The Partly Cloudy Patriot - Sarah Vowell

   2002; 200 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Essays; Politics & Government; US History; Anecdotes.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Sarah Vowell wrote three fantastic History books between 2008 and 2015, all of which I’ve read and reviewed.  The Wordy Shipmates chronicles the Puritan colonists; Unfamiliar Fishes tells how the United States came about acquiring the Hawaiian Islands; and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States which focuses on that the famous French general who helped our cause in the Revolutionary War.

    I enjoyed them all, giving each on a rating in the 8-9 Stars range, and since then I’ve been looking forward eagerly to whatever historical subject she next researches and writes about.  Alas, five years later, I’m still waiting.  If she’s put written any books since then, neither Wikipedia nor Amazon are aware of it.

    Fortunately, there are four Sarah Vowell books from the 1997-2005 timespan, in which, I gather, she writes about a variety of topics instead of focusing on just one.  I’ve got three of those books on either my Kindle or my TBR shelf.  And since it’s been five years since I last read anything by her, I felt it was time to pull one of them off the shelf and get cracking.

    I chose the one with the enigmatic title The Partly Cloudy Patriot.

What’s To Like...

    The Partly Cloudy Patriot is a collection of nineteen articles from Sarah Vowell, about evenly split between ones that were previously published and ones  that were new.  Their length varies from 4 to 32 pages, which means some can technically be called essays and others called anecdotes.

    The articles cover a broad spectrum of genres, including historical (the Salem witch trials); politics (presidential libraries); athletics (arcade basketball, aka “Pop-a-Shot”); art (German cinema); Hollywood (thoughts about Tom Cruise); travel (there’s a restaurant in the Carlsbad Caverns); bloopers (maps that show California as an island), and family (Sarah Vowell is a twin!).

    My two favorite chapters were Rosa Parks, C’est Moi, which cites various people who have dared to compare themselves to Rosa Parks, and the titular The Partly Cloudy Patriot, which examines the not-so-patriotic ways some people define “patriotism”.  My two favorite chapter titles were God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass and Tom Landry, Existentialist, Dead at 75.  I’ll let you guess what those two chapters are about.

    It was fun to get to know the author a bit.  As mentioned, Sarah is a twin (fraternal, not identical), is an atheist who was raised a Pentecostal, has endured family Thanksgivings (haven’t we all?), and worked as a teenager in a map-dealer’s store.  She’s also a diehard Dallas Cowboy fan, but hey, nobody's perfect.

    Being a Pennsylvanian by birth, I enjoyed her walk through the Gettysburg battlefield, and chuckled at the brief mention of the unique town of Hershey.  I liked the literary nods to The Great Gatsby and The Cross and the Switchblade.  I read the latter at some point in my junior high years.   Luther and Johnny Htoo were new to me, as was the chocolatey caffé mocha from Starbucks, and the Tom Landry Christian comic book left me scratching my head.

    Sarah Vowell’s wit abounds throughout, which made this a fun read from beginning to end.  And while my favorite books by her will continue to be those that focus on a single historical subject, The Partly Cloudy Patriot serves as an excellent stopgap until she gets back to writing full-length books again.

Excerpts...

    I wish that in order to secure his party’s nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism of seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Two Sleepy People”, Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising”, and “You Got the Silver” by the Rolling Stones.  (loc. 1308)

    In 1873, Canada’s first prime minister, John MacDonald, saw what was happening in the American Wild West and organized a police force to make sure Canada steered clear of America’s bloodbath.

    That’s it.  Or, as they might say in Quebec, voilà!  That explains how the Canadians are different from Americans.  No cowboys for Canada.  Canada got Mounties instead – Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne.  (loc. 1599)

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.  (loc. 1676 )

    I've yet to find much to gripe about in any Sarah Vowell book, and that’s true for The Partly Cloudy Patriot as well.  I think I counted eleven cusswords in the whole book, mostly where she’s quoting someone.  There are some interesting pictures, although not every chapter has one.  And if your political viewpoint is staunch right-wing, you probably should give this book a pass.

    The Partly Cloudy Patriot was a quick and easy read, so if you have a book report due in two days in your high school Civics class and you haven’t even started reading anything yet, this may be your saving grace.

    8 Stars.  Take the Cannoli and Assassination Vacation remain in my library.  Hopefully it won’t take another five years to read one or both of them.

No Sunscreen For The Dead - Tim Dorsey

    2019; 336 pages.  Book 22 (out of 23, with #24 due out next January) in the “Serge Storms” series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Florida Crime Noir; Stoner Humor.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    Serge Storms has found a new passion in life.  A rich resource of historical information.  A veritable mother lode of Americana.  And his home state of Florida is blessed to have an abundance of it, just waiting to be tapped into.

    We’re talking about retirees, of course.  Otherwise known as, according to Serge: “bluehair, cotton-top, geezer, old biddy, old coot, old codger, old fart, over the hill, worm food, corpse-lite, junior varsity cadaver”.

    Along with his faithful sidekick Coleman, Serge is now on a mission to reach out to these people, to listen to their tales of ancient deeds, and to break bread with them, especially if they are paying for the meal.

