BookLinker

2011-11-17T13:48:00.000-08:00

Well, I've added the Prologue to the excerpt of The Jesuit Letter...Enjoy!

2011-09-10T18:34:00.000-07:00

Well it has been a somewhat lengthy time since I last updated BookLinker.

The delay was not without reason.

Late in 2006, I moved book reviews off of my priority list, for purely selfish motives. At that time I started working on my own writing project. With only a limited amount of spare time each week to spend on my writing, I elected to focus on my personal project and see where it took me.

Now five long years later, I have a completed manuscript piled in front of me. The book is The Jesuit Letter. It is historical fiction, approximately 112,000+ words and set in 1575 in Elizabethan England.

The story tells the tale of ex-soldier-turned-player Christopher Tyburn, who finds himself entangled in a murderous conspiracy when he intercepts a coded letter from a hidden Jesuit priest in Warwickshire.

I have posted the first two chapters as excerpts on the sidebar, so feel free to click through and have a read. As per the message on the sidebar, I am currently seeking agent representation with an aim for eventual publication.

Making this excerpt available online is a bit of an experiment, a “message in a bottle” cast into the ocean to see what happens.

If you do happen to be a reputable literary agent, or know of one that you can recommend or introduce to my work, please feel free to do so via email.

Thank you for visiting Booklinker and please let me know if you enjoy the excerpt!

2006-07-14T00:07:00.000-07:00

Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte

"He was not the most honest or pious of men, but he was courageous. His name was Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, and he fought in the ranks during the Flemish wars. When I met him he was barely making ends meet in Madrid, hiring himself out for four maravedis in employ of little glory, often as a swordsman for those who had neither the skill nor the daring to settle their own quarrels. You know the sort I mean: a cuckolded husband here, outstanding gambling debts there, a petty lawsuit or questionable inheritance, and more troubles of that kind. It is easy to criticize now, but in those days the capital of all the Spains was a place where a man had to fight for life on a street corner lighted by the gleam of two blades."

So begins Arturo Perez-Reverte's stellar tale of a former soldier turned street-sword for hire in Spain's Golden Age. Originally published in Spain where it sold mroe than a million copies, Perez-Reverte's work has now crossed the Pond and has made its debut in a superlative and evocative English translation.

Ex-soldier and blade-for-hire Diego Alatriste y Tenorio is hired through intermediaries to waylay and murder two English travellers to Madrid. Privately instructed by one of his paymasters to merely wound the travellers, when Alatriste, touched by their honorable conduct, allows the travellers to live, he finds himself the target of a vicious conspiracy out to destablize the tenuous peace between Spain and England...with the Inquisition furiously pursuing Alatriste for reneging on his deadly bargain.

Captain Alatriste paints a marvelous swashbuckling historic picture of Madrid in Spain's Golden era, evoking the splendid colorful swagger of the streets with the politics and factions orbiting the Spanish courts. The book brings poetry, excitement, romance and a smooth textual verve that must be read to be truly understood and appreciated.

The second book in the series The Purity of Blood is already on the shelves and a film version of Captain Alatriste is apparently now in the works with Viggo Mortenson in the title role. My recommendation for some good summer holiday readings is to crack open Captain Alastriste and let the smooth heady prose of Arturo Perez-Reverte work its magic. You will not be disappointed.

For an excerpt from Captain Alatriste, check out Arturo Perez-Reverte's own site.

You can also pick up some Spanish rapiers online....

Take a virtual walk through the Golden Age of Spain or read up about the era at the ever dependable Wikipedia. Check out Cerventes here or dive into his work at the Cervantes Project.

Interested in visiting Madrid? Check out Mad About Madrid for a fascinating look at the city (including an Alatriste tour of the city...).

Thank you for reading BookLinker!

My apologies for the present dearth of posts but between getting reading for a house move and my own book project, I am far behind in my reviews. More will be coming, and with better regularity.

Comments and feedback are always welcome!

2006-03-10T16:21:00.000-08:00

Illicit : How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy by Moises Naim

You probably didn't think, that time you downloaded an MP3 online or bought a bootleg DVD of the latest Hollywood release, that you were tied into one of the most dangerous and potentially destablizing political and economic forces on the planet...

Illicit by Moises Naim, takes a long, hard look at a new phenonoma in the international arena - the role of traffickers and trafficking networks in transforming politics, economics and borders. Naim, the Editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, has penned a darkly intriguing look at the underground economy of trafficking. Illicit looks a the intricate, intertwined worlds of smuggling, illegal migrants, narcotics, organ-legging, the international sex trade, slavery, the arms trade, money laundering, weapons of mass destruction and counterfeit goods.

Naim makes a strong case that the same value-chain enabling technologies that permit the Wal-Marts of the world to exist, have also given birth to illicit and illegal networks and enterprises - from Al Quada to pirated software. He traces the connections between points of international instability, legitimate trade, weak governments and porous borders and the rise of highly flexible, de-centralized networks that transcend state boundaries.

These networks are not Pablo Escobarean-style structures, run by a single boss, but rather a loose and ever-changing adaptable network of illegal and legal enterprises that can recombine, shift and take advantage of the restrictions inherent in states and state bureaucracy. They are, in essence, entrepenuerial power set free. They are networks - connections - the goods being trafficked are secondary to the linkages and capabilities the traffickers demonstrate.

One example Naim cites is the underground nuclear trade network of Abdul Quadeer Khan, Pakistan's father of the Islamic bomb. Khan's commercial network shipped centrifuges to Libya (uncovered in 2003) using, among others, a Malaysian enginnering firm, a Swiss engineer, a Sri Lanken intermediary, and a partially-owned British-owned Dubai corporation. The centrifuge was shipped on a German-registered ship.

The ability of these networks to heighten political instability, particularly in regions with marginal governmental / state controls or in regions where those particular states are weak, corrupt or permeable, is very high. Columbia, Peru and Bolivia for cocaine; Afghanistan for heroin; South Africa and Israel for illegal organs; China for counterfeit goods, software, DVD's, clothing; migrants from Africa and Asia; prostitutes from Hungary; optical disks from Ukraine...the list is endless and it is not just consumer goods but commercial industrial goods and medications.

Here's a quick excerpt description of Transdniester, a breakaway region of Moldova:

"Weapons are to Transdniester what chocolate is to Switzerland or oil to Saudi Arabia. Some countries export oil and gas, others, cotton or computers. Transdniester exports weapons - illegally. What kinds of weapons? Vast quantities of Soviet shells and rockets. Newly manufactured machine guns, rocket launchers, RPGs, and more, produced in what are described as 'at least six sprawling factories'".

Moldova has little to no authority over Transdniester. The region, which holds much of Moldova's industrial capacity, is essentially run by a family-owned company - the Sopranos writ large. They supply endless streams of weapons clandestinely around the world, a function previously controlled by and occupied by state players, now gone entreprenurial in the post-Cold War world of the 21st century.

Naim links the rise in trafficking networks of all types with other transnational networks such as Al Quada and offers the strong suggestion that where one is found, the other is not far behind. He also outlines the difficulties in fighting these criminal networks with the highly centralized, nation-based bureaucracies that now exist (i.e. Homeland Security) and the frictions and problems they face manifest in the fact that they are merely states. For the illicit networks of the world, borders and regulations spell opportunity. They are not going away. They are driven by high profits and markets not by morals. Like it or not, the Sprawl is now here.

In short, Illicit is probably one of the most important books for anyone looking to understand this "brave new world" which we inhabit, and the new influences and players operating within it. I seriously recommend you crack it open...it will make you think carefully about connections the next time your download your tunes.

I also recommend cracking open The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman. Reading both books gives you a fairly complete picture of the impact, both legal and illegal, that freed-up, easily-moving capital and supply can have on the world's economies and on political stability.

Wondering where Moldova is? Wonder no further....

Thanks for reading BookLinker! Comments & feedback are always welcome.

2006-01-11T20:58:00.000-08:00

The Devil's Teeth : A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks by Susan Casey

"When a two-ton animal takes a taste of you, it doesn't do much good to apologize." - Peter Benchley

25 miles from where customers order tall lattes and casually sip cappachino's in Ghirardelli Square amid the noisy commerce of Fisherman's Wharf, a 400-million year old predator hunts.

The Devil's Teeth is a gripping and voraciously readable piece of work that looks at the Great White Sharks of the Farallon Islands, nicknamed The Devil's Teeth. A ragged, storm-tossed and desolate set of islands located 27 miles due west of San Francisco, the Farallon's are home to innumerable seabirds, a large colony of sea lions and one of the few known migratory gathering places for Great White Sharks.

Written by Susan Casey, The Devil's Teeth is one of the very best books of 2005. Captivated or obsessed, depending on your perspective, Casey ventures to the Farallon Islands to report on the Great White Shark study of biologists Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson. Venturing daily into the choppy environs that is the Farallons, the author joins the biologists in their dangerous work, tagging along after predators "so old they predate trees". Here's a brief excerpt:

"The killing took place at dawn and as usual it was a decapitation, accomplished by a single vicious swipe. Blood geysered into the air, creating a vivid slick that stood out on the water like the work of a violent abstract painter. Five hundred yards away, outside of the lighthouse on the island's highest peak, a man watched through a telescope. First he noticed the frenzy of gulls, bird gestalt that signaled trouble. And then he saw the blood. Grabbing his radio, he turned and began to run.

His transmission jolted awake the four other people on the island. 'We've got an attack off Sugarloaf, big one looks like'."

Casey's strings prose together in an intelligent, brisk and highly readable style, dropping elegant nuggets of shark lore, background on the Farallon's history (an "egg-station" where seabirds eggs were profitably gathered for years), and details on the Farallon shark study into a well-researched, well-written tome that draws a reader in and refuses to let them go until they too, start to wonder obsessively about these sepulchral denizens of the deep.

Reading the book, it occurred to me that I still didn't have a really good grasp on the sheer size of the Great White, so my seven-year old son and I took our measuring tape and his colored chalk and sketched out a life-size shark (based on Casey's measurements of "The Sisters", a group of older Farallon female Great Whites) on the sidewalk in front of our house. The scale was daunting to say the least and generated a new appreciation within me for both the biologists who daily ventured onto the sea to study the beasts, and a new respect for the author's obsession.

Just for fun, we added a life-size diver at the mouth end...passerbys were duely impressed.

I highly recommend The Devil's Teeth, it is a great read.

For more on sharks, check out the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation and visit this site for info on the Great Whites. Scared to hit the beach? Be sure to visit the Florida Museum of Natural History's Shark Attack List.

Drop by the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Shark exhibit for a look at the myths and realities around sharks and shark behavior and be sure to watch these guys for some clues to Shark behavior..

Thanks for reading BookLinker! As always, comments and feedback are always welcome.

2005-12-24T14:45:00.000-08:00

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Chapter 1 - Marley's Ghost

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot -- say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance -- literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the ware-house door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often came down handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, ``My dear Scrooge, how are you. When will you come to see me.'' No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blindmen's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, ``No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master! ''

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call nuts to Scrooge.

Once upon a time -- of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve -- old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

``A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!'' cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

``Bah!'' said Scrooge, ``Humbug!''

Click here for more humbug!

Merry Christmas, Happy holidays and Happy New Year from BookLinker! All the best!

2005-12-16T19:55:00.000-08:00

The Golem's Eye (Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 2) by Jonathan Stroud

Something strange is afoot in London.

Nathaniel, once a mere magician-in-training, now a rising star in the government, is faced with two vexing problems - first, track down a small and persistant group of underground rebels threatening the stability of the magician's government and, more importantly, find out who or what is behind a mysterious and destructive series of magical attacks now rocking London.

The Golem's Eye is the superlative sequel to Jonathan Strauss's terrific The Amulet of Samarkand. Nathaniel must once again call on the services of the wily, shape-shifting djinni Bartimaeus, in all his devious and humorous forms, to unravel the mystery. The unlikely team of the ambitious student magician and the cynical, wise-cracking 5,000 year old djinni makes for a solid and involving page-turner. In this outing a new character is thrown into the mix - Kitty, a young leader of the resistance - whom Nathaniel must find. Toss in a dangerous, secretive mission to the enemy City of Prague, a deadly hidden menance that the resistence accidently unleashes, and the cold, devious ambitions of an unseen enemy within London itself, and even a djinni with the myrid skills of Bartimaeus ccould find themselves taxed.

Struss has written a fabulously original series of books with the Bartimaeus trilogy, the best magical series since Harry Potter. The new book, Ptolemy's Gate is due out in January 2006 and I for one, will be picking it up as soon as it hits the shelves. They are excellent. Here's a quick excerpt:

"The magician went a bit gog-eyed with forboding; rightly so as it turned out. The smoke coalesced into a muscular black form, some seven feet high, complete with four waving arms. It shuffled slowly around the perimeter of the pentacle, testing for weaknesses.

And to its evident surprise, found one.

The four arms froze for a moment, as if in doubt. Then a dribble of smoke emerged from the base of the figure and prodded the edge of the pentacle with experimental care. Two such prods were all it took. The weak spot was pinpointed: a little hole in the incantatory barrier. Instantly the pseudopodium extended forward and began to stream through the breach...

An instant later, both pentacles were empty, except for a tell-tale scorch where the magician had once stood and a charred book lying beside it.

Throughout the summoning chamber, there was stunned silence. The magicians stood dumbfounded, their clerks limp and sagging in their seats....

We higher beings began a cheery and approving chatter. I exchanged a few remarks with the green maisma and the stilt-legged bird.

'Nice one.'
'Stylishly done.'
'That lucky beggar. You could tell she could hardly believe it.'"

Be sure to visit The Bartimaeus Trilogy online for some additional excerpts.

Wondering what a 'golem' is? Wonder no longer...

Want to find out how to summon one of Bartimaeuses' kindred? It's not recommended but hey, do what you want. Check out this site or this one...but no guarantees.

Thanks for reading BookLinker!

2005-11-27T22:32:00.000-08:00

The (Incomplete) Iraq / Afghan War Reading Review

It might be a bit of hubris to offer up a review for this many books in one fell swoop. Indeed given the sheer volume of publications on the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, particularly in the last year, any type of comprehensive review becomes... well, fairly subjective by sheer necessity.

My list is no exception.

The books below were selected for a number of different reasons (in one case because the cover just looked so damn interesting). I don't pretend that they cover the complete gamut of available books on the subject, or that they cover the complete range of political viewpoints on the war. My selections were driven by a long-standing interest in history, politics, and current events; a belief in humanity, previous good experiences with several authors, recommendations from various sources and by following my nose and my instincts on what looked worth cracking open and spending my time. I've dumped out of this review almost as many books as are included within it, mainly because they didn't impress in content or in writing quality, or because the books selected did a better job of telling that particular story. You have to draw the line somewhere, or we'll be here all day.

I don't expect people to agree with me on either my selections or my opinion - hey, it's a book review. You buy your ticket, you take your ride.

The books selected for the review were deliberately selected to cover a range of topical areas - from the battlefields to the backrooms of the White House, to the slums of Baghdad. I've always been a believer that proponents of a black and white worldview were trying to sell me something...and I generally like to make up my own mind on most things (except when my wife makes up my mind for me...). Garnering a range of information sources is the best way to develop some level of understanding but I don't pretend that I can ever know the real story, just a reflection of it.

Generally the best place to start is at the beginning, so for a good background source I recommend reading Rick Atkinson's excellent account of the first Gulf War, Crusade (reviewed previously here). It's useful in providing some context for the events today and, despite the many people wanting to paint the current conflict as one uniquely and entirely driven by George W. Bush, there are a number of forces at work and none of them are either simplistic or operate in a vacuum.

For a unique and deeply fascinating look at the backdrop behind the decision to go to war in Iraq, Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack provides a terrific "fly-on-the-wall" look at the decision-making process within the Bush White House. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty but even with this in consideration a disturbing pattern seems evident within the decision-making process of the administration that lends credence to the questioning of some of the elements behind the decision to go to war, particularly in the swift manifestation of that decision in the wake of 9/11 and the deliberate effort to interpret sometimes flimsy evidence as a smoking gun.

Woodward makes the most of his access and bases his account on exhaustive research and more than 75 interviews with high ranking officials including George W. Bush, Colin Powell and others. Despite the occasional misstep and a fairly dry and turgid writing style, the account is comprehensive and compelling.

Also of note is Richard A. Clarke's involving narrative Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror which touches briefly on similar issues (namely the swift determination of the administration to war on Iraq following 9/11 and the efforts to link Saddam to the 9/11 hijackers. Clarke's book offers an insiders look at the shadowy War on Terror and paints a disturbing picture of the early Bush White House as blithly unappreciative of the potential dangers of Al Quada and coldly manipulative of it as an opportunity in the aftermath of 9/11.

Less helpful is Clarke's failure in the book to cast a real light on the failings of the Clinton administration in recognizing the danger and the evolving threat of terrorism within the global community. You can cite the domestic political issues faced by Clinton as much as you want as an excuse for distraction, but the harsh reality is that his administration (though it did more than anyone previously) failed miserably in assessing and managing the threat. But, as was noted previously, hindsight is always twenty-twenty...

Lastly Imperial Hubris, originally published anonymously but later revealed to be written by Michael Scheuer, a CIA Middle-East expert, pulls no punches in lambasting the current public perception of the issues, heaping significant scorn on Bush's reasoning behind the war on terror and on the invasion of Iraq, calling for instead a much geographically wider, much more targeted effort (yes, using substantial military force where necessary) to defeat the Islamists and to reduce the political and strategic environment that lends them support. Imperial Hubris is a polemic, and not an altogether comfortable one, but one that seems intent on skewering all sides of the debate and forcing as many sacred cows as possible to be tossed out.

With the advent of the war against Al Quada and the Taliban in Afghanistan, a good background primer on the region is an absolute necessity. I heartily recommend Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, and Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia by Karl Ernest Meyer. These two works will give you the historical background. Then go and read some Kipling for the flavor...

For a more contemporary look at Afghanistan, the rise of Al Quada and Bin Ladin, crack open Steve Coll's superlative Pulitzer-Prize winning Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (detailed review can be found here). I also recommend Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile (also reviewed here). Both books are characterized by strong research, excellent writing and a highly involving look at the last thirty-years of Afghan history and its bitter aftermath.

The war against the Taliban in Afghanistan was an extraordinary one, by any definition, made moreso by the relative dearth of U.S. forces on the ground for much of the conflict. U.S. Special Forces played a key role in the Northern Alliance's overthrow of the Taliban regime and the relatively swift victory that ensued, bringing their battlefield expertise, communications, language, organizational skills, and their innovative, evolving warfare techniques to bear.

Linda Robinson's Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces takes a
careful look at the activities of the U.S. Special Forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, although the book is in actuality an overview of their activities across other operational theaters such as Panama, Kosovo, Somolia, and more.

Robinson pulls together a solid account of the Special Forces, weaving together interviews with more than 30 special forces operators and delving into and contrasting the attitudes and approaches found in the Special Forces with the mainstream military forces.

By contrast Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda by Sean Naylor may have your gnashing your teeth in frustration as you read this taut, well-written account of a U.S. operation in the Shahikot mountains of south-east Afghanistan. Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down has helped drive a literary resurgence in intricate, well-researched and deeply involving accounts of battles and Not a Good Day to Die is written in a similar vein.

It is a highly engrossing, moving and involving account of Operation Anaconda, a large strike against a Taliban/Al Quada stronghold that goes dramatically wrong. Naylor's book gives a comprehensive account of how, despite all the technology and the firepower, planning can go seriously awry and how, although new technology can create more and better battlefield intelligence, the same technologies can result in information overload, coommunications friction and serious command-and-control issues.

The War in Iraq has been, by contrast, very different from Afghanistan.

John Keegan's book The Iraq War provides readers with a sound strategic and diplomatic overview of the events leading up to war, particularly in helping readers understand the context of the war, the process of the diplomatic dance and the directions of the major players.

Keegan doesn't treat the "march to war" as a process that occurs in isolation, but does a good job of drawing in the many and varied elements that contributed, not the least of which was Saddam's horrific record of human rights abuses, his wars with Iran, Kuwait and the Kurds and his overall history of belligerence. Keegan, one of the world's foremost military historians and the author of such works as Intelligence in War and the superlative The Face of Battle, has penned a dry, somewhat pedestrian work but one that provides a good and exhaustive viewpoint that is free of much of the overt political bile that mars some of the U.S. publications.

Beyond Keegan's contextual work, there are a wide range of publications that cover the actual events of the war itself. The use of "embedded" journalists provided a number of writers with the opportunity to experience the war in a way quite frankly unprecedented since World War II and at a level that lends itself to often highly personal accounts, albeit ones that are sometimes skewed through the narrow and oft-times constrained perspective of the particular journalist.

One of the first books released after the conclusion of the war (the overt formal hostilities at any rate) was The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the 1st Marine Division by Ray Smith and Bing West. Smith and West are both former Marines who traveled with the 1st Marine Division, at the "point of the spear", from Kuwait to Baghdad. Smith and West do an solid job chronicling the dangers and uncertainties the Marine's faced on the march however the book suffers from a decidely uneven editing job at points that detracts from the overall narrative. West and Smith offer little commentary on the political or diplomatic particulars of the war but offer an honest and revealing look at the men placed in harm's way.

Strangely enough, while reading The March Up, I was struck at one point with a startling and eerie sense of recognition as the authors described a skirmish that I had listened to live, courtesy of CNN and my local radio station, while driving to work one day. The contrast was jarring, disturbing and unnerving, listening to a war unfold within the banality of the everyday.

There have been a wide variety of publications being penned by the various embedded journalists but one of the better works was Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War by Evan Wright. Wright, a writer for, of all publications, Rolling Stone Magazine, was also embedded with the Marines, specifically with the First Reconnaissance Battalion, the leading unit of the invasion (nicknamed the "First Suicide Battalion" for their position ahead of other U.S. Forces and for their role in racing ahead to trigger suspected ambushes).

Generation Kill has energy, verve and above all a taut sense of reality caught up within its pages. Wright pulls few punches, portraying the Marines, warts and all, delving into their attitudes and opinions on the war, their fears and hopes and personalities. As for the war itself, Wright builds a vivid picture of the mixed bag that was Iraq - the strange melange of little and futile organized resistance interspersed with vicious and intense Fedayeen attacks, and the horrific ongoing accidents of small groups of Iraqi civilians wandering into the crossfire. Brutally honest, involving and at times wrenching, Generation Kill is an well-written, highly charged piece of work.

In the Company of Soldiers : A Chronicle of Combat by Rick Atkinson is another example of embedded coverage. In this case Atkinson, the author of arguably the best account of the First Gulf War, Crusade, and of An Army at Dawn, was placed with the 101st Airborne Division commanded by the larger-than-life Major General David Petraeus. In the Company of Soldiers spends far less time looking at the war as a whole, as with his previous work, and little time on the individual soldiers on the battlefield.

Atkinson focuses the work on the senior commanders, looking at the logistics, planning, decision-making, communciation and adaptability of the 101st's command structure. Petraeus comes off as a caring, charismatic and intensely competitive leader and the overall image of the U.S. field commanders is one of high professionalism although there is a sense that Atkinson might have been better served in spending an equivalent amount of time with the men in the field. As a sketch of the decision-making and leadership qualities, it is a solid, but unexciting piece of work albeit not as encompassing as Crusade nor as far-reaching as An Army at Dawn.

Thunder Run by contrast is a pure battlefield account, and possibly one of the best written since Black Hawk Down. Thunder Run is a rousing and detailed account of the armored strike on Baghdad, following the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, the Spartan Brigade. A "thunder run" is an rapid, fast-moving armored attack, designed to punch through enemy defenses in a highly aggressive manner. Written by David Zucchino, Thunder Run offers an intense front-seat view of modern armor at war. The traditional strategic doctrines governing the use of armor and the "thunder runs" were, ironically enough, effectively turned on their heads when carried out in Iraq.

Zucchino pulls out subtle details on the men, the machines and the realities of war, capturing both the turmoil and the tragedy in equal measures. He also serves to shed light on one of the more erroneously reported and infamous incidents of the war - the shelling of the Palestine Hotel - offering a through after-action report with a number of witnesses to the incident, laying to rest the reports of a deliberate assault on the media. Here's a quick excerpt:

"The division had just completed the fastest sustained combat ground march in American military history - 704 kilometers in just over two weeks and 300 kilometers in one twenty-four hour sprint. It was April 4, 2003 and Jason Diaz from the Bronx - budding army lifer, husband of Monique, father of little Alondra and the twins, Alexandra and Anthony - was weary and filthy and longing to go home. But now, on this cold starry night, he was obliged to demand even more from his exhausted crew and his overextended tank. He had just been ordered to take them straight into Baghdad."

Thunder Run is, quite bluntly, a terrific read.

