This review is going to be as much about comparing it to the new Netflix series as it is the book itself. You have been warned.
John Douglas was a FBI This review is going to be as much about comparing it to the new Netflix series as it is the book itself. You have been warned.
John Douglas was a FBI agent who spent most of his career working for its Behavioral Science Unit. Along with other agents Douglas interviewed a wide variety of violent offenders including such notorious figures as Charles Manson, Richard Speck, and David Berkowitz, and then he tried to apply what they learned to develop criminal profiles of active unsolved cases. If you’ve ever read the books of Thomas Harris like Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs or seen the movies or TV show based on them then you might be familiar with the character of Jack Crawford who was based on Douglas. Over the course of his career he worked on famous cases like the ‘80s Atlanta child murders and the Green River Strangler.
This is your basic true crime stuff written by a law enforcement professional. Douglas gives us his background as a fairly aimless youth who ended up as an FBI agent by pure chance and found that he had a taste and talent for digging into the history of criminals to see what made them tick. The book mixes his war stories of cases he worked along with a fair amount of bitching about the criminal justice system, and a little griping about he sometimes felt ill-treated by the FBI. He sprinkles his story with tidbits of his meetings with serial killers, and brags a fair amount about how accurate his profiles turned out to be for several cases he worked. In fact, you sometimes get the impression that the only reason that there are active killers who haven’t been caught was because someone failed to heed his advice.
In fairness, Douglas does spread a lot of credit around to his fellow agents and local cops he worked with over the years, and he goes out of his way to note that the agents of his department are essentially consultants who don’t catch criminals themselves. The guy did dedicate his professional life to studying the worst of the worst in the hopes of finding better ways to identify and catch them in the future. While that’s obviously a noble calling you do get a sense of smugness and self aggrandizement from him at times. You can tell that he gets a huge kick out of playing Sherlock Holmes and dropping predictions on people that turn out to be right, but there’s a notable absence of him ever being wrong about any of them other than minor discrepancies.
What’s most interesting about this book is how it was adapted into the a TV series. The first season of the show is about the early days of the Behavioral Science Unit when they were still coming up with the terminology and methodology they’d use to research and study violent offenders in prison. Douglas and fellow profiler Robert Ressler have been turned into fictionalized characters, but the killers and their crimes are historically accurate. Many of the scenes and stories are drawn from this book, but using created characters as the leads frees them up to add more drama as well as pick and choose their spots on the non-fiction bits.
So while Douglas certainly has had a colorful career and has many interesting things to say I found it a lot more satisfying as a TV show than a book.
Also, if you’re watching and liking Mindhunter be sure to check out Zodiac which producer/director David Fincher also did....more
I'd already read the issues collected here as part of the Infinity story which had all of the usual problems of a large scale comic crossover so I wasI'd already read the issues collected here as part of the Infinity story which had all of the usual problems of a large scale comic crossover so I wasn't thrilled about going through these again. However, I'm trying to read this Hickman run to finally get to Secret Wars, another large crossover event I'm sure I'll also be fairly unhappy about.
Wait.....Why am I comic book reader again?
Leaving that question aside for the moment, you can read my full thoughts on my Infinity review. While that was OK enough as far as these things go trying to read just these issues without the rest of it makes this collection by itself an unsatisfying mess....more
There’s a utopian idea in some sci-fi like Star Trek that humanity exploring space will bring out the best in us as a species. I think that anyone whoThere’s a utopian idea in some sci-fi like Star Trek that humanity exploring space will bring out the best in us as a species. I think that anyone who believes that hasn’t paid enough attention to what we are actually like. That’s one of the big reasons that I’m loving this series. It shows that people suck whether they’re on Earth, Mars, a moon, an asteroid, a spaceship, or exploring an alien construct built by an ancient protomolecule.
This third book in the Expanse series picks up shortly after the events of the last one. James Holden and his small crew of misfits continue to earn a living by hiring out the Rocinante as a transport or escort ship around the solar system. The governments of Earth, Mars, and the Belt have all sent ships out towards the mysterious giant ring that the protomolecule cobbled together that is now outside the orbit of Uranus. (Feel free to make your own Uranus jokes.) As you’d expect the three rival powers are spending as much time watching and scheming against each other as they are trying to figure out exactly what the ring is.
Holden wants nothing more to do with the protomolecule, especially since he’s having some freaky episodes that are apparently connected to it, so he tries to get them a job that will take them as far away from the ring as the Rocinante can get. Unfortunately, he’s got an enemy named Clarissa who thinks Holden is responsible for her family’s misfortune, and she manipulates events to get him near the ring where she can destroy his reputation and kill him.