    Alas, the lives of retirees is not always bliss.  Unscrupulous salesmen prey among them, fast-talking them into spending large amounts of money on things they have absolutely no need for.  They need a champion, someone to right these wrongs, someone to avenge these useless purchases.

    Perhaps Serge can be of assistance.

What’s To Like...

    Devoted readers of this series can rejoice, No Sunscreen For The Dead has the usual overall plot structure: Serge stumbles across an injustice and takes it upon himself punish the perpetrators in some very original ways, while Coleman provides comic relief by ingesting copious amounts of food, drugs, and alcohol and encouraging others to do the same.

    But there’s more to the plotline than that.  The FBI is puzzled by a strange spike in murder-suicides among the Florida retirees.  A nerdy data-cruncher can’t figure out why a client wants a database of people who are related but aren't twins, and have consecutive (last four digits of) social security numbers.  And we follow two guys named Teddy and Tofer who have a strange lifelong relationship that stretches way back to 1957.  You know that all these plot threads will eventually converge, and mix with Serge’s newfound desire to bask vicariously live the life of a retiree.  The fun is watching how Tim Dorsey accomplishes this.

    Unsurprisingly, the settings are limited to the state of Florida, mostly in the Tampa Bay and Sarasota area.  There are a few flashback scenes, some of which go back as far as 1957, and of course a whole bunch of clever Florida historical info dumps, delivered via short spiels by Serge.  I always love those.

    We get introduced to the Florida Amish retiree community, which I was unaware of, and who ride along the local highways at perilously slow speeds, but on tricycles instead of their traditional horse-and-buggy rigs.  Shoofly pies get mentioned (yum yum!), along with my personal gustatory weakness – Little Debbie snack cakes.  My personal hero, Rosa Parks, gets some nice ink, as does one of the watershed moments in the Korean War: Chosin Reservoir.  And I feel positively enlightened now that I know about the Teddy Roosevelt "Rough Rider" condoms.

    Everything builds to an ending that’s long of excitement although short on tension.  It felt more like vaudeville than breathtaking adventure, and seemed a bit contrived, but hey, what should we expect when Serge and Coleman are involved?

    No Sunscreen For The Dead is a standalone story, as well as part of a long-running series.  The pace is crisp, the wit is abundant, and all the plot threads get resolved nicely.  You don’t have to read this series in order.

Excerpts...

    Benmont grew up in a small coal-mining town in eastern Tennessee that had run out of coal.  The two children in his wallet were the product of a marriage to his high school sweetheart, who was an accomplished tuba player in the marching band and winner of the school’s contest to memorize the value of pi to the most digits.  The morning after his wife’s thirtieth birthday, she entered the Dollar Store and was overwhelmed with a shuddering realization that there was more to life than this.  Benmont came home to a half-empty closet and a note on the kitchen table.  (loc. 280)

    “Some scientists theorize that all of time has already happened, and the dimension is completely laid out like the others, but it’s just the constraints of our particular universe that create the illusion we’re flowing through it.”

    “Makes sense to me,” said Coleman, tapping an ash out the window.

    “And thank God it’s set up that way!” said Serge.  “Can you imagine if we could see all of time at once, but lose one of the other dimensions?  And then we’re a bunch of flat people who can’t move, like refrigerator magnets stuck to an infinitely large metal astro-plane stretching across the cosmos.”

    “I hate it when that happens.”  (loc. 1652)

Kindle Details…

    No Sunscreen for the Dead is presently priced at $10.99 at Amazon.  The other books in the series range in price from $2.99 to $12.99.

“What’s the point of retiring to Florida if you don’t follow the weather back home?”  (loc. 688 )

    There are a couple quibbles, but most of them are for readers new to this series.

    There is an abundance of cussing, but that’s the norm for a Tim Dorsey tale.  If you’re looking for a cozy crime story, this ain’t it.  There are also some innovative executions (see below) committed by our protagonist, but this is something Serge fans always look forward to.  Several reviewers were appalled by this, but that just makes it obvious they’ve never read a book from this series before.

    Other reviewers felt the flashbacks made it hard to follow the storyline, but I had no difficulties.

    It did seem like Serge went looking for trouble here, which felt different to me.  Usually trouble comes looking for Serge.  And last, and incredibly nitpicky on my part, if there was a tie-in between the story and the book’s title, I never saw it.

    But enough of the quibbles.  No Sunscreen For The Dead is another fine installment in this series, and it amused me from beginning to end.  There’s nothing highbrow about it, its sole aim is entertainment (well, okay, and maybe to educate you a bit about Florida), and to that end, it fully succeeds.

    7½ Stars.  For those who keep track of such things, there are three Serge “executions” in No Sunscreen For The Dead, and without giving any spoilers, we’ll simply say they involve glue, dust, and Brillo pads.

Time And Again - Jack Finney

   1970; 398 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Book 1 (out of 2) in the “Time” series.  Genre : Time Travel; Hard Sci-Fi; Classic Science Fiction.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

    Simon “Si” Morley is happy working as an illustrator for an advertising agency located in the heart of New York City.  He’s not looking for another job, but a curious-looking short stocky man has just stopped by his office, and wants to talk to him about a new career opportunity.