Beyond the battlefield accounts and the "embeds" are another set of stories penned by a handful of reporters who remained behind in Baghdad after the war began. The Fall of Baghdad by John Lee Anderson is a highly personal, very evocative, gritty and well-written account of Baghdad before, during and immediately after the war. Anderson draws a careful and nuanced account of his days in Baghdad, sketching out the often narrow path that individual Iraqi's have had to tread between a dangerous and rampant advancing superpower and the ruthless internal security apparatus of the Saddam and the Baathists. Through experience, interviews and trenchent observation, Anderson has built an effective and gripping picture of life in the final days of Baghdad, putting an all-too-human face on the people at the other end of the rifle sight.

By the time you finish The Fall of Baghdad, you are left with a decidely mixed taste in your mouth regarding the invasion - it rid Iraq and the world of Saddam and the apparatus that supported him - but the question of what impact the occupation will have for the peoples of Iraq is decidely uncertain. Anderson's book is not an overtly political work, it is not an anti-war or pro-war polemic, but rather concerns itself with opening a window on the conditions, thoughts, hopes and fears of the people of Iraq. Some of the messages are unpleasant and unsettling, but they do need to be heard and Anderson's work is a well-written and rich first step towards a better understanding of the situation.

Naked in Baghdad by Anne Garrels is another solid first-person account of Baghdad at war. Anne Garrels was the NPR correspondent in Baghdad, gamely sticking to her reportage throughout the war, one of only 16 non-embedded reporters who stayed in the capital during the war. Based out of the Palestine Hotel, she dodged her Iraqi minders, cajoled the bureaucracy, scrounged supplies, and roamed the city trying to pull together stories in the face of U.S. bombing and missle strikes and a relentless Iraqi propaganda machine.

Garrels work lacks the depth of content and insight that laces through Anderson's account but her book remains a vivid and highly readable account. Interestingly enough, it too touches on the U.S. shelling of the Palestine Hotel - from the receiving end of the shells. Overall Naked in Baghdad is a fascinating personal account but at the end of the day is more of a war diary.

Overall the books covered in this brief and incomplete reader review are all well worth your time and will help you gain a better comprehension of the events that have occurred and are daily unfolding. The one element I would recommend is that you make an effort to read outside of your comfort zone, whatever side of the political fence you may find yourself on.

For more on Iraq I recommend checking out some of the many first-hand accounts of the warzone. Here are a few notable ones:

Back to Iraq by Christopher Allbritten is a weblog started by a freelance journalist who went "stumbling around Iraqi Kurdistan" in 2002 and again in 2003 during the war. He is now based in Baghdad covering the post-war events for Time Magazine. He offers a solid and involving look at the tensions of living and working in Baghdad, and some fascinating insights into the evolving Iraqi political situation.

Michael Yon's Online Magazine site is another freelance independent reporter embedded with the U.S. Forces in Iraq. Yon's work is tense, tight and highly readable, providing a window into the lives of the men on the ground and the war they face that goes far beynd the regular media.

Also notable is Kevin Sites blog of his activities in the warzone.

For other miitary bloggers of note - check out The Mudville Gazette, which provides an exhaustive and comprehensive mil-blogger list, Blackfive, CounterColumn , and The Indepundit (formerly Lt. Smash when he was in Iraq...).

Beyond the mil-bloggers, check out Riverbend, Healing Iraq, and lastly Dear Raed (the famous Iraqi blogger who blogged from Baghdad throughout the war,. His site is now in hiatus).

If you are interested in more news from Iraq, check out Iraq Daily .

All of the above sites come with fairly extensive links to additional sites, so please feel free to browse (hey, its the world wide web ain't it?) and surf. There are some fascinating sites out there and some terrific writing hidden away online in obscure little corners.

Lao Tzu once wrote that the Tao which we can perceive is never the true Tao. I fully expect that people reading this review list from all sides of the political spectrum will say "yes but he didn't read this..." or, more bluntly "this guys is full of sh*t..." and you know what...I am. You may read all of the books reviewed here and totally disagree, you may think the selections from this list leave off some spectacular works and include some ridiculous ones...Great! Go crack open a book and read one! Send me a recommendation! Write your own take on things! A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, before you know it a damn civil discussion might have broken out and who knows, dare I say it - some ideas might be exchanged, despite the differences in opinions.

One reason I decided to post this review was the sheer level of acrimony and posturing I've seen demonstrated on the web from all sides of the political spectrum. They are less interested in building up their understanding of the situation, the issues and the moral choices, and more interested in tearing down and using the events for gain in their arguments. I'll be blunt - I have no idea who's right and who's wrong and on the issues regarding the war, I'm particularly torn, galloping madly off in all directions at once, idealism, pragmatism, hope and cynicism, all pushing and pulling.... Reading these works is my effort to get a handle on the ideas being tossed about, an anchor of sorts amid the rhetoric and idiocy.

I hope in the end you check out some of the books.

Thanks for visiting BookLinker. I hope you've enjoyed the post. Please feel free to link and add comments...and if you can please make an effort to support the site by clicking on some ads or making your holiday purchases from Amazon here.

Bye.

2005-11-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

Lest We Forget

For our king and our country and the promise of glory
We came from Kingston and Brighton to fight on the front line
Just lads from the farms and boys from the cities
Not meant to be soldiers we lay in the trenches
We'd face the fighting with a smile - or so we said
If only we had known what danger lay ahead

The sky turned to grey as we went into battle
On the fields of Europe young men were fallin'
I'll be back for you someday - it won't be long
If I can just hold on 'til this bloody war is over

The guns will be silent on Remembrance Day
There'll be no more fighting on Remembrance Day

By October of 18 Cambrai had fallen
Soon the war would be over and we'd be returnin'
Don't forget me while I'm gone far away
Well it won't be long 'till I'm back there in your arms again
One day soon - I don't know when
You know we'll all be free and the bells of peace will ring again
The time will come for you and me
We'll be goin' home when this bloody war is ended

The guns will be silent on Remembrance Day
We'll all say a prayer on Remembrance Day
On Remembrance Day - say a little prayer
On Remembrance Day
Well the guns will be silent
There'll be no more fighting
Oh we'll lay down our weapons
On Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day - Bryan Adams

2005-11-02T20:58:00.000-08:00

Bucks & Blogs

I've been posting book reviews on BookLinker for just under three years now and have now now passed a significant threshold, nay, a Rubicon of sorts...BookLinker is now officially IN THE MONEY!

Yes, after nearly three years, 67 book reviews and approximately 180 hours of work (review writing time, site maintenance etc.), BookLinker has now OFFICIALLY reached the magic number of $10.00 worth of referral fees as an Amazon Affiliate.

Who says you can't make the big bucks blogging?

Why is $10.00 the magic number? It is the minimum amount that Amazon requires before they will actually bother to send a check....

Interestingly enough, the ratio works out to one Amazon purchase for every 1,000 visitors.

Seriously, BookLinker was never started as a money-making enterprise, but as an opportunity for me to mix two things - my love of books and an opportunity to hone my writing skills on something other than marketing materials. The $10.00 is just a nice bonus!

Just to put it in perspective, my blogging efforts have earned me the princely sum of approximately $0.055 per hour.

Here is what I may eventually be able to purchase with my hard-earned Blogging Bucks:

1). My very own private 8.3 acre Bahamian island called Kalabash Cay for a mere US$995,000 or approximately 19.9 million hours of work. At roughly 2.69 hours per written review (plus site maintenance etc), I need to review only another 7,397,702 books.

Oh wait....that calculation doesn't include reading time. Damn.

2). A silver F430 Spider Ferrari for a mere US$198,667. This little toy would have me toil only 3.97-million hours or a miniscule 1,482,589 reviews.

Well the best things in life are free...but the expensive ones are still worth a look.

3). Fly into space with Virgin Galactic for just US$200,000. Technically shouldn't it be called Virgin Orbital, or Virgin Interplanetary? Either way, its only a paltry 3.6 million hours worth of blogging labour or 1,398,601 reviews. Dare I blog myself into space? Space is beckoning, a mere US$199,990 away!

I could go on, listing the many items that will be forever beyond my blogging revenues but I prefer to view this as a watershed, a triumph. In reaching that magic $10.00 mark I am probably ahead of 7-million other blogs! Eat my dust!

Enough already, where's the damn mailman with my check?....What do you mean I don't get it until the end of the quarter?!?

Thanks for reading BookLinker! And on a serious note thank you to all my site visitors and to the terrific customers who purchased product through the site, thus allowing me to claim a blogging victory of sorts to my beautiful wife.

Oh, please remember, Christmas is comings, so try to make all of your online gift purchases through BookLinker! Maybe I can hit $20 by Year 4....

2005-10-30T22:38:00.000-08:00

Make Love* The Bruce Campbell Way by Bruce Campbell

"Hail to the King, baby" - Bruce Campbell as Ash, Army of Darkness

Bruce Campbell, author of If Chins Could Kill, the most original autobiography out of Tinseltown, has struck again with an "autobiographical" fiction, an implausible "what-if" with a premise to shake the very pillers of heaven...Make Love* The Bruce Campbell Way asks that most singular of questions -- What happens when a schlock-heavy, lantern-jawed, quip-laden B-Movie star like Bruce Campbell lands an "A" film?

Unexpectedly landing the lead role in a new Mike Nichol's romantic comedy (called Let's Make Love), Campbell is cast as a wise-cracking Southern doorman, dispensing sage relationship advice to a star-crossed Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger. He immediately starts making his presence known, researching his role as a doorman; running afoul of Colin Powell; teaching Richard Gere how to stage a real knock-down, drag-out punch-up; sourcing stunt cars for Nichols; dispensing unrequested advice to Renee Zellweger on sexing up her wardrobe and generally and liberally spreading his B-movie wisdom about like lawn fertilizer.

Broadly written but servicable, Make Love* The Bruce Campbell Way doesn't pretend to be literature. Campbell is, however, very, very funny, in his own peculiar twisted style, and Make Love* The Bruce Campbell Way, while it is never going to win an literary prizes, is something that most prize winners aren't - a fun and enjoyable read. Just don't expect Tolstoy.

For more info on Bruce Campbell and his multitudinous filmography, check out the always excellent Internet movie Database (IMDB) (Did you know that Richard Gere's middle name was Tiffeny?), or drop by Campbell's own website for an excerpt from the book and some words of wisdom on life in B-moviedom. You can also check out his work as Coach Boomer in Sky High or as the irritating theater usher who refuses entry to Peter Parker in Spider-Man 2.

Thanks for dropping by BookLinker! Comments. links and feedback are always welcome. Please try to make you Amazon purchases through us and support the site!

2005-10-04T22:57:00.000-07:00

Old Man's War by John Scalzi

Heinleinesque.

There. Now that "that" is out of the way, John Scalzi's Old Man's War is a gripping, enjoyable military science-fiction novel who's sole major fault is that it feels too damnably short.

The title is unfailingly accurate - it is the story of an old man's war. Join the Army, see the Galaxy, meet exotic aliens...and, well, kill them. Seventy-five year old widower John Perry takes a second shot at life and abandons Earth to enlist in the Colonial Defense Forces. Conveniently dropped into a new enhanced body, Perry is soon hip-deep in a decidely Darwinian conflict between various sentient species for habitable planets. The story arc follows the predictable set-up - boot camp (of a sort), first combat, the progressive hardening of the character through more varied combat experience.

Though the story arc is a familiar one, Scalzi has peppered his work with an abundance of nifty concepts, social commentary, technology and some interesting twists on the usual aliens, as well as tight writing and good characterization (and a slightly sick and off-beat sense of humor).

Aside from the story length, the only quibble I had plotwise with Old Man's War was the black-and-white, everybody versus everybody vision of the OMW's universe. This reads as a bit shallow and unbelievable - not because I couldn't believe in a Darwinian universe - but because I would have expected that the conflict would not be quite as simplistic as it seems portrayed here. I would have expected more alien species using different evolutionary tracks to succeed (i.e. some parasitical etc.) rather then just straight-forward violent competition...but hey, that's me.

If you are looking for more military science fiction to read, check out the Baen Free Library, courtesy of Baen Books (Note: not the publisher of OMW - that would be Tor Books) . The Baen Free Library includes works from such authors as David Drake, John Ringo, and David Weber (for the excellent Honor Harrington Series). I also recommend the old classic Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein if you haven't read it yet (note: I've linked to the version with the classic cover, not the trashy movie cover version) and as a bonus, I recommend my personal favorite Heinlein - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

I also recommend avoiding Paul Verhovan's film version of Starship Troopers which, although I know some view it as a great exercise in satire, utterly and steadfastly manages to avoid any of the elements that make Heinlein's book a good read.

If you are interested, check out Scalzi's own website at www.scalzi.com and read the "Whatever" for some occasional scathing commentary, interesting tips on writing (and selling your writing) and info on other upcoming works. As I understand it, the sequel to Old Man's War entitled The Ghost Brigades is complete and heading for release in 2006. I for one will be waiting.

Thanks for reading BookLinker! Comments, links and feedback are appreciated. Please support the site by clicking on our ads and making your Amazon purchases here.

*UPDATE* - As I am now starting to gather irritating amounts of spam in the Comments (i.e. see comment 1), I have activated Blogger's comment verification system. This should stop future spam but annoyingly Blogger offers no editorial control over existing individual spam postings so I can't delete those existing suckers....Please feel free to now post your pithy, erudite and thoughtful comments in a spamless environment.

You may now resume your regular programming.

2005-09-11T23:04:00.000-07:00

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

This is the oddest good book I've read in many a day. Reading it, I have the impression that Sarah Vowell and Mary Roach would get along like a house on fire...

Assassination Vacation is Vowell's exploration into the twisted annals of, well, Presidential assassinations, specifically Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. Vowell's odd fetish drives her on pilgramage, visiting innumerable assassination-linked locales, including the obvious ones like Ford's Theater and the more obscure such as Fort Jefferson prison on Dry Tortugas Island (where Dr. Samuel Mudd was held for his role in the Lincoln assassination), the National Museum of Health and Medicine, the Oneida Community of New York, the back roads of Maryland (and the assassination linkages found in a roadside diner's placemat and the Maryland state anthem) and even venturing up to the wilds of Buffalo (where McKinley met his demise).

Vowell's writing is tight, droll and astute, catching both the gravitas and the absurdity of both politics and history, one moment musing on the magnificence of the Lincoln Memorial and the next noting that the addition of the reflecting pool screwed up the lighting in the memorial - making Lincoln look as those someone was shining a flashlight up his nose. Of particular note is Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln who, like some dreadful jinxed Presidential Nemesis, found himself present at all three of the assassinations. Also new to me was the odd fact that Charles Guiteau (Garfield's mentally disturbed killer) blamed the doctor's at the trial for Garfield's death, claiming that he had merely shot the man, the doctor's were the ones that killed him (which, strangely enough, they did, through probing Garfield's wound with non-sterile fingers and instruments).

This odd literary pilgrimage delves into almost every conceivable "relic" of the assassinations, tracing torn bits of clothes, Presidential skull fragments, Booth's escape route and many, many side-trips into trivia, politics and culture, making a superlative, highly readable and fascinating blend.

Assassination Vacation is a page-turner, simply because you want to find out where Vowell will be dragging her readers next.

For more information on Abraham Lincoln, check out Lincoln Online, visit Ford's Theater, or check out John Wilkes Booth here. There are a number of Lincoln assassination sites on the web such as The Abraham Lincoln assassination Page (which includes (for CSI fans out there) info on Booth's autopsy), and a site with a collection of the legal trial documents.

For more on Garfield (shamelessly ignored online compared to Lincoln), visit Wikipedia, check out Georgetown University's Special Collections for Guiteau's letters and learn about Alexander Graham Bell's link to the assassination here.

For McKinley check out History.Net, this site, and the National Park Service site.

By way of interest, here's a list of the 18 attempts that failed....

Interestingly in addition to being an excellent (if obsessive) writer, Sarah Vowell is also the voice of this young lady...

Strange girl.

Thanks for reading BookLinker! Support the site and make your Amazon purchases here! Yes this means YOU!.

Links and comments are always welcome.

2005-08-08T23:21:00.000-07:00

The Closers by Michael Connelly

Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch is back where he belongs, rejoining the LAPD after three years in exile as a private investigator. Bosch is dropped into the Open-Unsolved Unit, the "closers", a squad focused on cold cases - unsolved homicides - tracking down a DNA hit from a 17-year old murder of a teenage girl.

The Closers is Michael Connelly's 11th mystery featuring Harry Bosch and he delves into it with all the verve and strength of the previous novels, building a deepening mystery that slowly unfolds and develops. Connelly's Bosch is dogged, resourceful and persistent, bring his own tattered and haunted past to bear on uncovering the truth behind the killing, while tracing the echoing wake of the tragedy on the family and friends of the young victim.

The 'cold case' concept seems to be in vogue now, partially due to the success of television shows like CSI but The Closers does an excellent job building the reasoning, logic and evidence behind the case, and dropping in a enough mysterious twists to give life to the storyline that goes beyond just being a solid and robust police procedural. Well written, well-paced and taut, The Closers is well worth your time.

One notable relief in the book is the absence of any Hannibal Lector-type serial killer, a characterization that is frankly all-to-frequently used in murder mysteries - to the detriment of both the mystery and the skills of the author at drawing more vivid, purpose-driven characters, rather then another remorseless, uniquely twisted cartoon caricature. Much of the current crop of crime fiction that is replete and obsessed with serial killers reminds me a little of how the Agatha Christie school of murder (exotic poisons, locked room mysteries, esoteric motives...you get the picture) was so very out-of-touch with the real world. It took Raymond Chandler's mysteries to bring murder back to the street, back to real motives and real weapons, with real passions that spoke to the experiences of the world. Here's hoping that Connelly and some of his fellow authors are finally moving away from the serial killer writer's trap.

For more background on the author Michael Connelly, drop by his official website.

Check out Bosch's employers at the LAPD Online. For that matter learn a little bit more about Bosch's namesake Hieronymus Bosch, a painter termed by Carl Jung, the "master of the monstrous".

Lastly if you are still interested in reading serial killer mysteries, you might want to check out Elliott Leyton's classic book Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer for the definitive real-world portrait.

Thanks for reading BookLinker. Be sure to support the site by making your Amazon purchases here. Comments and suggestions are always welcome!

2005-07-28T23:25:00.000-07:00

"It was a gloomy, tempestuous period between sunset and sunrise...."

Yes it is that time again, time for deathless prose to fall drippingly from the hissing neurons of a thousand writers brains as the results of the 2005 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are released!

The competition honors the memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" and for the opening words of his wonderfully wretched work Paul Clifford (1830) which opened with "It was a dark and stormy night..."

Full results can be found at the Bulwer-Lytton website but here is a quick selection of some of the best of 2005:

"The night resembled nothing so much as the nose of a giant Labrador in excellent health: cold, black, and wet." - Devery Doleman, Brooklyn, NY

The golden-haired dawn curled back the fading face of night in a perpetual coiffure like an Ace comb in God's hand parting the day, making pompadours of mountains, crew cuts of Kansas wheat fields, and trendy cuts of the oceans' rolling waves. - Gordon Grant, Savannah, GA

Our fearless heroine (well, mostly fearless: she is deathly afraid of caterpillars, not the fuzzy little brown ones but the colossal green ones that terrorized her while she was playing in her grandmother's garden when she was just five or six years old, which, coincidentally, was also when she discovered that shaving cream really does not taste like whipped cream) awakened with a start. - Alison Heft, Lititz, PA

Long, long ago in a galaxy far away, in General Hospital born I was, and quite happy were my parents, but when a youngling still I was, moved we did. - Mary Potts, Oneco, Fl

She was standing weepily at her father's grave in the old family cemetery, where the ancient headstones tipped and tumbled like a flock of spring lambs, when she raised her weary eyes to see a shirtless man, his mighty thighs clutching the loins of a raging steed whose breath came hot as a desert wind, and made a mental note to get her hairdryer repaired. - Nancy Lee, Chapel Hill, NC

And finally the Grand Prize Winner:
As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual. - Dan McKay, Fargo, ND

Once you are done laughing, drop by the the Bulwer-Lytton website for much, much more!

Thanks for visiting BookLinker!

2005-07-27T23:38:00.000-07:00

Flashman On the March by George McDonald Fraser

"When all other trusts fail, turn to Flashman"- Abraham Lincoln

"For an instant, even I was appalled. But only for an instant." - H.P. Flashman

When Sir Harry Flashman (VC, KCB) finds himself in desperate need of a quiet and quick exit out of Trieste ("ain't much of town unless your in trade or banking or some other shady pursuit...") to duck the enraged uncle of yet another amorous conquest, he ends up escorting a load of silver intended to support the British Expedition to Abyssinia in 1868. And with that, the twelfth packet of the Flashman Papers begins...

Flashman On the March is the latest Flashman novel penned by George MacDonald Fraser. Fraser lifted Flashman wholesale out the famous Victorian book Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. In Hughes book, Flashman was the bullying, cowardly tormentor of Brown and his friends at the Rugby School, before being expelled for drunkeness.

Fraser has asked the timeless question: what happens next? And so began the Flashman Papers, Harry Flashman's unvarnished memoirs, set down in Flashman's old age. The long-running series of historical fiction (the first of which appeared in 1968) traces Flashman's illustrious career in the British Army, dropping him into most of the major historical events and almost all of the unmitgated military disasters of the era.

Flashman, though bluff and bold-faced in appearance, is a caddish, bullying, womanizing coward who manages, through luck, knavish skill and consummate acting, to find himself hailed as a Victorian hero in the first book. The remaining books follow a similar formula with Flashy trying desperately to get out from under while maintaining his dauntless facade and reputation, lecherously pursuing every available female in reach and pocketing any "blunt" and credit he finds along the way. His adventures include escaping the destruction of the British Army in Afghanistan in 1842 (where he accidentally develops his heroic reputation), skulking through the Sikh War and Soboran, bedding Lola Montez during the Schleswig-Holstein crisis, battling Skrang River pirates in Borneo, keeping the mad Queen of Madagascar happy, and instigating the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. Other honors include the Indian Mutiny, the Taiping Rebellion, the March on Beijing, Little Big Horn and the American Civil War (serving on both sides, no less). And that really just covers the major engagements....

In Flashman On the March, Flashman finds himself reluctantly hooked into the British Expedition to Abysinnia. The Abysinnia Expedition was one of those stranger-than-fiction events that lurk in the back annals of history. Launched expressly for the purpose of rescuing a handful of British hostages being held by Emperor Theodore, the Abysinnia Expedition saw 12,000 British troops travel deep into the interior of Abysinnia to face down Theodore's army.

Flashy finds himself cajoled by Robert Napier ("Bob the Bughunter" as Flashman terms him) into journeying into the interior to cement a secret alliance with the Gallas, preventing Theodore and the hostages from escaping the British by cutting off their retreat. Needless to say, Flashy finds himself on the sharp end yet again, ducking out on his enemies, cavorting with his female guide (also a jealous contender for the Galla throne), hobnobbing with the insane Emperor Theodore, and generally behaving with a reckless disregard for honor, duty or anything but the preservation of his own skin and reputation.

Flashman is very refreshing...and utterly politically incorrect. Fraser has gifted him with an unmitigated honesty that tars all the players involved with equal amounts of scorn, blame and praise (where necessary). Flashman provides Fraser with a worthy pawn for history's canvas and allows him to weave Flashman's disreputable adventures seamlessly with real historical figures (thus we've seen Flashman annoying Lord Cardigan, trying (and failing) to befuddle Lincoln, hoaxing Bismark into a boxing match...and many, many more escapades) helping to bring both the historic characters and their times into new light.

Here's a brief excerpt:

"You gather from this that I was in a tranquil, optimistic mood as I set off on my Abyssinian odyssey, ass that I was. You'd ha' thought, after all I'd seen and suffered in my time, that I'd have remembered all the occasions when I'd set off carefree and unsuspecting along some seemingly primrose path only to go head first into the pit of damnation at t'other end. But you never can tell.

I couldn't foresee as I stood content in the bow, watching green fire foaming up from the forefoot, feeling the soft Adriatic breeze on my face, hearing the oaths and laughter of the Jollies and the strangled wailing of some frenzied tenor in the crew - I couldn't foresee the screaming charge of long-haired warriors swinging their hideous sickle-blades against the Sikh bayonets, or the huge mound of rotting corpses under the precipice at Islamgee, or the ghastly forest of crucifixes at Gondar, or feel the agonizing bite of steel bars against my body as I swung caged in the freezing gale above a yawning void...

Aye, it's an interesting country Abyssinia"

The Flashman novels are more then just an adventurous farce however. Fraser's descriptions of Flashman's many battles quite literally take the reader into the heart of the fight, presenting, alongside the humor and comic aspects of Flashman's adventures, a deep and abiding feel for the horror, chaos and confusion that permeates the martial engagements. Given that Fraser fought in Burma in WWII (see "Quartered Safe Out Here", his war memoirs for details) in an environment that had far more in common with 19th century warfare then with the 20th, it is not surprising that he can bring both a historian's acumen and personal experience to bear on events.

