# Cheer and jeer THC as he reads a bunch of books in 2015



## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

I have been slothful in writing up a new thread on this. But I've done one of these threads for three years now, so why quit?



Chew On This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food, by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson

This is a book on the perils of eating fast food and the rotten things the big fast food chains, and other companies that market to children do. I was very interested but only got about 12% into the book. Then I had to quit. When I read an expose book like this, I expect the facts to be absolutely straight. And I would like the attitude of the author to be as unbiased as possible, which may be unfair of me to expect in an expose book.

Very early in the book the biography of "Colonel" Sanders is covered. The author makes a point of disparging Sanders for referring to himself as a colonel. He incidentally says that Sanders was never in the military. I was aware of the tradition of the Kentucky Colonel, so was puzzled by this. I did a little bit of research, and found that Sanders was indeed officially a Kentucky Colonel. This really bothered me, because I was aware of Sanders holding this honorary title back when I was a teenager. If the author did any research at all, how could he not Know this stuff? While researching, I also discovered that contrary to what this book asserts, Sanders was briefly in the military, though at much lower rank than Colonel. I was now concerned about the book. But I shrugged it off and kept reading.

The author then began to discuss Walt Disney and the Disney empire. The author made a cutting comment about how Disney was not the artist on his animated cartoons. This really bothered me, as I knew that even the directors of short Warner Bros. cartoons were not the artists. The director and producer of an animated feature have other jobs. And in fact Walt Disney really was the voice of Mickey Mouse for several years. So he did participate directly in making some of his most important early cartoons.

At this point I concluded that I was skeptical the authors had a clue what they were talking about, and even more skeptical that they were ever going to give the subjects even remotely fair treatment. So I put the book aside and won't be going back to it. I don't give out many one-star ratings, but this book does get one star from me


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Star Witness, by Lia Matera

I picked this up a while ago when it was offered for 99 cents. I was very happy with the purchase and picked up all the others that were in Kindle form at a reduced price.

Our heroine is an attorney who was raised by unrepentant hippie parents. Her parents are retain their leftist, antiestablishment views now, but she has more conventional ideas on politics in the world. She still is enough of a rebel that she has trouble holding down an attorney job, and has only recently changed jobs when a friend who she owes a gigantic favor insists that she repay by taking a capital case that is way out of her expertise. Her new client is accused of vehicular manslaughter. His car drove over a cliff and crushed a car (with occupant) on the road below. But it seems that her client is not guilty. He was not driving his car at the time of the accident, he was in the UFO where he had been kidnapped! The UFO seems to have carelessly dropped the empty car on the road. At least this explains how his sports car with narrow performance tires passed over a plowed field without leaving any tracks! Of course, few jurors are likely to be impressed by this explanation. So her case may be a tough one.

I enjoyed the book a lot. Lots of twists and turns to the plot, some interesting expert witnesses and others, and I will read the others in the series. Not that I need another mystery series to follow, darn it! A very solid four stars from me. Oh, and I love the cover!


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## DK Mok (Jan 3, 2015)

The Hooded Claw said:


> I enjoyed the book a lot. Lots of twists and turns to the plot, some interesting expert witnesses and others, and I will read the others in the series. Not that I need another mystery series to follow, darn it! A very solid four stars from me. Oh, and I love the cover!


Star Witness sounds like a fun story with a nice blend of courtroom drama and paranormal geekery. The cover reminds me of the Weekly World News, in a good way.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

DK Mok said:


> Star Witness sounds like a fun story with a nice blend of courtroom drama and paranormal geekery. The cover reminds me of the Weekly World News, in a good way.


 I agree about the cover. I also liked this cover which was on a book I read and reviewed it last year's thread:


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Fer-Dec-Lance, by Rex Stout

I've heard of the Nero Wolfe mysteries literally for decades, but had never read one till now. This is the first in the series (though I understand that the books are independent, so there is no compelling need to read them in order), and we meet Wolfe, a retiring super genius who doesn't get out much. The story is told through his leg man Archie, and Wolfe didn't always reveal his purposes to Archie, and thus to the reader. The story is set when it was written in the 1930s.

As is typical of mysteries, there isn't a lot I can discuss without revealing plot points, so I will be good and hold my peace. I'll just say that Wolfe has a problem in that in his murder case, every possible suspect seems to be in the clear.

I liked the book, it is well-written and clear. I had no problems keeping the characters straight, which is sometimes a problem in mysteries with simultaneous investigations of many suspects. The book wasn't gripping. It didn't grab my attention and hold it. I still rate it as four stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Kirov Saga, books 9-11
Altered States
Darkest Hour
Hinge of Fate

I am covering all three of these together, though I read other books in between them. These are part of the Kirov series of time travel naval alternate history science fiction (everybody got that straight?). Last year I began reading these at the rate of one a month using the free borrow from my Amazon Prime subscription. This month I took advantage of my free trial of Kindle Unlimited for reasons unrelated to this series. Since I had access to a bunch of free books, after I'd used KU for my intended purpose, I took advantage of the remaining books, and snarfed up the books in this series.

For those of you unenlightened enough to not have read last year's thread, I'll recap that the Kirov is a near-future Russian warship that spent the first three volumes in the series finding themselves mysteriously deposited in the midst of World War II.


Spoiler



Before returning home, they discovered that World War III would start soon after they got back to their proper time, and that it would destroy all human life. Since they had acquired a limited ability to time travel on command, they resolve to avert the coming war. But not every crewman agrees with the way the commander goes about this


.

The author has started formatting the series into trilogies with one independent book in between each trilogy. This trilogy finds Kirov back in her original stomping grounds of early World War II. But their other machinations have changed history, and this isn't your father's World War II. Things are different, and even the Soviet Union they used to know doesn't exist here. Thus the title of Altered States! One thing that pleased me was that now that there is no longer a thread of existing history to protect, Kirov quits being a retiring butterfly, and actively seeks to talk to the people in their current timeline, rather than just trying to lay low, invariably unsuccessfully. I enjoyed the story and kept reading eagerly.

This flagged a bit in the last book, Hinge of Fate. Several things began to bother me. This series is story-driven, not character-driven, but in this last book, I was more bothered by the flatness of the characters. One new character in particular bothered me. The editing problems of bad word choice, poor grammar, and periodic errors in the generally exhaustive historical research bothered me more than in earlier books. And the author repeatedly harped on how the hinge of Fate was turning, enough that it began to annoy me. I'm not sure if these problems were the result of reading so many of the series in a short time, or if there really is a degradation of the quality. I'm going to give it awhile before reading the next book and see if that helps.

Note that the cover of Darkest Hour includes a dirigible, Stuka dive bombers, and a laser beam.surely the first time in history that particular combination of objects appeared on a book cover!

Despite some worries,I am still thoroughly enjoying the story here, and I must give these books a collective four and a half stars. If I was giving individual ratings, I'd give the last book three and a half, however.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Love these, THC! Keep up the good work. You keep adding titles to my To-Read list.


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## SunshineOnMe (Jan 11, 2014)

This thread has been great because I learned about a bunch of books that aren't normally on my radar. But they sound interesting!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Robots Have no Tails, by Henry Kuttner

I haven't read a lot of Henry Kuttner, but I've been very impressed by what I have read. Kutner was mostly known for extremely creative science-fiction short stories. He was active in the 1940s and early 1950s, until his career was cut short by an untimely death at a young age.

The other Kuttner works that I have read were independent short stories. This is a five-story series about the same character, Gallagher. Gallagher is a very creative super genius type. Unfortunately his greatest capabilities are only active when he is drunk. He has a recurring problem of being off on a bender, agreeing to solve a problem for a client, solving it while still in this inebriated state, but then not being able to remember anything about what he has done when he sobers up. Each of these stories begins when he comes out of the influence and realizes that he doesn't remember what he's agreed to do, or even who he has agreed to do it for. The story involves him extricating himself from the situation.

The stories are very creative, but the very artificial setup took a lot of the joy out of it for me. My favorites were the first story, a sort of locked room mystery, and the second, where his home is overrun with cute talking bunnies from Mars, while he is the object of unwanted police attention because a series of dead bodies keeps materializing in his garden.

One curious feature of the book is the deliberate choice of obscure but appropriate words from time to time. For the first time, I encountered "scarify," "insufflate," and "noumenon." There are more of these. The Kindle dictionary generally came through for me.

The stories are clever and fun, but the artificial setup bugged me, especially when it happened five times. I look back at it with more fondness than I felt while reading it, but my dissatisfaction while reading lets me give this three and a half stars, and that last half star is given grudgingly.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Cartoons of World War II, by Tony Husband

My attention was drawn to this when a friend bought a remaindered paper copy at Barnes & Noble (first time he'd been in one for ages). I was pleased to see it is available on Kindle for a reasonable price. The book is just pages of editorial cartoons organized by year. There is some text, but it focuses almost entirely on the cartoonists, there is little explanation of the events the cartoons comment on. So to get the full benefit of the book, you need to have some knowledge of the war.

The cartoons begin before the war, with the earliest covering the rise of the Nazis, and end with a few cartoons about the end of the war and demobilization. Cartoons from many countries are included, the ones from Soviet and Nazi publications are especially jarring with their completely different world views:

These are a few of my favorites:

A commentary from before the war on naval arms races...










This was done during the short-lived alliance between Hitler and Stalin...










And this Nazi poster showed how the Germans sought to portray American "civilization."










I like this book a lot. Five stars for those interested in World War II. Others will quite properly ignore it.


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

um, your favorite cartoons are missing...


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

telracs said:


> um, your favorite cartoons are missing...


To avoid problems posting, they were added in later...


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

i don't get the "liberators" one.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

telracs said:


> i don't get the "liberators" one.


It suggests that instead of being heroic saviors from a shining city on a hill, the Americans are a despicable and alien hybrid of black, KKK, Jewish, and money-grubbing capitalist influence, who view the jitterbug (inside the birdcage), world's greatest leg contests, and drum majorettes as big cultural achievements. So obviously all civilized Europeans must unite behind the Germans in defending civilization from these uncouth foreign interlopers who shatter our cities with their bombing! Pretty crude appeal to chauvinism. Of course, we Americans are above such crass things


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

A Companion to Easter Island, by James Grant-Peterkin

I am preparing for a trip to South America in April, and this book is part of my background reading. It is a travel guide, not a general information book on the island and the statues. Much of it is given over to detailed descriptions of routes around the island and what you will see while traveling them. I won't be able to give it a true rating until my trip is over, but for the moment I give it 3 1/2 stars. Not recommended for anyone not planning a trip to Easter Island.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Last Chants: A Willa Jansson Mystery, by Lia Matera

It is actually out of order, but I'm going to cover this now as I will otherwise forget about it. This book is a sequel to Star Witness, which I read a few weeks ago and really enjoyed. I started reading it last night. Our heroine is an attorney who was raised by parents who remain unrepentant hippies, but she didn't quite follow in their unconventional footsteps. She is now an adult attorney, but absorbed enough rebellious spirit from her parents to be not completely comfortable with mainstream thinking.

I love the first book, but gave up on this one 8% into the book. The book begins with our attorney seeing a family friend who is about to be arrested by the police. She intervenes with a rather dimwitted plan to save him from arrest, which works. The friend is a bumbling absent-minded professor type, and doesn't understand his peril. This professor is supposed to be an anthropologist who has done cultural research spending long periods living with savage tribes deep in the Amazon and with Arctic aboriginal people in Siberia. To establish these relationships and live in those circumstances would take a very savvy and aware person, but this professor should not be allowed to use plastic tableware except under responsible supervision. Among many other failures, he seems completely unable to understand why the police would be upset with him because in their eyes he threatened people with a pistol and left the scene with a hostage at gunpoint (I told you her plan to extricate him was stupid). Despite the bumbling professor and bold but foolish lawyer they make it to a place of safety, at which point we learn that the lawyer's mother who is a friend of the professor, has with surgical precision done the most damaging thing possible in this situation. At this point, I closed the book. I don't think I'm going back to it. Since I read so little of the book I'm not going to give it a star rating despite my temptation to give it a very bad one. I grabbed a couple of these these at low price, and will probably give the series a try with another book. I really did like Star Witness!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Weight Training for Dummies, by Liz Neropont

Upfront I have to say that I have an older edition of this book, but it is by the same authors as this one. There is also yet another Kindle version of this book which is almost brand-new released in December 2014. Two revisions later, I assume the content is quite different.

I am reporting on this now but I actually have been using this as a reference for almost a year. If you've been following this thread you know that I lost quite a bit of weight over the last couple years and have been working diligently to keep things that way. That desire, Plus reading about how a key factor in being able to live independently as you age is to maintain your strength as you get older motivated me to do resistance training. Resistance training is what people who actually work in this field call what most of us think of as weight training. This is not just for barbell boys. And much of it does not involve actually lifting weights at all, but doing things that create resistance your muscles have to press against.

I recently realized I had at one point or another read most of the book. I read the first half or so in one go back when I started this and every read chapters and it periodically and now I have literally gone through every chapter. So I decided to counted as a book read and talk about it here.

In short, if you're interested in building and maintaining your strength, and I'm not talking about Charles Atlas stuff I'm talking about things real people do, this book is outstanding. It begins with a great deal of information and advice on benefits of resistance training, and how to start doing this yourself. Topics covered include deciding whether to join a gym, or just work at home, choosing what equipment if any you want to acquire (barbells are not necessary), advantages of using a personal trainer if you decide to do so, and how do you choose a gym or personal trainer if that's the route you take. Basics of anatomy and what different muscle groups do are covered. This is followed by numerous chapters on exercises to focus on particular groups of muscles. There are illustrations safety tips and detailed written instructions.

The only complaint I have and it is a minor one, is that although the illustrations are of good size and show up wonderfully on my 7 inch Kindle Fire, and usably even on my smart phone using the Kindle app, there are usually only two illustrations per exercise. Sometimes I'd like to see intermediate steps. Fortunately there are numerous YouTube videos illustrating the same exercises. So this is not a major deficiency.

Highly recommended for those who want to do this. I give it a solid 4 1/2 stars. If you buy this, you'll be getting a later edition. Probably best to pick up the most recent edition, though I don't know how much it is changed from what I've been reading.


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## DK Mok (Jan 3, 2015)

The Hooded Claw said:


> A Companion to Easter Island, by James Grant-Peterkin... I won't be able to give it a true rating until my trip is over, but for the moment I give it 3 1/2 stars. Not recommended for anyone not planning a trip to Easter Island.


I look forward to hearing your final review of the book (and Easter Island). I hope you have a fantastic trip!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

What I Wish I Knew Before I Moved to Hollywood (2nd Edition), by T.R. Locke

I've never been star-struck or particularly interested in Hollywood. Until recently anyway. For the past few months the glamour of the place, how it works, and the history of it have begun to appeal to me. When I had free access to a few more books using my Kindle Unlimited trial, I saw that this book by a script writer was available, and snarfed it up.

Author Locke identified himself as a scriptwriter, he never said he was a SUCCESSFUL scriptwriter! Don't read this book when you are depressed. It is largely a tale of woe and frustration. But it was interesting to read. If I had any actual ambitions of heading to Hollywood to make my fortune, I suppose it would've been useful to read. If only for insight on some new ways to get diddled around.

I'm going to start off with a few direct quotes:

"There are 120,00 SAG (Screen Actor's Guild) members. At any given time, 85% of them are out of work. The average salary of a SAG member is less than $10,000 a year. Eighteen to 20%_ [sic]_ fall into star roles and earn serious money. Others are just trying to make at least $7500 this year so they can qualify for their health and medical benefits. Less than 1% get into the million-dollar and double digit million dollar realm.

"It's imperative that an actor either has a job that allows him this freedom or that he work at night. That's why so many actors are waiters. ... Catering companies work on a per day basis--They call you up and check if you're available a day or so in advance and, if you work it right, it's possible to bring home upwards of $500/week."

"People wonder why rappers who succeeded in becoming big stars still hang out and often do the same things they did before they made it big. T.I. gets caught with machine guns with silencers on them, while he's already on probation? Stupid!...The inspiration for their art is shattered as soon as they become stars. It's very difficult to write about injustice and dirty cops when those cops are guarding your mansion and keeping your child safe at school."

"If my agent and manager and I were lunching together at Hamburger Hamlet in Beverly Hills, and discussing my next million-dollar script, I wouldn't feel free to say what I say here. I wouldn't even want to."

"I asked him what he animated _(on the Disney Tarzan movie_). I can't remember the exact thing he said, but it was some minutiae related to the way that one group of animals moved during the musical sequences. 'I worked on that for three years,' he said glumly, 'and they only used ten seconds of what I'd done.'"

"Hollywood is full of distractions. By that I mean some of the best looking people in the world--many of them extremely friendly, intelligent, open, supportive, creative, driven, alone, horny and single; every type of drug, every type of lifestyle, and every type of entertainment. When things aren't right in one part of your life, it's often too easy to find a temporary fix in a bad place."

Back to Claw now. In the book Locke describes how he convinced his wife to abandon their stressed but plush double income professional lives in Chicago so that they could move to Hollywood and he could pursue his dream of being a scriptwriter. He also describes how this led him to bankruptcy and nearly to divorce, though he says he and his wife have reconciled.

When I was initially in the Army as an enlisted man, I briefly conceived the idea of reenlisting to get a special benefit. I was sent to a special reenlistment NCO who handled the unusual type of contract that I wanted. The reenlistment NCO listened sympathetically but told me to come back later. When I came back later he told me to come back even later. This went on for a while, and I eventually talked to another reenlistment NCO who I knew better and complained. He explained that the sergeant had met his quota for the month, and was putting me off so he could use me to meet his quota in the following month. I was eager to get on with things and didn't want to wait a month, and in my naivety was shocked that a professional would do something so selfish and dismissive of my interests. To be young and idealistic again! I was sufficiently annoyed by this that I abandoned the idea of reenlisting and went back to my original plan of returning to college, going through ROTC, and coming back as an officer. The manipulative reenlistment NCO was a small time operator compared to what goes on in Hollywood. In this book the author describes many different ways of being had as a writer. One of the simplest ones, and one that even I was aware of before I read the book, was when producers interview you in detail about your script ideas, then take the idea and have their favored writer modify it and turn it into a movie script. There are many different ways in which people use each other shamelessly, and the book describes them in a way that will make you weep at man's inhumanity to man. On the other hand, the author describes how he became frustrated with a very important producer and literally screamed obscenities at the fellow. The author now believes the producer's protestations that he was genuinely trying to help. Maybe he's right. Maybe he isn't.

