness in her manner. She looked like a girl preparing to cope with an aunt.

Mac had many admirable qualities, but not tact. He was the sort of man who would have tried to cheer Napoleon up by talking about the Winter Sports at Moscow.

From boyhood up, Lord Emsworth had possessed an intelligence about as mean as an intelligence can be without actually being placed under restraint.

How low an estimate Sir Gregory Parsloe had formed of his visitors' collective sanity was revealed by the fact that it was actually to Lord Emsworth that he now turned as the more intelligent of the pair.

"Have you ever tasted a mint julep, Beach?"
"Not to my recollection, sir."
"Oh, you'd remember all right if you had. Insidious things. They creep up to you like a baby sister and slide their little hands into yours and the next thing you know the judge is telling you to pay the clerk of the court fifty dollars."

"It is astonishing to me that any one individual can be such a poop. You'd have thought it would have required a large syndicate."

He was in no mood for fuss and gabble. Pot-luck with a tableful of Trappist monks he might just have endured, but not a hearty feed with the family.



Murder in the Queen's Armes, by Aaron Elkins

This is another of the Gideon Oliver books I've been reading. Gideon Oliver is an anthropology professor who has an unfortunate habit of getting tangled up in murder mysteries. Among other skills, he depends on his knowledge of bones to help him. This is the third in the series, and it continued the streak of being a great read! Most importantly, this is the book that finally asks the question you've all been itching to ask...

"Why would anyone steal a thirty-thousand year-old parieto-occipital calvareal fragment?"

 Gideon really does voice that question out loud! I guessed the reason for the theft quite early in the book, but was totally off-base in my theory of who the murderer was.

In a sentence, Gideon Oliver takes his bride to England on a honeymoon, but then gets caught up in the theft of an obscure but important ancient human remain from a museum, and finally in a murder on an archeological dig. As usual with mysteries, I can't discuss more without committing spoilers.

Interesting but useless bit of trivia: According to a museum curator in the book, in 1376, a royal proclamation required that every English town maintain a set of stocks for public embarassment as a punishment (and I found verification of that on the internet). The curator also says the proclamation has never been repealed, though I couldn't verify that.

I liked this one A LOT. Not quite a five star book, but a solid four and a half stars.


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## geoffthomas (Feb 27, 2009)

Entertaining as always, claw.
Thank you for sharing your finds with us.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

I wish I could write reviews like you do, Claw!

Betsy


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> I wish I could write reviews like you do, Claw!
> 
> Betsy


i like your reviews betsy. sometimes i find claw's hard to read....


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

telracs said:


> i like your reviews betsy. sometimes i find claw's hard to read....


I'm a short review kind of gal, when I'm writing them. (Have I mentioned that I'm lazy?) I like reading Claw's though...

Betsy


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Thanks for the kind words! I've been having more fun this year reading than writing things up, so I am behind, but I hope to do some catching up on posting here this weekend!



Spectroscopy: Key to the Stars, by Keith Robinson

As advertised, this is a book about how astronomers use spectroscopy, studying the light of stars and other objects to learn things about them. It is written for amateur astronomers who want to try spectroscopy for themselves, so is not a professional book, but it is still a tough read that will only be undertaken by someone serious or demented (I fall in both categories...).

I enjoy learning about something clever. I gasp with glee at a slick way of figuring something out, and spectroscopy is good for that. It is amazing how this can be used not only to learn the chemical composition of a star or other body, but its temperature, velocity towards or away from us, the structure of a multiple star system, and other things. I'm glad I read it, but it was a long tough slog even for a hardcore science nerd such as myself.

Please hold your applause, but I'm not going to try to recount most of the material covered. I will toss in a couple of interesting trivia tidbits, though:

In 1825, August Comte, a noted philosopher of the day, announced that the chemical composition of the stars was knowledge mankind would never possess. Ironically, this was the year after Gustav Kirchoff, one of the two founders of stellar spectroscopy was born.

In 1868, as America recovered from the devastating Civil War, and President Andrew Johnson was being impeached, French astronomer Jules Janssen (a Frenchman named Janssen?!) "discovered" Helium by observing its spectral lines in the light from the Sun. Helium was the first element to be discovered in this way. It was 1895 before an actual sample of helium was isolated and identified.

If you pay any attention to shows such as NOVA, you've probably heard that Hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe. Everyone knows that gold is pretty rare. For every 250 billion (with a B) atoms of hydrogen in the universe, there's just one atom of gold!

I'm glad I read this book, both for the understanding of spectroscopy itself, plus the review of basic physics stuff that I ought to know well as a card-carrying physics geek. But I wouldn't recommend it to any but the most determined readers. Despite that, it is about as readable as this sort of book can be, and it does a good job of covering the subject. So I give it a solid four stars.



Target Lancer, by Max Allan Collins

My favorite detective hero is undoubtedly Sherlock Holmes, and my favorite mystery writer must be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But my second favorites are undoubtedly detective Nate Heller and his creator, Max Allan Collins. Collins is incredibly prolific and never disappoints, and Heller is by far my favorite of his many characters. I reviewed some Heller books in my 2012 thread, but in 2013, I deliberately didn't read any Nate Heller books so I could explore some of the other characters created by Collins. So not a word from a Heller novel passed before my eyes in 2013! But now that year is over, and I can dive back into my favorite!

Nate Heller's (fictional) career began with the Chicago police in the early 1930s, and the earliest Nate Heller books describe him in the era of Al Capone and John Dillinger. He became a private detective, and further Heller books have him getting involved in most every famous crime or scandal of the 30s, 40s, 50s, and early 1960s. All are meticulously researched, and Collins often uses the books to present a revisionist or alternate view of the conventional wisdom on the events. The books I've read so far were all from the 30s and 40s, this one is from near the end of Heller's career, with the earliest scene taking place just before the 1960 presidential election, and most of the book taking place in October 1963. Heller is now the prosperous head of a Private Detective agency with offices in Chicago, Las Vegas, and southern California, and is generally too old for field work. But he still wears off shoe leather for the right client, including the Kennedy brothers, and when he is asked to help investigate a threat to assassinate President Kennedy, he can't refuse. In the first few pages of the book, we meet a man named Jack Ruby, and a quiet, rather odd young man whose first name is Lee, and who says he is a former Marine. But the threat here is for a sniper to assassinate President Kennedy by firing from a warehouse when the President is riding in an open car visiting...Chicago! Apparently there actually was a plot of this type when Kennedy planned a Chicago visit shortly before the fatal trip to Dallas. As usual, Collins ends the book with an afterword where he discusses the relationship of actual history to the fictional book.

Target Lancer is extensively researched, and there is lots of early '60s color here. Numerous famous people of the period appear in the book, or have a role offstage, including some surprising ones such as Hugh Hefner, a famous (at the time) stripper who rejoiced in the name Candy Barr, Jimmy Hoffa, and (of all people) comedian Dan Rowan. You bet your bippy I was surprised when he was mentioned! 

I won't discuss details of the story, but will indulge myself with some interesting bits of color and trivia that I highlighted (no spoilers).

When on stakeout and using a car as your base, the operative must not sit behind the driver's seat. This will cause other drivers to assume he is about to pull out, and they will stop and wait for him to clear the space, drawing attention that he doesn't want! The front passenger seat is a much better place to sit.

Apparently they actually played football games in Wrigley Field back in the early '60s. A box that was at a prime location for baseball season (behind home plate) was at the corner of an end zone, which made it awful for a football game! As Jimmy Hoffa observed, "Do they play basketball in a swimming pool?"

Some of the book, including one murder, takes place in the Congress Hotel....I have stayed in that same hotel when in Chicago! I wonder if my room was the one with the murder? Brrrr, what a thought! I'm not a Chicago regular, but I've been there enough to remember well some of the locations in the book.

Nate Heller is quite prosperous, so his home is decadently fitted-out with the latest and greatest technology, including an RCA color console tv with a gigantic twenty-one inch screen!

It seems that Jack Ruby, of Kennedy assassination fame, grew up in Chicago and ran minor errands for Al Capone's gang when he was a youngster.

Collins never disappoints, and he comes through here. The book is excellent, and I read it in one long evening. It is particularly impressive that Collins makes the book interesting, because we know that President Kennedy is not going to be killed in Chicago! But that weakness did take away some from the book for me. I rate it as a four star book, it would probably be higher if not for that inherent plot problem.


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## SunshineOnMe (Jan 11, 2014)

Rah! Rah! Rah! (I'm cheering!!!)


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Adams Vs. Jeffeson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, by John Ferling

Many Americans were outraged--They feared the rising power of the federal government, and accused it of over-reach. There is talk of states unilaterally nullifying federal laws they disagree with. Societies claiming to represent the Revolutionary spirit of 1776 had arisen throughout the country, with a stated goal of forcing the retreat of federal power, and returning sovereignty to the states. The President is running for re-election and his Republican opponents denounce him as an out-of-touch elitist with dictatorial ambitions. And a breathtakingly-close result in the electoral college throws the Presidential election into the House of Representatives....

Nope, I'm not talking about the election of 2012 with some alternate history ending, I'm talking about 1800!

One of my projects is to read a book on each American President, and I started it late last year reading the book on Washington and Mount Vernon. This is the second book, covering John Adams (I'm not going to claim a two-fer, even though Jefferson also plays an important role in this book). The election of 1800 may not seem like a landmark, but it was important because it was the first peaceful transfer of power between political parties. John Adams had replaced George Washington in the 1796 election, but they were both Federalists. In 1800, power was transferred from the Federalists to the Republicans (from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson), and though the election was close, and did have to be decided in the House of Representatives, John Adams gave up power and left Washington peacefully, and Jefferson was inaugurated without controversy. That doesn't seem very exciting now, but looking at the history of democracy in other countries, I think we should be a little more appreciative.

This book covers more ground than the title would lead you to believe. It actually covers American politics in the second half of the 1790s, culminating in the election of 1800 and the battle in the House of Representatives. It took thirty-six ballots in the House to settle matters, and it was mid-February of 1801 before it was known who the next President would be (at that time the Presidential inauguration was in March rather than January). The biggest surprise for me was how many of the same issues were being discussed that are contentious in American politics now.

Lots and lots of interesting trivia:

The Presidential election system was different then than it is now. Each Elector in the Electoral college got two votes (that had to be cast for different people), and the candidate with the most votes became President, and the number two vote-getter became Vice-President. In the 1796 election, this resulted in John Adams being President, and Thomas Jefferson, his bitter political enemy, serving as Vice-President. Fortunately, this was soon changed to a more sensible system.

John Adams hadn't really wanted to be Vice President under George Washington, but he took the job, which he regarded as a "siege of dullness" and "completely insignificant," to secure his place as Washington's heir apparent.

Slavery was alive and well at this time. In 1800 about 1 in 6 Americans was a slave, and three of the four Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates were or had been slave owners.

In the Summer of 1800, the seat of government was officially moved from Philadelphia to the still-under-construction capital of Washington, DC. The combined archives of the Departments of State, Treasury, War, Navy, and Justice fit into seven packing cases!

John Adams had a son (about thirty years old) who had built a successful law firm despite being an alcoholic. The son couldn't hold all this together however, and his life collapsed while Adams was President. John Adams denounced his son as a "Rake" and a "Beast" and declared "I renounce him." He never spoke to his son again, never wrote to him or attempted to visit him, and his son died about a year later. Adams realized that he'd been a fool to stand aloof during his son's final year, and told his wife Abigail that his offspring had caused him more grief than his worst political enemies, and he envied George Washington for having no children.

When Adams was elected President in 1796, he got the magnificent (for the time) annual salary of $25,000, much more than his $5,000 salary as Vice President. He did have to pay an annual rent of $2,700 on the President's House (in Philadelphia, not The White House), and provide his own furniture there.

Although they were bitter enemies in the late 1790s, Adams and Jefferson had been great friends just a few years before. While serving as US Minister in France, Jefferson had even traveled from France to England to spend his vacation with John and Abigail Adams. They did make up and were friends again before they both died on the same day in 1826.

If you talked about "election day" in 1800, everyone assumed you meant December 3. That was the day that the Electors cast their vote in the Electoral College. The votes in the states had been held on all sorts of different days over the preceding weeks, and some states had the Electors chose by the state legislature rather than popular vote.

I liked this book a lot. It is accessible, and probably will be enjoyed by those with even a modest interest in the topic. Four and a half stars from me, close to five.



This House is Haunted, by John Boyne

About once a year, I get the urge for a good ghost story. When this was offered for $2.99 a week or so ago, I grabbed it and dug in. It looked promising with good reviews, and author Boyne has had several successful novels. It lived up to the billing.

Our first-person narrator is a young Victorian-era woman who has been raised by her father after her mother's early death. Her life is turned upside down after her father dies unexpectedly from lung trouble, and she learns that the house they live in is not owned by the family, but is rented. Since she can't come up with the rent from her job as a teacher in a school for young girls, she must find something else. She impulsively accepts a job as governess to a family in a rural town, even though her application is accepted in a rushed and suspicious manner, without even a face-to-face interview.

"You're never alone at Gaudlin Hall" she is told soon after she arrives. And this is correct. The house is haunted. And it seems that the haunting spirit has it in for her particularly.

I had some reservations going into the book, despite the good reviews. It seems the author seeks to imitate the style of Charles Dickens, and I hadn't had a good experience with Dickens the one time in decades I tried reading him (I gave up on Great Expectations a few years ago, one of the earlier books I read on Kindle!). I also wondered if I'd be able to empathize with a first-person narrator who was a barely-of-age Victorian woman. But there were no problems. I liked the writing style, never even considered abandoning the book, and the story was a good one. A minor criticism is that the narrator has some awfully modern viewpoints for a Victorian girl, but I suppose that is necessary to be reader-friendly for us moderns. I REALLY liked the strategy the heroine chose to use to confront the spirit that oppressed her.

A solid four and a half stars. I'm giving a lot of four and five star ratings this year, I must be going soft!


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Noting that This House is Haunted is currently on sale for $2.24....

Betsy


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## Sam Kates (Aug 28, 2012)

cinisajoy said:


> I will be watching for updates.


Me, too. I love these threads.


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## heidi_g (Nov 14, 2013)

Your reading list continues to be varied and eclectic, which I wholeheartedly appreciate! Since I've checked in the last time, the _Adams Vs. Jefferson_ book and the ghost story look most appealing to me. I actually love reading about the problems our government has always had, I dunno, I find it kind of heartening that it's always been affected by the flaws of humanity, and that that's not anything new  The ghost story sounds good cause I DO enjoy Dickensian type prose when the stories good and a good ghost story is hard to come by!

Cheering you on!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Keeper of the Keys: A Charlie Chan Mystery, by Earl Derr Biggers

I grew up seeing old Charlie Chan movies on the late show, but didn't read any of the books that spawned the movies until just a couple of years ago. I really liked the books, and read through them rapidly, till I got to this one, the last one by the original author. I started it back in 2012, and after reading just a little I abandoned it. I've always suspected that I had just burnt out on the series, and finally went back and gave the book another chance. I'm glad I did; I thoroughly enjoyed the book! For an Inspector with the Honolulu Police Department, Chan sure got around. Hawaii is entirely offstage in this book, and Chan is in the High Sierra Mountains. He is thrilled with the scenery, and overjoyed to see snow for the first time! But he isn't there for sightseeing and pleasure, he has been called in by a hotel owner to use his detection skills to solve a private problem. The problem assumes second place when an opera star is murdered, and the inexperienced local sheriff implores Chan to help solve the mystery. This book could arguably be entitled "Too Many Suspects," as there are at least five suspects, mostly ex-husbands of the victim, and surprisingly, none of them even attempts to have an alibi! Chan amusingly points out that usually he could count on the guilty party trying to come up with a convincing alibi. Charlie also complains in the book of "too many clues." But this being a Charlie Chan mystery, we know that he will triumph, and in fact he does. In the Charlie Chan movies, Charlie was famous for quoting supposed oriental aphorisms. He also does so in the book (I understand that author Biggers hated these, but had to respond to the expectations of his fans). There are a LOT of these in this book. In previous writeups of this series, I've quoted many or most of the sayings, but in this one I'm going to have to trim ruthlessly. Here are a few of the ones I particularly liked:

"He who stands on pinnacle has no place to step but off."

"In time of severe illness summon three doctors. One might be good."

"Eggs should not dance with stones."

"He who keeps the friendship of a prince wins honors. But he who keeps that of a cook, wins food. My preference runs to the latter."

One that KBers will like:
"He who listens to the chatter outside the window, and neglects his books, is but a donkey in clothes."

"Can you borrow a comb in a Buddhist monastery?"

I liked the book a lot. A solid four stars. Incidentally, though this book is about nine dollars in Kindle form, several of the early books in the series are available for $1.99 and $2.99.



The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece--And Western Civilization, by Barry Strauss

So here we are, the naval battle where the Greek Navy defended a large convoy of ships carrying sausage to Western Europe, and ensured that cured sausage would continue to be available to us all!  Actually, the island of Salamis makes a choke point that is difficult to bypass for galleys that need to hug the coast in sheltered waters as ancient mariners preferred to do, and a Greek naval victory here didn't save any sausage, but did foil a Persian attempt to conquer Greece. I bought this cheap when it was part of a Kindle Deal of the Day a week or so ago, and it seemed a worthy thing to read in preparation for a trip to Greece and Turkey that is coming up in April.

The author has set himself a difficult task--We have very limited sources for what happened in the battle, and don't know basic things like the actual strength of the two fleets, and have only a general idea of how they were deployed and how the battle went. But we do have detailed reports of some incidents before and after the battle, and we know many things about the ancient triremes (a large galley built for war) that were the main combatants. The author tries to make an interesting story, and fill in as many details as he can without descending into writing a piece of fiction. He does repeatedly give very detailed descriptions of clothing and equipment of various real individuals and generic examples of different participants, that seems to be a particular interest for him. There are many different players in this drama, but the main one on the Greek side is Themistocles, a canny strategist who must try to gain cooperation from Greeks of rival city-states who don't trust him. On the Persian side, the Persian King Xerxes is the main character, but there are lesser ones as well.

Lots of trivia in the book, here are a few interesting bits:

The triremes were miserable ships to fight from. Most of the rowers were shielded from the outside so that they couldn't see a thing of what was going on around them, and had to follow rowing orders in ignorance of whether their side was winning or losing, or even if their ship was threatened. Soldiers who sat on the flimsy and small top deck had a better view, but had to sit very still when not actually in battle, as the galley was so light and delicately-balanced that violent movements by even one individual could unbalance the ship! They also had no railing to keep them from falling overboard, where their bronze armor would drag them straight to the bottom.

A major participant in the battle on the Persian side was Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus, a captain-queen who seems to have been pretty shrewd--She advised the Persian King not to fight a battle at Salamis, and when threatened as the Persian position collapsed, she escaped by ramming a friendly ship, causing the Greeks to think that she was an ally! (Their were Greek ships being forced to fight for the Persians, and the Greeks had been trying to propagandize them to desert, so this wasn't totally unreasonable). The Persian King gave her special honors after the battle, but nothing is known of her subsequently. She is one of the few female naval commanders in all history! The Greeks were particularly offended that a woman would make war against them, and made special calls for her to be captured, offering a large reward to the ship that could take her alive.

In the course of the fighting, the Persians actually did capture Athens (after the Athenians had evacuated it), and burned the Greek temples on the famous Acropolis. This cleared the way for the Greeks to build the famous Parthenon.

Our word "laconic" comes from the way the Spartans talked. They tended not to have florid speech, and their region of Greece was known as Laconia.

There is some interesting stuff here, but the vagueness in many areas is annoying. I give it three and a half stars.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

And the first in the Chan series is $0.99



Thanks, Claw...picked this one^ up and a couple $1.99 ones.

EDIT: also this one, a precursor to the series with some of the same elements but no Chan...plus a short story by the same author. This one is also $0.99.



Betsy


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## anguabell (Jan 9, 2011)

I love these Claw's threats - some courageous choices and great reviews here! And it's always good to see my favorite authors mentioned, like van Gulik and Earl Derr Biggers


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> And the first in the Chan series is $0.99
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks, Claw...picked this one^ up and a couple $1.99 ones.


The first book, House Without a Key has Charlie as a secondary character, and he was so popular that Biggers wrote future novels around him! It has an interesting view of Hawaii before it was "spoiled".

I was writing late last night, and left out a feature of Keeper of the Keys that interested me. Charlie was Chinese, but he was definitely assimilated and bought into the American culture and way of life. Early in Keeper of the Keys, he meets a young Chinese couple who are similarly coopted, and they express great admiration for his success and fame. But later in the book, he meets a more traditional Chinese man who clearly disapproves of Charlie's compromises with the West. Charlie is impressed enough by this to think about his views and attitudes. I found it interesting. Of course it was Biggers' (a Westerner) view of Chinese culture and attitudes, but it was still pretty forward-thinking for a book published in 1932. Biggers died young (age 4 of a heart attack the next year, and I think we readers missed out. It would be great to have a long series of Charlie Chan books, both for the mysteries themselves (I like his mysteries, and love Charlie as a character), and to have more insight into the culture clash. I've picked up a nonfiction book on Charlie Chan, and now that I've finished all of the "authentic" books by the original author, will probably read it:



But it won't be next. I'm reading a book on "the history of monsters" and have already identified my next book as one about psychology and the mind. By that time I will be in a mood for fiction, after three nonfiction books in a row! So nonfiction Charlie will have to come later.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, by Steven T. Asma

My elderly stepfather had never seen The Grand Canyon, and wanted to see it. I'd been there, but am always happy to go back, so about a year ago I escorted him to Arizona and we took a conducted group tour that included a day at the Canyon. One of the evenings, the tour operators kept us entertained by bringing in a lady who kept spiders, snakes, and scorpions as pets. She talked about these creatures, and showed off her pet tarantula and her pet snake. At the end of her (excellent!) presentation, she invited audience members to come up front and hold these creatures. When she offered a chance to hold the tarantula, I politely waited for others to volunteer, but nobody did. After a moment, I went up and held her tarantula, and after seeing me do it, two other people out of a group of almost thirty also came up and held it. When the time to hold the snake (a harmless domestic snake, a couple of feet long and less than an inch in diameter), nobody immediately volunteered, so I figured I had to break the ice again, and I went up and held the little girl without incident. But when I was done, NOBODY else would come up and hold the snake. Even my stepfather, who I badgered individually, refused. The fear of spiders was so strong that even after seeing several of their peers hold a spider, most of these people wouldn't touch the critter. Fear of snakes was even stronger.

In the beginning of this book, Asma discusses the fear of snakes that we have, and suggests that it is instinctive in us (I thought that was established, but apparently not--Oddly enough, I have another book that has our fear of snakes as a major topic, and I hope to read it before long if it can battle to the top of the "read next" list). This was a first clue (actually, there is a clue in the title, but I'd ignored it) that this isn't just a history of monster legends, but is a history of how we view monsters, and how we explain their existence and their place in the world. Further clues are some early discussion of brutal murderers. But then the book moves back to ancient time, and quotes Ptolmey and John de Mandeville, alleged author of a Medieval travel book that discusses dog-headed men and men with no heads, but their faces in their chests as real people the author had supposedly met.

After the opening, most of the book is indeed a sort of history of monster legends, but as it moves forward in time towards the present, the history is interspersed with discussions of period views of why monsters existed, and what their purpose in the world was. I actually found this very interesting through most of the book as theories of why monsters existed moved from the ignorant but interesting and mostly logical explanations of the ancient Greeks to Medieval times when theologists concocted elaborate theories of why God created monsters or alternately, allowed them to exist. These struck me as bizarre, but were still interesting. We move onto The Enlightenment, which again seemed very logical to me, if scientifically uninformed (I am an Enlightenment sort of guy) to the Romanticists and then efforts to fit monsters in with the theory of evolution (and most mythical monsters had disappeared from the discussion by now) and later even with creationism. I was comfortable with all this stuff, but when the author comes to the modern day, he discusses the actions of Al Qaeda, suicide bombers, and the Western reaction to them, with repeated references to the actions of US guards who tortured prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. This was too contemporary for me, and I wasn't comfortable with it, even though I actually think the author and I are in agreement on much of this stuff Asma tries to just discuss different views and theories rather than take sides in the book, but sometimes his views are quietly alluded to, or hints just ooze through. I didn't care for this, and I also wasn't crazy about some of the modern psychological theories of Freud and later analysts of serial killers and similar people. Fortunately, this stuff is limited to perhaps fifteen or twenty percent of the book.

So the book tries to be a broad-brush history of monster lore, for both fantastical creatures and humans who behave in ways that we view as monstrous, but it also heavily discusses the philosophy and rationale behind such creatures. I liked the book a lot, despite my discomfort with some of the later stuff. If all you want is a history of monster legends, this is not the best choice of book. I should mention that though there are a couple of brief references, there is no major discussion of modern legends such as the Loch Ness Monster, UFO aliens, Bigfoot, etc.

Okay, I have seen through y'all. You say you come here for the book reviews, but what you are hoping for is some really juicy trivia, right?  Well, I try not to disappoint, and this book absolutely has fascinating trivia dripping off the pages, so here it comes:

One of the earliest theories for the origin of life was proposed by a predecessor of Aristotle named Empedocles. He suggested that in the distant past, single parts of animals (heads, necks, arms, presumably internal organs) were living independently, and rolled and oozed around pathetically trying to survive. Some of these managed to assemble themselves into more complete creatures, and the most successful of these survived, while the others perished (surprisingly close to evolution!). Some of the more freakish variants still existed in remote parts of the world, and that is the origin of legendary Greek creatures such as the chimera or Medusa. The last stage of this was when the successful variants split into male and female versions. Aristotle thought this was backwards, and that there were "essential forms" of various creatures that guided how things were created. Presumably Aristotle would have been delighted to learn about DNA!

Lucretius offered a very interesting and logical explanation of why centaurs were impossible. Young foals are independent very quickly after birth, while human babies are helpless for years. so a half-man, half-horse, would have a body that could run, jump, and move around after a few months, when the baby human front could barely hold up its head. Lucretius felt that this reasoning eliminated most hybrid creatures. The ancient Greeks didn't have the vast scientific knowledge of the world we have now, but they were not stupid!