As usual with this series we’ve got Holden and his crew as the on-going hero characters while some new people are introduced. Clarissa is a key figure, and her desire for revenge, extensive resources, and some illegal implants that give her a limited amount of berserker fury make her a very dangerous figure. Carlos ‘Bull’ c de Baca is the security chief on the main Outer Planets Alliance ship sent to the ring, but his loyalty to the leader of the OPA means that he’s been secretly given the responsibility of making sure that the ship’s idiot captain doesn’t screw things up. Pastor Anna Volovodov leaves her wife and child behind to go to the ring as part of an Earth delegation made up of religious figures and artists to try and figure out the significance of the ring to humanity from a spiritual standpoint.
As I noted before, one of the things I love about this series is how it sets up the idea that even with the terrifying and astounding things that have happened because of the protomolecule that the different factions of people scattered around the solar system still spend most of their time focused on squabbling with each other and looking for an angle to use the alien tech for their own purposes. That remains one of the key drivers to the plot, and it’s all too easy to believe that when confronted with something huge and scary that people would rather fight with each other than think about what it actually means.
Another aspect that I enjoy about Expanse is that it at least nods towards real science in that if you’re going to create a story in which spaceships can go fast enough to make travel within our solar system feasible, then that means you’ve got to account for the force of that on the human bodies in those ships. That’s built into these books with special gel couches and drugs having to be used to offset thrusts that cause high g-forces, and those forces get used to catastrophic effect in ways that are horrifyingly clever. When you’ve got people casually referring to how someone got turned into pasta sauce, you know things have gotten ugly.
The only off note is in how the book gets pretty black and white with the good guys vs. the bad guys. I’d complained before that the first two books had the heroes facing off against a shadowy conspiracy with no indications from their side what the plan was so it made the threat kind of vague and cartoonish. Here, we know that one big threat comes from Clarissa, and we get plenty on her motivations and her schemes. The other thing endangering everyone is the scared and stupid behavior of small minded people, and that’s also a relatable idea.
However, when things go sideways it seems like all the good guys line up on the same side immediately, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that they’re way is the right way even though with the information available the other side isn’t entirely out of line. It would have been nice to get a few more grey areas or some doubts creeping in rather than having almost everyone lining up along exact battle lines and sticking to that for the most part.
That was a minor point and didn’t detract much from the overall enjoyment I continue to get out of this ambitious space opera with it’s all too human characters....more
One big thing that stands out to me going back to this after reading all the available books in the series is that my complai**Reread update 5/17/17**
One big thing that stands out to me going back to this after reading all the available books in the series is that my complaint about distinct bad guys not getting introduced until very late in the stories was addressed. From this point on we almost always have a face of the threat through most of the action, and that’s an improvement that made a great series even better.
I also wanted to check this out again after seeing the second season of the TV series. The show has gotten so good that I’m now visualizing all the characters as the actors who play them while reading. There’s also an interesting dynamic in that that the two-headed writer who makes up the James SA Corey name also works on the show, and since they have the advantage of knowing what’s going to happen for the next several books it’s able to shade in lot of character nuance and motivations that were just a little thin and simplistic in the early going.
So now I’m counting the days until the new book publishes and the next season premieres.
(Original review.) Essentially this is a mix of Game of Thrones and Firefly without all the rape and child burning and people talking like they’re in a western movie.
Humanity has expanded throughout our solar system, colonizing Mars and various moons and asteroids. Since people are always gonna be people, and will therefore suck, political tensions are high between Earth, Mars, and the Belters, and the events of the first book in the series have the threat of war seeming higher than ever. And just like in Westeros everyone is so consumed with their petty scheming and power plays that they’re ignoring the much larger threat that is growing under their noses. So it falls to a crew of misfits running their own ship for profit to step in when the shit hits the air recyclers.
This on-going space opera has sucked me in to its world...er… solar system completely with its spaceships, action, politics, and weird sci-fi elements mixed with just enough humor and emotional weight to give it some heft beyond its pew!-pew! appeal. The characters are well drawn even if they aren’t particularly deep, and their motivations are plainly spelled out in their dialogue. So this is all text, no subtext, but it is entertaining. I particularly liked the new character of Chrisjen Avasarala, a grandmother and UN official from Earth whose little old lady appearance is subverted by her foul mouth and political cunning.
However, the series so far has suffered a bit from not giving us any perspective from the vast conspiracy that is causing so much of the trouble. Granted, some of this has been played as a mystery to solve, but for two books now we’ve gotten no sense of who the bad guys are or what they're planning other than what’s been figured out by the heroes. Both books have finally revealed a kind of mid-level mastermind character near the end, and in both cases these have been full on mustache twirling villains so the threat they pose seems kind of vague and cartoonish.
Still, this one ends on a helluva twist that has me itching to roll right into the next one, and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough when I was in the midst of this. I’ll be happily returning to the Expanse series as soon as possible.
Plus, this trailer for the show coming to SyFy based on the series has got me even more excited....more
I’ve had a long-standing policy that I will not read an unfinished sci-fi/fantasy series because I spent ovI got nobody to blame but myself for this….
