The Grouchy Historian - Ed Asner

   2017; 262 pages.  Full Title : The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Politics, Commentary.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Quick.  Tell me everything you know about the United States Constitution.

    Hmm.  Well, it was given by God Herself to our Founding Fathers.  It starts out “We, the People”.  No, wait; that was the Declaration of Independence.

    Not bad.  When was it written?

   A long time ago.  I think they wrote it the same time as they did the Declaration of Independence.  In fact, now that I think about it, I think the Declaration of Independence is the preamble to the Constitution.  Whatever a preamble is.

    What about the Amendments?

    I forgot about those.  Despite being an infallible document, God, in Her Graciousness, allowed us to make some changes to the Constitution.  The most important Amendment allowed us to get drunk again, after an earlier one said we couldn’t.  The other important one is the Second Amendment, which says everyone should carry an assault rifle with him at all times.

    You’re amazing.  One last question.  What about the Bill of Rights?

    Oh, I forgot about those too.  I’m pretty sure it was written at the same time as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  It gives us the right to Life, Liberty, and the Happiness of Pursuit.  And a couple other things.  Including assault rifles.  And slaves.

    You are truly in a class by yourself when it comes to American History.  Can I interest you in Ed Asner’s new book, The Grouchy Historian?

What’s To Like...

    Ed Asner is an outspoken and unashamed voice for the Political Left, and The Grouchy Historian details his study and research into the history and content of the United States Constitution.  In fairness, he admits at the very beginning of the book that he is politically biased, and thus he is not presenting “both sides” of the debate.  Instead, he is an unabashed apologist for the Left, addressing and refuting the various skewed assertions proffered to us by the titular Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs.

    The book consists of 24 chapters covering 262 pages of text, plus another 73 pages of extras that includes notes, a bibliography, acknowledgements, and the full text of the Constitution itself and all the Amendments.  If you want to double-check anything that Ed Asner asserts, it is easy to do.

    The main topics are separated into seven sections, namely:

    1. The Constitutional Convention – Who was there and when they met.  (Chs. 2-3)

    2. God and the Constitution.  (Chs. 5-6)

    3. The Writing of the Constitution.  (Chs. 7-9)

    4. The Amendments: Ed’s Open Letters to prominent Right-Wing Nut-Jobs.  (Chs. 11-14)

    5. The Bill of Rights.  (Chs. 15-16)

    6. The Supreme Court Right-Wing Nut Jobs.  (Chs. 18-21)

    7. The Second Amendment: Guns and the NRA.  (Ch. 23)

    The other chapters are dribs and drabs of information that Ed Asner found intriguing, but which didn’t fit into any of those seven broader categories.  The book lists one Ed Weinberger as a co-author.  It is unclear what role he plays; I suspect he took the points Asner wanted to make and polished them into a readable form.

    I enjoyed the writing style – it’s a folksy, easy-to-read sort, that kept the contentious subject matter light and oftentimes amusing.  This also made the book a fast read, so if you need to do a book report for Civics class, and it’s due tomorrow, this may be your saving grace.

    The literary format is varied, which kept things from bogging down.  The writing of the Constitution is presented as a diary of one of James Madison’s slaves.  The Amendments section includes Ed presenting some of the right-wing proposals, balanced by some of his own.  The section about the American eugenics experiment (pg. 180) and the chapter about how often the Bill of Rights failed to protect citizens are both sobering and scary.

Excerpts...

    For the record: I do not pretend that what I say here is an objective study of the Constitution and the men and events that went into its creation.  I come to the subject as a citizen with my own strong point of view, believing that “objective historian” is a contradiction in terms, like “compassionate conservative” or “Fox News”.  (pg. 5)

    An early example of how natural law was used can be found in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), a Supreme Court case in which Myra Bradwell had been denied admission to the Illinois State Bar because she was a woman.  The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, its Chief Justice stating:

   “ …that God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply and execute the laws, was regarded as an almost axiomatic truth.”