Asma points out an interesting dilemna that had to be resolved when we moved from a world-view of having multiple gods, the ancient Greek view of many gods in competition with each other, to a monotheistic world view, where there was only one supreme God. In the polytheistic Greek view, monsters were just another set of independent actors in competition with humans and the gods. But if you recognize only one supreme being, you have to explain why God created monsters, or at least allowed them to exist. Another version of the old chestnut of why God allows evil to exist, though since God presumably allowed monsters to be created, rather than to choose to act evil, this is a little harder. One suggestion was that evil monsters are God's lackeys, who take care of nasty stuff which must be done. As one art historian put it, "The Evil One is on God's side. He carries out the garbage."

Something that I found very interesting was a dog-headed human who was viewed to not only exist, but be a very revered human figure. Dog-headed men may have been around before, but they rose in Medieval attention because of a popular book of the day, where Sir John de Mandeville (now thought to be a fictitious person) described his world travels, and meeting dog headed men, men with one giant foot, men with no heads and their faces in their chests, etc. Most of us have heard of Saint Christopher, if only because of Saint Christopher medals. Many viewed Saint Christopher as a Cynocephalus (the official name for the race of dog-headed men:










Apparently the Eastern Orthodox Church was especially big on this view, but other denominations had it, and this book points out one Irish account that is specific about it.

Another important point for medieval Christians was whether monsters had souls. This isn't just an abstract point, whether deformed babies should be baptized was of overwhelming importance to them, and for the occasional child that had two heads or other evidence of being more than one person, should two baptisms be performed? This was a serious matter, and research has revealed a set of rules of thumb that seemed to be popular for deciding such cases.

There is quite a bit of discussion of the Beowulf legend (yet another classic that I have never read). The book points out that modern treatments of this legend have tended to make Beowulf the bad guy in the story, rather than the strong, rugged hero. And this being the Middle Ages, we can't skip over demonic possession and witchcraft. The Inquisition viewed midwives as especially suspicious people who often did mischief to offer babies to evil spirits or otherwise subvert them.

It seems that Carl Linnaeus, a revered figure in the history of biology, got his start by studying what was supposed to be a preserved and mounted small hydra. He proved that it was created from body parts of animals such as weasels and snakes. Unfortunately for Linnaeus, this mounted trophy had been offered for sale by an important local official who hoped to make a killing from selling it. The price anyone would pay for it after Linnaeus had exposed it plummeted. Linnaeus found it wise to leave town for his health! I was intrigued that Linnaeus believed that the fake had been made by monks who hoped to scare people with the reality of the Book of Revelations.

Despite being a bit disturbed by the turn to the War on Terror that the book takes at the end, I liked the book, and recommend it for those interested in the topic. A solid four stars from me.



Old Bones, by Aaron Elkins

I had already picked out yet another nonfiction book to read next, but On Monsters was heavy enough that I wanted something lighter to read. Wanting something reliable and a sure thing, I picked out another Gideon Oliver book. I was shocked when the opening took place here:










This fantastic place is Mont St. Michel, and a photo of it in a calendar impressed me so much that I took a trip to France to see it! Mont St. Michel figures repeatedly in this book.

I was amused that though Charlie Chan was an Inspector with the City of Honolulu, most of his books took place everywhere but the Hawaiian Islands. Based on this third Gideon Oliver book, it seems Gideon Oliver is going to have the same fate. Gideon is presenting at an international criminology conference in France when some very old bones are discovered in the basement of a centuries-old manor house near Mont St. Michel. It seems obvious that they are the remains of an SS officer assassinated by the Resistance in World War II, but Gideon is skeptical of this easy solution. Entertaining mystery ensues. I really liked the book a lot, and found the solution to the mystery delightfully complex and unexpected.

I've said as much as I dare about the book, but I highly recommend it. Five stars from me.


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## heidi_g (Nov 14, 2013)

ooh, that monsters book sounds really good!


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## Winter9_86 (Sep 3, 2013)

Love reading this thread!


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

The monster book does look good, and I love snakes....spiders, not so much, though I would hold a tarantula. (Which, if I recall, isn't technically a spider?  Or am I confusing that...)

Betsy


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

First, a small brag. I have been on a diet, and have lost seventy-six pounds in less than a year! I still have at least ten pounds to go, and the last ten are going to be more of a slog than before. So I remain interested in the subject of dieting and fitness, and when it was brought to my attention, I watched this TED video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn0Ygp7pMbA

This was disturbing, but very interesting. So naturally I looked for books by this lady (she is a PhD in neuroscience which gives her some credibility) and I found this:



Welcome to Your Brain, by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt

When I started the book, I found it a bit frustrating to read. It is written in chapters that cover a single subject through short articles (somewhat like the better-organized chapters of Fifteen Minutes, from the start of the year), and at the level of an article in Reader's Digest. That's not my favorite form of organization, I prefer a longer continuous narrative. I kept putting down the book after reading for a short time, and one evening about 25% in, I decided that I was going to give the book one more chance, and would move on if I didn't engage in the book better. I also tried to tell myself to quit wishing the format would change, and just accept that the book was written the way it was. I'm not sure if that admonition did it, or something else changed, but I found that I was interested in the book, and I finished it quickly. So I recommend the book if you want an easy to read book that gives you a peak into a layman's explanation of how your brain works, including some looks at the latest research. In addition to being interesting, at least a few of the things I learned appear to me to be useful, if only in telling me not to be so hard on myself when I find my mind isn't doing the things I want it to! 

Lots of interesting stuff to highlight, I'll start out with a one-liner quoted in the book:

"I used to think my brain was my most important organ. Then I thought: wait a minute, who's telling me that?"

One of the first things the book does is to debunk a couple of popular brain myths. First is that we only use about ten percent of our brains. This has been around for at least a Century, even the old Dale Carnegie book highlighted it, but it is just wrong. If you doubt it is wrong, consider how few people have serious damage to their brains, and continue to get along just fine since the damage was only to the unused ninety percent! Another one explored is sudden amnesia, especially that that is caused, and sometimes reversed, by a knock on the head. I didn't realize how common this one was. The authors report that during the three seasons of Gilligan's Island, there were three cases of this sort of amnesia! Apparently Edgar Rice Burroughs used it a lot. They briefly discuss several movies where this happens, and try to trace the idea back to when it was first introduced to popular thought.

Amnesia cases do happen, and one thing the movies sometimes get right is that apparently people who suffer from it will "create" memories to fill in and explain gaps by replacing them with a plausible memory. But any idea that somehow a physical blow to the brain will restore lost memories is definitely wrong.

I was intrigued by the discussion of the brain's use of energy. The brain uses about twelve watts of energy, less than a refrigerator light bulb! Each day, the brain uses the energy contained in two large bananas.

As someone who loves to travel internationally, I was very interested in a discussion of jet lag and circadian rhythm. The authors report that melatonin is of some help in adjusting to a new time zone, but not as much as using light strategically. I'm going to try their suggestions in April when I go to Turkey and Greece. By the way, the first reported case of "jet lag" was back in the pre-jet age in 1931, when Wiley Post and Harold Gatty flew around the world in about nine days. They had the same problems we experience today.

In the chapter on the brain and the senses, I learned that the treatment for lazy eye I received as a kid (having an eye patch put over the strong eye for awhile) was the standard treatment of the day, but ends up to be absolutely the wrong thing to do! Oh well...The book reports that the common belief that blind people have extra-sharp hearing isn't confirmed by testing. But they have been shown to develop exceptionally good memory, since they can't depend on looking to see exactly where (for instance) they sat down a glass.They do seem to be better at using sound to determine the direction of noise. Tests show that they reprogram part of the visual cortex of the brain to help with these things.

Something of real-life application that I found interesting--When talking on the phone in a noisy area, I have tried covering the ear away from the phone. It ends up this is the wrong thing to do. Your brain is pretty good already at separating things heard in the right ear from things heard in the left ear. But the microphone of the phone picks up room noise and feed it into the signal you hear in your ear! This is deliberately done because phone engineers found that mixing the caller's own voice in with what is heard makes it feel more like you are talking live ("full duplex" in telephone engineer talk). But when you have outside noise being picked up, this backfires, and you get room noise mixed in with the voice of the person you are talking to, and both somewhat modified by being processed through the phone. So the part of your brain responsible for hearing deduces that the room noise is also part of the conversation, and blows its little circuits! In a noisy room, you will help yourself more by covering up the microphone of YOUR phone so that this won't happen! I haven't yet had an opportunity to try this out for real, though.

Further popular ideas about the brain that are explored are that contrary to reports, there is no evidence that playing classical music for your babies increases brain development or makes them more intelligent. On the other hand, having children learn to play a musical instrument themselves really does help them in reasoning.

There's some discussion of learning languages, including how deaf people learn sign language. I was surprised to learn that there are different versions of sign language for the deaf in different countries. Apparently even a deaf person from Britain would be unintelligible to someone who had learned American Sign Language (ASL). Sign language has its own equivalent of "accents" where poor speakers don't quite get things right. People who didn't learn ASL till adulthood especially have this problem.

I've heard young kids argue with their parents when told to quit playing video games, saying that it was proven that fast arcade games improve hand-eye coordination, and the ability to track objects and pay attention. They actually have a point! But research shows that it doesn't take much to do this, in tests, the subjects were able to get most of the benefits by playing such games for an hour a day for ten days. The authors still don't recommend an extensive program of video gaming for childhood development!

There is considerable discussion of happiness. Frequent small positive events increase happiness more than rare but major positive events, and vice versa for negative events. In short, thinking about positive events regularly, and feeling grateful for them is a useful exercise to increase happiness. "Ac-cen-tu-ate the positive..." has a grain of truth in it!

Lots more good stuff in this book, but I've written enough already! I recommend the book for those who want to read and learn about their minds, especially if you don't want to deal with a lot of physiology or heavy-duty science. Four stars out of five from me. Incidentally, the book is only $2.99 right now, so grab it if you want it!


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## Sam Kates (Aug 28, 2012)

It's £8.99 in the UK.


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## Mike D. aka jmiked (Oct 28, 2008)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> (Which, if I recall, isn't technically a spider? Or am I confusing that...)
> 
> Betsy


A tarantula is a spider. One of the spiders commonly called "daddy long legs" (or _Opiliones_, also known as Harvestmen) is not a spider, although it is an arachnid. _Opiliones_ does not have a segmented body, poison glands, or web-making ability. It only has two eyes. It does have eight legs, though.

There's your nature lesson for the day. 

Mike


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## kansaskyle (Sep 14, 2010)

The Hooded Claw said:


> First, a small brag. I have been on a diet, and have lost seventy-six pounds in less than a year! I still have at least ten pounds to go, and the last ten are going to be more of a slog than before.


Congrats on the weight loss! Thank you for posting your reviews, as I find them interesting.


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## Mike D. aka jmiked (Oct 28, 2008)

The Hooded Claw said:


> First, a small brag. I have been on a diet, and have lost seventy-six pounds in less than a year! I still have at least ten pounds to go, and the last ten are going to be more of a slog than before.


Isn't it the truth! I've been stuck on that last 5 pounds for months.

Mike


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

jmiked said:


> A tarantula is a spider. One of the spiders commonly called "daddy long legs" (or _Opiliones_, also known as Harvestmen) is not a spider, although it is an arachnid. _Opiliones_ does not have a segmented body, poison glands, or web-making ability. It only has two eyes. It does have eight legs, though.
> 
> There's your nature lesson for the day.
> 
> Mike


Thanks, I was gritting my teeth and not indulging my tendency to pontificate on nature topics, but I am glad someone did it!

I have long been fascinated by spiders and insects, leading to bug photography as a hobby, but in elementary school I took advantage of my knowledge about Daddy Longlegs (aka harvestmen) to freak out the girls on the playground by picking up the "spiders" and letting them crawl all over me...


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Thanks for the nature lesson, LOL!

Betsy


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Parthenon Enigma, by Joan Bretton Connally

The short version of the review is that I quit reading this 5% into the book. Getting from 3% to 5% required almost a week of starting reading again and putting the book down. The first bit in the book was okay as an introduction, but then author Connally goes into a lengthy dissertation about the ancient Greeks and nature, and she just lost me. There was some interesting stuff in the very beginning, and I have hopes of going back and finishing the book. I may have to skip ahead past the nature stuff, even though I abhor skipping sections of books. But I'll give it another try. Minor things of interest in what I read include pointing out that The Parthenon was a Christian church for much longer than it was a temple to the Olympic gods, and for awhile, it was known as Notre Dame d'Athenes! In the nature lecture that so upset me, one interesting tidbit is perhaps the earliest known anti-pollution law...There is an inscription on a rock near a river (that flows past a sacred site) forbidding anyone tan hides (notoriously smelly) or throw waste into the river there!

I want to read this, but I finally got the hint and stopped after several days of finding excuses to stop after only a few minutes of reading.



Corsair, by Chris Bunch

I am a sucker for the idea of aliens (as in the kind from other planets) operating incognito on a planet of less-advanced humans. One of my favorite books is this one, by David Drake:










Think of the plot of the movie "Alien" transported to ancient Rome, and you'll have the idea behind Killer. I like the book a lot. Drake did another book with aliens among more advanced, but still much less sophisticated humans, when he wrote Skyripper, which is a Cold War era spy story where an American spy helps a top Soviet scientist defect and bring his advanced laser weapon with him, but it ends up the advance scouts of aliens planning to invade Earth don't want this to happen (this is telegraphed in the book's blurb, not a spoiler). I liked it a lot, though not as much as Killer.

Anyway, Corsair superficially impressed me as similar. The cover made me think of advanced sailing ships, think Captain Morgan and the Spanish Main, and the blurb explains that a sailing ship Captain comes to suspect that non-humans are behind the pirate slavers he hates. There's other evidence on the page that this is NOT actually the type of book with aliens that I was looking for, but in my eagerness I ignored it. I bought the book for 99 cents, even though it was from Prologue, and I haven't had good experiences with them (see my reviews of "The Case of the Little Green Men" and "Skulldoggery" in earlier years' Cheer and Jeer threads for the postmortems).

From this elaborate prologue (heh) you might expect me to lash into the book, and probably not finish it. But you'd be wrong! I liked the book quite a bit, enough to check into the author's other works looking for a sequel! This is a fantasy world, though not a stereotypical one. The sailing ships are better than you'd expect in classic fantasy, and gunpowder weapons are very common. Magic does work, and seems to be surprisingly easy, but is only available to a few exceptional people with unusual talent. The hero is a mischievous but likeable and decent sort, and I'll decline to go further for fear of spoilers. But I liked the first 3/4 of the book a LOT. It weakens a bit in the last quarter. The ending made me suspect a sequel, and I went looking for one unsuccessfully. Eventually I learned that the book had been published in 2001, and author Bunch passed away in 2005. So this is probably all we will have.

I give the book four stars, it would have been four and a half stars if not for the fade in the last part. Alas, the price is up to three dollars now. But well-recommended for lovers of swashbuckling adventure fiction.



Faster, Better, Stronger, by Eric Heider, MD and Massimo Testa, MD

As mentioned above, I am in the process of losing weight. I believe I have the diet part of things licked, but want to expand my use of the fitness angle. This book, written by two physicians, one of whom won four Olympic gold medals in speed skating, looked promising. The authors announce up front that this is not intended strictly for jocks, but is intended to be of broad applicability, even to healthy but rather pasty guys such as myself, and even the elderly. The first few chapters support this claim, they discuss the importance of setting specific goals (not just saying "I want to exercise and get healthy"), give advice on how to make the goals realistic, and caution keeping your expectations realistic, supported by several failure stories of clients in their fitness coaching business who had pie-in-the-sky aspirations. Despite the cover blurb promising results in twelve weeks, they are upfront that though visible improvement can happen in a couple of months, this is not a Charles Atlas overnight thing. I was pleased by the author's approach, and read to the 25% mark in the book, but stopped there. This will be temporary, however. In short, the authors emphasize that you need to do all of their approach, not pick and choose, and give some some good arguments why this is a good idea. Their approach is not consistent with the low-carb diet I've been following, and I'm not quite ready to give up on that method yet, though I'm very close to deciding I have wrung about all the fat out of me that the low-carb method is going to get. I'm going to do some low-key exercising to start working my way up, and after consulting with my physician at my next appointment (not for a couple of months) I am probably going to try to shift to their approach and see what I can do with it. I didn't see any benefit in reading the book till that point (I'd be afraid I couldn't resist trying specific ideas, and maybe souring myself on the whole book if they didn't work well in isolation), but I will be back to this book!

I have finished yet another book past this one, but this is enough for one evening....See you next time!

PS: the fitness book is selling for $1.99 now, so this is a good time to grab it if you want it!


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

I'll place myself firmly in the 'Cheer' category: reading that many books _*and*_ reviewing them to boot! With my schedule the way it is, I'm lucky if I can squeeze a dozen books into my reading during the year.

You've already gotten me to add a few books to my _To Read_ list that I probably never would have given a second glance. Thank you!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

WDR said:


> I'll place myself firmly in the 'Cheer' category: reading that many books _*and*_ reviewing them to boot! With my schedule the way it is, I'm lucky if I can squeeze a dozen books into my reading during the year.
> 
> You've already gotten me to add a few books to my _To Read_ list that I probably never would have given a second glance. Thank you!


Hi, WDR! I'm pleased that you found my comments interesting enough to pick up a book or two? I gotta ask, which ones did I inspire you on?


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Story of Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting

Minor logistical note...I have a free "volunteer" conversion of this that I got from Amazon back in 2009. It shows in my order list, but doesn't show as available now. Not sure what the reason for that is. But hopefully the 99 cent version above is a decent conversion.

When I was in elementary school, I loved the Doctor Dolittle books! I read every one available to me through purchase or the library. This was long before Amazon, and the notion of ordering books to be sent from far away was alien to me, so there were a couple of the books I never did find and read! But I've meant to revisit the series for quite awhile (obviously, since I got this in 2009) and my success with Andre Norton from late Elementary and Junior High School days made me reach a little further back into the memory vault and go for this. Short answer is that this is the first of my retro-reads that is a failure. I found the book a bore.

After setting the stage with a short introduction to the Doctor, and a brief account of how he learned to talk to the animals, the story revolves around a voyage to Africa to help stop an epidemic amongst the monkeys there. There's plenty of potential action, they are captured by a native King, evade pirates, and rescue a castaway and search for another survivor, but things aren't fleshed out much, and it is rarely interesting. It reads like the outline of a story for the most part. There is a lot of detail left out--Our heroes rescue a boy castaway and do a lengthy search for his guardian, but we never learn the name of the boy!

When I looked at what some other reviewers had to say about the book, I was saddened to find that part of one of the episodes where the book does become interesting has been Bowdlerized from many recent editions because of alleged racism (our heroes are imprisoned by a hostile African king who has a legitimate suspicion of Europeans because of previous ill-treatment, and they escape by trickery--I'm deliberately being vague here for the benefit of anyone who wants to read the book). Fortunately, the edition I have still contains the offending segment. I'm not sure I agree that it is racist. If it is, I'd prefer to see this used as an opportunity for educating any kid who is naive enough to be corrupted by a few pages of a clearly fantastic story, rather than pretend that everyone in the early 20th Century was as enlightened as we think of ourselves now (any parent who is concerned about this issue carefully monitors what the kids read, right?). As you might have guessed from my comments on a more innocent editing of the Time Traders story, I hate retroactive editing of a work after an author is dead and gone!

The book contains this little doggerel that amused me:

"I've seen the Black Sea and the Red Sea,
I rounded the Isle of Wight,
I discovered the Yellow River,
and the Orange too by night,
Now Greenland drops behind again,
and I sail the ocean Blue,
I'm tired of all these colors, Jane,
So I'm coming back to you."

Clearly this well-traveled singer never made it to Oklahoma to survey our Red River!

The book helpfully informs us that in bird language "Ka-ka oi-ee fee-fee" means "Is the porridge hot yet?" I'm sure Chickadees talk about that all the time.

I was amused that amongst the Doctor's most common veterinary patients were poodles who had eaten too much cake! Further amusement came from learning that a ship's bell can be used to tell time. You just ring it every half hour, and then you always know what time it is. 

One of the more memorable creatures in the series, was the Pushmi-Pullyu, a sort of two-headed gazelle, and a distant relation of the unicorn. I was sad to find that Pushmi-Pullyus are now extinct (explicitly reported, an unusual concern for a book written almost one hundred years ago), but amused to learn that they only eat with one of their heads at a time. That way these very polite creatures can avoid the ultimate crime of talking with a full mouth!

There were a couple of interesting moments, but the book overall very much disappointed me. I give it three stars, and that is probably generous. My emotions are yelling at me that the series has to be better than this. I suspect that is me making excuses, but I do see that I have another book in the series (The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle), and after a decent interval, I will give the series a second chance with that one.



Well, reading the book about the Parthenon in preparation for my Greece and Turkey trip was a bust. So perhaps I was too ambitious and need to start with something shorter and broader in coverage! I've found other books in this series worthwhile, so grabbed this one up for a bit over five bucks. It was a good choice. Rather than try to cover the whole scope of ancient Greek history, the author picks eleven Greek cities, and covers their story in separate chapters. Since the ancient Greek world ran to 1,000 separate cities (many quite small of course) from the Spanish coast of the Atlantic Ocean to the edges of the Russian steppes on the Black Sea, some sort of selection would have to be done in a short book such as this! There are unavoidable good and bad points to covering each city in an independent chapter--The good is that we get the whole story of a city in one go, rather than having to weave together bits about each city throughout the book as we'd do in a strictly chronological history. The bad is that sometimes we get a peek ahead in what is going to happen to one city when its fate is entwined with another. I'm reading for overall understanding, not sitting mouth agape wondering what is going to happen, so this didn't bother me much. I think the author made the right choice.

The author begins with Knossos (Or as he spells it, Cnossos), one of the oldest "Greek" cities around. I knew of the place, but knew little of it, and was surprised to find that it actually wasn't part of the Greek civilization. But it is definitely intertwined, as this book shows, and another book I've read since, so it has a place here. The other ten cities are chosen to cover some of the most important cities, and also give a representative of each type of city (island state, colonies in remote regions, etc.). I found the book very satisfying, and a great enhancement to my limited knowledge of the period. I highlighted lots of trivia, but will just select a few bits for here:

You've probably heard of retsina, a Greek wine flavored with pine resin that gives it a superficially-unpleasant flavor. I'd heard and believed stories that this was somehow forced on the Greeks during the Turkish occupation, but the book reports that wine flasks in the very ancient city of Mycenae show traces of pine resin! Apparently this was going on long before the Turks arrived on the scene.

The names given by Greeks to cities and regions far outside Greece still live on today. Nice, France, owes its name to Nike, Greek goddess of Victory.

Years ago I read (in translation!) a book by Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, and I remember that he described, with some convincing evidence, a possible Egyptian voyage circumnavigating Africa in ancient times. I didn't know that the Greeks have records of a Greek explorer who went far enough south on the African Atlantic coast to encounter and describe crocodiles! Wow!

I mentioned in my review of the Salamis book that our word "Laconic" comes from the Spartans' clipped and abbreviated speech. This book tells a good story about Spartan intolerance for longwindedness: Exiles from the island of Samos begged for Spartan help, in a speech even longer than one of my book review postings! They were very articulate and specific. The Spartans responded that the speech was too long and complex, and the Spartans had forgotten what was said at the beginning, and didn't understand anything after that. The Samians requested a second hearing. This time, they made no speech, but pointed to an empty sack and said "The sack lacks barley meal." The Spartans' comment was that the word "sack" was a word too many. But they did grant the requested aid!

Speaking of Spartans, I was interested to read the chapter on their city. Most of the stuff I've read on ancient Greece focuses on the Athenians, and mentions the Spartans only as militaristic, possibly with a story about them exposing imperfect children (which oddly isn't mentioned in this book). There is more detail here, though I wanted to read still more. The book adds that even though they are a non-English city from far away, the Spartans have contributed three words to English: Laconic (of course), helot, and (also of course) Spartan.

Speaking of words, lots of obscure word choices in this book, including: Subvent, conspectus, Medize (apparently actually a Greek term for cozying up to the (Persian) Medes), contumely, and many others I had seldom or more often, never seen before. I'm going to do a separate post on the Vocabulary Builder feature of the PW2, and obscure words used in Kindle books (not just this one) one of these days.

My main gripe for the book is that in many cases I wanted more detail. But when you're covering eleven cities in a 150-page book, you don't have time for a lot of detail. For the stated goal of a short introduction, I thought this was excellent. Four and a half stars from me.


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## Nancy Beck (Jul 1, 2011)

Like WDR, I've added a couple of books to my Wishlist that I never would have given a second glance because of your reviews. Thanks!


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

The Hooded Claw said:


> Hi, WDR! I'm pleased that you found my comments interesting enough to pick up a book or two? I gotta ask, which ones did I inspire you on?


_15 Minutes_, _Eavesdropping_, and _Jefferson vs. Adams_.

In New York, not far from Lake Placid, a house had gone up for sale for around $750,000 that had two very interesting features. First, it had its own runway. Being a pilot-had to give it up because I just couldn't afford it anymore-having my own runway really appealed to me. But the most interesting feature to the house was it had its own missile launching silo.

Yes, you read that correctly: a missile launching silo.

If I sell a million books and that house is available, I am _so_ buying it! Then, a couple months to build a model of an Atlas V missile out of mylar and balsa. I can just imagine my family picnic, with a very prominently placed box with a big red button-a big, shiny, candy-like button-and a hand-scrawled sign saying, "DO NOT PRESS!" (Written in red crayon, of course!) You just know somebody's gotta press it&#8230;


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## Nancy Beck (Jul 1, 2011)

WDR said:


> _15 Minutes_, _Eavesdropping_, and _Jefferson vs. Adams_.
> 
> In New York, not far from Lake Placid, a house had gone up for sale for around $750,000 that had two very interesting features. First, it had its own runway. Being a pilot-had to give it up because I just couldn't afford it anymore-having my own runway really appealed to me. But the most interesting feature to the house was it had its own missile launching silo.
> 
> ...