Despite all this, the author still is genuinely committed to his goal of succeeding in Hollywood as a writer. He doesn't seem to be getting far, this is the second edition, said to be published several years after the first but there is nothing in the book that I would consider as very successful. Though at least when he is old and gray, he won't sit and lament that he wasted his productive years doing a job he hated, when he should have gone to Hollywood and pursued his dream.

Most of the book is the author's recollections, but the last part is interviews with various (usually anonymous) people of greater and lesser success in different types of Hollywood jobs. The interviewees focus on what has worked for them, and what hasn't. It's interesting that one of the people interviewed had a substantial success as a producer with HBO, that I would've thought would lead to a successful career, but is now working outside of show business, I believe in North Carolina.

As long as you can handle the rather frustrated and gloomy yet still ultimately optimistic demeanor of the author , this is worth reading if the subject interests you. I'm going to give it 3 1/2 stars, but it is awfully close to four.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Unnatural Acts, by Kevin J. Anderson

_Where do you find a zombie that's lost its arms and legs?

Exactly where you left it._

Another tale of Dan Shamble, the private investigator who was murdered on the job, but returned as a zombie when The Big Uneasy released magic and all sorts of legendary creatures into our modern world. Like most of the various new types of resident, Dan just wants to make a living and have a happy life.

This story has a fairly standard set of interwoven cases, but hanging over everything is the rhetoric of Senator Rupert Balfour, who seems determined to rise to power by defending "normal, natural humans" against the monsters because "God hates unnaturals." And he seems determined to use the power of the law in his crusade. Sen. Ballfour is omnipresent enough and obnoxious enough that you just know that he is going to be involved in Shamble's cases. There's no deep philosophy here, just a pleasant read if you like this sort of thing, which I do. As in the other book in the series that I've read, the author gets in some interesting tidbits about integrating undead into society. Fitness is still a concern, zombies can't build new muscle but they do have to worry about maintaining their flexibility. Vampires can actually get fit and strong but a heart monitor is of no use to them in their fitness training! Oh, you also learn how a zombie can successfully hold hands with his non-corporeal ghost girlfriend.

A fun read. I give it an extremely solid 3 1/2 stars. I am a hard grader, so 3 1/2 stars is a very honorable score. I will definitely continue the series.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher, audio CD, read by the author

Sometimes it is better that your youthful fantasies don't come true. Back in the day when the original Star Wars movie came out, I had rather a crush on Carrie Fisher. The odds that anything ever would have come of this are even slimmer than my chances of winning the lottery jackpot (especially since in those days I'd never been to California or to New York, where she spends most of her time!). I'm still glad I didn't get involved with Carrie. In the years since the days that I fancied Carrie, I'd heard vaguely that she had drug, alcohol and mental health problems, but I didn't know the half of it! This memoir describes many parts of her life, but a big part of it focuses on the problems I've already mentioned.

I bought a used CD rather than a digital audio book to save a few bucks, so when I had to take a lengthy car trip seemed like the perfect time to pull out these disks. The three disks make it easy to visualize how the book, which is really a series of monologues, is organized. Disk one is mostly about her childhood, with a lengthy discussion of her electroconvulsive therapy and its effects on her memory thrown in. Disk two is mostly about her relationships, and disk three focuses on her substance abuse and mental health problems.

The book was depressing in some ways, hearing the gal I'd put on a pedestal decades ago knock herself off of the pedestal. But the stories are often fascinating, and Carrie's delivery is straight-shooting and matter-of-fact. Her honesty about her problems is refreshing in an age when nobody seems to take responsibility for their actions anymore.

Lots of interesting stories. Carrie grew up spending a lot of her time playing unsupervised with her brother on soundstage or studios, and she saw her father (who abandoned her family when she was two) more often on television than in real life. She claims this got her started off in life with an already-distorted sense of reality. Some of the others interesting stories include:

Being sent by her mother at the age of sixteen to "sanitize" their apartment of embarrassing evidence before the police arrived.

Getting her mother out of jail after an arrest on weapons charges!

Starting to see a therapist regularly at age fifteen.

Having the most normal part of her entire life be when she was sent to England as an unaccompanied teenager for acting school.

Seeing her face merchandised on every conceivable object.

Waking up in her own bed next to a dead friend who'd been alive and well the night before..

Fights and reconciliation with Paul Simon, and songs Simon wrote about her.

Being left by her husband, and the father of her child, for a man (she claims her main effects on men are to make them bald and turn them gay).

The feelings she has when she falls off the wagon, and coming out of it when she realizes how hurt and disappointed her daughter is.

The problems of being manic. I had at least some appreciation of the problems of depression, but hadn't thought about the manic part much. It it's a much bigger problem than you might think.

Main disappointment is that other than the merchandising issue, there's not much in the way of interesting or juicy stories about Star Wars and being a central figure in the movies.

I was very interested, and kept listening eagerly. This is rather short, only about three hours. I give it a solid four stars, but be wary if you formerly lusted after an idealized princess!


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## Trophywife007 (Aug 31, 2009)

I always enjoy reading your reviews!  Count me in again for this year.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Coroner, by Thomas T. Noguchi

Noguchi spent many years working as a coroner in Los Angeles, where he eventually headed the Coroner's Office, and became known in the media as "Coroner to the Stars." He had an unusual background, being born and raised and mostly educated in Japan but deciding to immigrate to the United States after medical school. Before he became a supervisor he had already achieved some prominence as the man who did the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe. But unusual events and controversy plagued him. There were two attempts to fire him from the office, the second successful. I'm only hearing his version of things here, but I suspect that the management felt that he was outshining his office, too concerned with his image rather than that of his agency.

Lots of fascinating stories here. His autopsy of Marilyn Monroe has a prominent place. Other recognizable cases he was involved in and talks about, are Examining the bodies of members of the victims of Charles Manson, the death of John Belushi and Janis Joplin, and the drowning of Natalie Woods. There are many less famous but very interesting cases described here. The one that most sticks in my mind is a man who appears to have killed seven people without leaving the bodies marked or any poison in them. He would bring his victims to a hospital ER after arranging for them to be injured in a minor accident and inject insulin into the tubing of their IV. He then collected on insurance. One of the victims was a nephew. Gruesome. He claims that 20% of autopsies reveal that the initial theory of the murder was wrong. This estimate, like the book, may be a bit dated. This book ends when he was fired in the early 1980s. So the technical methods described here are out of date.

Very readable, and worth the time if you are interested in this type of thing. Doubly so if Hollywood in the 70s and 80s interests you. I give it four stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Jeeves and the Fuedal Spirit, by P. G. Wodehouse

I listened to this audiobook while returning from my car trip today. One downside of audiobooks for these write ups is that I can't make any notes and annotations on the text in my Kindle. As a result I'm limited to what I can remember, so I'm writing this up now before memory fades. This is fairly typical Jeeves, though it takes place later than most. There are specific mentions of characters acting like the Gestapo or the Fuehrer. The narrator is Jonathan Cecil. I know nothing of him, I found the narration completely adequate but not exceptional either. My typical way to review a Wodehouse book is to quote some of the WWWW (Wodehouse Way With Words). I can't do that with an audiobook since I wasn't able to mark text to pull up for my review. And I don't really remember much of the WWWW in this book. I'm not sure if it is because there was less of it in this book, or if it just doesn't become as apparent when I listen rather than read. The other main deficiency I found in the book was that the ending isn't satisfactory as in the best Jeeves books. Things work out happily for everyone, but rather then the situation being resolved by one or two masterstrokes by Jeeves that fix everything, stuff just works out. And Jeeves' main contribution to the finish, and indeed throughout the book is rather mundane. But the story is good and interesting and there are some good moments. Bertie and his aunt Dahlia seem a bit denser than you'd expect in a couple of places (I know that's sayimg a lot when I say it about Bertie). In short, the situation is that Bertie is absolutely required by his Aunt Dahlia to come to her country mansion to assist her in keeping the patsy in a vital business deal happy. The only problem is that another guest there is a lady friend who has broken her engagement, and who now has her eye on Bertie as a replacement fiance. That would be bad enough, but her very muscular spurned fiance is also there and has sworn to break Bertie's spine in three four five places if he goes near her....

Not the best Jeeves book, but very acceptable. Three and a half stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Trophywife007 said:


> I always enjoy reading your reviews! Count me in again for this year.


Glad to see you back, TrophyWife!


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## DK Mok (Jan 3, 2015)

The Hooded Claw said:


> But the stories are often fascinating, and Carrie's delivery is straight-shooting and matter-of-fact. Her honesty about her problems is refreshing in an age when nobody seems to take responsibility for their actions anymore.


I enjoyed your review of Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher. Her character in Star Wars is such an icon, but I've only heard bits and pieces about Fisher herself. This book sounds like it does a good job of humanising the person behind the idealised princess.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

. 

A Colored Man's Reminescences of James Madison, by Paul Jennings

A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons, by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor

I have a project of reading one book about each of the US presidents. I had thought the "colored man's reminiscence" Book would handle this for James Madison, but it ends up that this book is only a couple of dozen pages long. It is an article that was taken down and published in a magazine when Jennings was an old man about the time of the Civil War. I found it fascinating even though it was too short. I was willing to bet someone had written more about Paul Jennings, and I found the slave in the White House book.

There are limitations when you're writing about a black person at the dawn of the 1800s. They tended not to be terribly literate, and not to be the type of person who left a lot of traces in other records. Fortunately for this book, the Madisons were meticulous recordkeepers and letter savers, and many of the people who dealt with them also memorialized their experiences. So author Taylor put together a fairly lengthy book, even though it is mostly about the parts of Paul's life where he was interacting with James and Dolley Madison.

Paul must have been exceptional, as he was chosen from about 100 of Madison slaves to leave Madisons Virginia plantation and join the household staff of the President's mansion (it was not yet known as the White House). He was a youngster only about 10 years old when this happened. Somewhere Paul had learned to read and write, probably by standing by and listening in as James Madison's stepson was tutored.

The book begins by giving a lot of background on James and Dolly Madison and their families, especially on Madison's relationship to the plantation and his family's relationship with their slaves. This was a rocky background, as James's grandfather was reportedly murdered by being poisoned by two of his slaves. The book suggests this probably happened, I wonder if it was something like accidental food poisoning in the age before refrigeration. But undoubtedly James believed it. You learn a lot about the troubles and worries of slaves in the book, whenever a slave master died it was a time of great tension for "his people." In executing the will and settling debts it was quite common for them to be given to other family members in the will of the deceased, or to be sold to pay debts. In fact this became quite a problem for Paul later as James and Dolly became old.

Dolly also had a background with a turbulent relationship with slavery. Her father had been a prosperous plantation owner, but had converted to become a Quaker, sold his slaves, and moved to Philadelphia to become a merchant. He promptly went bankrupt in the new trade, impoverishing himself. Undoubtedly this made Dolley reluctant to keep promises made about freeing slaves after her husband died, and had a great effect on Paul's life. The whole experience certainly affected Dolley's feelings about being a Quaker. When she married James, who is not a Quaker she was immediately read out of the Quaker faith. It appears that this adopted faith had never taken hold on her; she was a fashion plate and loved jewelry, and apparently even used snuff. And of course she was the wife of a major slaveowner.

Too many interesting details in Paul's memoir and in the book to cover even a fraction of them here. Paul seems to have kept his ears open and learned a lot while standing by waiting to serve and listening to the conversations that were supposedly above his head. There are a lot of different accounts of him working the system to try and get something he wanted, such as living near his family. Dolly did not keep a promise James had made to freel Jennings, but Jennings eventually bought his freedom with the help of the famous Daniel Webster. He also was able to free his family. Understandably no records were kept but it appears likely that now-free Paul had a hand in the voyage of the Pearl, the biggest escape attempt by the Underground Railroad. I had never heard of this till now, but was interested enough to pick up a book on the subject for my TBR stack.

Jennings held other jobs as a free man, including spending time working in the White House during the Polk presidency. As Dolly aged she got into deeper and deeper financial problems, and sold some of the slaves that remained her property into cruel and unpleasant circumstances, something that she had pledged not to do in more prosperous times. In one case, she sent a female slave on what was supposed to be an errand but was actually to an appointment with a purchaser who would forcibly take her to the deep South. In this particular case the woman who was to be sold got wind of it and made a run for it! Despite this, Jennings kept in touch with Dolly after she was widowed and claims to have occasionally given her money when she was broke. Jennings eventually had a job as a free man in the US pension office where he made $400 per year salary. The building where he worked is now the National Portrait Gallery, and I have actually been there!

Jennings saved enough from his work to buy a house for himself and his kids, which must have been immensely satisfying. Most of his children had reasonably successful lives, but one daughter seems to have been mentally unsound. She had to be looked after. Paul provided for an allowance to take care of her in his will, but she had a falling out with the rest of her family and eventually died young. Fortunately this was after her father passed away.

I have not joined the trend of reading the Twelve Years a Slave book, so this was my first book-length venture into reading about slavery. I found this book fascinating, and highly recommend it for anyone with an interest. Five stars from me.

I learned something unexpected from the book, that Dolly Madison lived long enough to be photographed in her old age. I was intrigued by this, because photographs just make people more real than paintings:


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Superfoods for Dummies, by Brent Agin

This is a "pocket guide" Dummies book, much shorter than a full-length book, but only costing ninety-nine cents. The book covers the so-called superfoods such as blueberries, spinach etc. The book reminded me of a really good website, with lots of concise information on each food. It is just the facts ma'am, and there is no effort to be entertaining or interesting. A good reference book on the subject if that's what you want. I give it a very solid three and a half stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond, Robert F. Curtis

This book was a Kindle deal of the day a couple of weeks ago, and I snatched it up at a low price. As expected it is a recounting of war stories from a career helicopter pilot. Note that in the military a "war story" does not necessarily mean that it happened in combat or during war. This fellow got around, he began as a helicopter pilot flying for the U.S. Army in Vietnam, spent time in the Kentucky National Guard, then went back on active duty as a Marine helicopter pilot and spent some of his Marine time flying from Royal Navy ships in an exchange program.

Lots of fascinating stories here. The scariest ones are from his time in Vietnam, as you'd expect. He explains safety features of some army helicopters, such as a practice of landing the helicopters with the control set so that the helicopter will go up if the pilot releases the stick. This gives his copilot a fraction of a second to take control if the pilot is shot during landing! Another reassuring feature is two levers on the back of the pilot seat that make the seat flip back so that the dead or injured pilot can be removed from the seat during flight! And in fact the author does describe being shot down and receiving minor injuries. The author points out that 43% of the helicopters deployed to Vietnam were destroyed and that almost 10% of the names on the Vietnam Memorial wall are helicopter pilots or crew. Some of the stories are just absurd, notably landing his army helicopter at the home of the mother of one of his crew members, so the crewmember could borrow some money, or standing guard on the State emergency command center during a major tornado, on a passageway which also contained the only women's restroom for three floors.

Numerous scary, funny, or interesting stories well-told. One black mark is that there are a fair number of conversion errors in the Kindle version. In particular, whenever there is a number in italics, the number is converted to gibberish. Since the author often puts sidebars in italics this is annoying. I still give the book four and a half stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Plane That Wasn't There: Why We Haven't Found Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (Kindle Single), by Jeff Wise

This is a Kindle Single, the first one of those that I have bought. The blurb explains that this is the definitive investigation of the Malaysian airliner disappearance about a year ago. We are promised a startling new hypothesis that explains things. As a Kindle single this is short, 95 pages long.

The book begins with a description of the facts that are known about the disappearance. Then there is a lengthy discussion of the two ways in which the plane was supposedly able to be tracked after that it gone into radio silence. How this was done as described in more detail than I recall seeing when this was in the news.

What I was interested in especially was the new hypothesis. And indeed he does have a suggestion with a suspect that I have not heard proposed elsewhere. The method used is one I actually had seen discussed in general, though he goes into more detail. In short, the author suggests that


Spoiler



the Russians did it.


 He even suggests one particular passenger as the ringleader of the effort, because of skills supposedly possessed by that passenger. Of course other than the destination of the plane, he has no evidence for this. As for the motive, he has a suggestion, which I did not find convincing at all. He even suggests a reason for the specific timing, which again I find unconvincing. I don't think there was enough reaction time from his proposed triggering event to the actual taking of the airplane. He goes further to speculate that another incident is related, but has little evidence for this.

A weakness is that there is little discussion of possible alternative explanations, such as problems from the batteries in the cargo. But there is a lot of information here, as payoff for a short investment of reading time and a modest price.

I am satisfied, but not highly impressed. There is a good explanation of some of the technical things about tracking the plane, but his hypothesis for the method and motive was completely unconvincing for me. I give it three and a half stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber (link is to paper version)

I actually read this in an omnibus Kindle collection of Thurber here:



In addition to Hard Times, I read a couple of other stories and reviewed a bunch of Thurber drawings that were also in the collection. I've still only read less than a quarter of the collection.

I first read this book when I was in the ninth or 10th grade. I really liked it at the time. It is a collection of humorous stories about things that supposedly happened in Thurber's youth, while he was still living with his parents. Some of them are classics, I first learned of the book when I read one of these as an assignment in school. The stories are illustrated with simple but clever drawings.

That old magic really isn't there on rereading. I enjoyed the stories, but seldom laughed out loud. As you'd expect in a collection of stories, some are more entertaining than others. Overall I give the book three and a half stars. Most of the additional materials, from a collection called the Owl in the Attic, are okay but not great. I did enjoy Mr. Monroe Holds the Fort, which was new to me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business, by David Mamet

Bambi vs. Godzilla is a famous very short film made decades ago. The animation technique is crude, but the film is justifiably a classic. If you have not seen it, or just want to refresh your memory, pay attention to the credits while you check out this on YouTube:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8s3UogfAGg0

The book title is not so much a reference to the actual film, as to the concept of a beautiful, naive, innocent, and weak creature against a powerful, horrible monster with no aesthetic sense.