Fraser's latest Flashman book (and frankly all the books in the series) is a throughly enjoyable romp and highly recommended.

For some information on Abyssinia, check out the Abyssinia Cyber Gateway. Intersted ina quick primer on Abyssinnia? Check out the ever dependable Wikipedia.

One of the many figures who pops up in Flashman's latest is George A, Henty, a British author who basically started the "boy's own" series of adventure novels in the 19th century. Henty also wrote about the Abyssinia Expedition (and accompanied it)in The March to Magdala. You can peruse some of his works online here, but alas, not his book on Abyssinia.

There's a fair number of Flashman sites online including The Royal Flashman Society of Upper Canada, The Flashman Society, and the Royal Flashman Society of Southwest Virginia, which includes the Flashman Macropedia site which is bursting with Flashman background and trivia.

Lastly, here's a peek at Tisisat Falls, which plays a key role in Flashy's latest tome and provides yet another opportunity for Flashman to give readers keen insight into the deplorable depths of his character...no I'm not going to explain it, but it is, bluntly, classic Flashman.

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2005-06-27T22:57:00.000-07:00

102 Minutes : The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer & Kevin Flynn

It is shocking to look back and absorb that it only took 102 minutes. Almost 4 years later, we are still dealing with the fallout.

102 Minutes serves up a well-written, absorbing and highly detailed, moment-by-moment account of the 102 minutes from the impact of Flight 11 until the collapse of the second tower. Dwyer and Flynn, two reporters for the New York Times, have drawn on interviews, first-hand accounts, radio and 9-11 phone transcripts, cell phone and email messages, and official reports, to put together a staggeringly detailed and vividly realized account that weaves together lives, observations, stories and testimony into an absorbing and comprehensive whole.

102 Minutes is a very difficult book to pick up and even harder to put down. The book traces the events of the day, the paths of the survivors, the observations, structural forensic engineering studies, and the many heart-breaking communiques of the trapped. 102 Minutes is THE account to read.

Of particular note is the authors work at examining the base causes that often determined who lived and who died - both from the engineering side, examining the construction of the towers - and the short-sighted, preventable mistakes that ultimately contributed to high losses of rescue personnel in the disaster (of particular note - the lack of coordination between the various police and fire units, the inability of the older radio sets being used to enable communication with firefighters in the towers, the lack of communication between structural engineers who were observing the disaster and predicting a potential collapse - the list goes on...).

The book is strictly limited to the events at the WTC - not covering the attack on the Pentagon or the events on Flight 93 but in covering the WTC the way they have, the authors have put together an account that is hard, but brilliant.

102 Minutes is hard to top, both for the strength of its well-written prose, or for the careful detailed investigation that it reflects.

For more reading on 9/11 I also recommend Dennis Smith's superlative Report from Ground Zero: The Story of the Rescue Efforts at the World Trade Center.

Dennis Smith is a retired New York City firefighter turned author (Report from Engine Co. 92 is probably his most notable work). Smith has written a deeply personal and intensely moving account of the events of the day and the grim aftermath of three months working on The Pile, sifting the wreckage for the fallen and the lost. Smith's story is a chronicle of that loss, pulling out the first-hand accounts of firefighters, police and emergency workers and looking at the emotional aftermath and impact on the NYFD.

Also of note is, naturally enough, The 9/11 Commission Report...

For a good account of the engineering background on the collapse, check out this civil engineering site and for some background on the WTC, check out Great Buildings Online.

Visit the somewhat controversial plans for the WTC Memorial here, or view the site itself through EarthCams.

For still more info, drop by the September 11th Digital Archive. You might also want to have a look at Time Magazine's online photo essay, Shattered.

Thanks for reading BookLinker!

2005-06-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

Himalaya by Michael Palin

"Buddhism is a very steep religion."

This type of trenchent observation is what makes Michael Palin's travels a genuine joy to behold.

Having gone "Around the World in 80 Days", travelled "Full Circle" and traipsed across the Sahara. Michael Palin and his indefatigable BBC crew elected to visit the high peaks of the Himalaya. Covering 1800 miles, from Afghanistan to the China, the Himalaya is the highest mountain range in the world encompassing the top 14 tallest mountains in the world and some 30 peaks higher than 25,000 feet.

Palin and his crew delve into the peaks of K2 and Everest, the mysteries of Lhasa, Nagaland, Nepal, Kashmir, Tibet as well as the fringes of the range in Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass, wandering pell-mell in a 3,000 mile journey that took them the better part of 6 months. Among other areas they trace the major river systems down into India (Ganges), Bangladesh (Brahmaputra) and China (Yangtze), exploring the peoples and the politics that permeate the region. Palin brings his extraordinary good humor, patience and off-beat charm to their travels, whether it is chatting with the Dalai Lama in exile, or watching a cricket match in the high peaks of Nagaland.

One of the most enjoyable elements of Palin's travels is the sheer joy of the act of travel that is clearly evident in his work. The other key element is his focus less on history, geography and poltiics and more on the people that live in the region and their day-to-day lives. He makes deliberate efforts to avoid the usual meetings with authority figures, concentrating instead on the everyday encounters of life and the travails of survival in the high ranges.

In short, Himalaya is fun, effortless read that really does make a reader want to walk a mile in Palin's shoes, or perhaps just alongside him on one of his wayward treks.

You can watch Himayala on DVD, but I also recommend checking out Basil Pao's amazing photography of the journey in Inside Himalaya. He does an excellent job capturing the sheer immensity and scale of the landscape in question.

Find out about trekking the Himalaya here (also with some very nice photography) and here, visit Everest or learn about the culture and anthropology of the region at Digital Himalaya.

Here's a nice satellite image, courtesy of NASA's Visible Earth site, of Everest from orbit...damn big, isn't it?

Find out about how the Himalaya were created at Nova Online's Everest site and check out this famous fellow...no, he's not another member of Monty Python.

Thank you for reading BookLinker! Comments and links are always welcome. Please click on some of our sponsors and please remember to support the site by making your Amazon purchases here.

2005-05-22T22:36:00.000-07:00

The Amulet of Samarkand (The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 1)- Jonathan Stroud

Whenever an author finds exceptional success in their field, it tends to spawn wave after wave of second-rate imitations, generally poorly written and badly executed.
J.K. Rowlings' Harrry Potter series has been no exception. The bookshelves are sagging under the sheer weight of witches, wizards, and magicians - the vast majority of which range from the forgettable and mundane to the abysmal.

There are some notable exceptions.

Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Triology is one of those notable exceptions.

The Amulet of Samarkand introduces us to a different type of magic - gone are the magical school of wizardry, muggles and quidditch and instead Stroud's world draws on a darker source of magic - demonic efrits, djinni and spirits, summoned and controlled through elaborate, cryptic rituals and protections that force the djinni's and many lesser demons into unwilling servitude to those with enough magical knowledge to harness their deadly power.

Enter the two main characters: Nathaniel, a magician-in-training, sold to the government at five and apprenticed to a master magician; and Bartimaeus, a 5,000 year old djinni, summoned by Nathaniel to steal the magical Amulet of Samarkand and effect Nathaniel's revenge on the famous London magician Simon Lovelace. Stroud has created a fascinating Dickensian alternate London, where the government is dominated and ruled by magicians and their magical servants. Rich, intricate, yet with a bleak understory that belies the magical trappings, The Amulet of Samarkand is a terrifically enjoyable read, albeit one with a dark undercurrent, at times too dark for younger readers.

The standout aspect of the book is however the cynical, wisecracking, shape-shifting Bartimaeus, whose character leaps off the page and springs utterly to life. Whether it is musing over what manifestation would be most off-putting for its summoner or cracking wise on the history of magic (much of which is found in the many, many footnotes that permeate the Bartimaeus sections of the book - word to the wise - do not skip reading the footnotes), Bartimaeus is hilarious (and witheringly sarcastic) and nigh on unforgettable. Unwillingly, Bartimaeus finds himself thrown together with Nathaniel and the unlikely pair find themselves taxed to uncover a sinister conspiracy designed to overthrow the government.

Stroud does an excellent job of pulling together a comprehensive tale, alternating the viewpoint from Nathanial to Bartimaeus and building in a nice, well-rounded world, with just enough of the familiar to give the magical world they inhabit some solidity and depth. One notable (and somewhat unsettling) aspect of the book is that the magicians for the most part are an unpleasant, ambitious and power-hungry crew. The question of whether Nathanial will drift into this mindset is one that makes the tale much more ambiguous then is typical.

An excellent book and well-worth a look.

You can visit the real Samarkand online at Tashkent.org or here. You can also drop in on the real London here.

Drop by The Bartimaeus Triology online and read an excerpt from The Amulet of Samarkand and from the second book The Golem's Eye.

Here's a quick magic spell for you (hope it is helpful), courtesy of William Shakespeare:

"Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and howlet's wing,--
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble."

Thank you for reading BookLinker! Comments and links are always welcome. Please click on some of our sponsors and please remember to support the site by making your Amazon purchases here.

2005-05-04T22:38:00.000-07:00

The Devil's Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea

The Devil's Highway, El Camino del Diablo, lies sere, bleak , arid and forbidding, a calescent trail across the Mexican-US border for illegals seeking salvation and opportunity in the north.

The Devil's Highway is the true story of a group of 26 Mexican illegals who crossed the US-Mexican border heading through the desert for Ajo, Arizona on May 19th, 2001. By May 25th, only 12 came out.

Luis Alberto Urrea's book is a powerful piece of work. Urrea can sling a phrase with the best of them, weaving politics, desert myth, history and culture in an evocative, poetic style that captures both the facts and the heavy weight of the heart.

The author paints a horrifying and vivid portrayal of the events on the border, putting names, and faces in place behind the walkers, outlining the hidden necessities and motivations behind the illegal trek north. Urrea puts a human face on both the 400 dead illegals that the border claims annually and on the Border Patrol officers who stem the illegal flood of "tonks" (a name derived from the distinctive sound a flashlight makes when busted over an illegal's head) - sometimes hunting them down, sometimes rescuing them and sometimes burying them.

The Devil's Highway looks at the practices of the smugglers, who for an usurious fee take the illegals over the border to their low-wage jobs in the north and in the case of the Yuma 14 (the dead out of the 26), abandoned their charges to their fate - (first taking all of their customer's cash with them). Urrea also examines the politics and practices of the border (what he terms "the politics of stupidity"), the Border Patrol's approaches and attitudes towards their role (a blend of weary cynicism, professionalism and humanity) and, among other things, what it is like to die of hyperthermia.

Urrea excels in detailing the presence of the Devil's Highway, a bleak and searing hot stretch of forbidding desert that stretches across 250 miles, painting a lasting picture of the character of the land the walkers tried to cross - a desert littered with the bleached bones of countless travelers lured into a quicker route to California. Here's a brief excerpt:

"As long as there have been people, there have been deaths in the western desert. When the Devil's Highway was a faint scratch of desert bighorn hoof marks, and the first hunters ran along it, someone died. But the brown and red men who ran the paths left no record outside of faded songs and rock paintings we still don't understand.

Desert spirits of a dark and mysterious nature have always traveled these trails. From the beginning, the highway has always lacked grace - those who worship desert gods know them to favor retribution over the tender dove of forgiveness. In Desolation, doves are at the bottom of the food chain."

Powerful, terrifying and illuminating, The Devil's Highway is by far one of the best books I've read in several years. Don't just rely on my judgement, it was also up for a Pulitzer.

For more on the Desolation and the Devil's Highway, check out the National Park Services site on the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument - reputed to be the most dangerous national park in the US due to the ongoing smuggling routes that wind across it.

Visit the Cabeza Prieta Wilderness at Wilderness.net or here, and take a close look at the Devil's Highway at Desert USA and the US Fish & Wildlife Service site.

Interested in learning more about the US-Mexican border relations? Check out Borderlands at the International Relations Center for some interesting articles or read Time Magazine's excellent look at the border and the Coyotes . You can also drop by the Border Patrol homepage for a look at how they are fulfilling their role in the post-9/11 era. Be sure to check out BORSTAR which handles the search and rescue across the Devil's Highway.

You can also check out Humane Borders, for a look at yet another player in the borderlands.

For more reading on the borderlands, check out Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of America's Illegal Aliens by Ted Conover, Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border by Sebastian Rotella and Hard Line : Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border by Ken Ellingwood.

Finally, you can visit Urrea's website here.

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Thanks for reading.

2005-04-30T21:54:00.000-07:00

The Sex Lives of Cannibals : Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost

It is a flyspeck on the map, the merest hint of a place, a lonely tropical coral atoll in the middle of a cerulean Pacific. The place is the Republic of Kiribati, in the Gilbert Islands, an island that, while not quite at the back end of nowhere, certainly lives in that general neighborhood.

J. Maarten Troost's book The Sex Lives of Cannibals chronicles his two-year stay on the island of Tarawa. Accompanying his wife (who works for a non-governmental aid organization), Troost meanders into Tarawa with unrealistic expectations of a tropical south seas paradise. What he found was an over-populated, stiflingly hot, polluted (and occassionally toxic) island, infested with stray dogs, lackadasical and corrupt bureaucracy, and an overabundance of La Macarena playing at every turn.

Troost looks at life among the Kiribati (whom he seems to regard with a fairly odd mix of wonderment, fondness, respect and bemusement), moving from varied discussions on the general attitudes towards work, the desperate quest for some island foodstuffs not based on fish, encounters with sharks (and some flotsum that is too disagreeable to outline here), the Kiribati fondness for stray dogs (think back to what I said about foodstuffs...'nuff said), and the daily trials of infrequent and intermittant electrical power, poor water supplies and government bureaucracy. Of particular note is when the beer ran out...on the entire island....for four weeks.

He also, on occasion, seems to have captured part of that particular magic that the south seas seems to possess...

Here's a brief excerpt From The Sex Lives of Cannibals:

"Landing on a rock-strewn strip cleared of coconut trees was exactly as I expected it would be. Terrifying. The passenger door jammed, and we scrambled out through the rear cargo door and soon we began to feel like Martian invaders. I-Matang I-Matang, said a chorus of tiny voices. But they quieted when I bared my teeth, and the youngest even scattered into the bush. Parents in Kiribati tell their children to behave or otherwise an I-Matang will devour them, which has led to the wonderful result that the younger segement of the population believes I-Matang to be cannibals.

I, of course, did nothing to dissuade them."

As an added bonus, the lurid title of the book seems to excite some interest, particularly when reading it on crowded subway trains...again, 'nuff said. All in all a throughly enjoyable, highly funny read.

For more on Tarawa and Kiribati, visit Lonely Planet. Also recommended is Janes Kiribati page and this Kiribati site.

Tarawa was the site of a particular nasty battle in World War II. Find out more at Eyewitness to History and Tarawa on the Web. Visit Tarawa's namesake here.

Want a look at Kiribati? Here is Kiribati and Christmas Island from space....

As always, tell your friends about BookLinker, click on our advertisers and please link to the site! Comments are alwys welcome. Thanks for reading.

2005-04-08T21:06:00.000-07:00

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond

"I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculpter well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

About ten years ago, sweating profusely in the Yucatan humidity and liberally gulping down bottled water, I hauled myself up a vine-strewn pyramid in the Mayan city of Coba, and stared out at the view. Coba was a comparatively new site (only located in the early 70's) and remains somewhat isolated and still, with a few exceptions, pristinely covered in jungle. From our vantage point you could see the remains of another four massive structures that poked out of the green foliage canopy. We watched red kites circling languidly in the humid air and snapped our photos before scrambling back down to mull over the ruins that lay before us. Nothing focuses your attention like a disaster. Ruin is a source of wonder.

Collapse looks at ruin.

Jared Diamond has followed up on his superlative Pulitzer Prize-winning work Guns, Germs and Steel with Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

He is very specific in his choice of titles - Collapse is about the choices that societies make, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, that in the end determine failure or success.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond examined what made certain civilizations succeed, what were the catalysts of their success and growth. In Collapse, he flips the coin and looks closely at what makes them fail, drawing on a number of comparative examples to illustrate his key points.

Diamond looks variously at such locales as modern-day Montana ranch country, the remote Easter Island, Pitcairn & Henderson islands, the American south-west's Anasazi culture and Chaco Canyon, the Mayan Empire of Central American (my old friends from Coba), and the Norse Vikings of Greenland, Vinland and Iceland. Diamond also takes a look at modern day disasters and societal collapses such as the Malthusian events of Rwanda (which he tellingly ties to population overpressure, demographics and the cultural inheritance traditions), the horrific conditions of Haiti (and the telling opposite across the border, the Dominican Republic). He also looks at conditions in Australia, China and his own native southern California.

Diamond postulates five primary sets of factors consisting of: 1)damage people inadvertently inflict on their environment, 2) climate change, 3) hostile neighbor's, 4) decreased support from friendly neighbors, 5) the society's response to the problems. Diamond is careful not to cite a single reason for any collapse, but rather does a solid job of drawing together the varying elements and their collective impact on the society.

Collapse is long and, bluntly, at times a bleak and repetitive read, however Diamond exhibits a solid grasp of his subject, drawing out the particular threads and weaving them together into a coherent and compelling, if depressing, whole. The key role of how societies interact with the environment in their various states of social disintegration is chillingly convincing, particularly the well-documented collapse of Easter Island and the connections that Diamond draws between the factors such as deforestation, environmental stress, and ecological breakdown.

The implications for the near future for modern society is clear and stark - it is choice. Interestingly enough, Diamond refuses to rest as a Cassandra-like prophet of doom and gloom, and spends the remainder of the book carefully examining the tremendous success stories that are also in evidence.

After all the last thing that flew out of Pandora's Box was hope.

Interested in learning more about Easter Island? Check out Rapa Nui, the Navel of the World here, here and here.

Investigate the lost Vikings of Greenland here or read Archaology's online article.

Live in the American South-west? Learn more about the Anasazi and the Chaco Canyon civilization (including their sophisticated astronomical observatories).

Check out the Maya at this site, or learn about Mayan culture at Rabbit in the Moon.

Found this review useful? Please support BookLinker by clicking on our ads or ordering your publications through the site.

Comments, links and feedback are always welcome. Working on the six degrees of separation theory, someone who knows someone who knows someone please impose on Instapundit for a link, I'd love to see the traffic levels rise!

Thanks for reading!

2005-04-05T23:35:00.000-07:00

Click Me!

Dr. Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs...
Dr. Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth...
- Jurassic Park

Sorry, I just couldn't resist.

2005-03-28T20:16:00.000-08:00

The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece -- and Western Civilization - Barry Strauss

"Stifling in the August heat, even at night, Artermisium is a hub of activity. Seen by the light of bonfires, fifty thousand men are at work: here racing to patch damaged equipment, there hauling the bodies of the dead onto pyres, at one point filling water jugs and wineskins at the sprint, at another point leaving messages as disinformation for the enemy, who is close behind them. Some men are buckling on bronze helmets, others are tightening the leather straps of the arrow cases they carry on their backs, while most are holding nothing more than a seat pad made of sheepskin. As the men work, the area's familiar scents of brine, thyme, and pine needles mix with the odor of sweat and the stink of corpses.

The cove is lined, at the shore's edge, with about 250 triremes, moored stern first. From each ship, a pair of ladders comes down and a horde of blistered hands grabs onto the rungs, as rowers pull themselves up toward their seats. The rowers grunts mix with the crackle of firewood, while the cries of the rowing masters drown out other sounds.

The Greek navy is pulling out." - Excerpt, The Battle of Salamis, Barry Strauss

Building a strong and compelling picture of an event in the distant past, of the forces that drove its occurence and of the people that lived through it is not an easy task. Historians as a breed seem often narrow, didactic and detail-obsessed, taking the most fascinating moments and devolving them down to dry and dusty factual points, sending another generation of students drifting into the land of Nod in the back rows of the lecture hall.

The Battle of Salamis is not that type of history book. Barry Strauss has penned a superlative and riveting account of the epic naval battle of Salamis in 480 BC between the Greeks, led by the fledgling democracy of Athens and the canny, manipulative and vain Themistocles, and the overwhelming Persian forces of Xerxes.

Strauss vividly portrays the key individuals, events and circumstances, drawing on chronicles of both participants such as Aeschylus, and the later accounts of "the first historian" Herodotus, among others. The result is an amazingly readable account of the battle, the ships (triremes), the tactics (drawing the enemy into enclosed waters where speed and manuverability mattered more than size...and ramming, lots of ramming), and the long-term impact of the battle through the history of the western world (Greek victory at Salamis = success for democracy).

Strauss's efforts to portray the turning of the battle as one of democracy versus authoritarianism feels slightly overstated given the limitations on democracy at the time in both Athens (and the lack thereof in the other Greek city states) but the long-term historical impact certainly reverberates to this day.

Strauss has mastered the ability to give the reader a feel for the action, normally the strict purview of fiction writers, illustrating the event beyond just bare facts. In his words you can taste the woodsmoke and sweat, feel the thick knot of fear in the rowers stomachs and hear the creak of the oars and the thunderous crescendo of splintering wood before the rams...

Overall Strauss has written a crackling good history that is well worth your time.

Interesting in reading more? On the fiction side, I highly recommend Stephen Pressfield's amazing Gates of Fire, an epic account of the 300 Spartans who faced Xerxes before Thermopylae, The Hot Gates and also (by the same author) the book Tides of War covering the Athenian soldier Alcibiades. Tides of War in particular has a brutal, rip-snorting trireme battle at Syracuse that, in my opinion, ranks with the best of Hornblower as a naval battle scene.

Read Herodotus's account of the Battle of Salamis here, or visit modern Salamis here for a look at the island today.

Interested in learning more about Herodotus, the world's first modern historian (also called "The Father of Lies")? Check out Herodotus on the Web for a comprehensive link list or go to Herodotus's Histories. You can read Herodotus complete works online here.

For some details on triremes visit The Classics Pages, this site , or this one. Want to build one? Check out the Trireme Trust.

Thanks for reading BookLinker!

2005-03-19T22:34:00.000-08:00

The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

"Confusticate those dwarves!." - Bilbo Baggins

I first read The Hobbit at the grand old age of eleven and, at the time, thought it was one of the very best books I had ever encountered. Interestingly enough, more than 25 years later, it still remains a marvelous piece of work in my eyes. As a matter of fact, I just finished re-reading it with my six-year old son and the re-read brought with it the added joy of watching something you grew up with light up your child's eyes.

Chronicling the intrepid journey of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit of the Shire (with just a little bit too much Took in him for his own good) who is shanghaied from his own tea party by a group of thirteen treasure-seeking dwarves and one irascible wizard, The Hobbit is a delightful read. Bilbo is recruited by the wizard Gandalf to become the official "burglar" for Thorin Oakenshield and his twelve dwarven companions, as they journey across the Edge of the Wild to the far distant Lonely Mountain to face the implacable malevolence of the dragon Smaug.

From troll-hollows to the dreary spider-infested forest of Mirkwood, Tolkien has woven a wonderful adventure, leavened with character, humor, spark and a thread of a greater darkness tracing through the story, evident in the hissing fury of the riddling Gollum and in the deep and abiding malice that lurks behind the conversational tone of Smaug.

It is particularly different to revisit The Hobbit after having read Tolkiens' larger, more mythic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, which expanded the world of Middle-Earth exponentially and, to a certain extent, removed it from Bilbo's more comforting adventure and warmer tale.

All in all The Hobbit is about as close to a perfect bedtime read for the kids as you are likely to find on any shelf.

While The Lord of the Rings has been brought to vivid life in the theatres, The Hobbit is apparently tied up in legal wrangling over the movie rights. Here's hoping that Peter Jackson gets the chance to bring The Hobbit to the silver screen in the near future. In the meantime, I recommend the 1978 animated feature which was a solid (if short) adaptation featuring Otto Preminger and John Huston among others.

Visit the Tolkien Society, or to learn something more about the creator of Middle-earth, read J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator.

Here's a real-world hobbit that has scientest puzzled and intrigued...

And here's a dragon to boot..

There are absolutely tons of websites dedicated to the Lord of the Rings films but for the best info, check out theonering.net. Tour Middle-Earth at this site...

You can also find a movie trailer for The Hobbit at iFilm patched together from various sources. No, as far as I know it isn't real ...yet.

Thanks for reading BookLinker. Please click on our ads or make your Amazon purchases through BookLinker to help support the site. Comments, links and feedback are always welcome!

2005-02-23T22:24:00.000-08:00

Blue Blood - Edward Conlon

According to the NYPD website, the New York Police Department currently employs 39,110 cops, a force larger then the standing armies of some countries. At least one of them is a solid writer.