    Which goes to show how stupid you can be when you’re sure you know what God is up to.  (pg. 212)

 “Scalia’s cultivated vision of the Constitution made him unquestionably one of the great minds of the thirteenth century.”  (pg. 208 )

    There are some quibbles.  First, while I enjoyed learning the author’s points-of-view, if you happen to be of the right-wing persuasion, you will probably hate those very things.  However, you can’t say Ed doesn’t warn you about this, and right at the very beginning.

    Similarly, he can get quite snarky at times, particularly when talking about the nut-jobs.   Since that’s the right-wingers’ favorite strategy when dealing with us liberals, there is a certain amount of karmic satisfaction here.  But it also feels a little like we’re mud-wrestling with pigs when we adopt their same dirty tactics.

    Finally, Chapter 8, wherein Ed gives short biographies of all 55 Framers of the Constitution, can get tedious and repetitive.  See the next paragraph for why.  Ed recognizes this, and gives the reader permission to skip this chapter if it bogs down.  I read the whole chapter anyway, but feel free to take him up on this offer after reading the first couple bios.  They don’t vary much from there on.

    8 Stars.  Highly informative and highly recommended.  If I had to sum up Ed Asner’s main hypothesis in The Grouchy Historian, it would be that those who wrote the Constitution did so to further their own fortunes (they were all rich white businessmen, whose fortunes depended heavily on speculating on frontier lands and near-worthless IOUs from the Revolutionary War).  And that the right-wingers who champion it today are doing the same.

White Fire - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

   2013; 470 pages.  New Author? : No, and no.  Book 13 (out of 17) in the Agent Pendergast Series.  Genre : Thriller; Murder-Mystery.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    It was the opportunity of a lifetime.  Okay, the opportunity of a deathtime, if you want to get technical about it.  Corrie Swanson’s looking for a topic for her Forensic Criminology thesis at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, so this is a godsend.

    It seems that, way back in the 1870’s, a man-eating bear went crazy around the Colorado town of Roaring Fork, killing 11 miners, and even eating some of them, before the rampage finally stopped.  Of course, that was more than a century ago, the victims have been buried for a long time, and no one would dream of allowing them to be dug up so some forensics analysis could be run on them for a thesis.

    Ah, but Roaring Fork was just a mining town back then; it’s now a posh ski resort, where people look down their noses at you if you’re “only” a millionaire.  All the caskets in the old graveyard have been unearthed to make way for a new housing development.  Money trumps dignity every time.

    The coffins presently repose in a warehouse, awaiting reburial in a new, still-to-be-determined location.  Surely no one would object to Corrie looking at the aftereffects of a man-mauling, man-eating bear.

    Yet for reasons unknown, some of the residents of Roaring Fork do object.  Even to the point of threatening Corrie’s life.

    Now why would someone do that?

What’s To Like...

    There are three main threads in White Fire, namely: a.) Who killed those miners way back when, b.) Who’s trying to kill Corrie nowadays, and c.) Who’s setting fire to various mansions in Roaring Fork and why?  That makes for a busy storyline, but as usual, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are up to the task.

    The settings are limited, with most of the story taking place in and around Roaring Fork.  The book opens briefly in New York City, and later on Pendergast makes a brief trip to London.  That's it.  Despite this, there are a bunch of people to meet and suspect of assorted skullduggery.

    Reading a tale with Aloysius Pendergast in it is a plus, and here we also have a backstory featuring Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde.  The highlight of the book is a 40-page “missing Sherlock Holmes story” penned by Preston & Child, and it’s the only one I’ve read thus far that does a great job imitating an Arthur Conan Doyle tale.

    I enjoyed the nod to Watership Down, also to The Hound of the Baskervilles.  I also liked the info-dump about mining chemistry.  Here it was in regard to extracting silver from ore.  The company I work for sells chemicals into the mining industry, albeit mostly to copper and gold mines, but the chemistry is quite similar, and it was fun to read about a process I'm familiar with.

