Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 97
February 10, 2016
The Anonymous Source by A.C. Fuller
The Anonymous Source by A.C. Fuller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This pleasant mystery features a reporter as the primary investigator. He teams up with a lovely professor whose boyfriend-professor was recently killed. All this is set in the backdrop of the aftermath of the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks. The plot tends toward the hackneyed, with evil corporate types and a hired diabolical Ukrainian killer. It’s rather far-fetched, but the writing style is accurate and easy to read for grammar nazis like me.
The sparks take forever to fly between the main characters, and when they do, the ignition is implausibly missing. Still, that aspect was done tastefully, avoiding the crudeness you find in other examples of the genre. I’m not sure most mystery readers want tasteful, though. The settings range from New York to Hawaii and the main characters are mostly believable (which cannot be said for the auxiliary ones.) I’ll say this for it – I didn’t figure out who the anonymous source was. The final reveal was a good jolt of an ending.
I downloaded this when it was offered free and as a fellow author I know that the least a freeloader can do is write a review. Four stars may be a bit of a stretch, but it was good enough to hold my interest.
February 8, 2016
Classical Gas by Mason Williams
Considering this song was written and made popular in the 60s, I decided to give this video a psychedelic look. The song was written and performed originally by Mason Williams on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, but there have been many other guitarists, like Tommy Emmanuel, record it. I can’t compete with those pros, but then they haven’t written six mystery novels.
February 7, 2016
Fantasy sports and loyalty
This being Super Bowl Sunday and all it seems an appropriate time for a discussion of fantasy football and what it means. I’ll tell you what it means. It means the concept of loyalty is pretty much a bygone thing in this country. You see it everywhere. With all the fantasy sports leagues fans no longer care about their home team. They’ll root for their erstwhile favorite to do badly if they’ve started the opposing quarterback on their fantasy team. The players don’t stay with a team. If they think they’ll get more money or more playing time they’ll hop to another team in a heartbeat if they can. The coaches do the same. The owners don’t care. To them it’s just a business. They don’t even care about winning. They get a cut of the total revenue now whether they deserve it or not, so they make more by keeping payroll down, i.e. letting the good players go. This applies in other sports and even in college. Top prospects leave their school if another one promises a starting slot.
It’s not just sports. Companies no longer have any loyalty to their employees. Pensions are a thing of the past. The “HP way” is no more. Employees hop from one company to another as soon as their options vest in the last one. It’s everyone for himself. That’s today’s mentality. People don’t even get married, or if they do, they consider it just a convenience until they decide to get a divorce.
Of course I am only talking about trends. It’s a real trend, and getting worse every year, but I’m sure you know many exceptions. Maybe you and your company are loyal and true and blue. But I’m sure you also know plenty of examples that prove the trend. It’s a sad thing in my opinion.
February 3, 2016
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In this massive tome Bryson gives a creditable history of nearly everything … science related. He totally ignores traditional recorded human history such as wars and dynasties and exploration (other than scientific ones). He writes well and can make almost any topic seem interesting, but he has a few tendencies you should be prepared for if you plan to undertake this book. The most obvious obstacle is the sheer size of the book at over 500 pages. Bryson also seems almost obsessed with the notion of misplaced credit. Virtually every major discovery or breakthrough in science he discusses seems to have an associated story of someone who discovered or thought of it first but was not believed or published and the credit fell to someone else later. The appeal of this sort of revelation wanes after (or well before) the hundredth time it is mentioned. At least it did with me.
This is not a science book, at least not in the traditional sense of trying to impart a working or even academic knowledge of a scientific subject. Bryson is a journalist, not a scientist. He gets the basics right but tends to gloss over the science itself rather quickly in order to focus on the people who were involved. There is at least much biography as biology in the book. The reader learns where the controversies are and what the current frontiers of a field of science are, but not how to conduct any scientific research. Your SAT score won’t go up using this as a prep book, and that’s a good thing. It’s meant to be read for enjoyment and for an understanding of science and scientists as a whole, as an institution or process. The reader will appreciate how often it has gone wrong, how hard it has been to get on the right track, and mostly, how amazing the great minds have been to work out the vast store of knowledge and understanding we now enjoy. It has been in only the last few decades that so many myths have been destroyed.