    It sounds like he’s either selling something or wanting to enlist Simon in the army.  The latter is not particularly inviting since this is 1970 and America is mired in Vietnam.  Still, the little guy is friendly enough, and Simon agrees to at least hear him out.

    The man is curiously vague about this fabulous “opportunity”.  He says it’s a secret government project of some sort, and he’s adamant that he can’t reveal any details about it until Simon commits to joining it.  He claims it is more exciting than flying to the moon, which is hard to believe, and when Simon jokingly asks if it’s more interesting than sex, the man contends that it is.  Wow.

    There’s just one catch.  The man wants permission to send someone over to Simon’s apartment before he goes back there tonight and do a thorough search, which seems rather nervy from a prospective employer.  But after a bit of stalling, Simon agrees, which delights the little man to no end, and he admits the permission to search was just a bluff because for some reason he’s sure that means Simon has already decided to accept the job offer.

    Now how could he possibly know that?

What’s To Like...

    Time and Again is an ambitious attempt to infuse a time-travel tale with realistic (“hard”) science fiction.  Instead of stumbling upon alien-built magic portals or getting zapped by Marty McFly lightning bolts, Jack Finney presents a plausible scenario for how we might develop such technology ourselves.  As with the USS space program in the 1950s, this means that the first set of temporal voyagers are subjected to rigorous training and simulations, plus lots of classroom lessons on how to blend in with the locals in a long-gone era. 

    The initial attempts at time-travel here only involve jumping backward in time (although you can subsequently return to your present-day starting point), you can’t jump to a different location, and your jump is always to the same calendar day but in a predetermined earlier year.  Afterward, those who jump and return are subjected to a vigorous debriefing, to see if there are any noticeable historical differences in our present timeline due to their interactions while in the past.  "Observe, don't interfere" is their motto and top priority.

    A successful time-jump (this is not a spoiler) hinges on the jumper adjusted his senses to where he feels completely immersed in the selected past, which for Simon is going to be New York City in 1882.  Jack Finney wants very much to have the reader experience this, so he did meticulous research into the life and sights of the Big Apple back then, and gives detailed descriptions of what Simon sees, hears, smells, feels, and even tastes as he adjusts to this culture change.  But there’s also an underlying plotline: Simon wants to witness, but not interfere in, the mailing of a letter that is known to have provoked a suicide because it contains a Doomsday message.

    Jack Finney incorporates a bunch of drawings, old photographs, and even newspaper headlines into the storyline, similar to what Ransom Riggs did in his blockbuster book Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children and reviewed here.  Perhaps Ransom Riggs got his idea from Time And Again.  In both cases, I was simply enchanted by those more-than-a-century-old photographs.

    It was fascinating to see what was, and what was not, around back in 1882 New York City.  Ben-Hur (the book, not the movie) was a best-seller at the time, and although the Statue of Liberty wasn’t standing yet in the harbor, her gigantic arm had arrived, and was sitting in a lot (there’s a picture of it in the book) waiting for the rest of the statue.  There's no radio or TV, of course, but you’ll recognize a lot of the songs that the characters sing to entertain themselves, and maybe even have a nostalgic twinge from something called a stereoscope, which used to keep me entertained for hours as a kid, although I’m sure we called it something else.

    I wouldn’t call the ending exciting, but it is realistic (a must for any hard sci-fi story), and has an ingenious twist that I didn’t see coming.  The book is written in the first-person point-of-view (Simon’s), and while the settings are limited to parts of New York City, in both 1882 and 1970, it was neat to see what had changed in those 88 years (lots!) and what was still around (more than you’d think).  Amazon labels Time and Again is considered "classic American literature", and I’ve been meaning to read it for quite some time.

Kewlest New Word ...

Fillip (n.) : a movement made by bending the last joint of the finger against the thumb and suddenly releasing it; a flick of the finger.

Excerpts...

    I’ve always felt a wonder at old photographs not easy to explain.  Maybe I don’t need to explain; maybe you’ll recognize what I mean.  I mean the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you’re seeing was once real.  That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects.  That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera.  You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them.  You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can - what was just inside the door.  (pg. 19)

    “A world war?”

    “They called it that, Julia, because … all the world was concerned about it.  It was everyone’s business, you see, and … they soon put a stop to it.  I’d almost forgotten it.”

    How much sense that made to her, if any, I don’t know.  She said, “And what does ‘World War Eye’ mean?”

    “Well …”  I couldn’t think of anything to say but the truth.  “That isn’t a letter of the alphabet.  It’s a number, Julia, a roman numeral.”

    “World War … one?  There’ve been more?”  (pg. 377)

“Are you from the army?  If so, I don’t want any today.”  (pg. 9 )

    There are some nits to pick.  The book opens with us meeting a bunch of Simon’s coworkers (at his then-present job) who thereafter have no impact on the storyline.  The book then plods along, as Simon trains for his new job and we wait patiently for the first time-jump, which doesn’t occur until page 100.  The main plot thread takes its own sweet to emerge, although once it does, things liven up considerably.