    Proctor, Constance Greene, and Lt. Vincent D’Agosta are all absent from White Fire, and to be honest, I’ve never found Corrie  to be an exciting character.  The storyline therefore dragged a bit for me for about 80 pages while Corrie once again gets herself into trouble.  But Pendergast shows up, saves the day, and everything zips along just fine thereafter.

    The ending is both exciting and twisty, with a great, albeit contrived, chase scene thrown in.  All threads are tied up, although the resolution of the arson crime spree seemed a bit rushed.  There’s lots of cussing, and some gruesome ways to die, but that’s true of any book in this series.  This is a standalone story, as well as part of the series.

Kewlest New Word ...

Titubating (v.) : reeling or stumbling, as if tipsy; staggering

Others : redounded (v.) bolus (n.) descant (n.).

Excerpts...

    “It took them rather longer than I’d hoped to complete the paperwork,” said Pendergast, perusing the list.  “Fortunately, the Sebastian’s dining room is open late.  I think the Chateau Pichon-Longueville 2000 will do nicely – don’t you?”

    “I don’t know jack about wine, sorry.”

    “You should learn.  It is one of the true and ancient pleasures that make human existence tolerable.”  (pg. 98)

    “I beg your pardon, Mr. Wilde.  Do you mean to say that these men were … cannibals?”

    “Indeed I do.  American cannibals.”

    Doyle shook his head.  “Monstrous.  Monstrous.”

    “Quite so,” Wilde said.  “They have none of the good manners of your English cannibals.”  (pg. 374)

“Effing?  I see your penchant for charming euphemisms has not abated.”  (pg. 99)

    There are some quibbles, which was surprising since I’m an avid fan of this series.

     First of all, most of the characters seemed black-or-white to me; I prefer “gray” ones.  The lone exception to this was Capt. Stacy Bowdree, who hopefully will be developed into a recurring character.

    Second, while Corrie’s impulsiveness getting her once again into needless trouble can be tolerated (it’s part of her character), here some of her actions border on being just plain stupid.  For instance, at one point, she knows she’s being followed, yet instead of hightailing it to safety, she deliberately heads for a mine, knowing full well that entering it is a dead-end.

    Third, one of the earlier traits of an Agent Pendergast tale – “Is the evil natural or supernatural?” – isn’t utilized here.   Nor is there anything even remotely “epic” about the storyline.  Corrie gets into a fix, Pendergast uses his position (working for the FBI has its perks) and Holmesian sleuthing skills to bail her out, and a century-old cold case is put to rest.  The world will little note what was accomplished here.

    8 Stars.  I don’t think that White Fire will ever be anyone’s favorite Agent Pendergast book, but that doesn’t mean it’s a dud.  This was still a page-turner for me, and the Sherlock Holmes story alone makes it a worthwhile read.  And a so-so Preston & Child book is still a better read than most of the other thrillers out there on the market.

The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey

   1975; 422 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Contemporary Fiction; American Literature; Eco-Political How-To Manual; Middle-Brow.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Meet the Monkey Wrench Gang.

    George Hayduke.  A Vietnam vet and ex-Green Beret.  25 years old and hails from Tucson, Arizona.  Has a habit of measuring distances in units of six-packs.  Tucson-to-Vegas: 3 six-packs.  Phoenix-to-Los Angeles: 4 six-packs.  Etc.

    “Seldom Seen” Smith.  A Jack Mormon who was born in Utah and still lives there.  Has three wives, all of which are kinda cool with that.  Earns a living as a river guide, and longs for the world he grew up in.  Don’t we all, Seldom, don’t we all?

    Doctor A. K. “Doc” Sarvis.  A surgeon, and a rich one.  Smokes cigars.  No wives, but has a trophy girlfriend.  His favorite pastime is burning down billboards.  Everyone should have a hobby.

    Ms. Bonnie Abbzug. A nurse by trade, and assistant to Doc Sarvis.  Likes to help him burn down billboards.  Described as a “sexualized feminist”, whatever that might be.  Likes to smoke up.  You know what they say: “Give a girl enough rope and she’ll smoke it”.