I’ve had a long-standing policy that I will not read an unfinished sci-fi/fantasy series because I spent over a decade waiting for a certain master of horror to get off his ass and finish what he started. Plus, I have no urge to join the ranks of fans of other fantasy writers who seem to spend more time coming up with excuses and side projects rather than producing new books to finish their on-going series.
Ignorance isn’t a good defense, but it’s all I can claim. I picked this up on a whim after hearing it mentioned on the Incomparable podcast. I was a little leery when I saw it was almost 600 pages, but I didn’t bother looking into exactly what I had gotten myself into until I started the book That’s when I freaked the hell out:
“9 novels?!? 9 goddamn novels and they’re all this long? Holy shit! Only 5 have been released? It’s an unfinished series?? IT’S AN UNFINISHED SERIES! Oh, sweet jebus what have I done? And holy shit snacks they’ve been releasing off-shoot novels! ARGGHHH!! This is a nightmare…. OK, calm down. Let’s see, there’s actually two guys writing it under one pen name. Two guys can keep each other focused and moving forward. They’ve been releasing books like clockwork and have a schedule to bring it home. That’s good news. And these off-shoots are Kindle shorts so it looks like they’re really just true extras and not them filling their pockets while dawdling on the main series. Oh, and the Syfy network is doing a TV series based on it? That could be cool. Maybe this isn’t so bad after all. Wait, one of the authors also works as an assistant to….Uh oh. Well, maybe he’s learned what NOT to do when you’re working on a series…Or maybe I‘ll end up not liking it very much and can just stop here.”
No such luck. Damn it. I’m a sucker for the kind of sci-fi where even though they’re in space the characters have dirt under their nails and skinned knuckles rather than lounging around in pristine uniforms on ships that look like corporate cube farms. I’m also much more of a believer in the idea that if humanity does make it to other worlds that we’ll be dragging all our collective baggage out there with us rather than being explorers from a utopian society. Plus, I’m a big mystery fan and one of the main characters is a burned out space detective with a cynical outlook. And I also like (view spoiler)[zombie stories. So when it’s alien vomit zombies? (hide spoiler)] Oh, yeah. I’m in.
I particularly liked the push/pull between the two main characters. Holden is an idealist who thinks that people will make good collective choices as long as they’re told the truth, and that contrasts well with Miller’s bleak outlook that people are stupid sheep. Put those two guys in a society built out among our solar system’s asteroid belt that is about to go to war with Earth and Mars as they try to unravel the conspiracy behind it, and you’ve got yourself a pretty damn compelling sci-fi story.
I still kinda feel like a rube though….
Update 2/7/17 - You can tell from the original review I posted that I had a lot of misgivings about starting an unfinished series back when I first read this. A few years later after re-reading it I'm happy to report that it all worked out for the best. The authors have stuck to their schedule and delivered a book a year since they started, and the entires series has become one of my favorite sci-fi things ever. I also got a bonus in a pretty damn good TV series based on the show since then which just started it's second season. So this gamble has paid off pretty well so far. ...more
Anybody who ever served on a school board and had to listen to people complain about the curriculum or the budget or what the cafeteria served could pAnybody who ever served on a school board and had to listen to people complain about the curriculum or the budget or what the cafeteria served could probably relate to this book in which a small town board votes to start murdering people. That’s one way to keep parents from whining about their kid’s grade point average….
Minnesota state cop Virgil Flowers has come to a rural community at the request of his old fishing buddy Johnson Johnson to look into someone who has been stealing dogs to sell to research labs. As he tries to track down the missing pooches a local newspaper reporter is murdered, and Virgil finds clues that it’s linked to a massive embezzlement scheme by the local school board. Virgil’s investigation riles the board and soon more bodies are dropping as they attempt to cover up their scam.
This is a prime example of what Sandford does well. He cooks up an interesting criminal scheme, lets us see what the bad guys are up too, introduces one of his main characters, and then the game begins. While the stakes are deadly serious there’s also plenty of humor along the way with cop thugs Shrake and Jenkins making an appearance to back Virgil up and give him a lot of grief in the process.
As a longtime fan of the Lucas Davenport series I continue to appreciate the way that Sandford contrasts Virgil as being the more laid back and the softer of the two who is more concerned with right and wrong. Yet Virgil also has a sly way of flouting the rules that infuriates many which is why he is generally referred to as ‘that fuckin’ Flowers’, and he’s more than capable of pulling some sneaky moves to get things rolling his way.
The school board scheme is a great hook to hang a story like this on, and Sandford does a nice job of laying out how a small town criminal conspiracy like that would work as well as the carnage that could happen once things start going sideways. The subplot with the missing dogs is also a good one with Virgil having to try and keep angry owners from going vigilante.
The more books Sandford puts out, the more impressed I am at his ability to deliver entertaining thrillers that keep the elements fans like while still providing enough fresh ideas to prevent them from becoming formulaic and stale.
The only thing better than a new John Sandford book is a FREE John Sandford book. Thanks Goodreads giveaways!