I am going to begin by including some quotes from the book:

My father was a negotiator. He opined that to conserve good feelings at the bargaining table, one should, if possible, express a negative concept in a positive form: "not meaningful" rather than "meaningless." I agree and will, therefore, now refer to contemporary movie executives as running around "like chickens without their heads cut on."

It was at this same lunch that he told me how he shot the vast crowd scene in Exodus. The scene is the proclamation, in Independence Square in Jerusalem, of the state of Israel. Preminger required a packed square, some ten thousand extras. He could not pay for them. "What did you do?" I asked. "I charged them," he said. He papered the town with posters: BE IN A MOVIE, TEN SHEKELS. That's what I call a producer.

Now, The Godfather is, of course, the better film_ (than The Exodus)._ Even its theme song is (marginally but nonetheless) better than that of Exodus, and to retire the trophy, the last time the Jews and the Italians clashed (Masada, 73 CE), the Italians won that, too.

The artist is, in effect, a sort of gangster. He hitches up his trousers and goes into the guarded bank of the unconscious in an attempt to steal the gold of inspiration. The producer is like the getaway driver who sells the getaway car and waits outside the bank grinning about what a great deal he's made.

Many movie stars, directors, and producers exhibit the manners, literally, of a two-year-old--a being imagining itself to have vast power, and ignorant of responsibility, enraged by the least human noncompliance as with the broken top that refuses to spin.

Just as the young and sexually vulnerable present themselves in these western precincts as victims, so the mantra of the neophyte screenwriter is: I am young and stupid. Please abuse me.

Let's examine a perfect movie: The Lady Eve, written and directed by Preston Sturges. His work is, to me, irrefutable proof of an afterlife, for it is impossible to make films that sweet and not go to heaven.

To write a successful scene, one must stringently apply and stringently answer the following three questions: Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now? That's it.

A couple of guys in a coffee shop set out to write a gag; a couple of guys with a camera set out to film a gag; a couple of guys in an editing room set out to make sense of the trash that's been dumped on their desks. That's moviemaking in its entirety--anything else is just "the suits." Through it all the clock is ticking: so many days and they take away the camera, so many days and the studio needs to release the print.

I got notes over the phone on my first screenplay from Samson Raphaelson, who wrote the first talkie. I once had a drink with Dorothy Gish, who starred for D. W. Griffith; I made a film with Don Ameche, who was the world's biggest star in the early talkie era; I played poker for years with Eddie Bracken; the gaffer on the last film I shot is the grandson of the gaffer on Intolerance. We find ourselves, still, that close to the beginning of the first new art since cave painting.

British war films--In Which We Serve, The Cruel Sea, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, indeed, Cy Endfield's magnificent Zulu--stress unity rather than, as in American films, a confected competition between comrades under arms. Most American World War II films feature interunit antagonisms: the drill instructor vs. the recruit (Sands of Iwo Jima), the commander vs. the passed-over subordinate (Run Silent, Run Deep), the boss vs. the flyers (Twelve O'Clock High), two guys battling for the same girl (Bombardier).

Manners in Hollywood, in short, stink on ice. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issues, each year, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Jean Hersholt was a character actor in the thirties and forties, and one may note that he is remembered only as a nonentity and a nice guy, and one may draw his own conclusions.

Back to Claw. The book is a series of essays that appear to have been written independently. They are grouped together by theme, don't necessarily flow together, and some of them overlap covering the same concepts. Some of them actually are discussions of how to write or make good movies , some of them are discussions of various types of movies, some of them are gripes about the system very much like the book I recently reviewed about Hollywood. Mostly these gripe about how the suits ruin good movies, and how they take advantage of the weak and trusting, especially writers. For a brief period in mid-book, he veers into politics. Fortunately this doesn't last long.

Sometimes Mamet gets into his personal opinions about movies and actors. His favorite movie is a British epic called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (not kidding!). He also highly recommends the comedies of a director named Preston Sturges. I never heard of Sturges, though I've heard of some of his movies. I'm going to check them out! He likes two of my favorites, a movie called GalaxyQuest, and that classic guy favorite Zulu.

The book is worth reading if movies interest you. I suspect writers would benefit from some of it, even if they don't desire to write for the screen. If they did desire to write for the screen, I suspect reading this book and reading the "what I wish I knew" book would cure them of the urge. I recommend Bambi vs. Godzillafor those people, and give it a solid four stars, very close to four and a half.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Yes, another of the Kirov series of books. This one is a standalone book into between two trilogies. In the very last book of the last trilogy, I had begun to fatigue from some of the writing, editing errors, and lack of characterization in the book. I feared the quality of the series might be declining, but fortunately I was reassured by this book. There are still more editing errors than there should be but not the large number in the previous book. The tone of the series has changed again, at least in this book. Time traveling played a major role throughout the series for a while, but with the exclusion of a few scenes, this book could just be a straight alternate history story of a somewhat different World War II. Kirov is offstage, or at least is a spectator and not a major actor in most of the book. Admittedly, the end of the book implies this is going to change. This book changes the scene of action to the Mediterranean, and almost the entire book is set there. The other threads that have been in the last trilogy were mostly ignored. I give it four stars . But you should start back at the beginning of the series if you decide you want to jump into this.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Alex Prud'homme

This is one of a series of books that are supposed to present both sides of various controversial subjects. Hydrofracking, better known as Fracking is certainly a controversial subject! The book does appear to me to be balanced. The author admits that he has feelings both ways in the debate. He doesn't present a conclusive answer or endorse either side. The book is short and readable, and I actually recommend it if you want a summary of the subject.

Lots of great tidbits in the book, here are a few:

Fracking is not new, the first attempt to Frack a well was in 1947, and a patent for the process was issued in 1949. But it's only in the past few years that the practices become widespread, and even now, it is mostly only used in United States.

Demand for coal is plummeting in the United States, and this far proceeded the recent greenhouse gas debate. The lower price of natural gas due to Fracking caused the share of US power generated by natural gas to nearly double between 2000 and 2012. Most of this increase was taken away from coal.

Barrels of oil are not the classic 55 gallon drum, but are 42 gallons capacity. This came from whiskey distillers who use a 40 gallon barrel. When oil drillers adopted these barrels, they added 2 gallons for spillage. Refining oil into different products actually increases the volume. A 42 gallon barrel of crude oil typically produces 45 gallons of products, 19 of which will be gasoline.

One of the biggest environmental impacts of franking is water use. A typical well uses from 1,000,000 to 4,000,000 gallons of water. For comparison, the book reports that 50,000 people will use 5,000,000 gallons of water in one day. Not only is a lot of water used, much of it flows back to the surface and has to be disposed of in some way. Injection wells for this type of waste are sometimes blamed for the earthquakes that seem more common in some states now.

Recommended for people who want to book of this type. I give it a very solid three and a half stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Enigmas of Easter Island, by John Flenley and Paul Hahn

You guessed it, I am reading this in preparation for my upcoming trip to South America. The title is accurate, this is an in-depth book about every aspect of Easter Island. I say it straddled the line between being an academic book and a popular one. Everything is footnoted, and the writing style is rather dry. I found myself complaining in my head while I was reading that this was not a terribly accessible book, but on the other hand I finished a lengthy book in one day. So the good information kept me going. An advantage of the straightforward style is that you get a lot of information without a lot of unnecessary exposition. Here is a near-random sample of the text, and this is far from the worst: "Certain species, for example, are endemic and, since they have no extra-island distribution, they must presumably be native."

Positively tons of tidbits, enough to equal the weight of one of the famous statues that are drawing me to the island. There is coverage of a parade of historical explorers, and despite the mysterious statues, some visitors stayed only briefly. The Dutch were ashore for only a day, while the French, under the famous La Perouse, only stayed for 10 hours. Makes my four-day visit seem lengthy! One of the first serious researchers, an English lady named Katherine Scoresby who spent 17 months on the island during the First World War, was so determined to learn about Island legends from the surviving aged Islanders, that she even visited the Island's leper colony. I have her book, alas only available in paper, and hope to read it before I leave.

The Island remains a volcanic one where the cone is not extinct, but merely dormant. So it could erupt at any time, though there is no recorded activity during the 1000+ years of human residence on the island. On the other hand, there have been tidal waves, including one that buried 15 statues under rubble. The island is far enough south that the climate is on the cool side. Too cool for reef building corals to live, so there is no coral reef. The extreme isolation of the island means that it has very limited native flora for an island of its size. No other island of comparable size and geography has such a poor native flora.

I knew dimly that Thor Herehydral's famous Kon-Tiki theory that the Easter Islanders may have come from South America was no longer accepted, but didn't know how thoroughly discredited it was. Thor cheated on one important part of his voyage. Another adventurer's attempt to repeat Thor's trip without cheating led to him going from South America north to Panama instead of East to Easter Island! One harsh critic wrote that "in a lifetime of nutty theorizing, Herehydral's single success was his proof, in Kon-tiki, that six middle-class Scandinavians could successfully crash-land a raft on a coral atoll in the middle of nowhere."

A palynologist is a scientist who studies ancient pollen grains. Actually very important for identifying the age of stuff you have dug up from the ground, and learning what the plant life was like when it was buried.

The Polynesian settlers definitely brought an edible rat species with them to the island. This may have been the cause of their civilization's collapse centuries later, however. The rats ate the seeds of the tree that was critical to the island culture.

There are 887 of the famous statues that have officially been inventoried. Contrary to the impression I had, they are not identical or even close. Statues that were successfully erected range from 6 feet to 33 feet high. The average size is about 13 feet high, weighing 12 1/2 tons. One mysterious statue which was never completed and erected is 65 feet long and weighs approximately 270 tons. It is left unfinished in the quarry, and seems far beyond the power of the Islanders to have moved and erected.

One frustration about the island is that Captain Cook visited, but stayed only briefly. If he had stayed longer, things would probably not be so mysterious. He was early enough and a thorough enough investigator that he surely would've learned and recorded what the Islanders said about the history of the statues before the passage of time and the activities of outsiders blurred and destroyed the collective memory of the inhabitants. The statue building cult seems to have still been going in 1722, but to have stopped before Cook visited in 1774. Whatever happened was violent and hostile to statue building, the statues were toppled and many of them were deliberately broken. Most were also deliberately defaced. The Golden age of statue building appears to have started in the 1100s and the peak was in the 1400s.

A lot a fascinating information, but only for the very determined. Not an easy read. I give it a extremely solid three and a half stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Flying Blind, by Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins is one of my favorite authors. From his many works, the Nate Heller series is my favorite series. I've been neglecting Nate for the last year or so, and intend to correct that. These are historical detective mysteries. The protagonist is a private investigator based in Chicago who started as a Chicago cop in the very early 1930s but became a private investigator. From his early roots involving Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, and the like, he moved on to be involved in almost every important mystery or oddity of the period from the 1930s to the Early 1960s. Collins has inserted his detective into mysteries such as the Roswell aliens, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the final book deals with the assassination of President Kennedy. This book is about the the disappearance. of Amelia Earhart. Heller is hired by Earhart's publisher/promoter husband to investigate threats to his wife, as well as do another job. You would guess that this means that Amelia and her navigator Fred Noonan did not quietly drown after ditching in the Pacific, and you'd be right!

As always the historical research for this book is extensive. Something interesting I had not known is that Amelia could only communicate in flight with her navigator by a pulley arrangement with a clothes pin attached. They had to write notes and passed them to each other by the line. In the usual addendum written by Collins describing good sources of information, I identified an autobiography of a flyer from the period that sounds really interesting, which I have ordered. Something else that interested me was that Amelia's husband was GP Putnam, who gave his name to a publishing house that we all recognize even today!

An excellent book, as is usual from this author. Solidly four stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The New Rules of Lifting For Life: An All-New Muscle-Building, Fat-Blasting Plan for Men and Women Who Want to Ace Their Midlife Exams, by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove

These authors seem to come out with a new weightlifting book every couple of years that has a slightly different emphasis. This one, focusing on middle-aged people who want to lose or at least control weight, sounded promising when I wanted to read something else on the subject. For a project (such as fitness) where I'm trying to keep my enthusiasm up, reading something new helps give me new ideas and keep me motivated. Or at least that's my theory! I was a little bit nervous by some of the reviews that suggested that this book was a bit hard core, and especially by one that suggested some of the exercises couldn't be done outside of a gym, since I have access to two rather limited facilities without high-class equipment. I decided to go for the book.

Initially, I was a bit put off. These guys are pretty hard-core if you follow their program all the way. The meat of their plan is a set of nine categories of exercises, eight that focus on broad regions of the body, and one that focuses on making different parts of the body work together in exercise. For each of these nine categories, they have five levels of effort. The idea is that you start doing level one, and when you have mastered it, move up to level two and so on to level five. The different levels are not just doing more of the earlier exercises, but are completely different exercises. And there are a number of alternatives on most of the levels. Especially on the first level, they often have easier alternatives for those who cannot do level one at the start. This mass of exercises did intimidate me as rather hard-core! Most of the level five exercises scare the bejeezus out of me. I was also perturbed that they encourage you to go quickly on many of the exercises at higher levels. Especially for older people with less flexible and more brittle muscles and tendons this made me nervous.

On a more positive note, I was impressed by the variety of alternatives they offer. And some of the "philosophy" that they describe made sense to me. Many exercise programs encourage you to do exercises that focus on one particular muscle. A biceps curl, resting your elbow on your inner thigh near the knee and lifting one dumbbell up-and-down while pivoting on your elbow is an example. As the name implies, this has a laser like focus on your bicep. Since the biceps are potentially very visible and obvious and flashy, the barbell boys who are into the body beautiful love these! Actually, I find them rather satisfying myself. In this Book, the authors point out some disadvantages to this one-muscle-group at a time approach. One is that if you want to do an exercise to focus on every muscle you'd like to develop, and do a sufficient number of repetitions of the exercise, you'll spend a lot of time exercising. Another is that in real life the muscles have to work together to do the tasks we want to do. It is seldom that you will just need to use your biceps for a task. This book reminds us of what I have read elsewhere, that your nervous system does need to learn to control all your muscles together through practice, and this is as important as building up the muscles themselves. So these authors recommend that we try to find exercises that work a number of muscle groups together. This will be more efficient in time and will probably get better results at doing actual tasks in the real world. I found this a convincing argument.

The book makes an interesting argument that most people doing resistance training choose weights that are well below what they can and should be using to get the most benefit. In my own experience, I've been finding that when I try timidly to increase the weight I'm using, I usually find myself quite capable of handling more. I thought that was because I was making progress, perhaps it is because I have been being too conservative in choosing less challenging weights!

Some interesting statistics from the New England Journal of Medicine: subjects who regularly eat potato chips gained 1.69 pounds on average over a four-year period compared with otherwise similar people who didn't eat potato chips. Sugar-sweetened drinks were worth a one pound gain. Unprocessed red meat was worth .95 pounds gain in four years. On the other hand, eating yogurt tended to reduce weight by 0.82 pounds over four years compared with otherwise similar people who avoided fermented milk, and nuts cause a 0.57 pound loss over four years. The book suggests that many of the habits we associate with successful weight management may work not because they truly make us lose weight, but because they help keep us mindful of what we are trying to do. This helps keep us "on the wagon."

After describing their extensive exercise program there are other chapters that focus on some particular issues rather than the exercises. There is considerable discussion of diet and of the problems of organized diets when you follow them for a long period of time. If you read my previous threads, I posted a link to a TED talk by Sandra Aamodt, a neurologist who talked about why diets generally do not work. This book does not cite her, but has a discussion that is similar to hers ideas. Incidentally, one of the things I really liked about the book is that the author is very careful about giving citations for peer-reviewed research for most of his statements where that is appropriate. The diet discussion didn't tell me anything cause me to change what I'm doing, but it gave me some food for thought to chew on. And made me think about Aamodt's work again. Find the old thread or Google Sandra Aamodt TED if you want to hear or rehear her ideas. I doubt "Aamodt" is used much on KB, so that should be easy to find.

The authors suggest that you really need to follow their program completely. I'm not going to do that, they want me to go further with extreme stuff than I am willing to go. But I still found the variety of exercises and the programs worthwhile. I'm looking for ways to change what I do and find new exercises for variety and to work my body in different ways, and there are an awful lot of good ones here.

I found the book valuable, even though I'm not using the program fully. Four stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Machu Picchu Guide: Rediscovering the Mystery of the Incan Land, by Elisabeth Sanz

I picked this book up when it was free recently. The price is the best thing about it. There are no illustrations past the lovely cover illustration, editing is awful, and the level of information is about the same as you can get by casually scanning websites. I don't recommend it for any purpose. If you were actually visiting this place, the expense and effort involved warrant you paying a few bucks and getting a much better guidebook than this. If you are not visiting the place you won't find this book interesting or useful. One star from me, and that's not a rating I give very often (I've given it twice this year, but don't ever remember giving it in the three previous years I have done these threads).


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Account of the Fables and Rites of the Incas, by Cristobal de Molina

This book is over 450 years old! It was written by a Spanish priest in newly-conquered Peru. He interviewed many of the locals about their legends and especially about the ceremonies they had performed before their old ways were repressed in favor of Catholicism. This is not the ideal way to conduct anthropology! de Molina was hardly an unbiased observer, and I have no doubt that his informants were terrified that he would be displeased by what they said. But the Indians could not write, at least not in any form that would've come down to us and that we could read, so this is the best that we are going to get. This translation begins with an account of what is known of the author's life, and a few notes on The translation. This was fairly interesting. There are a couple of accounts of the creation of the world from the Inca view which are fairly interesting. Unfortunately, we then get a lengthy list of accounts of different ceremonies that are dry as dust to read. Not interesting and or enlightening at all. I was puzzled because I was only about halfway through the book, but that meter reported that I was minutes away from finishing it. There are extensive end notes, including a glossary that I wish I had been aware of at the start. The book does have some very nice black-and-white illustrations, both of old manuscripts illustrating some of the ceremonies, and some photos of some of the places and objects mentioned, most of which were taken in the early 20th century.

