Murder in the Queen's Armes - Aaron Elkins

   1985; 260 pages.  Book 3 (out of 18) in the “Gideon Oliver Mysteries” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : International Mystery & Crime; England; Whodunit; Forensic Anthropology.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    Hooray!  Gideon and Julie are newlyweds!  It’s time for their honeymoon!

 

    And a mighty fine honeymoon it’s going to be for the American couple.  They’re heading for a beautiful part of Great Britain called Dorset.  Right on the scenic coast of the English Channel.  How delightfully romantic!

 

    There will be two little side-trips for Gideon.   First, a trip to the Greater Dorchester Museum of History to see a skull fragment affectionately called “Pummy”.  Then to a nearby archaeological site, where a former classmate of Gideon’s, Dr. Nate Marcus, is supervising an excavation.  Both visits will be short; neither one is anything major.

 

    Well actually, Nate claims he is onto something major.  He says he’s uncovered proof that the ancient Mycenaeans visited early Britain and ushered the locals into the Bronze Age!

 

    Ho hum.  I guess you’d have to be a fellow archaeologist to get excited about that, and Gideon’s an anthropologist.  I certainly can't see that any of this is worth killing somebody over, right?

 

What’s To Like...

    Murder in the Queen’s Armes is the third book in this 18-volume series, and the second one I’ve read and which is reviewed here.  The title references the inn where Gideon and Julie are staying.  As expected, complications quickly arise that intrude into the couple’s honeymoon, including several mysteries that have need of Gideon’s technical expertise as the renowned “skeleton detective”.

 

    I thought the mysteries in the storyline were well-crafted.  To give details would entail spoilers, but let’s just say that neither Gideon nor the reader should discard any discovery, no matter how minor it may seem at the time.

 

    I loved the setting: a picturesque area along the southern coast of England.  I have a Facebook friend who lives nearby, and she’s posted pictures of Dorset in bloom.  I want to go there!

 

    The technical aspect of the story also fascinated me.  Gideon is called upon twice to do a skeletal analysis, and I was amazed at how much can be deduced from an ancient bone, no matter whether “ancient” means a couple millennia or a couple million years.  I was delighted that my favorite indigenous paleo-British group, the “Beaker People”, figure into the plotline, and enjoyed learning a number of Yiddish phrases, since one of the main characters was Jewish, such as doppes, nu, ungepotchket, farpotchket, and tzimiss.

 

    The ending is good, although the key break in the investigation doesn't happen until late in the story.  So even though this is a whodunit, and even though there are clues aplenty along the way, don’t be upset if you can’t solve the crime before Gideon does.  The fun comes with “connecting the dots” from a series of clues.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Oleaginously (adv.) : obsequiously; in an exaggerated and distastefully complimentary manner.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 1,134 ratings and 102 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.98*/5, based on 1,842 ratings and 112 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “I can’t say I find the Bronze Age all that fascinating myself.  Too recent.”

    “Seventeen hundred b.c. is recent?”

    “Sure, to an anthropologist.  Didn’t you ever hear what Agatha Christie said about being married to one?”

    “I didn’t know she was.”

    “Yes, a famous one: Max Mallowan.  She said it was wonderful—the older she got, the more interesting he found her.”  (loc. 272)

 

    “He was pretty well soused when I left him an hour ago.”

    “Nate?”

    “Yes, indeed.  He’s sleeping it off, I think.”

    Abe made a decisive little nod.  “When we’re finished here, I’ll go down and fix him up.  I’ll make him take a guggle-muggle.”

    “Come again?”

    “An old remedy.  You mix whiskey, hot tea, molasses, and raw eggs, and swallow it in one gulp.”

    Gideon made a face.  “It sounds terrible.”

    “That’s why you got to drink it one gulp.  You call it a guggle-muggle because that’s what it sounds like when it goes down: Guggle, muggle.  Believe me, by seven o’clock he’ll be fine.”  (loc. 2760)

 

Kindle Details…

    Murder in the Queen’s Armes sells for $7.99 right now at Amazon.  The other books in the series cost anywhere from $1.99 to $8.99.  There are also two "bundles", both priced at $16.99, one with Books 1-4, the other with Books 5-7.

 

“He’s glick and he’s slib, that’s all he is.”  (loc. 2576)

    There’s not much in Murder in the Queen’s Armes to whine about.  The cussing is moderate, 17 instances in the first 20%, but I didn’t feel that it was overused, and I don’t recall any f-bombs.  There is some romantic banter between our newlyweds, but nothing salacious.

