Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 17

Flight 232 by Laurence Gonzalez

Flight 232 by Laurence Gonzalez

If you want an opportunity to read about humanity at its best, you might want to take a look at Flight 232. It’s the story of a passenger airplane that, as the result of a rare engine problem, ended up losing all of its hydraulics and with it the ability to steer. Somehow, its amazing pilots got the plane to the ground anyway—crashing, but not losing all of their passengers as everybody who knew anything about airplane mechanics believed would happen. Then even more amazing things began to happen as the passengers and the surrounding community mobilized to save as many lives as they could. The most stirring of these stories is the man who ran back into the smoke-filled plane, holding his breath and closing his eyes against the acrid fumes, because he believed he heard a baby crying—a baby who couldn’t have survived the crash—but did. There are other equally touching moments of people caring for each other and doing everything possible to help.

 

Gonzalez tells the story from a great many POVs which lets him follow the events forward and then constantly step back in time to pick up the thread from another part of the plane or from the people on the ground struggling to find a response to the disaster. It’s a very moving account—really a model for this sort of history.

 

A Brief History of the Samurai by Jonathan Clements

A Brief History of the Samurai by Jonathan Clements

This history wasn’t quite brief enough for me and it seemed to get bogged down in individuals rather than talk about the phenomenon of the samurai, their ethics, their skills, and all the things that we think of when we think samurai. Perhaps that is because the modern idea of bushido and the samurai is largely a myth created after the age of the samurai was over. Whatever the reason, I enjoyed the book but when I finished, I felt like the first and last chapters contained most of what I got out of it.

 

In the Barren Ground by Loreth Anne White

In the Barren Ground by Loreth Anne White

What I like best about this novel was the sense White conveyed of the wide open and very dangerous wilderness in northern Canada. It’s a vivid and threatening backdrop that is critical to all the events that occur in the novel. The main character, a pregnant police officer stuck by herself with the responsibility for thousands of square miles of mostly uninhabited terrain, is also a sympathetic and likeable figure.

 

The crime isn’t an obvious one at first. Wolves have eaten two biologists out in the wild, but the heroine starts to notice some unusual characteristics to the kills, and more importantly, strange similarities to past deaths which lead her to question whether these were animal kills at all.

 

The mystery is quite a good one, although it ran a little long for the material. My biggest problem with the book is that I never really believed in the central romance. White goes to great pains in the beginning to make the destined lovers dislike each other and that worked for me. Somewhere along the way they predictably fall in love and while I accepted it as inevitable, I never really believed in it.

 

Run, Hide, Die by Ian W. Sainsbury

Run, Hide, Die by Ian W. Sainsbury

This is what an action novel is supposed to read like. Jimmy Blue is the alternate personality of Tom Lewis. Tom is mentally damaged after surviving a bullet to the head when he was a child. His speech is slow and his IQ very low. Jimmy Blue is an angel of vengeance who is everything Tom is not—fast, brilliant, and driven to make a difference in the world. It's weird that the two men inhabit the same body and I feel bad for Tom having to deal with the aftermath of Jimmy Blue’s crusade against violent criminals.

 

The police, quite naturally, think Jimmy Blue is a criminal himself and seem determined to protect other murderers from him. After a particularly successful bit of vengeance in London, Blue decides it’s time to escape to the U.S. The problem is that the cops are looking for him, so he takes passage with a shady ship’s captain who is even shadier than he suspected. The results is a book that’s packed with action from beginning to end.

 

I do think there is one problem with the ending, but I can’t state what is it without giving away the conclusion of the story. And it wasn’t enough to even slightly damage my enjoyment of the tale.

 

Three for the Chair by Rex Stout

Three for the Chair by Rex Stout

Here are three more excellent novellas featuring Nero Wolfe. The best of the lot is the final one, Too Many Detectives, in which Wolfe and a large number of NYC detectives have been subpoenaed to testify about the practice of wiretapping when a client who tricked Wolfe into performing an illegal tap is murdered. The answer should have been obvious, but it wasn’t to me.

 

In the first story, A Window for Death, Wolfe takes the most insignificant element of a case—a carton of ice cream—and uses it to uncover a murderer.

 

And finally, in Immune to Murder, Wolfe’s culinary genius proves the key to unlocking the crime.

 

They are all great little stories.

 

Critical Failures 4 by Robert Bevan

Critical Failures 4 by Robert Bevan

Cavern Master Mordred has escaped into his fantasy world minus his magic dice and the hunt is on to track him down again. Most of the characters (maybe all) still want to return to the real world, but even if they didn’t, Mordred is bent on conquering the world he created so he can get his revenge on the PCs. In addition to the delightfully incompetent original cast, Bevan treats us to three new characters, my favorite of which is Randy, who is a paladin who chooses for his god—Jesus Christ.

 

Now, I think everyone needs to be forewarned that everything that happens around Randy the Paladin from that point forward is sacrilegious to the max, but it is also hilarious as a fantasy world attempts to understand Jesus—someone Randy doesn’t seems to understand very well himself. Bevan’s fantasy world interpretation is both hilarious and somewhat logical and it sets up a wonderfully madcap ending.