Not really a useful book for my efforts to prepare for my trip to South America next month. On the other hand this is what was written down several hundred years ago, I can't really criticize the translator or publisher. I give it three stars out of five, and it is not recommended for anyone who does not have a deep scholarly interest in Incan customs.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The 30-Day Heart Tune-Up: A Breakthrough Medical Plan to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition], by Steven Masley (Author), Allan Robertson (Narrator)

I have been listening to this Audible audiobook on and off for a while, and I am about two thirds through. I've concluded I'm not going to go back and finish it so I will cover it here now. This book was heavily hyped, so I've been aware of it for a while. I saw the last few minutes of a program the author did on PBS, and although things weren't spectacular, I was interested enough to look into the book. I found the Kindle book was rather expensive but that at the time I was looking the Audible version was available for only a few bucks. Naturally I paid for the audiobook and listened to it while exercising and doing other things. My suspicions were confirmed: listening and not having something you can look at available is not the best way to absorb a nonfiction book where you intend to use the material! In some cases there were tables I didn't have access to, and there were supposedly recipes that I didn't get to. I cannot imagine how they covered those in an audiobook!

I've seen most of this material in different forms from different providers over the last year or two, and I found this a very acceptable version, though not exceptional either. I found one thing to take serious issue with. The author sings the praises of a test of your arteries called the IMT. He says that this is very important and useful. Checking on the Internet, I find that peer-reviewed medical studies don't support him in this. The studies I found said that IMT was perfectly acceptable, but did not give useful additional information that wasn't given by less-expensive studies. In other words it costs more, but doesn't really benefit the patient. I don't necessarily think that the author is being dishonest or being "naughty" here. I just think he is convinced of something that most doctors do not buy into. Of course it is very possible that he is right and they are wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it.

If you want to take steps to improve your health, and want a one book summary introduction to the subject, this appears to be a good one. On the other hand I don't find it exceptional. I do recommend that you get a paper or Kindle copy rather than the Audible version. I give it a very comfortable three stars, but nothing higher.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

The Hooded Claw said:


> Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business, by David Mamet


I'll have to read this one. I'd always heard that Hollywood destroyed great scripts all the time, but I hadn't seen a concrete example of the "before and after" of the process until I read this piece by Jonathan Last in _The Weekly Standard _a few years ago:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/595hsjaq.asp?page=3

It's a brutal story. My two favourite examples of script-tampering that must be obvious to anyone who watches the movies are _AI_ (Spielberg tacked on the ridiculous beginning and even more awful ending) and _The Last Samurai_. You can tell that there was a great script beneath _Last Samurai_, because it's a great story. But you can also tell that casting Tom Cruise as Captain Nathan Algren required beefing up the character's role. Instead of being an observer, Cruise's character becomes a major participant in the drama, wrecking what would surely have been a classic otherwise. I'll never forgive Cruise for this.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island, by Jo Anne van Tillburg, PhD

Katherine Routledge was the leader of the first "scientific" expedition to study Easter Island. She and her husband led a private expedition independent of universities or government, just as World War I was breaking out. They did excavation and sample gathering as you'd expect, but Routledge was especially interested in oral records as reported by the oldest surviving islanders. She went to great lengths to meet these people and record what they said, even visiting residents in a leper colony! Unfortunately, many of the reports she received contradicted each other, but her reports are the best we have for some of this stuff. Their time on the island wasn't involved only in archaeology and anthropology, however. Everything seem to happen at once. The Islanders, who had long been exploited by an outside company, chose the time Routledge was there to revolt against being exploited. Several weeks were spent with members of their expedition standing guard with guns. And World War I was breaking out. Despite the remoteness of the Easter Island the war came to them there, when the German fleet visited! As English civilians, their position was awkward. And there seems to have been a German spy on the island most or all of the time they were there.

The book isn't just about her expedition to Easter Island however. It is a complete biography, running from childhood to her death. Routledge was an interesting and tragic character. She was born to wealth and privilege as a member of a rich Quaker family. Unfortunately because of intermarriage among a few like-minded families, there were some skeletons in the family gene pool, and some of them seemed to affect her. Her brother was physically abusive all his life, and he was committed permanently to a mental institution a few years after he married when he beat his wife savagely. Katherine believed throughout her life that she was hearing voices, influenced no doubt by some of the beliefs in her family's version of the Quaker religion. She angered her family by insisting on attending college at Oxford, one of the earliest women to do so. She did not marry until reaching 40, and she seems to have done so then mostly as a convenience because it made the adventures she aspired to easier. Before going to Easter Island, she and her husband visited her husband's farm in British East Africa. A few years after returning from Easter Island, her mental condition deteriorated, and her later years were marked by her throwing her husband out and barricading herself in a mansion, leading to her being institutionalized at the end of her life. A very sad ending but she certainly had an exciting life overall.

I was caught up in the book, reading it in one long evening. If my description interests you, I predict you'll like the book. I give it four stars. Sadly, it isn't available on Kindle. Paper only.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Body Language for Dummies, by Elizabeth Kuhnke

I have been reading on this book for some time. I started it with considerable enthusiasm expecting it to be interesting. The topic is an interesting one, and I've had good experiences with the Dummies books. This one just did not come through, I did not find it interesting to read. I cannot specifically criticize the style, but somehow it does not engage me. While I was reading this book, I had cause to pull out another Dummies book on nutrition just to look up something specific. I got interested and actually read several chapters in the nutrition book. I generally think of body language as a much more interesting topic that nutrition, but I never had a similar experience of getting absorbed with this book. I ended up reading it a chapter at a time with increasingly longer gaps in between sessions of reading. I'm about two thirds of the way through the book, and have decided to just abandon it.

There are a few interesting tidbits in the book. One that I found interesting is that nodding while another person is talking encourages them to deliver more information. Supposedly experienced interviewers will nod as their interviewee is speaking and get three times as much information, or even more, this way.

There are a lot of illustrations, and some pretty good photographs, illustrating various stances, ways of holding my head, and other body actions that may convey information. On the other hand I haven't been inspired to really use this in the real world yet.

Clearly, I was disappointed with the book. There is a lot of good information here but the presentation just did not work for me. I will give the book two and a half stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

WHDean said:


> ) and _The Last Samurai_. You can tell that there was a great script beneath _Last Samurai_, because it's a great story. But you can also tell that casting Tom Cruise as Captain Nathan Algren required beefing up the character's role. Instead of being an observer, Cruise's character becomes a major participant in the drama, wrecking what would surely have been a classic otherwise. I'll never forgive Cruise for this.


If you like Asian epics, this may interest you. Available for free streaming if you have Amazon Prime. I have not seen it yet, but it is well spoken of:


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Prior-Convictions-Willa-Jansson-Book/dp/0345374452/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1428107647&sr=1-7&keywords=Lia+matera

Prior Convictions, by Lia Matera

This is another book in the series that contained Star Witness which I really liked. As you recall I quit another book in the series, Last Chants, only 7% into the book. This was my third try at the series, and I made it to 27% before quitting. At least I wasn't disgusted as I was with Last Chants. I just was not engaged or interested, and it seemed like a bunch of unrelated stuff was happening. Unlike Star Witness I did not feel any sympathy or empathy with the protagonist. This book is heavily caught up in angst and the aftereffects of protests against the Vietnam War, large corporations, and other relics of the 60s and early 70s. I am pretty sure that contributed to my disinterest in the book.

I give it one and a half stars.

I have this book on Kindle, and I used to have it in my reading bar. But it is no longer available on Kindle. Paper copies are still available from Amazon, but for some reason I can't get the paper version to appear in the link maker. So you'll have to click on the URL above if you want to look at the book.

Not a very positive review but the good thing about it is that I am now caught up reporting on my reading! Woo hoo!


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## anguabell (Jan 9, 2011)

The Hooded Claw said:


> If you like Asian epics, this may interest you. Available for free streaming if you have Amazon Prime. I have not seen it yet, but it is well spoken of:


Jumping in to add my enthusiastic support to that recommendation, as this is one of my favorite movies of all times. Absolutely gorgeous, and the streaming doesn't do it justice! By the way, the script is actually based on a great book, or I should say on a few chapters of a book "great" in more than one sense, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.



After over a year, I barely got to chapter 100 out of 120. I bet The Hooded Claw would be done with it in a week


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Easter Island: The Essential Guide, by Kay Kenady Sanger

I purchased this book in paper form a couple of years ago, and see that it is now out of print. Copies are available from third-party vendors on Amazon at outrageous prices only. This is a pity as the book has seven five-star ratings out of seven, and about half of them are verified purchases. And I agree that the book seems excellent. The book will not show up in the link maker, but here is the URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Easter-Island-Essential-SANGER-Kenady/dp/1880636298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1428239673&sr=8-1&keywords=Easter+island+essential

Sadly, at the price it is available from Amazon, I don't recommend it even though it is a very good book! It is interesting I like this book much better than the "Companion to Easter Island" I reviewed here recently, even though both books have similar ratings and the Companion book has successfully migrated to Kindle, while this book didn't!

This book has the expected guides to what you will see on different routes out of the one town on Easter Island, as well as some specific information about restaurants and hotels, and island vocabulary. There is a list of suggested reading in the back that looks good. The author of this book apparently is an archaeologist who has conducted fieldwork on Easter Island, and claims to have been the president of the Easter Island Foundation, which is encouraging (skeptic that I am, I looked on the Internet and found information to support this!)

There is good specific information on practicalities such as ATMs, shopping, specific recreational activities on the island, highlights of the island museum, and restaurants that I didn't find in the other book. Of course there's always the risk that this kind of information will become out of date, but that can't be helped. There is Very specific information on a few of the more important statues on the island. I'm going to call this book four and a half stars for now. Unless I find a nasty surprise when I take this book with me to the island, I will recommend this for those planning a visit.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

I thought I would bring this to everyone's attention while I was thinking of it. I have purchased it on prime video, and it is loaded on my fire to watch on the airplane. I may watch it on the big screen tonight or tomorrow night, before I leave. It's a historical story set and filmed on Easter Island. I'm told that is not terribly accurate historically, but that the footage of Easter Island is fantastic. The producer was, of all people, Kevin Costner.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

The Hooded Claw said:


> If you like Asian epics, this may interest you. Available for free streaming if you have Amazon Prime. I have not seen it yet, but it is well spoken of:


Thanks for the recommendation, though Asian epics tend to be a little too "theatrical" for my tastes. The big exception would be _Mongol_ (200, directed by Sergei Bodrov. I'd call that a great movie.

On the South American history front, I can partly recommend Bernal Díaz del Castillo's _True History of the Conquest of New Spain_, which is the author's memoire of fighting beside Cortés during the conquest of the Aztecs. I only say "partly" because I've only read parts of the book.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

WHDean said:


> Thanks for the recommendation, though Asian epics tend to be a little too "theatrical" for my tastes. The big exception would be _Mongol_ (200, directed by Sergei Bodrov. I'd call that a great movie.
> 
> On the South American history front, I can partly recommend Bernal Diaz del Castillo's _True History of the Conquest of New Spain_, which is the author's memoire of fighting beside Cortes during the conquest of the Aztecs. I only say "partly" because I've only read parts of the book.


I have read Bernal Diaz, and I also recommend. Fascinating read. Cortes was a sneaky guy!


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## DK Mok (Jan 3, 2015)

anguabell said:


> Jumping in to add my enthusiastic support to that recommendation, as this is one of my favorite movies of all times.


I also really enjoyed Red Cliff. It's very long, but fascinating. I've been a fan of Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro since _Chungking Express_, and it's interesting to see John Woo tackling historical epics.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

I haven't seen Red Cliff yet, but people rave about it.

I am on vacation in Peru using horrible hotel wifi, so won't post much for awhile.


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## Joseph J Bailey (Jun 28, 2013)

Some great recommendations here, THC!

I've made sure _Red Cliff_ is on my Netflix queue and was excited to see it is available for streaming.

I have added _The New Rules of Lifting_ to my Wish List. I am always looking for unique exercise programs and this book may fit the bill.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

For those who are interested, I'm not doing much reading right now, but I am traveling in South America as mentioned earlier in this thread. I've been in Peru, am currently in Brazil, and will end the trip at Easter Island. I'm generally operating off of horrible hotel Wi-Fi, but am doing some posting at a thread and not quite Kindle , and have even posted a few pictures when the Wi-Fi gods smiled particularly benevolently. These can be found at this thread:

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,212720.0.html

I will be home in about a week and a half , and probably won't be posting about any books till then. Very little time to read on vacation, even on the plane!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

And I haven't posted about a book in over two months here! Sorry, I went to South America, then had two business trips shortly after I returned, and have a family member with some health problems now. So life is exciting. I'm still reading, and have a bunch of new books to review.

For anyone who did not find it and is interested, here is a link to a thread with photos from South America:

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,212720.0.html

And I'll be back with a book review or two to make a small dent in the backlog tonight.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Yes, I read the first two books in a series about a character called Captain Underpants! These were actually from a recommendation made by our own Delly_X in chat. When she mentioned him I said that I've never heard of Captain Underpants but based on the name I liked him already! As you have surely guessed, this is a series meant to lure young readers into books. It is a long-running series and looking at the date of the first ones, it is frightening to think the kids who cut their teeth on the original books are at Harvard and Yale now. They are fast inexpensive reads, heavily illustrated. The main two characters are George and Harold, and right off we are informed that they are usually very responsible. For instance when all the toilets back up in the teacher's lounge, they are usually responsible. When not pranking, The boys amuse themselves by drawing comic books of an imaginary character named Captain Underpants. Early on, the school principal, who is usually their nemesis, is accidentally hypnotized so that he occasionally turns into a real version of the imaginary Captain Underpants! The pattern for the series seems to be that some horrible event takes place such as the arrival of talking maneating toilets, and the boys, in conjunction with Captain Underpants, foil the peril of the day. Of course it looks like the boys are usually going to be very responsible again, I mean very responsible for accidentally unleashing the peril. But at least they try to fix their mistakes. I really liked the first of these, and give it four stars. The second one did not please me as much, I'm not sure if there was an actual decline in entertainment value, or if the novelty is just wearing off. The second one gets 3 1/2 stars. I have already purchased others in the series and will find out.

I am amused to find that this series is one of the most censored books in the United States. It draws a lot of attention primarily because the boys are not very respectful of authority. In some cases they have also been attacked for talking about unseemly topics, such as boogers. Of course, based on my experience, that is the sort of thing that will titillate the target audience, inspiring them to read these books, and hopefully move on to more literary ones. If the idea of these books amuses you, I predict you will like them, or at least not be inspired to seek to censor them.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

This was one of the last books I read to prepare for my South America trip. In short it is a revisionist summary of the various controversies about Easter Island. It is accessible and worth reading, but many of the ideas are not generally accepted, so it shouldn't be the only book you read on the subject. I got to talk extensively with a fairly well-known archaeologist specializing in Easter Island during my trip, and I was surprised how much controversy there is and how enthusiastic the debate over it gets!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

[/Uri]

the Kirov Series

Grand Alliance
Hammer of God
Crescendo of Doom

Yes, I am still reading the Kirov series of series of time travel alternate naval history military science fiction (I love that description!). These three books continue the series much as it has been. Most of the action has shifted to the Mediterranean, there are fewer naval battles, but in compensation, we have several battles between zeppelins! The inevitable has happened, and Kirov is no longer the only military unit from the future that finds itself in World War II. And Crescendo of Doom appropriately informs us that it is nothing so trivial as preventing World War III and the extinction of humanity that is at stake here. The existence of time itself is in question!

I am still enjoying the series, and as a group would give these a 3 1/2, almost 4 star rating. I probably go to four stars if the nagging problem of a higher level of editing errors than I can easily forgive didn't keep recurring. I'm going to use my monthly Prime borrow to keep reading (I had a temporary fright when I misunderstood something and thought these had been removed from Prime).


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Complete Colonel Blimp, by David Low

A few months ago I reviewed a collection of World War II cartoons in this thread. A couple of cartoons in the book featured the character Colonel Blimp, who I had heard about over the years, but Knew little about. This book collects all of the original cartoons, there are over 200 spread over several decades. But the heart of the book is actually a series of essays, some written by author of the cartoons and some by other people. Much of it is criticism or praise for the character of Colonel Blimp. The creator insists that the cartoons are not intended as an attack on the British upper-class and leadership, but that Blimp represents stupidity in every guise. There is also some discussion of the movie "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which had Blimp as a quite different character. There are some discussion of the effort by Winston Churchill to use government power to suppress the movie during the War. I had always had the impression that Churchill was upset because the movie shows a German officer as quite an honorable and sympathetic character. It ends up that Churchill was actually motivated by fear that the movie would cut the confidence of the British rank-and-file in their leaders. I enjoyed seeing all the cartoons, but found the essays a bit much even for someone who is obsessive about historical detail as I am. The book was as represented, and I will give it 3 1/2 stars, but I will recommend it only for the most fanatical devotees of historical trivia.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Triple Pay: A Nathan Heller Casebook, by Max Allan Collins

This is a collection of three novellas/novelettes about one of my favorite detective characters, Nathan Heller. Heller's fictional career was spread over many decades , but these all take place in the late 40s and early 50s. I am not truly sure of the difference between a novella and a novellette, but these vary greatly in length. The longest, Dying in the Postwar World, could pass as a very short book itself. As is usual with the Heller books, it is based on a real case. The story is based on the historical lipstick killer. I had heard that name, but really didn't know anything about this actual series of murders. But these murders introduced a trope that we often hear about today. The name of the murders came from the killer's habit of writing "stop me before I kill more" in lipstick near the bodies of his victims. Of course that's now a cliche, though I think of it as having "again" on the end instead of "more." In any case, I found this story a good one . But be warned that the description of the crime scene that starts the story may be disturbing to some. The second novella is shorter and is a good story but not remarkable. I really liked the last tale, which I consider of short story length. I'm not making it up, this story is about the murder of the only midget ever to play major league baseball! And it is a real story and real murder. The entertainment is actually in the back story of how a midget was put in the game and what happened. The murder investigation is very brief and can probably be summed up in a sentence.

