Verdict on The Gun Seller: Good.

A while back I wrote a post about this book, saying that if I found it was good or entertaining or some combination of both, I'd be upset at the polymathical talents of Hugh Laurie, actor, pianist, singer, writer, and novelist.

It's good.

So I am upset.

But in a good way. Though the book was a bit predictable in parts, the story is entertaining, and the last 30 or so pages I had to finish in a gulp because the tension built nicely and the bad guys get their comeuppance and it doesn't really matter all that much if there were so many characters, many of whom blended together, I kinda forgot who some of the bad guys were even at the end. That might be this novel's biggest fault, and something I should learn for my own writing. We don't need to make all of our characters zany and Gentry Lee-esque, but we should certainly strive to help them be memorable enough when their names are mentioned again long after they're introduced we remember who they are. And maybe that's my fault; sometimes I'm not the most observant reader. But this book is no Dickens character fest, either.

It's not the best spy spoof or whatever that I've read, but it was a fun read nonetheless.

I can't recommend it to my wife, to whom I pass many a book, because there's plenty of swearing in the story. I don't mind an occasional cuss, but this kind of went beyond the pale. True-to-life dialogue it might be, but it certainly makes the characters a lot less memorable when all they can do is drop an f-bomb rather than say something clever.

A Cloak for Cowardice

As I read "Three Against Hitler," by Rudi Wobbe and Jerry Borrowman - a telling of the story of Helmuth Hubener who, with his friends, including Wobbe, published and distributed anti-Nazi information in their native Hamburg as teenagers, I can't but help to look for parallels to our own day.

This story is an exceptionally good lens for me to look through, as with Wobbe and Hubener, I also am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Before you sneer, consider this: This isn't necessarily a churchy book or a "Mormon" book either; though the protagonists remain true to their faith, the goal of this book isn't to preach.

And, as with my own observations, it doesn't put all member of the church in a good light; some of them supported the Nazis either through enthusiasm or through simply trying to get along without making waves -- something Hubener and his friends didn't shy away from.

An aside: I don't know how true to the story this movie is. I haven't seen it. I've just read Wobbe's book.

The parallels: Though support of Donald Trump today certainly doesn't rise to the level of supporting the Nazis, there are troubling similarities in members of the church choosing to support, either wholeheartedly, or through a desire not to make waves, what's going on right now. We're on the cusp of something that could turn pretty sinister, and I think it's up to us to decide what side of the fence to be on. I know what side my Dad would have me be on, waves or not. so that's where I lie.

Wobbe's book isn't shy discussing this either. Even after immigrating to Utah, he finds some resistance to the idea of resisting tyranny. We have to be very, very careful in electing whom to support outside of God.

I see members of the church cling to some messages by past prophets as justifications for serving God and mammon. I can't do that. It's Jesus or nothing. If our government chooses to do the wrong thing, we can't go along with it just because one of the tenets of our faith is that we support government. Government does wrong, and we can't support wrong.

As I read this book, I see how easy it is to twist messages. Wobbe shares this from the White Rose Movement, an anti-Nazi organization active during the war:

There is a point at which the law becomes immoral and unethical. That point is reached when it becomes a cloak for the cowardice that dares not stand up against blatant violations of justice. A state that suppresses all freedom of speech and which, by imposing the most terrible punishment, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as "plotting to high treason," is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

Wobbe concludes that unwritten law is God's law of agency, where it lies in the conscience and heart of each person to decide how to act.

Some look at these words as treasonous. Some look at these words as an excuse to commit treason. It's the contradiction of all contracictions. Wobbe can't explain it, but he saw the result: Many, many people justified their actions out of righteous desires: Patriotism, freedom, loyalty, love.

Part of that unwritten law is do unto others as you would have other do unto you. It cannot be an eye for an eye, or a tooth for a tooth, as that leaves us all blind and toothless.

Wrong should be dealt with and punished. But wrong should be agreed upon, not made whim to whatever political winds blow. I've seen both major US political parties justify wrong in the name of doing something right, or wrong in the name of "The other side is doing it; we have to do so as well or we'll fall behind."

