Christopher S. Claremont et al. Star Trek: Debt of Honor (1992)

     Christopher S. Claremont et al. Star Trek: Debt of Honor (1992) Graphic novel treatment of a convoluted ST tale about Kirk’s Debt of Honor to T’Cel, a part-human Vulcan woman, who saved him from an attack by bugs that have invaded the galaxy via a space-time rift. Now, he comes out of retirement and teams up with her and an Klingon frenemy to defeat those bugs. The original Enterprise was destroyed in the earlier fight with these creatures. The whole crew comes together for this final battle. Subplots involve other debts of honour. The book looks very much like a scenario, not a complete script. The style is DC Comics naturalistic, with sometimes difficult to follow dialogue balloons. The jump cuts don’t help; perhaps paradoxically, they’d be easier to follow in a movie. In fact, this story would work better as a movie, I think. Still, it was fun to read, but I’m a diehard ST fan. It ends with T’Cel departing through the space-time rift, and her daughter (who may be Kirk’s child) left on the Enterprise. Clearly To Be Continued, but I don’t know of any sequels. **½

Robert Robinson. Landscape with Dead Dons (1963)

     Robert Robinson. Landscape with Dead Dons (1963) UP and AR gave me this in 1987, for Christmas. It’s been languishing on the shelf ever since. The plot is set in an Oxford college; the author apparently went down shortly before he wrote this book, and it’s an ironical hymn of love towards the University.
     A Vice Chancellor is murdered, then a Fellow, and finally a pornographer is almost drowned, too. Inspector Autumn is the cop, and he would have made a nice series, but I suppose Robinson didn’t have any more stories in him. Autumn’s not from Oxford, so he would have to do his stuff in various parts of the kingdom. A new-found poem by Chaucer (The Book of the Lion, alluded to by Chaucer himself, but never found), a little decorous hanky-panky, academic infighting, and so forth, along with a nice smattering of eccentrics make for a pleasant entertainment. A police procedural this is not – perhaps that’s another reason Robinson didn’t make a series, not having sufficient knowledge to make it believable – but with the usual suspension of disbelief, it works quite well. There are a few oddities, which disappear when one remembers the date of composition. **-½ (2003)

Boese, Alex. The Museum of Hoaxes (2002)

     Boese, Alex. The Museum of Hoaxes (2002) A cursory catalogue of hoaxes from the Middle Ages to the present. The book is apparently based on a doctoral dissertation, and its author maintains a website. Superficial, especially in its attempts at providing some sort of sociological explanation for the hoaxes; flat, surprisingly boring style, considering the subject matter; and not enough pictures. Also strongly unbalanced in its selection, with recent hoaxes far outnumbering those of the past. A more subtle analysis of hoaxes and their varieties would have been interesting, too. For example, what about unintentional hoaxes such as the Tulip Mania, in which the public creates the hoax? Perhaps the book was dumbed down from the dissertation, but I doubt it. Not worth the money. I’m trying to get a refund, as the book is mounted upside down in the case. * (2003)

Martha Grimes. I Am the Only Running Footman (1986)

     Martha Grimes. I Am the Only Running Footman (1986) Grimes has a very high reputation, but if this book is a fair sample of her work, I think it’s undeserved. The plotting is muzzy, with a lot of necessary information withheld until near the end, the characterisation is superficial and derivative, and the resolution is unsatisfactory. I suppose a good team could make a decent movie out of this book --  certainly a lot of the writing seems based on some inner screen vision of the scene -- but as it stands I was disappointed. Richard Jury is the cop, two girls are the victims, a dysfunctional but fiercely loyal family is the link (and one of the family is the murderer). The writing is cute, and in place self-consciously funny. Grimes is American, and critics have acclaimed her skill at doing the British atmosphere. Not at all. It’s all very Masterpiece Theatre, and really doesn’t work. Perhaps the fact that this book comes well along in the series is at fault; we are supposed to know why Melrose Plant appears, for example. But other characters, such as the St Clairs and the Warboys, have no function other than lugubrious, oh so veddy British comic relief. I won’t be reading another of these books. * (2003)

Spider Robinson. The Callahan Touch (1993)

     Spider Robinson. The Callahan Touch (1993) I didn't finish this. The first book in this series had some point, ie a plot and characters that one could care about. This excursion into fantasy is just that, fantasy, and rather infantile at that. The bar is now the location of a permanent party, and there’s a lot of sentimental claptrap about absent friends, and such. I suppose some sort of problem turns up and the denizens have to solve it to make the universe safe for beer drinkers. But at the halfway point there was not much indication of what the plot point might be. Browsing the last few pages confirms that everything turned out all right, but I really didn’t care enough to find out what and why. The writing is amusing enough, if you’re half cut and your critical faculties are dissolved in a haze of alcohol, or whatever drug you use, but otherwise this is a tedious example of what happens when a writer tries to be cute. (2003)

Lewis Lapham. Money and Class in America. (1988) (re-read)

     Lewis Lapham. Money and Class in America. (1988) A long and mostly witty rant, combined with semi-autobiographical anecdote, and social history and analysis. Like all good observers of the social comedy, Lapham is good at seeing the significant moment or comment, and having been born into the “equestrian classes”, he can see the rulers of America close up. His testimony rings true , truer than a library full of sociological analysis and statistics. Lapham has the ability of a good novelist to show the general in the particular. He knows when the mask slips, and the primitive animal within peers out, aware and frightened of death.
     The net effect is a portrait of a sad, confused, self-absorbed, and somnambulent bunch of fools. Only the fact that they wield so much influence, and that they can directly intervene in government, prevents one from giving in to the dual impulse to laugh and to pity.
     Lapham claims that the general wealth of the United States has infected the whole culture with the pathologies of the rich. He makes a good case. In particular, he notes the ability (if that’s the word) of the rich to persuade themselves that their view of the world is the only one, and that the rest of the universe is mere stage set for the drama of their lives. When I look at the current stumbling towards war with Iraq, Lapham’s perspective helps one understand the inexplicable. Only a nation or ruling class caught up in the fantasies of power could plan such a stupid venture. Bush and company talk as if they are playing a game on a large table in a dimly lit “library” while sipping bourbon and chatting languidly about next year’s golf or their neighbours’ indiscretions with their neighbours’ wives. One can almost see them pushing little metal figures around on the map spread over the pool table, occasionally congratulating each other on a particularly witty move.
     Lapham’s chapter on the corrosive effects of the love (and fear) of money, of the worship of Mammon, is worth the price of the book, which in my case wasn’t much (I bought this copy at Value Village). I suspect that Lapham based this book on his Harpers essays; there is some repetition, the kind that a person who repeatedly writes essays on the same themes is liable to produce. That’s really the only flaw of any consequence. **** (2003)