An excellent book for fans of the hard-boiled detective story, particularly if they like the 40s and 50s. I give it four and a half stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Bitten: True Medical Stories of Bites and Stings

This is a book by physician about insects and a wide variety of other creatures that bite and sting, and how they affect people. The book extends to diseases that can be transmitted in this manner. In addition to the expected spiders and snakes, the book covers many other biting and stinging creatures including a stinging mollusk and mammals such as ferrets. I love scientific trivia, and there is a definite fun tingly horror aspect to creepy crawly creatures. So I really expected like this book! I did like it and there's lots of fascinating stuff in here but it did not please me as much as I expected it to. I was traveling in South America while I read it, and perhaps that distracted me, but when I had time to read, such as during several plane flights that were part of the program, I actually shifted to another book for a while before returning to this one. It could be that there's a limit to how much biting and stinging I care to read about.

I may have made a world record number of notes and marks of interesting stuff in this book, but will try to limit my enthusiasm...

Dimettap and other liquid antihistamines can be big lifesavers if drunk quickly after bad experiences such as attacks by masses of Fire Ants. Speaking of fire ants it is rather mysterious that they seem to love to be electrically shocked. Electromagnetic field is have no fascination for them but they seek chances to be shocked, and are attracted to anything electrical.

Black widow spider bites cause excruciating pain, even though they are rarely fatal (one to five percent death rate). The pain is so extreme and distinctive that there is a special name for it, lactrodectism. Black widows are particularly known for being attracted to the openings of privies which are a magnet for insects. They will build a web in or just under the opening and lurk nearby, and when a human takes a seat, are confused by the vibrations, and will leap out to bite this attractive prey! The decline in outhouse use has made this less common, thankfully. Many outhouse users would take a stick and sweep out the area of the opening to knock away webs before they used the privy.

Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine, are the only States that do not have a venomous species of snake.

Snakes digest their food whole, bringing them in intimate contact with the intestinal bacteria of the mice and other creatures that they eat. These are often found in the snake's mouths and are easily injected in wounds where they find envenomed and dying tissue a wonderful environment to go forth and multiply. A poisonous snakebite usually has infection as a bonus.

The first recorded victim of a cobra bite was the Egyptian God Ra. An ancient Egyptian text from 1550 BC describes the legend of him being bit and gives a very accurate description of cobra venom symptoms.

Australia seems to be the great place for venomous snakes. It is the only continent that has more species of animus the nonvenomous snakes. Because of great education and first aid, plus good trauma centers, Australia average is only about three snakebite deaths per year despite having a couple of thousand poisonous snake bites each year.

The most effective drug for sleeping sickness is not profitable for its manufacturer to produce, and came close to going out of production in 1995 even though sleeping sickness had increased a hundredfold since the 1950s. Sleeping sickness is such a problem that it is considered the most effective guardian of the African ecosystem by making it difficult to develop in those areas.

Diseases we consider purely tropical were widespread in the United States only decades ago. In 1878 there were 100,000 cases of yellow fever in the United States. In 1940 about 150,000 people had malaria in the Southern states (my own mother had malaria as a child in Southeast Missouri about that time!).
It is late, I may add more tomorrow night...


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

I think I'll stay indoors tonight. Safer there.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Great Yachts of Long Island's North Shore (Images of America), by Robert B. McKay

It's not always easy being a megamillionaire of the 1% . Shortly after the turn-of-the-century the people of this class who had jobs in Manhattan had a terrible problem. Many of them wanted to escape the crowds and heat of Manhattan and live at their luxurious estates on Long Island. But they still needed to be at work in their offices in Manhattan each day. What a problem!

Fortunately the boatbuilders of the area provided a solution. The "commuter yacht" was born. Commuter yachts are very fast ships, small as millionaire yachts go, that are built with speed first and capacity not even a consideration. They had a small crew of 2 to 4, a lounge for the owner and his fortunate buddies, a galley to prepare breakfast and usually some sort of bathing facilities and a comfortable bunk for the owner take a quick nap if needed. Of course there would also be a wet bar to celebrate a profitable day on the trip home. There were quite a lot of these, and a private dock was built for the owners at 23rd Street in Manhattan. They could disembark and there would be a short walk to the office.

Humans were involved in this enterprise so of course there began to be competitions and bets and one-upsmanship. Owning the fastest yacht became a matter of pride. There is a famous story of how one millionaire whose yacht would go 24 knots was edged out by his "friend's" which could go 25 knots. He told the crew to abandon the 23rd Street dock as their destination and instead go to the shipyard, where he placed a order for a 35 knot yacht! Presumably he enjoyed trouncing his rival once it was delivered. The contract for another yacht specified a speed of 38 knots with a penalty to the builder for every knot short of that in the speed trials of the completed ship.

This book has lots of pictures of the yachts as you'd expect, quite a few pictures of the owners , as well as text describing the background of some of them. This wasn't a surprise, but I also enjoyed photos of the mansions and even the docks some of them were commuting to and from. I was disappointed that there were only a few photos of the luxurious interiors. These must've been interesting, it was common for the owner to walk onto a ship in the morning clad in his night clothes or dressing gown, then bathe, get a shave, and have breakfast while being carried into town. There were also lounges for relaxing on the way home.

Clearly this isn't a book for everyone, but if you're fascinated by ships, fascinated by millionaires, or just intrigued by quirky excess, you will probably enjoy it. I give it a solid four stars. You're going to see more of this stuff, I have been on a yacht binge lately.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Burglars Can't Be Choosers, by Lawrence Block

Bernie Rhodenbarr makes his living as a professional burglar. He is not a smalltime operator who steals TVs from common homes, but neither is he the big-time cat burglar who steals million-dollar gems. He only does a burglary every few months, after he has identified a good target. He departs from this plan on a single occasion. An unknown person wants him to steal a small item, he will even receive a phone call when the coast is clear to do the job. It sounds like easy money , so Bernie agrees. Unfortunately he finds that the cops arrive and catch him in the burglary. That's bad enough, but when the owner of the apartment is discovered murdered in the bedroom, Bernie is clearly the prime and only suspect. In the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock, Bernie must make a run for it and clear himself before the cops catch him again and put him away permanently.

A good story slightly more unbelievable in some places than the typical mystery. One thing that I found weird was that at one point in the book, a character calls the Screen Actors Guild to discover the name and whereabouts of an actor. No big deal, but the following day in a completely different book , I read a description of doing this exact same thing!  since it is something I've live to a respectable age without even thinking about doing, it was a strange coincidence.

A good story and I will read others in the series. By the way it is only three dollars now on Kindle. Four stars for me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Hollywood 101: The Film Industry
by Frederick Levy

This is a book written for those who want a job in the film industry . What interested me about it was that the book has detailed descriptions of the various jobs in the film industry and what they do. It also has lots of advice for jobseekers for each position, as well as generic advice for those wanting to work in Hollywood. Things such as thinking about where to live in the area and how to prepare beforehand if you are coming from outside Southern California. I'm not planning on abandoning my science geek job to go and be a flunky in Hollywood, but I was interested in the book anyway.

Lots of interesting stuff. A good point of the book for the target audience is that it emphasizes that there are many satisfying careers in this business besides the glamorous and well-known ones of actor, producer, and director. As I mentioned in the previous review it gives explicit directions, including the phone number, of how to contact the screen actors Guild to reach an actor or other person who works in the industry. It was bizarre to see this after reading about the same task in the previous book just a day earlier!

Interesting trivia and stories, which was a big part of what I was looking for. In the book you will learn how to make a hippopotamus run towards you, learn about the dilemma of the producers of Titanic when they wanted to get shots at a angle (the list of the sinking ship) on the set while Christmas was fast approaching, and get the inside scoop on how John Carpenter came to direct Halloween. I was surprised to learn that the average movie has about eighty different locations--apparently working in the location department is a good, if unglamorous way to break in. And most stars have nudity riders incorporated in their contracts, you'll get to find out what those are. This book is actually fifteen years old so I'm sure many things in it have changed. The author had changes to his own plan. In the book he describes a series of books that he wanted to write on this subject. Checking, I find that he has written several books but they are not his projected series!

Despite the subtitle of "how to succeed in Hollywood without connections," the book is clear that who you know plays a big part in success in the film business!

Definitely worth the read if the subject interests you. A very solid four stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Angel in Black, by Max Allan Collins

Another Nate Heller mystery. The subject this time is the Black Dahlia murders. Collins is one of the most reliable writers for me, and he comes through again. Unlike the mysteries in some of his books I've read recently, this one is fairly well-known even having movies made about it. To avoid spoilers, I will not cover details of the story except to warn that there are a couple of disturbing scenes in this book. The description of the murder scene is more graphic than usual in Collins' books.


Spoiler



And at the end is an especially nasty bit of vigilante justice.


 As always,there is an essay at the end which describes sources that Collins used, and throws in some historical postscripts and facts. The most interesting for me was that this murder was the impetus for developing the first list of registered sex offenders. Not a big deal, but interesting.

As I said Collins comes through. Very solid four stars for me. Close to four and a half.


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## Tony Richards (Jul 6, 2011)

The Hooded Claw said:


> Burglars Can't Be Choosers, by Lawrence Block
> 
> Bernie Rhodenbarr makes his living as a professional burglar. He is not a smalltime operator who steals TVs from common homes, but neither is he the big-time cat burglar who steals million-dollar gems. He only does a burglary every few months, after he has identified a good target. He departs from this plan on a single occasion. An unknown person wants him to steal a small item, he will even receive a phone call when the coast is clear to do the job. It sounds like easy money , so Bernie agrees. Unfortunately he finds that the cops arrive and catch him in the burglary. That's bad enough, but when the owner of the apartment is discovered murdered in the bedroom, Bernie is clearly the prime and only suspect. In the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock, Bernie must make a run for it and clear himself before the cops catch him again and put him away permanently.
> 
> ...


Love Lawrence Block. He injects humor into his mystery novels in a way few other authors can match.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Golden Century: Classic Motor Yachts, 1830-1930
by Ross Mactaggart

I told you that I've been on a yacht binge, and you would hear more. This book is clearly a labor of love. The author is fascinated by millionaires from the Gilded Age through the Roaring Twenties, and has done extensive archival research to come up with some lovely illustrations of the yachts these gentlemen poured money into. The illustrations are reproduced in large size and high-quality in this book, the author brags that many of them have never been published before. And many are excellent! The author includes extensive commentary, my favorite combination of photo and commentary is a photo taken on the deck of Atalanta, One of the yachts owned by railroad baron Jay Gould, where "three well-dressed teenagers were unsuccessfully trying to look casual." A perfect description of the poses, and I couldn't have said it better myself!

The book has some semblance of organization but still is a bit chaotic, the photos are organized into sections such as masts, sterns, and the like. Each section title describes some feature of the ships that author Mactaggart wanted to highlight. Sometimes there is a single photo and only a sentence or two of commentary, in other cases there will be as many as 10 pages of photos showing all aspects of the ship, including fantastically opulent interiors, supplemented with extensive text discussing the photographs. McTaggart gives his personal opinion on matters frequently, even on subjective matters of taste.

There is a subculture of fanatics hidden among the general boating classes who are obsessed with the remnants of these old ships and will sometimes buy miserable and pitiful old wrecks, and spend fortunes trying to restore them to their former grandeur. MacTaggard spends a final section of the book describing his adventures seeking a boat to sink (deliberate word choice by me!) his money into so that he can join this elite group. He is very specific giving many details of going onto the old hulks, one of which he he was not allowed onto for liability reasons until he volunteered to sign a waiver. He describes digging through piles of literal garbage, and walking across decks that he was uncertain would support his weight. For many of these he publishes photos of what he found in his explorations, in some cases set alongside photos taken of the same feature back in the glory days of the ship. This book was published in 2001, and many of these yachts are well enough known that you can find out where they are now by Googling. I was curious enough to do that for many of these and learned that many have been broken up as unsalvageable now, although some have been rescued and are now restored to their full glory. For many of them in the book, it is clear the author hope that someone would be inspired to seek the ship out and save it. He gives details on the broker who was trying to sell the ship, even giving a phone number in one case.

As you can see, this was a extremely personal book. This was bitterly criticized by some Amazon reviewers, but I actually quite liked it. I really like this book, enough so that I am going to rate it as a five-star book, even though it will only appeal to those who are fascinated by the megarich, their boats, or both. McTaggart followed this book up with a second book with a broader focus, including the millionaires and their mansions as well as the boats. I have it, and it is on my short list for reading.

As I said, a five star book and recommended for those who find my description intriguing.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Sequoia: Presidential Yacht
by giles m. Kelly (Author), Ann Stevens (Photographer)

Still caught up in my yacht binge, this is a yacht that used to be famous. It was used by several presidents, beginning with President Hoover, and ending with Jimmy Carter, who ordered the yacht sold, as an effort to save money and make the president appear less imperial. The author is a former captain of the yacht, which gives him some special insight, but also makes him a biased evaluator!

The book is filledwith interesting stories of the glory and not so glory days of Sequoia. Some presidents liked it, and some did not. For instance President Roosevelt, who was an experienced yachtsmen, disliked it and felt it was unsafe. President Eisenhower felt that using a yacht would interfere with his desired image of a common man. Other presidents loved it, especially Lyndon B Johnson. Johnson's teenage children liked it as well, ordering it to be taken out on joyrides so they and their friends could party! Eventually LBJ got wind of this and put a stop to it. Johnson was also skilled at using this ship to lobby and pressure other politicians, and even foreign leaders. Allegedly in at least one case he took the boat out and refused to order it back to land until the politician agreed with his position!

After President Carter ordered it sold, the yacht was eventually transferred to a trust designed to keep it as a permanent museum piece. Everyone seems to be in favor of this, but no one seems to want to donate money to it! And people aren't willing to pay enough money to tour it to make it self-supporting. So the last part of the book is spent describing struggles to raise money through fundraising tours and such.

An interesting book, but not fascinating. Illustrations are good. I rated it a solid 3 1/2 stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

(Warning! Link to Audible audiobook version)

Contraband From Otherspace, by A. Bertram Chandler

This is another in the John Grimes series of science fiction space operas. I have been reading them in order, and you may recall that they try to cover the career of a space Navy officer from start to finish, with the first novel being set as he travels as a passenger on a civilian space liner to his first assignment, and the last several novels covering his later years as his career has peaked. It is the second book written in the series, and it shows. The story is weak, linear, and not very exciting or interesting. Things begin when a battered but somewhat outdated starship of a type used a few years ago seems to come out of no place. Nobody responds when the ship is hailed, and a boarding party finds the bodies of a human crew who are naked, show signs of grave ill-treatment, and appear to be escaped slaves. Examination of the log shows that the ship is from a parallel universe similar to their own where rats mutated mysteriously into a large, intelligent form which successfully enslaved humanity and took over. Yes, I know it is way past far-fetched!

Commodore Grimes is assigned to take this ship back to the parallel universe and set things right. He does so, but the whole thing is rather pedestrian


Spoiler



, and sadly the giant rats only make one brief appearance on stage.


Possibly the best thing about the book is the Keith Laumer-ish way the rats talk!

This is not my least favorite book in the series, but it is definitely the silliest. And I don't mean silly in a good way. Sadly, I have to give this one two stars. It is not available as a standalone book in Kindle form, but can be purchased as part of a collection of Grimes books covering this part of his life.

Oh, and the cover of the audiobook is absolutely wretched. One of the worst covers I've ever seen.


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## DK Mok (Jan 3, 2015)

The Hooded Claw said:


> Bitten: True Medical Stories of Bites and Stings
> 
> This is a book by physician about insects and a wide variety of other creatures that bite and sting, and how they affect people.


Bitten sounds fascinating. I love scientific trivia too, but I can understand how it might be more enjoyable to flick through such a book now and then, rather than reading it in one go.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

DK Mok said:


> Bitten sounds fascinating. I love scientific trivia too, but I can understand how it might be more enjoyable to flick through such a book now and then, rather than reading it in one go.


The author has another book out with the cheery title of: The Woman With a Worm in her Head!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Down Below: Aboard The World's Classic Yachts, by Matthew Walker



The Guide to Wooden Power Boats, by Maynard Bray

Two nice paper picture books of yachts. As the titles suggest, each has a specialty. Down Below has images of interiors of all sorts of yachts, both motorboats and sail. The title of the wooden powerboats book is not as descriptive. You might believe that this was a definitive guide to recognizing common types of wooden powerboats around the world. But that's not the case. Most of these are quirky individual ships, either aged survivors from the early Twentieth Century, or the beloved money pit custom-built for a more recent owner.

Both books have nice illustrations, minimal text, and are not terribly informative to most readers. But those who are intrigued by, or better yet, love boats will enjoy them. These are decent sized books but not true coffee-table books. I give both 3 1/2 stars and recommend them only for those who are genuinely interested in the subject matter.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights?: Fitness Myths, Training Truths, and Other Surprising Discoveries from the Science of Exercise, by Alex Hutchinson

Last year I read a book called The First Twenty Minutes, about the latest research related to exercising, and how it applied to those of us in the gym or on the jogging trail. When I bought the book, I debated whether to get this book or The First Twenty Minutes. Since I really like that book, I chose to go ahead and get this one to read it as well. This book was not nearly as satisfying. Part of the difference in the books is this book is heavily biased towards those preparing for competitive events such as marathons, or "the big game." I'm not that dedicated, I just want to control my weight, and keep in as good shape as I can.

Like the first book, this one is organized into topical chapters, such as "Fitness Gear" or "Nutrition and Hydration." Each chapter has various questions, with discussion about each one, and reports of relevant research. Much of the information, unsurprisingly, is duplicated in both books. Even though I wasn't as pleased with this one, there is still a lot of good information, especially for competitive types.

Some examples...

Research suggests that it really is in your head--quitting after a hard run or other exertion seems to be limited by your brain deciding that it is dangerous to go further or harder, not because your muscles are completely depleted. Perception of effort is a big part of this. So you may not be able to perform as well after a particularly mentally strenuous day at work, for instance. Regular hard training, besides building up your muscles, helps teach your brain that your body can do more.

Listening to music during workout seems to help performance, but it seems that what you listen to matters. Stuff with a faster beat is better for aerobics, while motivational stuff is better for weightlifting. And it needs to be something you personally like and find motivating. Something another person likes may not motivate you. It isn't definitive, but there is some suggestion that watching a video during workouts may hurt your performance!

