David G. Cookson's Blog, page 2

The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Kerouac was on journey, always. And in Dharma Bums he is on journey for Enlightenment. And Dharma Bums is framed loosely around his friendship with Japhy, a fellow traveler. The Dharma Bums starts with Kerouac stand-in main character hopping a train out of Los Angeles…later he offers an account of the first time Allan Ginsburg read his breakout poem, Howl (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”) to an audience, Kerouac leading the cheer, “Go! Go! Go!” and you see that taken by itself, this is a rambling book that doesn’t have a conventional plot but when paired with his other books and knowledge of the history of the beats, it becomes a valuable documentation of the times.

Author of On the Road and member of the Beat Generation (a sort of splintering off from The Greatest Generation), Kerouac has always been a sort of godfather of inspiration for my own writing. As a fan of Cometbus (long running zine that was often about traveling, squatting, punk, life…it appealed to the young punker in me and appeals to the old writer I am now) it is logical to go back to the Beats and Ginsburg and Burroughs and Jack Kerouac to see what it was like for the people that came before.

On the Road was the book that people know him for. But a tapestry is woven through all his novels which present a picture for a movement that led to a great wave of wonderful artists and poets and Route 66 (a show I loved even before I knew what the hell a Beatnik was). And Dharma Bums is one thread of the Beat tapestry.




View all my reviews

The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf

The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf by Isa Arsén

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A period piece, set in the 1950’s. It is dark noir; a tale of a woman who is losing herself to lies and to the demands of keeping up appearances for others.

Margaret Shoad is an up-and-coming New York stage actress who lands the part she has always wanted: Lady Macbeth in the cursed Scottish Play (MacBeth). After her stunning debut performance, she has some sort of…spell…and is sidelined and replaced by an…understudy…
Meanwhile, she has entered into a marriage of convenience for the sake of appearances. Her best friend is Wesley, a gay man and a gay actor in a time when that would have and could have cost him roles or even led to blacklisting. Their marriage is for show but they really do love each other in a friendly sort of way and in the end, they will depend on each other to survive…or not.

She winds up tagging along when her husband gets a part in Titus Andronicus in a playhouse way the hell in New Mexico, a three-day bus ride away. Invited by an eccentric director named Vaughn Kline, it is far and in the middle of nowhere but it is work and it is something. And it is there, with nothing much to do where she fosters a drug habit and enters a tryst with her husband’s new lover, a man who may not be what he seems.

From there it goes very dark and I won’t give away too much.

There’s a sense that everyone is slowly killing themselves one way or another, hiding things that must never come out.
But as always, the show must go on…




View all my reviews

I Might Be in Trouble

I Might Be in Trouble by Daniel Aleman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


David Alvarez had a hit book a few years ago called “The Millers” and he figured his career was skyrocketing…then his follow up novel “The Walk Home” became a total flop and his life unraveled…he lost his boyfriend, he burned through all the money he made (Living in New York aint cheap)…he is desperate to bounce back but he has no good ideas…then, on the advice of his indefatigable literary agent, Stacey, (I love her, she calls everyone “Darling”) he partakes in a wild night out…he hits up Grindr and meets Robert….drinks flow, sex ensues…and maybe just maybe he has finally shaken loose the beginnings of an idea for his next book…

And then the man he has gone to bed with does not wake up…

Desperate to keep this quiet (Because it looks really really bad to be implicated in a death that he may or may not have caused), and lacking the will to do the right thing, he calls his agent… Stacey…who barely blinks an eye at the problem in front of her…

They have to move the body….
They have to bring him back to his own hotel…
They have to do it without anyone noticing….

A couple of “Weekend at Bernie’s” trips with the dead man to put him somewhere else…and then we come across some unexpected problems…including the fact that Robert was not exactly the person he said he was…

But damn this will make a great book….

I’ll just say it. I really enjoyed this too much to be overly critical of it. It is difficult to 100 percent call it a comedy or to even take it very seriously. It’s just a fun book that takes you to a deliberately messy place. And that’s what you can hope for, darling.




View all my reviews

Flight Attendant Joe

Flight Attendant Joe by Joe Thomas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Joe Thomas regales us with tales from his 8 years of being a flight attendant and I am all ears.

A couple things to know. This book is lively, fun, as loud as a book can be. You might get thrown by the number of dirty jokes and odd references. He’s a gay man with a husband and a unique lens on a world into a strange industry (note: it’s also my industry.) Airline passengers are the worst, the WORST. And flight attendants regularly spend hours locked up in a metal tube with them.

And Joe dishes the dirt.

