Edited to add: Reason tribute.
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Obit watch.
Monday, July 12th, 2010Books in brief: Friends of the Family: The Inside Story of the Mafia Cops Case
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010The Mafia Cops case is a great story for true crime lovers. Two retired NYPD cops are arrested, accused of being in the Mafia’s pocket for almost their entire careers on the force, convicted, have their conviction partially overturned, reinstated on appeal, and wind up with lengthy prison terms. Adding additional savor to the case are such minor details as:
- These cops didn’t just sell inside NYPD information to the mob: they’re accused of actually performing hits for the mob themselves, using their badges as cover.
- One of the convicted cops actually wrote a book
about how he overcame his upbringing in a Mafia family to become a decorated NYPD officer.
This has the makings of a pretty decent book.
Friends of the Family: The Inside Story of the Mafia Cops Case
I expected a book co-written by two of the people who worked on the case (a former NYPD detective and an assistant DA) to be at least somewhat compelling. Instead, that’s actually the source of the book’s biggest problems. Problem number one: because Dades (the detective) and Vecchione (the assistant DA) are co-authors, the book is told entirely from their point of view. This is a problem because the decision to prosecute the Mafia Cops at the Federal level, rather than locally, was rather controversial, and frankly questionable. The conviction was initially overturned because the Federal prosecutors chose to bring RICO charges against the two cops: there are legal questions about whether their ongoing criminal activities fell inside or outside of the statute of limitations. An outside observer could have written an interesting book giving both sides of the case: because Fisher chose to work with Dades and Vecchione, his coverage of the question is mostly quoting uncritically the griping of the local cops and DA’s office. It reads like an episode of NYPD Blue: The Bad Years.
A second problem is that Dades and Vecchione are not well served by their ghost writer. Vecchione, in particular, comes across as a cypher. We know nothing about him going into the book, and little more than nothing coming out.
The book’s third, crippling, problem is actually related to the second problem. If Vecchione is a cypher, we end up knowing too much about Dades. Why is that a major issue? Because a great deal of time and space in the book is devoted to Dades and his issues. Dades is bitter: he feels he’s being forced into retirement after 20 years of service to the NYPD. Why does he feel “forced” into retirement? Let’s go over the reasons:
- Dades cheated on his wife with the wife of a suspect he arrested.
- When he broke off the relationship, the woman he was cheating with accused him of rape.
- Dades was cleared by NYPD Internal Affairs.
- Dades also managed to avoid a charge of “conduct unbecoming an officer”. The book doesn’t specify how he did that, and I actually am curious. After all, he admitted the affair…
- In spite of all this, Dades feels like he has to retire because he’s made enemies within the department, and within Internal Affairs specifically. Dades is bitter, resentful, and wonders why he is being treated like a criminal. After all, what did he do wrong? (Except for the whole cheating on his wife, jeopardizing a criminal case, and making the department look bad thing.)
In addition to Dades and his resentment about being “forced” out of the NYPD, a considerable amount of space is devoted to Dades and his attempt to establish a relationship with the father who walked out on him when Dades was a kid. I figure there’s about two people, maybe, who care about that. The rest of us wanted the ghost writer to shut the hell up about Dades and his father issues and get back to the case already.
I have not read it yet, but I suspect The Brotherhoods: The True Story of Two Cops Who Murdered for the Mafia
(I’d like to thank Patrick at Popehat, who encouraged me to write this review.)
And the head coach wants no sissies…
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010Happy Bloomsday, everyone!
Use your freedom of Joyce!
For some reason, I started thinking about food, and stumbled across these two links to Bloomsday Breakfasts. Enjoy. As for me, I think I’ll stick to some Gorgonzola and a glass of Burgundy; I’m not much for the inner organs of beasts, with or without relish.
One of these years, I’m going to get it together enough to do my own Bloomsday greeting cards.
(Subject line hattip, for those of you who didn’t get enough Dr. Demento as a child.)
The Hidden World of Girls.