    Their paths will all cross on one of Seldom’s guided river cruises.  And they’ll find they all have one thing in common – a strong desire to stop industries – any and all industries – from tearing up the landscape in the Four Corners area of the grand Southwest.

What’s To Like...

    If you’re the kind of reader who hates having to keep track of a slew of characters, The Monkey Wrench Gang is perfect for you.  The story is almost entirely about the shenanigans of our “gang of four”.  The only other people to take note of are Bishop J. Dudley Love and Park Ranger Edwin P. Abbott, Jr.  The settings are also easy to remember, they're all in the Four Corners area.

    I liked the story’s structure.  We tag along with Doc in the prologue as he practices his hobby; then get acquainted with the four main characters, one chapter at a time.  After that, it’s all about the hijinks perpetrated by our heroes, the wit and wisdom of their conversations, and Edward Abbey’s sweeping descriptions of the great outdoors, to let you know what they are trying to preserve.

    The book is an amazingly detailed “how-to” manual for eco-terrorists.  The Wikipedia article quotes several eco-activists describing how great an impact it had on them.  Indeed, Wiki claims that the use of the term “monkey wrench” as a metaphor for sabotaging something springs from this book.  If you want to learn how to disable earth-moving equipment, destroy a bridge, burn down a billboard, or even blow up a dam; this book will teach you everything you need to know.

    The writing is superb, and the book is a vocabularian’s delight.  There’s a slew of cussing, including some in Spanish.  This apparently offended some Amazon reviewers, but it didn’t bother me.  And while Bishop Love is the Monkey Wrench Gang’s bane, the real baddies here are Peabody Coal (mining), Arizona Public Service (electricity), Black Mesa & Lake Powell Railroad (transporting natural resources), Exxon, Reddy Mix Cement & Gravel Company, and the American Forestry Association (clear-cut logging).  It was weird to see Smokey the Bear cast in a negative light.

    The ending had some twists, and everything built to a satisfying and exciting climax.  But it was also somewhat easy to predict the outcome.  There’s only one way for a four-against-the-world struggle to be resolved.  I thought the epilogue was great, although you could suss out what was going to happen even there.  This is a standalone novel, and there is a sequel.  I  label this a “middle-brow” book, suitable for book clubs. 

Kewlest New Word ...

Apocdictic (adj.) : clearly established and beyond dispute.

Others : Concatenate (adj.) Acedia (n.) Empyrean (n.) Virescent (adj.) Arcologium (n.) Raddled (v.)

Excerpts...

    “This here’s ahr air and I reckon we know best what we want to do with it.  We don’t like them outsiders from the Sahara Club tryin’ to tell us what we can do with ahr air.”

    “Okay, but look at it this way, Calvin.  Keep your fscking air here halfways clean and you can sell it to them city dudes by the jugful, like pure-spring drinking water.”

    “We already think of that.  There ain’t enough money in it.”

    “You could put meters on their noses when they cross the state line.”  (loc. 2673)

    Smith sighed.  “Three things my daddy tried to learn me. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘remember these three precepts and you can’t go wrong: One. Never eat (at) a place called Mom’s.  Two.  Never play cards with a man named Doc.’”  He halted.  “Deal me in.”

    “That’s only two,” Bonnie said.

    “I never can recollect the third, and that’s what worries me.”  (loc. 5234)

Kindle Details...

    The Monkey Wrench Gang sells for $8.99 at Amazon.  Edward Abbey has another dozen or so books available for the Kindle, all in the price range of $7.59-$9.99.   

Om sweet om: be it ever so humble …”  (loc. 731)

     I didn’t really have any quibbles with The Monkey Wrench Gang, but if you’re not concerned about things like global warming, the rapid pace with which we’re using up our natural resources, and overpopulation, I can see where this might be a bit of a slog.  And I must admit, the book was initially a slow read for me.  But things sped up once the Gang became activists.

    It also helped that I live in Arizona, where part of this book takes place.  When Edward Abbey mentions The Arizona Republic, hey, that’s my newspaper.  When he talks about McCulloch chain saws, well, that was the company (and the developer of Lake Havasu City) that spurred my parents to move to Arizona from back east.