A serial killer has been using an old welThe only thing better than a new John Sandford book is a FREE John Sandford book. Thanks Goodreads giveaways!
A serial killer has been using an old well in a remote field to dump the bodies of women he has abducted over the years, and when it’s discovered the police find body parts from over 20 corpses* that have turned into what one cop describes as ‘bean soup’. The media hysteria is instant and rabid over what they dub The Black Hole Murders so the political pressure being put on the police and politicians is enormous. As usual when Minnesota cops have a crime that will get people fired they put in a call to their head rat catcher, Lucas Davenport. With most of his usual crew off on various assignments of their own Lucas works a lot with a smart but abrasive female deputy from the county where the bodies were found.
The Prey series has done its fair share of serial killer plots, but my favorites tend to be the ones where the villains had more interesting motives than just being psychotic. The recent books had gotten away from that maniac murderer concept so I was a little concerned at the start of this when it seemed like Sandford was just doing an old familiar plot but turning the dial up to 11 by throwing an overwhelming amount of bodies at the reader.
However, I should have had more faith because the story takes several unexpected turns and ends up being one where Lucas is at his most emotionally involved. While I’ve always liked the way that Davenport has mostly been portrayed as a guy doing a job he loves rather than the stereotypical burned out cop with his stable home life and realistic perspective about the limits of what he can do there can be an impression that he’s just gliding over the carnage without it really impacting him. Events here take a turn that has him fully engaged in a way we haven’t seen in a while other than threats to his family, and that’s what just kept this from feeling like another rematch of Lucas Vs. The Serial Killer.
As with most of the Davenport books the killer is introduced early, and the tension comes from watching the cat-and-mouse game between him and Lucas from both perspectives although Sandford holds back a few items to keep the reader guessing. Sandford also remains one of the best I’ve ever read at creating a sense of momentum at times that makes me want to pace as I read because I can barely stay in my chair.
It also seems like change is on the horizon for Lucas. There are several references that when the Minnesota governor leaves office that Lucas will be out too, and a few other things that could be hints that Lucas’s time with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension may be coming to an end. Sandford has talked about ending the series in the near future although his web site also states that he may keep doing Davenport but end the Prey naming format. He may be 70 years old, but with the quality remaining this high I’d like to see him keep going for another 10 or 20 years.
* Edited because I originally said there were 20 corpses and there aren't actually 20 full corpses in the well. 8/10/14
Minnesota state investigator Virgil Flowers is working diligently on a case involving Florence ‘Ma’ Nobles and her sons selling counterfeit antique luMinnesota state investigator Virgil Flowers is working diligently on a case involving Florence ‘Ma’ Nobles and her sons selling counterfeit antique lumber. Of course part of the reason that Virgil is working so hard is that Ma is very attractive and flirting shamelessly with him. So when a call comes in from his boss Lucas Davenport with another assignment Virgil is more than a little miffed.
Davenport tells him that it's no big deal. A Lutheran minister named Elijah Jones who is dying of cancer stole an ancient inscribed stone called a stele from an archaeological dig in Israel and smuggled it home to Minnesota. The Israelis want it back and have dispatched an antiquities expert to makes sure that happens. Virgil just has to play tour guide, pick up the terminally ill minister, and locate the stele. Davenport assures Flowers that he’ll back on his counterfeit lumber case in to time at all.
Virgil really should know by now that Davenport lies…
Jones plans to auction the stele off to the highest bidder to get the money needed to care for his wife suffering from Alzheimer’s after he dies, and it turns out the old man is pretty wily. The stele’s inscription has historic implications that could be very damaging to Israel so Hezbollah has sent a representative to try and obtain it for propaganda purposes. A couple of tough Turks with fearsome reputations also show up. Two spotlight hungry media whores who pretend to be scholars also want in on the action, and the Israelis have a couple of dirty tricks at the ready. Even Ma Nobles gets mixed up in hunt for the stele, much to Virgil’s consternation.
Soon there’s more allegiances declared and alliances broken than on a season of Game of Thrones, and an increasingly frustrated Virgil can’t seem to make any of these double crossing idiots understand that somebody’s gonna get killed if this foolishness doesn’t stop.
Sandford has a lot of interests other than writing and one of the them is archaeology. Per his bio on his web page he has funded and participated in a large dig in Israel since the late ‘90s so it’s a little surprising that this is the first one of his books to feature an archaeological angle to it. Despite the international flavor with various groups and countries interested in the stele this still has the same grounded style that you usually get in a Sandford novel. There are some great bits late in the book with Virgil interacting with the shadowy figures of some unnamed American security agency, but Flowers remains the kind of guy far more interested in reading a fishing magazine than worrying about international intrigue and national security.
