John C Summitt

Bernard Cornwell is a guy you'd want with you on the desert island; he's the consummate story teller and he's prolific, approaching Steven King proportions. This is the first book of the Richard Sharpe saga. He's considering deserting from the army as they prepare to fight the Tippoo of Mysore. He has a run-in with a certain Sgt. Obadiah Hakeswill, who is one of the great villains for which he is punished. He is spared the the full punishment so that he can undertake a dangerous mission that entails penetrating the Tippoo's capital city. The story is riveting and the setting historically accurateas are the details of the soldier's daily life, the buying of rank for the officers, the manner in which combat was conducted, etc. The epilogue discusses the context in which the battle was fought and is eerily reminiscent of current events. The British, wanting to extend and solidify their empire, found a flimsy excuse to wage an unprovoked war on the Tippoo. Draw your own parallels.

A remarkable story of obsession and redemption by way of the surfing world. An aging surfing legend who is half Brian Wilson (in Dennis' body) and half Captain Ahab recruits and leads an unlikely group of characters in the search for the holy grail of waves. His obsession disturbs the natural balance of the world they traverse with consequences. Kem Nunn is a master artist at creating memorable, believable characters and weaving them seamlessly into original, gripping plots. The young hotshot surfer dude with a unique body piercing is not to be missed. So turn off Dancing With The Stars, back away from the remote control and start reading this book. Now.

Michael Ruppert's strength is not writing–he is much better when he speaks–but he is not interested in creating a literary work, he is interested in sounding a warning of the coming catastrope that will result from oil depletion and humanity's lack of action in dealing with it. It's message is stark; the optimal response will still result in hardship because we do not have sufficient lead time in making a seamless transition to an alternative way of life. Worse, we are stuck in the paradigm of trying to recover a way of life that will never be again (see economy, current). He catalogues the alternative sources of energy and illustrates how for a variety of reasons they are not panaceas to the evolving crisis. Finally he provides a list of recommendation which, as he says, should provide a starting point for discussion on the problem of peak oil. I would highly recommend reading Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over before reading this book as it provides a foundation for understanding oil depletion and it's implications.

In this book Orwell recounts his time fighting for the POUM in Spain and observes the Byzantine nature of leftist politics in Spain and its intersection with the culture. He deftly handles the twists and turns of the myriad alphabetized organizations with a style so clear and vivid that you almost want to be there in spite of the dirt and the lice and the stray bullets.

Isherwood Williams gets bitten by a snake while camping and after he recovers and returns to civilization he discovers that a mysterious disease has killed off most of the population. As a result civilization collapses. It is a quiet book, a steady accumulation of observations of the breakdown of civilization, the encroachment of the natural world into that void and, after gathering some survivors around him to form a community, the challenge of how to preserve the spark of civilization for future generations. It is essentially a treatise on earth science, anthropology, sociology, etc., disguised as a novel, but artfully done by the author. The ruminations of Isherwood Williams in the course of the book would relevant topics of discussion today (if we can switch the channel from American Idol for a moment) in light of the current economic collapse, resource depletion, and environmental instability. But then , Soylent Green taste like chicken, or so I'm told.

A plodding tale of a plodding man whose wife, who looks like Granny Clampett and has the personality of Dick Cheney, drives Frome into the arms of his wife's cousin Mattie Silver. Well, not quite because Ethan Frome doesn't have the wherewithal to pull the trigger and go to the arms of Mattie Silver. In the end he and Mattie try to pull a Thelma and Louise that fails miserably, ultimately leaving Ethan, Mattie, and his wife Zina conjoined in a menage a trois from Dante's Inferno, reminiscent of the two Lazeruses (Lazeri?) in the original Star Trek. On the plus side, the book is nowhere near as long as Moby Dick.

The night was dark and stormy. The revelers sat around the campfire when one said, “Bill, tell us a story.” So Bill said, “The night was dark and stormy...”
Dan Simmons is a talented writer and somewhere in this book is a good story but the Canterbury Tales motif is contrived and leaves the reader feeling he is taking one step forward and two steps back. There are compelling passages such as the wickedly funny section where Martin Silenus discusses the nine word vocabulary to which he is reduced after suffering a stroke but these moments are islands floating in the horse latitude of tedium. Beyond that, there is a sense of style transcending substance. The reader is mesmerized by the verbal agility of the writer rather than riveted by the story. Still and all it's worth a read.