    8 Stars.  One personal anecdote.  I am not an eco-terrorist, and the one and only time I attended a Sierra Club meeting, I was bored silly.  However…

    Back in my college days, one of my daily activities each summer was to take the family dog for a constitutional up in an undeveloped hill a block behind our house.  He loved it!  I’d let him off the leash, and he had a fine time chasing rabbits, yapping at birds, running and sniffing wherever he pleased.

    One summer I came home to find the whole hill plowed up, the first step in developing it into a subdivision.  The streets and house lots were already staked out.  Ugh.  There goes the ecosystem.  No more rabbit-chasing for my dog.

    So I started my own little rebellion.  Every night when I walked the dog, I’d pull up a bunch of those stakes.  It made me feel good, and since I walked the dog at sundown, long after all the construction workers had gone home, it seemed a safe way to slow down their project.  Until one night, about three weeks into my little campaign of sabotage, what did I espy?  A big, burly guy sitting in a pick-up up on one of those staked-out streets.  Just a-watching.  My small acts of defiance had obviously irked the construction company into taking preventative action.

    Prudence was therefore called for.  And thus ended my eco-protest.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J.K. Rowling

   1998; 341 pages.  Book 2 (out of 7) in the Harry Potter series.  New Author? : No; well, yes, if you don’t count reading the French translation of Book 1.  Genre : YA; Adventure; Fantasy.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    Yippee!  Summer vacation’s almost over, and it’s almost time to go back to school!

   Well, there aren’t many kids that would have such a sentiment, but Harry Potter happens to be one of the few.  That’s because he has to spend his summers with Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and their brat for a son, Dudley.  Harry’s owl is confined to a cage, his wand is locked away, and he’s forbidden to even utter the word M-word (“magic”), let alone practice it.  For a magician like Harry, living among Muggles (those devoid of any magic powers) can be sheer drudgery.

    So it is a welcome relief from the tedium when a magical being comes to visit Harry.  A sprightly little house-elf named Dobby.  Unfortunately, Dobby bears a message for Harry, and it is not the cheeriest one to receive.

    “Harry Potter must not go back to Hogwarts.  Harry Potter must stay where he is safe.  He is too great, too good, to lose.”

What’s To Like...

    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets chronicles the sophomore year of Harry, Hermione, and Ron at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry, hereafter known simply as “Hogwarts”.  There’s a short backstory (pages 2-4) which came in handy for me, since it’s been at least 15 years since I read Book 1.  The book is a quick and easy read, which is the ideal for a YA novel.  The pacing is brisk (for the most part), yet somehow the various characters get nicely developed alongside the constant action.

    Speaking of characters, there are a slew of them.  I think most of them are repeats from the first book – Harry’s family members, the Weasley family, his fellow students, and the professors and employees at Hogwarts.  If you have all those already locked in your memory cells, keeping track of the new ones will be a breeze.  Each of the 18 chapters in my book leads off with a kewl drawing, although your version may or may not have those.

    J.K. Rowling spins a variety of neat fantasy critters into the story, including gnomes, ghouls, pixies, a boarhound, ghosts, a poltergeist, and even a phoenix.  The obligatory quidditch match starts on page 107, and I chuckled at things like floo powder, a red howler, a “Deathday Party”, and the pejorative “Mudbloods”.  There are also rib-tickling puns woven into the text; for instance, a pair shady streets called Diagon Alley and Knockturn Alley.

    The storyline thread dealing with the titular Chamber of Secrets doesn't get started until page 138.  The main mysteries for Harry to solve are: a.) who opened it 50 years ago, b.) who just opened it again, c.) what sort of evilness has been unleashed, and d.) where dwelleth that evil?  The threads of this plotline are laid out meticulously, with a bunch of clues for Harry (and the reader) to ponder.  For instance, it becomes obvious at a certain point that a trail of spiders is a vital clue, but what exactly does it mean?

