Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 64

Review: Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories by Michael Shermer

Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories by Michael Shermer

There is no denying that this is a fascinating book, but it is not the book I expected it to be. Where I was expecting each lecture to be dedicated to a famous conspiracy theory or two, most of the book is dedicated to the psychology of people who believe in conspiracy theories and trying to understand why they find them attractive. It turns out that everyone believes in conspiracy theories of some sort—the political left and right, the rich and the poor, people of every race, people of every religion, the young, the old, and everyone in between. The book is a lot of fun, but you won’t come away knowing a lot more about specific conspiracies and conspiracy theories.

 

Review: Nerve by Dick Francis

Nerve by Dick Francis

Two things Dick Francis understands better than anyone is the pain of injuries and the raw courage it takes to ride a horse jumping at breakneck speeds. In this novel, he also proves he understands cowardice and the insidious depths to which the coward will plunge in order to get the better of people more courageous than he.

 

Jockeys are engaged in a reckless and dangerous trade. They risk the integrity of their bodies and even their lives every time they get on a horse. In this novel, Francis shows how precarious their careers really are and how vulnerable the jockeys are to rumor and inuendo when these two tools are wielded by an intelligent bad actor.

 

I’ve read just about all of Dick Francis’ novels and I thought this one was one of the best at actually getting into the life of a jockey and the world of English racing.

 

Review: Ten Big Questions of the American Civil War by Caroline Janney

Ten Big Questions of the American Civil War by Caroline Janney

I have read a lot of books on the American Civil War that trace the development of the war, often in excruciating detail, from beginning to end. Caroline Janney brought a refreshingly new perspective to discussing the war and in doing so made the subject matter extremely relevant to modern times. She does this by asking pressing questions that modern audiences raise about the war and then tracing their answers in enough detail to show their complexity while also being convincing. For example, Did Lincoln Free the Slaves? The answer, of course, is yes, he did, but he didn’t do it in a vacuum totally by himself and Janney shows how he came to do so. The parts I found most interesting were those that involved why the war was fought and how we remember it. Humans being human, we have changed our thinking about these things as time went on. When the Civil War began, the South very much thought that it was about slavery, but after losing the war they edited their story in an attempt to make their cause seem more high-minded and just. Similarly, at the start of the war Northerners did not the war to be about slavery and insisted it was about preserving the union, but after the war it was the emancipation of the slaves that they most focused upon, recognizing it to have been a noble outcome of the struggle. Overall, this is one of the best books I’ve read on the Civil War because of its focus on issues and Janney’s willingness to tie those issues to modern debates in our society.

 

Review: Killer Chromosomes by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 32 Killer Chromosomes by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

After several weak books, The Destroyer finds its magic again with a straight-up science fiction adventure story. Scientist Sheila Feinberg recklessly combines several experimental DNA solutions in an attempt to prove how safe they are and turns herself into a sort of weretiger driven with a need to hunt and kill humans. Remo is sent out to find the beast and makes a critical mistake which leads to Feinberg almost killing him. He’s still good enough that he drives Feinberg off, but the shock to his system knocks him out of his Sinanju training (something Chiun describes as an amnesia of the body rather than the mind) and he begins sinking back into his ordinary human state—smoking cigarettes, eating meat, and plunging into a terrible depression.

 

Feinberg, meanwhile, is so impressed by Remo’s physical skills that she becomes obsessed with capturing him as a stud for a future race of tiger creatures. It’s not completely clear why she feels the need to do this, because she also begins forcing regular humans to imbibe her tiger formula turning them into werebeasts like her—creatures that begin hunting Remo.

 

Smith also makes several mistakes here and President Carter actually tries (and fails) to shut CURE down because Remo isn’t reporting in anymore. In setting a trap for the tiger people, Smith unknowingly puts everything on the line as CURE faces off against its most serious threat yet.

 

Review: Caesar's Legion by Stephen Dando-Collins

Caesar’s Legion by Stephen Dando-Collins

I like the idea behind this book, which traces the Tenth Legion from its creation until it was disbanded. Most of the book is dedicated to the legion’s role in fighting for Julius Caesar, which means Dando-Collins gets to walk the reader through a number of famous battles. This is both a strength and weakness of the monograph as for much of the book it feels as if we are really getting a sort of bio of Caesar, but then suddenly Caesar is wrapped up at extreme speed and killed and the legion goes on to other things.