 

And while some characters seem to be trying really hard to take life seriously and accomplish something, we also get reminded in no uncertain terms that none of these people were particularly successful in their original earthly lives and those character flaws that hurt them in reality are also present in the fantasy world.

 

There were a LOT of surprises in this one. Four volumes is not enough for this series and I’m glad to note that there are several more to enjoy.

 

Travel by Bullet by John Scalzi

Travel by Bullet by John Scalzi

I really like the Dispatcher series. Each short mystery involves in some important way the unexplained and possibly miraculous new reality that people who are murdered or killed intentionally—come back to life. But they aren’t resurrected where they are killed, they are magically transported to the place they feel safest in the whole world. This process which no one understands, works 999 out of a thousand times. And it doesn’t include suicides.

 

In this story, our hero has two mysteries to solve. One is why a person he considers to be a friend threw himself out of a moving car. And the other is why a tech billionaire committed suicide at a ritzy party. Along the way, Scalzi gives us another good look at how this new resurrection ability is corrupting society. The title of the story is a clue to one of the ways that corruption expresses itself.

 

I find this series refreshing and I hope Scalzi will give us more of them.

 

The Story of Medieval England by Jennifer Paxton

The Story of Medieval England by Jennifer Paxton

This is an excellent overview of the history of England from the days of the Romans to the triumph of Henry Tudor. I have read a lot of these histories and am always pleased when a new one teaches me something. While it mostly tracks political history, it also deals with social, cultural, and literary developments. The problem with a brief survey like this is that you don’t get a lot of depth. For example, Paxton embraces the traditional Shakespearian narrative of evil King Richard murdering the princes in the tower, and while she mentions that not everyone agrees with this interpretation, she doesn’t go into any of the reasons that support the counter narrative that Henry Tudor was their killer. But to her credit, she does then point out that Henry killed all of the other possible claimants to the English throne—apparently without recognizing that this strengthens the case against him and weakens hers.

 

But little annoyances like this aside, this is a really good overview that everyone interested in English history should enjoy.

 

The Fold by Peter Clines

The Fold by Peter Clines

This book whet my appetite in the very first chapter and then introduced a wonderful science fiction mystery that promised to be a full and glorious meal. Unfortunately, instead of the banquet I was anticipating, the main course proved to be a lot of hollow sugary pastries.

 

First the good: This novel starts out as cerebral science fiction at its very best. There is a mystery out there and we know from chapter one that people are being hurt by it. As the chapters unfold it becomes apparent that the world may be in jeopardy—not from cataclysm but through a subtle juxtaposition that would cause ever increasing amounts of chaos and distress to societies across the planet.

 

That’s awesome and the hero is extremely well suited to uncover the root of the problem. Mike has a fully eidetic memory and Clines has conceptualized what that means better than any author I have ever read. Mike’s ability to sort through vast amounts of information quickly and decisively was amazing. The psychic damage that never being able to forget anything does to him was also a brilliantly insightful addition to the tale. I always enjoyed the scenes where his mind spins into gear and starts making connections, although frankly I wondered why it was so difficult for him to come to a conclusion that I reached in chapter one.

 

Now the bad: Mike makes brilliant deductions throughout this book but we’re at least halfway through it before he begins to consider what every reader knows is happening from chapter one. Heck, one of the team of scientists is even a Star Trek fanatic but the solution (born right out of that series) never occurs to her. So that’s bad, but perhaps we have to accept it so that there is proper dramatic build up, the next problem was just flat out disappointing.

 

The last quarter of the book moves from being a fantastic mystery to a shoot-them-up standoff at the OK Corral. This was such a copout from the much subtler and frankly far scarier problem I had initially envisioned based on the idea of millions of juxtapositions ripping apart social ties throughout the planet. In many ways, that ending would have been far creepier because it would be very easy to imagine the government refusing to accept the evidence of disaster in favor of a highly lucrative economy-changing invention.

 

In summary, The Fold is a wonderful idea with a highly disappointing ending.

 

White Trash Warlock by David R. Slayton

White Trash Warlock by David R. Slayton

I’d been planning to read this book for a while, but when it finally found its way to the top of my “to read” pile I found myself wishing it hadn’t. Adam is an interesting character, but his actions in the book didn’t appear to be “in character” for him. To the point, the whole book depends on his dropping everything to go and help a brother he is estranged from. The reason they’re estranged? The brother had Adam committed for seeing things with his magical abilities. The reason Bobby needs Adam to come help him? Bobby’s wife is in trouble and Bobby “saw” something supernatural with his own magical abilities. Stop and think about that for a moment. Bobby knew Adam’s powers were real and had him committed anyway. And Adam decides that must not really be important because this jerk needs his help now. So he not only drops everything, but puts his life in very serious dangers multiple times for a man who can’t even be polite to him. I never understood why he would do this.

 

This fundamental problem really spoiled the book for me. There was plenty of action and frankly a lot of it was good action. But I never understood why Adam was doing what he did in the novel from a “motivational” point of view. And most of the time, I felt like Bobby not only didn’t respect Adam, he was hostile to Adam because (as we learn later) Adam represents a part of his life he rejected. So, why again, was Adam helping this jerk?