William Weintraub Why Rock the Boat? (1961)

     William Weintraub Why Rock the Boat? (1961) Harry Barnes, 19, learns the journalism trade at the Witness, a Montreal newspaper that exists to please the advertisers and puff the gentry. He falls for Julia Martin, a female colleague working at another paper, escapes being fired for having written scurrilous practice pieces that feature the tyrannical managing editor of his paper, does a stint as a PR hack, and so on. The city editor, a Milquetoast type whose wife seduced Harry at the yearly journalists’ excursion into ski country, has placed the scurrilous pieces in the paper. And so on. A loosely picaresque novel that never quite comes together, it’s written in a workmanlike style that makes its satirical points with varying subtlety, and occasionally veers off into semi-sentimental suburban yearnings. The characters are rather thin; Barnes is the only one with any depth, and even he’s often too naive to be entirely credible. Or maybe not: the sort of single-minded dorkiness he exhibits in his quest to learn all that there is to learn about newspapering does have the ring of truth.
     Entertaining, and possibly a roman a clef, since Weintraub worked as a reporter in his younger days, and this tale has the whiff of auto-biography about it. According to the cover blurb, the book caused controversy when it was first published, but it seems rather tame now. Canada was still easily shocked in 1961.
     Weintraub loosely adapted his book into a movie in 1974. I saw it many years ago. It has tighter plotting than the book, focussing on Julia’s attempts to form a union (which didn’t figure in the book). See IMDB’s page, and the Canadian Film Encyclopedia here. It was my vague memories of the movie that prompted me to buy this 2nd-hand copy of the book. It's worth than the 25 cents I paid for it.
     Book: ** Movie: **-½

Eric Wright. Death in the Old Country (1985)

     Eric Wright. Death in the Old Country (1985) Charlie Salter and Annie are on holiday in the UK, in an attempt to mend their relationship (they succeed). Charlie is sidetracked by both racing (he gets good tips from the local police sergeant), and by the murder of the hotel’s proprietor. Unable to desist, he does some sleuthing on his own. In the end he unearths one crucial fact, but the case has already been solved by Insp. Hamilton, who can’t resist rubbing it in.
     Charlie Salter is an unlikely hero. Like Maigret, he’s sloppy, self-indulgent, and given to relying on hunches and intuition. This makes for a rambling plot, and allows for digression. The result is an uneven but pleasant read. **-½ (2002)

Frances Awdry and Eda Green. By Lake and Forest. (Nd, but probably 1905/06)

     Frances Awdry and Eda Green. By Lake and Forest. (Nd, but probably 1905/06) An account of the Diocese of Algoma in Ontario, which at the time of writing was still a mission diocese, supported by the church at large and by a society dedicated to providing money and other things as needed. The style is a curious cross between the romantic and the practical, with occasional forays into the devotional mode. The authors include interesting stories of early priests’ hardships, and a number of photographs decorate the book, but there is no attempt to link pictures and text. The authors have definite opinions on the evil of idleness, and feel this is the only serious impediment to native peoples’ advancement; they express their cultural biases strongly, but have no racial bias whatever. A list of clergy in 1905, and a list of Society members, provide data for people who might want to confirm some facts. I’ve both photocopied and scanned the picture of Blind River’s church (whose name is not given.) I would like to know if Frances Awdry is related to the author of the Thomas books. **-½ (2002)

M. C. Beaton. Death of a Charming Man (1994)

     M. C. Beaton. Death of a Charming Man (1994) Hamish Macbeth feels constricted by Priscilla’s plans for him, plans she wants to implement before they are even married. Meanwhile, a beautiful man is upsetting the women in Drim, a bleak village over the ridge on the shores of a dark loch. When this man disappears, Macbeth believes he’s murdered; and eventually, by his usual unorthodox methods, he proves his point and discovers the murderer. A pleasant entertainment, but not at all like the TV series, which does not reproduce these stories. I’ll probably read a few more, when I feel in need of some simple pastime. ** (2002)

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)

S. A. Wakefield. Bottersnikes and Gumbles (1967)

     S. A. Wakefield. Bottersnikes and Gumbles (1967) Bottersnikes are nasty, scale beasts with sharp teeth, and their ears turn red hot when they are angry (which is most of the time). Red-hot ears are useful for starting fires. They live in garbage dumps and are very, very lazy. This deprives them of the comforts of life, so they are very, very bad tempered. Gumbles are agreeable, soft and furry, and squishy. They giggle a lot, and live in the bush, where they chat, play games, soak up the sun, and do just enough work to feel comfortable. Bottersnikes want Gumbles to work for them, so they put them in jam tins. Gumbles occasionally get away from the Bottersnikes, but as soon as they get the giggles, they are helpless, and the Bottersnikes put them in jam tins again. And so on.
     This is a Puffin book, designed to make eight-year-olds giggle like Gumbles, I suppose. However, the premise promises more than it delivers. The humour is strained and contrived as often as not, and the stories don’t have much point. That’s probably why this book never had a sequel, and its characters never showed up on TV. The author is Australian. Maybe the book’s humour is too Aussie for me. * (2002)

Peggy Coyle, Peggy, ed. Faith of Our Fathers (1980)