There’s an almost playful attitude in this one, and while the story is treated seriously it wouldn’t have taken much to turn this into an outright farce, kind of like one of Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder novels. Sandford’s always had a sense of humor, but this is the first one of his books where he almost seems to make light of the stakes involved. There also isn’t much of the usual momentum and tension you get in a Lucas Davenport or Virgil Flowers novel. This isn’t a bad thing since it seems like a bit of departure from the others, and with this many books in play I like that Sandford doesn’t feel obligated to stick to the formula that has worked so well for him in the past.
It isn’t my favorite Sandford novel but it’s a fun one....more
You ever make a meal comprised only of a bunch of leftovers that don’t really match? That’s how you end up eating half a Salisbury steak with the sweeYou ever make a meal comprised only of a bunch of leftovers that don’t really match? That’s how you end up eating half a Salisbury steak with the sweet-n-sour chicken from last night’s take-out. Stephen King loves doing that only it’s with books instead of food.
Here we have a hunk of Christine served up with stray bits from The Tommyknockers, and it’s all done using one of his preferred methods of having a character tell a long rambling story. Uncle Stevie then seasons it up with a lot of wistful thoughts on days gone by. Call it King Casserole Surprise.
The story here is told to the teenage son of a Pennsylvania State Police Trooper who was killed in the line of duty, and it’s about a strange car that his father impounded twenty years before. The car was abandoned at a gas station and at first glance was a 1954 Buick 8 Roadmaster in pristine condition, but closer examination shows a lot of odd things that indicate the car isn’t a car at all. After one of their troopers disappears they all believe that the Buick is somehow responsible, and they decide to keep the car stashed in a shed at their headquarters. Supposedly it’s to protect the public, but there’s also a healthy amount of curiosity that turns into near obsession on the part of some of the troopers including the dead boy’s father who spends the next two decades trying to unravel the secret of the Buick.
This is not one of King’s best books, and one of the biggest problems is that he tries to have it both ways. A large point of the story is supposed to be that there are some mysteries that we’ll just never solve, and that we have to make peace with that when we run across it. Which is fine, but if you’re going to play it that way then the mystery of the Buick needs to really be unknowable. What King does instead is to beat us over the head with that theme of acceptance, but then he pretty much goes ahead and tells us what the car is anyhow.
Plus, the weird things the Buick does get fairly predictable. Yeah, I know, that’s part of the point. The story makes it clear that the car and it’s occasional crazy happening became just part of the routine for everyone who knew it was back there, but then King has to have it unleash unspeakable horrors a couple of times which make it hard to believe that anyone could just go to work every day knowing it was back there instead of just being an oddity they deal with once in a while. The cops also seem to take the disappearance of one of their own fairly lightly.
While this comes in at a relatively tight 350 pages for a later work by Uncle Stevie it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough story here to justify it. As it stands it would have made a better short story or novella, but at this length it feels like there’s both too much and not enough at the same time.
Despite all my misgivings I kinda like this one, but it’s for mainly personal reasons. My mother worked as a dispatcher for the sheriff’s department of our rural Kansas county when I was growing up, and their office was just a block away from my grandmother’s house who would watch us when the folks were working. I spent a lot of time hanging around there, and this book, which details the humdrum everyday stuff that happens around any cop shop, reminds me of those times when I’d sit in their kitchen listening to the chatter of the guys in the office and on the radio. So it’s pure nostalgia that gets me to boost this from two stars to three. I make no apologies for that....more
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously Treasure of the Rubbermaids 24: Rocket Men
The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.
If you, a 21st century person, ever sees one of the old Mercury space capsules in a museum you’ll probably be amazed at how small and primitive it seems. (Whatever device you’re reading this on right now has more computing power than all of NASA had at the time.) It looks more like a toy, something that a kid might have in his backyard to play rocket ship, rather than a vehicle that actually took a man into space. Your next thought might be, “What kind of fool would have volunteered to strap himself into that on top of a giant cylinder filled with highly combustible fuel and ride it out of the atmosphere?”
To understand that you can read The Right Stuff.
This isn’t some dry account of the early days of America’s space program filled with dates and scientific facts. In fact, if that’s the kind of history you’re looking for then you’d probably find this disappointing. What Tom Wolfe did here is try to convey the mindset of an America panicked by suddenly finding itself behind the Soviet Union in the space race, and how in its desperation it turned seven pilots chosen to be the first astronauts into national heroes. Those men would find themselves in a media spotlight where the image they presented was often more important than their actual skills in the cockpit.
Wolfe starts by explaining what the ‘right stuff’ is by taking us back to late ‘40s when a hotshot test pilot named Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. The fact that Yeager did this with broken ribs and used a length of sawed-off broom handle as a lever to close the hatch on his X-1 rocket plane because he was in too much pain to lean over made it that much more impressive. What adds to his legend is that he got the injury in a drunken horse riding accident the night before and hid it from his superiors for fear they’d replace him on the flight. That’s the kind of thing that shows that Yeager had the right stuff practically dripping out of his pores and put him at the top of the test pilot pyramid.
Yet when the Soviets launched Sputnik and America scrambled to catch up Yeager wasn’t seriously considered as an astronaut candidate, and to many of the other test pilots who were setting speed records and pushing the boundary of space anyhow in their rocket propelled aircraft it was only a matter of time until they'd be flying into space anyhow. To them the Mercury program was a publicity stunt in which the astronauts would only be sealed in a can and shot into space without really flying the ship at all. Hell, it was so easy that a monkey could do it, and a couple actually did.
Yet after the media declared the Mercury 7 as the best and bravest that America had to offer everyone started forgetting about the test pilots and put all the resources and attention on the astronauts. The seven men themselves would start pushing back for changes that gave them more control of their spacecraft, and while they may have started out as a little more than guinea pigs they used their popularity to get more power and control within the fledgling NASA. This led to the egghead scientists taking a backseat while a more military mindset of operational performance became the yardstick that determined a mission’s success. More importantly to them, it would show the world that they really did have the right stuff.
This is all written more as a novel than a history. For example, rather than tell us what was happening on the ground during flights Wolfe sticks to what was going through the astronaut’s head at the time so that something like John Glenn finding out that his heat shield may have been loose comes to us as a realization that he had rather than giving us the full picture of what was going on. It also delves into the personal lives of the astronauts where they and their wives would try to present an All-American image even as some of the men were taking full advantage of the new celebrity they had attained.
It’s also frequently very funny. There’s a great sequence near the beginning about how if you find yourself on an airline flight with a problem and the captain on the intercom explains how there is nothing to worry about in a calm southern drawl it’s a direct result of generations of pilots imitating Chuck Yeager’s accent over the radio to mimic his understated sense of calm.
As a space geek and historical stickler I do find it lacking at a couple of points. Wolfe doesn’t give you any details about what happened to these men later so that you wouldn’t know something like Alan Shepherd would eventually be one of the men who walks on the moon after being grounded with an inner ear problem after his first flight. I also think he also does a disservice to Gus Grissom whose mission nearly ended in disaster after splashdown when his capsule door unexpectedly blew open. Grissom nearly drowned at the capsule was lost at sea. (It was recovered almost 40 years later. It has been restored and can be seen at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS.)
Wolfe uses Grissom’s heart rate which was higher than any other astronauts during their mission to strongly hint that he was in a state of near panic during his flight, and that he probably did blow the hatch despite his claims that he had done nothing wrong. In other words Grissom didn’t really have the right stuff after all according to Wolfe. It’s still unclear as to why the hatch did blow, but even back then on a subsequent mission Wally Schirra had deliberately blown his own hatch as a test and showed that the force required to do it left visible bruises on his hand while Grissom had no marks at all. I’ve also read other accounts and seen various documentaries in which other astronauts and NASA officials adamantly claim that it must have been a technical failure, not anything that Grissom did wrong. Wolfe omits all of this to leave a reader with a very strong impression that Grissom ‘screwed the pooch’. This seems especially unfair in that Grissom wasn’t alive to defend himself when the book came out since he had died in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire which also killed two other astronauts. (It’s a bitter irony that they couldn’t get out because the hatch of that spacecraft was badly designed so that it couldn’t be opened when the fire occurred.)
Despite some flaws, it’s still a fantastic read that really digs into the idea of how the macho code of these men was sometimes a crippling burden, it was also maybe exactly what was needed to get a bunch of guys to willingly climb into rockets. I also highly recommend the movie adaptation although it’s more of an emotional story than historically accurate....more
Sometimes it seems like every Tom, Phillip K. Dick, and Harry Turtledove wrote books that asked what would have happened if Hitler won the war.
It’s 1Sometimes it seems like every Tom, Phillip K. Dick, and Harry Turtledove wrote books that asked what would have happened if Hitler won the war.
It’s 1964 and Germany is preparing to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday. Police detective Xavier March is called in when a body is pulled out of a river, and he soon discovers that the dead man was a prominent member of the Nazi party. March’s investigation eventually leads him to secrets going back to the war that his government is desperate to keep buried.
So yes, this is another book about the most asked question in alternate history: What if the Nazis won World War II? But by framing this as mystery thriller Robert Harris has taken a different approach to it by using March as tour guide of a victorious Germany. We eventually have the bigger picture of what the rest of the world is like, and there are some interesting elements like the US did fight and defeat Japan yet Europe is Nazi controlled so that America and Germany have had an extended Cold War.
While the details of the world are well done this is really more of a story about what life would be like in this society. It’s all well-ordered prosperity on the surface, but the police state nature of it all lurks just below the surface with the average citizen’s paranoia encouraged by the government to keep them fearful and obedient.
March is an interesting character in this as a man who did his part in the war on board a U-boat, but he doesn’t much like the SS uniform he wears now. He reminded me a lot of the series by Martin Cruz Smith about Russian detective Arkady Renko. Like Renko, March is a basically good man who knows he’s working for a bad system, but he’s too cynical to think of trying to change it. Instead he just tries to find what justice he can even as he still has too much integrity to entirely go along with the program which is something that the true believers can sense and hate.