So I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. Nor am I a libertarian or whatever other political alliances are out there. They're all corrupt and try to justify their wrongness with a cloak of righteousness.

I'd rather go to prison like Wobbe than fall in league with that kind of fiction.

Book Review: The Town, by Shaun Prescott

There’s a part in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray’s Phil Connors is talking with two Punxatawney derelicts in a bar, who knows how long into his confinement in the town, where one of the derelicts says Phil strikes him as a “glass half empty” kind of person.

Phil, lost in the neverending small-town hell, replies: “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

The other derelict, soppy in his beer, responds “That pretty much sums it up for me.”

Phil, of course, escapes his exile in small-town hell as he gives up the self-pity and self-loathing and loses himself in service to what he discovers are the delightful characters of this small hamlet in western Pennsylvania that make the town pleasant, appealing, and definitely worth living in.

At the end of his film, having won the heart of his long-long-ed-for Rita, he says, “Let’s live here. We’ll rent to start.”

I’ve just finished reading Shaun Prescott’s “The Town,” set mostly in a dusty kinda central Australian town gradually being lost, footpaths, fibro houses, and listless, useless inhabitants and all, to a mysterious shimmer never really explained.

At first I saw Phil and the two derelicts in the town, in the story, and thought, “Well, maybe there’s redemption somewhere along the way.” I had my doubts – Prescott’s story was compared to Kafta, famous for no redemption whatsoever.

And I went with that feeling – but not with allusions to Kafka, but more with allusions to Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously wrote “Hell is other people.”

The concluding idea to Prescott’s story is similar, but perhaps even more gloomy: Apocalypse, it seems, is other people.

Because Prescott’s town suffers a nameless, formless apocalypse wrapped in the metaphor of holes appearing and causing blocks of the town and its inhabitants to disappear, but the story is really an apocalyptic tale without the apocalypse, as the people his characters encounter are a far worse fate than any mysterious shimmer could ever be.

There’s a lot about belonging to this tale, and at the end, well, nobody really finds it. There’s no surcease from the hell of the small town in the city.

Early on in the novel, we get this:

“People might be wiser to cower in towns. Maybe they wouldn’t be so devastated when the sea water rose. Maybe when everything became desperate, a small town would finally live up to the qualities that everyone believed them to have: Namely, that everyone would help one another out. Maybe the town would have tea parties during the apocalypse, while people in the city tore each other to shreds.”

Of course, people in the town tore each other to shreds, whether through a grudge, a fistfight, or general disdain. When the apocalyptic shimmer arrived and claimed victims, no one seemed too bothered, as it wasn’t them being lost forever.

The protagonist and Ciara, another small-town denizen, flee to the city, and quickly discover this:

“[Ciara] told me that everyone in the city speaks about the city in the same way that people in the town spoke about the town. They say the city is not what it used to be. If she asks what it used to be, they simply reply that it used to be more like a city.”

The apocalypse of people find them in the city, though the shimmer is long left behind. And it not needed, as the apocalypse is there all along.

If this is Good, I'm Cranky

Update: I started reading this yesterday, July 29. It's really good.

If this book is good, I'm going to be happy.

And really mad.

Peep the author: Hugh Laurie. Yes, the Hugh Laurie of Jeeves and Wooster, of Blackadder, of House. And the Hugh Laurie the pianist and singer:

He really impresses me with the depth and breadth of his talent.

So if this book is good, I'm going to have to say he's a polymath. And that's blatantly unfair.

Which is stupid to say. He's got the talents, it's a shame not to use them. And if I applied myself, I could do better than what I'm doing now that's for sure.

Still, the little green monster pops up. I almost left the book at the store just because of that. But I brought it home anyway because WHAT IF IT'S GOOD? I want to read it, so it's going to climb to the top of the reading pile.

Because it's important to remember that the talents displayed by others does not denigrate or limit the talent we may have, whether displayed or latent. We should strive to develop our talents and celebrate when others, even irritating polymaths like this, display excellent talent for the rest of us to enjoy. Their talent does not diminish us or ours. We should instead be inspired by that talent to better our own. That's where I am to be.

