M. C. Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener (1994)

     M. C. Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener (1994) Agatha returns to Carsley (somewhere in the Cotswolds), only to find that Mary Fortune has moved in on her turf: her neighbour James Lacey and Mary are an item. Then there are some nasty incidents involving gardens, and on the day of the horticultural show Mary Fortune is found hanging upside down in her conservatory, her head buried in a flowerpot, and of course quite dead. Agatha’s old friend Det. Insp. Bill Wong is on the case, as are Agatha and James, and the resolution suits the mood of the story: dotty old Bernard done it, on account of Mary poisoned his fish (and insulted his 80-year-old manhood, to boot.) Mary is a satisfying victim – she deserved it, after all – and Agatha is a nice 50-something amateur ‘tec with wistful thoughts of romantic love. Well done, a nice three hours’ read. Beaton is the author of the Hamish Macbeth series, which I shall sample next. ** (2002)

Paul Mallery. Design Handbook of Model Railroads. (1979)

     Paul Mallery. Design Handbook of Model Railroads. (1979) This 2nd printing (1983) shows the private car Harold Carstens on John Allen’s Gorre and Daphetid. Very nice photo, and the best part of the book. Mallery writes a wooden and “technical” style, using the passive voice far too much. The diagrams are very small and badly drawn, making them hard to read. The technical terms aren’t explained, the cross references to diagrams and pictures in other chapters interrupt the flow of information, the paragraph sub-titles and sub-section markings are inconsistent, and there are few too many typos. The quality of the information is good to excellent, but the presentation and the explanations are abysmal or missing. Mallery needs a good editor, or better yet a ghost who can rewrite his book. John Armstrong did the whole thing better in Designing Model Railroads for Prototype Operation, and anyone familiar with his work will find Mallery’s book a distant second-rate version of that book. * (2002)

Mary Higgins Clark presents The Plot Thickens (1997)

     Mary Higgins Clark presents The Plot Thickens (1997) The common motif is a thick fog, a thick steak, and a thick book; 11 writers play with this motif in entertaining, and mostly forgettable, stories. Their quality ranges from * to ***, and I spent a couple pleasant hours all told reading these confections. (2002)

Edward O. Wilson The Future of Life (2002)

     

Edward O. Wilson The Future of Life (2002) Humankind has become the dominant species on Earth in the only sense it really matters: we have a greater effect on the global ecosystems than any other species, and are almost certainly affecting the climate itself. [We are.] In our not so remote past, we could do at most local damage; and in those places where we had practised agriculture for millennia, we had created new stable ecosystems. But now that has changed; and there is a very real risk that ecosystems will change so much that they cannot sustain human life. We have reached a bottle neck, and although Wilson is hopeful that we will pass through it, the Earth will be changed forever.
      Why bother with efforts to sustain at least samples of old ecosystems? Why bother preserving wilderness? Wilson makes the usual economic arguments, and extends them, For example, we need the biodiversity of wilderness because we don’t know what pharmaceutical treasures are hidden there. We need wilderness because such ecosystems are carbon sinks,  and so help sustain human activities such as agriculture and fossil fuel burning. And so on.
     These arguments are enough to at least catch the attention of the money grubbers, but Wilson extends the argument. He claims a deep spiritual value for the natural world. We need it, he says, because we are adapted to it by thousands of generations of evolution. We even create versions of our putative original home, the sub-tropical savannas, in our gardens and parks, especially in temperate climates, whose natural ecosystem is the forest, not the savanna. Even our agricultural landscapes support Wilson’s thesis: where large scale agri-industry hasn’t converted large tracts of land to mono-cultured fields of wheat, the patchwork of fields and copses, of pastures and woodland, tends to reproduce the look of a savanna. And our enduring fascination with Africa also testifies, since we want to see documentaries about the open plains, not the rain forest. When you think about it, the universal human habit of making pleasure gardens of some sort is rather odd. Unlike agriculture and gardening for food, it has no practical value whatever. So I agree with Wilson that nature in and of itself sustains the human spirit. It would be a crime against our descendants to destroy wilderness and jungle.
      I am less certain that Wilson has good reasons for his hopefulness. He cites mostly government and non-government efforts to set aside and manage wilderness areas, to provide economic alternatives to clear cutting of rain forest, and so on. But although he spends a large chunk of one chapter describing the huge ecological footprint of the Western lifestyle, he doesn’t touch on what in my opinion is essential: developing an ethic that opposes continued economic growth, and one that in the short term (i.e., a couple or three generations) proposes a scaling back both of our consumption levels and our population. We need to think of how we can manage economic shrinkage. If we don’t do this, the only long-term value of the wilderness preserves will be as seeds of future temperate forest and tropical rain forest; for we will surely destroy our civilisation, and the vast majority of humans will die. Perhaps Wilson realises this, and that is why he carefully focuses on preservation rather than economic changes.
     The first part of the book, where Wilson describes the current state of the Earth, is well written, clear, and full of new and not so new information. The last chapter amounts to little more than a catalogue raisonnee of agencies and NGOs in the nature conservation movement. *** (2002, edited 2021)

Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Alfred Hitchcock’s Deathmate (1973)

     Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Alfred Hitchcock’s Deathmate (1973) Most of the stories date from the early 60s, which means that the dollar figures don’t have the impact they should have; the reader should mentally multiply by 10. Hitchcock likes stories with a twist, usually a dark one, and characterisation etc don’t matter except to drive the plot. Amusing stories, worth a read when you have no energy for anything demanding and there’s no TV handy. ** (2002)

Mordecai Richler, ed. The Best of Modern Humor (1983)

     Mordecai Richler, ed. The Best of Modern Humor (1983) Funny, this isn’t. There are a few pieces that elicit laughter (eg, Nora Ephron’s piece about breasts, Rosten’s tale of Hyman Kaplan, or Leacock’s brilliant “Gertrude,” one of his Nonsense Novels), but most of the fiction is about sad, pathetic losers. Only one of the satires (Bruce McCall’s parody of Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Mechanics) has the combination of fun and sharp criticism that I expect of the “best”.
     The pieces are very well written, but too many ask us to laugh at their protagonists, not with them. That is of course the function of satire, but when the targets are lower class caught in a web they never made and cannot escape, the laughter sounds mean. Those targets are too easy. The earlier pieces tend to be funnier than the later ones, even when their satire is sharp (as in Sullivan’s “Cliche Expert....”) The newer pieces have a sour tone, and there is a nasty streak of class superiority in many of them. Is this one of the reasons Richler chose them? The humour, what there is of it, relies a lot on the insider’s knowledge of already dated class and ethnic peculiarities. Some of the stories elicit compassion rather than laughter, but I suspect that Richler laughed rather than wept when he read them.
      Was Richler trying to demonstrate his cultural superiority over the rest of us once again? That has been the repeated theme in his pieces about Canada. Those pieces strike me as prime examples of the whine of the colonial who has felt the contempt of the mother country, and forever after feels that he must show he is really not a colonial after all. The book is worth keeping because of the few classics in it, but it reflects badly on Richler’s’ taste. But when I consider his own output, I shouldn’t be surprised. After Duddy Kravitz, his work becomes more and more peevish; that peevishness informs this collection, unfortunately. His early short stories about Montreal, for example, combine sharp satiric observation with a compassion for the humanity in us all. In his later work, that compassion appears fitfully and weakly, like the silent lightning of distant thunder storms, if it appears at all. * to *** (2002)

Stephen Jay Gould. I Have Landed (2002)

     Stephen Jay Gould. I Have Landed (2002) Gould’s last collection of essays. They display both his strengths and his weaknesses. As his fame as an essayist grew, Gould became increasingly self-conscious about himself as a writer, and occasionally that results in comments that should have been edited out. He also developed an unnecessarily multi-syllabic style, and some verbal tics (eg, “optimal” for “best”) that I noticed too often, and which began to annoy me. But these are minor cavils.
     What shines through more clearly than ever is Gould’s generosity, wonder, and awe. He simply refuses to put down past sages because they happened to be wrong: they did the best they could with the data and theoretical frameworks they had. Just as we do. If we put down the past for not having our advantages, surely our descendants will do the same to us when their turn comes.
     Gould loved this world we live in, he loved to trace out the many surprising connections between its parts, and between the people who described, thought about, and tried to explain those connections. He was I think a very joyful man, although his life had grief enough for anyone: the cancer that killed him after 20 or so years of acute episodes and remissions; an autistic son; and a first marriage that faltered and broke; not to mention misappropriation of his words by Creationists when they weren’t attacking him.
     Gould describes himself as a humanist, but he was without a doubt a man of faith. His faith did not rest in a personal God such as is proffered by his Jewish tradition, or its Christian and Muslim derivatives. But he knew that the realm of ought-to-be and would-it-were are absolutely necessary to us as human beings, and that we must construct an ethic that will enable us to act with compassion and justice, and to share our joys and griefs. His comments on the attacks of September 11th show this clearly: he contrasts the many thousand acts of kindness and decency that make our communal life worth living with the horrendous evil perpetrated by a few. He notes this asymmetry of numbers, and argues that it should give us hope. By far the vast majority of us want to live not only the good life, but the moral life, and so we do. That’s why our daily life does not make news. It’s the rare and unusual acts that make news, and the rarer they are, the greater their news value. The acts of greatest evil are the rarest of all. They are for most of us simply unimaginable until they happen, and for many still unimaginable then.
     As to why the perpetrators commit their acts of evil, Gould does not attempt to answer this question beyond the usual general hints of social and personal damage of some kind. But he does emphasise that one of the main sources of evil is the kind of limited and limiting faith he rejects, the belief in a personal God with an exclusive relationship with the faithful few.
     Yet in the end, Gould quotes from the Bible. I think Gould shows that faith need not be exclusivist or narrow; it need not be in a personal God. It’s more an attitude towards the world than a creed. That attitude starts with awe, and ends with joy.
     Rest in peace, Stephen. (2002) ***