From cleaning up bodily fluids to dealing with borderline drunk and psychotic people, to putting up with coworkers who are less than stellar at their jobs…this book covers a lot of ground. It also takes diversions into things that aren’t strictly related to air travel. The bit about his friend Evan hit home…as I also have my Evan, a friend who is not a “balcony friend.” (someone who cheers you on from the balcony of life). Interpersonal relationships can take a beating in a job that takes you away from home. Seniority and thick skin are everything.

Joe is brash and unapologetic but once you are along for the ride, you are really in for something. This book is never boring, and clocking in at about 275 pages, it is a quick read. I started it on Tuesday and finished it in 5 days….





View all my reviews

Crossroads

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This one takes place in 1971 stateside in the shadow of a faraway war in Vietnam. The family at the heart of this tale is the Hildebrandts, a family head by an associate minister at an inner-city church, Russ…who has run into the cruel reality that he is not so well-liked at his church…there is a hot young minister who connects with the youth…who has supplanted him and passed him by in what serves as a career path for some and an oddity for others.

Russ is sick of his life, sick of his marriage. But his wife Marion is also sick of him.

Of course there are kids…Becky, popular and confused, falling in love with the hot young guitarists at Crossroads, a kind of Sunday School meets the rock concert vibe…. there is brother Clem, a moral absolutist and huge pain in everyone’s ass…and there is brother Perry, who sells drugs…

There are a few laugh-out-loud parts (the foot washing scene, for one) as well as explorations of religion and philosophy, colonialism, white savior-ism, etc. And a wrap up that had me nodding along and maybe hitting harder than I might have realized it would.

Franzen’s books are all about layers and digging into the present and the past that led us to this point. At 580 pages, this is a hefty dose of expositional voyages but it never seems tedious. Mostly it’s just fun going along for the ride. The fact that this is a period piece just gives it an extra layer to work with.

Took me a month to read but it was worth it. Always enjoyable.






View all my reviews

The Book Censor's Library

The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Sometime in the future…

When the book censors have won the war against books and free thought…

And imagination is a crime…

As is any mention of the world BEFORE the revolution.

There is a new book censor, and unnamed man. Who does his job, reading from a list of books that he must determine if they are a go or no go…

“All language is smooth. There are no ripples. Stay on the surface, and you’ll always be the best censor.”

In other words, live in the superficialities. We are not interested in the deeper meaning…we are not concerned with context.

There are rabbits in the building…

Like in Alice in Wonderland…

And then one day he reads a book that he doesn’t want to ban…

“As the book censor awoke one morning, filled with others’ words, he found himself transitioned into a reader…”

The book is Zorba the Greek.

He becomes the most wretched of things in a society that values order and discipline and obedience…

He becomes a book lover.

And soon he joins the underground, fighting back against a society that lost its way a long time ago.

Wow.
This one…

As a great man once said: “Goose stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them.”

It doesn’t matter what a book is about. It is not up to the State to determine whether a book has merit or not. Stamping out books is stamping out humanity.

The Book Censor’s Library is as delightful and heartwarming as it is terrifyingly possible.
And it might one day be mentioned in the same breath as Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, before it gets banned.





View all my reviews

White Robes and Broken Badges

White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us by Joe Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


White Robes and Broken Badges (A Book Review)
Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the evil among us.
By Joe Moore.

Rage Against the Machine once put it bluntly:

“Some of those of work forces/are the ones who burn crosses.”
Joe Moore went behind enemy lines…twice and lived to tell the tale.

The enemy was within our own borders.

The enemy was given life through hate.
It was empowered by the people.
And even more shockingly, it was assisted by Law Enforcement.

Moore went into the fray once to embed himself with a Klavern (a local unit of the Ku Klux Klan), ultimately having an impact. He prevented an assassination attempt on future president, Barak Obama, before being pulled out when a personal issue went sideways and rendered the case tainted.
Later he was re-embedded into a different Klavern.

And his actions ultimately led to convictions of major Klan figures.
Donald Trump’s re-election allowed the perpetrators of the January 6th Insurrection to run free. January 6th 2021 was merely a dry run at the attempt to overthrow the government. If certain people get their way, it will happen. It will happen if we let it happen.

This movement is largely based on the backs of racist groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath keepers, who have filled the void of a weakened KKK…a KKK weakened in large part by the heroic actions of a man like Joe Moore. His family, his personal life, his home…all were impacted by the dangerous work.
There are people in this country who would have you believe that “We” are being infested and pushed out by the woke mob or the maggots or vermin…even “replaced.” That our blood is being poisoned.

This is what racism is.

If you are somehow unaware of the evil…
If you do not believe that we have in some way empowered the evil among us…
You need to read this book.