This all sounds like a 4 or 5 star book, especially in the capable hands of Robert Harris, but unfortunately it’s one of those where I liked the idea of it more than the actual finished product. This alternate world is intriguing and well thought out, and March is an interesting lead character, but the actual plot just seems kind of flat and obvious. You can tell much of what’s coming for a good long while so there’s not much suspense or shock to it....more
Every time I read this book I end up humming Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl the entire time so it’s a relief to finish it and put a stop to that particulaEvery time I read this book I end up humming Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl the entire time so it’s a relief to finish it and put a stop to that particular ear worm.
Travis McGee’s best buddy Meyer has loaned his houseboat to his niece and her new husband for their honeymoon while he’s away at a conference. Unfortunately, somebody blows up the boat as they’re going out on a fishing trip and all aboard are killed. (Providing more evidence for my theory that nothing good ever happens on a boat.) A South American terrorist group claims responsibility for the bombing, but that makes no sense to Meyer who asks Travis to help him find whoever was responsible.
McGee starts poking around and comes across evidence that the new hubby wasn’t on the boat after all. Pulling on that thread puts them on the trail of a mystery man with a chilling pattern of seduction and murder for profit. The other wrinkle here is that Meyer is recovering from a very bad moment in a previous book so catching his niece’s killer is a way to regain his nerve.
As usual when I reread one of these John D. MacDonald novels I find a lot I liked with some very good insights of what society was becoming mixed with some incredibly dated sexist attitudes. Travis and Meyer make for a good partnership of detective/con men, and a lot of good stuff comes from them trying to backtrack someone just based on some casual anecdotes he told them over dinner one night. MacDonald also uses McGee to muse on where the world is headed and really hit the nail on the head regarding some predictions about the growing computer age of the early ‘80s.
Yet Travis still has to give a mostly platonic female friend a pat on the butt in appreciation of a job well done. In fairness, the books got better in terms of this from their start in the ‘60s, and a big subplot here is that Travis is having relationship troubles with his current lady that are dealt with in a surprisingly adult fashion that gives equal time to her point of view.
The overall improvement of McGee’s relationships with women, and the personal angle of Meyer’s involvement make this one a better than average book in the series....more
I have to write this review without rhythm so that it won’t attract a worm.
In the distant future Arrakis is a hellhole desert planet where anyone who I have to write this review without rhythm so that it won’t attract a worm.
In the distant future Arrakis is a hellhole desert planet where anyone who doesn’t die of thirst will probably be eaten by one of the giant sandworms. It’s also the only place where the precious spice melange can be found so it’s incredibly valuable, and the honorable Duke Leto Atreides has been ordered by the Padishah Emperor to take over control of Arrakis from his mortal enemies, the House Harkonnen. While this seems like a great offer on the surface the Duke and his people realize that it’s actually a cunning trap being set by the Emperor and Baron Harkonnen.
The only hope seems to be allying with the local populace called Fremen whose harsh environment has led them to become an incredibly tough and disciplined people, but they have their own vision of what Arrakis should be. They also have a prophecy about the coming of a messiah figure who will lead them to freedom, and the Duke’s son Paul looks like he may be exactly who they’ve been waiting for.
This is classic sci-fi that really deserves the label. What Frank Herbert accomplished in one novel is stunning because he built a fascinatingly detailed universe in which the politics, religion, economics, espionage, and military strategy are all equally important. He then blended these more grounded concepts with bigger sci-fi ideas like being able to use spice to see through space-time, and the scope of that encompasses trying to pick the proper path through various potential timelines as well as free will vs. fate.
I think one of the factors that helps this story stay timeless is that so much of it is based on what humanity becomes vs. trying to predict what futuristic technology would be like. This is a society that once had a war with machines and has since rejected any type of computers so people have developed to fill the gap with the help of the spice. The Mentats are trained to use data to predict outcomes. The Navigators of the Guild have used so much of the spice to help them move through space that they’re mutating. The all female Bene Gesserit have developed a variety of skills to place their members alongside positions of power to help advance their breeding scheme that spans generations. Herbert also cleverly came up with an excuse that explains why knives and hand-to-hand combat are so important with the idea of the personal body shields.
So even though we still got a good sci-fi’s novel worth of cool gadgets the emphasis is on what the people can do and how that’s developed over a long period of time. It also adds a lot of depth to the political dimensions because all of these groups have different agendas that cause them all to mistrust each other, but because they all fill these various roles none can exist without the others.
There are also parallels to our world that are still in play because the idea of a desert people caught up in the power struggles of various outsiders because of their valuable natural resource is an obvious allegory to the Middle East that still works today. Plus, the classic film Lawrence of Arabia came out a few years before Herbert published this, and you have to think that it had some influence on him because there are elements of the story that seem very much inspired by it.