     Peggy Coyle, Peggy, ed. Faith of Our Fathers (1980) Six women write about their fathers, all priests in Algoma Diocese. These men come across as focussed on their work, willing to accept all kinds of hardships, devout and dedicated priests, and more or less easy-going fathers. They also had a wide range of interests, worked hard establishing various programs for the youth in their community, and enjoyed life. The daughters all clearly loved their fathers, and don’t tell us much of the flaws they must have had, but concentrate on the kinds of anecdotes that every family accumulates about its members. A few personal remarks reveal the closeness of these pioneer families. The overall effect is one of impressive dedication to one’s lifework, and of men who gave more than they got from their communities.
     There are also a number of really funny stories, all of them true. The one that sticks in my mind is the one about a bride’s worth. After the wedding (which was a grand affair, with more than the usual number of flowers, decorations, and pretty dresses), the bridegroom asked the priest what he owed. “Whatever you think your bride is worth,” said Mr Balfour. The bridegroom dug in his pocket, and found fifty cents, which he handed over to the priest.
     Worth reading, and a useful and more than entertaining addition to anyone’s collection of local histories.*** (2002)

Ray Bradbury. S is for Space. (1968)

      Ray Bradbury. S is for Space. (1968) Bradbury was at one time a favourite of mine, but rereading these stories makes me wonder at my early taste. He over-writes, is all. When his style matches the story’s theme, the effect can be very good; but much of the time the style seems intended to add a significance that isn’t there, like the swelling chords of a banal piece of pop music. Or something like that.
     In any case, only a few of these stories satisfied me. The best is “The Million Year Picnic,” in which a family escapes from a nuclear war on Earth and settles on Mars. Bradbury’s style suits the mix of elegy and hope in this story perfectly. In fact, the Mars stories generally work better than most of the other stories, even though there’s no attempt to make them consistent with each other. Bradbury uses Mars as a fabulous new Frontier. The themes of new beginnings and escape from the evil old world are what really interest him, and Mars permits him to play effectively with them.
      “Zero Hour” I have in a dramatised version on tape; it’s much better as a radio play than a story. A couple other stories work the motif of the hidden invader, recognised too late – very Cold War.
     But Bradbury’s most persistent theme and motif is the Lost Past, or its variation, Lost Childhood. In one form or another, these show up in every story. One of the best, more a meditation in the form of a narrative than a story, is “The Trolley,” in which we take the last ride on a trolley about to be replaced by buses. Here, Bradbury’s fey and whimsical style is an almost perfect match for the nostalgia of the piece, which never quite descends into mawkish sentimentality, though a couple of times it comes close. * to ***-½ (2002)

Bertolt Brecht. The Threepenny Opera Transl.. By Desmond Vesey

     Bertolt Brecht. The Threepenny Opera Transl.. By Desmond Vesey (book) and Eric Bentley (lyrics). This is not the book that the Stratford (Ontario) company used. I have no idea how the different versions compare in terms of fidelity to the German; this one advertises itself as including every word of the German text. I’ll have to read The Beggar’s Opera now, for comparison. Anyhow, the script is fairly straightforward. Brecht’s insistence on spelling out his theme is rather irritating, he knocks you over the head with it. His use of “epic drama” techniques is also rather obtrusive; or rather, his “actor’s tips” about this feature in my opinion demonstrate that he didn’t really understand theatre very well. Recent scholarly work has shown that his scripts were in large part written by others.  Considering the obtuseness of his advice to actors and the virtues of the script, I can well believe it.
     Reading this script so soon after seeing the debacle at Stratford probably prevented my enjoying it. However, Bentley’s lyrics are not as good as the traditional ones. Mack the Knife especially suffers from what appears to be Bentley’s attempt to reproduce the German text. ** (2002)

Charlotte Vale Allen. Dream Train (1988)

     Charlotte Vale Allen Dream Train (1988) I’ve been collecting fiction with a railway theme or setting; this is the most recent one I’ve read. Joanna James, photographer, has a gig riding the Venice-Simplon-Orient-Express, the luxury train cruise that’s the remnant of the original Orient Express. The book is a romance presented as part travelogue and part quest.
     Joanna encounters a variety of people and situations. She makes friends that reflect and refract her character back to herself and so help her on her voyage of self-discovery. Memories of her dysfunctional family intersect with her responses to her new friends and acquaintances. She comes to terms with her family’s past, discovers that she can be her own person, and who that person is; and chooses the man that’s right for her. As in all proper quests, the goal is the integration of a broken personality, in this case the competent and highly skilled professional with the shy, self-effacing, injured and repressed child that never grew up. Simple plot, simple theme. The book is well written in a style a cut or two above cliché, the characters have the kind of depth we expect from a moderately serious TV mini-series, the train trip is wonderful.
     Marie said the book was superficial, and it is, but there are enough hints of depths below the surface to persuade us these people matter, at least while we are reading about them. The main characters are too good to be true, the darkness of the human heart is glimpsed on the periphery and throws only a few shadows, and the crises are triggered by external events, not by weaknesses or flaws of character. But in all these respects, the novel conforms to the demands of its genre, so why cavil at them? The book is above average of its kind. I enjoyed reading it. **-½

Charles Seife. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000)

     Charles Seife. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000) It looks like I read this last year, but I can’t remember. Re-reading it, it’s not hard to see why. While Seife provides lots of interesting information, and explains a good deal, his writing is at best workmanlike, and often sloppy. I suspect the sloppiness may be the effect of trying to “explain complex ideas in simple language,” but the result is often conceptual blurriness and even error. I found myself mentally rephrasing many of his statements. For example. He says that Cantor compared the size of rational and irrational numbers. He of course means the size of the sets of those numbers. Since he already explained what a set is, and uses a very clear metaphor to illustrate how one compares sets without actually counting, there’s no excuse for such sloppy language. He does have a knack for the illustrative metaphor: comparing sets is like asking everyone in a stadium to sit down, he says. If some seats are empty, then there are fewer people than seats. If there some people left standing, then vice versa. If there are no empty seats and no people standing, then the two sets match: they are the same size. Well, that’s very well done; so why the sloppy language a page or so later?
     Seife also occasionally uses a technical term without explaining it. For example, towards the end he talks of the heat death of the universe as the ultimate result of its continuing expansion. But in the next sentence he refers to this as death by ice (in contrast to the fiery death of the big crunch). How these two terminologies can be reconciled may be a mystery to him; it certainly will be a mystery to many readers.
     Seife’s understanding of history consists of conventional wisdom, which also occasionally misleads the reader. Overall, however, his philosophical points are well made, and the power of Zero to confound metaphysics and theology is clearly conveyed. The appendices illustrating several mathematical and logical arguments in detail are concise and clear. I like the one that uses the a=b, ab=a^2 etc proof that 1=0 (or 2=1) to show that Winston Churchill is a carrot.
     In short, this is an adequate introduction to a number of mathematical, physical, and philosophical problems and their solutions, with a good deal of pleasantly conveyed history along the way, and will do for a high school library. ** (2002)