That Pretty Much Sums it Up for Me

 

I'm reading "The Town," by Australian author Shaun Prescott.

It's got echoes of Kafka, but in the small-town setting where nothing really happens and nothing that anyone there does matters, I'm getting more of a Groundhog Day vibe. But without the humor.

Not to say I'm giving up on it. I'll keep going. But it really is falling hard for the "small town people are either tragic losers or losers in that they don't realize how much of a bunch of losers they are" trope, and it's not all that entertaining.

Maybe it'll get better.

Stephen Ambrose: Americans at War

When I opened this book and saw the first essay concerned the Civil War, I wasn't sure I wanted to read it.

But Stephen Ambrose being Stephen Ambrose, and me being a stubborn reader who doesn't like to give up on books, I read. And read. And kept on reading.

Ambrose, in 252 pages, takes the reader from the U.S. Civil War to today's world, accurately predicting pilotless aircraft and conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and shedding light on the events and figures in America's wars from the mid-1800s into the future.

I enjoyed his profiles of Douglas MacArthur and George Patton as a World War II buff.

But his essays on the homefront and later on the My Lai massacre were the best parts of the book.

Ambrose, in only a few dozen pages, took me beyond the rah-rah of a nation united into a nation I vaguely remember reading about in some of the history books we had a home: Fighting a racist war against Japan while maintaining a segregated army and putting Japanese-Americans into prisons for the duration. He took us from Franklin Delano Roosevelt hoping to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible to advocating for firebombing cities in the hopes it would end the war sooner.

Mistakes sown there led to similar mistakes in Vietnam, where racism continued to bubble and mixed signals really fuddled the mission of the US in that nation.

Ambrose, of course, has the advantage of looking back at history to see the rights and wrongs, but also reminds us that we have no control over the past and that the only control we have on the future is remaining aware of what's going on now. He mentioned this quote from humorist James Thurber, and it's really stuck with me:

That's something I'm going to try to remember myself.

Don't Push the Red Button or Pull the Dangly Cord

From Stephen Ambrose's essay "Struggle for Vicksburg: The Battles and Siege that Decided the Civil War."

Cocksure no doubt.

The text:

The Indiana and the Illinois units came over the barricade north of the railroad and captured a gun. Private James S. Adkins of the 33rd Illinois, exhilarated by the bloodless victory, leaped astride the gun tube, waved his elbows up and down at his sides, and crowed like a rooster. Then, curious, he tugged at the lanyard. The gun went off, hurling a shell close over the heads of the units coming up in support, and bucking Adkins head over heels into the dirt. Miraculously, no one was hurt.

Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods"

I tend to take Bill Bryson with a grain of salt, as I get the feeling he's more of an exaggerator than a truthful reporter of the real.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book, though the humor he's often credited for comes off a lot as snark and smarm in this one. When reading Bryson, I always have the feeling he has never met another human being who has met up to his lofty standards, and that's wearing as you read his interactions. Maybe there's less mileage to be had through reporting pleasant interactions, or that we all as flawed humans remember the people we didn't like better than the ones we did.

That's just my take, I guess. I try to have a better view of humanity, though I often fail at is, particularly as I navigate the streets and marvel at the idiots I have to share the road with. There's a little of that Bryson superiority in us all, I suppose.

One caution with this book: Katz, Bryson's hiking companion for portions of the books, swears a bit. Not egregiously, and it does make him feel a bit more human than Bryson ever does. I didn't necessarily want to put up with the language, but at least the character of Katz felt real, and might come close to being the only character in the book that met Bryson's expectations.

Aw Shucks, Part 2

So I found "The Will Rogers Book" at a local thrift store and figured I'd give him a whirl. He's a name kind of on the edge of my realm of knowledge and I knew he was lauded as the cowboy philosopher.

As I read the mini biography in the book, I initially scoffed at the claim that he was a major movie star. Then it hit me -- major in the silent era, with much of his filming happening in the 1920s and 30s.

