Carol Bennet & D W McCuaig. In Search of the K & P (1981)

     Carol Bennet & D W McCuaig. In Search of the K & P (1981) 2nd edition. Bennet and McCuaig have assembled a great deal of information, documents, photographs, and oral history of the Kingston and Pembroke Railway. The result is a well-done scrapbook history, beginning with the business and construction facts, followed by a station by station survey of the line, and ending with miscellaneous reminiscences. A pleasant book, typical of the local histories written as labours of love for those who are most directly involved in the story. I like these books, despite their shortcomings in scholarship and inevitable errors and misleading implications. They constitute a valuable resource for anyone who wants to write an official or scholarly work. But mainly they give the younger generations a clear impression of what it was like for the people whose stories are told, who lived in the area, who accomplished the enterprises described and celebrated. Nicely done. An index would help. **½ (2008)

Elmer Kelton. Captain’s Rangers (1968)

     Elmer Kelton. Captain’s Rangers (1968) Kelton made a reputation for himself as a writer of historical Westerns. If this one is typical, he likes to mix a love story into his history. Actually, a lot of Westerns mix love and adventure romance. Here, a Captain McNelly is authorised to clean up the Nueces Strip, the tract of land between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers which many Mexicans considered improperly ceded to Texas, and which like all dipsuted border regions became a scene of pillage and rapine. Texans rustled Mexican cattle north, and Mexicans rustled Texan cattle south.
      Langham Neal works for the Dangerfields; returning from a branding session with Zoe and a couple of vaqueros, he discovers the ranch burned and everyone dead. Zoe vows vengeance; Bailey, a neighbouring rancher who wants Zoe and her land, mixes into the situation. When Neal prevents a revenge attack on a neighbouring ranch owned by Mexicans, Zoe fires him. Neal joins the Rangers, hears that Zoe has married Bailey, then that Bailey has beaten her, and goes to fight Bailey. He wins of course, and he and Zoe will work her ranch. Fadeout. Not a bad tale, well enough written to keep my interest and engage my sympathy for the characters, which are however barely more than the standard stereotypes. **  (Book in house we're renting)

Carl Hiaasen. Paradise Screwed (2001)

     Carl Hiaasen. Paradise Screwed (2001) A selection of Miami Herald columns, almost all about politics, and all fiercely “liberal”, as the Republicans understand the term: opposed to the unholy alliance of big business and government, supporting the ideal of the common good, protective of the only true wealth, the environment on which we depend for everything, and so on. Assorted other values still make him right of centre in Canada. I read the first dozen or two columns, then sampled others throughout the book, and decided that its main appeal is to Floridians. Hiaasen writes both Juvenalian and Horatian satire, but without a personal connection to his subjects, even his stylistic skills can’t maintain my interest. Those who know Hiaasen and Florida politics will find this a good source book: most columns include all the relevant facts and figures.. Although the columns are now 15 years old, the issues are if anything even more urgent now. ** (Book found in the house we're renting on S. Padre Island)

Andrew Martindale. The Rise of the Artist (1972)

     Andrew Martindale. The Rise of the Artist (1972) A reissue and revision of part of Flowering of the Middle Ages, a massive coffee-table book. Well done, with sound scholarship, but in a format and style accessible to the non-academic. Martindale clarifies the changing role and status of the artist, a change that began long before the Renascence. While a medieval artist was an artisan, that does not mean he was necessarily anonymous or had no sense of artistic accomplishment and pride. Even in the Renascence, the artist was more of a craftsman than the Romantic view of the artist as “unacknowledged legislator of the world” imagines. What changed was not so much the artist but the critic: classic works provided a vocabulary and models for discussion of artists’ works.
A good book, even though the reproductions suffer from the state of printing prior to the digital revolution. But it also benefits from the absence of spell checker software: I found no typos whatsoever. *** (2008)

Adrain Mourby. Whatever Happened to...? (1997)