Harry Turtledove. Departures (1993)

     Harry Turtledove. Departures (1993) A collection of “alternate history” stories, which I began in August, and mostly read in September, and finished on October 1, so I’m counting it as a September book. The eras range from ancient history to the far future. As with all such speculative sociology, the theories underlying the stories tend to be simplistic, but that doesn’t often detract from them as stories. After all, contemporary fiction suffers from the same deficiency. Plausibility does not depend on factual truth.
     Turtledove’s vision tends to be dark: history is driven by greed, hate, prejudice and sheer ignorance. Occasional glimmers of honour, truth and justice flicker fitfully here and there, but they are strictly personal virtues, not systemic attributes of a society. A couple of his stories are pure fantasy; the rest hew pretty closely to reality as we know it. One of his repeated notions is that Muhammad became a Christian monk, so that the Muslim world never came into being. The contrary vision, that Islam became the dominant culture of Europe, also informs several of his stories. An alternate worlds story takes us to a North America whose Revolutionary War was incomplete, and hence no unified polity ever emerged: a mish-mash of independent former colonies and states still tied to England, as well as aboriginal fiefdoms, has led to a state of perpetual warfare, and a very delayed Industrial Revolution.
     Like many pre-perestroika writers, Turtledove carefully use ethnic names to denote an “international” space culture. However, he does not assume that the Soviets will endure in their present form; his alternate future Russia breaks up into a re-established Czarist empire and a federation of reformed Soviet states.
     Not that it matters. Closer reflection shows that Turtledove uses the alternate history settings in otherwise very traditional ways. There are adventure romances, fantastic fables, hard-science mysteries, tall tales, and so on. Two stories comment on the role of the Jews in our world (Turtledove is a Jew) and both stories work very well, both as stories and as lessons. An amusing collection; I omitted one story that was getting tedious, but enjoyed the rest. ** to ***. (2002)

Coronet Magazine, August 1960

     Coronet Magazine, August 1960. Reading old magazines reminds us how much popular culture can change. The assumptions which we use in our daily lives, in our interpretation of everything from advertising to political news, change far more thoroughly in some respects than we like to admit.
     Consider the cover story: “Can Catholics Ever Accept Birth Control?” The author, William Clancy, says no, on the grounds that birth control violates objective natural law, which the Catholic Church has always accepted as God-given. He means objective moral law, of course, not natural law as we generally understand it. His argument was published as a serious contribution to the debate. It would probably not be published in a general interest magazine nowadays, based as it is on the arrogant assumption that his moral law is the only objectively true one. But it does explain why the hierarchy still opposes all conception control, while it accepts conception avoidance, on the grounds that the latter is more natural than the former. Why taking advantage of the fertility cycle of a woman to prevent conception is natural while taking advantage of mechanical or chemical processes to achieve the same end is not, is a question that I have long puzzled over. [Note 2013: even in 1960, many Catholics had already "accepted" birth control, and now a majority have done so. The hierarchy still uses Clancy's arguments to condemn it.]
     The general tone of articles on technical and scientific topics is very positive. Science and technology will improve our lives; side effects can be fixed easily with more science and technology. Even though Carson’s Silent Spring had been published some years earlier, and was still a best seller in 1960, its effects on general attitudes to the environment were still small. In particular, there seems to have been no sense of the inter-connectedness of things: That a solution over here will cause a problem over there. It took a few real disasters, such as Bhopal in India, repeated oil spills, and real effects on people’s health from pollution, to make her message real to most of us. The optimistic and hopeful attitudes toward science have been replaced by suspicion and hostility, an equally irrational response to what is after all the only means we have of knowing how the world really works, and figuring out ways to protect ourselves from its dangers. But I suppose I should keep in mind the rah-rah hyping of genetic engineering: it eerily echoes the happy acceptance of the wonders of the plastics and chemical industries in the 1950s and 60s. Think of the scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman’s character is told to get into plastics if he wants a great future.
     The feminist revolution had as yet no effect in August 1960, if this magazine is evidence. There are a couple of articles about how to be a good wife. They were presumably amusing then, but they don’t strike me as amusing now. But they do explain Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. The implicit and sometimes explicit patronising of tone towards “the little woman” in these articles (and in a photo story about Zsa Zsa Gabor), and even more obviously shown in the ads, must have offended many women even back then, and certainly offended any woman who thought about her status.
     The political articles don’t come close to the kind of stuff people published a mere three or four years later. 1960 was really still the 50s, and there is a respect shown towards politicos that no one feels any of them deserve nowadays. On the other hand, the kind of journalism that exposed the Watergate scandals isn’t possible anymore either, not since the media have been “consolidated” into ever greater conglomerates, and “convergence” has blurred the lines not only between the media, but also between advertising, information, and entertainment.
     The ads are the most telling. They are straightforward, and the longer ones, with lots of text, take a sensible tone, as of one man speaking to another. I was charmed by the ad for The Empire Builder, a streamlined train, which depicted a senior executive who is taking the train from Chicago to Seattle so as to have time for reflection about a big deal that his underlings have been negotiating, underlings who have flown to Seattle in order to have everything ready for the great man when he arrives
     All in all, what strikes me about this (and other magazines from the same time) is the naivete and hopefulness. Most of the articles are puff-pieces of one kind or another, or are designed to create an image of America the Good and Beautiful and Fun To Live In. People had not yet become as utterly cynical and almost hopeless as they have nowadays. Looking back, we can see the mistakes we made back then; but our reaction to those mistakes will certainly lead us to make equally bad or even worse ones. ** (2002)

Cohen and Stewart. The Collapse of Chaos. (1994)

      Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. The Collapse of Chaos (1994) Cohen and Stewart attempt a meta-story here: that of how the chaotic, messy events on one level of reality (or perhaps merely analysis) produce regular and orderly features at a higher. An excellent book, often heavy going for anyone without at least a smattering of a variety of disciplines, but also often offering high spirits and sly irony.
I read it when it first appeared, but had forgotten almost all of it. Only a few marginal notes (typo-corrections, mostly) testify to my former reading.
     But I realise that many of its ideas have become commonplace for me. Chief of these are four. The first is that theories or models may or may not represent reality as it is. They are certainly work-alikes. That is, their observable external relations are the same as what they model, but there is no guarantee that their internal workings are the same. Nor is it ever possible to discover whether models are more than work-alikes, since attempts to get inside the black boxes merely produce more models with the same ontological deficiency.
     The second idea is that of emergent features: that it is impossible to predict, and often impossible in practice to explain, how the behaviour of one set of entities gives rise to features observable at a larger scale (or “higher level.”) Related to this is the idea that to explain how something happens is not the same as predicting what will happen. Science’s attempt to combine explicability and predictability, indeed most people’s belief that they are the same, has kept us from noting and investigating many things, or has misdirected our investigations. Ironically, it was just such a misdirected investigation (that of trying to derive a model of the weather from statistical data) that led to the discovery of chaotic systems, and prompted the development of chaos theory. Mandelbrot, also, testifies to this irony: according to Stewart, he said he had studied fractals a long time before he realised that he was looking at a new class of mathematical objects.
     The third idea is that the genome does not describe the organism, but merely the production the proteins that interact with each other and the environment to produce the organism. Understanding this puts a huge question mark over all genetic engineering. We simply cannot predict all the effects of transferring a gene from one organism to another. The fact that at present a very small minority of such transfers actually work to produce any result, let alone the desired one, shows that genetic engineering is still the crudest form of trial and error. But the genome-as-blueprint metaphor has great power, probably because of its simplicity, and because people do not understand blueprints, but think they do. Everyone has seen blueprints, for example in the weekly home-plans feature carried by many newspapers. The fact that such plans are really directions to the builder, and do not contain enough information to describe the final building, is lost on most people. That is why the metaphor misleads. People do not consider the blueprint as a recipe, which is really what it is. It might be better to make the metaphor explicit, and think of the genome as a program or recipe. A recipe for a cheese omelette does not describe the omelette, it describes how to make one. It takes ingredients and a cook and a stove to make an omelette. Just so, a genome does not describe an organism, it describes how to make one. It takes a zygote and a womb and an organism to make one.
     The description of the process of development is indirect, too, and consists mostly of instructions to make or stop making proteins. The proteins themselves react with each other and other chemicals, under the influence of temperature, pH, etc, and the result is a developing organism. What’s more, the proteins affect the genome’s functions: the products made under process A trigger instruction X, which stops process A and starts process B. B triggers instruction Y, which starts process C, which triggers instruction Z, which stops process B; and so, in all sorts of interlaced and intertwining instructions and processes.
     Finally, Stewart and Cohen have a healthy respect for the limits of scientific explanation. More than most popular science writers, they emphasise the fuzziness and tentativeness of science. This is a good thing, if only to remind us all that knowledge, even the most strongly supported, is never certain. If only religious folk understood this and accepted it, they might have more faith. **** (2002)
     Update 2013: It now appears that genetics is even more complicated than Cohen and Stewart knew. The environment (i.e, other cells, the chemical bath surrounding the cell, the organ of which it a part, the organism embedded the external environment, ...) turns genes on and off, which in turn affect the cells interaction with neighbouring cells, the chemical bath that surrounds it, and so on a wonderfully recursive dance. And just within the last year or so it's been discovered that genes can be transferred "horizontally" between species,probably via the microorganisms that inhabit it). See this National geographic article. The problem is that we don't have a language to describe the dynamic web of reactions that constitute an organism. In ordinary language, an organism is at best a gearbox. In fact it's something much more difficult to describe. we are thrown on the mercy of our metaphors. Her's one: an organism is shape created by its substrate, in the same that a fountain is a shape created by its substrate: water for the decorative fountain in your garden; plasma on the surface of the Sun.

Richard Sheridan. The Rivals

 

Richard Sheridan. The Rivals (Ed. Alan Downer, 1953) Reading this reminded me once again how much a play depends on performance, especially if it is written in a style we do not expect in a play. Nowadays, we expect dialogue that’s close to the way people actually speak; we even expect sentence fragments and jumbles. Shakespeare’s style is closer to our expectations, so that he is easy to read once one has learned the early modern English in which he wrote. Sheridan’s language is much closer to our own, yet his eighteenth century formalities interfere with comprehension in way Shakespeare does not. Even Mrs Malaprop, who mangles the language, does so only at the level of vocabulary. All Sheridan’s characters speak in the same formal periods; a few minor differences in oaths don’t amount to enough of a distinction to enable us to read the play easily.
      Two years ago, Marie and I saw a performance in Stratford, England. It was wonderful, because the actors could make these stilted sentences sound natural and expressive. That performance struck a fine and beautiful balance between hamming and exaggeration, between the artificialities of theatre and the realities of life. The result was a play that drew you into its preposterous premises and made you believe, even while you knew you were watching a carefully crafted illusion, one that emphasised its illusory qualities in the set design and staging. Actors are a great gift to a playwright, especially one who has been dead for couple hundred years.
     The plot is pure soap opera: girl wants unsuitable boy, Father wants boy to marry suitable girl, a rival wants the girl’s money, servants are loyal to whoever pays them the most, and the older folk discover that the cooling coals of passion can be blown into hot flame. In the end, the right people marry each other, as they should, or else what’s the point of a comedy. Along the way there’s a lot of good clean and not-so-clean fun. Staged by a competent crew, one enjoys both a preposterous story made believable, and the realisation that one is seeing pure theatre. *** (2002)

Eating Horses: some history (link)

     Scientific American of  September 1886 ran an article about eating horses. Here's the link: SciAm 1886 Eating Horses
     Comments: The religious prohibition is very odd, considering that St Peter had a dream about "unclean" animals, which is usually interpreted as an attack on the the notion of "unclean" food.
     Real salami (not the imitation sold as such in our supermarkets) is made from donkey meat. The best french fries are said to be those fried in horse fat.
      During WW2, horse meat was offered in many parts of Europe when other meats became scarce. The objections to eating horses are clearly cultural and psychological: we just don't like eating friends. We think of horses, like dogs and cats, as friends. Family, even.