Edward Conlon's Blue Blood takes readers deep into a gritty, street-wise portrait of life in the NYPD, its politics, language, foibles, quirks and characters as well as the relentless nature of the urban police beat.

Blue Blood is part memoir, part history and part journey through the looking glass, tracing Conlon's history and roots in the NYPD, his experiences as a rookie cop in decaying Bronx housing projects, to narcotics stakeouts and the daily paperwork of a detective, the events of 9-11, as well as the day-to-day and life and death issues that cops face on the street. Conlon as a writer is canny and often blunt, offering a welcome perspective on such issues as police corruption and abuse, but also thoughtful and keenly observant, casting an often wry eye on NYPD practices, politics and the criminals they pursue.

Well-written, authentic and nuanced, Blue Blood is a unique, if lengthy, look at life behind the badge.

For more on one of the world's most famous police departnments, drop by the NYPD website. You can also visit the NYPD Police Museum and the NYPD Shop online - for those of you that desperately want a set of NYPD shooter glasses or your own police station. Unfortunately no handcuffs available.

Trace the history of New York's Finest here, or check out The Insider for a look at what is happening in the Big Apple. Check out the view from Times Square, or, if you prefer your New York from a couch - just watch these guys.

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2005-02-18T22:36:00.000-08:00

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 - Steve Coll

"When everyone is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before."
- Kim, Rudyard Kipling

The Great Game is alive and well and living in the cold, stony peaks of the Hindu Kush.

Ghost Wars is Steve Coll's superlative account of the tangled morass of the last twenty-five years of byzantine manuvering, chaos and war on the Afghan frontier. The war against the Russians was conducted mainly through proxies - the Muhjaddeen and the warlords, the Pakistani government, and the quioxtic brillance of Massoud. Coll outlines the early rise of US policy towards the region, tracing carefully the gradual emergence and steady growth of US involvement as the Muhjaddeen war against the Russians gradually became a key element for US policy.

Coll judiciously examines the post-war American neglect of the region (literally dropping off of the policy radar screen overnight) and the sudden and abrupt roll-up of the CIA's covert support operations (exacerbating the political vacuum), its impact on both the rise of the Taliban and the development of Al Quada and Osama Bin Laden.

Reading Ghost Wars amply demonstrates that none of the subsequent events of 9-11 was surprising in retrospect and that, bluntly, no one involved is a new or unknown player. Bin Laden in particular was amply demonstrating his direction, policy and goals but was initially overlooked and ignored, and later indifferently dealt with, despite mounting evidence of danger. Neither the Clinton nor the Bush (Jr. & Sr.) administrations escapes censure for their failure to recognize the approaching storm and the glimpse Coll offers into the inner workings of covert policy in the region both fascinates and frustrates.

Coll's book is a must-read for anyone genuinely interested in understanding the complex interplay of history, politics, culture and religion in Afghanistan and is, on top of being exhaustive and comprehensive, an excellent, gripping, high-quality and well-written read. Highly Recommended!

Also of note, and previously reviewed on BookLinker is George Crile's Charlie Wlison's War.

You can find an free online copy of Rudyard Kipling's classic Kim at the Gutenberg Project. I also heartily recommend Kipling's The Man Who Would be King and the excellent film version with Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

Interested in the real Man Who Would be King? He did exist - check out Ben McIntyre's biography of Josiah Harlen, ex-doctor, soldier-of-fortune, Prince of Ghur and pretender to the Afghan Throne (he also runs afoul of Flashman here...)

Check out another solid Frontline report on Afghanistan here. Also good is Hunting Bin Laden, a report that was put together prior to the attacks of 2001.

Thanks for reading BookLinker! Please show your support for the site by clicking through on our Google ad links, and initiating your Amazon purchases here. Comments and feedback are very welcome and links from other bloggers are always good to see!

2005-01-31T19:35:00.000-08:00

Wolves Eat Dogs - Martin Cruz Smith

Cynical, melancholy Moscow special investigator Arkardy Renko has a serious problem. One of Moscow's newly minted billionaires has taken a fatal plunge off of a twenty-story condominium - suicide or murder? As Renko dryly observes "We prefer suicides. Suicides don't demand work, or drive up the crime rate."

In his fifth book featuring his laconic, down-trodden detective, Martin Cruz Smith is at the top of his game. Wolves Eat Dogs takes Renko, filling his role as Moscow's most dogged and quixotic gumshoe, from the heady environs of the new Russian elite down a twisted, wayward path into a deadly quietly radioactive heart of darkness, the 30-mile Exclusion Zone surrounding Chernobyl.

Tautly written, intriguing and quite frankly offering a more humane glimpse of the Russian pysche then western fiction typically offers, Wolves Eat Dogs is a terrific and unique mystery, with Renko, as ever, leading the reader deeper and deeper into uncharted territory - in this case, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, with its eerie abandoned towns, burgeoning wildlife, icon-thieves, corrupt car parts dealers and obsessive scientests. Smith weaves an involving and immersive mystery with first-rate characters and plotting, in a very unique setting. I highly recommend it!

I would also recommend a look at Renko's earlier adventures - Gorky Park, Polar Star, Red Square, and Havana Bay.

Find out more about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster at Chernobyl Info, Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster and the Chernobyl Children's Project International. For a more detailed look at the overall health impact of the disaster ten years after, visit the Nuclear Energy Agency's Chernobyl Assessment page.

Why not take a visit to the Exclusion Zone? Follow along with Elena's motorcycle run through the Zone at Kiddofspeed - Ghost Town. Here are some more photos to check out.

Interestingly enough, due to a dearth of human presence, the Exclusion Zone is rapidly becoming a natural haven for Ukrainian wildlife.

Thinking of playing tourist? Better read this first.

Thanks for visiting BookLinker! Comments and links are always welcome! Please click on our Google Ads to show your support for this site!

2005-01-26T20:45:00.000-08:00

Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II - Robert Kurson

There is something deeply fascinating yet profoundly unsettling about this book.

It is, among other things, a story of high adventure, obsession and the cold face of imminent death. Shadow Divers is the true story of a group of deep-sea wreck divers who challenge themselves on the thin edge of the survivable, diving more than 200 feet into the cold Atlantic, venturing into twisted wrecks like the Andrea Doria and others, hunting souvenirs, bragging rights and a shivering adrenaline high.

Shadow Divers focuses on John Chatterton and Rich Kohler, who, investigating a mysterious wreck off the New Jersey coast, discover lurking 230 feet below the surface, a ghost from World War II, a sunken German U-Boat lying where none should be. Driven by the challenge of uncovering and identifying the boat, Chatterton and Kohler undertake a seven-year odyssey, diving repeatedly into the chill depths of the sea and into the musty records of World War II to discover the secrets of the wreck.

Deep-sea wreck diving is among the world's most deadly endeavors and the dives on the shadowy U-Boat are no exception. Kurson's vivid prose pulls the reader into the situation and at points is so profoundly tense it is almost impossible to put down. It is, as the expression goes, like watching a train wreck about to happen...terrified fascination and sick amazement are at war in your stomach when you read this book.

Kurson's narrative weaves the lore, dangers, technology and practices of deep-sea wreck diving, with the characters and practioners of the sport, pulling you into the excitement and the discovery...so when disaster strikes, although not unexpected, it is deeply unsettling, horrifying and vivid.

Similar to Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air which recounted the terrifying 1996 disaster on Mount Everest that cost five lives, Shadow Divers left me with a certain empty, morbid and questioning sense of "why?" and a mixed bag of both admiration and head-shaking irritation at the often pointless thrill-seeking.

Overall a definite first-rate book and one of the very best of the year.

Interested in learning more about U-boats? U-Boat.net is the place to go. Also check out the terrific Nova documentary and supporting website "Hitlers Lost Sub", for a look at the Shadow Divers' submarine, a virtual tour, maps of other sunken U-boat wrecks and an interactive feature on the chilling dangers of wreck diving.

Here's the website for the Wreck of the Andrea Doria, described by Kurson as "Mount Everest" for wreck divers. If you are wise, you will just stick to reading about the wreck...

Here's the Atocha, for the red-blooded, gold-hunting treasure-enthusiast in your family...

And some last thoughts...

They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

Thanks for visting BookLinker. Comments, links, email and feedback are welcome! You might also note that I've added Google Adwords on the side - please show your support for BookLinker and, if you can't buy a book through us, at least click on a couple of links...

2005-01-06T19:34:00.000-08:00

Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life - Ray Harryhausen, Tony Dalton

In the prehistoric days before the advent of a thousand digital channels, DVD's and VCRs, my local television channel would run a Sunday Afternoon Matinee. My brothers and I would sit, enthralled, watching Godzilla stomp Tokyo into smoky rubble, or some slithery beast ooze out of a bog and chase down some hapless passerby, or watch, as some wooden-voiced actor bounded about the screen improbably fighting a dozen skeletal swordsman or a towering bronze statue.

More often then not, we were watching the uniquely detailed work of Ray Harryhausen.

Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life is a glorious, fascinating and fun meander through the life, films and career of one of Hollywood's pioneering special effects masters. Harryhausen's magical beasts and evocative stop-action special effects were a source of inspiration for dozens of today's directors and directly led to the current state-of-the art work of such luminaries as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (although Harryhausen himself notes that despite the exquisite detail of today's computer-generated special efffects, he still prefers models and stop-animation for their "soul").

Harryhausen's highly illustrated book traces his roots in the special effects industry, his mentors Willis O'Brien and George Pal, and the various film influences (King Kong naturally enough)that shaped and impacted his work on such films as Mighty Joe Young, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Valley of the Gwangi, Jason and the Argonauts, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Clash of the Titans, and, my personal favorite, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

An Animated Life is fundamentally a book for a film buff, so temper any expectations of a detailed or seamy insider look at Hollywood in the 50's and 60's. You will however love having the curtain pulled aside on how Harryhausen and his cohorts pulled off much of their cinematic sleight-of-hand. For someone infected with the romance of the pulp films of the era, An Animated Life is a fabulous book but...

If however you really don't care for silver screen derring-do, the deep background on the Rhedosaurus, foul monsterous creatures from the depths or magical mythological beasts.. well, ...what the heck is wrong with you? Get a life.

For a complete round-up of Harryhausen's work, check out the ever dependable Internet Movie DataBase or read the profile at Sci-Fi Masters.

Check out this tribute to Harryhausen (with special guest appearance by He-Man's Skeletor), its just plain...surreal.

Check out this online explanation of Dynamation that gives you a good overview of how Harryhausen brought his intricate creatures to life or visit the Stop-Motion Animation site for some lessons on how you can develop your own stop-motion film.

Now I have to go, my six-year old son and I have to snuggle up, eat popcorn and watch The 7th Voyage of Sinbad... love that cyclops.

Thank you for reading BookLinker! Comments and feedback are always welcome (as are links)!

2004-12-01T20:28:00.000-08:00

Rats : Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants - Robert Sullivan

"And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling."
- Robert Browning

I used to take a short-cut through a back alley near my home, cutting two minutes off of my morning commute to the local subway station. Generally the laneway was empty of foot traffic except for the handful of parked cars and the garbage dumpsters festoned with cryptic graffiti and spray-painted tags. The alley was damp, deserted and the air layered with that dank, moist smell, just short of rotten but still driving in that general direction.

That particular yellow-lit morning, I was startled to see a furtive, pale brown creature about half the size of a housecat saunter out carefully from behind the local pizza parlor, dragging what look like about half of a medium-sized pizza behind it. It looked up, saw me, paused as if to say "What?" incredulously, then resumed its labor, dragging its hard-won prize along the edge of the curb. Obviously take-out. I spotted the long, thin, hairless tail trailing it and realized, with a profound bemusement, that it was a rat.

I don't know why I was so startled. Rats are as much a resident of the urban byways as people, albeit generally just a little more circumspect.

Rats by Robert Sullivan delves into the hidden world of rattus norvegicus, the infamous city-dwelling Norwegian Rat or Brown Rat (although they are often as not grey, off-pink, tan, whitish, or other color variations). Sullivan, whose previous off-the-beaten-path works include The Meadowlands, a study of the fetid swamplands outside of New York, (famous as a garbage dump and the sort of place the Sopranos might plant their former business partners) is really the perfect guide to a study of the urban rat, bringing the right mix of humor, readability and infectious curiosity to the subject.

Rats provides insight not only into the world of the rat, but how rats have grown with humanity, the lives they build in the thin margins of civilization and, how they frankly flourish mightily at times in their relationship with people. Rats offers a penetrating slice through the usual urban byways, weaving history, urban planning, archaeology, and natural history together into a fascinating and highly readable mix.

The book offers a number of eye-opening (i.e. disquieting) facts that lend a certain adventurous and squirmy feel to your next walk downtown. For example, a single pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendents in a single year. Think about that, the next time the kids run screaming through the house, knocking over furniture...

Weird as it sounds, one of the best books of the year is all about rats...

Learn more about these pesky rodents here and here. For the Hollywood take on rats, well, the all-time must-see rat movie is the original Willard, it's sequel Ben...or the recent Willard re-make.

Got rats? These guys might be able to help...or if you prefer, you can always call The Pied Piper.

2004-10-30T22:20:00.000-07:00

Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America - Steve Almond

Homer: "Got any of that beer that has candy floating in it? You know, Skittlebrau?"
Apu: "Such a beer does not exist, sir. I think you must have dreamed it."
Homer: "Oh. Well, then just give me a six-pack and a couple of bags of Skittles."

Candy seems like an apt topic around Halloween and Steve Almond's Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America is a saliva-inducing, hedonistic choclate voyage.

The aptly named Almond is, to be blunt, unhealthily obsessed with candy and Candyfreak is his own personal analysis of his bonbon fixation, from early childhood onwards, culminating in his cross-country trip to visit the last of America's independent manufacturers and purveyors of cavity-inducing deliciousness.

Candyfreak is, at best, an uneven journey, albeit a well-written one, that slowly draws you into the author's fascination and passion for candy and choclate. At first, reading Almond's endless descriptions of a particular brand of sweets, you start to wonder what on earth he's carrying on about, but after reading a few, you actually start to slip into the same sugar-rushed fetish frenzy. After reading this book, every chocolate bar you munch on your way to work becomes a pause for thought and a brief attempt to try to capture some of the sheer joy he seems to find in this food.

Alas in the end Candyfreak is a good but fairly thin product, partially due to the relative dearth of independent candy manufacturers today and partially because the book seems to coast along in uneven spurts, without a real direction or culmination of his odyssey. In long run, Candyfreak is, like its subject matter, highly consumable, with some flavorful morsels that roll elegantly off the tongue, but once it is gone...well, the moment ends.

Interested in candy? There is a veritable smorgusboard of candy-related sits ont he Internet, enough to make every dentist able to retire to Key West...

For some of Almond's favorite objects of obsession, check out the Twin Bing, the Goo Goo Clusters, and the Idaho Spud.

Grab more candy here, here and here. Still hungry? Visit the CandyFreak site for a complete list of deliciousness...

My personal favorite candy - boring old chocolate M&M's - refrigerated, so that you can crack off the candy-coating in your teeth....

2004-07-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

It was a dark and stormy night....

I couldn't resist blogging this, despite being laid up with two severed tendons in my right hand for the next six weeks...

The results are in for the 2004 Bulwer-Lytton Contest (see the site for details if you don't have a clue what it is....I can't explain right now, typing with just my left is far too much work.)

Grand Prize Winner:

She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.
Dave Zobel, Manhattan Beach, CA

Runner-Up:

The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen's hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be. - Pamela Patchet Hamilton, Beaconsfield, Quebec

And my personal favorites....

The legend about Padre Castillo's gold being buried deep in the Blackwolf Hills had lain untold for centuries and will continue to do so for this story is not about hidden treasure, nor is it set in any mountainous terrain whatsoever. - Siew-Fong YiapKowloon, Hong Kong

It was a dark and stormy night--actually not all that dark, but more dusky or maybe cloudy, and to say "stormy" may be overstating things a bit, although the sidewalks were still wettish and smelled of ozone, and, truth be told, characterizing the time as night is a stretch as it was more in the late, late afternoon because I think Oprah was still on. - Gregory Snider, MDLexington, KY

Check out the site for more...

Now goodbye for six weeks...

2004-07-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

Hiatus

Well, it's official. I managed to sever the flexor tendons on my right hand in the baby finger and the ring finger. The surgery happened the day before yesterday and now I am officially left-handed for the next six weeks or possibly longer.

The Dad Chronicles and Booklinker will be in hiatus until recovery. So get the hell off your computer and go enjoy the summer.

See you in six weeks!

2004-06-15T20:01:00.000-07:00

Island of the Blessed: The Secrets of Egypt's Everlasting Oasis - Harry Thurston

"Ex Africa semper aliquid novi - There is always something new out of Africa." - Pliny the Elder

Egypt has ever been about the Nile. It's seasonal floods have carried rich silt along a narrow strip of arable land ribboning 4,000 miles through the desert, it's rhythm sustaining the life, culture and development of one of the world's most monumental civilizations.

But life did not begin with the Nile.

Deep in the Egyptian Sahara, 400 miles from the familiar epic sites of Cairo, Giza and the Pyramids lies the Dakhleh Oasis, a green island in a sea of sand, rock and parched wilderness - a place that has been revealed as an archaeological treasure trove, with an almost complete record of continuous human habitation dating back more than 400,000 years.

Island of the Blessed (entitled Secrets of the Sands in the U.S. - not nearly as evocative a title...) offers an intensely fascinating look at a unique archaeological site. The Dakhleh Oasis is not the proverbial pond with a smattering of palm trees, but rather a region that covers more than 600 square miles, providing life-giving water to a variety of plants, animals and people - stretching back more than 400,000 years in history. It is, quite literally, an island of life in the bleak wasteland of the Sahara.

Thurston draws on more than 30-years of archaeological studies and carefully takes the reader through the slowly uncovering history and significance of Dakhleh. Among the evidence uncovered by the archaeological teams working in Dakhleh is neolitihic stone tools and prehistoric encampments, new evidence of some of mankind's earliest agricultural activities, an exquisitely preserved Old Kingdom town, Roman aqueducts, countless mummies, a vast collection of papyrus records and the world's oldest bound books. One crucial theory now being examined is that Dakhleh was the crucible for Egyptian civilization, predating the Nile River habitations and provided a critical role in the ongoing development of Egyptian civilization and trade.

Thurston has created a solid, highly readable work that captures the unique setting and environment of Dakhleh, and offers up colorful and vivid glimpses of the sometimes obsessive characters of the archaeologists who are slowly bringing the past to light. In addition to the archaeological record, the long sequence of continuous human habitation within the isolated oasis environment permits archaeologists and climatologists to develop a one-of-a kind environment assessment, measuring the environmental impact and growth of human habitation within the isolation of the Dakhleh Oasis over an extended period of time. The research brings to light some of the detrimental impact that unchecked human growth and overly extensive agricultural practices can have on the water supply, a practice that may, in time, bring the Everlasting Oasis to an ignominious end.

For more on Dakhleh, check out The Dakhleh Oasis Project. For information on the world's oldest bound books, visit this site on ancient Kellis.

For more information on the Sahara Desert, visit PBS's Sahara website or read Michael Palin's account of his sojourn in the world's largest desert.

For some fabulous websites on Egyptian archaeology, check out Eternal Egypt , a huge and extensive multimedia site, and the Theban Mapping Project which offers an interactive atlas of the Valley of the Kings.

Want a birds-eye view? Check out this image from NASA's Earth Observatory website. If you look carefully in the western desert, you can spot Dakhleh.

Thanks for reading BookLinker! Please post a link to the site and tell all your friends to drop by (somebody tell Instapundit! I need an insta-lanche!).

2004-05-08T19:44:00.000-07:00

Rain Fall - Barry Eisler

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. " - Raymond Chandler

Set in Tokyo, Barry Eisler's book Rain Fall (and it's sequel Hard Rain) is an excellent, hard-boiled Chandleresque action-thriller about an assassin-for-hire that specializes in "natural deaths". Half-Japanese, half-American, Eisler's John Rain is a character in the classic Chandler mold - a man with his own particular rigorous code of honor. When a client violates that code by lying to Rain, he is forced into investigating the circumstances of the murder he has just committed. Following a labyrinthine trail Rain finds himself caught between the competing interests of both his countries, the Yakuza, and the deeply held corruption of the Japanese political scene.

Eisler's character, setting and circumstances move Rain Fall and its sequal Hard Rain a cut above the common action-thriller. Rain's cultural background and profession make for an interestingly agreeable anti-hero with all the requisite nicities. Eisler's depiction of the neon reef that is modern Tokyo is, however, superlative.

Eisler successfully captures the unique feel and setting of the city of villages, the legions of salari-men packing the trains, the glare and needle-sharp opulence of the Ginza, the noise and bustle of Shinjuku and hectic ambience of Roppongi clubs. Eisler seems to be one of the few fiction writers who capture the essence of how a city feels, not just how it looks and his familiarity and love of Tokyo permeates the book. It brought back to me the feel of walking through Shinjuku in the cold night rain, the sky lit only by the towers, the streets wet and slick with water and light, the scattered groups of drunk salari-men meandering past with the loose rhythm of the elevated train runbling overhead and the blaring, relentless accompaniment of the pachinko parlors and the arcades spilling out of their bright doorways...

Tokyo's one hell of a city, and deserves to be featured in more fiction...

Rain Fall and Hard Rain are both solid thrillers and well worth a read. It's a series I plan to follow in the future.

For more background on Eisler's Japan, check out The Enigma of Japanese Power by Karel Van Wolferen, Ruth Benedict's classic The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, and, for a look at the youth of Japan, read Speed Tribes by Karl T. Greenfield.

For some Tokyo bloggers, check out Tokyo Shoes, and Hunkabutta.

For some background on the Yakuza, check out this site, and Court TV's Library site. Personally I recommend Robert Mitchum in The Yakuza for a more enjoyable learning experience!

For another film that truly captures the essence of Tokyo, watch Lost in Translation...it has that jet-lagged feel.

Comments and links to BookLinker are always welcome!

2004-04-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - Mary Roach

Deeply unsettling, morbidly funny, weird and disturbingly fascinating, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach is an unvarnished, questions-that-most-dare-not-ask, slightly off the wall examination of ...well, the practice and usage of human remains through history.

If it sounds like a bit of a reach, delving into a subject that most writers (and readers for that matter) would not care to visit, Stiff is a surprisingly good read. Skillfully written, tactful, sympathetic, respectful without being dull and heavy, strange without quite being off-putting, author Mary Roach weaves the ins and outs of such subjects as mortuary science, the history of surgery, autopsies, where plastic surgeons go for practice, medical experimentation, jello and gunshot wounds, crucification, human crash-test dummies, mummification and more into a riveting stew...just don't read it over your lunch hour. Seriously.

Stiff, despite its title, is anything but. Roach has a disconcerting habit of asking the people in charge questions that we all would have liked to ask, but were either too polite, too self-conscious or squeamish to ask. These queries, although they seriously make the reader question whether Roach would be someone to invite to a cocktail party, serve to beatifully illustrate the quandaries that we ourselves face, when confronted by the implacable certainty of The Father of Time.

My particular favorite moment was when the author was observing the "harvesting" of a doner heart from a brain-dead patient. Seeing the slippery, still-beating muscle being extracted, Roach promptly asked the doctor if they had ever dropped one on the floor...

Overall a well-written, excellent (if somewhat nausous) read. Remember to read outside of mealtimes...

For a look at the Internet's resident cadaver, check out The Virtual Man Project at the National Library of Medicine. Researchers froze a cadaver, then sliced it in ultra-thin slices creating an anatomically detailed virtual representation of the human body....For an added bonus, visit The Virtual Autopsy here or HBO's Autopsy website.

Just so you don't think it's just people under the surgeon's knife - someone autopsied a furby...

Here's some real Crash Test Dummies....and some more (especially 50th Percentile Hybrid III).

Lastly, here's the most famous cadaver of them all....It's Alive! ALIVE!

Thanks for dropping by BookLinker! Please tell all your friends, link to the site, toss off some comments and buy some books!

2004-03-24T20:06:00.000-08:00

Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor

Hercules was probably one of the most famous early practioners of biological weapons, and one of its most prominent victims...

Slayer of the Lemean Hydra, Hercule's dipped his deadly arrows in the Hydra's blood, creating a fatal weapon - one that echoed down through Greek history claiming myrid lives. Eventually the Fates drew him full-circle and Hercules is destroyed by the gift of a cloak from his wife. The garment, secretly poisoned with the blood of Nessus, a centaur that Hercules has shot with his envenomed arrows, "burns like fire" until Hercules, in agony, begs his own son to burn him in a bonfire.