The more I read his story and his writing, the more it hit me: He'd fit right in the social media age. His quips are short enough for Twitter, his personality homey enough to feed the Boomers on Facebook and his slick embrace of the new and unusual enough to make the crypto bros look at him for maybe a few seconds. He might have even minted his own LassoCoin.

He even died relatively young, crashing with pilot Wiley Post in the newfangled airplane shortly after they landed in a lagoon near Barrow, Alaska, when they got lost in a storm and stopped to ask directions.

Or maybe not. That's most likely me looking at his cornball through a modern lens.

And he is a bit cornball, echoing some of the crackerbarrel philosophy anyone who read Sinclair Lewis' books would be familiar with. He might be a star today, but certainly with the older folk, though some of them might call him woke.

So the book was okay, if definitely sounding a hundred years old.

A Non-Tom Holt Tom Holt Novel

Something unexpected tonight: I finished reading a Tom Holt book that didn't read like many of the other Tom Holt books I've read.

While there was a love story - seems common to his stories, even if the lovers are numpties - there was none of the following:

1. An uncannily capable hero.

2. An uncannily capable hero who should have been a fish out of water but who instead adapted remarkably well to the circumstances.

3, A television reporter keen on getting the big story but generally there to flit around like a ninny.

4. Any mention of Dounreay Nuclear Power Station.

Those elements are as common as the letter E in all the other Tom Holt books I've read, but were absent in The Portable Door. Which made the story that much more enjoyable.

Paul and Sophie are the numpty loser central characters, hired by an old, mysterious firm to do what appears to be useless busywork that would make the Terrible Trivium from The Phantom Tollbooth blush.

As they stumble through organizing spreadsheets and scrying photos for bauxite deposits, they soon learn the secrets of the firm they work for and their putative powers that will probably remain putative.

The story's a slow burn; the eponymous portable door doesn't make an appearance until halfway through the book, and doesn't get used until there are only about a hundred pages left. True to form, it's used numptily.

The climax of the story spools out quickly, which was fantastic for a Tom Holt novel.

The copy I had, early on, had the naughty words crossed out, but as I kept reading the censoring disappeared, probably a sign that a former owner gave up on the story. I could do without the words myself, but I liked the story (I'm kind of a numpty myself).

I Want My Spandex Jacket

As I finish reading Peter Stark’s “Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire,” I’m impressed to make a few comparisons to our day.

Astor was, of course, a businessman. A businessman with an expansive vision, which pushed his enterprise, with some support from the United States government, into untractable wilds in search of wealth for one and a cultural and political foothold in rich, disputed territory for another.

It’s difficult not to compare him to Elon Musk who, with his dabblings and vision (I’m not going to discuss the “rightness” of either his or Astor’s vision here) embarks on similar enterprises today.

As Astor looked to the Pacific Ocean for wealth, Musk looks to Mars – lately, the Moon – with similar ambitions. In both cases, there appears to be tacit approval by government, but, as Astor found out, not a lot of material support behind that approval. Maybe Musk is finding differently, at least in government contracts. In Astor’s time, the fledgling United States government, led by Thomas Jefferson at the onset of Astor’s adventure, then by a more cautious James Madison at the end, was too young and immature to do much of anything but look at the maps and dream.

Today’s government, with vastly greater resources, seems limited not by resource, but by resolve and is distracted by a thousand banalities to the point even life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seems more limited in scope than in the past.

There was, of course, great risk in establishing “empire” on the Pacific Coast. Lewis and Clark had only completed their initial journey from the East to Fort Clatsop and back a few years prior, and left enough acrimony among those along the way that those who followed had to take even greater risks to make the same accomplishments.

At the end, Astor managed only to plant a seed – his fort, successfully established at Astoria, sold under duress to the British during the War of 1812. But by mid-century, Americans were on a steady flow to Oregon overland, and political disputes were settled in 1846 with England ceding the southern portion of Oregon Country to the United States.

Whether Musk is planting any Moon- or Mars-bound seeds is open to conjecture and likely years in the offing, if at all, as government-supported exploration of anything beyond Earth orbit by manned spaceflight has evaporated since the 1970s. (Yes, Artemis did a Moon flyby in 2026 with a manned landing mission planned afterward, but whether anything will come of those efforts is also lost to the vaporous attention of government and man, Musk included, as his own SpaceX is now boasted as 93% an artificial intelligence company.