Moonstruck (1987)

   

    Moonstruck (1987) [D: Norman Jewison. Cher, Nicolas Cage, Olympia Dukakis] 39-year-old widow Loretta Castorini (Cher) agrees to marry Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello) even though she doesn’t love him. At his request, she finds his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to invite him to the wedding. They fall in love, and the rest of the movie unravels the complications caused by this accident of fate. Loretta’s father Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia) is having an affair. Her mother Rose (Dukakis) has a brief conversational encounter with Perry, a philandering professor. Johnny’s mother recovers from her deathbed, which will delay the wedding. All in all, a lovely mess, which Jewison directs with flair. The actors are convincing, the editing supports their exquisite timing, the narrative pace is always just fast enough that we ignore improbabilities, and slow enough that we savour the Great Moments.
     Almost exactly in the middle we attend a performance of La Bohème (Ronny loves opera), which reminds us that this movie is itself an opera: larger than life, moving the story forward through emotion not reason, and ultimately satisfying because it feels right. Logic has nothing to do with it. Logically, we should all give up and die, since that’s what will happen to us all anyhow. This movie says, No, we should live, and risk heartbreak. As someone else said somewhere: Pain is good, it reminds us we are alive. So is joy, and for the same reason. ****

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

      In the Heat of the Night (1967) [D: Norman Jewison. Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger] Watching this movie, I realised that I hadn’t seen it since its release 46 years ago. I did see many of the TV series episodes, and my vague memories of both made for a melange of misleading impressions. I’m glad we decided to watch it on TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies. The story is simple: Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), waiting for a train in Sparta, Mississippi, is arrested as a suspect in the murder of Colbert. a Northerner planning to build a factory in Sparta. When Chief Gillespie (Steiger) learns that Tibbs is Philadelphia’s number one homicide expert, he wants Tibbs to help him. Tibbs and Gillespie solve the crime, but not before personal weaknesses, and social and racial tensions create events that intersect with and delay the solution of the puzzle.
     The movie is tough, considering its time it’s very tough. It’s difficult to recall the state of race relations in the 1960s. The civil rights movement was top of news and mind. We all knew that people had been murdered in the South. We knew that a mild mistake or social solecism could still be lethal for blacks in Mississippi and Alabama. In Canada the racism wasn’t as overt, but it was real enough. We were at the beginning of decades of self-congratulation for “achievements” that should have been unremarkable: black MPs, black Lt Governors, black writers, and so on. This movie arrived on our screens carrying a heavy load of baggage.
     Still, the movie works simply as a movie. It’s quite likely that under-30s won’t get the full import of some of its plot points, for example, a Philadelphia police chief telling his black subordinate to help out the cops in a Mississippi town, or Endicott and Tibbs conversation about orchids in Endicott’s green house, or the fact that a Northerner was planning to build a factory in the town.
     Chief Gillespie’s slow, grudging acceptance of  Virgil Tibbs as a colleague is nicely done. Gillespie first fingers Tibbs as the perpetrator, then a poor white boy, then one of his own officers. The unquestioned assumptions of the old Southern social order prevent clear thinking. Tibbs also suffers from prejudices: he wants to bring down Endicott, a man who tries to maintain the ante-bellum social order, and, absent slavery, succeeds. Endicott is not the murderer, or even behind the murder, but the values he represents mess up the investigation. The turning point comes when Tibbs admits his hatred of Endicott. Gillespie says, “You’re like the rest of us.” This is a turning point for Gillespie, too. Both men are now able to see each other's strengths and weaknesses as men as well as cops, and the case unravels pretty quickly from that point on.
     The movie works on many levels. The acting is very, very good. It’s difficult to portray a change in character; both Poitier and Steiger succeed. The secondary characters are given enough of a backstory that we understand why they act as they do. Their racism may be a reflex, but it’s a reflex they can on occasion transcend. The pacing of the movie is just right. It starts slowly, and most of the time we see the action contrasted with the slow rural ambience of the town, so that even a drive across town is imbued with menace. The overall feel is of reactions barely suppressed, of rage and fear seething below the Southern politeness, a politeness that cracks from time to time.
      Daylight, nighttime, interior and exterior shots are so subtly alternated that we don’t realise how seamlessly they tell the story until we reflect on that story. The story itself is entirely plausible, both the crime, and the personal and social conflicts that intersect with it. Tibbs occasionally seems a little to good to be true, but in the next shot he’s vain enough of his superior policing skills that this impression dissipates. Unlike the stereotypical detective, he has to be rescued from physical danger. The ending, when Gillespie takes leave of Tibbs with the affectionate “You take care, y’hear?”, is perhaps too Hollywood feel-good, but that’s a very minor cavil. ****

Bob Atkinson. North Bay in Postcards and Sudbury in Postcards. (1981 and 1982)

     Bob Atkinson. North Bay in Postcards and Sudbury in Postcards. (1981 and 1982) Collections of old postcards open a window on the past. These pictures were published both to show off the places they depicted, and to provide people with the kind of images they thought were important. Public buildings of various kinds, whether built with public money (such as libraries or schools) or private money (such as railway stations and bank buildings) figure prominently. So do street scenes, primarily of business sections. This may reflect Atkinson’s taste, but my own casual examination of old postcards (almost always overpriced) in antique stores persuades me that these books reflect the range of available images. Postcards show us what our ancestors thought worth photographing, and that was mostly works for the public good and evidence of their prosperity and enterprise. There has been a subtle shift: modern postcards lean more heavily towards scenery, and “tourist attractions.” ***

Poul Anderson. Space Folk (1989)