 

    There were a couple of typos: be/he, chinthursting/chinthrusting, farfetched/far-fetched, and one (out of six) “house-keeping” variant of the correct “housekeeping”, but overall the editing was pretty clean.  There were also several instances unintended breaks in paragraphs, but I blame the Amazon conversion program for that, since I’ve seen that in other e-books.   More annoying were a couple of scene switches without any signal, although this too could be the Amazon program’s fault.

 

    Overall, I enjoyed Murder in the Queen’s Armes.  It was a fast-paced, quick, easy read.  I loved the setting, and all the genre components—mystery, archaeology, anthropology, intrigue, and even romance—were nicely blended.  I’ve got a couple more e-books from this series sitting on my Kindle, and I have a feeling I’m going to enjoy getting better acquainted with Gideon Oliver.

 

    8 Stars.  One last “Kewlest New Word” for your vocabulary enhancement: the aforementioned hangover cure called guggle-muggle.  I’d never heard of it, and thought at first it was something Aaron Elkins made up.  But Wikipedia has a post about a milder variation of it, a dessert, and with several variant spellings including gogle-mogle, gogol-mogol, and kogel mogel.  Wiki it.  It is not likely to be added to my dessert list anytime soon.

Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari

   2017; 398 pages.  Full Title: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.  Book 2 (out of 2) in the series “A Brief History”.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Speculative Futurism; Anthropology; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    There’s no doubt about it.  We Homo Sapiens are at the top of the food chain.  We are the kings of the hill, the crown of creation, and the top dogs.  The only question is: where do we go from here?

 

    Maybe we’ve reached the peak of evolution, maybe not.  But if we’re still evolving, what direction are we heading?  We’re getting taller and less hairy, that much is evident.  But as a species, are we getting more intelligent anymore?

 

    The rest of the animal kingdom view and fear us as gods.  But once upon a time, that was true of the dinosaurs, and look where they are today.  Is there anything we can do to help us remain the dominant species on Earth?

 

    In 2014, Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari came out with Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.  In it, he explains how we Homo Sapiens progressed from being just another ape in the jungle to the top of the pecking order here on Earth.  Hmm, he might be able to give us some educated insight as to where we go from here.

 

What’s To Like...

    After a 1-chapter introduction, Yuval Noah Harari divides the remaining 10 chapters of Homo Deus into three sections:

Part 1: Homo Sapiens Conquers the World (pg. 71, at 18% Kindle)

Part 2: Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World (pg. pg. 155, at 35% Kindle)

Part 3: Homo Sapiens Loses Control (pg. 281, at 59% Kindle)

 

    In a nutshell, Part 1 details how we separated our species from the rest of the animal world, Part 2 details what we did when we got to the top, and Part 3 details what we’re doing today to maintain and expand our dominating position.  The text comes with a fair number of footnotes and pictures; I’m happy to report they all worked easily and smoothly.  The text is incredibly free of cussing, I counted only six instances in the entire book – three “damns” and three “hells”.

 

    Yuval Harari is careful to mention several times that he isn’t presenting his views as some sort of prophecy; he’s simply laying out one set of possibilities.  The reader may or may not agree with what he proposes, but his points are most certainly thought-provoking, and will quite likely initiate a reevaluation of the reader's attitudes and beliefs.

 

    The chapters are fairly long, averaging about 36 pages, but they are subdivided into shorter sections that often have catchy titles.  Some examples are: Who’s Afraid of Charles Darwin?, A Brief History of Lawns, Is Beethoven Better than Chuck Berry?, Who Are I?, and I Smell Fear.

 

    The book is written in English, not American, but I didn’t find that distracting.  It just means you can baulk at something for ever even if you’re ageing or skilful, hop onto aeroplanes, hope you don’t get diarrhoea, and pay for things with roubles.  I learned some new acronyms: FOMO ("Fear Of Missing Out"), and WEIRD ("Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic").  That last one describes the type of test subject that’s almost invariably been used in brain studies.

 

    The last chapter is Yuval Harari’s guess at where Homo Sapiens is headed.  It involves something he calls Dataism, which the author describes as “the worship of data”, and can be viewed as either exciting or frightful, depending on your mindset.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.6/5 based on 13,680 ratings and 3,619 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.52/5 based on 3,377 ratings and 620 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Conflating (v.) : combining (two or more texts, ideas, etc.) into one.

Others: Congeries (n., singular); Diktat (n.).

 

Excerpts...