    The lengthy and detailed descriptions of 1882 New York City are fascinating at first, but unless that’s your home city, it can eventually become tedious.  There’s also quite a bit of swearing for a book regarded as “classic science fiction”, but I liked the novel rendering of one cuss phrase: “for crysake”.

     But I pick at nits.  Time And Again was a fascinating read for me for several reasons: a.) it’s a refreshing break from the stereotypical classic sci-fi novels, b.) I really did enjoy being immersed in 1882 New York City life, and c.) those 120-year old photographs were absolutely jaw-dropping.

    7 Stars.  Although Time and Again is a standalone novel, Jack Finney did later write a sequel, From Time To Time, which was published 25 years later in 1995, which also happened to be the year he passed away.  It too is described as an “illustrated novel”, which I presume means it too has a bunch of old photographs in it, and it resides on my Kindle, awaiting my attention.

The Roswell Conspiracy - Boyd Morrison

   2012; 336 pages.  Book 3 (out of 4) in the “Tyler Locke” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Action-Adventure; Thriller.  Overall Rating : 4½*/10.

    Let's call it a business write-off.  Some old lady has contacted Tyler Locke’s company, Gregorian Engineering, and wants to hire him to investigate something that happened more than fifty years ago – the alleged UFO sighting at Roswell, New Mexico.  Yeah, like nobody’s ever looked into that before.  To boot, she lives in New Zealand, which is about as far away from Roswell as one can get.

    The lady claims she was living in Roswell as a young girl when the alien flying saucer crash-landed, had an encounter with its pilot, who gave her a couple artifacts (it?) which she's sure will help in the investigation.

  

    Tyler doesn’t expect to take the job, yet here he is, with his business partner Grant Westfield, jetting to New Zealand for a preliminary meeting with her.  That’s where the business write-off comes in; this is a great excuse to go skiing in New Zealand while they’re in the neighborhood.

    So it comes as a surprise when two professional killers arrive at the old lady’s house just before Tyler and Grant do, and try to kill her and steal the artifacts.

    Somebody is obviously taking her wacky alien-conspiracy story way too seriously.

What’s To Like...

    The action in The Roswell Conspiracy is fast and furious, starts immediately, and never lets up.  The reader gets to tag along with Tyler and his team to some neat places – New Zealand, Australia (including Alice Springs!), Easter Island, Peru, Tijuana, and even Oshkosh, by gosh.

    The plotline is an ambitious attempt to combine four of the most intriguing historical mysteries around:

    What really happened at Roswell in 1947?

    What flattened 80 million trees in a Siberian forest in Tunguska in 1907?

    Who built those massive stone heads on Easter Island (‘Rapa Nui”), and why?

    Who drew those gigantic Nazca Lines in Peru, why, and how?

    There is a “is it terrestrial or extraterrestrial?” issue surrounding all of these, similar to the “is it natural or supernatural?” motif that Preston & Child sometimes use in their Agent Pendergast series, and I always like that.  I think the book’s explanation for how Roswell, Tunguska, Rapa Nui, and Nazca could possibly all be intertwined works pretty well.

    The robotic trucks were new for me, but they make sense for traversing the harsh and remote Australian desert.  Being a chemist, I am familiar with the use of ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate – Fuel Oil) as a deadly explosive; it was what was used in the Oklahoma City bombing years ago.  It was fun to do the BridgeClimb with our heroes on the Sydney Harbour Bridge; that’s the second time in two months it's popped up in books I was reading.  I also liked the literary nods to several other relevant books: R.U.R., Chariots of the Gods, and most of all, A Canticle for Liebowitz; the latter is reviewed here.

    The ending is sufficiently exciting, and “over-the-top” (literally!).  The Roswell Conspiracy is a standalone story, and all the plot threads get tied up nicely.  It is part of a series, which I presume is complete, since the most recent installment was published way back in 2013.  I haven’t read any other the other books in the series, but I didn’t feel like that was a handicap.  There’s only a little bit of cussing in the book, and I thought the editor did a good job.

Kewlest New Word ...

Pisco (n.) : a white brandy made in Peru from muscat grapes.

Excerpts...

    “You sure you can’t think of something better than this?”

    Tyler forced a smile.  “Would you rather wait in here until the truck comes to a full and complete stop?”

    “Not really.  But it feels like we’re going about sixty.  Gonna be a bumpy landing if we jump.”

    “Then we’ll have to stop the truck.”

    Grant raised a finger.  “One teensy problem with that plan-“

    “It’s more of a goal than a plan.”

    “The guys operating this thing have guns and we have persuasive verbal skills.”  (loc. 1912)

    “Wait a minute.  Are you sweet on him?”

    Morgan felt herself blush.  “Don’t be ridiculous.  Army grunts aren’t my type.”

    “He didn’t seem dimwitted to me, especially for a former pro wrestler.”

    The toilet flushed and Grant came out of the bathroom.  Morgan looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

    “Oh, he’s not stupid,” she said.  “Just annoying.”

    Grant nodded happily and took his seat.  (loc. 3146)

Kindle Details…

    The Roswell Conspiracy is presently priced at $4.99 at Amazon.  The other three books in the series go for either $7.99 (Books One and Two), or $4.99 (Book Four).  Boyd Morrison has several other e-books at $7.99, plus a whole bunch of novels co-written with Clive Cussler from the Oregon Files series, which range in price from $9.99 to $14.99.