When I was young my grandmother used to come visit and I played Scrabble with her. She'd sit at the table for what seemed like hours, lips pressed together, arranging and rearranging her tiles. Finally with an expression of triumph she would lay down most of her rack of tiles to form some absolutely beautiful word that netted her, oh, ten points or so. Dan Simmons finally gets around to letting us in on the mystery surrounding Hyperion but too often he is writing beautiful passages instead of winning the game. This triumph of style–and he is good–over substance leaves the characters falling short of qualities that allow reading empathy and identification and make the aesthetic digressions tedious to bear. The material in this book and the preceding Hyperion would have made one fine shorter novel; as it is it's like a beautiful Christmas tree with too much glitter and lights.

My interest was piqued after I heard an interview with the author on the radio. The story of a cop who is what we would call Internal Affairs intrigued me.

Malcolm Fox is an inspector in Complaints and Conduct, the Scottish version of IAD. After finishing one assignment he is given another, investigating a cop who is involved in child porn. At the same time the abusive boyfriend of Fox's sister turns up dead. Chaos ensues, all is not what it seems.

The story is satisfying but it is the author's deft depiction of the characters that really shines. In economical prose the author breathes life into his characters and they ring true. Based on this serendipitous discovery I suspect there will be more Ian Rankin books in my future.

In “ A Terrible Glory,” James Donovan has produced a fascinating and well-written history of the battle of the Little Bighorn, the events that led up to it, and the aftermath. Most interesting is Donovan's view that Custer was somewhat less rash and a better military leader than his current reputation would indicate, that he was more sympathetic to the plight of the Indians than Generals Sherman and Sheridan, the latter having uttered the infamous quote, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” and that the demise of Custer and the 7th Cavalry was the culmination of his following General Terry's orders to engage hostiles if contact is made. After the battle the cover up began and the blame was laid at Custer's feet. This book may or may not be the last word on Custer but it is a worthy place to start the exploration.

David Benioff's City Of Thieves is proof that a familiar plot, if told well, can be transformed into a compelling story. Two characters, one being the narrator, are thrown together are given a herculean task to perform in order to escape death. Without giving away the plot I had a general sense of what would happen to the characters early on in the story but read on because the author did an excellent job of creating characters worth caring about. It's a story that's been told a million times but the author has done it exceptionally well.

This is the book Dennis Lehane wished he wrote when he wrote Coronado. The format is reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (it even takes place in Ohio). It is a series of loosely interrelated stories that collectively create a portrait of the community of Knockemstiff. It is a collection of sad sacks and losers living dead end lives in a town where the only thing that is happening is entropy. Bruce Springsteen once wrote a song in which the characters suffer all sorts of misfortunes,yet “at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.” The people of Knockemstiff rarely find those reasons, yet they keep on living and there's something compelling in that.

A worthy sequel to the author's previous book, Child 44. He is adept at creating a believable world for his characters to act, in this case postwar Soviet Union. At times the plot strains credulity–lots o' stuff happens to Leo over the course of two books–but the pace is quick (the cattle are hustling to Abilene).

This book, a collection of short stories, is written in the same style as Diaz' novel, The Short Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao. While the novel provides the scope for this voice to flower and bloom in spectacular fashion, the stories tend to sound flat and forced as one peters out and another tentatively fades in. To torture the flower analogy the stories are like seeds that could have nurtured into spectacular blooms but once planted, ignored while the next is prepared. Lots of potential here, unrealized.

To read this book is to fall down the rabbit hole into some smoky circle of Hell with Hemingway and Orwell and occasionally Kerouac as your tour guides. War is about death and Dispatches captures the insanity and psychic rot that permeates the landscape of war–particularly, it would seem–this war, and also the fascination and even addiction to it. If one has ever read Hemingway's Soldier's Home and wondered at the disconnect between Krebs and his family and normal life, Dispatches describes what was in Krebs' head. Highly recommended.