Monday, June 14th, 2010I’m a day late and a few bucks short on this (somehow I missed it the first time around) but I did want to put up a link to this story from NPR’s “The Hidden World of Girls” project, featuring my friend Pat Cadigan.
(Lawrence and I discussed this: I get the Pat Cadigan beat, he gets the giant spider beat. Seems like a fair split to me.)
Why does a Yugo have a rear window defroster?
Monday, June 14th, 2010Quick thoughts on Jason Vuic’s The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
- This is almost as much a biography of Malcolm Bricklin as it is a history of the Yugo. I’ve hung around with enough car people to have heard of Bricklin, but not at the level of detail Vuic provides. One might say that Bricklin is a “colorful” character. One might also say that some of his business dealings pre-Yugo, Yugo, and post-Yugo, were…well, in the interest of avoiding lawsuits, let’s just say “a touch irregular”.
- Vuic makes an interesting argument that the Yugo wasn’t actually that bad a car. The short summary of his reasoning is: it was sold in the United States, therefore, it wasn’t that bad. A more elaborate summary of Vuic’s reasoning is that any car sold in the U.S. has to meet a certain minimum set of Federal standards; any car that can meet those standards is, almost by definition, not that bad a car. He goes on to argue that the Subaru 360 (a car I’d never heard of, but I was three years old when Subaru started importing it) is actually a much worse car. (I think Vuic undercuts his argument when he points out that the 360 was not sold as a car; it was actually sold as a “covered motorcycle” to get around U.S. safety standards. And guess who imported the 360 into the U.S.? Bricklin.)
- Vuic also manages to make Yugoslavian geopolitics somewhat interesting.
- He has a good sampling of Yugo jokes.
- And his endnotes show that he did his homework; he’s got citations to things like Composite World magazine and biographies of obscure Canadian (wait, is “obscure Canadian” redundant?) politicians. Reading the endnotes, I often found myself wondering, “Where did he dig that up?”
I was expecting, based on the reviews and excerpts I’d read online, that this would be at least a halfway decent book. The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
Sometimes, you’ve just got to shake your head…
Thursday, June 10th, 2010…and say “Wow”.
Tim Rutten reviews the new Chuck Barris book, Della: A Memoir of My Daughter, in the LAT.
Pull quote:
…it is difficult to understand how a reputable house like Simon & Schuster came to publish this wretched volume.
Timeless. Changeless.
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010In my family, there’s a running joke: you know it is a slow news day when the local paper runs a story about the timeless, changeless ways of the Amish.
The NYT covers the sudden Federal interest in changing Amish farming practices. Specifically, cattle runoff from the Amish and Old Order Mennonite farmers around Chesapeake Bay is destroying the bay’s ecosystem; the Feds are trying to persuade the farmers to implement practices that would reduce runoff, and even offering government grants to farmers. Of course…
Persuading plain-sect farmers to install fences and buffers underwritten by federal grants has been challenging because of their tendency to shy from government programs, including subsidies. Members neither pay Social Security nor receive its benefits, for example.
In other news, William Grimes (author of Straight Up or On the Rocks
(That reminds me: has anyone out there read Chasing the White Dog
Yes. I am sure Mr. Duncan arranged his death with the favorable tax consequences to his children in mind.
Oh, guess what? David Lee Powell has filed a new appeal!
Houston attorney Richard Burr said in a 53-page application for a writ of habeas corpus that Powell has been a model inmate, that he poses no threat to society and that to execute him would violate his constitutional rights prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.
“…think it possible you may be mistaken.”
Monday, June 7th, 2010Two of my favorite authors showed up while I was making the Internet rounds this morning.
The San Jose Mercury News has an interview with Tim Cahill, who just finished a semester of teaching at San Jose State. I hadn’t heard much from or about Cahill in a while, and the interview explains why.
Slate has an interview with Anthony Bourdain, specifically dealing with issues of right, wrong, and taste.