The legendary story of the 12 Labors of Hercules serves as both metaphor and warning in Adrienne Mayor's fascinating and highly readable examination of the usage and prevelance of biological and chemical warfare in the Ancient World. Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs is a timely and relevant eye-opener, touching on the practical usages of such tried and true weapons such as poisoned food, tainted water, bug bombs (scorpions and bees were apparently popular tools to loft onto besiging armies), snake bombs, burning oil, pestilence-ridden corpses, maddened cattle, pitch-covered pigs (ignited of course) and, of course, the precusor of modern napalm, greek fire. Of special note is the "mad honey" that Xenophon and the Ten Thousand encounter on their trek to the sea. Mixed from the rhododendron plant, the honey of Pontus is a famous and lethal toxin causing hallucinations and often death.

Mayor carefully outlines the often ambigious nature of chemical and biological weapons, particularly the fact that the ancients recognized the double-edged sword that they wielded had terrifying implications for their own populations if used unchecked. Mixing the mythological roots of bio-war with historical examples, Mayor has written a highly readable, utterly absorbing piece of work that, at the end, leaves you grimly fascinated and nervously appalled.

For some terrific information on the ancient world and such stalwarts as Hercules, check out the Perseus Project from Tufts University.

Worried about that fever? Check out the National Library of Medicine's Biological Warfare page...brrrrr. Hey, where'd that rash come from?

Damn, those guys are busy - here's their page on Chemical Warfare...damn, now there's spots with the rash...

Lastly, here's a copy of Sophocle's "Philoctetes", the tale of the man who inherited the dubious prize of Hercule's poisonous arrows...

Thanks for reading. Please post comments below. Links would be appreciated.

2004-03-01T19:32:00.000-08:00

Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker
- James McManus

"Never play cards with a man called Doc." - Nelson Algren

I've never played a serious game of poker in my life.

The few times I've sat down and played a few hands, it has been in almost total ignorance of the odds, poker strategy and anything but the most basic dos and don'ts...but...the first thing I wanted to do having finished Positively Fifth Street was jet down to Vegas and set myself down at a table.

James McManus's book Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs and Binion's World Series of Poker is, for lack of a better word, infectious.

McManus was assigned by Harper's Magazine to cover the simultaneous twin stories of the Ted Binion murder trial and the annual Binion's World Series of Poker held at the Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, the arguably most famous poker tournament in the world. McManus, a journalist, author and poet, also happened to be an itinerate amateur poker player who elected to use his $4,000 advance from Harpers to fund his own entry into the tournament (Read the book to find out how he did. Unlike the NY Times book review (SPOILER WARNING) , I refuse to spoil it for you by divulging the results...What were they thinking?).

The book offers a rather piecemeal look at Ted Binion's murder, using the crime more as an illustrative and cautionary tale of the author's own personality - the risk-taking, obsessive, "cliff-diver" face that McManus tries to generally keep in check ("Bad Jim" as McManus aptly terms himself). If you are looking for the details of a sordid crime drama, Positively Fifth Street covers the basics (Binion's tawdry drug use, the aspiring, leggy stripper girlfriend, the low-life pal who hooks up with her and plots Binion's ultimate demise, the fundamentals of "burking" and so on...), but is far more focused on the legacy of Binion in the poker tournament then on Binion himself. The murder trial does loom ominiously in the background but it seems to serve more as a grim reminder of the dangerous price of an unchecked lifestyle than as a raison-e'etre for the book, akin to the images of Death that can be seen perpetually lurking in the corners in a Renaissance painting. The murder is a reminder of mortality, chance and fate, and the luck of the cards.

Once the pasteboards start to hit the table, the book truly takes off, mixing each stage of the tournament action with a look at the intricacies of poker, the rise of "book-learned" system poker players, the rules of Texas Hold 'Em, the history of playing cards, and vivid portraits of the top professional poker players such as the cantakerous TJ Cloutier, top female player Kathy Liebert and others. McManus has woven a startling page turner that bluntly fascinates from beginning to end.

Interested in learning how to play Texas Hold 'Em? Check out Ultimatebet.com for the rules.

Author, blogger and actor Wil Wheaton drew my attention to Positively Fifth Street a while back through a mention of the book on his site and, as a poker player himself, recently posted a vivid and terrific piece on his own adventures in an illegal poker tournament at the Odessa in Hollywood. It's well worth a read.

Here's where you can find Binion's Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, everything you need to know about the World Series of Poker, and Court TV's take on the Ted Binion murder trial.

If you are really, really taken with Positively Fifth Street, then this site might be for you....

Comments are always welcome, book suggestions, feedback and links to the site.

Thanks for reading!

2004-02-18T20:00:00.000-08:00

Watership Down - Richard Adams

"El-ahrairah, your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed." - Lord Frith to El-ahrairah

If you proposed to someone that they read a 478-page book about rabbits, they would probably either look at you sideways like you were utterly insane or shout out in joyous recognition "Watership Down!". Richard Adams first published his utterly compelling tale of adventurous rabbitry in 1972 and the tale remains to this day one of the most creative and enjoyable pieces of children's literature ever set to paper.

Adams tells the story of a small band of rabbits that, aided by a prescient seer named Fiver, sets forth on a harrowing journey across the English countryside, escaping from their doomed warren (destroyed by land developers) to seek a safe home high on the Downs. The rabbits' odyssey take them through numerous fateful encounters, both treacherous and inspiring until, tempered by their adversity, they find themselves forced to face their most difficult challenge of all, using all their guile, skills and bravery against the repressive and dictatorial warren of Efrafa and its leader, the malevolent and powerful General Woundwort.

Adams prose vividly describes and awakens the English countryside in the mind of the reader, from a rabbit's point of view. You can almost feel the grass under your toes. Indeed, one of the few things I readily wished for while reading Watership Down, was a version abridged with sketches or pictures of all the damn plants (fleabane, purple loosestrife, pink butterbur, figwort, yellow mullein...the list goes on. I suspect one needs a certain grounding in botany to truly appreciate Adams understanding of the English countryside.). The other side of the coin is the strength of the various characters - Hazel, the decisive, intelligent leader; Fiver the precognitive runt whose intelligence and visions see the rabbits through diverse sets of danger; Bigwig, the rough-and-tumble fighter who refuses to give in - ever, and Woundwort himself as the battle-scarred and vicious, intelligent and obsessive rabbit that rules Efrafa with an iron paw.

Rich with political allegory and echoing with the touchstones of epic journeys, Watership Down is a book that, if you have not yet read it, will surprise you with its ability to pull you into the Lapin world. It remains a terrific piece of literature.

Of particular note within the book are the various tales of El-ahrairah, the Prince of Rabbits, interspersed within the story. El-ahrairah is a trickster, filled with cunning strategems who foils his enemies, infiltrates every lettuce patch and, in general, fulfills a legendary role within rabbit folklore. Of particular note is the recently published Tales from Watership Down, which collects a number of El-ahrairah's adventures (including several new ones) into a single volume. It is well worth a read.

For a look at the real Watership Down, Nuthanger Farm and the Crixa (they are all real places), check out this site.

Interested in a plot review and notes on Watership Down - you can find them here.

Finally, at least one blogger seems to know and appreciate the lore of Watership Down - check out the excellent Silflay Hraka. Read the book to find out what Silflay Hraka means....

If you can't bring yourself to read the book, there is a very good animated feature (done in 1978) which, barring an unfortunately syrupy theme song by Art Garfunkel (Bright Eyes), is true to the book in almost every way. It is now available on DVD and I highly recommend it (although it might be a little bit bloody for the wee tots...).

Comments are always welcome.

On a follow-up note, BookLinker is slowly trying to increase its traffic levels, so any links, comments, feedback, recommendations, friends, acquaintences, evil step-sisters etc. that you want to refer to us, it would be appreciated!

Thanks for reading!

2004-02-04T20:54:00.000-08:00

Monster of God - David Quammen

Walking downtown one day, a number of years ago, I was startled by a massive tawny head that peered around a concrete pillar and regarded me with a baleful, quizzical yellow glare. You don't generally expect to run into a full-grown African lion in the heart of a teeming metropolis. I stopped dead, an act that attracted its immediate attention, despite the more jaded urbanites that crowded the sidewalk and barely glanced at this apparition of the savannah as they passed. There is something about being the focus of a predator's gaze that puts a particular tingle in your day. Somewhere, buried very deep is that primodial recognition that there, but for the grace of God, go you....

Monster of God is a look at the role of the predator, in nature and in the mind of humanity, and the tenuous borders where the two uneasily mix. Author David Quammen looks at four "alpha" predators, creatures that live at the very apex of the food chain: The Gir lions of India, the crocodiles of Asia, Africa and Australia, the brown bear in Romania, and the Amur Siberian tigers of Asia. Monster of God looks at the relationship that the predator has with man, the social and cultural role of the predator, its key position within the natural world, and the deleterious impact the the burgeoning human population is having on the predator's environment.

Monster of God is a thoughtful, intelligent and highly readable examination of how humanity lives with predators. Quammen looks at what is the acceptable role in today's world for violent, essentially dangerous animals that can and quite readily do, kill people for food, their position as "keystone" species on the food chain, their position as totemic symbols within human history, language and culture (think about it, even today people are "lionized") and how economic realities of hunting and farming may shape their future. He examines the disparities that exist across the world in attitudes towards alpha predators, particularly noting the fact that where predators and people most often, most tellingly meet, is among the poorer marginal fringes of human society, left to deal with the beasts that haunt the dark nights and quiet waterways. It's easy to say "save the tigers" when you don't have to cut wood in the forest to earn a living, or walk a cold trapline to support your family, hoping not to run into something hungry and toothy.

Here's a brief excerpt: "Great and terrible flesh-eating beasts have always shared landscape with humans. They were part of the ecological matrix within which Homo sapiens evolved. They were part of the psychological context in which our sense of identity as a species arose. They were part of the spiritual systems we invented for coping. The teeth of big predators, their claws, their ferocity and their hunger, were grim realities that could be eluded but not forgotten. Every once in a while, a monsterous carnivore emerged like doom from a forest or a river to kill someone and feed on the body. It was a familiar sort of disaster - like auto fatalities today - that must have seemed freshly, shockingly gruesome each time, despite the familiarity. And it conveyed a certain message. Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat."

For more on the Gir lions, check out The Indian Wildlife Portal and the Gujarat Forest site.

For some further background on crocs, check out this site, or just hang out with the Crocodile Hunter.

One of the interesting facts that Quammen touches upon in his book is the hunting excesses of Romanian Communist strongman Ceausescu, who was notorious for, among other things, turning Romania's wildlife managment system into his own personal game shooting park, slaughtering every large beast that came within reach, including 24 brown bears in a single day.

Check out the Chauvet Cave site for a marvelous look at some of the earliest known prehistoric art, featuring, among others, some superlative depictions of lions...

Finally, if you have a literary turn, you can always peruse the quintessential story of man versus monster - the tale of Beowulf, King of the Geats, in his rending, bloody battle with the fearsome Grendal...

My downtown lion? He was being used to advertise some new boutique that was opening. I don't recall the name of the store, but I will long remember the grace, dignity, strength and banked, predatory gaze of that lion...even though he was sprawled across a mailbox of all things...

Comments are always welcome. Bloggers, please drop me a link if you like what you read. Thanks!

2004-01-28T20:50:00.000-08:00

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling - Ross King

Surly, often sullen, perpetually brooding, argumentative, distrustful, highly competitive, monstrously creative and ugly to boot, Michelangelo Buonarroti was a sculptor of genius. Ross King's superlative book Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling tells the story of how this tempermental artist created one of histories greatest art treasures, the ceiling frescos of the Sistine Chapel.

King draws a crisply written and fascinating portrait of Michelangelo, including his stormy relationship with his family, patrons and fellow artists, his chaotic life and times, and the myriad background sources of his artistic and creative vision. A contemporary of Leonardo Da Vinci and later Raphael, Michelangelo famously sculpted both the Pieta and David. His skill as a sculptor brought him to the attention and patronage of Pope Julius II, il papa terrible. Known for his fiery temper, a penchant for striking his cardinals and servants liberally with his walking stick and a highly militaristic, almost imperial ambition, Julius commissioned (almost coerced actually) Michelangelo into painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - all twelve thousand square feet of it.

King's book is filled with insight and detail, outlining the difficulties that Michelangelo faced "painting in the wet" (fresco literally means "fresh" as in wet or fresh plaster, as the colors are applied before the plaster can dry), the engineering of the Sistine Chapel's scaffolding, the usage of fixed perspective, the color scheme and biblical and mythic themes of the various frescos.

The book is, thankfully, well illustrated with details, including excellent color images of the Sistine Chapel, a necessary element that helps unfamiliar readers such as myself enormously in understanding the overwhelming scale of the projects (it took more than four years to complete).

Here's a brief excerpt on the bitter rivalry between Da Vinci and Michelangelo when both were commissioned to fresco opposite walls of the refectory in Santa Maria delle Grazie:

"This artistic duel was made even more compelling by the two artists' well-known dislike of each other. The surly Michelangelo had once taunted Leonardo in public for having failed in his attempt to cast a giant bronze equestrian statue in Milan. Leonardo, meanwhile, had made it clear that he had little regard for sculptors. 'This is a most mechanical exercise,' he once wrote, 'accompanied many times with a great deal of sweat.' He further claimed that sculptors, covered in marble dust, looked like bakers, and that their homes were both noisy and filthy, in contrast to the more elegant abodes of painters. All Florence awaited the outcome."

For a look at the fruits of Michelangelo's labors, check out the Sistine Chapel here, here, and here. And for good measure, here as well.

For a look at the restoration process (and some nice before and after images) check out the Artcyclopedia andthis site.

Among other items, King points out the habit of many artists (Michelangelo among them) of putting sly jokes and hidden messages within the content of their work, much as medieval monks would draw humorous pictures in the margins of their lavishly illustrated books (called "marginalia") or, in a more modern context, the 'easter eggs' found in many software programs. Check out this image (click to enlarge) and zoom in on the cherub in the back's right hand. He's giving her "the fig"...

2004-01-22T19:50:00.000-08:00

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J. K. Rowling

What more can one say about J.K. Rowlings and the most famous boy in wizardom?

Since last summer, I've been working my way steadily through all five of the Harry Potter books (Harry Potter and Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), reading them aloud to my five-year old son. Most recently, thanks to the benevolence of Santa Claus, we've been ripping through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

I say ripping because my enthralled son insisted on reading the 870-page book nightly, often for more than an hour at a time (which, if you have a five-year old and you are reading something that has no pictures, is definitely saying something about the author's ability to capture his interest!).

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling continues to build on both the depth of her imaginary magical world and on the steady growth of the characters. Harry Potter is returning to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for his fifth year, despite the ominous indications that (as seen in Book IV) He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (that's the evil Lord Voldemort, for the three people left in the world who haven't either read the books or seen the movie) has returned.

Harry, and his growing array of friends and allies (the Order of the Phoenix in the title) must face down enemies both within and without as Harry faces the multiple challenges of his cousin Dudley, rogue Dementors, OWL (Official Wizarding Levels) exams, bad press, first romance and a malevolent new "headmistress" at Hogwarts....and the machinations of Voldemort and his DeathEaters.

Despite the length, the book doesn't sag or lack. At times it is pure adventurous exhilaration and fun, and although some sections are somewhat slow, I found that as a reader, I was so invested in the characters, the world and the setting, that the occasional slow section was barely noticable. You should note that if you are reading the book to younger kids, you may wish to self-edit some of the more frightening bits and pieces. This is also a good excuse to read ahead....

All in all, we loved Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and are eagering anticipating the next book in the series. Get to work Ms. Rowling!

I have read in the media that some people have complained at times regarding the content of the Potter books.. Let's face it - these books offer up terrific, imaginative, thoughtful, adventurous reads that successfully pull kids and adults away from the pale everyday gleam of the cathode ray tube and gets them to read! Kids! Reading! Who'd have thunk it?

J.K. Rowling deserves to be congratulated for that fact alone (but I suppose being richer than the Queen is probably enough).

Interested in finding out exactly what are Muggles, Hippogriffs and Bowtruckles? Consult the Harry Potter Lexicon for all your wizarding queries.

Check out the trailer for the upcoming Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Interested in visiting Hogwarts?

Lastly, since it is an election year....

2004-01-14T20:08:00.000-08:00

The Year in "Review"

Well, BookLinker is now officially a one-year old!

On the off chance anyone is interested, here are some BookLinker benchmarks:

- In the last year, BookLinker has reviewed 38 books, not quite the "one book per week" I was aiming at, but not bad considering....I've read probably three times as many.

- BookLinker has received 2418 unique visitors in the past year. It's not Instapundit, but I'm pleased! My busiest single day was courtesy of Jerry Pournelle (the sci-fi writer) who kindly linked a book recommendation I dropped him and sent me 45 people in one day. Most days I average 6 visitors and, while I am happy to have the 6, I wouldn't mind increasing that traffic a tad, so if you blog, and you happen by the site and like what you see, I'd be pleased for a link and some mention (translation: Please send me some traffic, link to me - please, please, I'm beggin' ya...).

- Despite the malarky at the start of the page concerning the funding of my early retirement, my role as an Amazon associate works out to considerably less than minimum wage. In the past year, I've cleared $6.37 in Amazon commissions ($4.35 of which came in my whirlwind "Christmas rush" recently - that was two sales). Consider that each review generally takes about an hour to write and another hour (sometimes longer) to develop the subject links, and you are looking at probably about 85 hours worth of labor (not counting reading time), for a return of roughly $0.075 per hour. At this rate, I will be able to afford a 612 Scaglietti in another 43,000 years. I can hardly wait!

- A couple of people have commented to me that I tend to review too many non-fiction (in particular nautical-related history). Well, as I warned you at the start, you are stuck with my particular reading tastes and lately it has been inclined towards the non-fiction arena, mainly due to the relative dearth of fiction that has been appealing to me in the past year. Tough on you, but who knows, try reading some of the books or throw me some suggestions via email or the comments system. I love feedback and unfortunately recieve it very limited amounts...Maybe I should throw up some intense political debates on this site instead....Naw!

- Someone else noted that I seem to love all the books I read. Actually, no I don't. I do, however, tend to review the books I like best, so negative reviews just don't happen - they get filtered out by my own energy and enthusiasm. Unlike newspaper or "real" book reviewers, I'm doing this out of choice not (as you can see from the above sums) for the princely wages that blogging provides. This frees me from the onerous task of reviewing books I despise or dislike...except when I choose to.

- One of the single best comments I received during the year was actually from Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club, which I reviewed. He commented via email "Thanks so much for the nice write-up of my novel on your website. I really appreciate such thoughtful and well-written comments. By the way, great site!", praise that almost made me blush.... Garrett Soden, author of Falling, also emailed some great site feedback and was kind enough to bring the site to the attention of Howard Owens who also very kindly threw up a link (thanks Howard!).

Damn nice of 'em to notice.

In closing, I just wanted to say thanks to all BookLinker readers for your many visits (and for the $6.37). I hope you continue to drop by, link to us and tell all your friends. Maybe in 2004 I can clear the $10 minimum necessary for Amazon to actually mail me a check!

Thanks! Keep on blogging!

2004-01-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

1421: The Year China Discovered America - Gavin Menzies

History is a fuzzy subject.

The one real, inescapable truth that comes out of any serious assessment of history is, realistically, how little you actually know about the in's and outs of events, societies and people.

When you dig through dusty, moldy and sometimes starkly biased historical documentation or try to comprehend the social intricacies of an era by perusing a handful of broken pot shards, post holes and chipped foundation stones, you are, in essence, piecing together a barely legible puzzle, with incomplete pieces and an uncertain understanding of just what the hell a puzzle actually is...

I preface this review with the above remarks because I am very aware of how damnedly difficult history and archaeology can be as a subject and in Gavin Menzies' book 1421, I'm sorry to note the author has overreached his subject. He has shot for the moon, and fallen sadly well-short.

1421 outlines Menzies' theories regarding the exploits of Emperor Zhu Di's famous five Admirals (Zheng He, Yang Qing, Zhou Man, Hong Bao and Zhou Wen) who, under Imperial command, set sail in five massive fleets of sea-going junks in 1421 to "proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas". Menzies attempts to trace the routes of the five fleets, drawing on what little written historical record exists (the fleet records were destroyed by Zhu Di's somewhat xenophobic successor), a number of early maps and charts, and a huge pile of unfortunately highly subjective and circumstantial evidence.

Menzies traces the five fleets literally around the globe, touching on literally every continent and region including North, Central and South America (both east and west coasts), the Caribbean, Africa (which, actually does have evidence of Chinese contact on the east coast at any rate as the region was well-travelled by Arab voyagers who, among other destinations, regularly plied their trade with China), Russia, Greenland, Australia, and Antarctica.

While some of the work that Menzies assembles crys out for a more scholarly and searching examination (namely his persistant claims to have uncovered evidence on a number of charts for Chinese contact with Australia and the U.S.'s west coast, and his evidence that the Chinese had developed significant navigational advances well in advance of Europe) the majority of his assumptions are built on a succession of loose guesses and highly circumstantial and subjective evidence. Indeed, towards the end of the book (when a Chinese fleet has landed almost everywhere it is possible to discover except for Europe), Menzies seems almost frantic to buttress his arguments. In Menzies' hands, the fall of every sparrow is attributable to the five fleets.

Despite the highly questionable conclusions, 1421 does offer several highly commendable points - it brings to light an era of Chinese history and discovery that hitherto has been sadly under-examined by historians and raises a number of questions regarding the reach of the intrepid voyage of the Five Fleets. The author's passion and excitement for his subject is clearly evident in his writing and although it overreaches, it's nice to see someone shooting for the moon once in a while...

Incidentally, the book was titled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World everywhere except in the United States (where, as shown above, it was entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered America). I know that U.S. publishers routinely tweak titles to make them more applicable and appealing to U.S. markets but puh-leeze...Doesn't it seem a trifle ridiculous and condescending to think that we would only care to read it if it was about us? Next thing you know they'll be changing the titles of the Harry Potter books because people don't know what a Philosopher's Stone is....oh...wait a minute....they did change that one too. Oh. Sorry.

For more on 1421, check out the author's website (it includes still more evidence not included in the book).

Find out more about the famous Piri Reis Map (cited in the book several times) here, here and here. You can also find the Kandigo map, and the Pizzigano Chart from the James Ford Bell Library (which has some excellent additional materials well worth a look (such as this)).

Always wanted to learn more about Chinese history? (Try here as well). or you could just watch this....it's not history, but its damn fine cinema.

Comments are always welcome!

2003-12-22T20:50:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas!

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a long winter's nap,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

"Now, DASHER! now, DANCER! now, PRANCER and VIXEN!
On, COMET! on CUPID! on, DONDER and BLITZEN!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my hand, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!"

'Twas the Night Before Christmas or Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement C. Moore

2003-12-10T21:50:00.000-08:00

Holiday Picks!

As the holiday season is now lurching towards us inexorably like some drunken store Santa searching for a bathroom, I wanted to take this opportunity to present you with BookLinker's Top Ten Holiday Book Picks.

I hope that this makes your holiday shopping burden a trifle easier and please remember that if you click through to Amazon on this site and buy your books, I will receive a very small stipend...regretably very, very small....(sigh). In case anyone thinks I plan to retire to Monte Carlo on this - please be assured that the $1.67 in funds I expect to receive will be spent entirely frivously on chocolate...

On to BookLinkers Top Ten Holiday Books!

10). The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson - What can I say that anyone who has read even a single Far Side cartoon doesn't already know? Pricelessly off-kilter and fun!

9). The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl - Engrossing, literate, involving historical thriller! Damn fine!

8). The Devil in the White City : Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson - Desperately need to post the review for this one so in two words: just excellent!

7). Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swofford - Another pending reviews: Jarring, uncomfortable, profane and starkly unsettling but one of the best works in many a year...

6). Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis - Yet another pending review (Damn, I need to post more often don't I?). Perfect for the baseball junkie on your gift list, well-written and throughly enjoyable.

5). By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and OlympicChampions by Richard A. Cohen - Swashbuckling through the ages, an unbeatable history book that's great fun to boot!

4). Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History by George Crile - A must for the spy thriller and history junkie, it tells a story that you just plain won't believe until you read it...

3). The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd by Richard Zacks - Pirates. Need I say more?

2). Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand - The best sportsbook of the year...(and another outstanding pending review. Boy do I have a lot to answer for...)

and the Number One Pick for 2003 is....

1). Life of Pi by Yann Martel - Excellent, engrossing, thoughtful and provocative! A real winner!

As an added addition to my Top Ten Books, here is my 7 Worst, Most Overratted, Avoid-at-all-Costs books for 2003....Dan't even think about buying these books...yes, I'm talking to you. Don't do it...well, okay maybe for your mother-in-law...

7). A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson - I love Bill Bryson but this one is unfortunately lengthy, somewhat dull and not nearly as enjoyable as previous works...not bad but probably not a great holiday gift.

6). Prey by Michael Crichton - Why even bother?

5). Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! by Michael Moore - Nice to see that America still has professional gadflies and people challenging the system but am I the only one who wishes that he would just go away for awhile?

4). Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken - I have nothing against Al Franken. He is funny...sometimes... but am I alone is just finding this more of the same?

3). Who's Looking Out for You? by Bill O'Reilly - If these guys spent half as much energy thinking as they do yelling at each other, the world would be a much nicer place...quieter too...

2). The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss by Arthur Agatston - In all honesty: didn't read it. Eat less. Exercise more. Balanced diet. There, you're done! Save your money.

1). The Teeth of the Tiger by Tom Clancy - Bad. Really bad. Well, actually unfortunately worse then really bad. Extremely lame effort by the king of the techno-thrillers. Lengthy. Boring. It is also obviously a larger work deliberately truncated into two books. We can probably expect the next one next year. On the positive side it weighs less then some of his recent work...

Enjoy your holiday shopping!

2003-12-01T21:02:00.000-08:00

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

It was the bookjacket that caught my eye.

I've never been much of a "literary" reader. I think it had to do with too much D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf in school. The net impact of that particular school of great literature was to drive me irrevocably away from anything remotely literary for years, if not decades...

Oh I like classic literature but my taste runs more towards the ancients and the swashbucklers- The Odyssey remains a prime favorite, Beowulf, Shakespeare and Scharazade all grace my library shelves and as for literature from the last century or so, give me Dumas, Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, ER Burroughs, Twain and H.G. Wells and keep the rest...

Life of Pi might be literary according to the critics, but I'll warrant it has more in common with the Odyssey then it does any other literary tome. Yann Martel has crafted an evocative travelers tale, an odyssey story of sorts that weaves almost magically into your head and leaves you, in the end, puzzling over the journey, your own as well as the book's.

Life of Pi is the lyical and imaginative story of Piscine Patel (the Pi of the title), a 16-year old boy on a spiritual journey of faith that takes an abrupt left turn when he is cast adrift in a lifeboat by a shipwreck, alone on the high seas - except for the one unique passenger on his boat - a full-grown 450 lb. adult Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker.

Pi's odyssey is a parable of faith, imagination and, oddly enough, zoology, giving you a quick,vivid and surprisingly effective lessons in animal pyschology and lion-taming. Martel's fable is at times harrowing, uplifting and intense, drawing you into the shared plight of both Pi Patel and Richard Parker. Life of Pi is one of those stories that you find yourself mulling over long after the book is closed. It is, on many levels, one of the most mesmerizing stories I have read and Martel's prose gifts readers with a real treasure.

How long can you survive adrift at sea? The record very probably belongs to some poor unknown sailor whose story never came to anyone else's ears but for a true survivors' tale check out Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan.

Here's some more castaways for you....

And some more Pi...

Interested in tigers? Here's a little proverb:

"Trouble rather the tyger in his lair,
than the sage among his books,
for to you
Kingdom's and their Armies
are things mighty and enduring,
but to him
they are but
toys of the moment,
to be swept away
with the flick of a finger."

For more on tigers, check out 5Tigers Tiger Information Centre, Tigers in Crisis, and the Tiger Foundation.

You might also like these guys...Magnum P.I. did.

2003-11-20T20:15:00.000-08:00

Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History
- George Crile

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."
- Rudyard Kipling, 'The Young British Soldier'

When you study history in school, everything seems very structured and comprehensive, very coherent when viewed through the lense of economics and cause-and-effect. History is all about treaties and laws, trade, economic theory, statesmen and the hard realism of power....but then, time and time again, as you flip through the pages of history, they come at you - rollicking out of the mist with some grand wild-eyed vision, a chaotic elemental force that just seems to skew everything sideways...and at the end of the day you are left surveying an empire in ruins, millions of people freed from oppression and a blowback that is today, still only barely understood or acknowledged.

At the end of the day, Zia ul Haq's observation "Charlie did it." rings utterly true.

Charlie Wilson was a womanizing, alcoholic wastrel, an East Texas congressman best known for his booming voice, drinking, congressional junkets and proclivity for showgirls and Playboy bunnies. He was also the hinge and the catalyst for the largest covert operation in history - the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Charlie Wilson's War is, quite frankly, an extraordinary piece of work. George Crile, a producer for the television news show 60 Minutes, has put together a vivid and fascinating book that tellingly examines how a U.S. congressman essentially hijacked U.S. foreign policy into supporting the Afghan mudjahideen to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

This quixotic politician became obsessed with the plight of Afghanistan, the Afghan people,and with taking the fight to the Soviets directly. This passionate ambition (or obsession depending on your perspective) brought Wilson into play initially as the primary critic of the CIA's early efforts in Afghanistan, and through his political machinations, almost single-handedly pushed the CIA into a far more active covert role than they had planned. The operation evolved into one of the most critical centerpieces of the Cold War and a major contributing factor in the collapse of the USSR.

Crile's ability to draw vivid and motivated portrayals of the many people working with Charlie Wilson is one of the defining characteristics of this compulsively readable book. Charlie Wilson was aided in is endeavors by an unlikely and diverse cast of characters including Gust Avrokotos, a street-smart, "working-class" CIA agent of Greek-American descent, adrift in a sea of bureaucratic Ivy League "cake-eaters"; code-breakers, eccentric politicians trading favors and committee funding votes, suicidal mujahidden, Israeli weapons dealers, the President of Pakistan Zia ul Haq (who seemed to find a kindred spirit in Charlie Wilson), a Dallas housewife turned belly-dancer and an ex-Green Beret who helped turn the muj into an effective and deadly army of peasant techno-guerillas. Maybe too effective...

The result of Charlie Wilson's obsession was eventually 25,000 dead Russian soldiers...and a profoundly changed world.

I have just three words to emphasis: Read. The. Book. It is simply terrific.

For some historical perspective on Afghanistan and its role as a crossroads of empire (and a relentless eater of foreign armies) , I highly recommend Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, and that timeless classic Kim by Rudyard Kipling. You may also want to consult this chap...

For a slightly different, very moving and evocative take on Afghanistan check out An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan by Jason Elliot, a first-rate travel book that was published just after 9-11.

For more on Afghanistan check out Afghanistan Online , the CIA World Factbook , Afghanistan News Net and Afghanistan's Website .

Interested in what Afghanistan looks like? Be sure to check out National Geographic's Afghanistan in Crisis site. Also check out the University of Texas's Afghanistan Map Collection and get a look at life in Afghanistan here, here and here.

As a crossroads between Islam and Buddhism, Afghanistan and Central Asia are a priceless archaeological treasure trove, albeit one that has been difficult, if not impossible to study in recent years. Find out more at Central Asia Archaeology or if you are feeling ambitious, read another solid work by Peter Hopkirk called Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia.

Thank you for reading BookLinker! Feel free to post comments or book suggestions below. And be sure to buy all your books through BookLinker - Christmas is coming, so get your shopping done early!

2003-11-14T06:33:00.000-08:00

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

The Internet has been a fantastic boon for conspiracy theorists. Let's face it, everybody has suspicions that the world you see, the history that you inhabit, is not what it seems to be on the surface at first glance. The world is often a strange place...and you start to see things that may or may not be connected...the unspoken truth that you can glimpse only in those moments where the ice is thin or the veneer is flawed...and the raw, naked reality is suddenly staring you coldly in the face...or you may just be a raving lunatic...

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is one of those books. Brown has concocted a gripping and strongly paced thriller that weaves together The Holy Grail, pagan symbolism, secret Templar societies, biblical studies, the history of the Church, and the work of Leonardo Da Vinci into a melange that, weirdly enough, melds into a very readable and fairly taut story.

Following the symbolic code left by a murdered curator of the Louvre Museum, Robert Langdon, Harvard symbologist, must unravel a 2,000 year old mystery that cuts to the heart of the Christian faith, following the clues hidden in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci. Aided by the curator's (naturally enough) beautiful cryptographer daughter, the trail leads them to the Priory of Sion, a clandestine Templar society that is protecting a deadly secret, now being hunted by another group that will stop at nothing to protect the faith.

Although I've heard some mixed reviews regarding the historical accuracy of the information that Brown bases his trhiller on, his rich interpretation of symbolism provides the heart of the story and the clues to the mystery are endlessly fascinating.

In the end the book will probably be regarded as sensationalist and trashy by some, and truthful, thought-provoking and challenging by others. For myself, I found it to be a throughly agreeable thriller, easy to delve into and hard to put down, although I noted that Brown, when discussing Da Vinci's Mona Lisa in copious detail in the story, failed to note the first thing that struck me while gazing at the painting - that she has no eyebrows.

Interested in some of the alternative versions of the Bible (which, of course is online - you can find it here)? Check out The Dead Sea Scrolls which contain fragments of early testaments, some of which suggest new interpretations of what are considered the biblical facts. Here's some more moldy original documentation for you...

If Grail lore floats your boat, check out Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh, a work cited by Dan Brown as a major source for The Da Vinci Code. Interested in the Priory of Sion and the Knights Templar?

Want to know more about Renaissance genuis of Leonardo Da Vinci? There are innumerable sites dedicated to this artist, inventor, scientest and engineer. I recommend The Artcyclopedia for a good overview of links and sites, and Boston's Museum of Science site Leonardo. Also available is an online collection of Da Vinci's sketches and a site covering his famous Leichester Codex, now owned by none other than ....Bill Gates.

Talk about your conspiracies...

Thank you for reading BookLinker! Feel free to post comments or book suggestions below. And be sure to buy all your books through BookLinker's Amazon links - Christmas is coming, so get your shopping done early right here!

2003-11-04T20:40:00.000-08:00

Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions - Ben Mezrich

"Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit." - R. E. Shay

Once upon a time I made a little stop on a business trip and found myself sitting at a green baize-covered table flipping the pasteboards in a blaringly loud casino. The game was blackjack and, quite astonishingly, I found myself up $300 by the end of the evening. I was always quite pleased with myself for winning...and more importantly for walking away with my winnings in my pocket instead of fruitlessly pursuing more.

I was never foolish enough to attribute it to anything but dumb luck.

Bringing Down the House is the highly readable, if not mesmerizing, tale of MIT's underground blackjack club. The book tells the story of Kevin Lewis, a math-science "whiz kid" from Exeter, MIT student and card-counter extraordinaire, outlining his recruitment into the world of professional card-counting. Lewis joined a small, secretive, MIT-based card-counting team that would, eventually, take the major casinos of Las Vegas for more than $3-million, before fate and the casino security operatives eventually caught up with them.

Ben Mezrich brings a vivid cast of characters and settings to life, outstripping what you find in most fictional thrillers, opening up the hidden world of blackjack, professional gamblers, card counters, and casino backrooms to scrutiny. Interestingly enough, the card-counters of MIT weren't breaking the law (card-counting is perfectly legal as long as no artificial means are being used to count and the integrity of the game is not being violated)...just emptying the casino's pockets by cutting out their statistical edge.

Blackjack, more than any other casino game is predictable at a mathmatical level. It has a history - you know what cards have been played and can therefore guess what cards remain in the dealers' hand. You can't know the exact outcome, but you can know the statistical probability of the remaining unplayed cards. With a team tracking the cards, you can bet accordingly and ... bring down the house.

Mezrich's book is rich with compulsion, greed and adreneline, and filled with...well everything you need to know to count cards at blackjack, including Spotters, Gorillas, Big Players, the Eye-in-the-Sky, code signals, "back-rooming" and shuffle-tracking. Highly entertaining, tense and difficult to put down, Bringing Down the House is no gamble, it is a terrific read.

Did you know that playing cards have been traced back in popular culture to 1377? Check out more on the history of playing cards here or here.

Try out this magic virtual card trick. Did you figure out how he did it?

Want to find out what's happening right now in Vegas? Check out Las Vegas LiveCams for a look at where the gamblers like to roam.

Think you have a system that can beat the casinos? Have I got a card game for you!

Thank you for reading BookLinker! Feel free to post comments or book suggestions. I'd love to see some feedback and some discussion on these reads, so dive right in!

2003-10-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain

It winds its way, serpentine, through song and story, history and culture. 4,300 crooked and bent miles, a watery artery that cuts through the heart of a continent - directly into American life. "Too thick to drink, too thin to plow" is how Mark Twain describes the Mississipi River.

I'm not sure why the Mississippi seems to capture something in me. I've only seen it once, peering at it through an 12-year old's eyes out the windows of our station wagon as we sped south to an orange-scented Florida. To a twelve-year old, it was just another river crossing, albeit a bit wider then most, notable only in that it set my father humming CCR tunes for the next hundred miles (that's Creedance Clearwater Revival for the ignorant). Yet...it intrigues.

Mark Twain is possibly the most "American" of novelists, catching with his journalist's eye, the culture and life along "The Big Muddy", evoking in a way, the spirit of the place, better then any other writer. Though countless generations of students have waded through Huckleberry Finn, comparatively few crack open Life on the Mississipi, Twains' non-fiction "history" of the Mississippi and his evocation of the lost era of the steamboat and the untamed river, with its ever changing banks and shoals.

Life on the Mississippi is an intensely personal account, as Twain was a steamboat pilot and knew the river, snags,sand-bars, channels and river life as only a steamboat pilot can - intimately and minutely.

"Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling features that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!....All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a "break" that ripples above some deadly disease?...doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?"

Twain sketches the history of the river generally, but lightly, from LaSalle's initial foreys, touching on the physical vageries of the river, to the steamboat pilot's life and training, steamboat racing (S.S. Sultana, New Orleans to Natchez, 268 miles in 19 hours, 45 minutes in 1844), the impact of the Civil War, folktales, stories and legendary incidents,and the everyday life of the river community. Twain captures the cadance and rhythm of the river and the people and personalities who populated the Mississippi valley - those who worked it, cursed it, dreamed on it...

Now the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers has lassoed the river, tamed it with dikes and dredges...but Twain will tell you that the river is patient and one day it will, despite all we do to contain it, loose its shackles. They don't call it the Father of Waters for nothing.

There are any number of terrific sites on Twain, his legacy and his writings online. Check out this one for a good collection of background info and links, or this one for online versions of his works (I recommend his cuttingly sarcastic and funny assault on James Fenimore Cooper found here). PBS offers a great "interactive" scrapbook for Mark Twain here. Yes, Life on the Mississippi is also available online - you can find it here.

Check out the Father of Waters itself here, here and here. For some sense of the vital cultural impact that the river has, check out PBS's River of Song site. or cruise the river yourself in an old-fashioned paddle-wheeler.

Thanks for reading BookLinker! Comments and feedback are always welcome! (As are purchases - so buy a book today!)

2003-09-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

Ignorant Armies: Sliding into War in Iraq - Gwynne Dyer

"If historical ingratitude were a crime, the chattering classes of the West would be facing life sentences at hard labour. The luckiest generation in history, the people who got their future back because the Third World War was cancelled, think that the world has changed forever just because a few terrorists have chosen them as targets."

Watching the post 9-11 events play out over the last two years have left me with an astonishing contempt for a significant portion of the news media, particularly CNN and some of the other cable news channels (notably Fox, which, frankly, isn't news, just sensationalism repackaged with pretty graphics, attitude and aseriously skewed agenda). It is significant that you won't find Gwynne Dyer on any U.S. network. It may be because he is intelligent, incisive, plain-spoken, thoughtful, not given to simplistic soundbites and - uncharacteristically for a journalist - well-grounded on his subject of expertise.

His area of expertise is war. Dyer is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker. He has a PhD in Miilitary and Middle Eastern History from the University of London, has served in the Canadian, British and American navies, taught military history at the Canadian Forces College and the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst before beginning a career as a freelance journalist and filmmaker. Co-producer of a seven-part documentary television series "War" (nominated for an Oscar for one episode), his print column on international affairs now appears in more than 200 newspapers and more than 40 countries around the world.

The reason I delve so deep into his bio is that Ignorant Armies, written and published just prior to the start of the Iraq War, offers up, with astonishing clarity and insight, the single best examination of the motives, circumstances and driving forces behind the war with Iraq that I have yet found. This is no Noam Chomsky, anti-war peacenik or partisan conspiracy nut. Dyer is articulate, intelligent and thought-provoking, cutting through much of the agenda-laden drivel that the majority of the news media has been substituting for analysis recently. As Dyer himself memorably put it in one interview ""If you like being treated like an idiot child by your leaders and your media, you are living at the right time".

Ignorant Armies offers up a solid strategic analysis of the international political situation, examining the motivations of al Quada, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, George W. Bush and the current administration, looking sharply at the reasoning behind the scene. It is a refreshingly candid and non-partisan tome, well-written and accessible even for people with no prior background on the subject area. Of particular note is Dyer's scathing analysis of the administration's "Weapons of Mass Destruction" excuse for the war, an excuse he readily demolishes.

If 9-11 and Iraq have you baffled, or even if you are sure you know all the answers, Ignorant Armies is a must-read.

Interested in finding out more about what's going on in Iraq? Check out Dear Raed, an anonomous Iraqi blogger whose been posting since before the war.

For a look from "our side of the fence" (so to speak), check out LT. Smash's blog, Back to Iraq 2.0, and Warblogs.

A fair number of Gywnn Dyer's various articles and columns are available online, just pop by Google and take a look.

Comments are always welcome.

Remember BookLinker depends on your support so...buy a book! Please?

2003-08-26T19:21:00.000-07:00

Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser

Fast Food Nation has that greasy, delicious taste of muckraker ambience, but it is just too well written, too comprehensive, and too well researched to be tarred lightly with that label.

Eric Schlosser delves deep into the history, practices and culture of America's love-affair with fast food, and the lasting impact (both economic and otherwise) that the obsession creates. Schlosser's pen is wide ranging, from the cattle farms, feedlots and agribusiness of yesterday, today and tomorrow to fast-food's impact on labor practices and the meat-packing industry (guaranteed to make you view vegetarianism with a more sympathetic eye). His comprehensive tome examines the history and development of fast-food, including such varied and little known subtopics such as the taste-enhancing chemists (housed quietly in the New Jersey industrial strip) that add the final filip to the industry's special sauces. Very little escapes his gaze, including elegant factoids such as the profit margins on soft drinks (very, very high, particularly when you "supersize" your drink) to internal McDonalds' discussions on the brand merit of keeping the golden arches (The gist is that they resemble female breasts (there is a serious brand Oedipal thing going on there, trust me..)).

Like so many other people, I spent my time in the fast food industry - both as a customer and as a teenage burger flipper, so reading Fast Food Nation, I found I could identify and recognize quite readily many of the labor practices and processes that Schlosser examines. I still recall with a bit of a shudder the time one of the fry handlers pulled a full basket out of the boiling shortening without allowing the excess oil to run off. I just happened to be cleaning the small freezer below when he lifted the dripping, steaming basket over my head and bare arms, liberally pouring hot oil on me. I ended up with only painful but light burns on my arms but it was the manager's callous disregard for the accident that stuck in my mind. He wanted me to finish my shift...

Schlosser's horrifying and telling examination of the meat-packing industry culminates Fast Food Nation, looking at the industrialization of the meat industry, the severe economic and health impacts on society, and the labor practices and the ever-increasing pace of work on "the Killing Floor". This is great investigative journalism, well-written and uniformly fascinating.

Fast Food Nation is a book that, very probably, the MacDonald's and Taco Bell's of the world, do not want you to read. It makes you think too much about the real social cost of your Happy Meal. You will never eat a burger again without wondering, so if you really, really love your Big Mac, maybe you should skip this book.

Schlosser is also the author of the recently published Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. I liked Fast Food Nation so much, I immediately went out and grabbed Reefer Madness but it was, by comparison, disappointing. Reefer Madness examines, much more lightly, aspects of the U.S. underground economy, namely the current war on marijuana, the pornography industry and the illegal migrant worker industry in the strawberry fields. None of these topics are examined in the same comprehensive detail as Schlosser exhibited in Fast Food Nation. Although Reefer Madness is well-written and offers some of the same tantalizing facts and information snippets, the effort falls short, mainly as each of the topics deserve a much more in-depth and wider look - in short a book of their own.

Here's some more fast food facts on the healthiness of that burger and fries you just tucked away...

Want to know more about McDonalds? You can check out their corporate site here, or for a look at the Anti-McDonalds forces (McDonalds has become a prime target of the worldwide anti-globalization movement), check out this site. Of particular interst is the infamous "McLibal" case in the United Kingdom which is written up on the site.

My particular favorite McDonalds story (courtesy of the 60 Minutes news show), was when McDonald's in the UK sent a letter to small fine dining establishment in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands, demanding that the restaurant stop using the name McDonalds. The owner and operator happened to be the Laird of the McDonald Clan...who evoked Clan privilage and demanded in turn that McDonalds' cease using the name without the express permission of the Clan. Pu' tha in yer sporran, ye bluddy wee haggis!

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2003-08-07T20:58:00.000-07:00

Diplomatic Immunity - Lois Bujold

Good science fiction comes in many different forms and genres. You have hard science fiction (bouyed by speculation and imagination, but grounded in hard-core science), fantesy, cyberpunk and more...and you have Space Opera. Space opera is not concerned overly with building its worlds or concepts on scientific fact (or if it does, it clothes itself rather loosely in the robes of scientific fact) but with ideas, characters, and grand situations. For example, Star Wars is the classic space opera movie.

Diplomatic Immunity by Lois Bujold is space opera at its best, but in good conscience I cannot recommend you read it...without reading at least some of the prior books in the series. They are all damn fine reads.

Diplomatic Immunity is the latest in the Miles Vorkosigan saga. The plotline drags newly married, honeymooning Bayarran Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan ("The Emperor's Voice"), now retired from active service due to (repeated) injury, headlong into yet another fray, negotiating a diplomatic dispute at an isolated space station that rapidly escalates into attempted assassination, consipiracy and murder.

Filled with Bujold's usual combination of intricate plot, action, humor social commentary, Diplomatic Immunity is, like the other books in the series, hugely, entirely character-driven. The science in this science fiction is just the window-dressing for a terrific character. Miles Vorkosigan is one of the best characters that any author could hope to create - namely one that springs fullblown out of the page right at you. Miles, crippled at birth by an "invitro" assassination attempt, is physically constrained by both brittle bones and a dwarvish stature, but compensates by being brilliant, energetic (almost maniacal at points), duty-driven and almost psychotically determined. As one character aptly describes: "He's not short. He's...concentrated." For sheer personality, Miles is fabulous. Throw in a well-plotted set of devious foes (both foreign and domestic) into the universe, stir well...and you have one great space opera.

The next time your quest for good reading takes you into the giant mega-book superstore, walk right by the row upon row of Star Trek and Star Wars junk that pollutes the store shelves and dive into some good space opera for a change with Lois Bujold. I'm not saying this to slight the Star Wars and Star Trek books, but let's face it: they churn out new one's each month like Harlequin romances and few, if any are particularly good (J. Ford's The Final Reflection is excepted, along with one or two other authors). Don't read Diplomatic Immunity first. Grab a couple of her earlier works (some of the Miles Vorkosigan stories are now available in collections) to get yourself well and hooked on the character. Now go forth and read...

For more on Miles and Lois Bujold, visit the author's site (and home of the The Dendarii Free Mercenaries) here.

Here's another old space opera hero- Flash Gordon himself! Interested in old pulp fiction, Astounding stories etc? Check out this site and this one. To keep up with the sci-fi news, visit Sci-Fi Weekly. You can also get Analog online.

Interested in getting into space? You can do it...and make money to boot. Check out the X-Prize today.

2003-07-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

"It was a dark and stormy night" - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

The results of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for 2003 are now out and, in the interest of preserving the best of purple prose everywhere, here are several of the winning entries:

Grand Prize:
"They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined
string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . .
Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar
from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently" - Ms. Mariann Simms, Wetumpka, AL

Runner-up:
"The flock of geese flew overhead in a "V" formation - not in an old-fashioned-looking Times New Roman kind of a "V", branched out slightly at the two opposite arms at the top of the "V", nor in a more modern-looking, straight and crisp, linear Arial sort of "V" (although since they were flying, Arial might have been appropriate), but in a slightly asymmetric, tilting off-to-one-side sort of italicized Courier New-like "V" - and LaFonte knew that he was just the type of man to know the difference. " -John Dotson (U.S. Naval Officer), Arlington, VA

My personal favorite:
"They say she carried her own warmth around with her, like one of those thermoregulating arctic mammals, say, a polar bear, or a baby harp seal (though not a penguin, which is antarctic, anyway, and not a mammal, but a bird), but she wasn't fat or blubbery, which makes it all the more unbelievable why anyone would have wanted to club her to death for her fur coat, which wasn't even white, I'm told, but black."- Harry H. Buerkett, Urbana, IL

Bravo, bravo! For more check out the full contest results at the Bulwer-Lytton site.

2003-07-15T20:30:00.000-07:00

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex - Nathaniel Philbrick

"From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume. " - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

As sea tales go, In the Heart of the Sea covers the gamut.