    For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.  In the early twenty-first century, the average human is far more likely to die from bingeing at McDonald’s than from drought, Ebola, or an al-Qaeda attack.  (loc. 369)

 

    Today in the US more people read digital books than printed ones.  Devices such as Amazon’s Kindle are able to collect data on their users while they are reading.  Your Kindle can, for example, monitor which parts of a book you read quickly, and which slowly; on which page you took a break, and on which sentence you abandoned the book, never to pick it up again.  (Better tell the author to rewrite that bit.)  (loc. 5753)

 

Kindle Details…

    Homo Deus currently costs $13.49 at Amazon.  The prequel, Sapiens, goes for $14.99.  You can save yourself a couple of bucks by buying them in a 2-book bundle for $22.49.  Sapiens is also available as a two-volume “graphic” version; those will run you $19.99 apiece.

 

For millions of years we were enhanced chimpanzees.  In the future, we may become oversized ants.  (loc. 6057)

    I only have one thing to quibble about in Homo Deus: overall, the tone of the book is kind of a downer.

 

    For instance, here’s a list of things Yuval Harari doesn’t like: Gods-&-Religions, Humanism, Monotheism, Liberalism, Nazism, Fascism, Industrialization (*), Agriculturalization (*), Communism, Individualism (#), Free Will (#), AI, Google, Facebook, and something called Transhumanism.  Items marked (*) are covered in greater detail in his first book; items marked (#) are "isms" that he doesn’t believe exist.

 

    And here’s a list of things Yuval Harari likes:  Hunting-Gathering (*), and Dataism.

 

    8½ Stars.  The tone of Homo Deus may be negative, but I found it to be a treasure trove of facts, trivia, and things to ponder about concerning mankind's future.  It doesn’t quite measure up to Sapiens, but I think that's unavoidable because, whereas Sapiens focuses on the factual past, Homo Deus focuses on a speculative future.  Kudos to Yuval Noah Harari for daring to undertake such a challenge.

The Lost Tribe of Coney Island - Claire Prentice

   2014; 418 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Full Title : The Lost Tribe of Coney Island: Headhunters, Luna Park, and the Man Who Pulled Off the Spectacle of the Century.  Genre : Non-Fiction; Anthropology;  Social Sciences; American History.  Laurels : New York Post “Must Read” – October 2014; Amazon Best Book of the Month (History) – October 2014; shortlisted for the 2015 Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    One of the most popular exhibits at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition was created by the Philippines.  1,300 Filipinos from a dozen tribes were brought over to the heartland of America, so that visitors to the fair could see firsthand what ‘savages’ populated the recently-acquired American territory.  The exhibit covered 40 acres and was a real crowd-pleaser.  Alas, expositions are short-lived, and pretty soon everyone returned to their home countries.

    Dr. Truman Hunt has spent time in the Philippines, and part of it was spent in the villages of one of the tribes there, the Igorrotes.  And a year after the St. Louis display, he can see an enormous opportunity to make big money showcasing these natives around the rest of the United States.

    There are plenty of Igorrote tribesmen willing to take part in the show, even though it means being separated from their families for a full year.  But the pay will be phenomenal - $15 per month, plus tips, plus any money made by selling their handmade trinkets to American tourists.  The show itself has “can’t miss” written all over it.  And Truman Hunt is a natural-born showman whose instincts for making money are a proven asset.

    What could possibly go wrong?

What’s To Like...

    For me, The Lost Tribe of Coney Island is a delightful trip back in time to the turn of the 20^th century.  Amusement parks were at the height of their popularity, and the best place to visit one of them was New York City's Coney Island, which at the time had three separate amusement parks trying to outdo each other with thrilling rides, bizarre freak shows, and glimpses of foreign places that were both exotic and faux.

    Truman Hunt and his band of Igorrotes reached Vancouver on April 18, 1905, and arrived in New York City a month later, where one of the Coney Island amusement parks, Luna Park, immediately and enthusiastically snapped them up gave them top billing.  The savages instantly become a smash hit.

    But don’t mistake this for a National Geographic article.  Claire Prentice makes it a character study of Truman, as he gradually morphs from a trusted father-figure for his showcased Igorrotes to a person who lies to them, steals their money, and reneges on his promise to send them back to their homeland after one year.  The title is a bit misleading: although the main part of the book deals with the summer on Coney Island, both Truman and the Igorrotes then go on an extended run from the law, culminating in a long, drawn-out trial.

    There are 32 chapters, each of which starts with a photograph of something or someplace from that era.  These are expandable, and stay sharp even when zoomed out.  I found them to be absolutely fascinating.  The footnotes are user-friendly, and there’s a Cast of Characters at the beginning, which turned out to be extremely useful.  Finally, the Afterword at the end of the book gives a “Whatever Happened To” for each character that Claire Prentice could trace.  Unsurprisingly, most of the Igorrotes fade into obscurity as soon as they get back to the Philippines.