As a kid, I fully expected the option to work and live on the Moon as an adult. As an adult now, I can see that’s not likely to happen to the common schlub within my lifetime, nor likely within the lifetime of my own children, as even the greatest adventurers and entrepreneurs and governments seem bent on recreating the same stupid mistakes made in the past rather than looking united toward a better future.

On that train of graphite and glitter,

Undersea by rail.

Ninety minutes from New York to Paris,

By ’76, we’ll be A-OK . . .

Dreams of utopia from the 1950s, it seems, are as far away now as they were then. And the little government and little businessmen with little visions aren’t likely to carry us there anytime soon.

I want my spandex jacket.

I Capture the Castle - It *Is* A Kissing Book

 

So here's the deal: This book is indeed a soppy romance story featuring, at the end, an English Ignatius J. Reilly who gets locked in the dungeon of an ancient castle tower until he writes the second book of his genius career and the family is set back on kilter, or at least as much on kilter as the family could be.

I liked it. It felt a little ponderous and wandering, but at least it had a plot, unlike John Crowley's "Little, Big," to which I compared the book earlier this year.

If you want eccentric rural with a lot more humor, pick Stella Gibbons' "Cold Comfort Farm," but this book had a slow charm of its own, and built nicely toward the end when I suppose we should be cheering that someone connects with someone else. And they do, in ways you expect because that's how the expectations were set up waaaaaay at the beginning.

Dodie Smith does keep the story going, however, something Crowley didn't seem bothered to do. But it could have used a lot more of Gibbons' humor.

First Person POV? A Bit Hard, Even for A Good Book

When I started reading Robin McKinley’s “Dragonhaven,” it made me angry.

First of all, first person. Not my favorite point of view for a book. I’m hard-wired a bit to avoid that.

Second of all, the voice. Very scattered. Very slow to come to the point.

But I suppose, after finishing the book, that was the point.

The protagonist is, of course, young. And while versed in many things related to dragons, not really versed in writing.

So the longer I read, the more the point of view and the voice fit. Yes, at times, it was like trying to read one of my younger students’ essays, typical stream of consciousness garble that they usually are. They wear me out. Sometimes you have to read a paragraph, or a series of paragraphs, over and over again to get the gist, and even then you’re not really sure.

That’s what this book felt like, start to finish. Not necessarily how I would have done it, but clearly McKinley made a choice and she stuck with it. It certainly lent her character a unique voice.

I worried at times, however, that the voice got in the way of the story. I can be a demanding reader, and this story demanded a bit more than I actually got.

Remembering the main character’s name? Really hard to do. I got it in the last 40 or so pages.

Being able to tell but a few characters apart? Not really. That was hard, but as the POV is written from kind of an egocentric point of view, maybe that’s mission accomplished.

I’ve read a few other McKinley books and will stick with those. This one tells a good story, but the approach to it was a bit too grating for me to get into it.

Don't get me wrong: This is a good story, telling an interesting tale. McKinley is a strong writer, rich in dragon lore that's historic and contemporary and a bit of her own invention. I just had a hard time with the approach, that's all.

Book Review: Tales of the Peculiar

Finished reading this book today, and highly recommend it.

I haven't read any of Riggs' other books, though the titles are familiar.  This one caught my eye at the local thrift store based on the illustration, and there are a lot of them throughout the book. The illustrations are by Andrew Davidson, maybe a distant relative. Anyway, anyone with that name is a winner in my book.

Two tales in particular stood out, principally for the morals they embody. The Locust is probably my favorite; a tale on honestly loving those that surround us. Right behind is The Man Who Bottled the Sun, which should be read and ignored by every oligarch on the planet because it couldn't possibly have any bearing on their behavior.

This one's a keeper.

We'll See; I'm Pretty Dense

When I saw this at the local thrift, I knew it was coming home with me.