View all my reviews

Character Limit

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Elon Musk, richest man in the world (and wannabe super-villain/savior of the human race) decided that he wanted to run the so called “Digital Public Square,” a place where millions (like myself) updated and pontificated, made jokes and shared our innermost thoughts. Somehow there is something so cathartic and addictive about telling hundreds/thousands of people some random bit of life story, a deep dark secret you might never tell people in the real world.

But Musk wanted it all for himself. Declaring that he wanted to bring freedom of speech back, he began his push to force the board of Twitter and Jack Dorsey et al into accepting an offer for the site…

Rumblings of this began in 2022…friends of mine left the site in advance, wanting nothing to do with a wannabe fascist who seems to get his own way in all things. Others (like me) stayed on to see what would happen next…maybe he wouldn’t buy it…and indeed, as Character Limit chronicles, it was not a direct line from here to there. But Musk pushed for it, offering 44 billion dollars (based on the number of shares x 54.20 stock price). He made the offer, which was generally agreed to be way more than the company was worth…tried to back out of it, was forced into following through…then completed the sale in 2023 and as we know now, used all his power to elect the allegedly business friendly Donald Trump to a second term as president, by the narrowest of margins…
The book ends well before the 2024 election. But that’s what wound up happening.

Character Limit takes us all the way through the sale. Conger and Mac do a thorough job of walking us through it, revealing the iron fist and shocking level of immaturity of the new corporate overlord. Musk could do anything he wants to…anything at all. When he brought a sink into the office to make a photo op/bad joke “Let that sink in” we were all condemned to a site that would be his personal repository for unfunny jokes and observations that would carry weight because…well, he’s the richest man in the world and he must know something…

He manages employees through fear and personal whims. He fires and makes cost saving cutbacks with no regard for an employee’s value and certainly no regard for them as a person.
He believes he knows everything, and that the existence of Twitter (now: “X”) is vital to the survival of humanity. (I mean, who talks like that?) Where are the religious leaders speaking out about someone who essentially is trying to say he’s the next Jesus?

It’s a terrific book. If you want the blueprint for how he is proceeding with DOGE and wrecking the Federal Government thus paving the way to fascism, you really have to check this out.




View all my reviews

All The Worst Humans

All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians by Phil Elwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Wow.

I will start by saying that I was giving the side-eye to this book before I even picked it up. The guy is admitting on page one (on the cover, actually) that he has written a book about being a PR Operative—a fixer of sorts—who enables the worst people to exist, to survive and flourish. And he doesn’t even feel bad about it. He is almost bragging about what an enabler he is. How when the money is right, there is no job to dirty or out of bounds. Genocides, suppression of free speech, or sportswashing (Hello, Dubai) …all made possible by people behind the scenes who push the right stories to the media; people who move the needle on public opinions on stories, or who help the right leaders maintain a positive public persona in the face of truly awful private lives…this is the world that Mr. Elwood occupies and talks about in this book.

I gave it the side-eye…after all, why should I believe that he isn’t truly ashamed of himself? Is he really seeing the error of his ways?

“…I’m confronted by the grim reality of totalitarian power. People are murdered. Thrown into mass graves. And the truth is, nobody pulls the trigger a few million times without help. Operators like me oil the machines that prop up authoritarian power all over the world. I help those machines function by laundering the sins of dictators through the press. I attack their enemies. Provide backdoor access to Washington.” (P 78).

For the record, I believe he has. The depths he crawls out of to fix himself are truly profound. I believe his story. I believe that on some level, he is very sorry for all that he has done. I just don’t think I could forgive him.

That said…

This book is a riot. And if you want to know why the world is this way, I could think of no better place to start then by checking out this rather slight book.





View all my reviews

Run

Run by Blake Crouch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Jack Colclough wakes up to a nightmare.

The whole world has gone insane.

A rash of inexplicable murders caused by a large swath of people infected my madness has consumed the country.
Names are being read across the Emergency Broadcast System…And Jack and his family are next on the list.

He packs up what he can and off they go, wife Dee, and children Naiomi and Cole…into the wasteland of an America that is consumed by madness and violence.

So goes Run, a propulsive thriller that almost never looks back. The bad guys are everywhere, hunger and dehydration are the enemy…and a family has to find a way to survive…but for what?

This is an early book by Blake Crouch, once self-published. Now that he is a well-known writer, we have the professional copy. Crouch is a skilled writer that I will follow even on the rougher trips. And the author of Dark Matter and Recursion has given us a rough trip; a raw and violent tour de force through a country that may be only a few years off from this kind of thing.




View all my reviews