    I liked the “feel” the author gave to experiencing America in 1905-06.  Some were warm and fuzzy, but it was also neat to see the difference between then and now.  For example, showing ‘savages’ in their native habitat was mesmerizing back then; it would be condemned nowadays.  Bigamy apparently was prevalent and despised back then. Today it wouldn’t even be worthy of  making it into a newspaper article.  And Southern justice back then was anything but that; and it is hopefully better than that now.

Excerpts...

    Coney Island was made of tall tales.  The birthplace of the hot dog and the roller coaster, it was the poor man’s paradise, offering sensation for a nickel.  Coney bent the rules of time and space.  Its currency was the huge and the tiny, the ten-ton woman and the ten-inch man.  Freaks and curiosities lived alongside detailed recreations of kingdoms from beyond the seas.  Part Victorian cabinet of curiosities, part compendium of global delights, at Coney the extraordinary was commonplace and the humdrum of everyday life could be forgotten.   (loc. 1181)

   Much was said in the corridors of power and written in the press about the manifold ways in which America could “civilize” the Igorrotes, but the tribespeople had their own ideas.  Before he left Coney Island, Chief Fomoaley shared his impressions with a journalist.

    “I have seen many wonders [in America], but we will not bring any of them home to Bontoc.  We do not want them there.  We have the great sun and moon to light us; what do we want of your little suns [electric lighting]?  The houses that fly like birds [trains and cars] would be no good to us, because we do not want to leave Bontoc.  When we go home there, we will stay, for it is the best place in the world.”.  (loc. 5673)

Kindle Details...

    The Lost Tribe of Coney Island sells for $4.99 at Amazon.  Claire Prentice has only one other e-book to offer on Amazon, titled Miracle at Coney Island.  It sells for $2.99.

Dressed alone in my complexion, with a palm-leaf fan, perchance,

I would rather be a savage, Than a magnate wearing “pants”.  (loc. 1851)

    The quibbles with The Lost Tribe of Coney Island are minuscule.  The author can get repetitive at times, such as when she again-and-again points out Truman’s greed or reminds the reader of the $15/month lost wages.  But it never got to where it became annoying.

    The ending is both sweet and sad, and a tad bit anticlimactic.  However, this is non-fiction, which means the writer is stuck with whatever the final outcome was.

    I was intrigued by the politics behind the whole “showcasing the savages” bit.  The US had just won the Spanish-American war, and had inherited the Philippines, whose inhabitants were thankful we had liberated them from Spain, and expected full independence forthwith.  The United States wanted to delay this as long as possible, and showing the American public what a bunch of uncivilized savages they were (they eat dogs, for Pete’s sake!), helped establish the self-serving (for the United States) tenet that “they just aren’t ready for independence yet”.

     Some may not like these political tangents in the story, but I think they have relevance for this country, particularly under our present regime.

    8½ Stars.  The whole “eating dog meat” issue resonated with me.  Even in 1905, such a concept was abhorrent, yet mesmerizing.  The same people who condemned it regularly paid to watch it.  The odd thing was, dog meat was a delicacy for the Igorrotes, usually only eaten during a special feast.  Yet now, in order to satisfy the American tourists, they were forced to partake of it on a daily basis.  The irony just drips.

Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari

   2015; 415 pages.  New Author? : Yes.    Genre : Non-Fiction; Anthropology; History; Civilization & Culture.  Laurels : National Library of China’s “Wenjin Book Award” for 2015.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    The title says it all.  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (let’s shorten it to “Sapiens” from here on in) is an ambitious attempt to present the entire history, anthropology, and culture of the human race from the day we distinguished ourselves as Homo Sapiens up through the present, and briefly into the near future.

    To do this in just a smidgen over 400 pages is no small undertaking, but Yuval Noah Harari gives us a remarkably concise yet detailed effort, managing to address a wide range of topics from the Neanderthals, “imagined orders”, how science and money worked hand-in-hand with imperialism, and the evolution from polytheism to monotheism.

    But be forewarned.  Prepare to have your core beliefs assailed on every front, with sacred cows given short shrift and everything you’ve taken for granted being open to question.

    And let’s see if, by then end of the book, your prediction for mankind’s future matches up well with Harari’s.

What’s To Like...

