Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 127

Fatal Dose promotion 3/21-26/2014

For you fans of Cached Out who have been looking for an excuse to get the sequel Fatal Dose, Amazon is offering a promotional price on the Kindle starting at 99 cents on 3/21/14 and rising back to its original $4.95 price on 3/26/14.

A Cliff Knowles Mystery

Review of A Year in Fear

A Year in Fear: A Rookie Detective’s First 12 Months by Harry Gossett


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As it says on the 4th star “I really liked it.” This unusual detective book is written in a style reminiscent of the best of the old pulp fiction novels. The main character, Frieda, is one tough cookie, and contrary to what the title would have you believe, seems fearless. I say it’s unusual because it’s written in episodes, almost like a collection of short stories rather than a novel. Each case comes on suddenly and is wrapped up quickly by our heroine, often cleverly. There’s no time for suspense here – just non-stop action. I chuckled several times at the original approach she used. I especially liked the goose episode. You’ll know it when you see it. It’s a bit raunchy for my taste with some graphic descriptions of sex crimes and some strong language, but nothing beyond an R rating.





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Alumni? Not really

For all of you out there feeling the need for a Latin lesson, here’s one for you. My wife graduated from Stanford and I got my law degree from Cal Berkeley – arch rivals. Her car has a Stanford license plate holder on it and mine has a University of California Berkeley holder on it. Neither of these say “alumni.” Why not? Because we aren’t alumni of these schools. Actually, as stated in that last sentence, we probably are, but we certainly are not alumni of either school. I am an alumnus of Berkeley and she is an alumna of Stanford. Yet the makers of license plate holders are apparently not Latin scholars. This is a bit surprising to me since I always wondered what else someone with a degree in Latin or Classics could do for a living. So why do all the license plate holders, and for that matter, associations for graduates, use the term “alumni”? Simple: “alumni” is the plural masculine form of the word. It also includes any group (i.e. more than one person) if at least one is male.

So “Alumni Association” is a proper term unless all the alums are women, in which case it should be “Alumnae Association”. By now you’re rolling your eyes and wondering why anyone cares. I’m not suggesting you should, but my wife and I were in the same Latin class in junior high school for two years. We’re both appreciative of the refinements and subtlety of language, so it just grates on us to display publicly something ungrammatical. This blog is called OnWords, after all. Maybe there’s also a touch of school rivalry in there. If either of us had an “alumni” plate, its plural nature would suggest that we were both graduates of the school mentioned. So below is an easy-reference chart. Note that the top labels (Male/Female) refer to the sex of the people being described, not the gender of the words in that column. See my very first post in this blog: People have sex (and words have gender).

Review of The Perfect Mile by Neal Bascomb

The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It by Neal Bascomb


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A friend loaned me this book since he knew I was a runner. I’ve never been a competitive runner, and never on a track team, so I was never in the kind of world depicted in this book. This is, of course, non-fiction, which means you have to either be into biographies, or running, or at least have a healthy curiosity about it for the book to be interesting to you. Despite the specialized target audience, the author managed to bring real drama into the book. The lives of the three featured runners are brought into detailed relief. One Englishman, one Aussie, one American, all striving to be the first to break the 4-minute mile. You probably already know which one did unless you’re a lot younger than me and not much interested in track. But the book is not just about the first to break that magic barrier. The title refers to that perfect mile race where the three top milers in the world race against each other to see who is really the best. The training regimens these three follow are absolutely mind-boggling. The hardships they faced are unimaginable – a father who opposes his son’s efforts, weather disasters, a badly cut foot, politics among Olympic officials, AAU officials, the sports press, individual coaches and team coaches, amateur status and work and study and military obligations, ad infinitum. You’d think it would be easy enough just to invite the three of them to a race and let them prove who the best man was, but it wasn’t that easy. My biggest complaint is that it was just too long. The story could have been told in half as many pages, but it was well-told.





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Kansas City Public Library

I just posted a graphic yesterday, but as an author I can’t pass up reposting this cool photo from Google+ user Thorsen Vreeland:

Kansas City Public Library

ACA Membership

As a word maven I am a long-standing member of the American Cryptogram Association. I thought members would be interested in seeing this graphic representation of the relative size of ACA membership in the U.S. I had to do some creative rearranging to avoid some doughnut holes, but you should be able to find your state. If it’s not there, that means there were no ACA members (4 of those). The data is from the 2013 Membership Directory. The dominance of the coasts over the middle of the country is plain to see, especially around the Seat of Government (SOG). Click on the image to see it enlarged.

Matchbook

I’m trying a new promotion offered by Amazon called Matchbook. If you buy (or bought) a hard copy of my book Cached Out from Amazon, you can now buy a Kindle copy for only $1.99 additional. Did you give a hard copy to a friend for Christmas and now you want to read it? If you have a Kindle or a Kindle app, now’s the time to buy.

Drug research

I’ve always been strongly opposed to illicit drug use. I came across this video lately and had to share. Don’t give up on it too soon – it’s not what it seems.

Review of Red Sparrow

Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got a real kick out of this one, although I can kick about a few things in it, too. This is a spy novel in the classic cold war US vs. Russia genre. The author is the real deal and the jargon, tradecraft, and dialogue reflect that. The story reeks of authenticity. The plot and character descriptions are already described sufficiently in other reviews, so I’ll add my personal perspective. First off, the FBI bashing got real old real fast. I also found the sex and torture scenes excessive, unnecessary, and pandering – frankly offensive, but perhaps not more so than has become common in the thriller genre. I listened to this one on CD and the reader was excellent. I don’t know Russian, but I’ve heard enough of it to believe the reader did. He convinced me, anyway. This book is much better than Blowback by Valerie Plame. I gave up on that one halfway through, so I’m not reviewing it. It wasn’t terrible, but just too much geared to the chick lit scene for my taste.

This author made an odd choice that, surprisingly, I haven’t seen mentioned in the dozen or so reviews I read, although I assume there are reviews out there mentioning it. Every chapter or so he ends with a recipe related to the preceding scene. I can’t say this bothered me or appealed to me; it was just sort of weird. Most of the recipes sounded somewhat stomach turning to me, but then I’m no foodie. I’m the type who wishes they’d invent a food pill so no one had to eat. In order to feed this conceit, the author crams a lot of restaurant or dinner meetings into the exposition, thus repeating in the text the same recipe that is presented at the end. This is a waste of time and a bit irritating in my opinion.

All in all, though, the plot was clever, the American characters believable, the action not so much but still entertaining, and it was refreshing to relive that era. The Russian characters were grossly overdrawn, comic-book-like Snidely Whiplash bad guys. Putin would not be pleased, but American fans of the genre will.





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Well Oiled

Well Oiled by Rubin Johnson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is crammed with lots of fascinating elements – triathlons, bitcoins, geocaching, energy policy, and more. I especially liked the Cal Tech ditch day stories, the Mexican cave exploring, and the history of the Esselen Indians to name a few. The author is clearly knowledgeable and passionate about all these things and I learned a lot reading it, but in the end, it suffered from a lack of cohesion. The plot took second place to the author’s desire to educate us on yet one more thing. The dialog was often clunky and full of exposition. It was nice to read a thriller that wasn’t burdened with the usual gore and pornographic scenes that seem so common in this genre, and I appreciated the clear, precise grammar, spelling, and overall professionalism in the writing, which is so often lacking in self-published books. If you’re looking for shootouts and graphic bedroom scenes, this isn’t the book for you, but if you’re looking for something that tells you all you ever wanted to know about bike fitting, botnets, and a dozen other interesting things, give it a try. I was provided a free copy in exchange for an honest review.





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