Crunches, one of the traditional go-to exercise for building up your core, aren't really the best choice. Two Pilates routines called The Hundred and The Double Leg Stretch (instructional videos for both can be found via Google) are better.

Pre-exercise static stretching has no value for most exercise, and may hurt in some cases. Post-exercise stretching won't reduce soreness, but can be helpful to increase flexibility. Pre exercise warm ups, on the other hand, are important. Begin by doing something to generally get your blood flowing, such as an easy jog for at least five minutes. Follow these with a few minutes of dynamic drills related to what you're going to be doing, such as skipping or arm windmills. Finally, do something very close to what you'll be doing, but at low effort. Lifting very light weights before weightlifting, or a few relaxed sprints before a hard run.

Climbing stairs for two minutes at a time, five times a day, can give significant fitness benefits without even going to the gym!

And as for the title question...it depends on what your goal is for that exercise session. If the main goal is aerobics, begin with cardio, if it is strength building, get out the weights!

Three and a half stars for me. Would be more valuable for a competitive athlete. For non-hardcore people, I'd recommend The First Twenty Minutes over this book.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Sea Without a Shore, by David Drake

This is another in a lengthy space opera series featuring young Daniel Leary, an officer in The Republic of Cinnabar Navy, and his cohort Adele Mundy, presumably the only action hero librarian in science fiction (and possibly anywhere outside of satire). Lieutenant Leary and Adele are asked to do two interconnected favors for associates. As is common, classical historian Drake used two incidents from ancient history for inspiration here. The story is based on two incidents from the Fifth Century BC!

I can't really discuss the plot without spoiling. I will just say that I like the book a lot, and rate it four stars. Anyone who wants to read it should go back to With The Lightnings, the first in the series, however.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Key Out of Time, by Andrew Norton

About a year ago I reread the first in this series, The Time Traders, for the first time since my early teens, when Andre Norton was (in my view at the time) the absolute top of the heap for science fiction. To my surprise I really liked the book a lot! So I dove into the other books with great anticipation. There were four books in the original series, this being the last one. Sadly, books two through four have fallen way short of the first one in my rereading. There are two sequels written with a coauthor late in Norton's life that I never read originally, I'm not going to bother to track them down.

This book has our hero Ross Murdock propelled back in time while exploring an alien planet. He isn't sent back alone, a young female explorer and her two dolphin familiars are sent back as well, but they find themselves caught in an ancient civil war. And it appears that the "baldies" the mysterious aliens whose technology humans will scavenge in the future, are stirring things up for no good purpose. It is a tolerable read, but nothing more for me now. I give it three stars for adults, especially if they are reliving past glories by rereading a childhood favorite as I was. Perhaps higher for the intended teenage audience, though they may be put off by the 1960ish style of the book.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

The Hooded Claw said:


> I can't really discuss the plot without spoiling. I will just say that I like the book a lot, and rate it four stars. Anyone who wants to read it should go back to With The Lightnings, the first in the series, however.


And that title is FREE on Amazon:  so no cost to take a risk.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Fitness Walking For Dummies,by Liz Neropont

I am interested in walking for exercise, running just isn't my thing. And the author of this book wrote another Dummies book on fitness that I really liked. So I went into this book with a confident bounce in my "step." Alas, things didn't really pan out. The book is OK, but not terribly informative or useful For me. I think a big part of my problem with that is that I have read enough on this area and learned enough that I have absorbed most of the material here already. Another big part is that the book is divided into covering for different types of walking, lifestyle walking, fitness walking, High-energy walking, and walk-run. Each of these four chapters covers much of the same material. So a lot of the book you see four times. There are chapters and other things such as choosing running shoes, stretches and strength training as they relate to walking, and even logistics. It is a very practical book. But I didn't find it very beneficial. Someone who was totally new to fitness would probably feel differently, though I think the repetitiveness would still bother them.

Three stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Quite Contrary, by Richard Roberts

On the outside, Mary Stuart is too young to be interested in boys, and too undeveloped to interest boys, but she is a cynical thirty on the inside. She is capable of being cruel, but doesn't let her cruelty rule her. And as the title implies she is very strongly contrary, and refuses to let anyone judge her but herself. Most of all she knows she does not want to grow up to be her abusive and alcoholic mother.

She takes a foolish dare at a Halloween party that she really isn't old enough for. But she wasn't invited, so of course she had to go. Now Mary Stewart is in a forested land of myth. Her trusty rat (who she just met) tells her that every myth and fairytale she can think of can be reached by the paths here, and he is eager to loyally guide her through one if she will choose. Rat is shocked and upset when Mary ignores his warning and puts on the red cloak to replace her torn and dirty clothing. Why did she choose Little Red Riding Hood? All but one of the thousands of versions of that story end with something horrible happening to Little Red! But she has chosen and already the Wolf has arrived and is urging her to choose which path she wants to take. But stubborn and contrary little girls do not take paths, particularly when they are told to.

The story takes Mary, Rat, and others through a land filled with all sorts of myths and tales, both old and new. Rat warns that few of the new ones have happy endings. Many of these settings are recognizable as myth or even as a modern horror movie. But they can never stick around in one place long, as the Wolf is always in hot pursuit. Through it all, Mary tries to do the right thing, and even matures a bit and learns to appreciate friends. But her number one goal is to go somewhere that talking serial killer wolves aren't welcome. Oh, and to replace her MP3 player. She misses Les Miz.

I liked the story a lot and I liked the writing more. I was confident that this book would get a really high rating, when the way the ending was handled disappointed me. The final insult is that the ending is a surprise, the book ends at 92%! The ending causes the book to go from four and a half stars down to four. Be warned that some grisly things happen in the book, though they are seldom if ever described in excessively graphic terms. There's also some profanity, especially early in the book. Don't be fooled, this is not a kiddie book, even in the Harry Potter sense. I have some other books by this author, and they are moving to the upper tier of my TBR stack.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Ann in Arlington said:


> And that title is FREE on Amazon:  so no cost to take a risk.


I do recommend the series for anyone who is a fan of space opera which often looks more like James Bond than the thud and blunder of (for instance) Honor Harrington.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

On Board With the Duke: John Wayne and the Wild Goose, by Bert Minshall

The author began as a deckhand on John Wayne's private yacht, the Wild Goose. Over 16 years of service he rose to be the captain in the last few years before Wayne's death in 1979. As you would expect the book is full of interesting stories about John Wayne, as well as many informal photos. Wayne bought the yacht with the idea of taking it near locations where he was shooting film and using it as living quarters. He began doing many of his films in an inland location in Mexico that was too far from the sea for this to work. But he kept the Goose, and used it as a place for relaxation and especially to bond with his second batch of children. Lots of happy stories and sad , beginning with how the Duke spat on Bert's new shoes almost immediately on meeting him! (Wayne considered it lucky)

There are some sad stories about Wayne adjusting after removal of one and a half lungs to treat lung cancer. This really reduced his endurance, and once after attempting to scuba dive, which he apparently had done frequently, he complained " I'll never have any fun again!"

The author became a sort of guardian to Wayne's children, especially when they were on the boat. Lots of stories of pranks played by and on the Duke. Surprisingly, Wayne love to play chess, and read a fair amount, especially liking the works of Winston Churchill. He liked bridge and gin rummy, but the author claims to never have seen him playing poker as you might expect. On the other hand there is a big permanently installed round card table on the afterdeck of the ship!

The book ends with Wayne's final battles against cancer and heart disease, and the sale of a yacht he is no longer healthy enough to enjoy. I understand the author went on to be captain of the yacht owned by Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards!

Although we think of him in westerns, the author says that 15 of Wayne's movies have him in roles as a sailor or connected with the sea and ships. Wayne had attempted unsuccessfully to get into the Naval Academy as a young man, and seemed to enjoy that his yacht was converted from a World War II navy minesweeper.

Highly recommended for those with a great interest in John Wayne, or what it is like to be a crewman on a private yacht. Others can skip it, especially since the price at third party vendors has jumped dramatically. I give it four stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Many Lives of Aphrodite: The Saga of a Great American Yacht, by Alan E. Dinn

Aphrodite is a commuter yacht. I talked about these before, they were luxury items to allow ultra-rich businessmen to commute between their Long Island mansions and their Manhattan offices without running up the miles on the Rolls or (gasp!) mingling with the lower classes on a train. Aphrodite was built later than most of these, in the mid 1930s, and had a high-tech power plant, two Allison engines similar to those used in fighter planes of the day! These enabled her to speed around at nearly forty miles an hour. She was not only a fast woman, ssh was beautiful, with an innovative and sleek look. She was called to serve her country during World War II, and drafted into the Coast Guard. She returned to civilian life, but was never quite the same.

Eventually the Grand Lady went to seed. After being used as a pleasure boat at a school for disadvantaged boys, she was literally left to rot. About 1980, her savior came along, and repaired her back into semi-respectability, but as he grew older and became financially strapped, she once again felll into ruin. A finance multimillionaire similar to her original owner came to her rescue, adding her to the fleet of antique yachts he maintains as a hobby. Before she could take her place in his bevy of beauties, an extensive makeover was necessary, including a complete replacement of her rottingng wooden hull.

This book is the authorized Aphrodite story. There is disappointingly little about her glory days, some coverage of her fall and her rebuilding, then excruciating detail about the trip taking the barely-holding-together vessel back to a shipyard to be made over, and about her maiden voyage after she was reborn. I was amused to learn that Billy Joel has custom-built a modern yacht that is clearly inspired by her looks.

I was disappointed. Adding in that the price has skyrocketed further from the high price I paid, I can only give it three stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway, by John B. Lundstrom

This is a massive book going into excruciating detail about the US Navy air fighter combat during the first seven months of World War II. The paper version is 576 pages long, although some of that is footnotes. From what I can tell literally every single air combat that was recorded is described. As a detail hound and a big fan of World War II history I was fascinated. If you have a similar devotion to air combat in the 1940s, you must read this book. Everyone else should run for the hills! Too Much Information.

In addition to detailed accounts of air combat, there is a lot of information on training, organization, and technical stuff. I knew aircraft ground crews worked hard, but I gained a new appreciation. One squadron of fighters got new aircraft. This was great, till they learned that the rubber lining of the fuel tanks wasn't treated properly, and tended to disintegrate after awhile in the air. Having your fuel get filled with little bits of crumbling rubber isn't a good thing when you are flying over the ocean far from land, without GPS, and two hundred miles from your aircraft carrier. Even if there are not Japanese pilots with hostile intent flying around looking for you. But back to the ground crews. New fuel tanks were acquired, but they had to be installed. This requires removing over five hundred screws, several access plates, then putting all the screws back. this process which takes about twenty hours, only fixes one aircraft. There are about twenty-five aircraft in a squadron!

Besides the pilots and mechanics, the other hero of this story is the Grumman F4F Wildcat fighter. I consider myself knowledgeable about such things, but still learned a lot about this airplane in the book. I had read that during the time period of this book, the Navy switched versions of Wildcat, but had always assumed this was a fairly minor change. It ends up that the change was significant. In addition to the folding wings on the new version, which meant that many more aircraft carried on each carrier , the performance of the new Wildcat was actually inferior to the old version! The book explains the reasons for this and the near-mutiny among the pilots which this caused.

Many fascinating details. For one of the battles described in this book, the pilots would be flying over the jungles of New Guinea instead of the open ocean. For survival if they were forced down in the jungle, each pilot was given a survival kit. The kit consisted of a meat cleaver and a bottle of aspirin. Later the Navy paid great attention to getting survival gear as right as possible, but not during the period of this book! Despite the exotic and dangerous job they had taken, pilots still had to do their income taxes in between battles.

I'm deliberately avoiding describing the numerous air combats in the book, just not practical for me to describe. Suffice to say that this book starts Pearl Harbor and ends just after the crucial Battle of Midway.

Five stars for me! A must-read for aficionados of this era. Everyone else should skip it.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Rim Gods, by A. Bertram Chandler
(Note that the link is to an audio book. Kindle version is available in a collection, but not individually)

Another book describing the adventures of John Grimes up and coming young officer in the Federation Survey Service  independent tramp starship owner Astronautical Supervisor of Rim Runners Starship Lines and Commodore in the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve. This is a collection of short stories, which I usually find less satisfying than novels. And that's what I found in this book. The last few stories in the book are just our hero being interviewed by a media person and spinning shaggy dog stories for the galactic press.

This is a science fiction book, but religion in general and weird religions of the future in particular, crop up in several of the stories. I was amused by some of the religious groups mentioned in the book. Later Day Fascists, Militant Atheists, Latter Day Reformed Methodists, The Church of the Only Salvation, and The Children of Light all are going concerns. One starship owned by a religious group is the good ship Jerry Falwell.

Chandler wrote in a way that just seems to please me, so I was entertained even at the low moments of the book, but I still can only give this three and a half stars.

I don't care much for the cover of the audiobook above, so I will toss in this cover from an old dead tree version of the book. And this is an actual scene from one of the stories!


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

The Hooded Claw said:


> ...
> In addition to detailed accounts of air combat, there is a lot of information on training, organization, and technical stuff. I knew aircraft ground crews worked hard, but I gained a new appreciation. One squadron of fighters got new aircraft. This was great, till they learned that the rubber lining of the fuel tanks wasn't treated properly, and tended to disintegrate after awhile in the air. Having your fuel get filled with little bits of crumbling rubber isn't a good thing when you are flying over the ocean far from land, without GPS, and two hundred miles from your aircraft carrier. Even if there are not Japanese pilots with hostile intent flying around looking for you. But back to the ground crews. New fuel tanks were acquired, but they had to be installed. This requires removing over five hundred screws, several access plates, then putting all the screws back. this process which takes about twenty hours, only fixes one aircraft. There are about twenty-five aircraft in a squadron!
> ...


I think it was in Robert Johnson's (P47 ace in the ETO) book where he wrote that he was almost in tears one morning when he found out his crew had been up all night with steel wool and paint thinner to remove the camouflage paint down to the bare aluminum because it had snowed over the continent that night, and the light colored metal would stand out less against it than the darker camouflage scheme would.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

I've been indolent about updating this thread, and am reaching the point where it has been long enough since I read some of the books that I will have forgotten things about them that will hurt my ability to review. So I'm going to start working backwards on the backlog, and reviewing new reads as I read them. Hopefully I will finish the backlog before the end of the year! So here is the book I read yesterday in one long setting....



Abandon, by Blake Crouch

I don't find that much of my reading from Amazon's recommendations, but this one was brought to my attention that way. The blurb tells us that the entire population of a declining Colorado mountain town just disappeared on Christmas Day 1893. No bodies, not even any bones! But there was evidence of an abrupt departure, Christmas feasts set uneaten on tables, and half-empty bottles of beer frozen solid. The vanishing remains a mystery, but in the present day, the town will be investigated by a team of explorers including a married pair of paranormal photographers, a university professor, and his journalist daughter, who was invited to participate after twenty years of silence from her father after he abandoned his family with no explanation.the story takes place in just a few days. This is a substantial book, 532 pages, but I read it in one setting, so obviously I was caught up in the story. You'd expect I would like the book, and you'd be right, but I did have a couple of issues. I'm listing those first, but rest assured that I will give the book a positive rating eventually!

Biggest one is that the book is not the type of story the blurb lead me to expect. I can't be more specific without committing a spoiler on the level of my friend who told me in advance that Darth Vader was Luke's father, (the £\<%# really did!) so I won't say more.

I kind of fell out of sympathy with the journalist daughter who is the heroine when she went to explore a ghost town at night at 11000 feet with a blizzard approaching, carrying only one source of light and no spare batteries (admittedly as part of a group, but still). Her professional guide has some responsibility for not checking this before setting out of course. This and some excessively flowery descriptive language in the first ten percent or so of the book nearly caused me to walk away, but I persevered and am glad I did.

Things that weren't a serious problem for me, but might put off some people include that the book contains a LOT of profanity. Having spent time in the army, I normally don't even think about that, but even I noticed it here. Only a substantial minority of the characters do this, but while they are "on screen" they seem to be trying to set a record.

Another potential problem for some is that very nasty things happen to a bunch of innocent and undeserving people. It is described in detail, though not quite with gore porn.

Finally, the book has a number of recurring viewpoint characters, and is told by alternating between 1893 and the present day. These can easily turn me off, but it was well-done enough that it didn't. I'm sure having X-Ray helped, I used it a few times.

Now, what I liked--in short, the story and the cause of the mystery was extremely interesting, and unfolded for us in a way that really pleased me. In particular, the final confrontation was completely unexpected and totally surprised me, but made perfect sense, and didn't inspire a sense of author ex machina in me. That's awfully short praise after so many nits were picked, but I am nervous of giving things away. I was sufficiently caught up that I sat and read it in one sitting, despite the length, and being worried about staying up too late (my Voyage correctly predicted my reading time almost to the minute, and I wasn't up excessively late).

I'm torn between giving this three and a half stars or four, but I'm gonna go with four by a nose.

Incidentally, I borrowed this through Prime. I believe it is also in KU.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Out of curiosity, how much potty-talk is too much? Say, one word/page or something like long strings of it every fifth page. I realize it's not easy to quantify, and my examples probably sound ridiculous, but I'm not sure how to measure it.

Thanks for the review, by the way.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

WHDean said:


> Out of curiosity, how much potty-talk is too much? Say, one word/page or something like long strings of it every fifth page. I realize it's not easy to quantify, and my examples probably sound ridiculous, but I'm not sure how to measure it.
> 
> Thanks for the review, by the way.


Thanks to the wonders of ebooks, quantifying is actually easy! I did a search, and counted 87 uses of


Spoiler



the f word


, and 61 uses of


Spoiler



the s word (dealing with excrement, if there's any doubt).



These were probably the most frequent words, though there are others of course. It doesn't sound like that many in a 500 page book, but in one which isn't tipped in the blurb as "adult" it surprised me. It made it better in some ways, but most of the profanity is from a few characters, which made it more concentrated.