The format is more like a very long magazine than a storybook. There is no plot. Each chapter is like a new article on a different subject. You can open it anywhere or read it in any order without losing anything. It makes it easier to pick up and start reading at any point. It also makes it easier to put down and put off at any point, which I often found myself doing since there was no suspense as to how it was going to come out or what was going to happen next. I enjoy non-fiction, but I find myself with less patience for overlong books in the genre. Still, I recommend this one to anyone who enjoys good writing and a layman’s interest in scientific progress.
February 2, 2016
Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas
Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
It’s a bit difficult rating this book because it’s a translation from the French. I’m not sure whether the weaknesses are primarily those of the author or the translator. Ultimately, the book didn’t work for me. It’s promoted as an Inspector Adamsberg mystery, but he doesn’t make a substantial appearance until two-thirds of the way through the book. The main character is Camille, his erstwhile lover, who is shacked up with a tall, handsome Canadian naturalist studying the wild wolves of the Pyrenees. The village they reside in is in sheep farming country.
After several local sheep are savaged, left dead with throats ripped out by a wolf of enormous size (based on the fang marks), some of the more superstitious villagers think it is a werewolf. Soon thereafter Suzanne, a beloved local figure, is killed the same way. The suspicion then turns to a shadowy figure named Massart who has disappeared. He is known to have a huge mastiff. These killings are followed by more sheep killings and then killings of men throughout the countryside. Camille sets off in a stinky lorry with Solimon, a black adoptee of Suzanne’s, and Watchee, an old man who also loved Suzanne, to track down Massart. The two men are both quite odd in their own ways and the conversations that occur on this road trip are bizarre and clumsy. I think the story was meant to be humorous or something of a farce, but I’m not sure. It may have just been bad translation. It never sounded like English-speakers talking. Even the title is bad. It’s a phrase taken from a heated conversation about Massart’s (or the werewolf’s, or real wolf’s) intentions. Can you imagine speaking that phrase?
As if that were not enough, the ending was particularly irritating. It is one of those where the case is solved because the inspector is privy to information not shared with the reader until the end when he reveals the solution. Thus it is impossible to solve it before the big reveal.
January 31, 2016
Anagrams on the News – Barbie
Barbie adds size diversity = Biddy bra sizes deviate, sir
January 30, 2016
January 26, 2016
Venus by Ben Bova
Venus by Ben Bova
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Venus is my type of science fiction – more science and less fiction. Of course it is an adventure thriller, and the story line includes some impossibilities, but there is also a lot of hard science in there. It is set in future, a hundred years or so, when men have industrialized the asteroid belt and set up colonies on the moon and Mars. Venus, however, has never been explored by “boots on the ground.” Van Humphries, the unlikely hero of the story, sets out to be the first, in order to recover the body of his brother who preceded him in an ill-fated attempt to explore our nearest planetary neighbor. Of course there is a beautiful young female scientist on board …
If you’re not careful you’ll end up learning a lot of actual facts about Venus while you are caught up in the drama of the tale. Van has a competitor, a mortal enemy of his father, the zillionaire who set the reward. The human story is riveting but I think you will enjoy the drama of the science, the excitement that NASA and the world enjoys when a real space mission goes well and we learn all kinds of new things. The prose is clear and easily understood, although the author overuses the word clamber and has a couple of other annoying idiosyncrasies. The narrator is very good for the audiobook.
January 24, 2016
Anagrams on the News
Lawmaker looking to uncork Indiana’s happy-hour law = Wowie! Unpopular hooligans amok; drink, talk anarchy
Another headline of mine in The Anagram Times
Original news story: Lawmaker looking to uncork Indiana’s happy-hour law USA Today