Wait, in Lake Placid?? I remember seeing people in the midwest _living _ in old underground missile silos. Wasn't aware there were any up thata way.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

There is, or at least was, a museum centered around an old Titan Missile silo in Arizona that I got to visit once. Very interesting! I seem to remember googling for it once recently and finding it was closed now. There are websites with photos people have taken while doing unauthorized excursions into some of these old silos. Sounds like a great adventure, but not a very safe one!

WDR, some great potential book choices there! I hope you get to read them and enjoy them!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Defiant Agents, by Andre Norton

I thought the Kindle cover was boring, so used an image of the cover that was on the book I read as a kid. Here is a link to the actual Kindle version.



I actually read a version I got for free from Baen Books a couple of years ago (part of a double volume called Time Traders II, still available from Amazon for $6.99 if you prefer that to individual copies of the books for free), so I can't attest to the goodness of the Kindle ebook conversion, but at least the price is right!

This is the third in the Time Traders series I started re-reading recently. I really liked the first book a lot, thought the second one is just okay, and this one was better than just okay, but still didn't hold a candle to the first book.

The viewpoint character here is Travis Fox, returning from Galactic Derelict. But other than cameo appearances by some of the big bosses in the first few pages, everyone else here is new. I found the setup a little contrived. Fox (an Apache) and several other tribal members are being indoctrinated by some sort of mind altering machine that brings them in touch with "racial memories" about their warrior Apache past. When it is discovered that the Russians may have stolen a march and beaten the USA to colonizing a desirable alien planet, we see a rushed scheme to send the Apache there to "head the Russians off at the pass." Things go wrong, and in short, our heroes arrive on the alien planet unsupported and unbriefed, and not sure what is real from the implanted memories that seem as valid as their real memories. They find that the Russians have indeed already established a base, and many of them have similar false memories of a Mongol tribal past. This is another adventure story with sanitized violence, and one gambit used by Fox is downright mean to an innocent person. But I read it when I was eleven or so or so, and it doesn't seem to have warped me too badly (no comments on that!) 

I liked the book better than Galactic Derelict, which is the opposite of my opinion of them as a youngster. But whereas I remembered at least a few details of Galactic Derelict from reading it years ago, I didn't remember a thing from this other than vague stuff about Mongols and Apaches on an alien planet. In any event, it is a solid three and a half stars.



The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, by Margalit Fox

Before the earliest ancient Greeks, there was a civilization called the Minoans, centered on Crete. At the dawn of the 20th Century, archeologists found large numbers of tablets with markings that appeared to be writing, but since we didn't even know what language they were written in, being able to decipher the tablets seemed unlikely. Since the actual language wasn't known, the writing was called Linear B. Despite the obstacles, in the 1950s, Linear B divulged its secrets. This book describes the efforts of three people author Margolit thought of as central to this success: Arthur Evans, who actually excavated the ruins of Knossos where the tablets were found, but then became as much a hindrance as an aid to the decoding, Alice Kober, a pioneering woman classicist, who doesn't get a lot of atttention in most retellings of this story, and the guy who got all the credit, an English architect <!> named Michael Ventris. The story is fascinating! I'm glad I read the book, though a bit disappointed is that there is very little here about the ancient Minoans, most everything is about the three people mentioned above.

Sir Arthur Evans was a classic eccentric Englishman. He had money of his own, and used it freely to finance his archeological interests. He had enough money to build a second home on Crete for use during excavations that was large and nice enough that the Germans seized it to use as their headquarters when they occupied Crete during World War II. He lived to a very old age, and was selfish in releasing copies of most of the tablets for many years, which hindered efforts to decode them.

Kober was interesting. She used some clever methods to organize her information in a pre-computer age, including making punch cards for each tablet with writing that had carefully-positioned holes indicating key traits of that tablet. By stacking the cards together, she could identify with ease which cards shared common traits. She was incredibly accomplished, getting a Guggenheim Fellowship the same year as Ansel Adams! Among other languages, she spoke Hittite, Old Irish, Akkadian, Tocharian (I'm pretty knowledgeable for an amateur about such things, but I don't even know what that is!), Sumerian, Old Persian, Basque, and Chinese. While teaching full time in New York City, she took a train to Yale weekly to take classes in advanced Sanskrit. She faced significant discrimination as a woman academic in the 1940s, and that seems to have been why she lost out on a plum position she otherwise would have won easily.

Michael Ventris was precocious...At age 18 he wrote a twenty-three page letter to Sir Arthur Evans explaining his theories about Linear B. The same year, he submitted an article on Linear B to a professional journal, and it was accepted and published! He didn't inform the editors of his age, and they didn't ask about his academic credentials. In his cover letter, the eighteen year old described the article as "the result of five years' research." Ventris was the right age to be in the Service during World War II. He served as a navigator on long-range bombers, and would take notes along with him on bombing raids and continue his research while flying into hostile territory. You can hear Ventris talk about his discovery here:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22799109

BBC recorded this radio talk in 1952, and I was impressed how clear it sounds today!

While Evans lived a very long life, Kober and Ventris met early and tragic ends. The book talks about what we know about their deaths.

The tablets aren't great literature, but are bureaucratic records, mostly dealing with taxes. One group of tablets is an inventory of sheep that includes over one hundred thousand sheep! There was an entire store room devoted just to records of sheep!

The story is interesting and well-written. Highly recommended for those who are interested in the subject. As mentioned, I wish there had been more about the Minoans themselves. Not a five-star book, but a solid four and a half.


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## heidi_g (Nov 14, 2013)

The Hooded Claw said:


> Further popular ideas about the brain that are explored are that contrary to reports, there is no evidence that playing classical music for your babies increases brain development or makes them more intelligent. On the other hand, having children learn to play a musical instrument themselves really does help them in reasoning.


Great write up on the brain book. I can imagine that learning an instrument has a much greater influence than just listening to music. I love reading about the brian, especially because so much new information is coming out these days. One of the things I love most is the understanding that our brains are very plastic. It's one of the most hopeful pieces of information I've come across, because it means we can actually change

Anyway, the Ted talk was interesting, as I've dealt with a lot of issues she spoke of. I've also increased the amount of fat in my diet over the past two years and it seems to have had a tremendous positive impact on my thinking and moods. From what I understand the brain thrives on fat. Anyway, I think all of this stuff is fascinating and love to hear all the different ideas.


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## heidi_g (Nov 14, 2013)

The Hooded Claw said:


> The Story of Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting
> 
> When I was in elementary school, I loved the Doctor Dolittle books! I read every one available to me through purchase or the library. This was long before Amazon, and the notion of ordering books to be sent from far away was alien to me, so there were a couple of the books I never did find and read! But I've meant to revisit the series for quite awhile (obviously, since I got this in 2009) and my success with Andre Norton from late Elementary and Junior High School days made me reach a little further back into the memory vault and go for this. Short answer is that this is the first of my retro-reads that is a failure. I found the book a bore.


haha! I was a huge Dr. Doolittle fan when I was a kid too! Sorry the retro-read was a bore. I went back to _The Chronicles of Narnia_ recently and loved *The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe * . The next book, *Prince Caspian*  veered to middling. But when I got to *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader*  I couldn't even finish it! I was so disappointed, especially cause that has always been one of my favorite book titles ever. Sigh. I was trying to get to* The Last Battle*  but for now that reading project is all on hold.

I guess sometimes we can't back!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Heidi, thanks for reminding me that I've been neglecting this thread! I've been distracted by an upcoming overseas trip. I haven't totally neglected my reading, but I've not posted here much. I do intend to read a second Doctor Dolittle book and see if that one is more pleasing. The only C. S. Lewis I've ever read was The Screwtape Letters, which I enjoyed. I saw the Narnia books in the library as a kid, but for some reason they didn't sing to me, and I never tried to read them. I have these Lewis books in my backlist, and hopefully I'll get to them before I die of old age....



Studies in Words



The Discarded Image

I bought both of them when they were marked down to a few bucks, and they are patiently waiting for me in the archives.

But now we return you to our regular 80 books thread...



Trojan Gold (Vicky Bliss Mysteries), by Elizabeth Peters

Peters is best-known as the author of a series of mysteries about Victorian archeologists in Egypt, but she also has this series about a modern classicist who just can't keep from getting sucked up into mysteries and murders. I've read several of the Amelia Peabody books, but this is my first venture into the modern Vicky Bliss mysteries. Part of my upcoming trip involves visiting the alleged site of the ruins of Troy, so how could I pass up this when I saw Peters had this book for $3.99? In short, I'm content, but not thrilled with my purchase.

As a mystery, the book is reasonably satisfying, but not spectacular. Heroine Bliss is a medieval painting expert at a European museum, but a mysterious photograph she received in the mail gets her attention when it offers the prospect of recovering some (real) Trojan archeological relics that had been lost for forty years. Time has moved past this book since it was published in 1987, and we now know where these lost relics are. But that doesn't take away any enjoyment from the story.

I had one unique experience in reading the book.


Spoiler



The book opens with a brief scene set in the past. I'm confident that this is the first time I've ever read a scene in a fiction book, and been three thousand years off in my estimate of when the scene took place!  There are actually two words in the passage that should have alerted me to my error, but I wasn't reading analytically, and missed them. I liked the book anyway!



_added later--Who knew that emoticons showed up through spoiler blocks?_

One minor disappointment is that this is a modern mystery, and the Trojan gold is just a macguffin. There's very little about the jewelry or Troy in the book, and with minor modification, the Trojan gold could have been ICBM launch codes, or a key to a locker containing perfect $100 bill printing plates, or most anything else. So read this if you want a good Elizabeth Peters mystery, but don't go in thinking that Troy is going to be a major feature of the book.

Entertaining, but forgettable. Three and a half stars, but nothing more.



The Lacquer Screen (Judge Dee Mystery), by Robert van Gulik

Yep, another Judge Dee book. This is the third I've read, and after taking a year to return to the series after my first book, I read this third book only a couple of months after the second one. I'm enjoying these, and this one kept the streak going. I literally read it in one sitting (admittedly a fairly short book, 180 pages). As usual for mysteries, I can't talk much about the story, but I will say that it is gripping, and I stayed interested even after I was positive I had solved the mystery myself (it ends up that I didn't have it right!).

The book and the series are both recommended. Solidly four and a half stars.

I still have two more books to cover, hopefully I'll get to them tomorrow night.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Vanished Ocean, by Dorrik Stow

Why listen to me ramble on, when you can hear the author tell us about what the book tries to do?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUQW2CjdOgo

I bought this book with great anticipation when it was marked down in March, I love a good factual story about the past. The book didn't quite live up to my hopes. Reading about an ancient sea just isn't quite as COOL as reading about dinosaurs, what can I say? If the topic interests you, I think you'll find the book is okay, but not great. Those not clearly intrigued by the topic will correctly skip this one. It does have some interesting trivia, though:

You've no doubt heard of plate tectonics, where the surface of the earth is covered by about ten large and twenty smaller plates that shift about slowly and grind into each other or under each other. This movement is very slow in terms of the size of the earth, with speeds ranging from the growth rate of fingernails up to the speed demons that race along at about the growth rate of human hair.

Through analyzing growth rates in fossilized coral and shellfish, scientists have learned that 260 million years ago, each year had about 278 23 hour days. Back in the really old days, 600 million years ago, the year had 420 days of just 22 hours each. The earth's rotation rate is slowing as time passes.

My favorite quote from the book is: "My own research specialty within the broader science of geology and oceanography is deep-sea mud. However, if I give this in answer to the question 'What do you do?', I find that conversation soon wanes."

I found it interesting that the author doesn't buy into the currently-popular theory that a meteorite strike near Yucatan was a primary cause of the great dinosaur extinction.

Worthwhile for the afficianado, even if not as gripping as I'd hoped for. Three and a half stars.



The Bronze God of Rhodes, by L. Sprague de Camp

L. Sprague de Camp is a largely forgotten writer of science fiction and fantasy, but he wrote one of my favorite books, a time travel story called Lest Darkness Fall where a modern archeologist tries to avert the fall of the Roman Empire. de Camp also wrote some conventional historical novels, such as this one. The hero is an actual historical figure named Chares who lived in Greece shortly after the death of Alexander the Great. Chares was the sculptor who created The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. This story is a (heavily finctionalized) biography of Chares that covers decades of his life. Since almost nothing is known of the historical Chares, the author makes him into a sort of Forrest Gump of the Hellenic world, and he meets almost everyone of note who was alive and in that part of the world, as well as participating in several historical events, including a major siege and the founding of the Library of Alexandria. de Camp was an excellent storyteller with an extensive knowledge of the period, and the story is interesting and enjoyable. I liked the book a lot. Four stars from me.



The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction, by Eric H. Cline

I read this one as preparation for my trip to Greece and Turkey, where our group was to visit the site of ancient Troy. This is very much what it says it is, a short book that gives a lot of information about what we know of the Trojan War. There is very little about the Iliad after an initial chapter that explains the ancient sources available to us. It ends up that a lot of what we know about the story of the Trojan War does NOT come from the Iliad, which covers a fairly short period in the siege. Among other things, the Iliad doesn't contain the Trojan Horse story. I need to read The Iliad, I'll get around to it some day!

There is surprising coverage of what we know from non-Greek sources. Archeologists have found and translated most of the Hittite diplomatic archives (the Hittites were the dominant power in what is now modern Turkey, and it is likely that Troy was a Hittite client state). We can't prove that the war described by Homer took place, but it is definitely possible, even if some of the exploits he described were invented.

Highly recommended if you have a great interest in the Trojan War, but too specialized for most people to read for fun. Four stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Faster Better Stronger, By Eric Heiden, MD and Massimo Testa MD

As part of the saga of me improving my weight and fitness situation, I started this a couple of months ago, got 25% into the book, and quit reading, even though I was impressed and interested, because I felt the approach clashed with what I was trying to do healthwise at the time. Since then, my doctor has recommended that I drop my focus on weight loss, and shift to being exercise-focused. So I returned to the book and finished it. My mind is a bit boggled by it all, but I liked the book, am starting to use it, and am pleased with it.

I was fairly well-convinced anyway, but the authors make a convincing case for the benefits of exercise, with lots of documented reasons it is beneficial, including some that were new to me. The focus of the book is on exercise and devising an exercise plan, not on dieting. There is diet information in the book, but it is mostly limited to some recommendations of what sort of things to eat and avoid, and general information. The authors are very well-qualified, both are sports medicine MDs who have a consulting practice, both have been very successful in competitive sports themselves, and one won multiple Olympic Gold Medals.

The focus here is on exercise. I was amazed how complicated exercise plans can be--And this from a guy who reads physics books for fun! Part one of the complexity is that you should not just do the same exercises three (or however many) times a week. The authors recommend shifting what types of exercises you do each time you exercise. They recommend that you don't just randomly do a few different types of exercise, but that you pick and choose specific exercises, and that you vary not only the types of exercise, but the intensity on a daily basis, and have a twelve-week exercise schedule written out! The rules for scheduling exercise days in your plan are VERY complex. I can't keep them all straight in my mind. Everything is quite complex, but well-explained and the reasons for it are laid out. Some things that surprised this pasty middle-aged guy who hadn't done much exercise since leaving the Army many years ago include that the authors emphasize that lifting weights (or something similar) is very important, and they also highly recommend yoga, though there are other ways to accomplish the ends of yoga. This was news to me. I've always viewed weight lifting as the domain of narcissistic men (and a few women) obsessed with their abs and lats. And I was more aware of the idea of yoga for fitness, but mostly viewed it as something for people who were put off by more physical exercises. But the authors give some very sound reasons for both these things, and their opinions have been echoed in some other reading on fitness I've done since. I believe them. Another thing that surprised me is that those ads for specialized running shoes, weight lifting shoes, "mall walkers" or other types of athletic shoes aren't just hype. Throughout, the importance of a plan with a specific schedule and specific goals is emphasized.

I thought highly of the book, thanks to the straightforward and factual way they explained things, and gave evidence for what they said. The book was helpful to me, and I am using this now. Hopefully I won't be one of the fifty percent of people who quit within three months after starting a regular exercise routine! In any case, the book gets five stars from me.



Dead Leprechauns and Devil Cats: Strange Tales of the White Street Society, by Grady Hendrix

_"The man is a monster," Augustus snapped. "Why else would he cram himself down our chimneys when we all have perfectly good front doors? Bound by no laws save his own, judging us as 'naughty' or 'nice' in some kind of secret tribunals, respecting no national boundaries, coming and going at will. Who knows what filthy diseases his nasty reindeer carry on their sharp and pointy hooves? Who knows what plagues lurk in his lice-ridden beard? And why this obsession with children? Why?"_

In addition to loathing Santa Claus, Augustus has other antisocial behaviors, such as dumping boiling water on Christmas carolers unwise enough to come near his house.

DL&DC concerns the adventures of a very small group of men living in New York City just before the start of the Twentieth Century who investigate and sometimes do battle with weird and supernatural intrusions. The book so far contains four stories, but more are promised. As my intro quote illustrates, they are quite eccentric. This is clearly supposed to have a strong humorous element. One thing that I presume is supposed to be humorous is that the adventurers are callous bustards about dealing with members of the "lower classes." This feature of the book is strong enough that it really bothered me, and I considered quitting the book shortly after starting the second story. I love a good villain. Of course, I describe myself in my KB profile as a melodrama villain, and chose an appropriate avatar. My favorite book of the year a couple of years ago was Moriarty, a memoir about the Holmes villain written by his chief henchman, Colonel Moran. Moran gleefully boasts of beggaring innocent people and ruining their lives because it is fun. I loved it. I think one of the differences in the two books is that Moran (and Moriarty) both freely acknowledge they are villains, indeed they glory in the title. The White Street Society regards themselves as scientists, gentlemen, and public benefactors. Though in one case, something that many would view as callous won my approval.


Spoiler



In "The Corpse Army of Khartoum" one of the adventurers deliberately lets a hoard of ravenous undead into a city that would have been safe from them without his intervention, and I actually approved


. The heroes have other prejudices. In one case the narrator describes a young woman as obviously honest and virtuous, apparently because he thinks she is a beauty.

Anyway, I did keep reading after my self-doubt in story two, and rather enjoyed the book, though never quite got over my feeling of unease. I have to say I did like the book. One thing that is curious is that we have four stories here:

1) The Hairy Ghost
2) The Corpse Army of Khartoum
3) The Yellow Curse
4) The Christmas Spirits.

This makes for a rather short book of about 100 pages. We are promised more stories, and told that our Kindle will automatically update (though how this will work if we don't have our Kindle set to automatically update is unclear).

One last thing: This is a self-published indy novel, one of very few I've bought without being led by the nose to it by a trusted reader known to have similar tastes to me. I didn't use the sample system, and suspect I wouldn't have bought it if I had. The book is defiintely not flawless, but has pretty good editing.

Overall, I give the book three and a half stars. I'd give it at least four if I didn't have the unease mentioned above.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The KB Linkmaker doesn't seem to work for audible books, but I "read" this one:



The Myths of Nutrition and Fitness, by Anthony Goodman, MD

This is a short (a little over three hours) series of six lectures by a doctor on exercise and nutrition. It kept my interest, and was useful. As you might expect, it reinforced some things my own physician said. I can't highlight things or take notes (easily) while listening to an audiobook, so I have little to share on it except to recommend it if you want to listen to something in this area.



Ghosts: A Natural History: Five Hundred Years of Searching for Proof

Not quite as sweeping as the title of "A Natural History" implies, this book still covers a lot of ground. I'd say it is more of a history of prominent ghost reports and ghost hunters, and of the general attitude about ghosts, in England. There are occasional diversions to American ghosts, but almost nothing about the rest of the world. It is a rather personal history, with the author occasionally interrupting the historical narrative by sharing stories about growing up in England and being fascinated by ghosts while living in centuries-old houses and hearing insistent relatives talk about repeatedly seeing ghosts.

In a couple of introductory chapters, the author discusses ghosts in general, and then gives a very brief history of English ghost-hunting. I was interested that he accepts the eight types of ghost identified by another writer, they are:

Elementals
Poltergeists
Traditional or Historical Ghosts
Mental Imprint Manifestations
Crisis or Death-survival Apparitions
Time Slips
Ghosts of the Living
Haunted Inanimate Objects

The descriptions of the different types are very brief. Most were pretty self-explanatory, but Elementals are not what I expected, since my ideas on the subject had been influenced by playing Dungeons & Dragons back in the Good Old Days...The author reports that what ghosts appear as has changed over the years. He says there are ghosts described in The Epic of Gilgamesh that are quite different, though isn't specific (now I'll have to find out what that's about), and briefly mentions other explanations and appearances, but doesn't elaborate much. But some archetypes go back a long ways. There is a report from Italy in 500 AD of a haunting by a stone-throwing poltergeist! There are multiple English poltergeist reports from as early as the 1100s.

My impression is that the author sincerely was interested in ghosts early in life, and he was active in an organization devoted to searching for them, but I get the impression he no longer really believes in them (he never comes out and confesses to being a doubter, though). As I've mentioned in my reviews of books on UFOs and such, I am very much intrigued by the idea of mysterious or supernatural things such as ghosts, Bigfoot, etc., but I insist on a very high standard of proof, so am generally disappointed when I try reading about them. Despite that, I thought very well of this book, and am glad I read it. I say that even though it informed my opinions on ghosts, but didn't fundamentally change them. I was saddened to learn that they have the same sort of "ghost hunter" reality show garbage on BBC as we have on some networks in the USA! I noted lots of interesting trivia:

I was intrigued to learn that centuries ago, belief in ghosts was an accepted part of Catholic dogma. Protestant sects generally denied the reality of ghosts, and a belief in ghosts during the English religious battles was viewed by Protestants as a dangerous sign of reversion to Catholicism. An exception to this was the Methodists. John Wesley's family suffered from a haunting that lasted several years and was well-documented as such things go, and it understandably appeared to influence his thinking, even though it happened when he'd left home for school, and he never witnessed anything himself. He went to great trouble to get written statements from family members and witnesses about what happened. Nevertheless, after he departed, the Methodist hierarchy gradually de-emphasized ghosts!

Minor trivia note (not really ghost-related): According to this book, the first special effect in any film was a decapitation of Mary, Queen of Scots in an 1895 film!

In Victorian times, mobs would gather in the vicinity of reported ghost sightings. The would stick around for hours or even days, in hopes of seeing something themselves. The London police viewed many of these crazes as created by pickpockets to gain a fruitful hunting ground to practice their trade.

In one area of the Tower of London, _LOTS_ of bodies were unceremoniously buried after questionable executions. So many skeletons were found during routine groundskeeping work that the administration eventually decided to excavate that whole area at one time. The idea was to remove all the old bodies at once, bury them properly elsewhere, and be done with it! Naturally, in a place with such a creepy reputation, ghost reports by Warders and others are not unusual.

The author is quite forthright in describing how many historical ghost cases were proved to be fakery, and in some cases he feels that cases that weren't proved as fakes still clearly were the result of mortal human intervention. As you might expect, unhappy servants were behind many of the cases, and a repeated feature of the various cases is that the servants in the house who aren't driven off by the apparition become insolent and lazy, because they know that if they are fired, no replacement is going to be available! In at least two cases described in the book, a "haunting" was discovered to be the creation of a servant to cover up an illicit affair!

Of course, there is no authenticated case of a ghost "getting" anyone and causing death, but one haunting in 1803 did have a victim. One evening a bricklayer was walking home from work near the site of repeated hauntings. Apparently a white uniform was traditional garb for bricklayers, and in the poor light, a lawman who had been drinking decided he was The Ghost, and blasted the poor man with a shotgun! The lawman was convicted of murder, but received a royal pardon.

For some reason, English ghost sitings seem to be most frequent in midsummer, and again near Christmas.

There's a discussion of ghosts in war, dominated by two cases. One, the supposed sighting of a giant ghostly knight or angel by vast numbers of English soldiers at a critical point in World War I, I was aware of. The other, an alleged haunted U-boat, was new to me. Both appear to be strictly the creation of propagandists or publicists. Two English Prisoners of War managed to convince their Turkish captors to release them by pretending to be mediums in communication with local spirits. After the Turks expended great effort searching for a supposed buried treasure, the Turks finally concluded the prisoners were insane and released them!

I liked the book a lot, and it somehow seemed to avoid the "here we go again" repetitiveness of many books that describe a series of separate events. Recommended for those who are interested in this sort of thing. Four and a half stars from me.



Be Unstoppable: The Eight Essential Actions to Succeed at Anything, by Alden Mills

Some years ago I spent a lot of time reading books on self-help and self-improvement, and I still pick one up from time to time. This one appealed to me for some reason. The eight essential actions won't surprise anybody who has read a substantial number of these sort of books, but this is still worth the read. The actions are explained in parable form, it is quite readable, and avoids the heavy dose of religion many of these books inject. If you want to hear the eight actions, they are:

*U*nderstand
*P*lan
*E*xercise
*R*ecognize
*S*urvey
*I*mprovise
*S*eek
*T*eam up

These make a nice mnemonic of UPERSIST. But there's lots more to it than these short words. Not a great book, but a good one of its type. Solid three and a half stars from me.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

The Hooded Claw said:


> The KB Linkmaker doesn't seem to work for audible books, but I "read" this one:


Sure it does: you just have to switch the drop down filter from kindle books to all


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Ann in Arlington said:


> Sure it does: you just have to switch the drop down filter from kindle books to all


Oops! I stand corrected.... 

I am about to leave on a business trip, and don't have time to update with more reviews. But I will say that if you are a dinosaur fan, you must read My Beloved Brontosaurus. Wonderful book! Reviews of it and other books when I return home near the end of the week.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

My life has calmed down a bit after being on the road for all but one week of the past six weeks (a fun trip followed by two strictly-business trips in a row). I've managed to do quite a bit of reading, but am way behind writing books up here. So time to do some catching up!



Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections, by Patrick Smith

_We've come to view flying as yet another impressive but ultimately uninspiring technological realm. There I am, sitting in a Boeing 747, a plane that if tipped on its nose would rise as tall as a 20-story office tower. I'm at 33,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, traveling at 600 miles per hour, bound for the Far East. And what are the passengers doing? Complaining, sulking, tapping glumly into their laptops. A man next to me is upset over a dent in his can of ginger ale. This is the realization, perhaps, of a fully evolved technology. Progress, one way or the other, mandates that the extraordinary become ordinary._

I have been Plane Crazy since childhood, love to travel, and have read extensively in both fields, so it isn't surprising that I picked up this tell all book by a career airline pilot. I was familiar with author Smith, I'd followed his recurring column on air travel at Salon.com for many years. With all this background in the area, in retrospect it also isn't surprising that I didn't find that much in the book that was thrilling or fascinating for me. On the other hand, it is a fine job of giving good information about airliners and the people who work in them. Smith writes well, knows his stuff, and shares information freely. Most of it is very interesting. If you haven't made a practice of following the area obsessively, I think you will find the book interesting if you travel by air. Even if you do follow the field obsessively (as I do), you'll probably still find the book worth the read. The book moves from topic to topic, divided broadly into seven chapters with titles such as "The Airlines We Love to Hate" and "Flying for a Living: The Awe and Odd of a Life Aloft." There is a useful glossary at the end of the book, though accessing it will presumably play havoc with your "furthest page read" record. In short, if you're interested in the book, you probably should read it, but keep your expectations realistic if this isn't your first airplane ride.

Lots and lots of trivia, of course. But here are a few:

I've always viewed the Boeing 707, arguably first successful jet airliner (sorry De Havilland Comet fans!), as the turning point in making long-distance air travel affordable and tolerable. Smith views the 747 as the key aircraft, because of the lower ticket prices allowed by its huge passenger capacity and economies of scale. He points out with pride that the 747 is still the second best-selling jet airliner of all time, in spite of not being economical to use (except for a few special cases, such as one in Japan that he writes about) on the numerous short haul passenger routes that far outnumber the intercontinental trips where the 747 excels. I was amused that Boeing messed with their traditional numbering system on the latest version of the 747, to take advantage of a popular Asian superstition.

Smith says that during the episodes of "violent" turbulence we sometimes experience, the altitude of the plane varies by only forty feet and usually much less (the rare exceptions are the ones that get large numbers of people injured and make it into the news). The response to an area of turbulence is just to slow the plane down, and possibly ask for a course change to a more stable altitude or heading. Pilots do not whip the controls around to fight the turbulence, in fact they do less maneuvering and controlling in turbulence and let the plane go its way.

Smith talks about the airports as well as the airplanes. Like me, he bewails the barrage of noise in American airports compared to some more sedate foreign airports where they dispense with a continual blare of safety announcements and parking directives, and turn off the nonstop CNN News broadcasts at the gates. Many American airports have muted the CNN, but the irrelevant and ignored security announcements still continue unabated.

I grew up thinking of airline pilot as a high-paying job, and for the lucky few, that is still true. But we learn that between 1977 and 2010, the average airline pilot salary in the US fell 42 percent. That's not 42 percent adjusted for inflation, it is 42 percent! Starting salaries at the major airlines (which generally take significant experience to get) are about $30,000 a year. Most jobs are at the regional airlines, where new copilots start at $19,000 a year, and senior pilots peak their careers at $100,000 if they are lucky enough to be selected for a top job. Smith works out that on a New York to San Francisco flight, the pilot gets about $6.78 of your fare, and the first officer gets about $5. On a typical regional airline 90-minute hop, the pilot gets less than $3 per passenger. Smith compares flying to painting, playing minor league sports, or writing books; big reward awaits a lucky few, but "most toil in extended purgatory for their art." Promotions to pilot are based strictly on seniority, and not every person offerd a pilot slot will accept it. Desirable routes and schedules are also awarded based on seniority at that rank, and many feel it is better to remain a senior first officer than become a junior captain and have a life that has you continually jet lagged and away from home. Flight attendants are in pretty much the same system as far as seniority and schedules, by the way. And if you change airlines or your airline goes bust, you start over in seniority, assuming you can find another job at all. Furloughs where you are laid off temporarily are common, Smith reports that he was furloughed for five and a half years before being called back.

Despite what we've read, the book reports that less than one percent of landings are performed automatically.

There are disappointingly few war stories in the book, probably for liability reasons. Smith does tell an amusing story about being a cargo pilot carrying a load of flowers on a transAtlantic flight where pollen from the flowers made the cockpit continually smell like being in a box of baby powder, and his reaction on learning that the large amounts of pollen and dust made the jet's smoke and fire detectors go off almost continually. He thought about the custom sometimes practiced of tossing flowers at sea on the site of a crashed airliner, and how this flight would save everyone the trouble if fire brought it down off Labrador!

It seems there is an airline in one of the former Soviet 'Stans called Zhezkazan Zhez Air. Though spelled slightly differently, Google sort of confirms this:
http://www.airlines-inform.com/world_airlines/Zhezkazgan_Air.html (one Zhez is left out)

Four stars from me. This itinerary is definitely recommended for those who are interested in the topic. Of course, stay at home people and those who are afraid to fly will correctly "Go Greyhound."



Curses!, by Aaron Elkins

Yep, it was time for another Gideon Oliver mystery. Once again, Gideon is on the road, as a visiting expert at a Mayan archeological dig in Mexico. But it seems this dig is cursed. Literally. The Mayans left it in writing. And the curse seems to be coming true. Before the book is over, Oliver, his long-suffering wife, and the other diggers will confront the bloodsucking kinkajou, a darkness that causes the spirit to languish and faint, fire and bloody flux, the one called Xecotcavach who pierces skulls, and the beast that turns men to stone. This could definitely be fatal for our hero!

I've said as much or more than I should above, so I won't dwell on the story. I did like "Goldstein's Theorum [sic] of Interconnected Monkey Business" as promulgated by the Director of the dig. There seem to be more typos than I'm used to having in non-indy Kindle books, though it is still not bad enough to seriously mess with reading the book.

I liked the book, but it wasn't as awesome as the previous books in this series have been. Maybe I'm just getting acclimated to the character and settings, like the passengers on the airliner Patrick Smith described in my quote at the beginning of this post. Still a worthy read. Three and a half stars from me (I'm a hard grader, this means that I was quite satisfied with the book).


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## Mike D. aka jmiked (Oct 28, 2008)

The Hooded Claw said:


> I've always viewed the Boeing 707, arguably first successful jet airliner (sorry De Havilland Comet fans!), as the turning point in making long-distance air travel affordable and tolerable.


I think I'd have to go with the DC-3 on that. Depending on how you define long-distance, affordable, and tolerable, of course. 

Mike


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

jmiked said:


> I think I'd have to go with the DC-3 on that. Depending on how you define long-distance, affordable, and tolerable, of course.


I'd agree about the DC3 being the first really successful airliner, but I'm unaware of any jet versions of that bird!  I did specify jet airliner...


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## SidneyW (Aug 6, 2010)

I read a couple of the Gideon Olivers, but it's been a while back. There's one set in the Washington state rain forest that's pretty good. I believe it's "A Dark Place."


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road With Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs, by Brian Switek

First, there's this:










Calvin was a dinosaur fanatic. More about that later. But I was saddened, in reading "Beloved Brontosaurus," to learn that "Ultrasaurus" as mentioned in the cartoon above, is not considered a valid species anymore. Just like Brontosaurus. Dagnabit.

What we have in this book is the writings of a raving dinosaur fanatic about various dinosaur-related topics. This guy outdoes me for being a dinosaur fan. By quite a lot. Over his wife's objections, he has a life-sized casting of the skull of an Apatosaurus in his home. Purchased at the estate sale of Utah's long-time State Paleontologist (it must be cool to live in a state with a State Paleontologist!). The book is organized on chapters covering different aspects of dinosaurs, but he begins by telling us of the experience of growing up as a dinosaur fanatic, and the sadness of the name going away. As Switek puts it: "...The iconic dinosaur that suffered a second extinction at the hands of research....she evaporated into the scientific ether just as soon as I met her." He mentions that his preliterate attempts at art included crayoned portraits of his family including a pet dinosaur roughly the size of a Great Dane, and that he was so obsessed with seeing the animatronic dinosaurs at Disney World that his parents took him there and put him on the bus before going to the hotel to unpack the car (I wouldn't have gotten away with that, as a former science-obsessed brat, I envy his technique!). He says he has had an Allosaurus tattoo designed for his right arm (though he doesn't explicitly say that it has been drawn on).

A less personal bit on the loss of the name Brontosaurus is that Switek mentions that using Google's Engram Viewer, we can learn that Brontosaurus was still used in books more frequently than Apatosaurus for long after the old name was no longer valid.

The book is organized into chapters including such topics as "Dinosaur Feathers" (I was astonished to learn that even Tyrannosaurus Rex almost certainly had feathers, which just seems morally wrong!), "Hadrosaur Harmonics and Tyrannosaur Tastes," And others on different topics. Every chapter is fascinating. I am shocked how far behind I am on dinosaur lore, lots has been learned in the last couple of decades that I was clueless about.

I highlighted far too many interesting things to even begin to give a representative sampling of here, but I will mention that in the iconic movie Jurassic Park, the Tyrannosaurus roar was a blend of elephant, alligator, tiger, dog, and penguin<!> sounds. Well, at least a penguin is (now) considered a form of dinosaur! Apparently Spielberg was offered the chance to use colored dinosaurs (it appears that many dinosaurs had at least portions of their anatomy with bright colors), but declined because he couldn't "scare people with Technicolor dinosaurs."

There is at least one infectious disease that affects injuries in the beaks of modern birds that has been identified in the fossils of dinosaurs with mouth injuries, including the famous Tyrannosaurus Sue, who was installed in Chicago a few years ago. Dinosaur fossils have also revealed cancers in creatures that lived hundreds of millions of years ago.

The book talks extensively about what is known of dinosaur social behavior, including mating. Investigations of Stegosaurus mating habits are also included.

The notion of grazers such as Triceratops being herd animals has been around for a long time, but based on discoveries of large numbers of immature animals of the same species together suggest that even Allosaurus may have run in packs, at least as a juvenile.

In addition to all the lore, accounts of visits to many modern dinosaur sites are included.

Highly recommended for dinosaur buffs. If you are one of that elite crew, get this and read it at once!

Five stars out of five.



The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie

I'd never heard of this book, but it appears to have been a huge hit in the literary world a ways back. Long enough ago that this is the Twentieth Anniversary Edition, which I picked up at a celebratory sale price. I admit that the only reason I looked at it was curiosity about the title! The book is a collection of short stories about life on an Indian Reservation (The Rez) in Eastern Washington.

The Rez is a very sad place. Opportunity is scarce, but alcoholism is plentiful. The author grew up on such a reservation, and he claims that the events in the stories are largely true, albeit dramatized. In particular, he claims in the introduction that "everyone in this book is a drunk or in love with a drunk." He reports that his father never did shake free of alcoholism, and that alcohol-aggravated diabetes eventually caused his father's demise (the aftermath is the subject of one of the stories). He reports that one murderer is known as such to everyone, including the police, but they apparently can't get a case that will be solid enough to allow an arrest (police questioning of his father on the subject is yet another story subject). "It's hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half-filled or half-empty. They just hope it's good beer." Sometimes the book shifts into fanciful stuff that is either a story being told by a character, or a bit of escapism inside the head of one of the characters.

There are some lovely bits of writing in the book. My favorite sentence is "Thomas was a storyteller that nobody wanted to listen to. That's like being a dentist in a town where everybody has false teeth." The book title is also a story title, and the title makes sense, even though neither Keemosabe nor Jay Silverheels makes an appearance in the book (no sign of Johnny Depp, either). Nevertheless, though I found the lengthy introduction fascinating, the stories themselves didn't appeal to me. I was a bit enlightened (and depressed), but seldom entertained. About 50% of the way through the book, I concluded this wasn't going to change, but for some reason was very determined to finish the book, and I did. I'm not generally a "literary" kind of guy, though I do like Steinbeck and D. H. Lawrence sometimes. But I couldn't get engaged in this. Lest you think I'm denouncing the book, I must remind you that this isn't my sort of read, and the fact that I stuck with it at all is a tribute to the author's writing.

Three stars out of five is my rating. For me personally, I probably rated it lower, but since I was stepping out of bounds to a place I didn't really belong here, I'm being generous. I really do think that if you like literary stuff that is depressing but interesting, you might really like the book.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

SidneyW said:


> I read a couple of the Gideon Olivers, but it's been a while back. There's one set in the Washington state rain forest that's pretty good. I believe it's "A Dark Place."


Yep, it's "The Dark Place" and there is a review of it, I believe earlier in this thread (if not, it is near the end of the 2013 thread). Oliver investigates a series of murders where the main suspect appears to be Bigfoot! I recommend it.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Can you Feel Anything When I do This?, by Robert Sheckley

I read this collection of short stories waaay back in high school. I hadn't reread it in many years, but two of the stories stuck with me so well that I could still describe them in great detail decades later. Sheckley's accounts of a man being offered a "free gift" by a PR representative of The Devil, and of the struggles of an astronaut on a desert planet being kept away from water by his own security robot stuck with me. I had high hopes of discovering new stories that I really, really liked when I reread the book now. Alas, didn't happen. I still really like those same two stories a lot. All the rest of the stories are good, but not great, except one, and I'm looking forward to reading more of Robert Sheckley now that his work is on Kindle (This book and a couple of random stories in anthologies are my total dose of his work so far).

For the benefit of the sensitive, I will warn that the book very much has an early seventies sensibility to it, and there are frequent favorable references to illegal drug use. I am and have always been a complete party pooper in that area, but I didn't let it keep me from enjoying the book.

The one story that is a stinker is "Aspects of Langranak." I had highlighted the title on my Fire, with a note. Didn't remember it at all, so since it was short, I just reread it. Didn't like it at all, but didn't remember reading it just two weeks ago. Nor did I remember it from my younger days. I went back and looked at my highlighting, and realized I'd put in a note. The note just said "boring." I really should rewrite the note to say "boring and unmemorable." I have no memory of reading the story at all. And probably won't remember it for long now. But don't let that deter you from the book, two of the stories are outstanding, and the rest range from perfectly acceptable to good.

Three and a half stars from me.



Situational Prevention of Poaching

This was offered for free a month or two ago. I grabbed it. I really like my "occupational memoirs" where someone talks about their interesting job, and though this wasn't literally a memoir, I thought it might give some interesting insights into the jobs of game wardens and conservationists. I discovered that this is a collection of academic papers (clearly I hadn't screened it well before clicking "buy"). This didn't make me optimistic, but I noted that the papers were all about exotic subjects. Not Warden Will trying to keep Bubba from spotlighting deer out of the cab of his F150, but the problems involved in stopping poaching of rhinoceri for their horns and similar stuff. I felt that might have potential, at least it was different!

I read the introduction, which explains "situational crime prevention" (Google it if you're interested) and talks a bit about poaching and stopping it in general. It was readable, but not thrilling. I was optimistic enough to read the first paper, which dealt with stopping poaching of rhinos in a South African game preserve. There actually was some interesting trivia about the subject, and I read the entirety of the paper with some interest. I then read the next paper, about stopping nest-robbing of parrots in South America (for local pets of families in South America, not for export to rich First Worlders) and it didn't hold my interest as well. Twenty-six percent of the way into the book, I gave it a rest. I doubt I'll go back.

There were a handful of interesting tidbits, mostly about rhinos and their horns. Here they are, wrapped up in a paragraph or so:

Rhino horn is highly sought-after in China and Southeast Asia for traditional medicine purposes. Contrary to the stories I'd heard, it is NOT (and has never been) sought after to help older men's sex problems. But it is used for many other "medicinal" purposes, and also is highly sought after to be drunk mixed in wine at parties as a conspicuous consumption item. Rhino horn is worth about the same, weight for weight, as gold. The poor saps in Africa who dodge game wardens to get rhino horn don't share generously in the financial bonanza, they get about five percent of the horn's value, 45 percent goes to middlemen, and about 50 percent goes to the final seller.

Until about 2008, African rhinos were viewed as a big conservation success story...There were only about twenty white rhinos in 1895, but this had grown to 18,800 in 2010. Black rhinos weren't as plentiful, but were also recovering. But starting in 2008, the Asian demand for illegal rhino horn started booming.

Rhinos are different than some other poached animals...If a poacher kills a tiger, nearly every bit of the animal can be sold as a souvenir or medicine or charm. But rhinos are only valuable for the horn. I'd read beforehand that preemptively removing the horn (to deny it to poachers and remove their incentive to kill the rhinos) was a solution, but it ends up that the horns grow back fast enough, and the process of horn removal (the rhino has to be tranquilized each time) is expensive and traumatic enough for the rhino, that dehorning isn't the way to go.

I didn't read enough of this book to give it a star rating, but I will say that anyone involved in wildlife conservation, especially in exotic (to this North American) locales will probably benifit professionally from reading the book.



Estate and Trust Administration for Dummies, by Margaret Atkins Munro

I may get to/have to start playing a larger role in a trust, so this seemed a prudent thing to read. For what I'm likely to do in the near future, only the first 1/4 or so of the book seemed relevant, so that's all that I read. The book does a good job of explaining things to someone who is a complete yokel in this area (like me), and I recommend it if you are in a similar situation to me. I see by my notes that I haven't highlighted a single thing that is interesting in general, as opposed to something relevant to me in my trust role, so this is not entertaining, and I can't imagine anyone reading it other than with utility in mind. I'm not going to give it a rating, except for the above recommendation to those who need to master the material.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

(link to paper version, no Amazon Kindle version available in the US)

Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy, by Craig A. Monson

I liked the title of this book, and LOVED the National Enquirer-style cover. I've been interested in it for awhile, and have been tracking the book on EreaderIQ in hopes the price would drop. The price didn't drop, but I noticed that the Kindle version stopped being available to me (it still exists, so there is some type of rights issue--And the publisher is the University of Chicago Press, so it has nothing to do with Hachette). I didn't want to buy a paper version, I'm trying to kick that habit, but I noticed that the book was still available for Nook. So I gritted my teeth and bought a Nook version. I wasn't too surprised to find that there is no Nook app for my Kindle Fire (I suppose I could've sideloaded it, but didn't want to bother, nor did I want to delve into stripping DRM). I ended up reading the book using the Nook app on my iPad.

In short, the author researched the records of The Sacred Congregations of Bishops and Regulars. This group was assigned assigned to deal with troublesome monastics during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance. He says that it appeared many of the records he used had not been opened since being sealed in bundles three or four centuries before! He says he would frequently start chuckling to himself in the quiet reading room, and the other researchers would invariably ask "Okay, what did you find this time?" He only stumbled into these by doing research for music history, but was so intrigued by what he found that he chose to write a separate book on (mostly) non-musical naughty nuns.

I went into the book with tremendous optimism, I was sure this would be a five-star book. It ended up falling short. In a way, my expectations were unrealistic. Occasionally author Monson was able to get additional facts from municipal archives, or even the archives of a great music hall on some occasions, but his primary information source was reports of bad behavior, which were generally written by the local bishop, and often by The Inquisition! Though some of the records of interrogation by The Inquisition are surprisingly frank, this is still mostly a rather sanitized view of what was no doubt discovered, and even the people doing the reporting often had their own agendas, whether they were annoyed bishops trying to get the Vatican off their back about troublemakers, or a frightened novice nun talking to inquisitors (most of the interviews don't appear to have been any more scary than modern police interviews). Most of these are secondary sources, and unless he wanted to use the material he found as the basis for a novel (not a bad idea, actually), he had to summarize things in many cases. With one or two lapses, he stuck to avoiding creating fictionalized conversations and such. I still liked the book a lot, but this isn't the route to a lively and gripping narrative.

Some of the heavy-handed rules imposed on nuns by the clerical hierarchy, and the "exceptions" sought by nuns are bizarre. An archbishop prohibited nuns from keeping male dogs, but female dogs were okay. In most cases, nuns were locked within their convent and unable to leave, with the only outside contact visiting friends or relatives from opposite sides of a set of bars like you'd find in the jail in an old Western movie. One overweight abbess from Naples requested an exception to the "no males" policy, seeking two strong male servants to carryher to Mass, which she was too obese to walk to on her own. Nuns had various enterprises to earn money to support their institution, sometimes they were conventional, such as making handicrafts, and sometimes exotic, such as raising silkworms. In one case there was a scandal over importing lay female instructors into a convent to teach weaving and working silk. Permission was refused, in the name of monastic discipline, and new applicants for admission who had learned silk work before they actually assumed holy orders, would come into the nunnery and teach their superiors. Not the most efficient method!

On the other hand, when the rich and powerful sent daughters into the convent, all sorts of exceptions and privileges would be arranged for the wealthy. Wealthy daughters were unpopular among the rich--If a daughter was going to be married to a person of quality, her parents were required to provide a substantial dowry, and splitting up the family wealth among several daughters was usually viewed as unwise. Even though donations were required to send rich daughters into a nunnery, it was much cheaper to send them off to a religious devotion than to marry them off. But sometimes class conflict between these wealthy initiates and the more humble sisters was the root of the problem.

The book focuses on five cases. One involves the background to an order from the Vatican that reads (author's translation) "We further command by virtue of holy obedience, on pain of excommunication, that nobody speak about the business of the viola...It must be totally covered up and smoothed over." What was this business of the viola that caused such a powerful response? You'll have to read the book to find out.

The second case involves something even more shocking. A group of nuns were accused of deliberately burning down their convent! And it appears likely that they did, though of course we can't be certain of anything almost 350 years later.

The third case covers a "mafia" of related sisters who had achieved great influence in one particular convent (rules against having too many family members together, intended to avoid this exact situation, had been ignored, presumably after a suitable donation of gold by outside relatives). The sisters were genuinely talented at crafts and were redecorating the chapel in a spectacular fashion when a rival, apparently intending to "scoop" them and steal some glory, put some lesser coverings and weavings of her own creation in place first. One of the sisters publicly tore up these offending religious symbols, despite being begged not to, and this impiety started a lengthy administrative battle, with the sisters defying instructions from their own archbishop to make reparations. It appears that male members of families of the feuding sisters had duels over the matter. The efforts of the authorities to calm things down without offending the powerful patrons of either group were amusing.

Other cases involved nuns who actually escaped from the convent, in some cases temporarily, and in another case permanently. I was shocked that a man who had helped one nun escape temporarily (not permantly) received life imprisonment in very harsh conditions for his "crime." The nun in this case was returned to the convent she had fled from, and unsurprisingly didn't get along well with her sisters who had discovered her absence and "ratted her out."

In addition to the expected scandalous and interesting tales, the book tells a lot about the lives and conditions of nuns at this time. The author points out that executing art in a convent was one of the few ways that women of the time could indulge creative abilities in a systematic way, so the nunnery wasn't necessarily a horrible fate. I was surprised how diligently rich families sought to send young daughters to nunneries. The saying had been "A woman should have a husband or a wall" (wall referring to a convent), but the author suggests that for rich families, it should have been modified to "Only one daughter should have a husband, and the rest should have a wall."

Downsides of the book are that the foreign (to me) names for institutions and people made things hard to follow. There is a Dramatis Personae at the front of the book that I should have used more efficiently to help in this. The stories become rather repetitive in some ways over time, even though they really are unique. I liked the book, but didn't prize it as highly as I'd hoped to. I recommend the book for those interested in the subject, and rate it a solid four stars. The author has another similar book (still available in Kindle for for now), and I'm probably going to buy and read it.



Memos to the Governor: An Introduction to State Budgeting, by Dall W. Forsythe

I'm sure that hardly anyone is reading this part of the post, because as soon as y'all saw the title of the book, you clicked through to buy, and immediately abandoned the computer to go read this book on your Kindle...Or perhaps not! I work in a state government job, but am not involved in the budget, and am not on the Governor's speed dial. I did track this book on EreaderIQ, and grabbed it when it dropped below five dollars a few months ago, but just stuck it in the backlog, and didn't read it. Recently the dramatics around our state budget were more impactful than usual, so I decided it was time to get this out and plow through it. Plow I did, the book is not terribly long, and I read it in an evening, even though I didn't start the book till nine o'clock or so. The title is not just rhetoric, the book really is written as advice to a hypothetical governor, and this governor is addressed in the second person, i.e., "As a practical matter, you can do little to speed up the legislative process." At least he didn't put "TO:" and "FROM" up at the start of each chapter! The book is surprisingly readable, I began it wondering if I'd truly be able to read the thing, but I kept going happily at a fast clip, with ne'er a thought of abandoning the book.

This is the third edition, and I was amused that the author brags on himself a bit in the Introduction by describing how a state budget director declined to send a copy of the book to his own governor, choosing instead to summarize the chapters as memos sent to the guv under his own name! The author says he decided this was a compliment.

This is truly a book written for the highest levels of state government--The focus is on the interactions between the governor and legislature, with additional bits about the Governor's interaction with other players, such as press representatives, the bond market, and even individual citizens. But there's little directly for petty bureaucrats such as myself, even in the tiny role we do play in the process.

Though not much of it applies to me directly, I do understand much more completely the budget brawl I've seen from the sidelines. Some of the information is disturbing or depressing, such as learning in 2009, the year the Great Recession hit, the average state overestimated the revenue they'd receive for the year by over ten percent! Reduced sales tax collections and similar economy-based income falls were responsible for the rapid and unexpected drop. Another depressing item came in a discussion of using "gimmicks" to create a balanced budget (this is never a good idea, according to the authors-they say the road to state fiscal Hell is paved not with good intentions, but with one-time gimmicks), but nonetheless, the book tells governors that though the legislature will often change a budget submitted by the guv, they "...will not pass a budget that is more fiscally responsible than the one you give them." This is especially depressing for governors, since as chief executive, solving the problems this creates falls to them, not the legislative leaders who created and passed an unrealistic budget.

I learned a lot--I now understand the value of mandatory adjournment dates for legislatures in a way I never did before, and will have more insight into the budget battle next year. Unfortunately for you who are viewing these posts, the only people who will (or should) read this are either in a state government job, or are political junkies for state politics. I rate the book a solid four stars, but you should avoid it unless you fall into one of those two groups.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Sideloading the Nook app is possible...I've done it.   But it's easier on the iPad.