I personally wasn't offended or upset, but I did notice it, which is unusual for me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (Captain Underpants #3), by Dav Pilkey

Naughty elementary school students George and Harold have returned! As you may remember, the mischievous boys' archfoe, Principal Krupp, turns into comic book hero Captain Underpants when he hears someone snapping fingers. His help will be needed, because the boys must defeat not only invading space aliens disguised as cafeteria ladies, and not only the entire student body of their school in zombie nerd form, but they must defeat another surprise foe! The situation becomes so dire that the boys voluntarily sacrifice their lives to save earth (they really think they are doing that), but since there are at least 10 more Captain Underpants books, we know that they will somehow survive.

In addition to the expected mayhem and crude but funny drawings, the book teaches important life lessons, such as never drink evil zombie nerd milkshakes, and don't pour evil giant growth juice blindly out the window.

Good light fun, even if you are past the age of the target audience. Three and a half stars. As I post, this book and the predecessor are selling for $1.99 each.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Kirov: Paradox Hour & Kirov: Doppelganger, by John Schettler

Have you ever gone back in time to 1941, made big changes to world history, then jumped back to 1905 and made further changes, then been jumped to 1940 where you get stuck in the alternate past your actions have created, and wonder what would happen to you twelve months later when the 1941 date of your original time travel rolls around and you are already present in that time? I didn't think so. You may find it difficult to feel sympathy for someone in such a predicament, but if you read these books, you're going to have to sit through the situation, sympathy or no.

I enjoyed these books, even though there are several things about them that bugged me.

1) the gross editing errors still continue!
2) the


Spoiler



author ties the books into a completely different series of time travel books he has written.


 This really ticked me off, though it didn't seem to have ruined the book for me.
3) I dislike the way the author chose to resolve the paradox.

It says something either about the books or about me that in spite of all these dislikes, I still am enjoying the books and the series. Both books get four stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Rest is Silence, by James R. Benn

Here we have another Billy Boyle mystery. You may remember that Billy Boyle is a Boston policeman draftee whose mother wrangled him a job on the staff of distant relative General Dwight Eisenhower. Billy finds that Eisenhower expects him to solve touchy and difficult problems without nasty publicity.

As tension builds before D-Day, Billy and his Polish friend Kaz are given an assignment to investigate an unidentified body that washed up on the beach in southwest England. Any disappointment Billy might feel is soothed by the knowledge that they will get to stay in a luxurious English mansion while investigating. But Billy's life is never simple. A training disaster during a practice amphibious landing complicates matters, and there seems to be a separate mystery right in the manor house where they're staying. Then Agatha Christie shows up and things really get messy!

As is typical for this series, I really liked this. Four and a half stars for sure.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Working Stiff: The Cases of Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I., by Kevin J Anderson

Part of a series about Dan Chambeaux, A private investigator in a version of our world where a Magical accident caused undead and various monsters to be released. Fortunately, most of these creatures just want to get along and make their way in the world. But some have less noble intentions, and this becomes Dan's specialty when he is murdered and returns to life as a zombie himself. His girlfriend, who has also been murdered, but returned as a ghost, serves as his secretary and assistant. Some of the stories include events such as being locked inside a monster-proof burial vault, solving the murder of a vampire circus performer, and finding a lost dog which happens to be a Hell Hound.

I generally find short stories less satisfying than novels, and this goes double in the detective genre. I did not like this book as well as the two novels in the series that I have read. it was still very acceptable entertainment for a few hours. This is a rather short collection, 179 pages in print. Some of the stories are offered separately as short stories in Kindle form for ninety nine cents.

Good but not great, I give the book three and a half stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson, by Lyndsay Faye

Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper is well-plowed ground on screen and in print, plus I am generally a fundamentalist Holmesian who prefers his Holmes to come from Dr. Watson's literary agent Dr. Doyle, rather than some modern pretender. I saw this, but ignored it initially. When it was marked down I grabbed it on impulse and read it during a plane trip last month. I am glad I picked it up!

This is a good story, and the author does a good job of capturing Dr. Watson's voice. As is typical in detective stories, I can't discuss much for fear of spoilers. I will just say that I really enjoyed it, was impressed by the knowledge of period. Asis typical in detective stories, I can't discuss much for fear of spoilers. I will just say I was disappointed to find that the author has not written any other Holmes stories at this time.

A very solid four and a half stars. Naturally, people who are not devotees of Holmes and Watson should probably avoid it.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes, by Ella Cheever Thayer

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0082RE7K2/

For some reason the free version of this book will not show up in the link maker. It has a boring cover anyway, so I've just put the link in.

Technology creates problems and opportunities, even in romance. This is a story of how a man and a woman met online, got to know each other that way, and eventually connected in the real world, despite worries about meeting an unknown person, and even the interference of "trolls" who attempt to sabotage a budding relationship. The thing is, the line connecting them is a telegraph line, and the date is approximately 1880! This is a very old book which was written at that time. The author is apparently a woman who had worked as a telegraph operator. The book deserves special recognition as the first romance that I have ever read in my entire life!

I liked the book quite a bit. I had wondered how the author would keep things interesting when all communications were over a telegraph line. The periods of online communication were enlivened by the heroine's real world life, where she interacts with neighbors in the boarding house she lives in. There is a rival to her distant lover, a deserving friend who also seeks romance, and of course a negative and suspicious landlady. For a while the interactions and romantic drama of different characters, including a colossal misunderstanding, reminded me of a Jeeves novel, though much less witty.

I liked the book. Four stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, by Singer & Cole

Decades ago, I was in the US Army. I applied the obsessive infomaniac traits I still exhibit to learning about all sorts of military stuff, not just my job, and still follow these matters despite decades out of uniform. This book by two professional observers of defense got a lot of publicity a few months back. It seeks to do something like Tom Clancy used to do, and give one view of what the next big war would be like. In particular, the authors wanted to emphasize how different a cyber war would be from previous warfare.

The story is that China allied with Russia decides to take the United States down a peg, starting with a cybernetic Pearl Harbor, and quickly following up with a more literal Pearl Harbor, a surprise invasion to grab Hawaii from under American noses. In addition to Internet warfare, the Chinese have a couple of other surprises for us. I had two things that bugged me about the book, one is that literally nothing went wrong for the Chinese. Their plan works perfectly, and they smash the American Navy, use infected electronic chips to turn American warplanes into target beacons for their missiles, completely drive the US from space to seize the orbital high ground, and occupy the Hawaiian islands. This happens pretty quickly, and the bulk of the book is about a handful of characters--A US Navy Captain who will take charge of the most important ship in the American fleet scrabbled together to fight the Chinese takeover of the Pacific, his father, another naval man with whom he has a troubled relationship, and a female US Marine Major who becomes the leader of the North Side Mujahideen, a guerrila group fighting the Chinese on Hawaii. There are some other characters with important recurring roles, my favorite being a psychotic serial killer living in Hawaii--I haven't read the Dexter books, and until I do, this will be my only time cheering for a serial killer! Another favored lesser character was a Russian advisor to the Chinese who tries to advise them on counterinsurgency warfare, and takes on the project of finding the serial killer.

The book started out with a scene that really bugged me (my other major gripe). The Russians seize control of the International Space Station by locking the sole American outside during a spacewalk. There's a problem with that, once he was convinced he was going to suffocate, he would have no reason not to sabotage things like the solar panels....

I liked the book a lot. Four stars from me.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Lord Hornblower, by C. S. Forester

This book is part of a lengthy series following the career of Horatio Hornblower, a British naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars. They were written with great attention to historical detail and accuracy, and are great favorites of mine. They are unusual in that movie was made by condensing the plots of three of the novels, and it is excellent as well. This book is late in the series, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Hornblower is in on the finish, he is given an assignment to recapture an English ship with a mutinous crew, and ends up in the position of being able to capture a French port as Napoleon's empire finally crumbles. Then we follow Hornblower at the beginning of the peace, and find out what he does when Napoleon stages a comeback, culminating in Waterloo. Late in the book there is an unusual amount of attention to Hornblower's married life.

This is possibly my least favorite book in the entire series of over a dozen novels. I have read it at least four times, starting as a teenager, but not for more than ten years, and I'd forgotten how much I dislike it! The first half of the book is typical for the series, and is quite good. But then we are treated to a series of tragedies, and Hornblower inexplicably and repeatedly behaves as an utter ass to his wife. The last part of the book has Hornblower as almost literally a fish out of water, far from his naval element. I'm not sorry I reread it, but it is definitely not a favorite in the series. But this is CS Forester, and it is Hornblower, so I still have to give it 3 1/2 stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Make no Bones, by Aaron Elkins

"How often do you look into a glass case in a museum, and see someone you've shared a pepperoni pizza with?" If you are forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver, it happens at least once! A distinguished but unloved university professor died in a tragic accident near a museum years ago, and he left his actual mortal remains to the museum! The museum chooses to use his charred bones in a display explaining forensic anthropology. Gideon and several other associates of the professor attend the exhibit opening, but things go wrong when the bones are stolen! You know there's going to be a murder, and there is. You know that the tragic accident is going to be found not an accident and it is, and this is pretty much a formula for the series, but it is still an excellent story.

A murderer's worst nightmare has to be when a convention of forensic anthropologists meets at your murder scene a few years later. Especially when one of them is the hero of a series Of mystery novels. Poor murderer! I was amused to learn that "cremains" is an actual word! It's even in the Kindle dictionary.

Kept me solidly entertained for several hours. Four stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Riddle me this -- why is it that if you put "make no bones" into the Kboards link maker, the second and fourth results are the basic Kindle and Kindle Voyage?


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Above, you see the Missouri Bootheel, the little stub of Missouri that sticks down between Arkansas and the Mississippi River. It has always been the poorest part of Missouri, and until the early Twentieth Century, it was a swamp--Bayou complete with cypress. Flood control and drainage was brought in, and much of the area was turned into productive farmland, some of which my family still owns today. This process was finishing as my parents were born, and my mother even had malaria as a small child. While I was there recently, we discussed the fate of a huge cypress tree that is over a century old, but still soldiers on in the middle of a field where we've been growing soybeans, but have just prepared to grow rice. So remnants of the bayou are definitely still there today, and some people still call it "Swampeast Missouri."

The area is remote from most of Missouri, and in addition to one Missouri station, tv from Illinois, Arkansas, Kentucky, AND Tennessee is watched regularly. Air travel is routinely done from Memphis. My parents and grandparents drove to Arkansas to buy gasoline because taxes were lower there, and my mother magically transmogrified into an Arkansas resident when it came time for her to attend college at Arkansas State University. There is not a lot of opportunity, and five of the six kids in my parents' generation left the area promptly on graduating from high school. Finally, it was the site of the biggest earthquake in US History. Fortunately this happened over the winter of 1811-1812, and the area was lightly settled without major buildings. Today this would be a catastrophe, and people there still worry about it as they vacation on Reelfoot Lake, a lake created by the earthquake! I've written a lot about it because I am fond of the area and people, even though I made fun of it as "Green Acres" when I was a kid and we visited.

I learned of a book while I was there recently checking out our farm, and whipped out my phone and purchased it on the spot:



Murder on the Floodways, by Harold G. Walker

This book takes place in the bootheel, and is an extremely personal memoir of a sensational crime there. The author was only 12 years old at the time, and it follows what he saw before and after the murder in great detail, ending after the weird double funeral of the murderer and his victim. Author Walker makes up a great deal of action and conversation, and in many ways it is a historical novel. It is particularly interesting because it took place only about 20 miles from where my mother grew up, and about a month after my parents married. The murder was not one that was consequential to anyone other than friends and family of the victims. There was a falling out between two young tough guys. Although they were best friends, one became angry at the other while drunk, and shot him at close range in front of a family that was friendly to both of them. No one really knows what happened next, but the murderer was found dead the next morning with a gun shot wound that was presumed to be self-inflicted. There was genuine alarm that a Hatfield-McCoy style feud might erupt between the families of the two victims, and the joint funeral seems to have been vey tense and carefully watched by law enforcement.

I never lived in the area, but visited it, and heard about it all my life. So it is strange to read about places that are familiar to me. Both bodies were taken to a funeral home that I have visited many times during the funerals of relatives. I am pretty sure that as a child, I met the coroner who examined the bodies, as he was owner of the funeral home at the time. The book mentions by name numerous pool halls, gin joints, and dives. I am taking great delight in teasing my mother about how grandfather had to go pick her up from Red's 5% when he heard she was hanging out there!

I have asked my mother about some of the things in the book and she remembers many of them. There are some anomalies. The author insists that when a guy was sweet on a girl, the local slang was that he was "staunch" on her. Both my mother and my aunt were of an appropriate age to have used this phrase at the time, but both insist that they never heard it!

When I realized that it was going to mostly consist of a detailed recounting of the experience of a young boy, I was worried that I would not be able to stick through the book. But I really enjoyed it, and read it in one long sitting. For me the book is a solid four stars. In all honesty, I cannot vouch for whether people who have no ties to the area will find it as enchanting.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Rhinoceros Giants: The Paleobiology of Indricotheres, by Donald R. Prothero

From Swampeast Missouri crime to ancient mammals!










When I was a kid and was reading about all sorts of prehistoric things, mammals just were not as cool as dinosaurs. Mammoths and sabertooth tigers were just barely OK but most other prehistoric mammals were boring! But one prehistoric mammal did impress me and stuck with me was the Baluchitherium. Basically, the Baluchitherium was a prehistoric rhinoceros that went to night school and studed hard to become a giraffe. They were much larger than elephants and probably weighed a bit more than modern elephants. I have been on a fossil binge lately, and this book seemed like a good one to pull out of my back list. One of the first things I learned from the book was that the name Baluchitherium was like Brontosaurus, an obsolete fraud even decades ago when I read about it. the name was superseded in 1931!

Anyway, this book was both frustrating and well worthwhile. It has seven chapters, and how interesting it was varied wildly between the chapters. The first two chapters were sort of the history of the discovery of these beasts. The first chapter being about an expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews, 1920s character who some feel was the real world model for Indiana Jones. I had read about Andrews as a kid and was delighted to read more about him. He led the expedition that really brought these creatures to modern attention. Another chapter describe what kinds of fossils were found in different layers of rock in Central Asia. I'd rather read a phone book! One chapter over nomenclature was both intriguing, though not in the way the author had intended, and dry as dust. The author, who appears to be something of a stickler, talked in great detail about crimes in naming prehistoric creatures. Some of these are hilarious! Then he gets into nomenclature and arguing over which genus different fossils belong to. More phonebook style material. The last two chapters are what I actually read the book for. Material on the life and extinction of these creatures, and how they fit into their environment. Overall I give the book four stars, but it is only for true enthusiasts about this sort of thing, especially for this price.

A few tidbits: most illustrations of this creature show it with rhinoceros-style ears. With their body mass, these creatures almost certainly had trouble getting rid of excess heat, and probably had large ears for dissipating heat, the same way modern elephants do. I was also intrigued to learn that most prehistoric rhinoceri did not have horns, though all five modern species do.

Some of the nomenclature crimes are hilarious. Official rules forbid giving a name that will cause offense. But many people do this anyway. There are several species of slime mold beetle named after President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld! A zoologist who hated President Theodore Roosevelt named a species of pirhana after him. There are often mistaken names that are non-the less valid and must stand. One of the earliest known fossil whales was originally mistaken for a marine reptile and given the name of Basilosaurus, which means lizard Emperor. Around 1890, an entomologist got cute and named an insect genus Peggichisme, pronounced "PeggyKissMe". There is apparently a website devoted to weird creature names at www.curioustaxonomy.net, but I haven't dared investigate!

Teeth are really important in classifying fossils especially rhinoceri. So of course the book contains extensive discussion of fossil teeth. In one case the author discusses measuring each tooth dimension known of fossil teeth, dividing the standard deviation of each measurement by its mean, and multiplying by 100. These numbers are used in deciding whether different fossils should be classified as the same species. Boy do I have fun reading some of these books!

Of course the big question for any dramatic prehistoric a beast is "why did it become extinct?" As is usual we will never know the reason for sure for these creatures. But the best guess is that they lost ground when the rise of the Arabian Peninsula gave a pathway for ancestors of mammoths to come in to their Central Asia homeland. Some additional new predators which might threaten the bBaluchitherium came in with the mammoths, adding to the gigantic crocodiles that sometimes preyed on these giants.

In the unlikely event you are tempted by this book, make sure you are really interested!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants, by Dav Pilkey

Professor Pippy Poopypants has had enough. He is tired of people making fun of his name, and he's not going to take it anymore! As a brilliant scientist, he has means to correct the situation. He is going to take over the world, and his first order of business will be to make everyone change their name so that his name seems normal. But first he's going to have to get past George and Harold. And of course Captain Underpants. The boys are back in town, and they are on the march pranking again. Unusually, this time they bear only partial responsibility for the peril tothe world that they must stop. As an added bonus, the book includes The Name Change-O-Chart 2000, so you can see what your name will become if the boys fail and Professor Poopypants succeeds in his evil plan. I will become Pinky Toiletbutt (really!). So I hope the boys win. But first they'll have to be shrunk to miniature size, make a daring trip by paper airplane, evade a vicious giant (to them) wiener dog, and face Professor Poopypants himself. Of course they'll have help from Captain Underpants. That's good, right?

(Of course now telracs is going to start calling me Pinky anyway....)

I enjoyed this quite a lot. Solid four stars for me.


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

no, we will be calling you toiletbutt


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## crebel (Jan 15, 2009)

We can shorten it to "TB" since we'll all know what it stands for!


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Man Cave Book, by Jeff Wilser and Michael H. Yost

This is a book glorifying the idea that men should have a separate space all their own, where they can be independent of the woman in their life. He is careful to point out that single men should have a man cave too, however. The idea is that it should completely reflect the owner's personality and interests, but hopefully will have a main theme. The book is inspirational, with lots of admonition a and encouragement, with the main feature being short descriptions of various man caves, usually with interviews with their owner/creators, and LOTS of photographs. My main complaint on the (Kindle version) book is the photographs. The better ones are in resolution barely adequate for my iPad. But most of them are downright blurry. I don't mean soft, I mean blurry! This detracts a great deal from my enjoyment of the book. As you'd expect, a lot of this is quite entertaining or humorous. I wasn't really surprised, but was a bit disappointed to find that at least half the caves are themed on bars or on sports teams, neither of which appeals to me a lot.