 

There were two other things I found disappointing about the book. I would have liked to have seen a lot of time put into what life in the legion was like, and I just never got that sort of day-to-day life view I was hoping for. Also, Dando-Collins chose to use modern ranks like colonel and general to describe Caesar’s officers. I understand he’s trying to make these men’s roles more accessible to the modern reader, but I found it jarring every time a modern rank was mentioned.

 

Six Western Crime Stories--The Miss Pandora Parson Series

The Miss Pandora Parson Series

 

I'm happy to announce that I have been able to make three more stories in my Miss Pandora Series available for my fans. This series of crime stories set in the Old West was originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. They focus on a lady gambler named Pandora Parson, a bare knuckle boxer, Corey "Rock Quarry" Callaghan, and his trainer, Patrick Sullivan. As you might imagine, they get into a lot of trouble while basically trying to mind their own business and make a living in a rough and tumble world.

 

 

 

The series is available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Links are below:

 

Pandora's Luck

 

Pandora's Defense

 

Pandora's Journey

 

Pandora's Fort

 

Pandora's Ghost Town

 

Pandora's Demon

New Book: Fugitive by Gilbert M. Stack

Fugitive, the first novel in my new series, The Unity, is now available on Amazon (or free on Kindle Unlimited). I've been toying around with this book for nearly ten years, but the ideas underlying it and the series stretch back something like three decades. It's a wonderful feeling to finally be making it available to be read. Here's the blurb:

 

Deep in the Fringe on a tramp freighter, Jewel Aurora is about to discover that there are much worse things than being forced into a marriage to secure her parents’ fortune. On the edges of human space, where no one can be trusted with your back, the young woman is about to stumble upon a fortune that star nations will go to war to possess. It’s a treasure that has already killed two sets of colonists who tried to claim it. And if anyone learns she and her crewmates have found it, it is absolutely certain to attract the attention of the two influential families she turned fugitive to escape—assuming, of course, that she and her shipmates are not the third set of victims to die on a cold little world far from the core of galactic civilization.

Here's the link to the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Fugitive-Gilbe...

Review: The Head Men by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 31 The Head Men by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Jimmy Carter is in the White House and has discovered CURE, knows what it can do, and is so confident in its abilities that he refuses to worry about a very credible assassination threat. Indeed, he’s so confident in Remo and Chiun’s skills that he decides to stops payments that have been made by several presidents as a preventive measure to stay an unknown assassin’s hand. The problem is that Remo cannot defend the president from a threat that he doesn’t know about.

 

This is a much better story than the series has been producing of late. The problem is credible and the solution—hinted at by Sinanju legend—was well thought out. There’s a lot of muddling around in the middle that really wasn’t that fun, but when Remo finally figures out what’s going on things start moving well again.

 

Perhaps the best element of the story was the way in which Murphy and Sapir took a centuries-old Sinanju teaching fable and showed how it directly applied to modern day problems. The Masters of Sinanju are not the best solely because of their extraordinary physical abilities. They have been in the assassination trade for thousands of years and have learned just about everything there is to know about killing people. It was very clever of the authors to show how relevant that ancient knowledge can be today.

 

Review: High Strangeness by Will MacLean

High Strangeness by Will MacLean

I love a good radio drama, and lately, thanks to audiobooks, the format has been revived in fully dramatized stories. That’s what you get with High Strangeness, a quirky, often funny, tale of paranormal craziness that is so out of hand it will quite likely destroy life as we know it. A fanatical paranormal investigator stumbles into an actual otherworldly event and runs afoul of a secret government agency that both investigates these happenings and tries to shut up anyone else who finds out about them. A lot of the action is delightfully over the top. You’ve got clones, cow mutilations, a bizarre religious cult, rival paranormal investigators, coverups, the aforementioned end of the world, and an awful lot of fun. The book is set up for a sequel and I’m certainly hoping we get one.

 

Review: Mugger Blood by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 30 Mugger Blood by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

This is one of the worst Destroyer novels in the series thus far. I really can’t find anything positive to say about the plot. The story is slow moving and engaged in a seemingly endless satirical parody of the crime and law enforcement problems (plus the educational system problems) of New York City in the 1970s. It was positively painful to read, and if I weren’t rereading the whole series, I would have given up on it.

 

Yet, I find it interesting to note that the author, Warren Murphy, reports this as one of his favorite stories. His reason? Remo goes off on his own to try and help people instead of waiting for his next assignment from CURE.