Thanks for doing this, Claw, I've added several books to my wishlist!

Betsy


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Fitness for Dummies, by Suzanne Schlosberg

If you've been following this thread, you know that I've lost weight (successfully, rah!), and am trying to change my pasty self into a slightly fit pasty self. I bought several of the fitness books from the famous "Dummies" series of how-to volumes, and have been reading pieces of several of them as I needed to lately. I read this one cover to cover, since getting a solid introduction seemed smart, and I recommend the book. The text is logically divided into chapters on different subjects, it doesn't talk only to jocks (or jockettes). Coverage is broad, seemingly everything you can imagine is in here. Since this is a survey book, nothing is gone into terribly deeply, but there is enough to get you well-started and working. There are chapters covering why you should do this, nutrition, the advantages and disadvantages of fitness clubs and programs. How to create a home gym is discussed, as well as reasons why this may or may not be a good idea for you. As you'd expect, there are detailed instructions on exercises of various types, showing exercises to target different muscles. These explain specific movements with illustrations. The illustrations are good quality, and look great on my iPad Air, are fine on my 7 inch Kindle HDX, and are legible on my Galaxy Note 3 smartphone (huge screen for a phone, but still not designed for showing large illustrations to advantage). Most of the time, the illustrations are adequate to understand the exercises, but in a few cases I wish there were more, showing intermediate steps. I didn't like the chapter on designing workouts as well as I liked the material in Faster, Better, Stronger, however.

The book is well-written and easy to read, and does well the goal of giving you the information to get started. Very solid four stars from me, though anyone with a eInk Kindle (unless perhaps it is a DX) might want to sample it first to see if the illustrations show up satisfactorily. It is pricey as Kindle books go, but if it helps motivate you to improve yourself, the investment is well worth it! (I'm still glad I got it for a bit over five bucks a few months ago, though!)



We Will Destroy Your Planet: An Alien's Guide to Conquering Earth, by David McIntee

I saw and grabbed this a few weeks ago when the priced dropped to just a few bucks. This is a lighthearted and not serious book, but of course you didn't expect anything else from a book that discusses the advantages of destroying planet Earth vs. merely enslaving humanity, harvesting them for food, etc.

The book is divided into chapters on topics such as the best way to destroy the Earth (ends up that it is very, very, hard), various problems in battling those pesky humans if you do decide to conquer it instead, what to do with it once you've conquered it, and what to do when things go wrong. It ends with a chapter that surveys some of the more famous alien invasions documented in Earth's literature, movies, and television.

Often there is a fair amount of Reader's Digest-level science explanation of things like the amount of energy it would take actually destroy the planet, and the relative merits of using Venus, the Moon, antimatter, etc., to blow it up (don't worry, no equations whatsoever, and only a few numbers, this ain't a physics book). It quickly moves on to the more practical options of fumigating the planet to remove the present pesky, ugly, inhabitants to make room for your superior race with their nice purple tentacles glistening attractively with just the right amount of mucus (or whoever the conqueror is). As I was reading the descriptions of astronomy and biology, and how they affected conquest plans, and the advantages of air power versus ground power and such, I (mentally) yawned, and thought to myself: "This is well-known stuff, heck I could write most of this myself." Then it dawned on me: I've spent my life getting a broad formal and informal education in all sorts of scientific topics, supplementing it with being a history buff with special interest in military history, and being entertained by science fiction for decades. I finally realized--I've spent my whole life studying to conquer Earth, especially in a science fictional scenario with advanced weapons. Since my own civilization doesn't offer the tools for me to do this, I obviously am going to have to hire myself as mercenary to some advanced alien species to be their local adviser on their conquest! So perhaps I will abandon my title of "melodrama villain" for "mercenary world conqueror." Of course, I'll have to make my availability known to the advanced scouts of these alien conquerors. Maybe I should contact Harvey about purchasing a banner ad here on KB...? 

The book is well-written, as if it truly were an advice manual for alien conquerors, but one thing that I found a little bit jarring is that it covers all sorts of conceivable conquerors--Many types of traditional aliens from other planets, actual humans from alternate universes or the distant past, and other types. This is a strength of the book, since it enables the authors to address a lot of different scenarios, but it is also a weakness in that there are frequent digressions into "...If you're a human from a parallel Earth, your troops will already be acclimated to Earth's gravity, while those from high or especially low grav worlds may need specialized experience and possibly bionic assistance at working in the different gravity, while aquatic beings will need special amphibious carriers to engage with the dominant species on land..." (this isn't an actual quote, but it is something representative I made up on the fly). These become repetitive sometimes.

Lots of interesting stuff in the book. The authors critique one of the most striking scenes from one of my favorite television shows (Babylon 5--For the half a dozen or so B5 fans out there in the world, it is the scene that was later reused in the opening showing Londo watching with horror as ships used mass drivers to bombard Narn). I don't entirely agree with their critique, but they have some points. They also belong to the Billy Mitchell/US Air Force/Shock and Awe school that claims that if you can fly over a region and blast anything that moves, you have won. As a former US Army Officer, I stand with S.L.A. Marshall, and subscribe to the doctrine that you don't control a place till you have put a seventeen year old with a rifle in it. Incidentally, if I did my sums right, today (June 14th) is the 239th birthday of the US Army! Hoo-Wah!

The book points out something interesting. The first "alien invasion" story as we know it is a book called The Germ Growers, written and published in Australia by Robert Potter in 1892, beating HG Wells and The War of the Worlds by a few years. Apparently these aliens used biological warfare in offense, unlike HG, where biowar was Earth's last-ditch unplanned defense. Another interesting point is that alien invasion truly blossomed as a genre in the years after World War II in the culture of the USA, the only major combatant in World War II that didn't come under invasion threat or suffer (widespread) bombardment.

There are references to alien invasion fiction throughout the books, especially Doctor Who. Even Marvin the Martian and Looney Tunes are covered. This comes out into the open in the final chapter where some of the most prominent examples of invasion books/movies/tv are discussed and reviewed. They speak well of one of them that was new to me: Iron Sky, which I'm now going to have to watch myself. The references to and discussions of of fictional invasions were the most interesting part of the book for me. Oh, and here's Iron Sky on Amazon video. Fair warning, it seems to be very campy!



I haven't yet seen the movie, but the authors recommend it, and it sounds promising. It appears to be available for free streaming on Netflix. There's also a Director's Cut.

Back to the book: I liked it, but it didn't shock and awe me. If you are a fan of alien invasion science fiction on screen or page, I think you'll like it. Solid three and a half stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

An Elephant for Aristotle, by L. Sprague de Camp

Actually, I read this several books before the ones I posted yesterday, but somehow skipped writing it up. It is similar to The Bronze God of Rhodes, which I wrote up a couple of months ago, being a historical novel set in the period after Alexander the Great made most of his conquests. de Camp reportedly wrote the book because some people feel the great ancient Greek natural philosopher Aristotle wrote about Elephants in such detail that he must have seen a living one. de Camp decided to write a novel based on the idea that Alexander decided to reward his old tutor (Aristotle) by sending him an Indian elephant for his very own! Since the gift was being sent from the very borders of India to Athens, 2000 miles away, some poor sap had to physically escort the elephant on this long trip. The hero of the book is the poor sap in question. Leon of Atrax is one of Alexander's officers who just wants to return to his Greek home, but before he will be allowed to resign, he must complete this final mission for his king. The book is basically a travelogue of events, incidents, and problems along the way (and there are lots!). It is interesting, but becomes a bit repetitive. It also suffers a bit because there's no continuing adversary or opponent through the book, unless you want to count the accumulation of human, natural, and other obstacles on the road as the adversary. Though not a true historical story, it could be true. As in Bronze God of Rhodes, there's no magic or fantasy element to the book. I did miss a map, and since the book uses ancient Greek, Persian, and other place names transmogrified into English characters, the spellings often vary and can't be readily looked up on Google or in an atlas. I was irritated to discover a list of modern equivalents of the place names at the end of the book--After I was done reading it! I liked the book, but it isn't great. I'll say that it barely squeaked into four stars, but not by much. It's well written, and if it sounds interesting you'll probably be pleased with it.



Call of the Jersey Devil, by Aurelio Voltaire

I commend the following to your attention:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcgvLiNYCcA

This is a song by Voltaire, who now styles himself Aurelio Voltaire (thank goodness he's not "The Artist Formerly Known as Voltaire.") I have no business liking his music, but I do! He is a Goth, which is a completely alien way of being to me, but doesn't stop my enjoyment. He puts all of his music on Youtube at his official Youtube Channel, and I'd further recommend you look up "When You're Evil" and "Death, Death, (Devil, Devil, Evil, Evil Song)." If you are a Trekkie, look up "The USS Make Sh*t UP", the version on the album "Bitrektual," not the earlier version. A lot of his music is available in Amazon Prime Music if you have that (though not the Trekkie songs). And I liked him before I knew of the Star Trek/Star Wars/Doctor Who songs, so that wasn't what made me a fan. You may not have known of Voltaire, but if you are old enough, you have seen his work. He did most of the stop-motion animation bumpers they showed between commercials on MTV in the early '80s. Clearly, he is multi-talented, and this book is his first major literary production. It's a novel about a washed-up Goth Rocker and five young Goth mall rats who accidentally meet up trying to reach a rock festival out in the New Jersey barrens. They never make it to the festival, but they do end up involuntarily being involved when one of the gates to Hell opens up near where they are stranded. Fortunately, they have help from a "good witch" who has spent her life plugging up the gate when it periodically opens, but she is old and losing her mojo.

Voltaire intends the book to be both scarey and hilarious, and many of the reviews on Amazon refer to it as side splitting. I agree that it did have its moments of humor, but it was mostly a dark horror book. There are a lot of ugly things in it, and the fate of one character in particular was absolutely vile. Not only do ghouls and demons and monsters emerge from Hell with hostile intent, you see, but many of them aren't satisfied to merely slaughter innocents when they come into the human world, they want to use trickery to try to lure more sufferers into Hell. Misery loves company. I liked the book, but be warned there is some ugly stuff in here.

Most of the protagonists are seriously damaged people, but we gain some insight into their minds and the background that caused them to be damaged, and they are a sympathetic bunch, with the exception of Aleister. I like it when bad things happen to Aleister. And they do. A lot. One scene in particular is probably the only moment in the book where I did laugh out loud.

Voltaire appears to have a coauthor who I assume did most of the drudge work of whipping the story into presentable shape, but there are some editing problems. Many sentences are over-written, and in some cases Voltaire used deliberately obscure words for no special reason. On the other hand, a few of the nearly-overwritten sentences are kind of pleasing.

The book is recommended to those who find the idea of five Goths (four teenagers and one overaged musician) battling the legions of Hell appealing. Four stars from me. And Voltaire's music is worth a listen. Check out Prime Music if you have it, or the Voltaire Channel on Youtube. I especially recommend the albums "To The Bottom of The Sea" and "The Devil's Bris." "Bitrektual" if you are into pop science fiction such as Star Trek or Doctor Who.



Panther: Germany's Quest for Combat Dominance, by Michael Green

I am one of those military nerds who delights in obscure trivia about obsolete military equipment, especially tanks or planes or submarines. You may remember that last year I read a book on the history and development of the American Sherman tank. This is a somewhat similar book about the German Panther, the signature German tank of the last third of World War II (the Tiger gets mentioned in the movies, but the Panther was much more used, and at least in my opinion, a much better tank once the bugs were ironed out). The book differs from the Sherman one by being even more obsessed over the fine points of distinction between different models of the tank, and having less discussion of the design philosophy and bureaucratic infighting over the use and modification of the subject tank. There are lots of great illustrations, though I doubt you'll be truly pleased with them unless you have an iPad, or at least an 8.9 inch Fire.

There are all sorts of trivia, some of it interesting, and some merely tedious. Extensive quotes from period documents, one of my favorites was this sentence from a German manual describing the duties of Panther tank drivers:

_"Always pay attention to the road in front of you, and never think about girls, vacation, or pork chops!"_

Lots of anecdotes from German tankers, and American tankers unfortunate enough to come up against Panthers. My favorite was the account of two refugee German tankers who were fleeing on foot from being routed, when they came across an abandoned Panther. After acquainting themselves with the controls of the Panther (they had been assigned to a different sort of tank) they were delighted to find that the gas tank was half full, and drove off merrily in retreat, figuring riding was better than walking any day. When they encountered American tanks, they prepared to defend themselves, and only then realized that the ammunition bin was completely empty. So now they had insight into why the tank had been abandoned, even though it still had gas....

I learned some very interesting stuff I hadn't known, such as one of the reasons that German tanks early in the war always seemed to have short gun barrels (which hurts gun performance) was that the German Ordnance Department insisted tank main guns couldn't extend past the front end of the tank, for fear of the barrel being damaged by striking an object such as a tree or building. A noble idea, but a little too enthusiastically pursued!

I liked the book. You won't like it unless you are really into this stuff. For those people, you know who you are. Three and a half stars from me, which means I was satisfied but not delighted.


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## anguabell (Jan 9, 2011)

It always warms my heart to see other people reading weird books   Somewhere on my computer, there is a copy of the German user manual for Tiger tanks. It is very thorough, with many illustrations. I always imagine German soldiers, in the middle of the combat, studying methodically those complicated instructions for use... Panther was a better tank but I think Tiger was scarier looking.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

If by "people" you mean "The Hooded Claw...." 

I read a little bit of everything, but I don't quite approach the diversity of Claw's list. 

Betsy


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> If by "people" you mean "The Hooded Claw...."
> 
> I read a little bit of everything, but I don't quite approach the diversity of Claw's list.
> 
> Betsy


he's a PERSON? i thought he was a cartoon character that's why he read such a diverse bunch of stuff, too many screenwriters pushing him different ways.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

telracs said:


> he's a PERSON? i thought he was a cartoon character that's why he read such a diverse bunch of stuff, too many screenwriters pushing him different ways.


Well, I was thinking more in terms of "People" being plural vs "The Hooded Claw" being a singular unit. 

Betsy


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

telracs said:


> he's a PERSON? i thought he was a cartoon character that's why he read such a diverse bunch of stuff, too many screenwriters pushing him different ways.


But of course, I'm actually six different cartoon characters. It's just that you keep changing channels and getting different versions of me. Since I am on all the networks. 

For Betsy and Anguabell, trying different stuff is what keeps me from getting bored...it beats playing golf or Lion's Club!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

iron Sky was mentioned in the alien invasion book I read recently. Although I generally confine my comments here to books, I'm going to comment on the movie since I mentioned it in my post.

Here is the official movie trailer:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NIRtZP7lojM

Iron Sky is a movie about alien invasion with a strong comedy element. It's also a political satire. In 2018, President Palin is overjoyed at how the invasion will help her efforts at being reelected. Note by the way that 2018 is not a presidential election year.  the movie was a foreign production with actors who US residents probably will not recognize. It's also fairly low budget, although computer special-effects mean that even low-budget movies look pretty impressive sometimes. I liked the movie but did not love the movie. The humor is good in many places, but the story is merely okay. In a couple of places there are plot holes you could fly a Zeppelin through, but a logical plot is not the goal here. Many of the scenes are Nazis talking to other Nazis, all in German with subtitles. This gets a little tiresome. Being primarily a European production it is sometimes critical of the United States in ways that may bother some Americans.

Using my standard 1 to 5 scale I say it is right on the border between three and half star and a four-star movie. It is available for free streaming if you have Netflix. If you are interested in the movie and have Netflix I would definitely give it a try. If you don't have Netflix and don't want to try a free trial of the service, the DVD is available on Amazon and you can also buy or rent the movie from Amazon video. You'll have to make your own choice, but renting the movie is only three bucks. What I watched is the theatrical version of the movie. Netflix also has the directors cut, which I'm going to give a try later. Supposedly the key difference is 20 minutes of extra stuff that was edited out of the original release.


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> Well, I was thinking more in terms of "People" being plural vs "The Hooded Claw" being a singular unit.
> 
> Betsy


well, he is one of a kind, i'll grant you that.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Interesting, Claw!

Here's a link to the Amazon Instant Video one:


It's not Prime, so, as you say, it'll cost a small bit.

I'm going to watch it later on Netflix....

Betsy


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

(image only, link to kindle book with boring cover below)



Shades of Gray, by Timothy O'Neill

Nope, not Fifty Shades of Gray, so stop rolling your eyes and leering! 

I am biased about this book, it is a long-time favorite. I first read it in 1988, and I believe this is the fourth time I've re-read it since then. I've long held it to be one of my favorite books. This time I enjoyed it greatly, though I admit that on read number four it doesn't quite sizzle like it used to.

The book is a ghost story set at West Point. A cadet who claims he is repeatedly visited by a ghost at night goes AWOL, and to put the story to rest, the Commandant orders two psychology instructors to investigate. And they do, complete with temperature sensors, infrared cameras, and the like. But the key to the mystery may lie not with the fancy instruments, but with the aged and close-mouthed West Point librarian. Plus, there is a great surprise revealed at the end. I really like the book. I valued it enough that when I saw it was available in Kindle form, I bought it again, in case my ancient paperback falls apart from acid eating the paper!

The book was first published in 1988 (when I was an Army officer myself, though I never went near West Point) and it is set in that time. The computers and electronics are dated, and one of the characters receives a phone message by a yellow piece of carbonless paper left on his desk.

I will not commit spoilers, but I recommend the book if a ghost story set at a military academy interests you in the slightest. Five stars from me. The book has seven of nine Amazon reviews for five stars, and two for four stars, so I'm not the only one who liked it!



The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, The First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805, by Richard Zacks

I haven't done anything on it in a few months, but you may remember that I have an ongoing project to read a book about each US President. I'm up to President Jefferson now (only number three, I have a long ways to go!). This book is about how the famous line "...to the shores of Tripoli..." came to be in The Marine's Hymn. In America's first effort to subvert a foreign government, President Jefferson sent an adventurous former Army Captain and eight Marines to Egypt to help the exiled brother of the troublesome pirate ruler of Tripoli (roughly modern Libya) throw his brother out of power and be America's friend forever (or at least stop capturing our ships and citizens). It is a fascinating story, and this is an excellent account of it. The book begins by telling the background of the Barbary Pirates and America's early naval operations against them, covers the biography of William Eaton, the adventurer who had charge of the Marine expedition, covers the politicking to prepare the expedition, and the adventure itself in considerable detail, then covers the aftermath as Eaton returned to America a hero, but managed to alienate nearly everyone. I grew to like Eaton a lot as a character in a book, but he was definitely not a charming man most of the time. The naval stuff and the preliminary politicking are quite interesting, but the details of the expedition are incredible. I'm genuinely impressed with what Eaton had to deal with. Besides his eight Marines, his troops were several hundred mercenaries, split between Greek Christians and North African Muslims who hated each other.

Lots and lots of interesting trivia:

A Tunisian minister, Soliman Meli-Melli, visited the US in the early 1800s, and Secretary of State James Madison approved the government paying the cost of a Greek prostitute for him as (I'm not making this up) "appropriations to foreign intercourse." Who said little Jimmy Madison didn't have a sense of humor?

Tobias Lear, the US agent who negotiated with the ruler of Tripoli, was a very shifty person--He had been caught embezzling from George Washington, appears to have destroyed some of George Washington's personal papers for political purposes, and hired a foreign assistant and interpreter who was almost certainly a double agent for the Tunisians.

In 1801, Tripoli (modern Libya) was the first country ever to declare war on the United States.

Rare Word Alert: A "fanfaronade" is a braggadacio or arrogant and boastful talk.

Before he became the ruler of Tripoli, Yussef (the fellow who later declared war on the US) told his mother that he wanted to reconcile with his other brother (not the one who the Marines tried to help, but a second one). He convinced her to arrange a meeting with the brother in her apartments, and she sat between them on a sofa, holding hands with each of them, expressing her delight that they were going to make peace. Under cover of getting a Koran to swear peace on Yussef grabbed a pair of pistols and shot at his brother, hitting his mother and shattering several of her fingers. In the presence of their mother and the brother's pregnant wife, Yussef and his bodyguards shot her other son a total of ten times, then hacked up and emasculated the body. Nice guy.

The local brother we were trying to install in power didn't really "get" America. He wrote a nice letter expressing thanks for American help--Addressed to "The King of America."

Highly recommended. I was torn between four and a half stars and five stars, but I'm going to say that this just scrapes into being a five star book.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

I admit it, I knew the Lindy Hop was a dance, but didn't really know anything about it. Click below and check out the Lindy Hop:






The above embedded video should work, but in case it doesn't, here is the actual link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5nds-RvK_c

Abe Lincoln: Public Enemy No. 1, by Brian Anthony

The reason I am talking about the Lindy Hop, is because in this book....



Abraham Lincoln does the Lindy Hop! Unfortunately, it happens offstage, so we don't get a detailed description. But I still cherish the mental image.

It seems that before John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln, he visited a Voodoo practicioner and got a curse put on the bullet in his assassination weapon. But like most magic, Voodoo is unreliable. So instead of dying after he is shot, Lincoln goes into a coma. Since the head of government can't be uncertain in the critical days of reconstruction, this is hidden from the public, but the sleeping Lincoln is well-cared for. And Lincoln sleeps peacefully until 1933, when he comes out of the coma! President Roosevelt and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover can't abide having someone of Lincoln's stature (heh) taking the active hand in public events old Abe desires, so newly-revived Abe Lincoln ends up on the run from the FBI, with his picture in every Post Office in the country.

I was drawn to this by the bizarre premise, and decided to take a chance at the low 99 cent price. I read the book in one long sitting on the same evening I bought it! In fairness, it is not a great book, but it is entertaining and held my interest. If the gimmick in the book intrigues you, you'll probably like it. I give it a very solid three and a half stars. I remind you that I'm a pretty tough grader, so this means that I was well-satisfied with the book.

Kirov, by John Schettler



Okay, here we have a naval time travel alternate history novel. Have you got that straight? Unlike most of my reading, this one was actually brought to my attention through Amazon's recommendation system. It is extremely well-reviewed with numerous sequels, and I've been meaning to use my Prime membership to borrow and read it for awhile. I finally did it last weekend, and I liked the book.

The Kirov (which is an actual Soviet/Russian Navy ship), was refitted in the late twenty-teens with the best available weaponry, and it is out on maneuvers in 2021 when a mysterious accident causes the weather to abruptly change, all known radio stations to stop broadcasting, and even the ship's GPS system to stop working. It takes a lot of investigation to convince the crew that they have been sent back in time to July 1941. World War II is raging, and the German raider Bismarck was sunk just a few months before, so the British have a zero-tolerance policy towards mysterious large warships abroad in the North Atlantic. America has not yet entered the war, but Churchill and Roosevelt are known (thanks to an amateur historian on board the ship) to be secretly meeting aboard a warship off the Canadian coast only a few days steaming away. The crew of the Kirov can't help but change history somehow--The mere existence of their ship and the advanced technology will change the future. But they have to decide how they want to act, and who their friends are (the obvious choice of the Soviet government isn't necessarily the way they want to go).

I ate the book up. Great effort was put into historical accuracy by the author, and rather than carp over a couple of minor nits I have, I must just say that I'm really impressed. The story is excellent, and the dilemma faced by the ship's officers is captivating.


Spoiler



I had some unconscious expectations because of my knowledge that there were several sequels


, and the end genuinely surprised me. I highly recommend the book for military history buffs. Others won't be so captivated. A very solid four stars from me (almost four and a half, but they are penalized by some editing mistakes, such as repeatedly using "who's" for "whose"), and I'll be reading the sequel with my next month's borrow.

The Wild Ones, by A. Bertram Chandler









(image only, not a link)

A couple of years ago, just before I started these threads, I began rereading the entire massive series of John Grimes science fiction novels, and this book continues that task. These books were great favorites of mine as a teenager and in my early twenties. I read my first one in eighth or ninth grade, and kept reading them until and after author Chandler passed away in 1983. This particular one is rather sentimentally sad--It was Chandler's last book, and I read it when it was first published a few months after I read notice of Chandler's death in a science fiction magazine. Perhaps Chandler wasn't feeling well, this one doesn't live up to the rest of the series. We do get to spend some time with Grimes' parents where he grew up in the first part of the book. Moving to The Main Event, you might guess what the central crisis of the novel was from learning that his assignment (although officially owner and captain of an independent tramp freighter, Grimes is secretly working for his former bosses as a sort of secret agent) is to go to a planet called New Salem. If the planet's name doesn't tip you off, thinking of that name while you look at the cover illustration will. And in honesty, not much happens in the book. I hadn't reread the book in decades (a bad sign when the book is part of a favorite series), and didn't remember anything at all of the plot. And when I finished the book, I mentally asked myself, "Is that all? Geeze, not much happened in the book."

To Chandler's credit, even Grimes toodling along without much happening was interesting enough and well-written enough that I'd been quite content while reading the book. It wasn't till I got through that I realized there wasn't really much of a plot. Since I was happy while reading, I can still give this book three and a half stars, even given the lack of action.

The Wild Ones is not independently available on Kindle, but you can get it cheap as part of a four-ebook set here:


The good news about this is that from here we move to the last phase of Grimes' career, with some excellent stories. Oddly enough, Chandler wrote up the last part of Grimes biography first, so there are still more books to go. In fact, the next book will be the very first Grimes book I read. And I'm looking forward to it, because it has some relation to a historical mystery that I read about in a book I wrote up last year. I want to see how what Chandler wrote fits in with what the history book says.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

The Hooded Claw said:


> ...
> The Kirov (which is an actual Soviet/Russian Navy ship), was refitted in the late twenty-teens with the best available weaponry, and it is out on maneuvers in 2021 when a mysterious accident causes the weather to abruptly change, all known radio stations to stop broadcasting, and even the ship's GPS system to stop working. It takes a lot of investigation to convince the crew that they have been sent back in time to July 1941. World War II is raging, and the German raider Bismarck was sunk just a few months before, so the British have a zero-tolerance policy towards mysterious large warships abroad in the North Atlantic. America has not yet entered the war, but Churchill and Roosevelt are known (thanks to an amateur historian on board the ship) to be secretly meeting aboard a warship off the Canadian coast only a few days steaming away. The crew of the Kirov can't help but change history somehow--The mere existence of their ship and the advanced technology will change the future. But they have to decide how they want to act, and who their friends are (the obvious choice of the Soviet government isn't necessarily the way they want to go).
> ...


