This week's book:
Five Days At Memorial by Sheri Fink
Grade: A-
"Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job." - George Bush, 02 Sep 2005
I was in Virginia during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall on 29 Aug 2005. I remember the 'heck of a job' quote, which seemed at the time such an incongruous, out-of-touch thing to say, what with people in New Orleans still calling for rescue from the attics of their flooded homes.
After reading this book, I actually got angry.
If you were alive and over the age of about ten back in 2005, you remember Katrina. You also remember the way every government entity, from the municipalities all the way up to the Federal government completely underestimated the severity of the storm, even though NOAA and other agencies warned of the bad things to come. When things did turn from bad to worse in New Orleans, the situation was magnified by massive incompetence, failure, and miscommunication at all levels, and then compounded by panic and despair. The author of Five Days at Memorial examines the situation in one of New Orleans' oldest hospitals at great length.
Why Memorial? Because it's where doctors and nurses killed patients. On purpose.
Yup, it happened. Only three days after the levees broke, five days after Katrina made landfall. Things in New Orleans had taken 72 hours to degenerate into a lawless, every-man-for-himself situation, one where health care professionals - at least a few of them - and one very overwhelmed administrator thought the best course of action for a few problematic, almost certainly terminal patients would be to end their lives.
How could such a thing come to pass? Read the book and you'll find out.
No one gets away without a scathing critique in this book, not the City of New Orleans, not the doctors and nurses involved in giving the injections that gradually stole the breath from their patients, not the Federal government, not the local police or National Guard, and especially not the corporate shills at Tenet Health Care, owners of both Memorial Hospital and the LifeCare business unit hosted there.
It's not an easy read. For any other topic I'd say Ms. Fink makes the subject entertaining, but when she follows failure after failure and outrage after outrage it's hard to call that entertaining. Thorough, perhaps? It's a case study in what can happen when precisely the wrong corporate culture intersects with precisely the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Heartbreaking. And infuriating.
I loved it, even though it made me madder with practically every page, but I graded it down to an A- because it's so damned long. In other non-fiction the extra page count came from extensive notes. And there are extensive notes with Five Days At Memorial. There are also 689 pages of text. That's a lot of book by anyone's measure. Not a light read at all.
I think this book should be required reading for any
emergency manager. Back in 2005 none of the people in charge took their preparations seriously,
leaving staff in an emergency with no direction, people who were unsuited to the challenge. And
medical professionals euthanized patients because of it. An object
lesson for everyone.
If you're a medical professional you must read this book. You think it can't happen to you, but so did these doctors and nurses. Aside from them, anyone who wants to understand how seriously incompetent the entire emergency response apparatus in the US was in 2005 should give it a look. Keep in mind the events in the book happened four years after 9/11. Let's hope they learned their lesson.
Next week:
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
My first Stephen King novel. Really. I saw 'The Shining' in the theater and loved it, but that was Kubrick, after all. Before he even considered 'Eyes Wide Shut.'
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Sunday, September 22, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 38: The Princess Bride
This week's book:
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Grade: A+
Better than the movie, and the movie is one of the greatest of all time. You need to read this book.
Next week:
Five Days At...
I'm sorry... what? You want more detail about The Princess Bride? Sure, I can do that.
William Goldman is a celebrated screenwriter with impeccable credits, including two Academy Awards. He wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President's Men, Marathon Man. And, of course, The Princess Bride.*
Before it was an amazing screenplay and one of my favorite movies ever, though, The Princess Bride was a book. A fantastic book, it turns out. William Goldman has been one of my screenwriting heroes for some time. Now he's one of my book-writing heroes too.
The set-up runs a little like the framing sequences in the movie. The author claims that his near-illiterate father read the book aloud to him when he was sick with pneumonia, and that it was this book by S. Morgenstern that turned him into the literary powerhouse he is. He tried to find the book for his son on his tenth birthday to recreate his own discovery on his tenth. His son didn't like the book. When Goldman read the book (keep in mind this is all fiction too) he discovered that the original Florinese writer had produced a work that was unreadable, full of pages of discussions of hats and customs and whatnot. Things that didn't interest scholars let alone ten-year-old boys.
When his father read it aloud, come to find out, he skipped all the boring parts and just included the good parts. The swordfighting, poison, pirates, spiders, pain, death, chases, and miracles. So what Goldman did was abridge the original, to make a book that matched the one his immigrant father read to him when he was sick. That's still fiction, there has never been a country called Florin. I checked.
The book follows the movie, for the most part. But there is so much more in the book. So much more. If you've seen the movie you know the plot. But do you know who Inigo's father actually was, and why the Count killed him? Do you know Fezzik's story, or that he was a Turk before he became French and Andre the Giant? You'll have to read the book to discover these things.
I loved every moment I spent reading this book. Yes, it's from an older literary tradition, one where the author speaks directly to the reader sometimes, but it still holds up. It's better than many of the newer books I've read during this year of a book a week.