Written by Nathanial Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea tells the true tale of the whaleship Essex, which provided the grist for Melville's famous salty yarn quoted above. The Essex was a 238-ton Nantucket whaler that set sail in 1819 to hunt sperm whales in the South Pacific in a newly discovered whaling region called the Offshore Ground. In an extraordinary turn of events, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an eighty-five foot sperm whale, sending the ship to the bottom and its 20 crew members on a 3,000-mile dark and epic battle for survival across the empty expanse of the Pacific. Only eight eventually made it back to civilization, and their passage was one marked by terrible tribulation, death and cannibalism.

Philbrick has put together a wrenchingly vivid story that brings to life both the participants and the whaling culture of Nantucket. Loaded with sharp gems of information and observation on topics from whale behavior, the hunting process, the whaling economy, Quakerism, Nantucket culture, the racial make-up of the Essex's crew (7 were African-American, 1/3 of the crew), the history and usage of the infamous "custom of the sea" (or cannibalism as you or I would have it) and many other topics. One of the facts that stuck in my mind was the description of the "trying out" process, of cooking the blubber to extract the whale oil, and how often, when the fetid and noxious process was well underway, the only safe way to move across the oily, slippery deck was to slide on the seat of your pants.

In the Heart of the Sea is an extraordinary and horrific sea tale, but Philbrick's careful research and excellent prose raise it well above the average in both the telling and in the content. Highly recommended.

Here's a Nantucket toast quoted from In the Heart of the Sea which I thought weirdly captured the strange dicotomy between Nantucket's highly religious Quaker roots, and the bloody labor on the waves that kept it's people employed...

" Death to the living
Long Life to the killers,
Success to sailors wives
And greasy luck to whalers."

For more on the Essex, check out the first-hand accounts of The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex by Owen Chase (who was the First Mate on the Essex) and The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale by Thomas Nickerson (the Essex's then 15-year old cabin boy). Another read recommended by the author is Stove by a Whale by Thomas Farel Heffernan (the author of Mutiny on the Globe , also reviewed on this site).

If you are interested. Herman Melville's epic (if lengthy) story of obsession, death and the White Whale is available free on-line here. Melville based his tale upon the story of the Essex but politely ended his story with the sinking of the ship rather then dwelling on the darker tale of survival at sea...

For more information on Nantucket and its history of whaling, check out the Nantucket Historical Association. Also good is the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

For more on whale conservation check out The Ocean Alliance and the American Cetacean Society.

Not a believer in whale conservation? - here's some whale recipes for your gastronomical enjoyment (although on the whole I'd rather eat broccali...and I really hate broccali.).

Comments are always welcome. Please remember, if you like this review, support BookLinker by buying your online purchases through our site.

Thanks!

2003-07-09T12:17:00.000-07:00

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw - Mark Bowden

Somewhere, probably in some dusty back-alley private house in Pesawar or Quetta or some country farmhouse, is a quiet team of Delta Force operatives, patiently and relentlessly running the hunt for Osama Bin Ladin.

You see, they've done it before...

Killing Pablo is not about Bin Ladin, but outlines a very similar hunt for another of world's greatest outlaws. The target was Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin drug cartel and in Killing Pablo, Mark Bowden offers a chilling, gripping and fascinating glimpse into the long and difficult hunt to eliminate Escobar.

Killing Pablo outlines Escobar's rise from a petty car thief in the slums of Medellin to his absolute control over the Colombian cocaine trade, and consequently his eventual rise to becoming an active threat to the fragile stability of Colombia. Bowden paints a disquieting (if fascinating) potrait of Pablo Escobar: By turns Escobar is vicious, charming, cunning, delusional, pedophiliac, a habitual marijuana-user and an indifferent businessman at best who made up for his entreprenuerial shortcomings by being utterly ruthless and coldly practical in the application of violence.

Bowden has penned a well-written, highly readable book, if somewhat disturbing, as it is essentially the tale of the efforts to find and kill one man, albeit one man who had destablized and crippled the government of Colombia and the Colombian justice system (Colombian jurists, police and prosecutors were generally offered one choice: gold or lead - referring to accepting a bribe or a shot in the head. One hell of a lot of them ended up dead....).

The book outlines the extensive involvement of the U.S. government and its most secret assets that were used to help track and hunt down Escobar. It also touches on the highly secretative involvement of the U.S. anti-terrorism unit Delta Force. Bowden, who previously won the Pulitzer (very deservedly, I might add) for his excellent book Black Hawk Down, hints at Delta Force's involvement in the killing of Pablo Escobar and in their involvement in the extra-legal vigilante groups that targeted Escobar's associates, partners and family. Think what you will about the relative paucity of hard evidence supporting the author's theory, but as a result of Black Hawk Down Bowden knows the Special Forces community quite well. Read the book and judge for yourself.

Overall, an excellent read. The only quibble I had was with the cover, which was a photograph of the dead Pablo Escobar flanked by his hunters (Colombian police and, interestingly enough, a CIA guy). I was never able to leave the book lying around anywhere in my house where my five-year wouldn't get a look at that disturbing image, so as a result the book has been shovelled into a storage box instead of gracing my bookshelf....

If you are interested, the Philidelphia Inquirer (the paper that Bowden writes for) has available online copies of the series of articles by Bowden that eventually became the book (they did something similar for Black Hawk Down). Check it out here.

For more about international drug trafficking, check out the DEA. For more on the war on drugs, check out Frontline's Drugwars.

Remember these guys?

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2003-06-18T20:40:00.000-07:00

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

Life is all about patterns. Think about it: you live your life on a linear frame, a demographic progression, with your likes and dislikes, your life stages and steps all patterned out, in sync with others of your generation. Each life is similar, but different when regarded up close. Life, like a city in the distance, is clear, well-ordered and structured - patterned - but up close, that's where the chaos and pattern becomes more intricate, more fractual...harder to see.

Pattern Recognition is William Gibson's latest book, and in my opinion, one of his best. It still doesn't come close to the impact of Neuromancer (which was both a literary and genre-defining work), but, it is, as was once said, a near run thing.

Pattern Recognition's main character, Cayce Pollard, is a "cool-hunter", a natural marketer, someone who has developed an inate sense of pattern recognition for what "works" and what doesn't in the ever-changing, chaotic and permeable world of consumer brand marketing. Pollard is also chasing after an underground Internet "sub-culture" that is piecing together clips of a unique and unknown film clips called "the footage" that is being uploaded onto the Net by person or persons unknown. Unknown to her, others are chasing the footage and view her and her unique brand sense as a tool to finding the creator of the footage...

One of Gibson's descriptive riffs from an earlier work still floats around in my head regularly - for no particular reason that I can discern: "The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.."

I've yet to find an author who can weave the modern and the descriptive quite so well as William Gibson. Gibson's prose is so evocative and effective, so laced with meaning and sub-text. It is, as with his book Neuromancer, as though something is lurking just under the surface, some meaning, some presence...The message you receive when you parse through one of his intricate and elegant paragraphs is eeriely reminscent of the stripping away of layers of chaos within society, technology, and the modern world; to discover the underlying codes that permeate today's world....Pattern Recognition is both a title and what he does as a writer.

Don't read Pattern Recognition expecting cyberpunk. This is not cyberpunk. Do read it however, it is worth your time.

Check out Gibson's own weblog here. Nice to see an author blogging...I highly recommend some of his online articles, in particular the one he wrote on Japan, a country with which I have had a long history and involvement with. I know no one who can capture the essence of modern Tokyo like Gibson can. It is indeed a writer's gift...

Interested in cyberpunk culture? Check out Project Cyberpunk for some interesting links, or read Neal Stephenson's excellent book Snow Crash.

Interesting in marketing and "cool-hunters"? First read Naomi Klein's No Logo, then check out Frontline's take on cool-hunting. Personally I prefer Toffler...he's not cool, but he's got pattern recognition down cold.

Remember, if you enjoy BookLinker's reviews, you can show your appreciation by clicking to Amazon through our links when you make your purchases. Thanks!

2003-06-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

Kingdom of Fear : Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century - Hunter Thompson

"We are few, but we speak with the power of many. We are strong like lonely bulls, but we are legion. Our code is gentle, but our justice is Certain - seeming Slow on some days, but slashing Fast on others, eating the necks of the Guilty like a gang of Dwarf Crocodiles in some lonely stretch of the Maputo River in the Transvaal, where the Guilty are free to run, but they can never Hide." Hunter S, Thompson, on the difficulties of maintaining an equitable lawyer - client relationship.

He is one of the most unique post-modern authors in America today and his words race like rabid dogs through the rancid backalleys of your forebrain, rendering you incapable of speech, foaming like some pundit on cable, salivating at the thought of driving THOSE DAMNED WORDS out of your head and ending this hallucinatory haze of despair and triumph....

Okay, okay. I can't write HST. No one but the Hunter himself seems to channel the weird, chaotic content that confuses, twists and writhes into your head, leaving you, at the end of the day, recognizing his supreme talent for making sense out of what, so far, has been a relatively senseless century. Kingdom of Fear is his latest work and a strange, but throughly enjoyable journey. Mainly focused on post 9-11 America, the vageries of the justice system and the climate of fear and reactionary response that now seems pervasive across much of the US, Thompson's somewhat autobiographical work is a surreal blend of musings, tempered political and sociological insight, name-dropping and dementia - which now that I think about it, probably sums up most of his work.

Best known for such works as Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Generation of Swine, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (interestingly enough, now considered an example of studying social anthropology through "direct observation" and is used in a number of Anthropology courses), The Great Shark Hunt, and as Rolling Stone Magazines "Gonzo" political reporter, Thompson is a true child of the Sixties, a worldly anachronism that, perhaps, is more politically relevant now then ever before.... Thompson's self-proclaimed beat is "The Death of the American Dream" and he has been covering that journalistic beat for more than 35 years (This is a man who once interviewed Richard M. Nixon while standing at a urinal). Kingdom of Fear is a fascinating (and dark and twisted and chaotic and...well, read it and you'll find out) book, well-written (in it's own hallucinatory way) but probably not for all tastes.

For more on The Hunter, check out this link page.

If you've ever read Gary Trudeau's (Note: not the former Canadian Prime Minster) comic strip Doonesbury, you will probably recall Duke - the Luger-wielding, Wild Turkey swilling, drug-using, vaguely psychotic former Ambassador to China...you guessed it - he's based on HST.

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2003-06-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

The Dante Club - Matthew Pearl

"Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear."

Finding a work that combines Dante Alighieri, 19th Century Boston, Harvard University politics, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and a serial killer is...well, it's a rare find, and a rippin' good mystery novel it makes...

The Civil War is over. The troops are returning, The Confederacy is crushed beneath the Union's heel and Boston, the "Athens" of the North, is the epicenter of American intellectual life. In this rarified atmosphere, the Dante Club is formed. The Dante Club is a group of Boston's finest literari: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and publisher J.T. Fields; dedicated to bringing the first American translation of Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy to publication. Opposed by an insular Harvard and scholars that view Dante as dangerous and foreign, The Dante Club must also face a terrifying new threat: finding a vicious serial killer that seems to be copying the punishments in The Inferno and metting them out onto some of Boston's most prominent citizens.

Somewhat reminiscent of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (another mystery with hidden depths in a unique setting ) The Dante Club is one of those books that may be off-putting to some readers due to the "literary" nature of its subject matter but Pearl does an excellent job weaving the mystery through the prose (and the somewhat pompous and self-important posturing of some of the main characters. I've never met a "literary giant" in person but these guys...yeeesh.). The author presents a well-written and fascinating glimpse into some of the premier literary figures of the age, outlining the historic details of their personal struggles, ambitions and petty rivalries (E.A. Poe's spiteful resentment of and rivalry with the Boston intellectuals of the Dante Club for instance). Into this worthy mix, Pearl skillfully threads a very believable and well-plotted mystery that does a very good job of catching and keeping your interest high throughout the book while dragging the literary greats on a intricate journey into their own private Hell in pursuit of the killer.

Don't read this book expecting the usual "serial killer thriller", it is more thoughtful, more evocative and the themes more mythic then expected. As an added bonus, the background on Dante, his life and times, and the literary structure of the Inferno is well worth a look. I hadn't read Dante since high school but I found myself reading and re-reading the Dante quotes very attentively. Time changes all literary works for a reader and now, approaching the mid-point of my own life, it may be that Dante says new things to me that warrent a second look.

Interested in learning more? Check out the World of Dante here, and be sure to visit the DigitalDante site (which includes the complete version of the Divine Comedy online).

You can see what the real-world Dante Club eventually evolved into here or visit the book's own website here for a sneak peek (not to be confused with this Dante Club)..

Learn about historic Boston here, or check out Harvard here.

For a Sci-fi writers take on Hell, check out Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's book Inferno.

Remember, if you enjoy this review, please support the site by clicking on and purchasing your books through our links to Amazon! Thanks!

2003-05-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

Krakatoa : The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 - Simon Winchester

My younger brother is a professional astronomer. Several years ago, on a research trip to Hawaii, he unfortunately had his observation time on Mauna Kea cut short by a telescope malfunction (Note: Only an astronomer would call two days off work in Hawaii an unfortunate occurence). This breakdown left him with two days to roam about the Big Island in daylight, something that astronomers, with their vampiric lifestyle, rarely get the opportunity to do. He headed off to Volcanoes National Park and upon his return, described to me in exceptional vivid detail what it was like to hike on ground that was too hot to stand still on for lengthy periods of time...

Such is the hidden geothermal power of the earth. Melted sneakers are the least of your worries...

Krakatoa: The Day the Earth Exploded is a fascinating, complex journey into the heart of one of the most infamous volcanic eruptions of all time, and, thanks to the advent of the undersea telegraph cable, the first truly "modern" disaster of history. Krakatoa exploded on August 27, 1883, claiming more than 40,000 lives and the shock wave traveled the globe a total of seven times, being measured clearly in England in both tidal records and barometer measurements.

Winchester does an excellent job outlining the background of the disaster, including both the geologic significance of Krakatoa's location, the significance of Alfred Russell Wallace's evolutionary "Wallace Line", the background of plate tectonics and continental drift, with the history of vulcanism and the Dutch colonial empire of the East. He knows his geology and is gifted with an excellent ability to explain the details in clear and refreshingly non-technical prose. At the end of the day you have a clear view of the significance of the disaster, the horrifying eyewitness accounts of huge and cataclysmic explosion (heard more than 3600 km away), the 100-foot tsunamis that devastated the coastal regions, the long-term impact the eruption had on the burgeoning Dutch empire, and the glorious sunsets that Krakatoa's globe-encircling dust and ash gifted the world.

Winchester does a good job demosntrating the unimaginable scale and horror of the event. One particularly chilling passage recounts ships sighting literal rafts of pumice clogging the seas, floating across the Indian Ocean, complete with hundreds of skeletal human remains and household debris strewn across their surfaces.

The book falls short unfortunately in two key areas. First, though the disaster is well-described and documented, it also left me strangely unmoved and untouched. I found it difficult, if not impossible, to find myself involved or interested in any of the key figures of the age, partially because Winchester generally doesn't focus in on specific individuals or themes for lengthy periods of time and possibly because the geology lessons do tend to interrupt the flow of the narrative at times. Second, Winchester's attempt to link the eventual fall of the Dutch from power in Java and Indonesia with the devastation following the volcanic eruption seems...well, to be a bit of a reach. He notes the rise in radical Islamic activities in the years following Krakatoa and makes a basic case for cause-and-effect, it does not seem to be a particularly strong one and I for one, remain fairly unconvinced.

Overall, a strong and fascinating read.

For a look at Krakatoa today, check out these pictures, these ones and this site.

For more on volcanoes, check out Volcano World at the University of North Dakota, learn how they work here, and check out Pompeii, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius here.

Learn more about plate tectonics here (courtesy of the US Geological Survey) and Alfred Russell Wallace (and his famous Wallace Line) here.

Learn how to make a Golden Volcano here ...believe me, you will regret it. I did.

2003-05-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

Prey - Michael Crichton

After reading ten of Michael Crichton's books over the years, I've come to the reluctant conclusion that his reach exceeds his grasp.

Prey is no exception.

Set in the new scientific frontier of nano-technology, Crichton cautionary tale mixes his usual blend of amoral scientests, venture capital and new technology run amuck to craft a marginally interesting story set (mostly) in a Mojave research lab. The scientests have combined artificial intelligence, nano-technology and emergent behavior to create a new type of life form - a swarm of miniscule, molecule-sized machines that rapidly evolve their own purpose and direction, potentially threatening not only the scientests (and the intrepid "good guy" who must work with them to shut it down) within the lab, but the future of life on Earth.

The problem with the book doesn't come from the ideas - Crichton is great with ideas - and not from the science - again, an area that Crichton manages to pull together reasonably well (albeit somewhat dull to read for page after page) - but from the simple fact that his books almost all tend to be shallow, relatively characterless and, quite bluntly, not that original in their take on the ideas and concepts he spins out. Indeed several of his books (most notably Jurassic Park, Timeline, Rising Sun...Congo,... well okay, almost all of them...) seem to more concept treatments then real novels, written as Hollywood screenplay pitches rather then as fully evolved stories. When I think about what the ideas he has developed could be in the hands of a pure science fiction writer, I get chills, I get excited....but not over what Crichton has written.

Prey is particularly disapointing in this vein. The characters are mostly lacking any clear motivation or distinguishing features (beyond such attributes as race, gender, age or general appearance), the dialogue is light (and mostly clunky) and the plot situation is such that I found myself predicting (with a fair amount of exactitude) the ending. In truth, I didn't really care by the time the book ended what happened to the characters. It wasn't so bad that I was cheering on the vicious and destructive nano-particles (well, okay...maybe I was...a little...) but it certainly wasn't good...

For a better (and far more fascinating) read on nano-technology set far in the future, check out Walter Jon Williams' book Aristoi.

Read physicist Richard Feynman's 1959 talk that kick-started the nanotechnology concept here and some additional background info on nanotechnology here and here.

Here's an article on the potential dangers of nanotechnology that makes Crichton's book look like a gentle walk in the park....be afraid, be very afraid.

Here's another Crichton for you....

2003-04-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana - Ann Louise Bardach

An ajiaco is a spicy Cuban stew. Cuba Confidential is just such a book, filled with myrid tasty insights, bubbling quietly in hidden corners.

Written by the experienced and thoughtful journalist Ann Louise Bardach, Cuba Confidential helps shed some light on what, to an outsider, is one of the most puzzling political stews leftover from the twentieth century.

Taking the recent Elian Gonzalez case as its starting point, the author delves into the intricacies and byzantine political machinations of the both the Cuban exile community and the stolid and enduring dictatorship of Castro, recasting what many see as a Cold War leftover into a bitter family feud that divides Cubans on both sides, sundering relationships and tearing deeply personal scars. The author's expertise and long-relationship with both sides of the Cuban coin reveals the depth of political intrangience that cripples both sides, preventing both true discourse and productive change - trapping both countries in a mutually destructive relationship that neither encourages nor rewards finding common ground.

Bardach is particularly chilling when she digs into the role of Miami's imbittered and politically powerful Exile community of Calle Ocho (the so-called Third Rail of Florida politics (as in the rail that will electrocute you if you touch it)), the control and dominence they have established over South Florida, the strings they pull and power they wield. Filled with vivid glimpses of the inside wheels of power and personal motives (Janet Reno, the Miami-born US Attorney-General under Clinton weeping in her office over the vicious characterizations and personal attacks that exploded in the wake of the Elian affair; the particular callous disregard for the well-being of Elian by his exile relations; the manipulation of the press....and so on. Read the book for a full view.), the book in particular highlights two constrasting characters - the greying Fidel Castro and the Exile leader Mas Canosa and CANF.

One of the particular nuggets of note in the book is the intricate ties between the Exile community and the Bushes; George Sr., George Jr. and Jeb (Governer of Florida); and the infamous "hanging chad" electioneering that in the end, decided the presidency and shaped dramatically the future of the US. Interestingly enough, prior to September 11, 2001, one of the most infamous acts of terrorism in the Western hemisphere was the bombing of Cubana 455 in 1976 which killed 73 people (including almost the entire Cuban National Fencing Team). Carried out by Orlando Bosch (an exile with strong ties to CANF and Mas Canosa), Bosch was later pardoned by - you guessed it - George Bush Sr. This tends to make anyone who follows the current adminstration's pronouncements on terrorism a bit leery...

Cuba Confidential starts a bit slow and I for one found the intricacies of Cuban family ties to be difficult and somewhat tedious to work through, but persistant readers are well-rewarded with a well-written, quality glimpse inside what can only be called the unrivaled family feud of the last century.

For a recipe for ajiaco, check out this site.

Check out the CIA's Cuba page in the CIA's World Fact Book or check out the latest news from Cuba here.

Check out Amnesty International's report on Cuba here, and learn about Cuba's contribution to modern dance with the Mambo, the Rumba and the inevitable Cha-Cha.

For more insight on Cuba check out Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana by Isadora Tattlin, or This is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives by Ben Corbett.

2003-04-07T19:56:00.000-07:00

The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd - Richard Zacks

Pirates and blue water took hold of me as a kid and never really let go.

I blame those early-morning black-and-white film classics that our local TV station ran where I thrilled to such worthies as Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., as they jaunted their way through the Spanish Main, with Erich Wolfgang Korngold's blaring trumpets offering rich accompaniment...

Those celluloid pirates offered only the barest reflection of the reality of the pirate life.

The Pirate Hunter tells the tale (and a richly detailed, well-researched, highly charged tale it is) of Captain William Kidd, who, together with Blackbeard, is probably the most well-known figure in pirate lore. Interestingly enough, most public knowledge of Kidd, his activities and his piratical life, is entirely wrong. In this well-written work, Zacks sheds new light on the legendary Captain Kidd, who was a prominent and well-respected captain and merchant in early New York, painting an authentic picture of Kidd as a privateer captain, sanctioned and backed by certain individuals high in the British government, to seek out and destroy pirate activities (incidentally enriching his investors/backers and himself in the process). Privateers were, as Zacks points out, legally contracted to prey on enemy shipping, so it may well be treading a fine-line to paint Kidd as an innocent abroad, but the evidence Zacks presents that Kidd was a Pirate Hunter, not a pirate himself, is highly compelling, particularly after Kidd returns to await trial. Interwoven with Kidd's story is the tale of a true pirate, Robert Culliford, whose ongoing piratical career weaves in and out of the narrative (and Kidd's life) like an unrelenting Nemesis.

Zacks work is copiously backed by research, documentation and records, and wonderfully enhanced by period details, pirate lore and backroom political intrigue, including such tidbits as the surprising democratic structure of most pirate crews, their general distaste of battle (they prefered to frighten and bluff unwary ships into submission), the truth about the legendary lost treasure of Captain Kidd, and the inevitable and unenviable fate that the Admiralty reserved for convicted pirates.

Zacks paints a vivid and exciting picture that makes The Pirate Hunter a hugely entertaining read. Highly recommended!

Avast there - seeking new reads to plunder? Look no further, check out Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates by David Cordingly. I also recommend the old classic adventure tale, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (also available here as a free online version). Another classic author who knew pirates well was Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe who wrote one of the first "pirate histories" called A General History of Pyrates in 1724 (unfortunately not available yet free online).

If you are looking to fall out of your chair with laughter, I highly recommend George MacDonald Fraser's The Pyrates. It offers a tongue-firmly-in-cheek look at the Brethern of the Coast that could possibly cause you to rupture something while reading...

For more information (and a terrific link list) on pirates, check out Pirates of the Spanish Main. Find out about the legendary pirate haunts of Port Royal (which sank beneath the waves one cataclysmic morning in 1692), the Island of Tortuga, and Madagascar and the activities of modern-day pirates here.

Looking for lost pirate treasure? Try Gardiner's Island, off Long Island, where Kidd hid some of his disputed treasure; or , if you are feeling very energetic, head for Oak Island, Nova Scotia, another reputed repository of pirate gold...

Lastly, check out the sunken site of Blackbeard's famed pirate ship, The Queen Anne's Revenge! Here's a brief excerpt from Blackbeard's journal (courtesy of Daniel Defoe):

"Such a day, rum all out: — Our company somewhat sober: — A damned confusion amongst us! — Rogues a-plotting: — Great talk of separation — so I looked sharp for a prize: — Such a day found one with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damned hot; then all things went well again."

Hoist the black flag!

2003-04-01T15:35:00.000-08:00

Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket - Richard Holmes

"All gentlemen that have a mind
to serve the queen that's good and kind
come 'list and enter into pay..."

The Duke of Wellington called them "The scum of the earth". Although he on occasion added as an afterword "But what very fine fellows we have made of them...", he was not far off the mark. They were uneducated, generally illiterate, frequently drunk, poverty-stricken, disease-ridden, itinerate looters, vagabonds and thieves. They were the redcoats and they were, for the better part of a century, the finest infantry in the world.