Stephen Ambrose (or whoever wrote the material he used) relates the history of Easy Company 506 PIR from Camp Toccoa where they were trained to Berchtesgaden at the war's end and how they remained close after the war despite the geographical separation.

Though no great stylist, Ambrose (or whoever) moves the story along easily and clearly. That's the good news.

The bad news is that, 1) He plays fast and loose with the facts. For example he says that Fritz Niland was not immediately pulled off the line when it was thought that his three brothers were killed within three weeks of each other. One of his brothers ultimately survived the war. And his mother did not receive three telegrams the same day. This apparently served, however as the seed for the grossly overrated Saving Private Ryan. Facts maybe stupid things, as Ronald Reagan once said, but that doesn't work for Oprah (see James Frey). 2) He annoyingly sprinkles insider jargon throughout the book as if he was one of the boys. It made me cringe when my father said groovy in an effort to fit in and it made me cringe in this book. 3) He perpetuates the hagiography of WWII as the good war, the victors as the greatest generation, and of America as inherently morally superior. At one point he refers to Easy company's successes as a triumph of democracy over all others. At the same time he contradicts himself throughout the book by emphasizing the fact that Captain Sobel, the hated martinet who was anything but fair and democratic was the key factor in what made Easy, Easy.

None of this is meant to denigrate or diminish the achievements, courage and integrity of the men of Easy Company. They would, however, be better served if those accomplishments were set in more historically accurate and truthful context. How do their reasons for fighting differ from the more complex geopolitical reasons of the military and political leaders? We'll get no answers here.

A penetrating look at poverty in Paris and London based on the author's experiences. Although the subject matter is bleak the book is not; in fact at times it is hilarious. Orwell's prodigious powers of observation and analysis are matched by his ability to put thoughts to the page in a manner that flows effortlessly for the reader. A good primer for imminent oil depletion and global systemic economic collapse.

Not for the faint of heart, this book is about the violence that men do because it is their nature to do it. They act with animal savagery but in the purposelessness of their actions cannot even aspire to that of animals, whose purpose is to eat. The apocalyptic figure of the Judge, who moves through the story relatively unscathed, does so because he alone openly embraces the nature of humans. The biblical tone of his prose underscores very effectively the complete lack of moral purpose of the characters in the book. Cormac McCarthy is not humanity's greatest cheerleader and he doesn't disappoint in this book.

From the creator of Bubba Ho Tep–the tale of Hap and Leonard, the former a disillusioned 60's activist and the latter a gay, black Viet Nam vet who have formed a friendship in the aftermath of their respective experiences. Hap's ex, Trudy, shows up at his doorstep and, utilizing her feminine wiles, entices Hap and Leonard to help her obtain some easy money. Mayhem ensues. The strength of the novel is the charactes of Hap and Lenard and their interactions. It is very natural and real and often quite funny. The plot is not horrible, just ordinary. After all you don't put Elvis in a Subaru. Worth a read for the humor and the hope that the series gets better.

A riveting story of screw-ups screwing up in the later part of the Viet Nam war. Journalist John Converse decides to get into the heroin trade and gets caught up with psychotic DEA agents and rogue CIA agents who have been tipped off to his enterprise and want the dope for themselves. There is a thread of insanity running through the book that perfectly reflects the times.

The second book in the Sharpe saga. Cornwell would be a desert island author except for the fact that if you were allowed 5 or even 10 books to take with you there's about a hundred books in the series. In addition to telling a good yarn, Cornwell is steadfast about weaving the plot into actual historical events as seamlessly as possible without changing the facts. And Obadiah Hakeswill is one of the great villains. Another good story from a consistently good author.

As the title says, this is the Gospel according to Biff who is Jesus' best friend and has his back. The book covers the lost years of Jesus in which Joshua and Biff set out to the east in search of the three wise men so that Joshua can learn the knowledge and wisdom he needs in order to be the messiah.

The book is often hilarious but there are lulls in the laughs, a problem that might have been solved if the book was shorter. Also I got the impression that the author pulled his punches for fear of offending someone. Bill Hicks never puled his punches and he was FUNNY. A worthy effort, worth another half star but not enough to round upwards.