“If you have a better idea, tell me three minutes ago.”  (loc. 5702 )

    Overall I was disappointed in The Roswell Conspiracy.  The character development is flat, the good guys and bad guys are stereotypical, and our two protagonists are just too good in every facet of being secret agents to be believable.  The storyline is straightforward and the puzzles are easily solved.  Even I could half-figure out the cryptic message given to Fay, and what that disclosed about its source.

    The info dumps felt awkward, and only have value if you know nothing about Roswell, Tunguska, Rapa Nui, and Nazca.  Worst of all were the WTF’s:

    Jumping out of a speeding truck at 60 mph while also carrying two unconscious persons apparently does not result in a serious injury to any of them.  How miraculous!  When our two heroes get stranded on a road and need to get to the airport immediately or else Evil will triumph, what should appear out of nowhere but a couple of kids on two motor scooters!  Holy godsend, Batman!  Finally, the main baddie, after getting away to fight another day, discovers he’s forgotten to equip himself with a basic piece of life-saving equipment, much to his demise.  Sloppy, dude, but very convenient for the forces of Good.

    However…

    I’ve read one Clive Cussler book in my life, was very disappointed in it for the same reasons mentioned above, and have never been tempted to read another one.  But there are millions of readers who thoroughly love his Dirk Pitt novels, and eat up his too-amazing-to-believe exploits.  So I’m in the minority on this author.

    In an odd bit of serendipity, Boyd Morrison has teamed up with Clive Cussler to co-write a bunch of books in the “Oregon Files” series.  Their writing styles match up closely, and I have the feeling that this is a happy partnership.  If you look at the book covers for these over on Amazon, you can see that Clive deservedly gets top billing (font size matters!), but I suspect Boyd does the bulk of the actual writing.

    4½ Stars.  Simply put, your opinion of The Roswell Conspiracy is going to match your opinion of Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt and Oregon Files books.  Adjust my 4½ Stars rating accordingly.

An Orc on the Wild Side - Tom Holt

   2019; 353 pages.  Book 5 (out of 5) in the “Doughnut” series.  New Author? : No.  Humorous Fantasy; Satire.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    He’s King Mordak.  Ruler of the goblins.  One all-around bad dude.  Successor to the Nameless One as the “Dark Lord” and the “Prince of Evil”.  But he’s much more than that.

    He’s a philosopher.  He’s developed and promoted “New Evil”, a radical new way of looking at, well, the fundamental relationship between Good and Evil.  Because is there really any reason for the cosmic yin/yang forces to be forever at war, continually depleting their ranks?  What, or better yet, whose, purpose does it serve?

    He’s a reformer, which is remarkable for a goblin.  He’s revamped the universal healthcare program.  One flat fee – threepence an hour plus you get to keep the cadaver.  And no more amputations for ingrown toenails.

    But now he’s got something new to ponder: the pros and cons of non-parthenogenetic reproduction.  It’s the goblin way; they are spawned, not born.  That means that, unlike any other species of beasties, there are no female goblins.  Maybe it’s about time they make one.  In the laboratory.  Because how he can guarantee gender equality in the goblin kingdom, if you have no females?

    Well, it doesn’t take a half-wit to see just how much can go wrong with that plan.  It’s almost as bad as discovering an egg whisk.

What’s To Like...

    An Orc on the Wild Side is the fifth installment in Tom Holt’s current “Doughnut” series, a fun and “spoofy” mash-up of quantum physics multiverses and fantasy classics.  The series’ title comes from the fact that you can bake yourself a doughnut, look through it into a parallel universe, and poof!, you get magically transported there.

    The storyline's structure is formulaic, and that's not a criticism.  Tom Holt throws in a whole bunch of plot threads (I counted at least nine of them here), most of which seemingly have nothing to do with any of the others, and we spend the rest of the book wondering how he’s going to tie them all together at the end.   He does it successfully every time, including here, and half the fun is watching how he does it.

    The other half of the fun is the Tom Holtian wit and spoofery.  We learn why egg whisk technology is so dangerous, struggle alongside Mordak to decipher a doom-and-gloom prophecy concerning the return of the Nameless One, and chortle at the pokes in gentle fun at Lord of the Rings, Braveheart, and even Brexit.  The enigmatic uncle/nephew duo of Herald and Art are back, the latter still in the process of redefining the term “omnivore”.  We begin to learn more about whom they ultimately work for at long last.

    There are no chapters in the book; instead it’s divided into five “parts”, each with a clever “orcish” title, such as “All Orc and No Prey”.  There are critters aplenty – goblins, dwarves, flying lizards (we’d call them dragons), wraiths, humans, an Evil Eye, Mr. Bullfrog (my favorite new character), and one not-to-be-messed-with she-goblin.   Curiously, there are no halflings, nor any orcs, although you could argue that the terms goblins and orcs are synonymous.