I was just in Liberia recently, and although I find certain tribal practices personally deeply repellant, I’d always felt uncomfortable with the idea of these “enlightened humanitarians” going to Africa and lecturing people who don’t have clean water and have been living with these systems for centuries about how to behave. And yet I gotta tell you, Liberia made me ask myself: Are some things just wrong? Genital mutilation would be one. Some of the practices of some of the traditional tribal elders—witch doctors, basically—are another. I really wonder whether there are absolutes in some cases. It’s something I’m wrestling with, clearly.
This interview is part of a series, “The Wrong Stuff“, by Kathryn Schulz, and is tied in to her forthcoming book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
I also wanted to link to this story about a Baltimore shooting involving an off-duty cop (hattip: Balko); not because I want to comment on the story itself (that’s being ably handled at Balko’s site), but because of this:
Baltimore Police Maj. Terrence McLarney, head of the homicide unit, said there is no indication the two men met inside the establishment or knew each other.
Terrence McLarney? Terrence f’ing McLarney? Tell me this can’t be the same Terrence McLarney who was a Detective Sergeant in Homicide when David Simon wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
(Subject line hattip.)
Edited to add: Well, McLarney and Worden both have entries in Wikipedia, believe it or not. And Worden apparently played “Det. Donald Worden” in a Season 5 episode of The Wire. McLarney’s entry says this:
In July 2008, McLarney was named the official commander of the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit, a position he had been the acting commander of since May 2008.
So, yeah, seems like the same guy.
Three men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong…
Thursday, May 27th, 2010Slate has an interesting summary/review of Milton Rokeach’s book, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti
Rokeach’s book is one of the more fascinating works of psychology I’ve read. I’d put it up there with When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World
Basically, Rokeach found three men in an asylum, each of whom believed he was Jesus Christ…and then put them together to see what happened.
So how was your day?
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010My primary care doctor has been on my case to see a cardiologist. She sent me to one practice, who we’ll call “Austin Heart”. I fired them after my first visit. This time she sent me over to a practice we’ll call The Grace L. Ferguson Heart (And Storm Door Co.)
I go in last week. They interview me, do an EKG. Some minor abnormalities on the EKG, but “nothing that really causes us concern”. Still, given my age and other factors, they want to do some tests “just to establish a baseline”. “Fine,” I say, “let’s get those scheduled and get them all knocked out in one day so I can minimize the amount of time I have to take off work.”
So they schedule a nuclear stress test, an echocardiogram, and a PADNET test (for peripheral artery disease) for this morning. Except for some reason they can’t schedule the PADNET test; I have to call The Hospital and schedule it myself. I figure this is going to be just a half-day thing, right? So I schedule only a half-day off work, and spend Monday night and all day Tuesday off coffee, soda, chocolate (not that I eat a lot of that anyway), tea, and anything else with caffeine in it.
Show up this morning. Somehow, the camera for the nuclear stress test had gone down over night, and they weren’t sure it was going to come back up. It takes time for “the heads” to come up to operating temperature.
Fine, we can still knock out the echo and the PADNET, and maybe the camera will come back up. So we do the echo, they call over to The Hospital and move my appointment up, I walk over to The Hospital and check in there.
The Hospital is out-of-network (OK, fine) and I haven’t met my $500 deductible for the year, so they want $500 RIGHT NOW for the test. “How much does this test cost?” <clerk calls manager> “Between $400 and $500.” Fine. Pay the $500. This test basically consists of one guy and 30 minutes of his time, mostly putting on and removing blood pressure cuffs from my arms and legs, and working the machine that actually pumps up the cuffs and takes the readings. You can’t tell me this is a $500 per person machine.
(But, as a side note, The Hospital is VERY NICE. If you’re going to go to a hospital, this is the one you want to go to. It even has a cafe I’d actually be willing to eat in, although part of that may have been that I hadn’t had anything to eat except some Pringles in the morning, and no coffee, soda, or tea.)