Hmm...remind you of anything?


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## Nancy Beck (Jul 1, 2011)

The Hooded Claw said:


> I admit it, I knew the Lindy Hop was a dance, but didn't really know anything about it. Click below and check out the Lindy Hop:
> 
> Abe Lincoln: Public Enemy No. 1, by Brian Anthony
> 
> ...


Claw, I noticed this book in your sig the other day, and I was kind of intrigued by it, put it in one of my Wishlists. 3-1/2 stars is good in my book, so I'll probably buy it over the weekend as a birthday present to myself.  Because it sounds like fun. Thanks for the review!


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## heidi_g (Nov 14, 2013)

Wow! to your thread!!!!! 

I appreciate your write-up of Abe Lincoln Enemy No. 1. I did try to read Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter  and didn't quite get through it. I love the premise of these fantastical takes on the real world. One I did finish was The Accursed  which I rather loved, it centers around Princeton University and I think about five presidents of the US, including, I think the second Cleveland, Roosevelt, and Wilson? It's been a while since I read it.

Bertram Chandler looks like an interesting author, see if I can dig up some of his books.

And fitness for dummies... I've been getting back into a workout groove too!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer, by Gretchen Reynolds

I continue to work out, and continue to take my usual approach of piling on maximum information about any serious project I undertake. Since it has 144 reviews with 77 being five star and 38 being four star, plus an author who has a physical fitness column in the New York Times, this book looked worthwhile. It promises to give us the "good stuff" from the latest scientific research on things that can help us exercise better and be more fit. It has chapters on appropriate topics, such as stretching, nutrition, weight loss, strength building, and others. The good news is that it does deliver on what it says--Lots of information on recent research is here. The bad news is that some of this stuff is not conclusive. And I've read stuff in other books that I considered credible that flatly contradicted some of it. When I finished the book I didn't feel I now knew the revealed truth about the best way to exercise and increase fitness. On the other hand, I'm glad I read it, and I actually went back and read it a second time a few days after I finished it!

At the end of each chapter, half a dozen or so high points are summarized, which is a nice feature. I bought the book for $9.99 (unusual for me to pay "full price" for a book!), and I see that it has gone up slightly since I bought it. The author has a "First 20 Minutes Personal Trainer" book that seems to summarize a lot of this information with less exposition and explanation. It is less than half the price of this book, if that will suit your needs. But I haven't seen that book, my report is based on the Amazon reviews and description.

I highlighted tons of stuff in the book, a lot for my personal use rather than to make sure I mentioned it in this thread. But I am going to give you some high points here....

The first chapter covers one of the most interesting things--Exercising for longevity. There is a huge body of research showing that people who exercise regularly live longer. This isn't a big surprise, but there is some more specific and interesting information. If you turn on "popular highlights" you find that one of the most highlighted passages in the book says that scientists recommend 150 minutes of light exercise per week to improve your health. An even more-highlighted passage says that it is not quite as well-justified, but pretty well supported by research that this can be split up a lot of different ways, and you'll still get the benefits. However you get it, the 150 minutes a week will lower your risk of premature death by twenty percent. Adding more exercise doesn't really gain you much in terms of longevity increase (though there are other reasons you may want to exercise). Tripling the 150 minutes to 450 minutes a week gains you four more percent over the twenty percent mortality reduction from the basic 150 minutes a week. Most of the benefits of light aerobic exercise for longevity come in the first twenty minutes of exercise (thus the title of the book).

In addition to the 150 minutes of light aerobic activity, some sort of strength or resistance training twice a week is described as very important. In addition to building bone density, it helps increase strength (duh), which is a key factor in being able to live by yourself as you get older--The strength loss that comes with aging keeps you from being able to get up unassisted, do routine self-care, and catch yourself if you fall. Strength training helps fight this. This doesn't necessarily involve barbells and dumbbells. Things like pushups, squats, planks, etc. can do fine.

Contrary to dogma among many athletes, stretching before an athletic event doesn't seem to improve performance, and may reduce it or increase injury risk for some events. Simple warmups are useful, even important for avoiding injury, but again, complicated or lengthy warmups are often shown to reduce performance when tested.

If you work out less than an hour at a time, you don't need any special nutrition or eating precautions, though having some protein after strength training is probably useful. I was delighted to learn that low fat chocolate milk is actually an IDEAL thing to drink (in moderation) after strength training! Similarly, unless you are running marathons at a high pace or doing hardcore workouts, the book says that research doesn't support drinking tons of water. According to the book, the popularity of marathons increased greatly after Oprah ran one to great publicity in the 90s. This increased popularity caused completion times for marathons to skyrocket in the succeeding years, as many modestly fit people tried it. There have been problems when some of these people, who don't go at a fast sweat-producing pace, repeatedly stop and hydrate themselves at rest stops on the marathon, and there have even been deaths attributed to drinking too much water during a marathon.

Unfortunately, the book reports that light aerobic exercise (fast walking or slow jogging) is of almost no use for losing weight (even though it has great benefits to longevity as described above). You just don't burn enough calories, and your body tends to prompt you to eat more after the exertion. And contrary to what I've read and heard as definitive truth, there is no such thing as "afterburn." Except in extreme workouts, your body doesn't keep burning calories for several hours after a good exercise session. Dagnabit.

There's lots of other stuff. A great deal of it is inconclusive, especially on warmups. There is no real scientific consensus on what a "good" warmup is, except agreement that many of the elaborate ones tire you out. When I initially finished the book, I had seen so many inconclusive reports in the book, that I mentally told myself. "Three and a half star book. Some interesting stuff, but not that much profound and indisputable truth." BUT....A couple of days after finishing this, I put aside the lengthy book I'd started next, and went back to this one intending just to hit some highlights. And ended up rereading it cover to cover. I don't often do that, so I am going to have to give this book a four star rating. But I do NOT recommend it be the first book you read on this subject, and probably not the second. The Fitness for Dummies book I wrote up a couple of weeks ago is probably the best candidate I've seen for that.


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## heidi_g (Nov 14, 2013)

Claw, another great write up! I think this book actually crossed my radar, what with all the "sitting on our butts is deadly" reports My research also supports this book's findings on longevity and the necessity of adding some strength training to the mix. What's been really hard for me to wrap my head around is that you don't have to do your exercise all at one time in a lengthy session. However, I have recently started doing just that, breaking down my "workouts" through shorter increments throughout the day. I recently read a report that that might be even better, since the problem of sitting down so long is that it actually causes hormonal changes, that simply standing up and fidgeting... or talking a short walk can alleviate! Did  address any of that at all? Just curious.

Happy reading


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## JFHilborne (Jan 22, 2011)

Fantastic that you read so many books in a year and provide so much detail in your reviews, Claw. Authors and readers appreciate it. Due to other commitments, my reading schedule is nowhere near where I intended it to be at 75 books per year. 40 for me is doing well. This year, I'll be lucky to get through 20, but we're only half way through the year and I've got some great reads lined up.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

heidi_g said:


> I recently read a report that that might be even better, since the problem of sitting down so long is that it actually causes hormonal changes, that simply standing up and fidgeting... or talking a short walk can alleviate! Did  address any of that at all? Just curious.


I have read similar reports, and actually thought this was discussed in the 20 minutes book. But after both thumbing through the book on my Kindle and searching for terms such as inactive, I can't find a lot in this particular book. The author does emphasize that inactivity is not good for you. One thing I found that was interesting and kind of relevant, is that although most exercise such as walking and slow jogging are not really that helpful for weight control, because they tend to make you eat more, just standing around oddly enough may be of some use for weight control. Just standing around for a couple hours can use up a modest number of calories like 150, and doesn't seem to trigger the body to want to eat to make up for the exercise.

She also points out there is considerable evidence to show that even moderate exercise helps retain weight-loss over a long period of time. There's quite a bit of research showing the people who kept up even a very modest exercise routine during and after a diet regained less weight over a period of years than people who did not exercise. That's a little bit encouraging after reading that anything less than extreme workouts does not seem to help weight-loss much.

I have seen a number other accounts that emphasize that inactivity is not good for you, even if you do get your 150 minutes of exercise each week. I don't remember specifics right now, but the gist seemed to be that even getting up and walking around periodically was a good thing.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

JFHilborne said:


> Fantastic that you read so many books in a year and provide so much detail in your reviews, Claw. Authors and readers appreciate it. Due to other commitments, my reading schedule is nowhere near where I intended it to be at 75 books per year. 40 for me is doing well. This year, I'll be lucky to get through 20, but we're only half way through the year and I've got some great reads lined up.


Thanks to JF and Heidi for the kind words!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

http://www.fitlinxx.net/resource-center-videos-gretchen-reynolds.htm

Above are links to interviews with Gretchen Reynolds, author of The First 20 Minutes. You can listen to it or read a transcript. She says many of the same things I listed above but also talks more about the inactivity being bad for you that Heidi askd about. In short, if you can get up and stand for at least two minutes every 20 minutes it helps a lot.


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## Marilyn Peake (Aug 8, 2011)

I just found out in the Writers' Cafe that there are other active areas of KBoards. Wandered over here and read this thread. Wow, I'm hooked. Bookmarked it to follow along on your writing and reviewing progress. Your reviews are very thorough and it's refreshing to discover so many books in so many different genres.


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## Mike D. aka jmiked (Oct 28, 2008)

Marilyn Peake said:


> I just found out in the Writers' Cafe that there are other active areas of KBoards.


What's a Writer's Cafe? 

Mike


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## Marilyn Peake (Aug 8, 2011)

jmiked said:


> What's a Writer's Cafe?


Writers' Cafe is the section of KBoards where a lot of writers hang out to discuss the craft and business of writing. Readers hang out there, too, and take part in some of the discussions and offer advice. Here's a link to it: http://www.kboards.com/index.php/board,60.0.html


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Marilyn, thanks for dropping by! Keep reading, but keep writing too!


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## Marilyn Peake (Aug 8, 2011)

The Hooded Claw said:


> Marilyn, thanks for dropping by! Keep reading, but keep writing too!


Thanks! I needed that. Great advice.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Marilyn Peake said:


> Writers' Cafe is the section of KBoards where a lot of writers hang out to discuss the craft and business of writing. Readers hang out there, too, and take part in some of the discussions and offer advice. Here's a link to it: http://www.kboards.com/index.php/board,60.0.html


I think Mike was joking!  But . . . yeah. . . . readers are welcome there too! Thanks for venturing out, Marilyn!


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## heidi_g (Nov 14, 2013)

The Hooded Claw said:


> http://www.fitlinxx.net/resource-center-videos-gretchen-reynolds.htm
> 
> Above are links to interviews with Gretchen Reynolds, author of The First 20 Minutes. You can listen to it or read a transcript. She says many of the same things I listed above but also talks more about the inactivity being bad for you that Heidi askd about. In short, if you can get up and stand for at least two minutes every 20 minutes it helps a lot.


Thanks for this additional resource Claw!!! My efforts to get up and move throughout the day are still a WIP


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## Marilyn Peake (Aug 8, 2011)

Ann in Arlington said:


> I think Mike was joking!  But . . . yeah. . . . readers are welcome there too! Thanks for venturing out, Marilyn!


Oooooops. I'm a bit of a newbie. LOL.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

The Hooded Claw said:


> http://www.fitlinxx.net/resource-center-videos-gretchen-reynolds.htm
> 
> Above are links to interviews with Gretchen Reynolds, author of The First 20 Minutes. You can listen to it or read a transcript. She says many of the same things I listed above but also talks more about the inactivity being bad for you that Heidi askd about. In short, if you can get up and stand for at least two minutes every 20 minutes it helps a lot.


I have an hourglass on my desk that goes for about 60 minutes. When I sit down to do work at my computer, I turn it over. At some point I will look up and if I see the sand in the hourglass has run through, then it is time for me to get up and take a five minute break walking around the house or out in the yard.

I find this works fairly well as a process. The hourglass is so primitive and unique that it is fun to use it, and that creates incentive for me to actually use it. I don't have to force myself to get up exactly every 60 minutes, so I don't have to worry about breaking my train of thought when I'm in the flow. Nor worry about being interrupted by an annoying beeping or buzzing from a modern timer which could also break my concentration at the wrong moment. Last, if I am really deep in the flow, then I can ignore it and keep on going until I fall out of it. Then, I glance up at the hourglass and if I see it has run out, I know it is time for a break.

It does require a little self-discipline in both directions. Either to stay focused and write while in the flow, or wrest myself away if I am not getting much productive done.

Last, taking a good walk does wonders for clearing the mind and setting your focus before writing, or blowing away the cobwebs and smoke when you are stuck during or after writing.The hourglass gives me that excuse to go for a walk, especially when I really need it to reset my thoughts.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
by David Fromkin

With Iraq being in the news, I was inspired to pick this up to read about the history of how the Middle East got as discombobulated as it is. Everyone seems to agree that many of the problems stem from a botched division of the area after World War I. I picked up this book to get a clearer picture. The short review is that if you want a detailed coverage of the events between 1914 and 1922 that created the modern Middle East, this is a good choice.

The book is a long one, and it took me awhile to read it--I found it interesting reading, but it was too heavy (not literally, I was reading on my Kindle!) to read for more than an hour or so most evenings. The author says the book tells two stories--One of how the British, French, and Russians agreed to divide the pieces of the Ottoman Empire up amongst themselves early in World War I, and the second of how their plans changed by the end in 1922. At which point the British, the most powerful of the players, no longer were accepting of the French and Russian presences they'd agreed to, and no longer were themselves willing to live up to the imperial commitment they'd bought into. As a Churchill fan, I was amused to read the author's statement than Winston Churchill was the key figure of the whole story, and unsurprised to find the author's judgement that this was definitely not Winston's finest hour. The biggest surprise of the book was reading about the Ottoman Empire during the War (the ancestor of modern Turkey). Despite being a relatively weak and backward country compared to the other major players, they did a good job of improving their position early in the war, but lost most of their gains over time. But after the war was over and they'd been defeated, they managed to stand up for themselves and face down the allies from carrying out plans to carve their old Empire up even more completely than was actually done. The role of the United States in the Middle East was also interesting--We never were technically at war with the Ottoman Empire, but even so Britain schemed to lure the United States into taking control of some Middle Eastern colonies after the war (but it was a trap!). President Wilson repaid the Brits (unintentionally) by dilly-dallying on a final Mideastern peace settlement until public demand had forced Britain to demobilize most of its military, and Britain no longer had the military might to truly enforce their plans on the local Arab and Turkish population.

The book forces me to conclude that I unjustly maligned David Weber. In one of his Honor Harrington science fiction stories of intergalactic war, he had an ambitious diplomat foment a war between two nations, neither of which really wanted to fight, by arranging that messages between the governments passed through him, and he inserted inflammatory comments in the messages, driving the countries into a mutually-unwanted war. I felt that this was nonsense, and no government would be so inept as to allow that to happen. But that was what happened in relations between Turkey and Russia just before war started between them.

Tthe standard reference work in English for understanding Turkish culture and history was a translation of a book written in German in the 1740s. This, plus a conspiracy theory about the area (see below) drove the British to a number of bad policy decisions, especially since there was no unified British policy for the area. There were several different organizations that often pursued different and even contradictory "official" goals.

I'll avoid further prolonged trivia or review, and just quote a few passages from the book that interested me.

The Ottomans never entirely outgrew their origins as a marauding war band. They enriched themselves by capturing wealth and slaves...Invading new territories was the only path they knew to economic growth. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the conquests turned into defeats and retreats, the dynamic of Ottoman existence was lost; the Turks had mastered the arts of war but not those of government.

There on the plains of Turkestan--In the middle of nowhere, as far as the western world was concerned--the confused armies clashed.....General Malleson's British-Indian forces fought alongside Enver's Turkish supporters against Soviet Russians aided by imperial German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war who had been released and armed by the Bolsheviks. Alliances had now been reversed.: it was now Britain and Turkey versus Russia and Germany.

The Constantinople Agreement (1915), the Treaty of London (1915), the Hussein-McMahon correspondence (1915-16), the Agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne (1917), the Balfour Declaration (1917), the Hogarth Message (191, the Declaration to the Seven (191 and the Anglo-French Declaration (191, as well as President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (8 January 191, Four Principles (11 February 191, and Five Particulars (27 September 191 were among the many statements that were presented _(at the Paris Peace Conference)_ by rival claimants to be honored as promissory notes or contracts at law.

Wrong in believing that Kemal was secretly acting on behalf of the Sultan, and wrong too, in suspecting that he was acting for Enver, the British were also wrong in suspecting that he was acting for the Bolsheviks.

...the young Greek King, Alexander, while taking a walk on the grounds of his palace, was bitten by a monkey. A severe fever set in, and on 25 October, Alexander died. In a famous phrase, Winston Churchill later wrote that "it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite."

Islam was thus being used, as was Bolshevism, and as were Turks and Russians, by a cabal of Jewish financiers and Prussian generals to the detriment of Britain. While in the clear light of history this conspiracy theory sounds absurd to the point of lunacy, it was believed either in whole or in part by large number of otherwise sane, well-balanced, and reasonably well-informed British officials...Against this background, the trend of British Intelligence assessments in the immediate postwar years seems less irrational than would otherwise be the case.

It took Europe a millenium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity...It was only with the creation of Germany and Italy that an accepted map of western Europe finally emerged, some 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete. The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or long-lasting. But its issue is the same: how diverse people are to regroup to form new political identies for themselves after the collapse of an ages-old imperial order to which they had become accustomed.

This book really covers the subject well, and is fascinating reading. But it is still a tough read, due to the size and complexity of the story. I give it five stars, but just barely. Not for the faint of heart.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

WDR said:


> I have an hourglass on my desk that goes for about 60 minutes. When I sit down to do work at my computer, I turn it over. At some point I will look up and if I see the sand in the hourglass has run through, then it is time for me to get up and take a five minute break walking around the house or out in the yard.
> 
> I find this works fairly well as a process.


Good plan! I'm not that systematic, but fortunately for several years I've periodically taken breaks from my work at my (about 80% desk-bound) job to walk around our floor, or sometimes hand-deliver some paperwork to someone else. This was just a lame attempt to tell myself I was doing some exercise, not something done from actual knowledge about inactivity effects. In the past month or so, I've enhanced this by drawing on suggestions that short periods (ideally several minutes) of very intense exercise have a healthful effect for those whose heart and other vital organs are able to handle it. I work in the middle floor of a multistory building, so after walking around briskly for a couple of minutes to warm up, I take the elevator down to the first floor or basement (depending on my whim) and dash up several flights of stairs as fast as I comfortably can. It doesn't seem that long ago that I could go up stairs two steps at a time. I hope to get back to that, but so far am going up one step at a time, and I've described myself as "scurrying" up the stairs rather than running up them.  As time goes on and I improve, I'll either add more flights of stairs, or else shift to going up two steps at a time. Or perhaps both! For now I'm doing this twice, and occasionally (when I feel peppy) three times a day.

Naturally anyone who wants to try this should check with their doctor if there is the slightest reason to doubt their joints, heart, etc., are up to the task. I take the elevator down and climb up because I feel going down stairs for more than a floor or two isn't good for my knees.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Kirov II: Cauldron of Fire, by John Schettler

This is the second book in a series I started last month. I'm reading them by borrowing from the KOLL. In short, a Russian warship from our near future is mysteriously transported through time to World War II. In the first book, the Kirov found itself in mid-Atlantic in 1941, now it has unexpectedly shifted in time and space to the Mediterranean about a year later. This is a much more dangerous place to be, and the commander of the Kirov is like Greta Garbo, and "just wants to be alone." Both Axis and Allies have other ideas, however. The story becomes more complicated:


Spoiler



they are finding that their actions in 1941 made various small but noticeable changes as things diverge from the history they know, a disgruntled Kirov crewman takes some drastic measures that may prove to be very important, expenditures of irreplacable modern missiles and ammunition are becoming worrisome, and unlike the first book, they do their best to try to talk to the chronological locals, rather than just swat away the panicked attacks against this mysterious and powerful interloper. A more positive item is they think they may be gaining some insight into the pattern of their jumps in time.



Again I found a few editing errors in the book--An annoying one was the repeated but apparently accidental substitution of the name of a jet-age British warplane for a World War II one, more serious, but happening only one time, was the explicit description of a warship trying to sneak past enemies who are searching for it in the night as sailing along with bright running lights flashing.

I liked the book, but it didn't grab me as much as the first one in the series. Three and a half stars, and I will still use my July borrow to read book 3 in the series.


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## heidi_g (Nov 14, 2013)

WDR said:


> I have an hourglass on my desk that goes for about 60 minutes. When I sit down to do work at my computer, I turn it over. At some point I will look up and if I see the sand in the hourglass has run through, then it is time for me to get up and take a five minute break walking around the house or out in the yard.
> 
> I find this works fairly well as a process. The hourglass is so primitive and unique that it is fun to use it, and that creates incentive for me to actually use it.


I love this. Now I want an hourglass! I know it's dumb, but setting the timer on my iPhone or something just doesn't have the same romance to it!



WDR said:


> Last, taking a good walk does wonders for clearing the mind and setting your focus before writing, or blowing away the cobwebs and smoke when you are stuck during or after writing.The hourglass gives me that excuse to go for a walk, especially when I really need it to reset my thoughts.


Yes. Movement=Good for Brain! 
One of the many non-fiction books I'm in the middle of 

Claw, kudos to you for reading_ A Peace to End All Peace_. I've made an effort to grasp that area of the world (mostly watching some documentaries) but it's very complex, which I guess is why the book was long.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

heidi_g said:


> I love this. Now I want an hourglass! I know it's dumb, but setting the timer on my iPhone or something just doesn't have the same romance to it!


This is the hourglass I use: http://www.officeplayground.com/Hourglass-Sand-Timer-60-Minute-Black-Sand-P1329.aspx

The problem with using a timer is it will beep when it is complete, breaking your concentration and potentially ruining your flow state. The hourglass makes not a sound (well, a very faint, ringing hiss) and only when I am ready for a pause and look up, do I see that the time has run out. Then I can make a more relaxed decision of whether I pause to take a break (discipline) or drop back into flow and keep writing. Truth is, if I am glancing up, I am no longer in flow and it is time for a break.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Very Good, Jeeves!, by P. G. Wodehouse

After the grim situation of being lost in time on a warship with every man's hand turned against you (Kirov II, reviewed a week or two ago), I was ready for something light and fun. When I think light and fun books, I think of Jeeves. So I pulled this Jeeves collection out, even though I'd read it just three or so years ago. I'm trying to read mostly new stuff, or at least stuff I haven't read in a very long time, but when I needed fun urgently, I went for the old reliable.

This book is almost stereotypical Jeeves. It is a collection of short stories in various settings in London and at rural estates that Bertie Wooster visits, accompanied of course by his brainy and reliable manservant. There is a bit of continuity between the stories, events in earlier stories are referenced, but there is no overall story arc. As always, Jeeves is reliable for the light entertainment that I sought, though I did find I remembered quite a bit about almost all of the stories, which took a little of the joy out of rereading. That is my fault, not the book's fault, of course. Even leaving that out, I think I prefer Bertie and Jeeves in novel length, rather than short stories. I still rate the book four and a half stars. As usual for Wodehouse books, in lieu of talking about the stories, I'm just going to list some of my favorite quotes from the book:

"Be reasonable Bertie, if you were your aunt, and you knew the sort of chap you were, would you let a fellow you knew to be your best pal tutor your son?"

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and forgotten to say "when!"

"You!" said Sir Roderick finally. And in this connection, I want to state that it's all rot to say that you can't hiss a word that hasn't an 's' in it.

[Blumenfeld]...hadn't struck me as a bloke with whom, if in one of his emotional moods, it would be at all agreeable to be shut up in a small room.

"Luncheon is a meal better omitted. If taken, it should consist merely of a few muscatels, bananas and grated carrots. It is a well-known fact--"
And she went on to speak at some length of the gastric juices in a vein far from suited to any gathering at which gentlemen were present.
_(with the attention to diet and exercise I've had lately, this story struck me as particularly funny)_

The car gave out a faint gurgle like a sick moose and stopped in its tracks...She got out and began peering into the thing's vitals. I thought for a moment of suggesting that its gastric juices might have taken a turn for the worse, due to lack of fat-soluble vitamins, but decided on the whole not. I'm a pretty close observer, and it didn't seem to me that she was in the mood.

One of the first lessons life teaches us is that on these occasions of back-chat between the delicately-nurtured [ladies] a man should retire into the offing, curl up into a ball, and imitate the prudent tactics of the opossum, which when danger is in the air, pretends to be dead, frequently going to the length of hanging out crepe and instructing its friends to stand round and say what a pity it all is.

When you've broken down on a chilly autumn evening miles from anywhere and have missed lunch, and look like missing tea as well, mere charm of manner can never be a really satisfactory substitute for a tinful of the juice.

He was so crusted with alluvial deposits that one realized how little a mere bath would ever be able to effect. To fit him to take his place once more in polite society, he would certainly have to be sent to the cleaner's. Indeed it was a moot point whether it wouldn't be simpler just to throw him away.


(WARNING! Link to Audible version!)

Into the Alternate Universe, by A. Bertram Chandler

I've been rereading the John Grimes series of science fiction novels for a couple of years now. This one marks an interesting transition--I reread The Wild Ones a few weeks ago, and mentioned that I'd originally read it a couple of months after reading notice of author Chandler's death. From that final disposition of the series, we go directly to the very first one of these books I read. Waaaay back when I was in the 8th grade! I still have my Ace Double paperback copy from that time, but I read this one on the Kindle, using an ebook from Baen Books.

Not only was this the first of the Grimes books I read, it was also the first one written. And things are different, I suppose the character wasn't fully developed yet. Most surprisingly, there is a brief reference to an ex-wife and to adult children that I don't think was ever again repeated in the series. And this is a significant jump in time later than the last book. Grimes is no longer operating independently, he has emigrated far from Earth, and now has a sedentary job as a Port Captain in the newly independent Rim Worlds. He's also a reserve officer in the Rim Worlds Navy, which will give him an excuse, in the remaining books of the series, to leave Port Captain work behind, and go haring around the edge of the galaxy having adventures that we'd like to read about!

