Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 33

A Ghostly Ride in Gulfport by M. L. Bullock

A Ghostly Ride in Gulfport by M. L. Bullock

Bullock does it again. This time the ghost has a living family member who is obviously suffering from the loss of her brother. Add to that, the ghost is powerful enough to turn on the lights in a carnival that is not connected to the electric grid. That’s some serious juice, especially in a ghost that looks pretty hostile. As if that isn’t bad enough, Cassidy’s paintings are taking a turn for the weird. I haven’t been a fan of these paintings in the last few books, but this time Bullock gives them a twist that really makes them interesting. Add to that the social lives of the Gulf Coast Paranormal team continue to be bumpy, and you have the makings of another good book in this series.

 

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After a long and grueling fight in Angosto Pass, Marcus and his legionnaires finally catch a break. The Diamonte city of Malaquita is not only badly under garrisoned, it has no idea that the legion is on its doorstep. Yet driving out the Gota and capturing the city only creates more problems for the legion. The city is barren of supplies and could easily turn into a deathtrap if Marcus and his men remain to defend it, but if they can hold it through the coming harvests its strategic location will greatly bolster Amatista’s chances in the war. His only hope is to build an alliance with the most influential Gente in the city as he tried and failed to do in Morganita. His one tenuous asset to make this alliance happen is the cousin of the wife of his trusted friend, Senior Mago Efraín Estudioso, who married into the powerful Astrónomo family—but the Astrónomos have a terrible secret of their own that could transform them into Marcus’ vehement enemies. And now Marcus has accidentally spurned the high priest of Madre Tierra, making this one political seduction that seems destined to go very wrong!

 

Against Time by Dean Wesley Smith

Against Time by Dean Wesley Smith

The opening sequence of this novel is superb. Callie, a paleontologist, and two of her graduate students, come out of a cave system they have been working in to discover dead people everywhere. It’s very creepy and certainly catches the reader’s attention.

 

At the same time, two guys are flying around in their spaceship and come across the earth. From them, we discover that there are thousands of earths each looking pretty much the same and having the same development due to a mysterious group called “the seeders”. Doc and Fisher are just figuring out that billions of people on this world have been killed when a whole bunch of spaceships appear and begin “rescuing” the remaining two million people on the planet before a second deadly wave of radiation arrives to kill off the rest of the survivors. I put rescue in quotes because they then return everyone after the radiation passes and two million people spread out over a whole globe aren’t going to survive very long

 

But still, interesting set up. The middle part, Fisher’s attempt to reconnect with Callie (whom he meets briefly during the “rescue”) is lower key adventure, but toward the end things pick up again when Fisher puts some facts that were troubling me together and in doing so sets up the series to follow.

 

A nice little adventure, but far from Smith’s best work.

 

Ireland in the 1990s by Ed Lengel

Ireland in the 1990s by Ed Lengel

As an Irish-American whose great grandfather (by family legend) was murdered by the Black and Tans, I always enjoy learning more about Irish history. This Great Courses text by Ed Lengel walks the reader through one of the most difficult times in Irish history and does so with a depth of understanding for the many sides in the conflict. That’s actually one of the things Lengel does best—continually illustrate how this was so much more than Irish vs. English, or Catholic vs. Protestant. There were a very large number of interest groups complicating everything. So if you want to understand how a completely intractable problem shockingly transformed into the relatively peaceful and stable situation enjoyed today, this book is a great guide.

 

The Creature on Crenshaw Road by M. L. Bullock

The Creature on Crenshaw Road by M. L. Bullock

M. L. Bullock finds the magic again with the ninth book in her Gulf Coast Paranormal series and I’m trying to figure out what she did that brought the series back to full bloom for me. The first part was obvious—there is a whole new kind of threat in this book. A physical monster, referred to as a cryptid, and the fact that there is a physical beast raises the stakes tremendously in this novel and that was obviously a good thing. Also, the mystery was a good one with both a historical aspect and a modern aspect, and there was no point in which I wasn’t engaged in solving it.

 

However, I think what worked best for me was that the personal interactions sparked in a way that they haven’t in the past couple of books. An old friend of Midas’ has come back to rejoin the team and they obviously are good friends sparking the possibility of major jealousy problems with his girlfriend. The old friend also used to date Pete and one of the new team members is interested in her. This does not turn into a soap-opera-esq romance, but it does add some worthwhile color to the cast and made the whole book work on multiple levels.