So I go back upstairs to Grace after they run that test. They tell me Dr. X (not THE Dr. X) will be in to see me in a few minutes. Then they come back and say, “Oh, the camera’s up, we can do the test now.” So the Nuclear Camera Guy rounds me and the four other people who were also scheduled for camera time up and takes us back down to The Hospital’s nuclear lab. Lucky me, I get to go first, since I had the earliest scheduled appointment. It only takes him two tries to get an IV into me (the second try he stuck the back of my left hand, so I now have a nice little puckered place there). Then I get to spend a half-hour in the imaging camera, which is about as roomy as an MRI machine when working (but without the magnetic fields, which is a good thing, since I had a pocket full of metal). Then they take me out and tell me they’ll come get me in a hour and a half (1:30 PM) for round two.
Of course, I’m supposed to be at work at 1, so I had to call my boss, tell him it looks like this is going to be an all-day affair, get the number to call and change my schedule from him, call and change my half-day to a full-day, wait around, spend another half-hour in the camera, go back upstairs to Grace; by now it’s 1:45 PM or so.
(Of course, since all the tests are done, I stop by The Cafe in The Hospital and tell the woman behind the counter I want an extra-large coffee. If I had been thinking about it, I would have told Nuclear Camera Guy to leave the IV line in, and just had the girl behind the counter inject that extra large coffee straight into the vein.)
“Did you need something else?” “Well, I thought Dr. X wanted to see me after the tests.” “Let me check.” <comes back> “You didn’t see him already?” “No, he was going to see me, but then the camera came back up, and we went down to that.” <wait> Very nice nurse comes out and explains politely that it’s going to take some time for him to look over the results (which I expected), he’ll call me, and I can go ahead and leave.
Leave. Five minutes down the road, cell phone rings. “How far away are you? Can you come back? Dr. X wants to see you.” “I can come back. I’ll come back. I WANT TO GET EVERYTHING TAKEN CARE OF TODAY.” (By this time, I have probably used the phrase “I WANT TO GET EVERYTHING TAKEN CARE OF TODAY.” with the capitalization, at least a half-dozen times to everyone in the office.) “Let me check.” She puts me on hold. Meanwhile, I’m hanging a U turn and heading back. By the time she gets back on the phone, I’m pulling into their driveway. “Can you come back on Friday?” ” I WANT TO GET EVERYTHING TAKEN CARE OF TODAY. If I have to wait, that’s okay.” “Well, Dr. X left for the day (at 2 PM; ah, the exciting life of a cardiologist) and he won’t be back. Can you come in on Friday?” “Okay, fine, if we do it early.”
So now I have to take more time off work so I can go in at 8:30 AM on Friday, which is going to look real good. Plus, it isn’t like I have unlimited time off work.
The thing that really aggravates me is that everyone was so nice and apologetic about the problems with the camera and all the waiting around. Camera Guy kept apologizing to me, and even offered to buy me a Coke if I wanted one (which I didn’t, plus I didn’t think I was supposed to have caffeinated sodas until after the tests were over). I’m very happy with Grace, and with Dr. X, so far, but this was just one of those days.
At least I finished What the Dog Saw
Edited to add: And, since the whole point of the nuclear stress test was to get imaging of my heart: when I see Dr. X on Friday, I plan to ask him if I can order some color glossy prints, perhaps 8″ x 10″s. If I can, I’ll scan them (copyright permitting) and post them here.
True crime.
Monday, May 24th, 2010Bill Crider, one of nature’s noblemen, points us to this list of “The 25 Best True Crime Books” from the Forensic Colleges blog.
Blogging about other people’s lists seems to me to be non-productive (de gustibus non disputatum and all that), but I’m making an exception here because this seems to be a pretty solid list. I’ve read 9 out of the 25 listed, and mostly agree with those choices.
Of course, I have a few quibbles:
- I wouldn’t have put both Mark Bowden books on the list, though he is a heck of a good writer. Finders Keepers
would be my pick for the list: Doctor Dealer
is only a so-so book (and a very early Bowden).
- I confess that I have not read Killer Clown
, but it will have to be one heck of a book to beat Buried Dreams
on the Gacy front.
- The Amanda Knox case is fascinating and troubling, but it seems a bit early to be putting Angel Face
on a best list. I have something of the same quibble about The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
.