     Poul Anderson. Space Folk (1989) The title describes the common thread of this collection. Generally upbeat in the 50s-60s “hard science” mode, and often funny. One story deliberately takes the gloomy view, arguing that if we don’t go into space, we will perish as a civilisation. This story hardly works; thesis-ridden stories rarely do, unless they’re cast as fables or parables, and this one is in the naturalistic mode.
     Anderson has a talent for creating characters that seem to be more than contrivances to make a plot work, but he also has the failing of writing to a thesis more often than not. The stories all have a point, and it sometimes gets in the way. Anderson is careful to be ethnically inclusive, his space-craft crews have diverse names, but their ethnic backgrounds tend to be stereotyped. In fact, there is more than a whiff of racist over-compensation.
     There is a similar effort to give women equal status. Here too he tends to be limited by stereotypes; he likes Nordic amazons, and oddly enough his most believable women are these almost-caricatures. The most successful effort in this book is a farce set on a cloud-covered planet dominated by head-hunting, caste-ridden warrior lizards navigating by wind and weather. Ulrica is the woman warrior, and Didymus is the teacher-wimp, but his science enables him first to assist her in defeating a nasty aristocrat, and secondly to navigate the ship to the Earth base. A Foucault pendulum figures in both events. Ulrica falls in love-lust with her little rescuer, a fate he is not sure he desires. The touches of space-opera parody provide the element of fantasy that allows one to suspend disbelief and enjoy the silliness.
     The stories range from OK to very good. I omitted reading two in which Anderson writes using another writer’s universe. These just didn’t have the immediacy of setting and character at which Anderson excels, and which make his most pedestrian plots believable. ** to *** (2002)

Bill Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes (1982ff)

     Bill Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes (1982ff)
     Calvin and Hobbes (1987); Something under the Bed is Drooling (1988); Yukon Ho! (1989); The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book (TLSB) (1989) Revenge of the Baby-sat (RBS) (1991); Scientific Progress Goes Boink! (SPGB) (1991); Attack of the Deranged Mutant Snow Goons (1992); The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes (TIC&H) (1992; compilation of RBS and SPGB).
     There will be no more Calvin and Hobbes; Watterson stopped writing the strip in shortly after 1992. Like Berke Breathead, he had mined his vein; and there was no more ore. He knew that repetitions would not do; variations on his themes had already begun to appear, as is clear when one reads all of these books at once, and Calvin could not stay six years old forever. But while it lasted, C&H was one of the best available.
     Some people thought of Calvin as merely an updated Dennis the Menace (whom Dairy Queen has quietly removed from its graphics). Calvin was more than that. He was both as silly and naive as any six-year-old can be, and wise as only children can be. Watterson did sometimes yield to the temptation of putting his own views into Calvin or Hobbes’s mouths, and occasionally the strip descended into sentimentality, but overall it was bizarre, surreal, clear-eyed, satirical, truthful, and accurate. It was never cynical, though it came close. It worked not just because of the graphics (Watterson is especially good at facial expressions and fuzzy tigers), but also because of the language. Watterson was a writer as well as an graphic artist. The full page renderings of Spaceman Spiff in TLSB show that he could be a great comic book or illustrated novel writer. The verses in TIC&H show his talent for wordplay, a talent that also shows up in his brilliant parodies of PI stories (written to show Calvin’s struggles with math tests.), and in Hobbes’ epigrams. And Spaceman Spiff is a loving rendition of the SF fantasies of the 1950s and 60s. Worth rereading more than once. **** (2002)

Robert Katz. The Cassandra Crossing (1977)

     Robert Katz. The Cassandra Crossing (1977) Novelisation of a film script. These rarely work, and this is worse than most. It’s in sections like a film script, perhaps to give it more of the feel of a movie. Maltin gives the movie three stars, but I give this book none. I couldn’t finish it, stopped after about 10 pages, read a few pages later in the book. Egregious errors abound, e.g. the train supposedly weighs 22,900 tons. Gagging noise! (2002)

Dozois and Schmidt, eds. Roads Not Taken (1998)

     Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt, eds. Roads Not Taken (1998) Tales of Alternate History, ranging from the mildly humorous to the ploddingly serious to the politically despairing. I omitted reading “The Forest of Time” (Flynn), a tale based on the many worlds interpretation of QT. The best stories use what’s known of the past, put a little twist on it, and extrapolate in terms of what we know or guess about social developments, such as “Outpost of Empire” by Silverberg (the Romans control Europe in the 1500-1600s); “We Could do Worse”by Benford (Joe McCarthy becomes president); “Aristotle and the Gun” by Sprague de Camp (in which a disgruntled scientist tries to nudge Aristotle into a more scientific direction, but fails; Aristotle decides to devote himself to ethics, political theory, and aesthetics instead.)
     The means of the twist range from sheer chance to time-travel. Chance is the most satisfying; we all know how much of our lives results from unforeseen and unforeseeable events. A taste for this kind of fiction is in itself specialised, and within it, there are subgenres of differing appeal. Inventing an alternate history in detail is a pleasant occupation, much like inventing a game universe, but one must have the same interests as the author to enjoy the result. Like a game universe, the setting has a feeling of arbitrariness about it. After all, change a few contingencies, and still another scenario is just as plausible. The characters who inhabit such alternative worlds differ from us only in accidentals, such as language, knowledge of the world, costume, political assumptions, and so on. But it’s these accidental details one must focus on, in order to give the alternate history a feel of plausibility, and in doing so, one tends to lose the essence of character. The writer of alternate history must find the right balance between accident and essence, and few succeed. Benford’s “We could do Worse” comes closest, perhaps because it’s the least different from our own world. * to **** (2002)

Charles Dennis. The Next to Last Train Ride (1977)

Charles Dennis. The Next to Last Train Ride (1977) I bought this book to add to my collection of railroad-related fiction, but that’s all there is to recommend it, and it’s not enough. A mixed-up plot involving a coffin that supposedly contains the body of a Vietnam casualty, a woman with three breasts, a transfer of money between west and east coast crooks (in the aforesaid coffin), and of course a train, plus an assortment of other characters, all somehow related to the hapless hero, a failed and failing confidence trickster. All this might make for a saleable scenario or treatment suitable for the imagination of a movie studio executive, but it doesn’t translate into a readable book. Not unless the writer has the style and the timing to carry it off, and though Dennis tries hard, it doesn’t work. The strings on the characters are too visible, there’s a lot of the nudge-nudge wink-wink type of humour, check the cover art. Too many plot points are telegraphed, often two scenes ahead. To compensate for this, I guess, other events are complete surprises, contradicting expectations set up earlier.