    The ending is typical Tom Holt, with the emphasis being on its clever resolution of the plot threads and Mordak’s question: why shouldn’t the Elves, Dwarves and Goblin engage in at least some degree of dialogue and cooperation?  Good triumphs, or at least “New Evil” does, despite some of the baddies living to incite another day.

    An Orc on the Wild Side is both a standalone story and part of a series.  It is set entirely in the fantasy-imbued parallel world called the “Hidden Realms”.  It was written in English, not American, so you might be sceptical about tyres and cissy about artefacts and  grotty centrefolds. There aren’t a lot of characters to keep track of, although you’re not always sure about who they actually are.

Excerpts...

    “Ms. White.”

    “Yes?”

    “I don’t think I quite caught your first name.”

    “Um.”

    “Excuse me?”

    She flushed slightly.  “It’s Snow.”

    “Snow White?”

    “Yup.”

    “That’s an unusual-“

    She looked at him.  “It’s short,” she said, for ‘S-no-business-of-yours-what-my-first-name-is.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have sausages to fry.”  (pg. 32)

    “So where does it say in the Act about killing three thousand goblins?”

    The Minister stabbed at a paragraph with his claw.  “There, look.  Paragraph six.”

    “What?  But that’s just-“

    “The living wage,” the Minister said.  “Well, this lot doesn’t comply.”

    “They don’t?”

    The Minister shook his head.  “The living wage is three Iron Pence a day, right?  Well, the lot doesn’t earn that much.”

    “So?”

    “So they can’t go on living, can they?”  (pg. 253)

“Truly is it said, go not to the Elves for answers, since they’re about as much use as a custard wall.”  (pg. 297)

    There’s not a lot of cussing – probably a bit less than a dozen instances.  I think I caught a plot hole (on page 72) unless the pair of human couples were engaged in a bit of wife-swapping, and that’s highly unlikely.  Plus one  typo (thing/things) a few pages later.

    There are a couple negative reviews at Amazon and Goodreads, mostly from people upset that Tom Holt would dare to poke fun at something as sacrosanct as LOTR.  Personally I think that most authors would love to be famous and successful enough to where their works and worlds are being parodied.

    8 Stars.  I’ve enjoyed all the books so far in this series, and An Orc on the Wild Side can be added to that list.  There’s no mention of a sequel over at Wikipedia, and my biggest worry is that Tom Holt will someday soon call it a career and hang up his pen.

The Great Wall - Julia Lovell

   2006; 351 pages.  Full Title: The Great Wall – China Against the World 1000 BC – AD 2000.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : History; China; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    The thing about the Great Wall of China is, it’s so positively great.  That’s why the Chinese call it that.

    I still remember the iconic picture of it, when President Nixon was visiting for a photo op back in 1972.  The wall looked like something you’d see on a medieval castle.  And to think it was actually built 2,000 years ago!

    I can’t imagine how much labor went into the construction – making a single wall stretching all across northern China.  Still, it was a good investment.  It was made to keep the barbarians out, and with the exception of Genghis Khan, it worked pretty well.

    And it’s huge!  Did you know it’s the only man made object on Earth that can be seen from the moon?  Neil Armstrong is on record as having spotted it while he was traipsing around up there.

    Sadly, most if not all of the above is inaccurate, being hyperbole written mostly by Western visitors to impress their countrymen back home and, in a lot of cases, with the idea of spurring trade between China and Europe.  We’ll list the correct facts at the end of this review.

What’s To Like...

    The Great Wall is a clever undertaking by Julia Lovell to tell the history of China by juxtaposing something the Chinese have been doing for several millennia – building walls.  Trying to squeeze 3,000 years of events into 351 pages of text (plus another 50 pages of Appendices, Notes, a Bibliography, and an Index) is essentially an impossible task, particularly when presenting it to people whose knowledge of Chinese history is limited to Confucius, the Mongols, and Mao Zedong (the author’s spelling).  Surprisingly, Julia Lovell succeeds admirably.

    The book is divided into 12 chapters, plus an Introduction and a Conclusion, and is presented in more or less chronological order.  Wherever an opportunity arises, wall-building is spotlighted, even when the walls were obsolete, and even when the "walls" refer to internet firewalls and those around shopping malls.  The maps, notes, and pictures all work smoothly, and I liked the use of pinyin (minus the tonal marks, but that’s not a complaint) and lots of examples of classical Chinese poetry.

    Unlike several reviewers, I thought Julia Lovell had a very balanced view of the various factions.  She gives a “warts and all” view of the various Chinese dynasties, the various nomadic tribes to the north, and the various more-recent European powers wielding their gunboat diplomacy.  The life of Sun Yat-sen gets fleshed out here, and there’s lots of interesting trivia, such as Mao Zedong being an enthusiastic but amateur versifier.

    My favorite Chinese poet Li Po gets some ink (although his name is rendered “Li Bo” here), even if he’s portrayed as a “drunken, duelling, romantic wanderer who is said to have drowned after leaping, drunk, into a river to embrace the reflection of the moon.”  Maodun was new to me – I wouldn’t want to mess with him even if I was his father.  I enjoyed meeting the early Turks, who were a major adversary of Chinese expansionism way back in the 6^th century AD, and I was startled to learn that it was a Tibetan tribe that destroyed the Yan dynasty.  I liked that oracle bones were used for divination for centuries, and that chess was being played in China as early as the 12^th century AD.