Who should read this book? If you loved the movie you'll love this book, I guarantee it. If you didn't see the movie then you absolutely need to read this book, and then see the movie. If you love adventure stories, if you love love stories, if you love being immersed in one man's clearly overactive imagination then you'll love this book.
If you hated the movie then... you're clearly a communist and you deserve a punch in the throat. How could you not like The Princess Bride? What the hell is wrong with you?
* he has also made millions upon millions of dollars as the uncredited script doctor - essentially ghost writer - on many very successful Hollywood movies. There are rumors about which ones (Good Will Hunting, for example), but you'll never find out for certain. Mr. Goldman has made a fortune by keeping his mouth shut.
Next week:
Five Days At Memorial by Sheri Fink
Back to non-fiction. The story of what happened at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in the days during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit the city. I don't think this is going to be as fun as The Princess Bride.
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Grade: A+
Better than the movie, and the movie is one of the greatest of all time. You need to read this book.
Next week:
Five Days At...
I'm sorry... what? You want more detail about The Princess Bride? Sure, I can do that.
William Goldman is a celebrated screenwriter with impeccable credits, including two Academy Awards. He wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President's Men, Marathon Man. And, of course, The Princess Bride.*
Before it was an amazing screenplay and one of my favorite movies ever, though, The Princess Bride was a book. A fantastic book, it turns out. William Goldman has been one of my screenwriting heroes for some time. Now he's one of my book-writing heroes too.
The set-up runs a little like the framing sequences in the movie. The author claims that his near-illiterate father read the book aloud to him when he was sick with pneumonia, and that it was this book by S. Morgenstern that turned him into the literary powerhouse he is. He tried to find the book for his son on his tenth birthday to recreate his own discovery on his tenth. His son didn't like the book. When Goldman read the book (keep in mind this is all fiction too) he discovered that the original Florinese writer had produced a work that was unreadable, full of pages of discussions of hats and customs and whatnot. Things that didn't interest scholars let alone ten-year-old boys.
When his father read it aloud, come to find out, he skipped all the boring parts and just included the good parts. The swordfighting, poison, pirates, spiders, pain, death, chases, and miracles. So what Goldman did was abridge the original, to make a book that matched the one his immigrant father read to him when he was sick. That's still fiction, there has never been a country called Florin. I checked.
The book follows the movie, for the most part. But there is so much more in the book. So much more. If you've seen the movie you know the plot. But do you know who Inigo's father actually was, and why the Count killed him? Do you know Fezzik's story, or that he was a Turk before he became French and Andre the Giant? You'll have to read the book to discover these things.
I loved every moment I spent reading this book. Yes, it's from an older literary tradition, one where the author speaks directly to the reader sometimes, but it still holds up. It's better than many of the newer books I've read during this year of a book a week.
Who should read this book? If you loved the movie you'll love this book, I guarantee it. If you didn't see the movie then you absolutely need to read this book, and then see the movie. If you love adventure stories, if you love love stories, if you love being immersed in one man's clearly overactive imagination then you'll love this book.
If you hated the movie then... you're clearly a communist and you deserve a punch in the throat. How could you not like The Princess Bride? What the hell is wrong with you?
* he has also made millions upon millions of dollars as the uncredited script doctor - essentially ghost writer - on many very successful Hollywood movies. There are rumors about which ones (Good Will Hunting, for example), but you'll never find out for certain. Mr. Goldman has made a fortune by keeping his mouth shut.
Next week:
Five Days At Memorial by Sheri Fink
Back to non-fiction. The story of what happened at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in the days during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit the city. I don't think this is going to be as fun as The Princess Bride.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 37: TekWar
This week's book:
TekWar by William Shatner (really Ron Goulart)
Grade: D+
Here's all you need to know about TekWar to make an informed decision about the kind of book it is. The main character's name is Jake Cardigan.
Cardigan. Like the sweater Mr. Rogers wore every day. That cardigan. They could have picked any other last name - it's fiction, after all - but they went with Cardigan. How about Jake Pullover? Or Jake Necktie? Or Jake Waistcoat? If you're not going to take naming your main character seriously, why take anything seriously?
Another name minus: there is a character named Warbride. I'm not lying.
This was such a truly, astonishingly awful novel that it's really hard to know where to start. Is it the cardboard characters? Is it the terrible dialogue? Is it the horrible mechanics? Is it the miserable excuse for a story?
I will tell you one thing, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Or worse, depends on the direction you're coming from. As a singular work, TekWar is exponentially more awful than its transgressions.
None of it's good, but let me pick two of the worst parts to expound on: the dialogue and the setting.