One wonders what will happen next on this silly odyssey, and if that was Dennis’s intention, he succeeds. But not enough to keep me slogging on to the end. If Dennis had focused on writing a novel instead of a movie-treatment, the book could have been very good. There’s more than a touch of the surreal, but one gets the feeling that Dennis is thinking more in terms of how the book will read to a director looking for movie material than in terms of how the story will unfold. * (2002)

Update 2026-04-14: There is in fact a movie based on this book: Finders Keepers (1984). IMDB rating is 5.3. Available on YouTube.

Hurwitz and Fidell. Silly Signs (1974)

     A. B. Hurwitz and J. A. Fidell. Silly Signs (1974) A Scholastic book bought by Cassandra many years ago. Consists of what the title says: and some of the signs are pretty silly, too. Not known which are real and which are made up. I mean, some signs are purposely silly, others are silly by accident. I’d like to know which are which. Most are the result of the writers’ not thinking about how the sign will look to the intended audience.
     Samples: Belt Your Family and Save Their Lives. Come In and Borrow Enough to Get out of Debt. Wanted - Man to Take Care of Horses Who can Speak German.
     Amusing. Middle school pupils like this kind of thing in part because it confirms their growing sense of mastery of the language. One has to understand the language pretty well to catch the absurdities in these signs. ** (2002)

Alan Ayckbourn. Bedroom Farce (1977)

     Alan Ayckbourn. Bedroom Farce (1977) Two act comedy. Three couples prepare for their respective evenings: Delia and Earnest for an anniversary dinner, Malcolm and Kate for a party; while Nick stays home with a bad back, and Jan goes to the party. Delia’s son Trevor and his wife Susannah are having marital problems and interfere with all three couples. They spoil the party, interrupt people’s sleep, and finally reconcile.
     The set consists of the three bedrooms, and the action takes place over a few hours on a Saturday evening. The play is “good theatre”, that is, it affords the actors and director an opportunity to do a lot of fun stuff to make the play work. The story is simple enough, the dialogue is typically British middle class, which means very little difference between the characters’ styles of speech, and there’s also the typically British eye for the absurdity of everyday or ordinary life. The script is marked up by Doreen, she played Susannah. I’d like to have seen that. **½ (2002)

Russel Myers. Broomhilda: Sneaky Volcanoes (1982)

     Russel Myers. Broomhilda: Sneaky Volcanoes (1982) Compilation of strips. Broomhilda enjoyed a brief vogue in the 70s and 80s. In some ways she’s a female Hagar The Horrible. Her friends and companions are a less witty version of the Bloom County menagerie, with some influences from Walt Kelly’s Pogo. OK as a time waster. *1/2 (2002)

Gordon R. Dickson. Hour of the Horde (1970)

     Gordon R. Dickson. Hour of the Horde (1970) The Horde threatens the galaxy, and the Ancients from the centre of the Galaxy organise resistance. They recruit members of “barbarian” peoples, who have not shaken off the distracting effects of emotions. Miles Vander represents Earth. He fights his way to the top of the heap in the ship in which the barbarians are sequestered, and persuades them to train for battle. The Ancients flee when the Horde appears, as their computers tell them the odds are slightly against them. This infuriates the barbarians, who feel this as a betrayal of them and their own planets. Their rage-induced suicidal attack on the Horde tips the balance, and the Alliance wins, just barely. Vander and his barbarian friends receive technical help from the Ancients, and decide they will not eliminate emotion from their makeup, since it was emotion that drove them to attack against the odds, and win.
     An early effort by Dickson, and it shows. The copyright date is 1970, but the story is very 1950s. It is essentially a teenage geek fantasy. Miles is half paralysed from polio, but an obsessed painter. It’s his creativity that makes him a suitable candidate to represent Earth, and it’s his obsessiveness that makes him a leader among races who feel impotent and useless because of the Ancients’ decision not to use them as fighters, but only as psychic resonators. There’s also the psychic power motif, as if the mind had its own energies that affect other minds, a motif that is rarely used these days outside of fantasy fiction. And the initial setting is a college campus; sounds like Dickson wrote the book when he was in college. I suspect the book was published because Dickson had made his reputation by 1970, and so an old manuscript, perhaps edited a bit, became publishable. ** (2002)

Death of an Outsider (1988)

     M. C. Beaton Death of an Outsider (1988) Some years ago, we viewed a series of crime stories set in Lochdubh, a Highland village overseen by an amiable and somewhat lazy copper, Hamish MacBeth. The makers of the series exaggerated the eccentricity and cheerful paganism of the villagers, but not by much, and used Beaton’s hints of the darker nooks of the human psyche to remind us that evil is real, even in the most bucolically innocent places. This book is a nicely done addition to the series. I enjoyed reading it. Mainwaring, a deliberately annoying incomer to Cnothan (a  valley or two over from Lochdubh) is bashed over the head and falls into a lobster tank, where he is quickly reduced to a skeleton. The drunk set to guard the fish plant discovers the skeleton, and hauls it to a ring of standing stones. MacBeth is pushed aside from the main investigation by his enemy Chief Detective Supt. Blair, but of course manages to find all the clues that lead to the murderer. His love life is complicated (it always is), he misses his lovely Priscilla, assorted subplots confuse the cops if not the reader, and it all ends more or less happily, with justice of a sort being done. A good read, made better by having seen the videos: it helps to be able to imagine a face and a voice. **-½

The Quotable Dad (2003)

     Nick and Tony Lyons The Quotable Dad (2003) A gift. The title suggests that the quotations are by dads, but in fact they are about dads. As such they range from the sentimental to the mildly cynical. Lots of good stuff, opening at random I find:
     Never fret for an only son. The idea of failure will never occur to him. - George Bernard Shaw
     The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. - Theodore Hesburgh
     How children survive being brought up amazes me. -Malcolm S. Forbes.
And one that should remind us that nothing fundamental ever changes:
     Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
     That was said 2500 years ago by Socrates.
     A nice collection, good source of quotations. ***