Richard Holmes excellent history is entitled Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket, and within its pages the redcoat has never been more vividly portrayed. How did the British Army, playing perpetual second-fiddle to the British Navy in both public respect and budget, rise to become Kipling's legendary "thin red line"?

Holmes touches on every aspect of the life of the Redcoat from the expense of the uniforms (and the recruiters' treachery at charging it against new recruits pay and recruitment bounties), the purchase system for buying officer's promotion, to the weapons (the famed Brown Bess musket - .75 inch muzzle-loading flintlock musket or as Kipling termed it "out-spoken, flinty-lipped brazen-faced jade") the redcoats typically carried.

One of the common problems in a book of this type is that for the average reader, the terminology lends itself to obscure references (particularly the endless reams of regimental names, colors etc.) that can be confusing and tiresome. To be honest, I don't care if the 11th Foot wore buff or yellow facings and to his credit Holmes doesn't dwell overlong on these trivialities. Instead he delves deep into how the British Army functioned in the era of Horse and Musket, the tactics and strategies it used, the sounds and experience of battle (for men of the line as well as the officers), how regimental society (at home and abroad) functioned, the unique position of wives and camp-followers, the soldier's entertainments, food, dueling, the roles of the cavalry, gunners, surgeons, the army bureaucracy (which was notable even then for obtuse behavior. One unit, stationed in the Caribbean was scheduled to return to Britain. The administrators very kindly stopped the unit's pay, clothing and food allowances on their scheduled departure date - six months prior to the actual departure), and the soldier's copious appetite for alcohol and liquor.

Holmes goes to the original sources - the unvarnished, unwashed commentary of the men and officers who stood in the Line, bringing a real voice to the facelessness of the era. From the wry observations of Edward Costello, Rifleman ranker of the 95th on the practice of looting, to the irritated commentary of the Duke of Wellington disparaging British cavalry, the book covers the gamut of viewpoints on every related subject.

Well-written, well-illustrated, with clear prose and solid detail, Redcoat is, hands-down, one of the most enjoyable and readable military histories I have ever encountered on this subject area.

All ranks - CLOSE UP!

For a quick outline of the life of the Iron Duke, click here. If you are interested in a good bio on Wellington, I recommend Wellington: The Years of the Sword by Elizabeth Longford.

Find out about the history of the British Army at this solid site and refight the Battle of Waterloo here.

Looking to sign up? They can always use a little more cannon fodder...

2003-03-31T11:15:00.000-08:00

If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of A B-Movie Actor - Bruce Campbell

"Such is an actor's life. We must ride the waves of every film, barfing occasionally, yet maintain our dignity, even as the bulk of our Herculean efforts are keel-hauled before our very eyes." -Bruce Campbell.

You've very probably seen Bruce Campbell onscreen or flickering brightly (albeit briefly) as you channel-surfed the cable hinterlands at 1 A.M, even it you didn't realize it at the time. He is the ominipresent "blue-collar" working guy of the film and television industry, a solid, industrial-chinned actor who pops up routinely (on such television shows as Xena, Homicide, Ellen; and in roles such as the (soon to be dead) scientest in Congo, a soap opera star in Fargo and, most recently, as the Ring Announcer in the big-budget hit Spider-Man), and has developed a long, somewhat twisted yet steadily successful career in the entertainment industry.

He also is a "cult" hero for his work in several B-movie splatter fests (The Evil Dead series), a well-known speaker on the convention and college circuit and, in If Chins Could Kill, a surprisingly good teller of tales.

If Chins Could Kill is part biography (touching on his misspent youth in the Detroit suburbs and the creation of the "Detroit Mafia", a loose collection of young up-and-coming Detroit movie makers including his friend Director Sam Raimi), part how-to-make-low-budget-independent-films-involving-huge-amounts-of-karo-syrup (used for fake blood), and part philosphical musings on the entertainment industry, movie-making and of his place in the Hollywood foodchain.

Somewhat chaotic in style, and for the most part almost wholly irreverant throughout, the book mainly concentrates on Campbell and the Raimi brothers initial forays into film-making that culminated in "Evil Dead", a low-budget ($350,000) horror flick that, using frugal special effect tricks, cheap actors and a determined crew, managed to create what author Stephen King termed "the most ferociously original horror film of the year". The book is wildly funny at times and provides an excellent guide to any would-be film-makers on how to do more with less (ranging from the creation of a smoothly panning "vas-o-cam" (camera plus board plus vaseline equals smooth pan), to the best formula for fake blood).

If Chins Could Kill suffers marginally from the episodic tone as Campbell recounts his story, most significantly near the end of the book where much of the latter parts of Campbell's career is crammed into a couple of chapters (none of them as fully fleshed out as the early pages). The end of the book almost feels like it was "rushed" through development, instead of being rewritten and "chewed over" properly.

Be that as it may, the first half of the book is a terrific romp through a life in B-movies. Campbell's enthusiasm for his profession, his cynical asides and genuine enjoyment permeate the book, giving you a look at the Hollywood you don't see in the more glossy tomes (Don't believe me? Check out the back cover of the book and just read the blurb If that doesn't give you taste of who you are dealing with, nothing will...).

If you are interested in more, check out Bruce Campbell's own website (with complete filmography, complete with caustic commentary, and excepts from his book).

So as Bruce says "buy the damned book already and read like the wind!"

For more on movies visit The Internet Movie Database.

For fun, try out University of Virginia's Oracle of Bacon (just so you know Bruce Campbell's Bacon Number is 2).

2003-03-25T09:55:00.000-08:00

Letters from MIR - Jerry M. Linenger

For 132 days, Dr. Jerry Linenger was away from home, away from his 14-month old son. Away on the longest, most distant business trip it was possible to take: stationed on the Russian Space Station Mir.

Letters from Mir is not notable as an account of his time in space, but it is notable as a heart-felt, sincere testament from a father to a young son. Letters from Mir is what it's name implies: letters from a father to a son, on everyday events, life in space, growing up, the role of fathers....It is, without hyperbole, a moving and expressive book.

The book is also notable for what is alluded to, but not generally focused on: the dangers that Dr. Linenger faced while stationed on Mir. During his time Mir suffered several almost crippling blows, the worst of which was a deadly and life-threatening fire that nearly consumed the station. The disaster's impact certainly permeates through Linenger's later letters as the tone shifts away from the everyday and roams deeper into the paternal essence of a father's love for his son. A short, but terrific book.

I think one reason I identify so strongly with this book is I've been doing a similar project for the past year, prior to having even heard of Letters from Mir, with my other weblog The Dad Chronicles. It's a damn strange world at times....

For Linenger's full account of life on Mir, check out Off The Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir.

Check out the view from above at NASA's Earth Observatory website or get a good look at Mir before it's fiery plunge into the Pacific Ocean in 2001 at Mir Space Station or at NASA's Mir Page. You can also find out about life onboard the ISS here.

Ever wonder where the futuristic flying cars and jetpacks you saw on Jetson's went? Look no further - here you go - and here.

2003-03-18T15:33:00.000-08:00

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before - Tony Horwitz

"Ambition leads me not only further than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go." - The Journal of Captain James Cook.

So opens Blue Latitudes, author Tony Horwitz's searching and thoughtful examination of Captain James Cook, whose three great voyages to the Pacific from 1768 to 1779 were the grand finale of the age of Discovery. Part whimsicle travelogue, part historical study, Horwitz tracks Cook's path from the lush islands of Polynesia to the shattering reefs of Australia and the mind-numbing waves of the Aleutians.

Cook was born in Yorkshire, England, a child of the peasant working class, who built his sea-going experience first crewing on coal-ships. Horwitz chronicles his rise to pre-eminence as one of England's most famous sailors and possibly the most famous navigator in history (some of his highly accurate coastal surveys were still in wide use well into the 20th century). Blue Latitudes seamlessly blends Cook's voyages with the author's modern-day visits to his many destinations, examining clues to Cook's character and the important legacy he left both Pacific cultures and the West. Horwitz is careful to examine the mixed nature of that legacy, with Cook alternately being seen as the personification of oppression and destruction for the Polynesian cultures scattered across the islands of the Pacific and aboriginal cultures of Australia and the sterling-true British hero and discoverer. Ironically, as Horwitz outlines, Cook was probably one of the most enlightened encroachers on the Pacific, but as the first, his reputation must bear the weight of the destructive forces that followed in his wake.

Blue Latitudes is a fascinating read, not the least for the history, but also for the flat-out humor that permeates the author's misadverntures and wanderings through Oceania. From the drunken festivities of Cookstown Australia's Cook Celebration ("Why do you think Cook ran up on the reef? He was on the piss.") where the Endeavour was nearly wrecked, to his wayward Australian friend recreating Cook's arrival on a Tahitian beach (" 'This is a solemn moment,' Roger declared. 'We're seeing just what Cook saw. Tropical mountains, swaying palms, topless crumpet.' ").

Blue Latitudes is not only a great read, but great fun and thought-provoking to boot. Highly recommended.

Interestingly enough, Cook's own journal, along with that of Joseph Banks the Endeavour's naturalist and botanist, can be found online here in a hypertext version.

For an excerpt from Blue Latitudes, and a first-rate interactive timeline map of Cook's various voyages, check out the Blue Latitudes website.

For additional information on Cook and his voyages, check out the Captain Cook Society website or this site for some good background on the good Captain.

Other recommended reading: Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania - a good read, but at times Theroux's sometimes depressed and caustic take on exotic locales and travel can be grating. He really is an acquired taste.

2003-03-12T20:14:00.000-08:00

The Wailing Wind - Tony Hillerman

I like a good mystery.

I started reading Sherlock Holmes in high school, thrilled with the Hound of the Baskervilles, and then moved onto more hard-boiled characters such as the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels and others. After reading Gorky Park (centered on a grisly murder in a Moscow park, back in the good old, bad old USSR-days), I developed a taste for mysteries with unique settings. Someone pointed me at Tony Hillerman and I have remained a faithful reader ever since.

Tony Hillerman's books are set on the Navajo Reservation of the American south-west, the Four Corners (where Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah meet). Blending the dusty beauty of the extraordinary landscape with the voice of the Dinah, the Navajo, Hillerman has created a unique and fascinating setting and ethos for his stories.

The Wailing Wind finds his two staple characters, the now retired, legendary lieutenant of the Navajo Tribal Police (who patrol an area in excess of 27,000 sq. miles), Joe Leaphorn, and the younger, slightly more muddled, Navajo traditionalist Sergeant Jim Chee, investigating the labyrinthine connections between an abandoned pick-up truck with dead body, a long-lost gold mine, a two-year old shooting, and La Llorana, the Wailing Women of the south-west.

Hillerman weaves modern culture with mythic lore, seamlessly making the leap from the intricate Navajo belief system to 21st century police work, building a very believable and reasonably involved mystery. The two overwhelming elements found in all of Hillerman's 15 novels are his unabashed appreciation for the land and his ability to evoke it so strongly that it literally represents another ongoing character in the story, and his ability to bring the reader into the belief system of the Navajo, replete with the religious ceremonies, cultural observances, and the dreaded presence of evil, often manifested as skinwalkers or Navajo witches. In particular he does an excellent job developing the characters and reflecting the directions and thinking that leads them to solve their particular puzzles in their own particular ways, Leaphorn with logic and pattern, Chee with the intuition and understanding that his training as a Navajo hataalii (shamen or healer) has developed.

The Wailing Woman is not the best of Hillerman's work. I would rank it as a middle-of-the-pack read, but as Hillerman is damned fine spinner of yarns, I would still place it head and shoulders above much of the rest of the detective fiction littering the store shelves. For fans of the series, it is like visiting an old friend.

Interested in learning more about the Navajo? Visit Explore the Navajo Nation. You can also drop by Tony Hillerman's website here for some interesting background on the books.

Find out about Navajo sand painting (and here as well), traditional Navajo rugs, and legendary figures such as Coyote and the Flint Boys.

You can check out some of the wonderous scenery of the sacred land of the Navajo at Flight Over Four Corners , a National Geographic website.

P.S. The Comments system is now active, so if anyone has any additional links, comments, books suggestions or feedback, please feel free to click below.

2003-03-04T10:44:00.000-08:00

By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions - Richard A. Cohen

It is telling that swords are so often named. Excaliber, Charlemagne's Flamberge, Beowulf's Hrunting, the Sword of Damocles ....

How many other weapons or objects for that matter, carry the weight or significance of a sword? In the 600-odd years that firearms have made their noisy presence felt, few, if any, of them carry the aura or mystique of the blade. The sword carries a power, elegance and personality within it, reflecting the user. The sword is, above all, a personal weapon, wielded up close, not remote or distant, whether on a battlefield, a dueling ground or a piste, it reflects the personalities behind them. Swords have always been symbols: of power, of choices, of status and honor, of elegance, skill, romance and justice. And of death and resolution.

Richard Cohen, Olympian and five times U.K. National Saber champion, has written a book that amply demonstrates that, while the pen maybe mighter then the sword, the sword has an abiding fascination and magic. By The Sword is a memorable and evocative history of swords, swordsmen (and women), duelists, swordsmiths, swashbucklers, fencers and beau sabreurs throughout the ages.

The book covers the earliest known history of the sword and fencing, stretching from ancient Egyptian wall murals and bloody gladiatorial Rome, to the heavy blades of the medieval European knights. Cohen paints a global picture, examining the samurai of feudal Japan who, when testing their blades, used criminals and peasants but for the honor of their swords, disdained testing them on murderers and those suffering from skin diseases. Cohen looks at the European culture of the sword, dissecting the age of the Musketeer's and beyond with a discerning eye to detail and the people behind the blade. The book covers virtually ever facet of the sword including the hidden alchemy of metallurgy, the evolution of the design of the sword, it's impact on fighting styles, the formalities (and legalities) of the duel and dueling culture (Ever wonder why you shake hands with your right hand? It demonstrates good faith as it was your sword hand), German schlager fighting, the rise of fencing as an Olympic sport, and modern fencing technology and styles.

Cohen brings an authoritative voice to the proceedings, if somewhat marred on occasion by the usage of technical terms that may be obscure to non-fencers. The book is filled to the brim with rich snippets of sword lore (Fencing elephants for example. Read the book if you don't believe me) and vivid historical personages. Take for example such personages as the cross-dressing La Chevalier d'Eon, who's prowess with a sword was superceded only by the public uncertainty over his/her sex (a matter not settled until after d'Eon's death), or the deadly female duelist (and opera singer) Julie d'Aubigny, La Maupin, who scandalized Parisian society with her bisexual affairs and topped off her reputation by dueling three men at once (and defeating all three) during a masked ball at the Palais-Royal. George Patton, d'Artagnan, Descartes, George Washington, Basil Rathbone and countless others, famous and infamous, populate these pages, helping to make By The Sword a fascinating read and one of the very best history books I have read in a very long time.

For more information on fencing, or to learn to fence, check out U.S. Fencing or Fencing Online.

Learn how they stage elaborate sword fights and the art of fight choreography for theater and film here, or if you just prefer to watch the swashbuckling action, click here.

Interested in Japanese swords? This may be the site for you.

Now please excuse me, I've got some buckles to swash.....

2003-02-25T15:08:00.000-08:00

The October Horse - Colleen McCullough

The October Horse is the latest and last in an epic series chronicling the end of the Roman Republic and the beginnings of the Roman Empire. You can't read The October Horse without being in awe of Colleen McCullough's scholarship, attention to detail and painstaking historical acuman. You also can't really read it without having read the previous five volumes (The First Man of Rome, The Grass Crown, Fortune's Favorites, Caesar's Women, and Caesar), so don't start in on them unless you have a lot of time on your hands (total= 4,916 pages).

I started reading them about three years ago (blame Gladiator), without any real expectation of what I was reading, either in scope, granduer or involvement. McCullough's Rome is not the Rome you typically find in historical fiction. Battles (although present and often filled with serious reprecussions) are not the driving force of the novels. It is personality that drives McCullough's vision of Rome and the Romans within. Her vivid portraits of Marius, Sulla, Julius Caesar, Brutus, Anthony, Cato and the countless others that inhabit her pages, are highly realistic, almost evocative personalities, reflecting the daily lives, ambitions, philosophies, obsessions, egos, emotions and respective madnesses of the historical personages.

The October Horse outlines the final phase of Caesar's civil war with Pompey, his dalliance with the young Queen of Egypt Cleopatra, and his subsequent reforms of Republican Rome, setting the stage for an Empire whose roots still can be found today across most of the Western world. There are no surprises here - Caesar ends up dead in the Senate - and a new character dominates the final half of the book - Octavian, Caesar's heir, who is intelligent, charismatic and ruthless by turns, jostling with Anthony and the Liberators to avenge Caesar and continue Caesar's unfinished work.

Drawn from letters (literate Romans were inveterate and constant letter-writers), original sources, historical studies and her own interpretations of the world of Rome, the books are a must-read if you are interested in the era. If not, best to stay away as the sheer bulk of the volumes makes slogging through them a herculean task.

For more information online on Roman history, check out the Internet Ancient History Sourcebook, LacusCurtius: Into the Roman World, and, as cited before, Caesar's weblog.

If you are interested in Egypt and Cleopatra, be sure to check out The Theban Mapping Project, and find out about Cleopatra's royal palace in Alexandia, recently uncovered by underwater archaeologists.

Read Shakespeare's take on royal romance with Anthony & Cleopatra online. Enjoy!

2003-02-21T14:46:00.000-08:00

The High Rise Private Eyes: The Case of the Climbing Cat - Cynthia Rylant, G. Brian Karas

It is harder and harder to find kid's books that aren't tied to some commercial enterprise such as a toy, TV show or movie. It is a shame because while it is now easy to find children's books with characters such as Scooby-Doo as they garner large tracts of shelf-space in the store, it is harder to pick out good, general, non-commercialized reads for kids.

The High Rise Private Eyes is a series of (so far) 6 children's books written by Cynthia Ryland and well illustrated by G. Brian Karas. Each book involves an unlikely pair of detectives, Bunny Brown (a rabbit naturally enough) and Jack Jones (a raccoon), a mild mystery and a snappy, gentle Nick-and-Noraesque banter between the two that makes the characters stand out. The book is terrific for the beginner reader or to read to your children directly. I couldn't resist putting a Bogart spin on Jack's sly responses when reading to my son, an imitation that fell on deaf ears when I realized that no one outside of myself thought I sounded anything like Humphrey Bogart.

So far, my son and I have worked our way through just two of the six stories (the Case of the Climbing Cat, and the Case of the Disappearing Monkey) and we will probably be looking at the others in the near future. The only minor quibble: It would have been nice to have them in a compilation instead of as separate books, but as most of the titles were released in the past year, so I expect we will see a compilation in the near future.

2003-02-17T10:28:00.000-08:00

Crusade : The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War - Rick Atkinson

Generally, my thought was that I would alternate my reviews on this site between fiction and non-fiction, but lately I've been reading nothing but non-fiction, so my apologies for failing to provide enough variety to readers seeking good fiction. Don't worry, I'll probably swing to the other extreme in the near future....

As Gulf War II: The Sequel is now manifestly preparing to get underway, I thought it might be useful to go back and re-read Crusade, the definative overview of the 42-day Persian Gulf War, which, among other things, made SCUD a household world, and catapulted CNN into the major leagues of reporting.

Crusade tells a complete story of the war, from its early beginnings to its questionable end, with an exhaustive account that outlines strategies, tactics, weapons and politics, and more importantly, the people behind them. From Marine recon units trapped by the Iraqi assault on Khafji to the windowless basement rooms of the command center, the book keeps rolling along, mixing anecdotes with good, solid strategic analysis and background. Atkinson does an excellent job outlining the give-and-take of structuring the plans behind the war, and delving into the sometimes acrimonious relationships between the various arms of the military (namely the proponents of air power versus ground force (with the Navy toddling along last, like an irritating little brother, continuously piping up "Me to, I wanna play!").

Of particular interest was General Norman Schwarzkopf, whose incandescent rages made him a figure of terror to much of the command staff. Atkinson spends a good deal of time examining "Stormin' Norman" and his role at the center of the storm. The book also illuminates a number of interesting side-issues that, quite frankly, still offer highly valid observations for the upcoming conflict (Assuming it actually kicks off). These include some good discussion on why the war was halted so abruptly (arguably allowing much of the Republican Guard to escape); on why, despite repeated attempts to curtail them, Iraqi mobile SCUDs still managed to pop off shots at Israel and Saudi Arabia (and why Norman Schwarzkopf hated the Special Forces and repeatedly resisted their use); how the most low-tech weapons the Iraqi's used (sea-mines) proved to be the most damaging weapon they deployed; and the marginal usefulness of the chemical and biological defenses that the military touted.

The most engrossing thing about the book by far are the characters of the people involved, from exhausted pilots ill from flying at night for a month straight, to a flamboyant British tank commander who, living in absolute dread of trigger-happy U.S. gunners, attaches an enormous British flag to his vehicle to prevent fratricide (It was somewhat successful in that he himself was not fired upon by U.S. forces however it is telling and sobering to note that all but a handful of British casulaties of the war were inflicted by U.S. troops.).

Overall Crusade is an excellent and fairly well-balanced account of the Gulf War. Whatever your war sentiments and opinions happen to be, the book should be a must-read towards understanding where we are today and how we arrived at this perilous state of affairs.

And now, for good or bad, Atkinson can write a sequal.....

There are a large number of books, studies and publications on the Gulf War, far too many to list here, but if you enjoy the ground-pounder's view of the action, try Bravo Two Zero by Andy MacNab for a riveting true account of an 8-man SAS team inserted into "SCUD-alley". Not for the faint-of-heart.

Online, you can find one of the best sites on the Gulf war at PBS. PBS's Frontline produced a number of excellent documentaries on both the war, international terrorism, biological warfare and Saddam Hussain's Iraq. Check it out at Frontline: The Gulf War. Completely engrossing.

2003-02-10T15:23:00.000-08:00

See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism - Robert Baer

I started reading spy thrillers and techno-thrillers back in my late-teens, at the height of Reagan's presidency and the 1980's Cold War with the "evil empire". By the time the Wall collapsed, I had moved on, more interested in history and reality than in the grandiose themes and psuedo-threats that most spy novels take for granted. Those lurid fictions of the Cold War had one unexpected progeny, in that they did spawn in me an ongoing interest in real-world spycraft. The result is that I can seldom resist a glimpse into that secret, covert world, so when I spotted See No Evil on the bookstore shelf, I had to crack it open.

See No Evil is a biography of sorts, following the author through his 25-years of service (mainly overseas) with the CIA in India, Iraq, Lebanon and other Middle East hotspots. To an extent, See No Evil is a cautionary tale. Inspired by the events of 9-11, it is a call to action for the U.S. to resume and expand the activities of the Directorate of Operations, the spies that actually spy, on the ground and in the field. Baer is at pains to note that the DO job is mainly about spycraft - recruiting and running agents, pulling in data, passing along the vital human intelligence that satellites and intercepts cannot provide. He paints a compelling and rather searing indictment of the CIA's policies and government direction in the past 20 years of moving away from relying on human intelligence to trust instead in technology, a strategy that, post-9-11, seems astonishingly naive.

Baer's ground-eye view of the CIA is refreshing, if somewhat limited in its overview of the strategic thinking that drove the organization. Baer is a field-man, working the world's terrorism hotspots, who, among other things, managed to make the DO issue two unique memos forbidding agents from a). parachuting with Russian special ops teams and b). driving T-72 tanks without a license.

The book reveals only limited surprises, as much of what it covers are the events of the 1980's and early 90's (the Beirut bombings, the hostage crisis, Iraq) but Baer does a good job in tying the events of yesterday to the post-9-11 world. At times, having followed in the headlines many of the events that Baer was on the periphery of, one is left with a maddening sense of "if only..." and how today's events may have changed as a result. Particularly moving was Baer's trip into the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon that, at a later date, was found to have taken him within a hundred yards of where several Beirut hostages were being held.

The long and short of it is that See No Evil is a good, solid account of life as a CIA field agent (if somewhat light on the analysis) and is intended as a wake-up call for anyone that thinks you can ever figure out what's going on in the world without getting your feet on the ground.

The CIA is on the web and you can go there...by clicking here. Go on, I dare you.

I especially like their homepage for kids. Yeah, that's right. No, I'm not kidding.

For some other books on spycraft, intelligence and general sneakiness, check out:
Inside the CIA: Revealing the Secrets of the World's Most Powerful Spy Agency by Ronald Kessler
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency by James Bamford (This one is particularly interesting is you are interested in codes, intercepts and electronic eavesdropping. If you are not, then probably give it a pass, as it is loooong.)
By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky (A good look at Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, by an insider.)

Want to go to work for the CIA? You might need this.....