     Adrain Mourby. Whatever Happened to...? (1997) Nicely done satire, using famous literary figures as speakers or subjects of reports. Mourby assumes 20th century sensibilities, and spins his sequels into absurd and sometimes all-too-plausible consequences. The report on Mr B. B. Wolf is priceless in its mealy-mouthed bureaucratic avoidance of the obvious. Snow White’s fate is clearly an attack on the Windsors’ use of Diana. Frankenstein shows Freud as an idiot, which he wasn’t, but too many of his followers were. Suppose Romeo survived and married Rosaline? Well, Rosaline tells us, and she is not a happy wife. Well done, but definitely for educated adults. *** (2008)

Margaret Doody Aristotle Detective (1978)

     Margaret Doody .Aristotle Detective (1978) Stephanos’s cousin Philemon, exiled for manslaughter in a bar fight, is accused of murdering neighbour Boutades. Desperate, Stephanos asks his former teacher Aristotle for help, and Aristotle eagerly jumps into detecting. The result is a fairly constructed puzzle and its solution, but for me the depiction of daily life in Athens was even more interesting. It’s one thing to read a history book, even one loaded with pictures, and quite another to read a well-imagined historical fiction. I could not detect any obvious anachronisms, the characters are believable, the settings even more so. Stephanos is the narrator, so our knowledge is as limited as his, but we also suffer with his sensitive nose, his vanity, his anxieties, and his sense of being burdened with duties as head of the family, both his and Philemon’s fathers having died before Stephanos could finish his studies with Aristotle.

     All in all, an entertaining read. The history is taught by the way, painlessly. One thing that’s clear is that what many nowadays think of as the Islamist segregation of women is an ancient East Mediterranean cultural value, and has nothing to do with religion. It predates Islam by thousands of years, a good example of how deeply ingrained values inform religions, which are far more malleable and flexible than the literalists imagine. We make our religion fit our prejudices, and thereby give them a spurious authority. **½

Two best sellers, and comment about gore-porn.

     Dan Brown. Deception Point (2001) Adolescent power-trip fantasy, larded with gee-whiz technologies, which all, according to a prefatory note, exist, plus dollops of gore porn, though not as nasty as some other authors indulge in. I stopped reading about one quarter of the way in, sampled a few passges later in the book, and conclude it would have been a much better one at one half its length. I suppose it’s “good of its kind”, but it’s an obnoxious kind. Zero

     Jeffery Deaver. The Vanished Man (2003) The conceit is that a serial killer used magic tricks to both perpetrate his murders and hide his tracks. The fist victim is done in by The Lazy Hangman, an escape trick. The cops not only found no trace of the killer, but what they thought was his hidey hole has no second exit. The janitor hasn’t seen anyone come or go in the last half hour. And so on. Pretty obvious killer, if you ask me, but I didn’t feel any need to discover his name, nor how many other victims he had on his list. The sleuth is a quadriplegic with a faithful retainer, consulted by the police when they can see no way ahead. The death scene signals a book indulging in the nastier kind of gore-porn, so I gave up on it. Zero.

     Best sellers and gore-porn. I first came across the nastier examples of this sub-genre of crime fiction in Patricia Cornwell’s books. I read a few of them because they’re well plotted, and Kate Scarpetta is a sympathetic character, the kind for whom we wish a good life and happy endings. But I eventually tired of the gore.
     Obvious question: why do so many best sellers these days indulge in extreme gore and violence, detailed descriptions of psychopathic torture, and the like? What is it about imagined nastiness that attracts so many readers? I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill horror, which leaves a good deal up to the reader’s imagination. I mean the clinically detailed descriptions of death-dealing, complete with the victim’s terror and pain. Why have gory death scenes become so common? It used to be a book had to have more-or-less explicit sex-fantasies, now it’s rather-more-than-less explicit murder fantasies. Something dark is at work here: I think it’s related to the free-floating anxiety about “them taking over”, which has been exacerbated since 9/11, and the paranoia that fuels so much politics.