    Since I took two years of Mandarin a few years back, I already knew that there are a bunch of dialects spoken throughout China (including Cantonese in the south), but that since they all use the same script, everyone in China can understand any and all written communication by their countrymen.  The southern city of Hangzhou get brief mention; it brought back memories from a business trip I took there 15 years ago.  The eight-year-long imperial debate about which of the five “cosmic elements” would be used by the Jin Dynasty made me chuckle.  An executive committee where I used to work once took eight months and many meetings to discuss what the company colors would be.  Dilbert would have sighed.

    The Great Wall is written in English, not American, but I didn’t find that distracting.  Stylistically, I’d label it a “scholarly” presentation, almost a polar opposite of the way Sarah Vowell or Mary Roach writes, and very effective here.

Kewlest New Word ...

Corvée (adj.) : referring to unpaid labor (as towards constructing roads) due from a feudal vassal to his lord.

Others: panegyrics (n.); enfeoff (v.); havering (v.); poetaster (n.).

Excerpts...

    [Erzhu Rong] crossed the Yellow River, settled on a hillside outside Luoyang and invited the capital’s aristocracy for a meeting at his campsite.  From there, after gracelessly massacring every single member – perhaps as many as 3,000 – of this state welcoming party, and drowning the dowager empress and her child-emperor in the Yellow River, he rode into Luoyang and set about enjoying court life, until he was himself stabbed to death in 530 by the new puppet emperor he had installed.  Following a plucky but doomed attempt to defend the city, the emperor was himself garroted by the murdered leader’s successors, shortly after praying to the Buddha not to let him be reborn as a king.  (loc. 1995)

    By his death in 1688 – at which point he was fluent in six languages, including Chinese and Manchu – Verbiest had laboured for almost two decades on behalf of the imperial court.  He had drawn up calendars, built huge and elaborate astronomical instruments, as well as an observatory in which to use them, and overseen the forging of 132 large cannons (on which he eccentrically inscribed the names of male and female Chinese saints), subsequently used to arm China’s city walls.  (…)

    Perhaps his most innovative moment was an early attempt at an automobile, in which he strapped a boiler on to an oven, attached a paddle wheel, gears and wheels, and steam-motored around the corridors of the Forbidden City for an hour or so.  (loc. 4286)

“Who scruples much achieves little.” (Fei Yi)  (loc. 814 )

    It’s hard to find anything to nitpick about in The Great Wall.  There were some “gaps” in the history, such as the history of the southern parts of China, the historic relation between Tibet and China, the fall of the last dynasty (Qing) in 1911, and Mao ousting Chiang Kai-shek in 1949.  But there’s only so much you can cover in 351 pages, and I doubt any of these topics could be tied in to the “wall-building” motif.

    The book was a slow read for me, but I think that’s because I was so unfamiliar with all those emperors, warlords, dynasties, and barbarian leaders.  If there was an underlying theme, it was that there is always an inherent and eternal tension when any agrarian-based “civilized” society abuts a roving hunter-gatherer one.  Or, as the book puts it, “the Chinese viewed the northern tribes as raiding barbarians, while the nomads viewed the Chinese as raiding targets.”

    8 Stars.  Some truths about the Great Wall, courtesy of Julia Lovell’s book.  The “castle-looking” part of it you see in all the photographs is just north of Beijing.  It looks “medieval” because that portion was built relatively recently, about 500 years ago, not 2000.  It’s still impressive though.

    Other sections of the wall are much older, not connected to the picturesque portion, and much more primitive in construction.  It’s only recently that the Chinese started calling it “the Great Wall”, mostly for tourism purposes.  Historically, they called it many things, including “the Long Wall”.

    The wall’s purpose is more offensive than defensive.  It kinda says “this is a boundary to our land”, just like Israel’s Palestinian wall, the Berlin wall, and Trump’s Mexico wall.  Yes, it says “keep out” as well, but as Genghis Khan apocryphally said, “the strength of walls depends on the courage of those who guard them.”

    You cannot see the Great Wall from the moon.  Yes, Neil Armstrong thought he did, but it turns out he was actually observing a cloud formation.

Fuzzy Nation - John Scalzi

   2011; 301 pages.  New Author? : No.  Science Fiction - Colonization; Hard Science Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    This just might be the most lucrative day in Jack Holloway’s life.  And that’s saying something since he used to be a lawyer, and even now he’s a licensed contractor for ZaraCorp, hired to do prospecting and surveying on Zara XXIII, a remote and undeveloped planet some 178 light-years from Earth.

    Jack’s about to set off four high-explosive charges in a nearby cliff that might, per his surveying experience, contain a vein of highly-prized sunstones.  If this proves out, Jack’s entitled to 0.25% of the profits garnered from ZaraCorp mining them, which may sound miniscule, but it’s not.