    I liked that not everything is as it seems, and that sometimes Harry and his friends are wrong in their suspicions.  The ending will be exciting for both adult and YA readers.  All the threads get tied up nicely.  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is a standalone story, as well as part of a series.

Excerpts...

    “You’re making fun of me,” she said, silver tears welling rapidly in her small, see-through eyes.

    “No – honestly – didn’t I just say how nice Myrtle’s looking?” said Hermione, nudging Harry and Ron painfully in the ribs.

    “Oh yeah –“

    “She did –“

     “Don’t lie to me,” Myrtle gasped, tears now flooding down her face, while Peeves chuckled happily over her shoulder.  “D’you think I don’t know what people call me behind my back?  Fat Myrtle!  Ugly Myrtle!  Miserable, moaning, moping Myrtle!”

    “You’ve forgotten pimply,” Peeves hissed in her ear.  (pg. 134)

    “Are you crazy?” said Ron.  “It could be dangerous.”

    “Dangerous?” said Harry, laughing.  “Come off it, how could it be dangerous?”

    “You’d be surprised,” said Ron, who was looking apprehensively at the book.  “Some of the books the Ministry’s confiscated – Dad’s told me – there was one that burned your eyes out.  And everyone who read Sonnets of a Sorcerer spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives.  And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading!  You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed. And –“

    “All right, I’ve got the point,” said Harry.  (pg. 230)

 “Peskipiksi Pesternomi!”  (pg. 102)

    It’s hard to nitpick a book that has garnered eye-poppingly phenomenal ratings at both Amazon and GoodReads.  But here are a couple:

    It takes a while for the main thread to get going, and that in turn made for a couple mildly slow spots in the early going.  But that also coincided with how far I had read this book in French years ago: up to about page 68.  Once I got to “new” chapters, the slow spots disappeared.  Maybe there’s a lesson there about going back and re-reading books.

    There are several dei ex machina (I had to go look up what the plural of deus ex machina was) in the story, and that may lead to some rolling of the eyes of adult readers.  But methinks YA readers won’t give a Hedwig hoot about those.

    That’s about it.  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets turned out to be a fun-filled read, even though I’m not in the target audience.  It brought back great memories of plowing through the first book in French, which expanded my FSL ("French as a Second Language") vocabulary considerably, and which included some head-scratching translations of non-translatable words, such as “Muggles” which become “Moldus” in French.

    9 Stars.  Some review/rating stats for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:  Amazon: 59,756 reviews.  50,252 5-Star reviews (84%).  Goodreads: 2,022,151 ratings, 37,104 reviews.  1,142,526 5-Star ratings (56%).  Note: The Amazon reviews are weirdly identical with the ratings of 4 or 5 of the other ones in the series.  I’m not sure why it’s that way.

Starship Grifters - Robert Kroese

    2014; 244 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Book 1 (out of 3) in the Rex Nihilo Adventures series.  Genre : Spoof; Science Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Space.  The “Final Fun-Tier”.  This is the story of the starship “Flagrante Delicto” and its two-man crew.  No, wait.  Make that a two-person crew.  Nah, that’s not right either.  How about a two-entity crew?

    The captain of the ship is Rex Nihilo, whose main goal in life appears to be trying to make a fast buck off of anyone in the galaxy who’ll sit down and play cards with him.   His one and only crewmate (for now, at least) is an android named Sasha, who serves as Rex’s first mate, girl Friday, and unfathomable font of knowledge.

    Their mission: to boldly seek out new planets, on which to hide out from the bounty hunters acting on behalf of the the Galactic Credit Bureau.  It seems Rex’s card-sharking expertise is legendary, and we don’t mean that in a good way.

    Yet perhaps his luck is changing.  Not only did Rex just win the Flagrante Delicto at the card table, but he also won an entire planet.  There’s no telling how much that’s worth.

    But just a minute.  Is that a faint twinkle I spy in the loser’s eye?  Why could he be happy about losing a starship and a planet?

What’s To Like...