John Penn. An Ad for Murder (1982)

     John Penn. An Ad for Murder (1982) A pleasant entertainment, in which what seems to be an advertisement for a forthcoming book turns out to be a warning of an actual murder. The murder happens, but apparently the wrong person is the victim. Until Inspector Taylor on a hunch (and because of a deepening interest in the victim’s daughter) decides the murderer accomplished his task exactly as intended, and proceeds to unravel a very knotted plot. The puzzle is a good one, the characters are pleasant, the author sometimes shifts point of view for no good reason, and the police procedure is a bit wonky, but all in all, the story works. It would make a nice little 2-hour TV special, and for all I know has been done. **-½ (2002)

Paul Fussell. BAD: Or, The Dumbing of America. (1991)

     Paul Fussell. BAD: Or, The Dumbing of America. (1991) A collection of rants of varying quality. The style is often oddly flat and ponderous. It seems as if Fussell had written a few of these pieces, and then someone suggested he make a book, which pushed him into forced humour, soggy satire, and jejune jokes. Well, not entirely: many of the points he makes are valid enough.
     However, much of what he discusses is really matter of taste or fashion, both of which are impervious to skewering, and are rendered silly by time alone. Some of his targets are too easy, such as ads aimed at the semi-literate and semi-cultured, offering them “exclusive heirloom” collectibles, manufactured by the tens of thousands, to store in a cheap glass fronted case for future generations to ooh and aah over.
     Fussell’s rage at the dumbing down of academic studies is worth reading, but I doubt many university presidents these day are even capable of understanding his critiques, and none I would think would want to act on them. Provincial premiers (and State governors) might stare suspiciously at anyone offering these critiques, aware that they are missing something, but uncertain just what it might be. That’s perhaps the saddest conclusion to take away from his book, that much of what Fussell has to say can’t be understood by those who might profit from it, but merely provides reasons for a mean-spirited sense of superiority for many of those who can understand. At his best, Fussell laughs at follies we might otherwise weep over; at his worst, he sounds merely peevish. I suppose that’s the risk a curmudgeon takes. ** (2002)

Robert E. Howard. The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan (1974)

     Robert E. Howard. The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan (1974) Howard wrote far more stories than he ever sold, and often plagiarised himself, changing stories to suit different markets. This collection includes one published, seven unpublished, and two accepted but never published stories (the magazine went out of business.) I read the introduction, which retails these facts, and part of the first story. Howard tries to reproduce the dialect of a lower class fellow who is good with his fists. The attempt fails. It takes more than the odd “phonetic” misspelling to convince me that I’m listening to a sailor with more wit than education. So I stopped reading.
     Howard is best known for his Conan the Barbarian series; the movie adaptations made Arnold Schwarzenegger famous. If this book is any indication of Howard’s talents, the movies are much better than the books. Howard is good at imagining content, but his execrable style makes the tales almost impossible to read. Readers whose main interest is in what happens next won’t be put off. Readers who want a sense of living in a well-imagined universe will find it hard to read Howard for other than “academic” reasons. It’s a good thing that writing style doesn’t transfer to a movie, except perhaps for dialogue, which in the Conan movies is mercifully brief. (2002)