This book is about a "Wild Ghost Chase." Not ghosts as we are used to thinking of them, but an investigation of "Rim Ghosts," sightings of known people and spaceships, often immaterial, that are thought to be things bleeding over from alternate universes where the same people have lived slightly different lives. Grimes is assigned to work with Commander Sonya Verrill, a visiting naval officer from the Federation (which used to be Grimes' employer) to take a Rim Worlds ship loaded with scientists and instrumentation out and solve the mystery, or at least pick up a few clues. It ends up that Commander Verrill will become quite an important person for the series, and for Grimes! The ghost hunt takes a nasty turn, and Grimes, Verrill, and the rest of his crew find themselves stuck in a crack between universes. And, as Grimes says, "all sorts of nasty things tend to fall into cracks." And how will our heroes get back home?

I've been eager to re-read this for awhile, but waited for its proper place in the chronology of Grimes. Over a year ago, I made this post:

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,137939.msg2154508.html#msg2154508

In reading a book on mysteries of the sea, the above book talked about the disappearance of the passenger ship Waratah in the early Twentieth Century. Into the Alternate Universe solves the mystery of Waratah for us, as the covers of every edition I've seen give away! I wanted to compare the information in the nonfiction book to the description in this novel.

For the "benefit" of anyone who didn't go look at the linked post about the sea mysteries book, this was the cover on my original Ace version, it captivated me in the bookstore as a young man of thirteen or so summers:










I still love this cover. It definitely shocked me and grabbed my attention in the bookstore--One downside of ebooks is that (at least the way I shop for books) it is hard for a cover to grab my attention that way--I never get a look at the cover unless I'm already interested in the book, in which case I give more attention to the blurb and the reviews, and mostly ignore the cover.

This book was probably the first science fiction written primarily for adults that I'd ever read (I'd read lots of Andre Norton, and a few other books, but irrationally shied away from many of the writers I'd come to love in the next few years). The idea of alternate universes and travel between them has been a favorite of mine ever since, and I've been pleased to read that it is now a respectable thing even for actual physicists to write about!

As mentioned, the book originally blew me away, I loved it. Taking off the rose-colored glasses of sentimental fondness, I now have to say I enjoyed the book, but it doesn't grab me like it used to. My horizons have expanded, and it isn't as mind-expanding as it used to be. I also noted a recurring feeling I've had when rereading the Grimes books--I'm used to longer books nowadays, and though this is a legitimate novel-length book, it is short for a novel, and I felt like I'd read a Cliff Notes version that just described key scenes and left out a lot of the detail and elaboration. I still like the book a lot. Trying to rate it fairly and without favoritism, I'd still rate it a four star book. Though I'll admit not a terribly strong four star book. Recommended if the idea interests you. The independent ebook isn't available on Amazon, but you can get it cheap as part of a bundle in this volume:





The Rosetta Key, by William Dietrich

I really loved Napoleon's Pyramids, the first book in this series. I held off reading further till there was a markdown of several of the later books. I grabbed them all at once, confident that I'd continue to love the series, and it appears that might have been a mistake!

I described the first book as "60% Raiders of the Lost Ark and 40% National Treasure." I still find that a reasonable description, and I was going through this book nicely, with one minor nag that I'll mention in a moment, when the hero took a major action that shocked and upset me. The closest thing I can think of is the actions of the hero in the first book of the Thomas Covenant fantasy series. I abandoned that book and never read the rest of the series. Now in Rosetta Key, the hero doesn't do something quite as rotten as Thomas Covenant did, but I still feel his action was a betrayal as well as STOOPID for his cause (which is literally the good guys versus the bad guys)! I may go back to the book and try to read on, but I'm not at all sure I will.

Before the action that outraged me, I was thoroughly enjoying the story in the book, though I had noticed a couple of places where the language was awfully modern. I've read the arguments that you don't write a book about the Siege of Troy in Ancient Greek, and that we have to make the actions of characters understandable and sympathetic for modern readers, but I like to at least have some atmospherics that show me I'm reading about another time or another world. Language is often an easy way to do this, but the characters in this book seem to speak awfully colloquial modern English. That was only bothering me slightly, but then in a negotiation with an Arab chieftain, he asks "What's your point?" put in quotes as a direct statement. That just really jerked me out of being immersed in the book and the action.

I can't really rate this book, since I didn't come close to finishing it, but I do report that I stopped several weeks ago, and haven't even opened the book up on my Kindle since!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

I note that one of the Kindle Deals of the Day is The Last Gunfight, a nonfiction book about the Gunfight at the OK Corral. I read the book a couple of years ago and wrote it up in an earlier 80 books thread. I highly recommend it if you have the slightest interest in the subject. It was one of my favorite books of the year.  You can probably find my writeup with search. It was definitely a five star book.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

it has been over two months since I posted to this thread! Late July and almost all of August were devoured by locusts, so I did little reading and no posting, but I'm back.



The Making of Star Wars

This ebook was a bit of an out of left field choice for me. I enjoy the Star Wars movies, but have never been a rabid fan, and I seldom buy ebooks that are over $9.99. But I bought this one, and I'm glad I did. It is truly the whole story of the film, beginning when the whole saga was just a gleam in George Lucas's eye, and continuing to the release of the film. Much of it is based on some extensie interiews with cast members and people who produced the moie that were done before and shortly after the movie release, but neer seem to have been exploited before. There are a lot of stills and video clips of test shots, or making special effects that are interesting.

I enjoyed it a lot, and recommend it if thesubject intrigues you. Tons and tons of fascinating trivia. Here are a few:

The story evolved a LOT over years of rewrites while Lucas worked on other projects. Luke was variously a black male, an Asianfemale, a 65 year old man, a prince and an archeology student. He also was originally named Luke Starkiller, but that name was changed because it made him seem too threatening. Han Solo was a large slug with gills and green skin at one point (sounds a lot like the concept later became Jabba the Hutt).

Even when filming was well underway, they had two big plot problems. One was that rescuing the Princess from the Death Star was too easy--Nobody got killed, and the other was that there was nothing for ObiWan Kenobi to do after the Princess was rescued. Lucas solved the problem by havig ObiWan killed by Vader. This also let him make the point that the Force transcended life and death by having Guiness just disappear. Guiness was very upset, and threatened to quit...."I'm going to die off early in the picture, and I don't even get a death scene?" But he was a pro, and accepted things when Lucas explained that it really was important to the picture.

Toshiro Mifune was sought after for the ObiWan part. If this had happened, Luke would have become a Japanese girl, and Han Solo would have become a black male. Lucas was worried about casting harrison Ford as Han Solo, because Ford had been in American Graffiti, Lucas's one big hit, and Lucas didn't want recognition jerking the audience out of the story. He deliberately wanted relative unknowns for the major parts.

Carrie fisher really wanted her part. She was given lines to memorize before a big screen test, and her family caught her rehearsing in her underwear shouting "General Kenobi...A battlestation with enough firepower to destroy an entire system?" She says they thought she was going crazy! After the test, she didn't hear anything for three weeks, so she decided she didn't get the part, and told herself "Well, I'm not going to get to have lunch with monsters."

Darth Vaders costume was budgeted for $1,173. C3PO's robot suit was budgeted for over $18,000. Anthony Daniels, the actor inside the robot suit, was miserable during filming. There was no way for him to sit down. On the other hand, he didn't have to worry about his lips, since the audience couldn't see his lips move, he didn't have to worry about what he said, or timing. The sound editor loved this, since it made for no lip synch probems. But Lucas decided that C3PO needed to be moving whenever he was talking, because otherwise he'd seem like just a disembodied voice.

The first day of filming was the scene where Luke and his uncle purchase the robots. They worked all day, and shot two minutes, thirty-six seconds of film. Lots of technical problems with the robots.

The desert scenes were shot in Tunisia, near the Algerian border (small brag, I have been there, andsat in the dinette where Luke argues with his uncle about staying on the farm another season). They had hired Tunisia military trucks to support filming, and the Algerians saw the big sand crawler mock up and worried that this was a prelude for invasion. Algerians came and inspected the sandcrawler to verify that it wasn't a weapon!

Peter Mayhew, inside the Chewbacca suit, had a regular job as a hospital orderlly, and had to coordinate shooting of his scenes with his real job.

There were lots of technical and budget problems with the film. Lucas said that Star Wars wasn't finished, it was abandoned when time ran out and it had to go to the theater! Now I understand a litte better why he was so hot about re-editing it a few years ago.

Hihgly recommended for the target audience. I give it five stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Crusader States and Their Neighbors

I loved Atlases as a kid, and would thumb through the pages looking at everything. Some Atlases had a section of historical maps with a page that looked like this one:









The names such as County of Edessa" fascinated me.Why was Edessa a County and not a Kingdom? Reading about the Crusades in generalized books never explained a lot. I thought this book would help, but it is truly about the CRusader States and their neighbors, not about the States themselves. So it doesn't talk about how these were set up, or boundaries or anything. Just covers diplomacy and wars among the states and their mostly Arab neighbors. I was surprised how much Arab and Christian often allied together agains another Christian or Arab state. Sounds like today's news!

Anyway, this was rather dry and repetitive, and I didn't enjoy it much. Three stars only.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Kirov III: Pacific Storm

Kirov IV: Men of War

I read the first of these two books about a month ago and read the second one last night, so I can use my Prime borrow on the next volume in the series before this month is up. I'm going to go ahead and cover both of them together.

These are the third and fourth the books in the saga of the Kirov and her crew. Kirov is a large Russian warship that in the first volume found itself hurled by a nuclear accident from the "now" of 2024 to 1941, in the middle of World War II. Time and fate are not done toying with them however, and the first three books cover


Spoiler



how they were uncontrollably moved around in time, experiencing the different parts of World War II and traveling into their future where they find a catastrophe has taken place. In the fourth book, they find themselves returned to their "proper" time, but have some embarrassing explanation to do, especially how 36 of the crew are missing and dead, many of the ship's weapons have been expended, and there is significant damage to the ship. They have another problem, since one crewman deserted and remained in 1942. How can he and will he change history, and what will they do about it? What will they do about the future they know is coming? I hope these guys excel under pressure, because they are under plenty of it!


. Despite the title of book IV, this is the book where the tone of the novels changes substantially, from tales of combat and occasional diplomacy in the first three books to a pretty serious and clever time travel/paradox story. The author surprised me several times. I like this a lot, and I'm looking forward to borrowing and reading the fifth in the series. I have eight more to go, though the author seems to be turning these out reliably and there may be others by the time I finish the twelve existing volumes. The only rain on this parade is that there continue to be annoying editing slips, though books 2-4 are much better on this than the first volume. I still give this one four and a half stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

We interrupt these reviews for a news bulletin from NASA!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1RNiNqkFcU
(Once again the YouTube embedding doesn't seem to be working, but the link above will get you there)








Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and how to Observe Them

Next year an unmanned space probe is expected to arrive at Pluto! As a card-carrying space and astronomy buff, I wanted to read this to help me appreciate what is coming. It was already in my library, as I bought it during a sale on textbooks about a year ago. Unfortunately, it wasn't a great read. The book has a separate chapter on what is known about each of the three planets, followed by a section on observation. The sections on each of the planets are very, very, dry and dull! There just isn't a lot known about these planets and most of it that is known is pretty tedious to read about, even for a enthusiast like me. Things like a detailed description of the planetary ring systems, with excruciating detail on particle size and chemical composition of each separate ring, but little explanation tying together why the rings are this way. The section on observation is too broad, covering simplistic stuff that I read about in my Golden Book of Astronomy during late elementary school, but following that closely with detailed discussions of how to do spectroscopy, which requires a very expensive specialized instrument and a lot of knowledge to do. There are occasional brief lashes of interesting trivia or something that's just amusing. I was pleased to see The moons of one planet are named after female characters from Shakespeare's plays. But these are few and far between. The book does do what it said it would do, so I can't really condemn it. But all I can give it is three stars. Don't even consider reading this unless you're a real enthusiast. And even then, think twice. But if you truly want the straight dope on these planets, it is here.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Death Warmed Over, by Kevin J. Anderson

_"I found myself sneaking into a cemetery at night while trying to elude a werewolf hit man who'd been following me since sunset -- in order to retrieve a lost painting for a ghost. Just another day at work for me"_.

Did you hear the one about the zombie PI? He's dead set on solving his cases!

And so our book begins. The first-person narrator is a private investigator who was murdered himself recently, and is trying to continue his profession of private investigator. He has to keep his clients happy and that comes first, but of course he would love to solve the mystery of his own murder as well.

Only a bit over 1% of the dead return as zombies, and this started, as well as the arrival of vampires, ghouls, and other supernatural creatures after "The Big Uneasy," an accident that changed the rules of our world. Some interesting fine points of this new situation are discussed, such as a government regulation requiring latches on the inside of coffins, and a legal quarrel between a ghoul artist and his estate over who owns royalties from his new paintings. The protagonist has had the unusual pleasure of reviewing his own autopsy report.

In addition to the supernatural stuff, there is a decent mystery here, and I really like the book. I found he author's writing style A pleasure to read.

I bought this and several in the series when it was marked down recently and look forward to reading more. Four and a half stars. And it gave five stars an awful fright!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Life Lessons From the Lottery, by Don McNay

I had never heard of this author or book, but stumbled across a web article by him when I got curious about posses and entourages of rich people. The web article was interesting, and I found this book was offered for free at the time so it seemed a no-brainer to pick it up. I actually read the book in Chicago's O'Hare Airport! Traveling home from a work meeting, I arrived at the airport with time before my flight, whipped out my Fire HDX and started the book in the waiting area at the gate and finished it as the plane was in line to take off. It's not a terribly long book, but did take me a couple of hours.

The book is interesting but not awesome. Author McNay is a financial adviser who specializes in giving advice to people who come into a large sum of money from winning a lottery, a lawsuit or insurance award, and the like.

The book is an interesting read and does have some anecdotes and points that are useful for non-lottery winners, but it is not amazing financial advice and will not rock your world. I did find his style interesting and the book worthwhile.

He tells lottery winners to do five things:

1. Never tell anyone you won. If you can take the money anonymously do so,
2. Talk to expert advisors who have worked with more money than you now have,
3. Take the money in payments instead of a lump sum,
4. Don't make any quick decisions. Take some time and put together a plan, and
5. Use your money for a purpose. Give back to society.

The chapters of the book expand on each of these. Under never tell anyone you won, he gives a couple of cautionary tales including a short bio of one Florida lottery winner who appears to have been murdered for his money. He also give some interesting statistics such as one from the NFL Players Association reporting that at least 78 pro football players lost a total of more than $42 million in a three-year period because of shenanigans by their financial advisors. The information is not just useful for lottery winners. For instance he gives some excellent advice on what to do if you think you are attracted to (or even just put up with) a friend or romantic partner because of their money.

I found the book very interesting, and give it a solid 3 1/2 stars. I see that the price is now $9.99, and am not sure I would pay that for it, though!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Dump Cable TV, by Tom Galland

Yes this is a book about "cutting the cord" and switching from your friendly local cable company to getting your entertainment by streaming video and a bit of broadcast television. It is short, but pretty complete. I have done quite a bit of Internet research before picking it up when it was offered for free. So I did not learn that much from it that was totally new. It was still good to have all the information in one document. Of course it helps that I got this when it was offered for free! It is still pretty inexpensive and is available as a Prime or Kindle Unlimited borrow. You probably don't need this if you like me are fond of and good at running down information on thel Internet, but if you don't want to do that or it isn't your style to do that, this is a good way to get up to speed. A very solid 3 1/2 stars, and recommended for the target audience.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Click on the link below to hear a sound which once sent fear into The Hooded Claw's Heart, and made his pulse race with apprehension:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JISCeFFts80

Yes, it is the closing credits to the old Perry Mason TV show. It was near the end of its run when I was a toddler, and my parents were big fans. Once a week, this closing music would start, I believe Tuesday nights at 9 PM. When I heard it, I knew my mother would soon be coming to put me to bed. This was something I dreaded, so I would get nervous, sometimes even trying to hide. When I heard the music years later, it would still make me tense!

Fortunately, this early experience didn't make me a lifelong PerryMasonphobic. So I was able to read this:



The Case of the Daring Divorcee, by Erle Stanley Gardner

When I was very small, Perry Mason was still on television, but I never watched the show, and I've never read any of the books till now. I knew there were a lot but was astonished to find that this was book number 74 in the series which started in 1934. This book was published in 1964. I didn't know that when I read it, and I actually thought it was written earlier. Characters explain things such as "I have a machine in my office that makes photos of documents. I'll have my secretary make a photo of this document and bring it over to your office." The process of getting on an airliner and watching as it takes off is also described in significant detail, I assume because the author believed that many readers would be unfamiliar with it and interested.

Despite some things dating the book, I found the writing style pleasing and the mystery worthwhile. It was well worth the $1.99 that I paid for it. I have been grabbing these Perry Mason mysteries as Amazon rolled the price down, but this is the first one I've read. Based on this experience I'm going to buy more and read more. They aren't wonderful, but they are a great way to be entertained for a few hours. Very solid 3 1/2 stars, almost 4.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction, by David Bender

When a bunch of the very short introduction series were marked down to a couple of bucks a while back, I bought several. This one was a natural for me to read, since I've been working on diet and exercise to lose weight and improve my health. There's a lot of good information in this book, but frankly I found the style a bore. I've read numerous college text books that were much more entertaining. On a more positive note there is a lot of information backed into the short book, and it is a pretty good way to learn a lot with a short read. Eight chapters cover topics such as vitamins and minerals, undernutrition, and energy nutrition. There are lots of bits of the interesting trivia that I love. Here are a few samples:

Research shows that when only one food is available, people will feel full sooner than when a variety of foods are available. So if you're dieting, avoid situations where you're presented with a a lot of options to eat.

"What's up, Doc?" The name carotene comes from the fact that beta-carotene was first isolated from carrots!

Rocky beware! The vitamin biotin is found in many foods, and the only people in Western societies who are deficient in biotin are those who have eaten large amounts of uncooked egg whites. Raw Egg whites contain a protein that binds to biotin so that it can't be absorbed by the body.

Scurvy is not just a deficiency disease, the name comes from an archaic word meaning ill-tempered. So when a character in a pirate story refers to someone as a scurvy knave, he's not just talking about the person's diet.

Looking back through the book, I like it better than I did when I just read it. But interesting trivia can only carry a book so far. The best I can do for this book is give it a three and half star rating. That's actually an improvement from three star rating I originally intended.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Amusement Parks, by Jim Hillman

This book is exactly what is implied a history of the amusement park, focused on the United States. Although there are references to some earlier things in the US and Europe, it really begins with the story of Coney Island. I found it interesting, but not amazing. A rabid fan of amusement parks or roller coasters, which I'm not, would probably like it better. I picked it up on a whim when it was offered for a low price, and this is not really a typical book for me to read. I mostly picked it up because of the promise of the illustrations, as I love old photographs.

The book covers at subject both by talking about specific parks, and also by covering broad trends and types of parks that operated at different points in time. I learned some things that were interesting and I hadn't known about. Many of the earliest amusement parks were established by the owners of trolley or urban rail systems at the end of the line, to encourage ridership all the way out, especially on evenings and weekends. Some rides are much older than I would've expected. Dodgem Corporation introduced bumper cars in 1919. The famous Tilt-a-whirl is a young whippersnapper in comparison, being introduced in 1926. The historical photographs are as advertised, Good-quality and interesting.

I rate this as a solid 3 1/2 stars, and a fan of the rides or the parks would surely rate it higher.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905, by Geoffrey Jukes

This book is published by Osprey. Osprey is famous among military history buffs for publishing short but gorgeously illustrated dead tree books that gave a great deal of detail about one very specific campaign or period. When I saw this book was available for two dollars and it was by Osprey I assumed that was what I was getting and eagerly grabbed it. It ends up this is part of a different Osprey series, still a fairly short book about a narrow topic, but with no actual photographs, at least in Kindle version and a few maps. Some of the reviews imply there are photographs in the dead tree version, but they are not to be seen in the e-book.

For two bucks I was definitely satisfied. The book is rather short and dryly written. But it does give a good summary of the war. It got rather repetitive at points, and I can't say it was a blast to read.

Non-history buffs probably have not heard of this war, but it was famous because before World War I, it was the first war where many modern innovations were fully used. Machine guns and steel battleships had their first wide use, and the trench warfare in some battles gave bloody warning of what would come 10 years later in World War I. The book describes some interesting stuff. Radio barely made an appearance in the war, but the Russians used heliographs for Battlefield communication. Heliographs are basically large signaling mirrors. Russian scouts were unable to use their heliographs to give warning of an important Japanese movement in one battle because the sky was cloudy and the heliographs wouldn't work! I was amused that one Russian Admiral was unimpressed by the capabilities of some Russian ships and referred to them as self -- sinkers!

Good value for the price, but only of interest to the specialist. 3 1/2 stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Revenge of the Cube Dweller, by Joanne Fox Phillips

The only reason I paid any attention at all to this book was that it is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma where I was raised. It had a distinct chick lit aura about it, and I almost did not buy it even though the price was marked down to a couple of bucks at the time. I'm glad I did not let my misgivings hold me back. I really like this book!

The protagonist abandoned a promising business career for marriage. Years later, she is far away from her family in California, living in Houston, Texas when her husband leaves her for a younger woman. She is now middle-aged and gaining weight, uncomfortable around most of her former social circle, has a financial need to work, and finds herself at an entry-level job as an internal auditor at a pipeline company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was mildly disappointed that there is a little bit of Tulsa color, but not much.

The book begins by describing some of the protagonist's adventures testing security at the company, and her dismay to find that her exclusively male superiors do not respect her abilities, and are not pleased when she uses initiative or judgment. Frustration turns to anger when in the course of her security investigations, she stumbles on evidence that her employer's negligence was involved in a disaster that killed several people in Houston, including two old friends. Company management is hiding what happened and destroying evidence. The meat of the book is her investigation, and how she chooses to make things right. Along the way you will get some completely non-technical insights into how fraud is committed and how auditors find out about it! I really liked it, enough that I looked for other books by the author. This appears to be her first book, but hopefully there will be others. In any case it is a five-star book for me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

(Out of print paperback doesn't show up in link maker, link to Amazon page below)
http://www.amazon.com/Captain-Empirical-An-Analog-Book/dp/0441091377/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412550252&sr=8-1&keywords=captain+empirical

Captain Empirical, by Sam Nicholson

In the late 1970s, which were my teenage years, there was a series of short stories in a popular science fiction magazine that featured a merchant ship captain who is troubleshooter for the shipping line that employed him. This sounds like an unlikely setting for a science-fiction series, but there was enough unusual technology involved in the stories but they did fit. And later in the series, his company did some development work at mining in space, where they naturally wanted to involve their ace problem-solver. I really liked the stories and was delighted when they were collected into a paperback book with some interlinking material to fill in gaps between the stories. So I remember this book fondly, but hadn't read it in many years till I saw imy yellowing paperback recently while moving. I decided to reread it. I must have reread the stories a lot back in the day, because I remembered most of the story lines, even after many years. That may have contributed to me finding them good, but not great on rereading.

I did some googling before posting this writeup and was astonished to find that "Sam Nicholson" was actually a pseudonym for Shirley Nikolaisen, a woman! This flabbergasted me because in the final story of the series the hero is openly scornful of an unsympathetically-portrayed feminist activist character (who admittedly was obstructing his project) , and in the same story he expresses some paternal though not misogynistic attitudes towards women. Striking enough that I remember being a bit set back by them at the time, and even more so now. Not what I would expect from a woman writer, even though I am well aware of the old chestnut that the character is not the author. I had looked for other work by Sam Nicholson back when these were published and I only located one fantasy book. I still don't see any other work, and I found suggestions that she is deceased, not shocking for someone who was publishing almost 40 years ago.

I'm glad I reread the book, but I can't recommend it for anyone other than another fan who wants to relive past glories. I'm going to let it squeak into four stars, but no higher.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Out of Nowhere: A History of the Military Sniper from the Sharpshooter to Afghanistan

I picked this up a while ago when it was marked down as one of Amazon's monthly deals. I was prepared to like it, and the book is a readable and complete history. It does have some very interesting material, covering big picture stuff like sniper training and unit organization, technical details, and numerous stories of individual experiences. Some of the details are very interesting, such as that many snipers are trained to pay particular attention to camouflaging their boot heels, as these may be the highest and most visible point if a sniper is lying prone to work. Some were ironic and sad, such as a sniper whose position was given away by a frantic mother bird because he had chosen a position only inches from the nest with her hatchling. He fatally lost a sniper duel because of this mistake. Don't mess with mama! I had heard it before but still found it interesting that despite what you see in the movies a tree is considered a suicidal position for a sniper to work from. These are all good things, less good is that the book didn't really grip me. I had to put it down periodically because I started reading it while I was waiting to be called for jury duty. I found I wasn't urgently eager to get back to it, despite the book covering a subject that is right up my alley. The writing is competent, but not great.

I've debated giving it three and a half or four stars, but I'm going to have to go with three and a half. If the subject is of great interest to you, you should like it, but I can't recommend it to anyone who's not already intrigued by the title.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by John Ratey

I bought this a month or two ago when it was one of Amazon's monthly deals, offered at a low price. As the title suggests it is about exercise and how exercise affects the brain. The author begins with a chapter on a school that has incorporated a revised gym class focused on fitness as a key part of the curriculum, and is showing excellent results. I'm not entirely convinced that the exercise program is the only cause of the improvement. The book moves on to different chapters about various things that can affect the brain, such as stress, anxiety, learning, and aging, and how exercise can improve matters. The final chapter is on what he recommends that you do about this. I'm assuming this is the one most readers will be especially interested in! The whole thing comes across as a bit too much of a sales pitch. I found myself reacting negatively just because I felt I was being propagandized. As if I was listening to a salesman trying to sell me a condo timeshare. The author is no snake oil salesman, he is a distinguished psychiatrist. But I still felt a little bit pitched to. The chapters went into more detail than I wanted about precise mechanisms and how things work. He describes the results of studies and how they showed the positive effects of exercise. Often these are multiple studies and seemed very well -- founded, but sometimes they were a single study, which makes the results much less certain. To his credit he does point this out.