My favorite cave was a guy who built a medieval style tower! Awesome, and very cool inside. The owner even has a website for the tower, at www.towerbloke.com (he is an Aussie). I cannot really enjoy the website except for the pictures, because the designer chose the most gawdawful font in recorded history. My eyes hurt just thinking about it! Another good cave had an Indiana Jones/adventure theme. And one was set up like an Air Force ready room. Star Wars, big screen tvs, and elaborate music and or video gaming systems are common.

The author says that Thomas Jefferson built Monticello as the first man cave! He says that a good decorating principal is that any blank space can be improved by a colorful, life-size poster of a man you never met. Some more eccentric additions, which I have to respect, if not crave for myself, are special video game chairs with large subwoofers in the base of the chair so that when a game lion roars, or there are explosions, you literally feel it in the seat of your pants. But perhaps the most unusual special feature is rocks embedded into an otherwise normal wall for indoor rock climbing, all the way to the ceiling. The floor below has fifteen layers of carpeting to absorb the inevitable impacts.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, but really missed sharp photos. I give it two and a half stars, it would be at least three and a half stars if the photos were sharp. I got this for two bucks, for the current ten dollar price, I can't really recommend it.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Train Wreck, by George Bibel

The author tells us "this is a train wreck book that teaches science (or a science book that tells train wreck stories)." And that's what it is. This goes into great detail with what happens when linked chains of train cars crash into another train (or other object) or go literally off the rails. Numerous real world accidents are described, and there is much information about details of how air brakes and other train systems work, and what happens when rail cars of different designs crash into each other during an accident. I loved it, but it is hard work to read! Besides the technical details, it is Positively filled with the trivia I love.

In case you think he is carrying a vendetta against trains, the author points out that trains are very safe. He says that passenger trains are nineteen times less dangerous than auto travel, but because passenger train fatalities are so rare, even a single accident seriously changes the statistics. Iinterestingly, one estimate shows that back in the 19th Century, stage coaches were sixty times more dangerous than the trains of the day.

A neat bit of trivia that I had not considered: since trains cannot stop in time to react to anything that they can see, a train has right-of-way over any road traffic, including firetrucks responding to emergencies! This is really in the laws of nature, not of man, and makes perfect sense. But I had never thought about it.

There is lots of detail on numerous accidents that illustrate different points. The windshields on locomotives are tough; when the engineer and conductor were trapped inside a burning locomotive, fireman found the windshield would not shatter when they attacked it with fire axes! The windshields are designed to withstand a 24 pound concrete block at 30 mph. The firemen had to pry out a rubber seal and remove the window.

Leaving out a train that was swept out to sea by the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, The deadliest train accident ever was a run away troop train in 1917. An overloaded train taking French soldiers home from Italy on Christmas leave was sent down a dangerously steep grade. The experienced train engineer refused to take the overloaded and under-braked train out of the station down the grade. He was threatened with court-martial and possible execution, and proceeded under protest. The runaway train flew off a curve at about 75 mph and there were about 550 deaths.

There of been efforts to improve passenger safety in crashes by the use of carefully designed railroad cars and couplings, but these have limits. Once the deceleration in a crash reaches about 50 Gs, no matter how well strapped in you are, your aorta will tear as your heart keeps trying to move forward within your body. These kind of decelerations are definitely possible at passenger rail speeds. On the other hand even very gentle crashes can be fatal. In 1970, two men were killed by a caboose that was backed at about 5 mph into the cab of a stationary locomotive!

The system of time zones was established in part to make it easier to coordinate trains on the limited number of tracks in the late 19th century. Before time zones, there were 38 different official local times in Wisconsin, and 27 in Illinois!

The couplings between cars are each allowed to move 6 inches in either direction for shock absorption. This means that the length of a 100 car train can change plus or minus 50 feet as it accelerates or slows down. Emergency brakes propagate almost twice as fast, but the speed of sound is still a limitation.

Making tracks go steeply up or down is very expensive and dangerous. To reduce the steepness of tracks there is at least one train line that has a spiral train tunnel!

When airbrakes are released, the signal to release the brakes past propagate through the train. This takes two minutes in a 100 car train, four minutes in a 150 car train. The engineer must wait for this to happen before applying the throttle after releasing the brakes, or there can be problems including derailment.

I recommend the book if you are really interested in the subject, but this is not for the faint of heart. I give it 4 1/2 stars.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

The Story of Life in 25 Fossils, by Donald R. Prothero



I love fossils! This one from the Smithsonian is my favorite of them all:



This huge slab is about nine feet tall, and is a section of ancient seabed, crisscrossed with tracks of a creature that has been named Climactichnites. Climactichnites lived about 500 million years ago, and NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE! I love the mystery of this.these tracks are (were) found at the entrance to the Smithsonian Hall of Fossils.

I was eager to read up on fossils before my trip to Washington, DC a few weeks ago, because I planned to visit the daid Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian and see those tracks, among other things, again. So I grabbed this book and loaded it onto my iPad before the trip. I read it on the airplane, and in my hotel room during evenings while traveling.

The book picks 25 ancient creatures that are well-represented by fossils, and covers each of them with a chapter and extensive illustrations. Unfortunately Climactichnites is not among them. The author is the same guy who wrote the indricothere (ancient giant mammal) book I covered a week ago. It is a 400 page book, covering 25 fossils means we have about 14 pages per creature. So there is some depth, but not enough time for the author to get too windy. Some of the creatures are well-known. Everyone knows brontosaurus (I know, not valid name since before any of our grandparents were born...)and most know trilobites and mammoths, but some of the creatures were new to me, such as Haikouichthys, a worm that grew a backbone and studied hard to be a fish, but didn't quite make it!

You can see elephants from space! Paste the coordinates below into Google Earrh, and you will see a herd of elephants going about their business, as photographed from a satellite in space!

10.903497 N, 19.93229 E

The author gives this example in his discussion of sauropods, such as the famous "brontosaurus." He debunks rumors that the brontosaurus or similar creature was still living somewhere in the depths of Africa, and explains that we would've seen them from orbit! He also makes a good point that such a large creature would need a huge amount of land to support each individual dinosaur, so that if the dinosaur still exist did, they would be ranging over a large area, not hidden in some secret valley like in a bad movie. Sadly, The fact that we haven't found them is pretty good proof that they are not really there.

A useless but fascinating fact--the fossilized bones of many ichthyosaurs show signs of decompression sickness! Even giant ancient sea monsters got the bends!

After describing the expected trilobites, dinosaurs, mammoths, and other monsters, the author uses two chapters to cover the fossils of two human ancestors. I was sorry to see the book end.

Heavily-illustrated, written for a popular audience, and all about ancient critters of many shapes and sizes, life doesn't get any better than this for fossil enthusiasts! Five stars.

And I never did see the Smithsonian Fossil Hall! It is closed, and under renovation till 2019! Interesting tales and photos of closing it down, and how the Fossil Hall has evolved(heh) over its history can be found here:

http://nmnh.typepad.com/smithsonian_fossils/exhibit-renovation/


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain
By Richard Roberts

It's exciting to be Penelope Akk. Next year will be her first year of high school. though she's a member of the "extroverted geeks" group at school, she has two amazingly cool friends, and great parents. She does have a lot to live up to, since her parents are both retired superheroes, and Brainy Akk and The Audit have a framed certificate from the United Nations on the wall thanking them for saving the Earth. But best of all, her Powers have started to show up, and mom and dad say that in four or five years, she should have super genius scientist talents similar to her dad's. When her Powers start increasing sooner than expected, she and her friends cook up a scheme to surprise everyone with her precociously-mature powers.

But things go wrong, and a misunderstanding causes Penelope and her friends to be labeled as supervillains. No real harm done, and they avoid being identified, but another misunderstanding makes things worse. And when acting as "Bad Penny," she finds she likes being a mad scientist! An early clue was when she realized she was putting self destruct buttons on all her inventions. This might be getting out of control. And if her parents find out, she will be so grounded....

I liked it a lot, but didn't absolutely love it. For awhile about 3/4 of the way through the book, I disliked the place things appeared to be going, but that cleared up. And at one point during the climax I was confused about what was happening (in a bad way) for awhile. I still rate it as solidly four stars, and will read the second book of the series soon.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

(Can't get the link maker to work, so image above only)

The Hybrid Warship: The Amalgamation of Big Guns and Aircraft
By R. D. Layman

'_Remember boys, when the enemy is in range, so are you"_

--Cave man war chief, shortly after the invention of the thrown rock.

I love the exotic and unique, and even enjoy reading about such things. So I've always been intrigued by the idea of the battleship-carrier. This is the concept that aircraft carriers are good, and big gun battleships are good, so a warship that combines big guns with the ability to launch aircraft to spot and attack the enemy must be wonderful! There are some disadvantages to this concept. It may not be a good idea to carry flammable aviation gasoline on a ship that has to get within enemy gun range to use those massive guns it carries. So hybrid ships with guns and planes are more talked about and planned for than built and used in Naval history.

I was still interested in this book, which is been out of print for many years and Previously sold for over $100 used. When The price dropped to less insane levels, I grabbed it. The book is almost worth it for the chapter titles, most of which come from discussion about proposed hybrid warships, including:

This idiotic canard 
An exceedingly useful type of warship 
Neither fish nor fowl
The results of a psychological maladjustment 
Phantoms of the Pacific

The book is extensively researched and very well illustrated. I was intrigued to find that a congressman from my state of Oklahoma was a major advocate of these ships back in the 1930s. But overall I didn't enjoy the book as much as I had anticipated. One problem is that these were only seriously put into service by two navies, and had no impressive accomplishments in either one of them. So most of this history is of plans that never came to fulfillment. There still some interesting stuff, such as a battleship that was proposed to have an aircraft runway platform sticking out like a diving board over the main guns! The book delivers on what it promises, so I can't truly criticize it. But on the other hand it is not that interesting. For diehard fans of this stuff only, and I give it 3 1/2 stars.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

And then in the 1970s the USSR began deploying the Kiev class carriers, with surface-to-surface missiles instead of big guns (though the dual-purpose 76.2mm guns were nothing to sneeze at).


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Hybrid Warships was written in the late 80s, so it describes the Kievs and their predecessors Mockba and Leningrad as the latest things. Kiev isn't too unconventional, I found the WW2 Japanese ships Ise and Hyuga more interesting....










Note the big flight deck tacked on top of the stern. Blocks the guns from firing to the rear, but still too short for the planes she launches to land there! They must land on a real carrier or shore base if they don't want to ditch...

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

The _USS Massachusetts _had two catapults on the rear deck for launching seaplanes.

The airplanes were seaplanes and used for spotting and targeting instead of delivering ordinance. The seaplanes would land in the ocean next to the ship and then be plucked out of the water via a crane on the back deck.

The _Massachusetts_ took part in some of the heaviest battles in both the Atlantic and Pacific, and yet lost no sailors or Marines during the war.

On a personal note: a friend's mother remembers seeing "Big Mamie" off the coast of the Philippines after their WWII liberation from Japanese occupation. For her, it was a really big deal to visit _Massachusetts_ and actually walk onboard the ship that she remembered seeing.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

Yep, I think all(?) the US battleships in WWII had seaplane catapults, and I believe some/many of the heavy cruisers, too. By the war's end, the catapults were probably not used much, as the US had lots of aircraft carriers deployed by then (including many "jeep" carriers for convoy work and such).

Yes, I used to read a lot of WWII history. 

PS: Nowadays almost every non-aircraft-carrier warship at least has a helipad, and many have a hangar for one or two helicopters.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Please Don't Tell my Parents I'm a Supervillain is free right now. back to five bucks....



The Hooded Claw said:


> Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain
> By Richard Roberts
> 
> It's exciting to be Penelope Akk. Next year will be her first year of high school. though she's a member of the "extroverted geeks" group at school, she has two amazingly cool friends, and great parents. She does have a lot to live up to, since her parents are both retired superheroes, and Brainy Akk and The Audit have a framed certificate from the United Nations on the wall thanking them for saving the Earth. But best of all, her Powers have started to show up, and mom and dad say that in four or five years, she should have super genius scientist talents similar to her dad's. When her Powers start increasing sooner than expected, she and her friends cook up a scheme to surprise everyone with her precociously-mature powers.
> ...


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Good review. I'd never heard of hybrid war ships. I thought I was in the know with pykrete ships.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Shattered Remains
By Brett Houser

These are dark days for The Hooded Claw! Not because of a winter storm that has shut down his home city, but because he has read three disappointing books in a row, and viewed two of them as sure things that were guaranteed to please!

I'm going to start with Shatttered Remains. This is the only one of the three I didn't view as a slam dunk four or five star book when I started it. Unusually, it came to my attention through the Amazon recommendations rather than a more deliberate search. I was casting about for a mystery book that I could use for my Amazon Prime borrow, and this book was suggested was suggested. I didn't view it as a sure thing, but I began with optimism, thinking that a mystery built around digging for dinosaur fossils that had good reviews was likely to please. This was a mistake. Even on the cover of the book, it is identified as "a fossil country thriller." I saw this, but didn't think through what it meant. Even if I had, the book was never thrilling...

In short, the book is an extended account of the life of a drifter/loser who takes low-paying work on dinosaur digs in the summer, and spends his winter sponging off women for whom he feigns affection in exchange for a place to live, while working in call centers for walking around money. He has no real plans or ambition for anything more, though he appears pretty capable, and has flashes of nobility. The story jumps wildly around in time between several years of his adulthood and flashbacks to his troubled childhood. It is a tribute to the writer's skill and my optimism that I kept with the book when I found this out--I can handle two commingled linear stories with one in the present and one in the past, but jumping around in time with no pattern generally sends me to the exits. The author did a good job of organizing these and keeping me in the story.

At the 47% mark of the book, we get a vague hint that there may be more to this than a rather sad and dull memoir, but still nothing much happens until late in the book


Spoiler



when the protagonist meets a woman who may inspire him to bring her into a plan to make something of his life, and we learn that someone else may want to shove them out of the way and take those plans for their own


. But there are no clues or hints to what is happening or who is doing it until things are sprung on us.

MAJOR SPOILERS COMING


Spoiler



in short, the hero and his lady are indeed victimized by a conspiracy between two conspirators who have no reason at all to get together (and one of whom has absolutely no reason to be involved in such a thing). The heroes make three major mistakes, two of which Homer Simpson would consider unforgivably stupid (leaving your pistol in a car a mile away over rough trails while camping in country where you've repeatedly seen a mountain lion, at a time when you believe two people have been murdered over what you are digging for!), the hero watches his lady be murdered by a foe, defeats the murderer after a desperate fight, and is eaten by a mountain lion. I'm not kidding about the mountain lion.



I don't think I have ever read to the end a book that disappointed and upset me so much! It is particularly disappointing because the author can write well. I would not have continued to the end if this it not been well written, and kept me convinced that this was going to become really interesting.

One star from me. My strongest anti-recommendation.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Bye Bye, Baby 
By Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins is one of my absolutely reliable "never-fail" authors, and Nate Heller is my favorite among all of his characters. I deliberately picked this book because I wanted something really good after being disappointed by Shattered Remains. Alas, I was disappointed again!

I've described Heller before in these reviews. Collins has written numerous novels and short stories about this detective, starting with his youth as a policeman in Chicago during the gangster era, and writing Heller into just about every major scandal or public mystery between 1935 and 1963. This is near the end of his working life, when he is asked to do some work for Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn's movie career has stumbled, she has battled substance abuse, and there are rumors of illicit involvement between her and President Kennedy. But she is engineering a comeback, and wants Heller to do some routine security work for her. He has done similar jobs for her before, so this isn't too unusual. As you probably would've guessed even if the cover didn't telegraph it, This is when Marilyn dies in suspicious circumstances. Being our rugged hero, Heller can't just leave this alone.

The story just drags. At one point I put this aside for two days before coming back. I actually dabbled with not finishing the book, which is never happened to me before with a Max Allan Collins work. Part of what turned me off I think, is that some of the stuff is really ugly. It's not gory or graphic, I have dealt with those before in this series with no problem. I did finish the book, but can only give it three stars.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

The Hooded Claw said:


> Shattered Remains
> By Brett Houser
> 
> These are dark days for The Hooded Claw! Not because of a winter storm that has shut down his home city, but because he has read three disappointing books in a row, and viewed two of them as sure things that were guaranteed to please!
> ...


All I can say is LOL. That's so bizarre, I almost want to read it.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

WHDean said:


> All I can say is LOL. That's so bizarre, I almost want to read it.


Perhaps the most bizarre thing is


Spoiler



that after dinner, there is an epilogue from the point of view of the mountain lion. Again, I swear I'm not making this up!


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

The Hooded Claw said:


> Perhaps the most bizarre thing is
> 
> 
> Spoiler
> ...


It doesn't get any better than that. You sold me completely. Going to pick up a copy.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

WHDean said:


> It doesn't get any better than that. You sold me completely. Going to pick up a copy.


Tell us here what you think. The end won't be as shocking for you as it was for me, of course.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

This book sounds like something that would be appropriate for Mystery Science Theatre 3000 --- if they did that for books.


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon
By Richard Roberts

I have definitely been on a bad streak! I had read a disappointing book, then picked a "sure thing" book which also disappointed me. But there was a light at the end of the tunnel! I had read two books by Richard Roberts that I enjoyed, and I had a sequel to one of them! This was a way to break my losing streak! Well, no. The light at the end of the tunnel wasn't an oncoming train, but it definitely was not a source of joy. The book is a sequel to Please Don't Tell my Parents I'm a Supervillain, which I liked very well. These books deal with some teenagers whose parents are superheroes, and you're developing superhero powers themselves. Unfortunately, their first effort at being superheroes were misunderstood in the first book.

Blew Up the Moon was a definite disappointment. Instead of another tale of young adults trying to establish themselves as positive superheroes, the characters from the previous book our dumped into a space voyage with strong steampunk theme and some genetic engineering overtones. The first 10% or so of the book is set in our young hero's hometown, and is a clear continuation of the first book in the series. After that the space voyage starts. If I had somehow skipped that first 10% and read the book starting with the space voyage, I might not even have realized it was in the same series as the first book.

I didn't detest the book, but I was disappointed. I give it three stars. And that just barely.


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