While the whole concept of a Chosen One has gotten a bit worn over time that’s not Herbert’s fault, and this is still a fantastic sci-fi story with big ideas that also works as space opera as well as being an epic adventure story....more
William Halleck is a successful lawyer living in upper middle class splendor in a Connecticut suburb wAnd I thought the Atkins Diet sounded unhealthy…
William Halleck is a successful lawyer living in upper middle class splendor in a Connecticut suburb with his wife and daughter, and his biggest problem is that he’s overweight. His perfect life is upset when he accidently ran over an old Gypsy woman when he was *ahem* distracted behind the wheel. Since Billy is one of the solid taxpayers who plays golf with all the right people the whole mess is quickly tidied up in court without him getting so much as a ticket. However, another old Gypsy puts a whammy on him and suddenly Billy can’t keep weight on no matter how much he eats. As he becomes a shadow of his former self Billy sets out on a desperate quest to track down the Gypsy and try to convince him to lift the curse of growing thinner.
This was the last of the novels Stephen King released under the pen name of Richard Bachman before his cover was blown shortly after its publication. (In fact, he gets cute by having a couple of characters describe the situation as sounding like a King novel.) As with the other Bachman books it seems like Uncle Stevie ran leaner and meaner in this one. He keeps the story focused tightly on its key concept, but he’s also delivering some nice subtext about American culture. We’ve got a nicely ironic curse of a man’s thoughtless greedy consumption being turned back on him as well as exploring the hypocritical way that the decent folk of New England will have their fun with the Gypsies and then run them out of town.
One of the strongest points here is in Halleck as a character. Billy seems like a decent guy who genuinely feels guilty about the death he inadvertently caused, and he’s got the brains and courage to face up to the bizarre situation and act to save himself. However, he also went along with sweeping the whole mess under the rug, and he’s willing to turn to a dangerous friend when he’s really in trouble. So there’s a nice mix in him that he’s both somewhat willing to take responsibility even as he trying to wriggle out of the consequences of it.
It’s a very solid piece of horror fiction that makes me wish that King would have gotten to do more Bachman books before the secret leaked out. He has published others under the name, but none were ever quite as good as the early ones....more
He starts off well enough as a nice guy with a talent for teaching and is in the early stages of what looks to beJohnny Smith is one bad-luck bastard.
He starts off well enough as a nice guy with a talent for teaching and is in the early stages of what looks to be a very promising relationship with Sarah. However, a car accident leaves Johnny in a coma which nobody thinks he’ll recover from. Miraculously, he wakes up 4 years later, but he finds that Sarah has married someone else, his mother has turned into a religious lunatic, he’s got a long and painful rehab to endure, and he faces a mountain of debt from his hospital bills. Oh, and he now has psychic ability to learn details about a person by touching them or personal objects as well as sometimes seeing their futures. This might seem like a gift, but as Johnny quickly learns it’s really a curse that eventually puts him on a collision course with a dangerous politician named Greg Stillson.
I’ve always thought this was one of King’s better books but hadn’t read it for years. A new audio version with James Franco narrating and doing a pretty good job of it got me motivated, and I’m pleased to find that it mostly lives up to my memory of it.
The elephant in the room on this one is that even though it was published in 1979 the Stillson plot is about a populist demagogue who manages to rise in politics despite being a crazy and corrupt piece of shit just because he has talent for making rubes think that he’s a maverick who tells it like it is even as they willfully ignore the obvious warning signs. So it’d be easy to say that King is a prophet these days. Yeah, he hit the mark with that one, but on the other hand there’s plenty of writers who have done stories about shady politicians.
What I found more interesting here is what King did with Johnny’s mother, Vera. She starts out as someone with strong fundamental religious beliefs, but Johnny’s accident sends her over the high side and into the realm where she starts believing tabloid stories about Jesus living underground at the South Pole. She’s completely immune to facts and logic, and she’d rather rely on prayer than medication to handle her high blood pressure.
It’s fascinating to read a character like this in the ‘70s setting where tabloids and poorly printed tracts are how Vera gets her crackpot theories, and how even then she uses them to create her own view of the world because reality doesn’t suit her. Fast forward to the 21st century where some people pick their news web sites based on how it conforms to what they want to believe as they spread rumors on Facebook about child sex rings in the basement of pizza restaurants that don’t even have a basement, and you realize that King had tapped into something that was on the rise even then.
Leaving aside the eerie similarities to America today, what sets this apart from his other novels is the way that King focused on John Smith and made his story a genuine tragedy. Johnny just wanting to try and resume some kind of normal life, but unable to stop himself from using his power to help people and put himself in a media spotlight is incredibly compelling.
Uncle Stevie takes his sweet time with this so that it comes across as more a slow burn, and it’s not really a horror novel although it can be creepy at times. You can see where the bigger plot involving Johnny and Stillson is headed for a good long while although King still makes the journey there worth the trip, and Johnny is one of his characters who haunts me the most....more
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