    Yuval Noah Harari divides Sapiens up into four chronological sections: The Cognitive Revolution (1% Kindle), where we learn to think differently.  The Agricultural Revolution (16%), where we stop being hunter-gatherers and start being farmers.  The Unification of Mankind (34%), where start banding into larger groups and getting into Imperialism.  And the Scientific Revolution (51%), where we start focusing on learning from other cultures in the hopes that it’ll further our aims.  As can be seen from the Kindle starting points, the sections are not equal in size, probably because we know a lot more about the last 5 centuries than we do about the time before we learned to farm.

    Each of those sections is further broken up into chapters, and frankly, this is the best e-book yet that I’ve found for easy jumping from one chapter to another via the table-of-contents.  Even the footnotes and links to bibliographical sources work slickly.  I thoroughly appreciated that.

    My favorite chapters were :

1.3.  A Day in the Life of Adam & Eve.  What it was like to be a hunter-gatherer.

2.2.  Building Pyramids.  Harari introduces the concept of “imagined orders”.

3.4.  The Law of Religion.  How polytheism evolved into monotheism, dualism, and other isms.

4.4.  The Wheels of Industry.  Consumerism, energy, and the industrialization of agriculture.

4.6.  And They Lived Happily Ever After.  Are we happier now than when we were living in caves?

    Your faves will probably be different from mine.

    The writing is a masterful blend of technical data and the author’s cultural and anthropological opinions.   I found it to be kind of a non-fiction version of Stephen Baxter’s masterpiece, Evolution (reviewed here).  It’s written in “English”, as opposed to “American”, but that wasn’t a distraction. 

    But the best part of Sapiens is the literary style.  Yuval Noah Harari challenges you to re-examine your belief-systems about history, your fellow humans, and society’s ethics.  I think this was deliberate, and among the groups he targets are devout theists, nationalists, bigots, capitalists, communists, Reaganomics adherents, humanists, carnivores, and liberals (in the European sense of the word).   Lots of reviewers seemed annoyed by this; I thought it was great.

    Sapiens is a relatively recent book (February, 2015), but there has been an incredible response to it.  At Amazon, as of this writing, 2,576 people has taken the time to write reviews.  Wowza!  The Goodreads stats are even more amazing: 43,385 ratings, 4,081 reviews, and an overall rating of 4.36.

    The book closes with a couple chapters on Harari’s predictions for the future of Homo Sapiens.  He makes no guarantees or firm prophecies, and apparently this serves as a segue for the book’s sequel.  See the “Kindle Details” section, below.

Excerpts...

    The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans.  It’s pointless to ask this power for victory in war, for health or for rain, because from its all-encompassing vantage point, it makes no difference whether a particular kingdom wins or loses, whether a particular city prospers or withers, whether a particular person recuperates or dies.  The Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on Fate, and Hindus built no temples to Atman.  (loc. 3321)

    The figures for 2002 are even more surprising.  Out of 57 million dead, only 172,000 people died in war and 569,000 died of violent crime (a total of 741,000 victims of human violence).  In contrast, 873,000 people committed suicide.  It turns out that in the year following the 9/11 attacks, despite all the talk of terrorism and war, the average person was more likely to kill himself than to be killed by a terrorist, a soldier or a drug dealer.  (loc. 5738)

Kindle Details...

    Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind sells for $16.99, which seems steep until you realize it’s a top-tier, recently-released, non-fiction book.  Yuval Noah Harari has only one other e-book available for the Kindle, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (the sequel to Sapiens), and it sells for $17.99.

 Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?  (loc. 6535)

    There are some quibbles.  First, and least-most, there were a bunch of kewl pictures, graphs, and maps, but they were small and didn’t enlarge when you clicked on them.  I guess there are still some advantages to reading a non-electronic book.

    Also, although the first two sections of Sapiens are fantastic, things did slow down a bit as we got into more modern times, and the writing changed from historical and archaeological to cultural and anthropological.  To some degree, this is unavoidable.  Discussing economics and corporate business strategy just isn’t as exciting as Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons coming in contact with each other.

    Finally, it has to admitted that Harari gets preachy at times, with personal opinions replacing scientific objectivity.  Among his pet subjects are Buddhism (he likes it), animal rights (PETA would be proud), and blind religious faith (he minces no words).

    But if you don’t mind being prodded into thinking about your beliefs, or about the many “imagined orders” that are drilled into our minds from an early age, you will find Sapiens to be a thought-provoking masterpiece that just might change the way you think about all sorts of things.  And very few books can do that.

    9 Stars.  Subtract 3 stars  if you're comfortably numb in your beliefs, and get insecure if/when someone or something disturbs them.  Add ½ star if you’re an ancient history fan, and the more ancient, the better.  That's me.