Not because I think I'll be able to understand any of it -- I peeked into the book before I bought it and saw algebra equations. But I'm gonna try.

Thus far, I'm on shaky ground. I understand the metaphor of lighting striking simultaneously in two different spots on train tracks and the light from the strike we're choo-chooing away from arriving later (relatively later) than the light from the strike we're approaching. On our minute scale the difference is less than negligible, but at interstellar distances, yeah, it makes sense.

But boy, with the first two chapters focusing - I think - on teaching me that we exist in a comprehensible three-dimensional space nearly going over my head, my hopes of understanding the rest aren't high.

Are They *Really*?

The Guardian is trying to get me upset about the loss of trade paperback books.

Their story sez:

But the era of the “pocket book” is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.

Romero, who grew up in the working-class, Latino and industrial city of Hialeah, Florida, says: “I don’t remember a bookstore. I had the library in Miami Springs across the bridge but in Hialeah around us, what was in walking distance because we didn’t have a car, was the Publix [supermarket] and sometimes we would get books from Goodwill [thrift store] as well.

“They had that democratic aspect to them where you can just find them anywhere and it always felt like it was the pick ’n’ mix candy-type store where there is something here for everyone, whether it’s the Harlequin romance novel or something very pulpy like a sci-fi or horror novel that you could quickly get.”

I'll admit: I don't remember book stores either. I mean, we had Pioneer Book, sure. But I was a big borrower from the library, and sneaked books off the classroom shelves in elementary school. While I do remember buying books from a grocery store as they describe here, they were exclusively Peanuts comic strip books.

When I was serious about buying books, it was the thrift store. Deseret Industries, one of our local thrifts, occasionally ran sales when they had too many books and I could come home with ten for a dollar. Those were heady days.

I still shop a lot there for books, abut also hit up used book sellers on the Internet as well. As far as I'm concerned, there is no book shortage.

I just bought a new little pile last weekend. It's fun.

A Dog for All Seasons: A Reflection

Note: This is less of a review, more of a personal reflection.

“Oh. That book,” my wife said when she saw me holding our copy of “A Dog for All Seasons” by Patti Sherlock. “You do know the dog dies at the end?”

Sorry for the spoiler. But as it’s a book about a dog, we all pretty much know how it ends. Because that’s pretty much how every book about a dog – or any animal – ends. Sure, not “Rascal,” by Sterling North. But damn few else.

And, in the end, we all know Rascal died too.

Thus is the nature of living, whether with animals or humans. Life passes. And we’re rarely prepared for the end of it. Dogs, who live in the moment, maybe have the better point of view, at least in the realm of mortality.

Once immortal, maybe we can learn things from each other.

Our own dog Dottie, now sixteen years old herself, gave us a scare last week, tumbling down a flight of stairs to end up in a shaking, crying heap at the bottom.

I’m not sure I liked how I reacted, yelling chastisement at the dog for not waiting for me to pick her up before she went pell-mell down the stairs, because picking her up is just what we do now when any amount of stairs are involved. She won’t ascend the four wooden steps on the back porch and balks usually at going down them, so I have no idea why the fourteen carpeted steps to the basement were so appealing that day.

So I was mad. Surely she didn’t understand the words, but knew the tone, and that is not what she needed. Chastisement in the moment rarely helps when all we really need is comfort.

Madder still it happened after hours, when no vets were open to see her. Madder still she woke crying during the night and I sacrificed sleep to hold her in my arms as we both fitfully tried to get some rest, waiting for the sun to crawl over the horizon.

Our vet was booked, so we took her to a vet we’d used previously until our emergency backup dog, Daisy, quailed at the ride there, knowing each time she was riding to her doom. We picked a vet closer to home so the anxiety of the trip was as short as the several-block trip.

The vet gave Dottie some pain meds and a cautious bill of health, and for the most part she’s been fine since. But I still don’t like that I yelled.

It didn’t help that at the bottom of the stairs Dasy was too fixated on getting her nightly rawhide to bother with her injured sister, and that I hurled the treat bag at our oldest, asking for help in a less-than-nice voice.