Greg McDonell. The History of Canadian Railroads (1985)

     Greg McDonell. The History of Canadian Railroads (1985) An ambitious title for what is essentially a picture book. McDonell has assembled a good collection of illustrations, and as far as I can tell his text is accurate enough. A pleasant read, and a good introduction to the subject. At folio size, a bit large as a reference book. One irritating thing: many of the captions refer to parts of the picture that have been cropped off to make the picture fit or to emphasise the main subject. That is one of the hazards of off-shore editing and printing. ** (2008)

Klaus J. Vetter. Die Eisenbahn in Österreich (2007)

     Klaus J. Vetter.  Die Eisenbahn in Österreich (2007) My cousin sent me this for my birthday last January, I looked through it twice then, and now for the 3rd time. This time, I read more of the captions, and some of the text. Interesting tidbits that I didn’t know before, especially clarification of some of the locomotive classes, and a clearer account of the sequence of line construction. The book is clearly aimed at an audience outside Austria. My cousin included an errata list that he had made up, thus making the book more authoritative. Excellent photo reproduction, and clearly the older pictures have all been rescanned for this book. I’m glad to have it.
      Austrian locomotive design was idiosyncratic, to put it mildly, and the earlier examples often look ungainly, even ugly. Even the 310, reputed to be the masterwork of Austrian locomotive design, has unpleasant proportions, with a cab that’s too small, huge driving wheels, a stack that’s in the wrong place, and a smoke-box that’s too long. The 93 class (2-8-2T) is a better proportioned machine in my eyes. The 310 was very successful in purely engineering terms, but not aesthetically. The electrics were on the whole much better designed I think. *** (2008)

Ross MacDonald. The Instant Enemy (1968)

     Ross MacDonald. The Instant Enemy (1968) The Sebastians hire Lew Archer to find their runaway daughter. He does, and also finds a mess of murder, multiple marriages, fraud, and impersonation. Well done, even though the plot is more tangled than it needs to be, and MacDonald doesn’t play as fair as he usually does. **½ (2008)

W. J. Burley. Wycliffe and the Tangled Web (1988)

    

 

W. J. Burley. Wycliffe and the Tangled Web (1988) The twist in this tale is that the victim claimed to be pregnant when she wasn’t, just to see how people would react. One of the people she was testing reacted by killing her. Burley delivers his usual well crafted police procedural laced with his mildly ironic bemusement at the foibles of humankind. In many ways his light tone doesn’t carry the weight of his motifs. After all, a clever schoolgirl who finds humans interesting as specimens, and dies when she miscalculates, isn’t exactly comic fare. **½ (2008)

Paul Love et al. Beginning Unix (2005)

     Paul Love et al. Beginning Unix (2005) A nicely laid out and easy to follow introduction to the OS that will perhaps eventually displace Windows. Surprising fun, too. I can’t judge the accuracy etc, but it seems authoritative to me. Three years is a long time in computing, so some of the information is already out of date: Linux is maturing rapidly, with several easy-to-install and easy-to-use distributions, so that the kind of hands-on familiarity with Unix taught in this text is no longer necessary. Recommended. *** (2008)
     Update 2013: Unix has not displaced Windows, in fact, in many places Windows Server has replaced *nix servers. Linux has slowly gained in overall  numbers, but has hardly moved in market share. Android a derivative of Linux, operates over half the cellphones in the world.
     Update 2016: Not much change. Ubuntu and Mint  have both been made to look'n'feel like the de facto standard Windows/Mac GUI, and have gained some ground. But the OS wars are pretty well over. Most people have no idea what an OS is, and have a hard time caring enough to find out. Computers have become "devices", people have come to expect them to just work. Many people now own two or more devices, and wireless connections (with or without a network) is taken for granted. Security and privacy-protection skills are now more important than understanding an OS. The pace of technical innovation and change has accelerated: this book is now a museum piece.