Category Archives: Books

Worth every darned penny — part 1

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There is a book I have sitting on my desk at work. It is called “Music Lust” and I checked it out at the Milwaukee Public Library.

I will leave the house in just a few minutes to take the dogs on their early morning walk. I will listen to an audio book, an Elvis Cole mystery called “Chasing Darkness.” I got it at the Milwaukee Public Library.

Sometimes I check out audio books without ever leaving my house, because I can download them for free through the Milwaukee Public Library. When I need to look up an old newspaper story, I don’t use the Journal Sentinel’s crappy search engine, I use the incredibly complete online archive available through the Milwaukee Public Library.

I love the library. What a terrific resource, and worth every darned penny of property tax support. Happy National Library Week, everyone! And don’t forget to pay your overdue fines!

(Full disclosure: I am on the Library Board as a designee of the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools).

Books! Or, life behind the best-seller curve

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A would-be terrorist tries to blow up a plane on Christmas Day and Americans are scared again.

Scared enough to return to the torture sanctioned by the Bush administration?

Anyone even thinking that might be a good idea needs to read “The Dark Side,” by Jane Mayer. (PBS’ “Frontline covered aspects of the Iraq war using “The Dark Side” name. More information about it is here.) Mayer’s book sets out a compelling case for rejecting the Bush doctrine that advocated imprisoning people without charges or hope, whether or not they were seriously suspected of wrongdoing; and committing the grossest violations of international law and the Geneva conventions in the nane of national security.

“The Dark Side” a fascinating, eminently readable and really, really scary account of what the CIA and military did after Sept. 11 and the machinations the Bush bureaucrats went through to unleash the worst of American policies. Dick Cheney, John Yoo and David Addington are almost ludicrous in their macho efforts to tear down the boundaries of the constitution. If the consequences of their White House power plays so grave, their overall incompetence might seem comical. Yoo’s outlandish legal analyses of presidential power and other related topics got adopted by the White House not because his reasoning was sound — it simply wasn’t — but because they said what Cheney et al wanted them to say. The boys with the power simply rolled over any one who didn’t agree with them.

Terrorism is, to our great misfortune, going to happen. Security will fail on occasion as long as human beings are involved. Crazies and zealots and just plain old soldiers will risk everything to strike at America in retaliation for harm done, either real or perceived. How we respond to the attacks will define America more than the attacks themselves will. This book is an excellent primer on how fear and swagger can guide us into the wrong policies, and why we should not let that happen.

Books! Or, life behind the best-seller curve

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We are talking one bad book here. This was a road trip audio book, selected to keep my sister and I company as we drove to Boston.

Oh, it was bad. Really, really bad. So bad that we could not turn it off because its very high degree of badness was both amazing and entertaining. We ended up shouting at the CD player when something improbable, impossible or just really stupid happened. And the writing matched the plotting.

In this book, the fourth in the Holly Barker series, Ms. Barker gets pulled early out of her CIA training and suddenly is directing the effort to catch serial killer Teddy Fay, a former CIA agent himself. It’s difficult to say just how awful this was — Barker’s CIA mentor is intent on giving Barker management experience, seeming to forget that she commanded a regiment in the Army. Barker has all the good ideas, but has an awesomely large brain fart when Teddy Fay shows up at the opera. And the ending stinks, too.

This book did, however, raise an important question: is the author really this bad or so contemptuous of his readers that he doesn’t believe they will notice how bad his book is? This is the second Stuart Woods book I’ve read and I deeply regret them both.

Books! Or, life behind the best-seller curve

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Two books are recommended in honor horror of the swine flu outbreak that is killing people in Mexico. The flu has a great and lethal history in the United States and around the world. The last huge influenza pandemic was in 1918, ennabled by WWI troop movements and the shroud of secrecy President Woodrow Wilson’s government threw over everything to preserve morale and morality.

A new pandemic is inevitable — viruses can mutate faster than we can defeat them.

The first book offered for your consideration is The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry.

I can’t get rid of some of visuals this book planted in my brain — a man getting off a street car because passengers kept collapsing, bodies in piles because there was no place else to put them. This book does have a problem that afflicts so many non-fiction books in the computer age — there is too much middle in the middle. It’s too late to submit this to an editor, so some page skipping is acceptable.

The second book is a novel — Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day.

This book is not about the flu, though the flu plays a prominent role. It’s about 1918 Boston, mostly. It’s a sprawling family epic written about a sprawling time in a major American city. There is love and hate, war and peace, labor strife and race relations, and a cop family trying to survive it all. This is a great book — a page-turner from beginning to end.