 

Our Oldest Companions by Pat Shipman

Our Oldest Companions by Pat Shipman

I’ve never been a big dog person, but since my niece got a puppy who stays with my family during the day so my mother-in-law can watch her, I have started to warm to our four-legged friends. This book examines what we know and can speculate about how humans and dogs began a friendship that has lasted tens of thousands of years. In doing so, it also looks quite a bit at our earliest forebearers.

 

There was a ton of information here that came as a surprise to me. For example, apparently many Neanderthal had blue eyes and freckles. (Not sure why that hasn’t come up in my previous readings.) By far the best parts of the book for me were the many chapters spent on Australia, which has a very unique settlement pattern that notably didn’t include dogs in the beginning.

 

Overall, this is a great book to introduce you to the origins of humans interacting with dogs.

 

The Berlin Wall by Hope M. Harrison

The Berlin Wall by Hope M. Harrison

Harrison provides a quick overview of the Berlin Wall, starting with the political situation that led to its creation and ending with the aftermath of its demolition. The account is punctuated with both exciting and heart-wrenching tales of real people who risked (and often lost) everything in an attempt to move from east to west. Harrison provides a lot of details I didn’t know. Perhaps most striking was that the wall was initiated by the East Germans without the approval of the Soviet Union—that sort of independence is not something the stereotype of the Iron Curtain led me to expect. I was also surprised by just how much official transit went on between East and West through the wall and how dependent the East German government was on the revenue that they gained from taxing those they let visit from the west. I was also surprised to learn that West Germany was in the habit of “purchasing” the freedom of many East Germans convicted of trying to escape to the west. On this level, communist East Germany was actually quite capitalistic.

 

Greek Tragedy by Elizabeth Vandiver

Greek Tragedy by Elizabeth Vandiver

There are two major benefits to this Great Courses text. The first is the obvious one, Elizabeth Vandiver walks the reader through the great tragedies of Ancient Athens not only outlining the plots of these plays but helping to visualize what is happening and showing how they evolve and compare to the other Greek tragedies. The second major benefit is what she teaches us about the ancient Athenians and their culture through these plays and in helping to put the events in the plays in their historical context. It’s a wonderful book.

 

Heaven's Rivers by Dennis E. Taylor

Heaven’s Rivers by Dennis E. Taylor

For most of the novel, this was a book in search of a plot. The technical overarching plot was the search for Bender who has been missing for quite a while. The more interesting subplot focused on a group of Bobs who call themselves Starfleet and have decided to force the other Bobs to stop interacting with biologicals. The first plot didn’t work much at all until the very end of the novel and the second was interesting but not interesting enough to float a book this length.

 

And that is truly the biggest problem with the novel. It was way too long and badly in need of an editor who would tell the author he needed to cut one-third of the material to make this more readable. The whole middle of the novel bogged down in endless exploration of Heaven’s River—a Ringworld-derived-idea on which trillions of aliens could eventually live. There was just too much exploration and not enough finding Bender. This part of the plot picks up quite a bit when Bender is found and has to be rescued, but it was terribly tedious getting to that point.

 

The Starfleet plotline was better. There are thousands of Bobs over some twenty-five generations and many of them just don’t think like Bob anymore. Bob is an intensely libertarian mindset who just doesn’t like others telling him what to do. So, what do you do when you get a couple of thousand Bobs trying to dictate actions to the others? It’s an interesting problem and was the only reason I kept reading long enough to start liking the main storyline again.

 

After a lot of contemplation, I’ve decided I like this book more than I dislike it, but I’m hoping Taylor writes something new before returning to the Bobiverse.

 

The Life and Legacy of Muhammad by Maria Dakake

The Life and Legacy of Muhammad by Maria Dakake

This short Great Courses book on Muhammad and very early Islam is a great supplement to the quick coverage this subject matter usually gets in surveys of the medieval world or the origins of Western Civilization. Muhammad was obviously a fascinating man but important moments in his life like the first revelations from the Angel Gabriel, the move to Medina, the return to Mecca, and the succession after he passed away, are usually painted in quick brush strokes that fail to help the reader understand the intricacies of what was happening around him. The succession of Abu Bakr after Muhammad’s death illustrates this point quite well. It’s usually presented as the faithful gathering to pray and elect a successor. And yet, this succession was decided while Muhammad’s family was burying the prophet and one of the main contenders to succeed him, Ali, was not even present. And some of the actions Abu Bakr took next (like confiscating the prophet’s wealth to distribute to the poor instead of letting it be inherited by his family) certainly looks like an attempt to suppress the ability of Ali to challenge his rule. Details like these enrich history and let us see a little bit behind the simplistic curtain that popular histories often draw over complicated events.