- I’ve read Crime and Science – The New Frontier in Criminology
, and it seems odd to pick that over Thorwald’s much more famous Century of the Detective
. To be fair, though, I’ve only read the latter book in the Reader’s Digest Condensed Edition. I’ve been trying to find a cheap used copy without much luck.
- Blood and Money
is actually a 1976 book, though it appears to have been reissued in 2001. (I read that for the first time last year; it is a swell book that belongs on the list.)
- The Onion Field
, dammit!
Wow.
Thursday, May 20th, 2010In order by “Squeee!” factor:
- Dennis Lehane has a new book coming in November.
- The new book is a Kenzie and Gennaro novel. Lehane hasn’t written one of those since 1999.
- The new book is a sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone.
(Hattip to The Rap Sheet.)
She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake…
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010The good folks over at The Rap Sheet are running a contest asking folks to name their four favorite private eye novels. It seems like a fun idea, so I’m sending in my entry. But while I was working on that, it occurred to me that I could get a blog post out of it as well; especially if I didn’t limit it to just four.
So here’s a list, in no particular order, of my ten favorite private eye novels, with some comments. The ones I included in my list for The Rap Sheet are marked with a (*). If nothing else, I hope this stimulates some discussion.
- California Fire and Life
, Don Winslow. (*)
- Free Fall
, Robert Crais. What I love most about this book is that the heart of the plot is a love story about two people who wind up walking through the fire. They don’t come out without scars, but Crais leaves you with the feeling they came out stronger for the experience.
- Gone, Baby, Gone
, Dennis Lehane.
- Promised Land
, Robert B. Parker. Here’s what I’ve said about this novel previously.
- When the Sacred Ginmill Closes
, Lawrence Block. (*) A sad, beautiful, elegiac private eye novel. I’m glad the series didn’t end with this one, but if it had, it couldn’t have ended any better.
- Pale Gray for Guilt
, John D. MacDonald. (*) More than just a stand-in for all of the Travis McGee novels, this is my favorite because:
- It is a very personal novel; McGee is out for revenge on the person who killed his friend, and to protect his friend’s widow.
- The Christmas setting. I like to pick this up and re-read it every Christmas, so I can get in the mood for the season.
- It is a novel about dealing with loss.
- It features Meyer, who I like almost as much as McGee. More to the point, it features Meyer in a key role, and makes good use of his specific talents.
- Farewell, My Lovely
, Dashiell Hammett Of course I know this was a Raymond Chandler novel; that was a copy and paste error. I know this is kind of a conventional choice, but there’s just something about Moose Malloy, and especially the last line of the novel, that gets to me.
- The Maltese Falcon
, Dashiell Hammett. (*) Another kind of conventional choice. There are people who would say that I picked this because of my romantic attachment to Bogart and the movie. There may be some truth to that. But the book existed before the movie did, and I picked this one (rather than Red Harvest
) because, I think, this is the Hammett book most concerned with honor; what it means, and how to live with honor in a world without honor.
- The Red Box
, Rex Stout. Some other folks have cited books as stand-ins for entire series. This is my stand-in for all the Wolfe books. I have fond memories of some of the other books (Too Many Cooks
and The Black Mountain
in particular), but those are atypical books. The Red Box is the most typical of the Wolfe books; all the routine is there, but it comes late enough in the series that it feels more polished than the early books.
- The Far Side of the Dollar
, Ross Macdonald. I’m not as well read in the Archer books as I would like to be, but I felt like he belonged on the list. Of the Archer books I’ve read, this is the one that made the strongest impression on me.
Honorable mention: I considered putting The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
The subject line is a hattip to Lawrence, who complained last time I quoted Mr. Costello’s song that I didn’t use that line.
Random notes: April 30, 2010.
Friday, April 30th, 2010Headline in the NYT: “On This Oregon Trail, Pioneers Embrace Organic Wine“.
Oh, sure, organic wine is all fun and games, until you die of dysentery.
In other news, “The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick” is coming in two volumes. Also, Valdez is coming, but that’s another story.