If you like, I can save you the trouble of reading the book. The author recommends some form of aerobic activity six days a week for 45 minutes to an hour. Four of these days should be longer and less intensive and two should be shorter and more intensive. The intensive days should have some very short high energy activity such as sprinting, but this can be as brief as thirty seconds to two minutes at a time interspersed with walking or slow jogging.He recommends up form of weight or resistance activity twice a week, and something that focuses on balance and flexibility such as yoga or Pilates twice a week. The more of this you can make some form of activity that you enjoy, such as tennis or dancing the better. As for nutritional supplements, he recommends omega-3 oil, vitamin D, and calcium for women on a daily basis. He recommends the usual suspects for a balanced diet. He does especially recommend foods containing antioxidants and believe it or not, very mild toxins, such as blueberries, spinach, and green tea.

Somehow I was not enthralled with the book. As I look back at what I've written here, this is obvious. On the other hand it does have a lot of good information in it. At the least, I'm sure it helped keep me focused and enthusiastic about the program of improving my health I'm working at. But the best I can give it is 3 1/2 stars.

For all the talk of open warfare between Amazon and Hatchette, this Hatchette book was promoted by Amazon and offered at a very low price!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Icy Clutches, by Aaron Elkins

Anthropologist Gideon Oliver is having a bit of a vacation, tagging along as his park ranger wife attends a training course at Glacier National Park. It's after the tourist season and most services are closed so he is worried about being bored, and the opportunity to examine some decades-old human bones found on a glacier is welcome. It seems the bones are from people killed by a scientific expedition gone bad after succumbing to an ice avalanche decades before. Oliver's examination shows that one of the scientists was killed by human hands 20 years ago before being swallowed up in the avalanche. This is cold case crime at its finest! Things are complicated because a visiting group containing the one survivor of the failed expedition, and several other associated people is in the area to dedicate a memorial. As we knew there would be, there's a new murder, and it's up to Gideon to solve the crimes new and old, before he becomes a victim himself!

Another solidly reliable Gideon Oliver mystery. A very strong four star book.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam, by Marshall G. S. Hodgson.

I bought all three volumes of this history in a burst of good intentions more than a year ago, but hadn't read them until I was prompted to pull this volume out after the recent unpleasantness (more of it than usual) in the Middle East. The publisher seems to be capitalizing on the news, the price now is twice what I paid a year ago!

If you check out the reviews on Amazon and also reviews on the web you will see that this book has an incredible reputation for being "the" book to read on the history of Islam. The book was published back in the 1970s, after the author died tragically young at age 47. It's a little bit unusual for a history book to remain trendy and not superseded by something else for that long. The author incidentally was a Quaker.

I thought well of the book but it is a tough go. Before actually covering any history, there is a prolonged segment where the author criticizes common terminology for Islam in English, and even geographical terms such as "Middle East." In many cases he announces his own terms he will use instead of flawed ones. This lengthy recital takes up 17% of the book! Because of his perfectionism, the author chose to use many Arabic terms mostly in English but with a few Arabic characters tossed in in some cases. This makes for real problems with the Kindle version. Some of the Arabic characters were not transcribed well, so in many cases the word is represented with semi-random English characters in place of the Arabic one. Also for some of the lesser-known terms it makes it difficult for someone unfamiliar with them like me to search for the terms using Google because I'm not sure which English characters should be used in place of the Arabic ones. Many Arabic characters are small and hard to read when the rest of the text is a comfortable size. Finally, the author's language is ponderous with huge and unfamiliar words abounding, and lengthy sentences with multiple phrases and clauses. This is a tough read! Here's an actual sentence (much shorter than many) from the book:

_An imperial tradition of long standing accentuated the cosmopolitanism, but militated against its embodiment in any sort of civic particularism._

But enough of my whining. The book did repay the effort spent. I understand some things about The history of Islam that I did not understand before. Two things that I can mention in capsule form are that the author made some observations about how Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all arose in the Middle East (Hodgson is rolling in his grave because I am using that term), and all have some common traits that are not regularly encountered in religions elsewhere. The author has a theory of why this trait was common in that place but nowhere else. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but it was thought-provoking. The author also explains The history of the concept of Sharia law that is much in the news lately. Because Islam does not have any concept of separation of church and state as we have devised in most of the West, Government and religion are much more entwined. A common theme in early Islamic government was that the government would be about protecting the interests of the money classes more than the interests of common people. Sharia law was originally developed in an attempt to come up with religious/legal principles that would bind the government to be more responsive to the masses. Of course over a millenium, motivations and reason change.

This is not a history book in the sense that it talks about generals and leaders and battles kings and political conflicts. This is specifically a history of Islam. Because of the close ties of religion and government, it does often talk about government. And this is a good thing because the period covered in this book was the time of the original caliphates, the ideal being talked about now. There are also chapters on the development of religious law, Islamic culture, and the relationship between Islam and science during this time period. I'm very glad that I read the book and persevered. I undoubtedly will tackle the next volume, but not real soon! I give the book a solid four stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Grave Peril (Dresden Files, book 3), by Jim Butcher

In Ghostbusters, a swarm of ghosts were released upon New York City. In this book something similar has happened in Chicago. The bounds between the netherworld and reality have been weakened, and lots of angry spooks are coming through to inflict havoc and horror on the living. Naturally, wizard/detective Harry Dresden feels it is his responsibility to fix this. I can't really talk about the story much without giving things away, but I will say that in the middle of the book I became frustrated when a series of well-intentioned but stupid decisions by our hero, combined with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune left Harry crippled and overmatched. I was particularly annoyed that Harry seemed to be obtusely ignoring a howlingly-obvious suspect for the trouble. I debated whether I wanted to finish the book. At one point in the book, one of the villains monumentally recognizes Harry Dresden's habit of doing well-intentioned but dumb things. So it seems the author is aware of this tendency, and intends it as a feature in theory, not a bug! I did persevere and ended up enjoying the book, and of course the good guys do triumph. Our own Telracs summarized it later in one of the big KB chatroom discussions as "Dresden just does dumb things." I guess I'll have to get used to this if I want to continue with the series, which I do. A worthwhile continuation to the series, but I can't quite justify four stars and will have to limit this one to 3 1/2 stars.


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

i read some of the dresden books way back in the day when they first came out.  i didn't make it too far into the series because i found dresden TSTL at times.  i got back into dresden thanks to the short lived TV series (with the excellent Paul Blackthorne and Terrence Mann) and having forgotten how annoying i'd found the books, tried to read another one.  and gave up pretty quickly.

part of my problem is that this is a LONG series of books and i just didn't care enough about the on-going soap operas.  and i didn't believe dresden would still be alive.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

This short video clip shows a bit of some of my recent TV viewing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdwL5PDd5IY

Watching that led to me purchasing this:



Hollywood Homicide: The Unsolved Murder of Starlet Christa Helm, by Fred Rosen

One of my guilty pleasures lately has been watching DVDs of the old 1970s TV series Wonder Woman! The first season was set in World War II, and is particularly fun. The opportunity to watch Lynda Carter running around in satin tights has nothing to do with my viewing choice! &#128512;

Sometimes after watching an episode, I will get onto the IMDb website and look up what happened to some of the guest stars. This was how I first came across Christa Helm. In an episode called "Beauty on Parade" Helm was a contestant in a traveling beauty contest that moved around between US military bases but was being used as a Trojan horse for a German spy ring to gain entry to the bases. Naturally Wonder Woman enters incognito as a contestant and breaks up the ring! Christa portrayed a "mean girl" contestant who is determined to win and gain fame by any means necessary. During the episode a murder attempt aimed at WW nearly kills her instead.

All of this is no big deal once the show is over, but in checking out IMDb I found that Christa had been murdered in unusually nasty fashion about six months after the episode aired and that the crime was still considered unsolved. I did a bit of Internet research, and found that Christa was a mean girl in the real world as well. She had confided to friends, and police were able to confirm after her death, that she repeatedly arranged sexual encounters with VIPs and taped them! Many people feel that her murder was arranged by someone angry at this, who also may have wanted to gain control of a notebook where she recorded her exploits. It's not clear whether she intended to use these recordings to blackmail for money, or to attempt to raise her opportunities as an actress. She does not appear to have been a very successful actress, her major accomplishments were to star in one low-budget movie which was never released, and have the guest appearance on WW and another on Starsky and Hutch.

Perhaps 15 or 20 minutes of browsing the web learned this, and I assumed there was nothing else to learn. Then a week or two later I saw this book up near the top of the recent price drops at EreaderIQ! It was short, 37 pages in print, but was only 99 cents. I decided to risk a buck.

For the price, I am quite content. The author recounts interviews with police who investigated the case and other people who knew Ms. Helm (real name Sandra Lee Clements, originally of Milwaukee). The author avoids sensationalism, and resisted the temptation to spice things up with too much that is sexually graphic. There is a short excerpt of one of the tapes that ended up in police custody. It sounds very tawdry and sad now. Other than that about everything here could've appeared in the newspaper.

The author doesn't solve the mystery, or even come up with a convincing case of whodunit, though several possible subjects are considered. The editing is terrible by the way. The author uses "incite" where he means "insight," has trouble with possessives and there are other problems. But it was an interesting short read and I am quite satisfied for 99 cents. I give it 3 1/2 stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

telracs said:


> i read some of the dresden books way back in the day when they first came out. i didn't make it too far into the series because i found dresden TSTL at times. i got back into dresden thanks to the short lived TV series (with the excellent Paul Blackthorne and Terrence Mann) and having forgotten how annoying i'd found the books, tried to read another one. and gave up pretty quickly.
> 
> part of my problem is that this is a LONG series of books and i just didn't care enough about the on-going soap operas. and i didn't believe dresden would still be alive.


I also love the television series better than I like the books. Sometimes Dresden is too stupid to live, but in fact most of the heroes of the often violent series that many of us love would never have lived through all the drama they experienced. If not dead, many of them would be permanently crippled!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande

Author Gawande is an M.D. and I have been a fan of several of his books. In earlier incarnations of this thread I've reviewed at least one of his books on reducing error and doing complicated jobs such as medicine right. I grabbed this one unhesitatingly when it was released, despite the morbid topic. Gawande wrote this book about one of the toughest and most important jobs a physician has, which is helping patients at the end of their lives, when medicine can no longer offer realistic hope of recovery.

This is not just a theoretical book or one for physicians. He deliberately wrote this to give his best advice to patients and family members in this predicament. Different chapters cover specialized topics such as the loss of the ability to live independently, maximizing independence as physical and mental abilities decline, letting go at the right time, and how to have a tough conversations with patients and their families. He draws on investigations he has done himself, patients he has treated, and the dying experiences of three of his family members to help convey all this information. As you would expect this is a difficult and emotional read, I consider myself fairly hard-boiled, but still teared up several times. I feel like the book was useful in preparing me for the worst with some older relatives, and I think it will be worth reading if you're worried about having to handle such situations. Two major decisions discussed in the book are deciding when and how to stop living independently, and what to do when medical treatments no longer give realistic hope of a cure.

The book describes how the existence and role of the elderly has changed over time. In 1790 only 2% of the American population was 65 or older; today they are 14%. Until fairly recently, elderly people were highly valued as a source of wisdom, experience and advice, and they lived with family members in their older years. Now elderly people continue to live independently in most cases until their physical abilities decline sharply, and even then they often go to a public or commercial facility to be cared for, rather than living in the home of a family member. This isn't a science or medical book, but I found interesting a short discussion of how much genetics has to do with longevity; according to one researcher who has studied the subject only 3% of how long you live is explained by your parents's longevity, compared with 90% of how tall you are being explained by your parents's height. Even genetically-identical twins typically have a gap of 15 years or more between their deaths.

If you're worried about the situation in the near-term you really should read the book, but a couple of nuggets include that the medical system and especially relatives generally are so focused on keeping the patient alive, regardless of how miserable the experience is, that too much effort is expended on keeping a dying patient alive and too little on making the last days as comfortable and valuable for the elder as possible. According to the author, in determining how unpleasant an experience such as chemotherapy is, people tend to judge this by the average of just two things, the worst part of the whole experience and the way the experience ended. Duration of an unpleasant experience doesn't seem to have a large role.

The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness. Elderly people without these risk factors have a 12% chance of falling in a year. Those with all three risk factors have almost 100% chance. This is important because for an old person with brittle bones to fall and break a hip is one of the most disastrous things that can happen. Something that I had ignored until recently, but that this book reinforced, is that as you get into the later part of middle-aged, it is important to do something to exercise to keep your strength up. The loss of strength that naturally occurs in aging is the biggest threat to being able to live independently.

Most doctors do not get good training in how to handle a case where the patient has few or no chances for a cure. More than two-thirds of the terminal cancer patients in one study reported having no discussion with their doctors about what their goals for their final days were, despite being an average of four months from death. The one third who did were found to be far less likely to accept extreme measures to preserve life, yet suffered less, were more capable, and had better interactions with others in their remaining time. Perhaps as important, six months after these patients died, their family members were much less likely to have persistent major depression. There are some studies that show that entering hospice and avoiding extreme measures actually results in the patient living longer!

Understandably, doctors hate to admit that an illness is untreatable. More than 40% of oncologists admitted in a survey that they offered treatments they believed were unlikely to work, even though many treatments for cancer have negative side effects that seriously hurt the quality of life for a dying patient.

One palliative care specialist shared a list of four questions she uses in these situations:

1. What do you understand your prognosis to be?

2. What are your concerns about what lies ahead?

3. What kinds of trade-offs are you willing to make, and how do you want to spend your time?

4. who do you want to make decisions if you can't?

Clearly this was not a fun read! If you or someone you love is unlikely to have to face this soon, you correctly won't want to read it. But I thought it was very valuable in helping me think about what I may have to face in caring for my elderly mother. Five stars for the target audience.


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## crebel (Jan 15, 2009)

Thanks for your very thoughtful review, Claw.  This book sounds like a useful resource for anyone.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by John Henry Patterson

This is a nonfiction book originally published in the first years of the 20th century. It got some attention about fifteen years ago when part of it it was made into a movie called The Ghost and the Darkness. Author Patterson was a railroad engineer responsible for railroad construction and maintenance in British colonies in Africa. He also loved to hunt. He describes how when he had been in Africa for only hours, and was on his way to his first assignment, a man riding on his passenger train spotted an ostrich running alongside the train, shot it from the moving train, and convinced the train staff to stop the train and back up so they could haul the big bird on board as a trophy. Patterson doesn't consider this unusual. Patterson seem to have that attitude towards everything, it is quite common for him to write sentences like "I was walking to my neighbors to see if the sick wife was recovering, and I saw a big eland, so I shot it." But these skills were needed when the attacks of two lions were killing and driving away construction workers from his project. The preferred method of attack was to leap into camp at night, sink teeth into a sleeping person, And run back into the darkness with the meal. The author spent quite a bit of time trying different arrangements of ambush, and even setting traps to try to kill the lions. He eventually succeeds, and this takes about the first one third of the book. The rest of the book is various short episodes of interest during his hunts.

Lots and lots of hair-raising adventures, some experienced by himself, and some by his friends. The lions were not perfect predators. They made mistakes. In one case a lion leapt into a hut where a man was sleeping, grabbed a sack of rice in its jaws, and leapt back out, carrying away it's "kill." One man had short-lived luck. A lion grabbed the mattress he was sleeping on and carried it off, leaving him a dazed and amazed survivor. But after this great luck he perished of thirst a few weeks later when crossing a desolate area. In another incident that is comical reading about it 100 years later but must've been terrifying at the time, a trader and his donkey were ambushed, but the lion got two cans strapped together by wire tangled in his front legs and was terrified by the loud banging of the linked cans. The tangled lion clattered off into the jungle and the trader grabbed his donkey and ran for his life. The lions killed twenty-eight railway workers before they were stopped. In retrospect, the deaths of the lions seem mundane compared to the hunting and waiting.

If you're not willing to accept a book written from the point of view of an enthusiastic sport hunter of all sorts of game, you won't care for the book. I could accept that, and liked the book but I wasn't enthralled. Some of the things that I would expect to be dramatic just didn't end up that way. Three and a half stars from me.

Note that this apparently is in the public domain now and there are numerous editions. I bought the one above and it has a few typos but not many. Apparently the original book had photographic illustrations that I'd love to see, but they are not in this edition.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Brain Rules; The Twelve Rules for Surviving and Thriving at Home, Work, and School, by John Medina

This book by a research molecular biologist, tries to summarize the state of research on the brain now and give us twelve easily-remembered nuggets that we can find useful in regular life. I was pleased to find the author says he based everything in his book on stuff that had been demonstrated by peer-reviewed research and replicated by other researchers. By the way, HeidiG originally brought this book to my attention.

I think the thing that astounded me the most in the book involved no impressive intellectual feats, but very young and untrained minds. Medina tells us that the brain does have some functions wired into it literally from birth. An early capability is the ability to mimic others. Babies as young as half an hour old can recognize when someone sticks a tongue out at them, and respond back the same way! Somehow babies that have never even seen a tongue before know that people have a tongue, and are able to stick out their own tounges when given the idea.

The book repeats some material that I've read just a couple of books back in the "Spark" book emphasizing that exercise is really good for the brain. This writer goes in a little further than the earlier book to explain why this might be so from an evolutionary perspective. Again like the other book, he says that stress is quite bad for the brain and for the body. In an interesting experiment, scientists studied the immune systems of method actors, who are trying to create in their own minds the emotions their character is feeling. Experienced method actors feeling stressed had the same negative effects on the body as people who are genuinely stressed, and happy actors had the positive effects of happy and good feelings. He talks at length about a famous case of occupational stress that I had forgotten about. Lisa Nowak, an astronaut and former Navy pilot concocted an elaborate scheme to meet a romantic rival at the airport and kidnap her or worse. Even in her stressed state she made elaborate plans, but fortunately did not succeed.

One thing that some of us can definitely use in the real world is that if you're presenting information, it should be presented in blocks of no more than 10 minutes. You can then present another block successfully if the first one was interesting to the audience. Science confirms what most of us already know reexposing yourself to information you want to learn and repeating it helps to retain more of it.

Visual information overrides the other senses. I was amused to read about an experiment where wine tasting professionals were given white wine with red dye in it, and they analyzed it as a white wine. The percentage of our genes devoted to smell is steadily decreasing over the generations so that our visual systems can be improved.

The book is divided into chapters for each of the twelve rules, and each chapter ends with a set of ideas that summarize the most important concepts in the chapter. I found it interesting and informative read and give it four stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

A Blind Goddess (Billy Boyle World War II Mystery) by James R. Benn

Everyone's nerves are on edge, because D-Day is close, when Billy Boyle, ace troubleshooter on the staff of his uncle General Eisenhower gets a peculiar assignment. He is to go to a small English town and assist the local police in investigating the murder of an Englishman even though there is no evidence Americans are involved. But he and the English police are strictly ordered not to interview or interfere with the most obvious suspect! But it isn't all bad. An old frenemy from the wrong side of the tracks in his teenage days has contacted Billy for the first time in years, asking for Billy's help. A member of the frenemy's tank crew is being railroaded for a murder he didn't commit. But since the accused murderer is black, no one is interested in checking his protestations of innocence. The murder was in this same small town, so that is a good break. At least Billy isn't behind German lines on some dangerous crazy mission, or preparing to jump out of a landing barge onto a French beach filled with waiting Germans. This should be a safe job. At least until Billy himself is the subject of a murder attempt. Maybe being on one of those invasion barges wouldn't be so bad...

An excellent murder mystery. I really like this one. Not quite five stars, but darn close. Very strong four and a half stars.

(The title refers to the figure of justice, by the way)


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

9 Days Falling (Kirov Saga Book 5), by John Schettler

_"The impossible has become commonplace for us."_

One of Kirov's crewmen summed things up nicely. I have been using my monthly Amazon Prime borrow to read this series. At book 5 I'm still pleased, though the introduction of one set of new characters made me briefly wonder about Turtledove syndrome. Harry Turtledove is a favorrite science-fiction and fantasy author of mine, but he has a strong tendency to let his series run on too long and acquire too many characters. Fortunately, there is no Turtledove syndrome in sight here.

After an involuntary time hopping tour of World War II and a devastated future, the crew of the Russian navy ship Kirov returned in the fourth book to their home time of 2021. They now have some ability to do controlled time travel themselves, so in book five they are determined to use this ability to repair the damage to history that may have been done by a deserter who remained back in the 1940s. But more urgent is that World War III is breaking out, and Kirov is ordered to sea to fight against the US Navy!

The author has put a lot of thought into this series. Into the mechanics of time travel and paradox, and also into the activities of the people in the 1940s who witnessed a warship full of Russian time travelers from the future. What would they do about this in the eighty years since? You'll have to read the book to find out!

The only rain on the parade is the continuation of imperfect editing. I really enjoyed the book, and have been on the fence whether to give it four and a half stars or five stars. I'm going to go with five stars, but I'll admit that this time Kirov barely scraped into the higher rating.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

I am way tardy in posting to this thread and finishing up for the year! Part of the reason is that I seemed to go on a reading strike in November and December. My count is that I read only four books in those two months. This is part, but not all of the reason that my book count is down from previous years. I get 86 books for the year.

Fortunately I'm doing a little better in 2014 and have read several books in January, although I'm not as productive as I've been in many previous years. I had intended to finish the thread up tonight. I'm traveling in a hotel room, and my only Internet access is on  Fire tablet which is having trouble cutting and pasting on the KB link maker for some reason. So I'll be able to post about some books but will have to add links from at home.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne

I had not read this since tackling it successfully late in elementary school. So I was eager to see how I liked it. a one sentence summary is that as entertainment, the story is merely okay for me, but I am awed by the amount of thought that the author put into things and how much of the technology he got right, or at least thought about. Many of the things in the book are exciting, but just aren't that thrilling to read about here. Even the famous fight against a giant squid with axes that was a major dramatic scene in some movie versions of the story happens rather quickly and just doesn't grab me here. What did impress me was how many small details of operating underwater the author thought through, and how carefully they are covered here. I am conflicted about how I should rate it, but I'm going to say 3 1/2 stars overall.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Kirov Series:

Fallen Angels
The Devil's Garden
Armageddon

Much of the reading I did in November and December was from this series of Military time travel science fiction books. My schedule was driven because I am borrowing these through Amazon Prime and wanted to use up my one book per month allowance! I read three of them in close sequence and am going to cover all three in one post. I've mentioned it before in previous posts, but the Kirov series follows the adventures of the crew of a Russian Navy ship from the near future after their ship is sent back in time by an accident. In later books in the series, the crew gain some ability to travel in time in a semi-controlled fashion, and uses this to try to repair damage to time caused by some of the earlier actions, and to avert World War III, which is apparently starting in their Hometime in the 2020s. The story gets more complicated when factions form among the crewmen who want to use the time traveling ability in different ways, and when new characters are introduced, mostly among people who are not part of the Kirov crew but who have knowledge that something is going on with time travel. Some of the situations developing are bizarre,


Spoiler



my favorite being when the Kirov is back in the early 1900s, and appears about to be matched with the Japanese fleet of that time, possibly combined with Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, while a 21st Century missile submarine is sneaking about (in 190 which may or may not be hostile to the Kirov!


 

I enjoyed the books a lot. I'm still very happy with the series, though I still worry that the number of characters will expand till it gets too unwieldy. One fly in the ointment is that there continue to be a lot of editing errors , some of which are very basic. I would still give the three books a joint rating of four stars, and not far short of 4 1/2.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie and TV Idols

I was astonished to find myself reading this, but I had picked it up for two bucks a few months back, and it did at least break my reading drought. For some reason I recently find the history and glamour of Hollywood capturing my attention quite a bit for the first time in my life. I found the book an interesting read, even though it is a bit depressing. In addition to the promised stories of unusual deaths, the book contains short biographies of each covered personality. It is sad how frequently alcohol, drugs, and especially divorce after divorce occur over and over and over again in the lives of these people. Of course many of the endings are particularly sad. The actor who played Allfalfa in the Little Rascals films died in 1959, shot in an argument over $50. He had had no success after the Little Rascals and did not adjust well. Russ Columbo, a famous crooner of the 1930s who I had never heard of, was shot in an even more unusual fashion. Allegedly, a good friend was showing him a collection of antique Blackpowder firearms that were not even supposed to be in firing condition. An accident with a gun that was not even known to be loaded resulted in the bullet being fired and ricocheting into his eye and killing him. This would be bad enough, but his mother had recently had a heart attack. No one one wanted to break the news to her, for fear it would kill her. A story was concocted that Russ had married his friend Carole Lombard and they had departed on an around the world cruise! The mother went on to live for ten years (!), and the story was continued for her benefit. Periodic fake letters from the happy couple were read to her, her last words were a message to her long-deceased son, and he was the primary beneficiary of her will. Some ends were just pathetic. William Holden was before my time, but I remember him for a memorable performance in Stalag 17, and an extraordinary guest appearance on the old I Love Lucy show. He died decades later when he stumbled and hit his head on a nightstand.

The book is not something that you will read cover to cover. You can only stand so many of these stories at a time. I found it interesting and I think anyone who enjoys trivia and has an interest in Hollywood will like it. It's not a great book but I let it just barely squeak into four stars.


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

um, claw, what's a kriener?

and you want to fix the sentence about the mother....7


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

telracs said:


> um, claw, what's a kriener?
> 
> and you want to fix the sentence about the mother....7


Okay, so maybe hiring the editor of the Kirov series to check my posts for typos and "autouncorrect" was false economy...


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## crebel (Jan 15, 2009)

The Hooded Claw said:


> Okay, so maybe hiring the editor of the Kirov series to check my posts for typos and "autouncorrect" was false economy...


LOL. We were working on the translation of your post in chat last night. Good to know our text-autocorrect skills were correct with Kreiner=crooner!


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