    Set in the 31^st Century, Starship Grifters is a fast-paced sci-fi spoof, filled with constant action and devoid of anything serious.  For the most part, it parodies the Star Wars saga, with a Darth Vader wannabe (Lord Heinous Vlaak), a rebel alliance hiding out on a far-flung planet, and even the cuddly Beebers subbing for the cuddly Ewoks.  Instead of “the Force” that’s with you”, it’s the “Chaotic Equilibrium”.

    The story is told in the first-person POV, and it's Sasha, not Rex, who's doing the talking.  The book cover gives a nice rendering of both of our protagonists.  There’s some smidgen of mild cussing, but most of the time when Robert Kroese wants to swear, he uses the euphemism “Space”, as in “for Space’s sake…”

    There are hilarious footnotes, which I took as a nod to the late, great Terry Pratchett.   I also enjoyed the mention of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, and Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”.  The rebel alliance is known as the Frente Repugnante, which gets further translated as “The Revolting Front”.  For science freaks, there’s “Hypergeometry” to explain interstellar travel, and the Ferbuson Paradox, a take-off of the Fermi Paradox, that’s applied to cloaking devices.

    Puns and word play abound.  One example: a med called “Pheelsophine” which I read three times before realizing its humor.  The character “Ted” is a hoot, and watch out for the Sp’ossels: they'll try to convert you to their cult religion.

    There aren’t a lot of characters to keep tabs on, which makes for an easy read.  The ending is a mixed bag.  While the resolution of the cloaking device thread was blatantly obvious, it was followed by several nifty plot twists providing an unanticipated backstory to explain Rex, Sasha, and Pepper.  Starship Grifters is a standalone story, as well as part of a series.

Kewlest New Word...

Caterwauling (v.) : making a shrill howling or wailing noise.

Excerpts...

    “You guys are just lucky I had a tracer on your ship.”

    “Lucky?” snarled Rex.  “You shot us down!”

    “I saved your asses.  If you’d have climbed any higher, you’d have been vaporized by the stealth satellite.”

    “What stealth satellite?” asked Rex.

    “Exactly,” replied Pepper.  (loc. 1536)

    “I’d still be prison if it weren’t for some contacts I had made in the Ursa Major Mafia.  They offered to help me escape in exchange for doing some jobs for them.  After I got out, they gave me a new identity and paid to have my DNA scrambled.”

    “Oh, man,” said Rex.  “DNA scrambling is the worst.  Last time I had an ear growing out between my shoulder blades.  People acted like they didn’t notice it, but I could hear them talking behind my back.”  (loc. 1652)

Kindle Details...

    Starship Grifters sells for $1.99 at present.  The other two books in the series are currently priced at $4.99 apiece.  Robert Kroese has a couple dozen e-books to offer at Amazon.  The full-length ones are in the $1.99-$13.99 range; and there are also a couple novellas and short stories for $0.99 a pop.  Robert Kroese frequently offers his books at a discount (or even free!), so keep your eye on the various Amazon e-book deals each day.  And oh yeah, from his picture on Amazon, it appears that Robert Kroese is left-handed.  That means he’s a genius.  All left-handers are geniuses.

A sane person is always at a disadvantage when negotiating with a lunatic.  (loc. 1311)

    I don’t have much to quibble about regarding Starship Grifters.  The plotline, while sufficient, wasn’t compelling, at least to me.  Then again, this is true of almost all spoofs: they either parrot whatever tale they’re making fun of, or else just dispense with a storyline altogether in favor of non-stop yuk-yuks.

    But I pick at nits.  Writing a spoof is always a roll of the dice, since everybody’s sense of humor is different.  For me, Robert Kroese’s attempts at wit and humor was a total success: the story tickled my funny-bone, and I was entertained from the start to the finish.

    8 Stars.  Robert Kroese is the master at combining catchy titles with frequent discounts on his various books.  Such a strategy rewards him with lots of reviews at Amazon and GoodReads, and presumably a hundred people buying one of his books for $0.99 is better than two people buying it for, say, $2.99.  There is perhaps something to be learned from this.