Adding to the “Blood in the Streets” watch, two out of three of our local Fuddrucker’s have closed (Anderson Lane, and I-35 North, between 290 and 183 along the access road). I’m curious; if any of my readers live in cities with Fuddrucker’s (I believe the chain is primarily Southern), have any of your locations closed recently?
Edited to add: Brian Dunbar‘s comment prompted me to do what I should have done earlier. According to the Fuddrucker’s website (Warning! Audio!), they’re more spread out than I thought. And I’d never heard of the Koo Koo Roo chain. Additionally, it appears that Magic Brands LLC, who owned both chains, sold “substantially all of its assets” to Tavistock Group on April 21st (for $40 million), and, at the same time, filed Chapter 11.
As part of Fuddruckers plan to concentrate resources in operations with the strongest potential for growth, the company will use the Chapter 11 process to terminate certain leases and will close 24 corporate-owned Fuddruckers restaurants by April 30, 2010.
Here’s a link to Fuddrucker’s announcement of the sale and Chapter 11 restructuring.
Lawrence predicted a while back that someday, people would pay real money for non-existent (i.e. “virtual”) stuff. I don’t remember if he predicted phase 2 of that: real world lawsuits over rights to non-existent property.
What China needs: strict hammer control laws.
Friday Astros update: 8-13, .381 winning percentage, projected 61.722 wins.
A man’s got to know his limitiations.
Monday, April 26th, 2010A weird confluence of things over the weekend left me with an idea for a SF novel (or possibly a trilogy). Since:
- Ideas are a dime a dozen. What you do with them is what counts.
- I don’t have the tools to write this novel right now.
I’m throwing this out for anyone who wants to make use of it.
The basic idea is similar to John Varley’s “Eight Worlds” stories: the aliens come and start throwing humans off the Earth. Only the aliens don’t stop there; they continue to drive humanity past the outer planets. Much of the action of the book would be the battle between humans and the aliens. I’d probably want to assume a radically extended human lifespan, or transfer of consciousness between cloned bodies (also like Varley) so that I could tell the story over several hundred years, using the same viewpoint character. (Thing one that fed into this: picking up a copy of The John Varley Reader
One thing this character would notice is that the aliens are using unusual weaponry; the character would attribute this to alien psychology, and wouldn’t think too deeply about this until the end of the story. Assume the character is smarter than the average bear, but also pissed off about events, and thus somewhat blinded by their anger.
The punchline at the end of the story, once our viewpoint character is able to communicate with the aliens, is that they aren’t trying to wipe out the human race. The aliens are actually trying to save the human race from a galactic disaster, along the lines of this post over at TJIC’s blog. What they’ve been trying to do all along is the equivalent of herding cats into a safe zone. And this particular race of aliens has, for want of a better word, a “charter” to do this kind of thing; intelligence in the Universe is so rare that these aliens travel around, looking for endangered intelligent civilizations, and then try to save them.
One of the limitations these aliens face is that they can’t communicate well with the lesser evolved intelligent civilizations they’re trying to save. What they see as equivalent to a lifeguard trying to save a drowning man, those civilizations see as an attack, and they tend to respond with force. Saving intelligent civilizations is so important to this race that they’re willing to sacrifice their own members to do so.
Playing into that theme is the alien weaponry; it turns out that the aliens have attempted to design weapons that are “non-lethal” to humans. The problem is, because of circumstances and their limited understanding of human biology, those “non-lethal” weapons aren’t always non-lethal. Humanity isn’t their first go-around at the rodeo; our protagonist finds out they’ve done this a couple of times before with other races, and their first attempt resulted in the total extermination of the race they were attempting to save.
So, yeah, after writing all this down, you’ve got a novel in which the entire plot hinges on a giant misunderstanding between humans and aliens. Still, I think someone with more talent than I have could do something with this; I like this idea better than I do aliens driving humanity off earth to save the dolphins.
(It wasn’t a major contributing factor to this idea, but this thread over at Popehat did make me decide to actually throw the idea out there.)