So when George kicked Duncan, the dog in Sherlock’s book, I felt a wince of regret. Never mind I’d stayed up that night cradling that little idiot dog in my arms after the fall. I’d hollered at her. Not what she nor our oldest needed at the time.

But that’s what pets do. They bring joy and laughter, sadness and pain. It’s what all creatures do. I can imagine God wanting to pick up our shaking forms at the bottom of a metaphorical staircase we’ve just tumbled down, irritated that the help that was forthcoming was ignored or the counsel given was forgotten, even momentarily.

“For those of us who have been loved by a great dog, who have, in turn, loved the dog back, we can say, and this is not too large a statement, we have known Glory in our lives,” Sherlock writes at the conclusion of her story.

Glory, indeed.

And maybe, when inevitably the dog passes and is with us no longer, a little bit of grace as well.

The Last Battle

It's been a while since I read a good World War II history, and when I saw this title by Cornelius Ryan on the shelf, I knew I had to have it. I really enjoyed his "A Bridge Too Far," and expected this book would be in a similar vein, with looks from both on high and on the ground for the battle of Berlin.

It did not disappoint.

I'm stunned at the amount of access he appeared to have to documents, photos, and people from all sorts of walks of life and alliances as he complied this book. I suppose that's a great sign of an excellent journalist and researcher.

Some of it was hard reading. Not because of the prose, but because of the subject matter. I appreciate this is war and that ugliness happens, but damn some of what he wrote about was terrible stuff. He did concentrate the worst of it into one section of the book, which made it easier to bleep over when things got too nasty.

Best Service by Friendly Staff

I love finding bookmarks people leave in the used books I buy. This has long been my favorite, from the New Merry Guest House in Bangkok, Thailand.

It came to me in a copy of Richard Adams' "Watership Down," clearly left there by a human who went on adventures or at least thought the business card would be a good bookmark.

Of course, back in the late '80s early '90s, discovering whether such a business still existed in a faraway country was nigh on impossible unless I wanted to make a phone call, but late '80s early '90s me was even less likely to make such a call than the me that exists currently.

So I turned to Google Maps.

The address itself, 18-20Phra Athit Rd, does indeed exist, and judging by the nearby river and the proximity of the Chana Songkram Temple, I do appear to have the right place.

And it looks like it's still a guest house, though under a different name:

The temple mentioned on the card if, of course, still there:

As is the bank, albeit under a different name:

So if I ever visit Thailand, I'll be strongly tempted to use this particular hotel to stay in, cause I feel like I already know it. All thanks to a guy who left the business card in a book he discarderd.

Book Review: The Dirks Escape, by C. Brandon Rimmer

I'm going to be a little more cautious with this review than I've been on others, because I don't want to denigrate the families that experienced this awful situation.

First, the cover:

I'm an absolute sucker for World War II nonfiction, particularly Holocaust literature. And the word "Holocaust" certainly appears on the cover of this book.

However.

The Holocaust -- the actual Holocaust -- is mentioned in passing in this telling. But the characters are certainly not "fleeing from the specter of the Holocaust." They are a family of German Lutherans fleeing the Soviet occupation of East Germany, yes, but the Holocaust plays no role whatsoever in their story.

I imagine -- I hope -- this was more of a marketing trick on the part of the publisher than a misdirection of the part of the author, but you never know.

So take that in mind as you read this book.

Told as a tale of a family fleeing Soviet occupation, this story works. Like many functionaries who were even moderately successful during the War, Gerhard Dirks was a member of the Nazi party, though it's made clear on some kind of Scientology level that his membership was more perfunctory than ideological, at least as it's presented in the book. Nevertheless, live under occupation would not have been pleasant, so Nazi or not I'd have want to have left as well.

There was a lot more telling in this book than showing, which makes it a bit harder to read. This might be more of a service to the books' intended audience (it's also sold as a conversion to Christianity from atheism, and is reviewed by Billy Graham on the back cover). The audience might not want a more vivid telling, as is typical in about 99.9% of the World War II books I've read.

So a good read, but go in with lower expectations than the cover might demand.

Also, Rimmer: