All reviews copyright 1984-2012 Evelyn C. Leeper.
ARCHANGEL PROTOCOL, FALLEN HOST, and MESSIAH NODE by Lyda Morehouse:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/18/2003]
Lyda Morehouse has a series of religious-based science fiction/fantasy. Currently there are three, ARCHANGEL PROTOCOL, FALLEN HOST, and MESSIAH NODE. They are supposedly specifically respectively Christian-oriented, Muslim-oriented, and Jewish- oriented, which makes me wonder what the fourth (last?) volume will be. I say supposedly because I read only the first one and part of the second before giving up--it just didn't seem to be progressing very much. They are, as I noted, both science fiction and fantasy. Fantasy, because there are angels and God and all sorts of other religious beings. Science fiction, because there are advanced computers and networking and futuristic bombs (including one that has turned the entire Bronx into glass). And there are also elements of the hard-boiled detective story. I found the premises and milieu interesting, but feel it would have been better if paced a bit faster.
To order Archangel Protocol from amazon.com, click here.
To order Fallen Host from amazon.com, click here.
To order Messiah Node from amazon.com, click here.
PARNASSUS ON WHEELS and THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP by Christopher Morley:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/18/2003]
For people who like books about books and bookshops, Christopher Morley wrote two classics: PARNASSUS ON WHEELS and THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP. The first is the story of a traveling book salesman, and the spinster who decides to buy his wagon (and his business). The second [slight spoiler here] is about the same characters after they have bought a bookshop in Brooklyn. The stories take place in the early twentieth century. While both are paeans to books, the first is also full of lavish descriptions of the Connecticut countryside, and the second is a mystery-thriller. THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP also references another one of those "little" books of the sort I mentioned last week, with the bookshop owner saying, "I get ten times more satisfaction in selling a copy of Newton's 'The Amenities of Book-Collecting' than I do in selling a copy of--well, Tarzan; but it's poor business to impose your own private tastes on your customers." This was apparently a well- known book at the time--my edition is a Modern Library edition.
(Oh, I have one quibble/question about THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP. At one point a character is walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, is set upon by ruffians, almost tipped into the water, and then flags down a passing vehicles. When we walked across, the pedestrian walkway was well above--and inaccessible from--the motorway, and was above the center of the motorway, which would mean that if you went over the railing, you would land on the motorway, not in the river. Was this the case in 1920?) The Morley books are both available on-line through Project Gutenberg.
To order Parnassus on Wheels from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Haunted Bookshop from amazon.com, click here.
THEODORE REX by Edmund Morris:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/09/2005]
THEODORE REX by Edmund Morris (ISBN 0-812-96660-7) covers just the seven-plus years of Theodore Roosevelt's Presidency, though there are references to his life before then. While Morris obviously finds Roosevelt fascinating, he does not idolize him, and Roosevelt's faults are covered as well as his virtues. (And his faults are often the faults of his time--his attitudes toward race, while in some ways more enlightened than his age, in many ways are just as backward as those of other people of his time. Unless you're a history student, though, I suspect that this is more a book to be partially skimmed than read in great detail-- there can be such a thing as information overkill.
And as proof that there is nothing new under the sun, I offer this quote: "The consistent features of the political landscape, as he saw it, were fault lines running deeply and dangerously through divergent blocks of power. Political chasms lurked between Isolationism and Expansionism, Government and the Trusts, Labor and Capital, conservation and development, Nativism and the Golden Door. And since the last election, the fault lines had widened. As William Jennings Bryan kept saying, 'The extremes of society are being driven further and further apart.'" (page 37)
To order Theodore Rex from amazon.com, click here.
SUPERHEROES AND PHILOSOPHY by Tom Morris and Matt Morris:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/16/2006]
SUPERHEROES AND PHILOSOPHY edited by Tom Morris and Matt Morris (ISBN 0-8126-9573-9) is a collection of essays that is volume thirteen in a series called "Popular Culture and Philosophy", whose earlier volumes cover Seinfeld, the Simpsons, the Matrix, Buffy. "Lord of the Rings", baseball, the Sopranos, Woody Allen, Harry Potter, Mel Gibson's "The Passion", and more. This volume deals with superheroes, primarily comic book superheroes. (That is, there is not much talk about Hercules or Mercury except in conjunction with such comic-book parallels as Superman or The Flash.) The most interesting essay (to me, anyway) was Christopher Robichaud's "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: On the Moral Duties of the Super-Powerful and Super-Heroic", which analyzes the superhero's responsibilities in terms of Jeremy Bentham's and John Stuart Mills's utilitarianism and Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative". Another essay worth pointing out is Michael Thau's "Comic-Book Wisdom", which analyzes the disappearance of wisdom in comic books, due (Thau says) to our skepticism and cynicism about wisdom. For example, the original Captain Marvel takes on both the strength of Hercules and the wisdom of Solomon, while the more recent version acquires the strength of Hercules but *not* the wisdom of Solomon—his wisdom becomes merely an external voice giving advice. For fans of comic books, this book is certainly highly recommended, but I am not a fan and even I enjoyed this enough to recommend it.
To order Superheroes and Philosophy from amazon.com, click here.
DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS by Walter Mosley:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/28/2005]
Just to provide "equal time" for all the quotes demonstrating anti-Semitism in early 20th century mysteries, I'll include this from DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS by Walter Mosley (ISBN 0-393-02854-2): The narrator is remembering his time in the Army and the liberation of one of the death camps, and says, "That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years."
To order Devil in a Blue Dress from amazon.com, click here.
THE STONE READER by Dow Mossman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/28/2004]
And one non-book: I watched THE STONE READER, a documentary about the filmmaker's search for Dow Mossman, the author of THE STONES OF SUMMER. Mark Moskowitz had tried to read the book in the 1970s and hated it, but when he came across his copy recently he found that to the contrary he now thought it was superb. He realized that Mossman hadn't ever written anything else and had disappeared from view. So he embarked on a quest to find Mossman and discover why this is so. The first part of the film is not specifically about THE STONES OF SUMMER, and books that matter to their readers in general--books like CATCH-22 and HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON and CALL IT SLEEP and many others. Moskowitz travels around, talking to people involved in publishing, teaching, or just plain reading, all the time looking for hints to what happened to Mossman. And this is the only movie I can remember that has, following the song credits, book credits--and more books were listed than I ever saw songs listed. Highly recommended for all lovers of books. (No, I won't tell you what happens.)
To order the movie The Stone Reader from amazon.com, click here.
To order the book The Stones of Summer from amazon.com, click here.
THE REVISIONISTS by Thomas Mullen:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/30/2012]
THE REVISIONISTS by Thomas Mullen (ISBN 978-0-316-17672-9) seems like a response to all those "Time Police" stories where it is taken as a given that the "present" that they are trying to save is worth saving. A few weeks ago I reviewed THE END OF ETERNITY by Isaac Asimov, which ultimately did not take this position, but most of its followers have (in part because it makes it a lot easier to write a series if you are effectively pressing a reset button at the end of each story). But in THE REVISIONISTS, the time police have come back to our Washington, D.C., to safeguard the events leading to the "Conflagration" that destroyed our civilization and almost all historical records, and hence allowed the creation of their "Perfect Present.
Or so it seems. But this "Perfect Present" is clearly a Stalinist dystopia where knowledge of history is forbidden except in the broadest terms, and even thinking about the past is prohibited. (For example, we discover that when someone dies, a squad comes in and removes all traces of their existence: pictures, belongings, clothing, even their smell.) And there seem to be far more "hags" (historical agitators) than seems reasonable.
One reviewer has criticized Mullen's history--for example, the statement that the atomic bomb was used on Japan only because Americans felt that the Japanese were subhuman. That statement is made, but by Zed, the time policeman from the future who has a very sketchy idea of any history not directly related to his mission. Zed is clearly confused about other aspects of 20th and early 21st century history, so why should this be any different?
To order The Revisionists from amazon.com, click here.
TURNING JAPANESE: MEMOIRS OF A SANSEI by David Mura:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/02/2005]
David Mura is a third-generation Japanese-American and his TURNING JAPANESE: MEMOIRS OF A SANSEI (ISBN 0-385-42344-6) is the story of his one-year sabbatical in Japan where he discovers that he is more Japanese than he thought he was. (He was born and raised in Minnesota, where his parents lived after they left their internment camp.) This book is very similar to Victoria Abbott Riccardi's UNTANGLING MY CHOPSTICKS (which I reviewed in the 12/03/04 issue of the MT VOID) in its story of an American trying to live in Japanese culture rather than make a brief visit. In both cases, though, the author has gone to Japan with a specific educational/artistic agenda and in both cases, the books spend a lot of time discussing classes, teachers, and meetings with others in that field. TURNING JAPANESE also spends time discussing the strain that Japan put on Mura's relationship with his Euro-American spouse. (Shifra Horn's SHALOM, JAPAN, reviewed in the 12/31/04 issue of the MT VOID, is a much "purer" look at Japan.) Choose Mura's book if you're interested in someone discovering his "roots" (or some of them), Mura or Riccardi for a discussion of Japanese art and the philosophy thereof, or Horn's book for more about Japan itself.
To order Turning Japanese from amazon.com, click here.
BEOWULF ON THE BEACH: WHAT TO LOVE AND WHAT TO SKIP IN LITERATURE'S 50 GREATEST HITS by Jack Murnighan:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/01/2011]
BEOWULF ON THE BEACH: WHAT TO LOVE AND WHAT TO SKIP IN LITERATURE'S 50 GREATEST HITS by Jack Murnighan (ISBN 978-0-307-40957-7) includes for each book such helpful sections as "What People Don't Know (But Should)", "What's Sexy", "Quirky Fact", and "What to Skip". (The latter reduces Marcel Proust's REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST by fifty percent, leaving only about 1200 pages.) There are a lot of books of this sort, going back at least to Clifton Fadiman's LIFETIME READING PLAN. These days, there are two sorts: the sort that emphasize the intellectual side (e.g., Harold Bloom's THE WESTERN CANON or David Denby's GREAT BOOKS), and the sort that portray the classics of literature as great beach reads. As you might guess from the title, Murnighan's book falls in the latter category. (I have the impression that most of these books with a number in the title fall into the latter category. One doesn't find "The 50 Greatest Books" or "100 Books to Give You a College Education", but you do find books like "The 50 Greatest Novels about Love" or "Two Dozen Novels to Help You Find Your Inner Serenity".) As with most books of this sort, many of Murnighan's book choices are obvious, some are unsurprising, and others are very much based on his personal opinion rather than any consensus.
Murnighan talks about the humor in MOBY DICK, and points out a bit I missed: "Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle." The "Pythagorean maxim" here is *not* the Pythagorean Theorem, but his dietary rule: Do not eat beans. Think about it.
However, although Murnighan talks about "What People Don't Know (But Should)" about the various classics, he also makes one mistake himself: he says that Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day. They died on the same *date* (April 23, 1616), but this was not the same day, because Spain had already switched to the Gregorian calendar, but England had not.
To order Beowulf on the Beach from amazon.com, click here.
A YEAR AT THE MOVIES by Kevin Murphy:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/10/2006]
A book that "jumped the queue" for me was A YEAR AT THE MOVIES by Kevin Murphy (ISBN 0-06-093786-6). Murphy set himself a goal of watching a movie in a public presentation every day. This allowed him to count films on airplanes, which was necessary because he was flying to Cannes, Australia, Canada, and other exotic places to find the world's smallest cinema, a cinema built out of ice, etc. His chapters (one per week) are not so much about the movies--though he does include some comments on some of them--but on various aspects of movie-going. Why are theaters so poorly designed? Why do the audiences have the attention span of goldfish? Can you survive entirely on movie concession stand food? (And conversely, how much food can you sneak into a theater at any one time?) Since Kevin Murphy was one of the hecklers from "Mystery Science Theater 3000", he may be as much to blame for noisy audiences as anyone, but his points are in general well-taken. Murphy makes no startling new discoveries, but he does summarize what we know about the joys and pitfalls of movie-going.
To order A Year at the Movies from amazon.com, click here.
THE VOICE OF THE CORPSE by Max Murray:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/17/2004]
Max Murray's THE VOICE OF THE CORPSE (ISBN 0-486-24905-0) is yet another Dover mystery from the first part of the last century, and is full of blackmail and hidden secrets, perhaps to excess. I suppose it is possible that everyone has such things to hide, but that one person could ferret them all out strains credulity a bit.
To order The Voice of the Corpse from amazon.com, click here.
THE SECOND FAVORITE SON by Daniel Myers:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/18/2005]
Daniel Myers's THE SECOND FAVORITE SON (ISBN 1-877-27044-X) is an alternate history based on the South winning the American Civil War (though it starts well before that, during the Revolutionary War). Though Myers was born in Chicago, he has lived abroad a lot, most recently in New Zealand. That may be why the extrapolation doesn't work: the resulting society seems just like what we had before the Civil Rights movement. I might accept that in a world that would have been very different with both a United States and a Confederate States of America there might be communists, WWI, and a Depression. However, Myers also has interstates (in our timeline conceived of by Eisenhower for military purposes), Toyotas, and California as being known for its gay population (as well as the word "gay" used in this way). (Without a civil rights movement, would there have been a gay rights movement? Also, white as a wedding dress color became common only when Queen Victoria wore it, so the comments about it during the Revolutionary War era are just plain wrong. I'm not sure why the author decided to make this an alternate history rather than a straight contemporary mystery, but that aspect does not work very well.
To order The Second Favorite Son from amazon.com, click here.