    Alas, Jack does not always play by the rules.  He’s about to let his dog, Carl, do the actual detonating, and ZaraCorp, always sensitive to its safety record, has rules against that.  ZaraCorp is also extremely sensitive to any actions undertaken on its behalf that might be construed as deliberately damaging of the native ecology on these far-flung planets.  Jack can be summarily fired for any violations of these policies.

    But hey, Jack and Carl know what they’re doing (well, Jack does anyway.  Carl just does it for the doggy treat reward), and if everything goes right, four small rips will appear in the wall of the cliff, just large enough for Jack to see if any sunstones are buried within.

    What’s the worst that could possibly happen?

What’s To Like...

    Fuzzy Nation is a “reimagining” (so sez John Scalzi) or a “reboot” (so sez Wikipedia) of H. Beam Piper’s 1962 classic Little Fuzzy, which I read way back in 2011 and is reviewed here.  So it’s a retelling, and not a sequel, of the original tale.  The protagonist, Jack Holloway, is the same, as are a couple of the Fuzzys, but all the other characters are new.  Similarly, the general storyline is also retained, but all the details thereof are new and technologically up-to-date.  The Fuzzys now like to watch Ewoks drop rocks on Stormtrooper heads in old Star Wars episodes, and Holloway likes to listen to audiobooks when he’s traveling.

    The central theme is: what qualities must a species have to be labeled sentient?  To put it a bit more crudely, when we land on a new planet and encounter living creatures, how do we determine whether to communicate with them or eat them?  There are lots of possible factors, but the one that everyone agrees on is: the species must be capable of speech.

    As usual, the dialogue has lots of John Scalzi wit in it, the pacing is brisk, and the characters are all "gray", which I always like.  Our protagonist, Jack Holloway, is a bit of a butthead, and both the good guys and bad ones are interesting to tag along with.  The settings are limited: a couple places on Zara XXIII, and that’s it.  Ditto for the critters: the only ones we meet are humans, Fuzzys, zararaptors, and nimbus floaters.   

    The main storyline revolves around trying to determine if the Fuzzys are sentient, but there are several secondary plot threads, such as whether Jack and his ex-girlfriend Isabel will get back together, whether Jack and ZaraCorp will get rich, and what will happen to the Fuzzys afterward, no matter how their sentience hearing turns out.

    The ending is adequate – you sorta know what the trial decision will be, but the fun is figuring out what kind of evidence will be presented.  The judge who presides over the hearing is one of my favorite characters, she's always in control of things but sometimes just barely.  There are a couple of neat plot twists, but they occur mostly in the secondary plot threads, and in the epilogue.

Excerpts...

    When one lands on the jungle floor with a skimmer, via crash or otherwise, it makes a terrific racket.  Most of the nearby creatures, evolutionarily designed to equate loud noise with predatory action and other dangers, will bolt to get out of the way.  But eventually they come back.  The ones that are actual predators come back sooner, intuiting in their predatory way that a big loud noise might, when finished, result in some small helpless creature being wounded or slowed down enough for it to be picked off without too much struggle.

    What this meant for Holloway was that he likely had two minutes, give or take ninety seconds, to set up the emergency perimeter fence.  After that, something large and hungry would definitely be on its way to see what might be for lunch.  (pg. 112)

    “What’s your general opinion of Mr. Holloway?” Meyer asked.

    “Am I allowed to use profanity?” Bourne asked.

    “No,” Soltan said.

    “Then it’s best to say that our relationship has been a tense one,” Bourne said.

    “Any particular reason?” Meyer asked.

    “How much time do you have?” Bourne said.

    “Just hit the highlights,” Meyer said.

    “He’s lax with CEPA and ZaraCorp regulations, he’s argumentative, he tries to lawyer everything, he ignores me when I tell him he can’t do things, and he’s just all-around a jerk,” Bourne said, looking at Holloway.

    “Any positive qualities?” Meyer asked, slightly bemused.

    “I like his dog.”  (pg. 244)

“Squids don’t make sandwiches.”  (pg. 104 )

    I had a couple of quibbles, most of them minor.  There’s a bunch of cussing in the book (I counted 13 instances in the first 50 pages), but it needs to be said that the target audience here are adult readers, not the YA audience H. Beam Piper wrote for. 

    The storyline mentions two other sentient races that we Earthlings had already encountered in our stellar travels: the Urai and the Negad, and what the factors were that made us conclude they were sentient.  It would’ve been neat to work them into the storyline somehow, but alas, that doesn't happen.  I think this is Piper’s fault more than Scalzi’s though.

    Finally, because this is a reimagining/reboot, if you’ve read Little Fuzzy, you kinda know how the storyline is going to unfold.  In the Author’s Note, at the book’s beginning, John Scalzi gives H. Beam Piper’s version due praise (Fuzzy Nation was authorized by the H. Beam Piper estate), but this is one of those rare situations where it’s probably best to either one, but not both.

    Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading Scalzi's reboot, although that was perhaps helped by the fact that it’s been nine years since I read H. Beam Piper's version.  One tends to forget a lot of the details in any book after that amount of time.

    8 Stars.  Fuzzy Nation might be a bit redundant, but it’s still an entertaining read due to John Scalzi’s writing skills.  Add 1 Star if you’ve never read Little Fuzzy, you're going to really enjoy this book.