Dialogue: unless you pick up the book and read it yourself, it's hard to convey how terrible this is. No one speaks the way the characters in this book speak. Now, realistic speech is not necessarily a requirement, City of Bohane demonstrates that, but the dialogue in TekWar wasn't a stylized, made-up patois. The characters in TekWar used the English we're familiar with, but the execution is just awful. It's clear that the author - not really William Shatner - did not read this dialogue out loud. If it were just one character with an odd way of speaking I might be able to excuse it as a failed experiment in dialect. But they all speak like they're sitting behind a typewriter, planning what they'll say in the next paragraph. Practically every page includes needless exposition, and Jake Cardigan, Two-Fisted Detective, has the annoying habit of commenting on the narrative as if it were coming from his own head. It's not a first-person point of view.
Setting: there's no reason for this to be a sci-fi novel. This is a cop story, and not a very good one. There's a lot of mention of sci-fi type materials, an awful lot of those, like someone went to a Home Depot and tried to think of what they'd call aluminum in 200 years. And there are flying cars, and Los Angeles now includes 'Sector' after every city name, like 'Pasadena Sector.' And there are robots. And androids which are robots who look like people. And Tek, which is a kind of psychoactive drug delivered by microchip. But the story doesn't really depend on these, all the sci-fi stuff is window dressing. Replace 'tek' with 'cocaine' and this could be a story from Miami Vice in 1987. It speaks to a lack of understanding of the genre, the sci-fi elements should enhance and amplify a contemporary conflict, allowing the author to explore real-word consequences in a fantastic setting. This is just TJ Hooker with flying cars.
Quite possibly the worst sin? It's boring. Dull, dull, dreadfully dull. I can excuse a lot of bad stuff if the author takes me on a ride. This wasn't a roller coaster, this was a plodding donkey-ride with an old, tired donkey. It takes over 100 pages of a 300 page book to get things going, and when things did start happening I found I didn't care.
Who should read this book? No one. I took the bullet for the rest of you, please, for the love of Spock, do not try this at home.
One plus: at least it wasn't set in Florida.
Next week:
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
It was a book before it was a movie. Years before. 1973, in fact.
TekWar by William Shatner (really Ron Goulart)
Grade: D+
Here's all you need to know about TekWar to make an informed decision about the kind of book it is. The main character's name is Jake Cardigan.
Cardigan. Like the sweater Mr. Rogers wore every day. That cardigan. They could have picked any other last name - it's fiction, after all - but they went with Cardigan. How about Jake Pullover? Or Jake Necktie? Or Jake Waistcoat? If you're not going to take naming your main character seriously, why take anything seriously?
Another name minus: there is a character named Warbride. I'm not lying.
This was such a truly, astonishingly awful novel that it's really hard to know where to start. Is it the cardboard characters? Is it the terrible dialogue? Is it the horrible mechanics? Is it the miserable excuse for a story?
I will tell you one thing, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Or worse, depends on the direction you're coming from. As a singular work, TekWar is exponentially more awful than its transgressions.
None of it's good, but let me pick two of the worst parts to expound on: the dialogue and the setting.
Dialogue: unless you pick up the book and read it yourself, it's hard to convey how terrible this is. No one speaks the way the characters in this book speak. Now, realistic speech is not necessarily a requirement, City of Bohane demonstrates that, but the dialogue in TekWar wasn't a stylized, made-up patois. The characters in TekWar used the English we're familiar with, but the execution is just awful. It's clear that the author - not really William Shatner - did not read this dialogue out loud. If it were just one character with an odd way of speaking I might be able to excuse it as a failed experiment in dialect. But they all speak like they're sitting behind a typewriter, planning what they'll say in the next paragraph. Practically every page includes needless exposition, and Jake Cardigan, Two-Fisted Detective, has the annoying habit of commenting on the narrative as if it were coming from his own head. It's not a first-person point of view.
Setting: there's no reason for this to be a sci-fi novel. This is a cop story, and not a very good one. There's a lot of mention of sci-fi type materials, an awful lot of those, like someone went to a Home Depot and tried to think of what they'd call aluminum in 200 years. And there are flying cars, and Los Angeles now includes 'Sector' after every city name, like 'Pasadena Sector.' And there are robots. And androids which are robots who look like people. And Tek, which is a kind of psychoactive drug delivered by microchip. But the story doesn't really depend on these, all the sci-fi stuff is window dressing. Replace 'tek' with 'cocaine' and this could be a story from Miami Vice in 1987. It speaks to a lack of understanding of the genre, the sci-fi elements should enhance and amplify a contemporary conflict, allowing the author to explore real-word consequences in a fantastic setting. This is just TJ Hooker with flying cars.
Quite possibly the worst sin? It's boring. Dull, dull, dreadfully dull. I can excuse a lot of bad stuff if the author takes me on a ride. This wasn't a roller coaster, this was a plodding donkey-ride with an old, tired donkey. It takes over 100 pages of a 300 page book to get things going, and when things did start happening I found I didn't care.
Who should read this book? No one. I took the bullet for the rest of you, please, for the love of Spock, do not try this at home.
One plus: at least it wasn't set in Florida.
Next week:
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
It was a book before it was a movie. Years before. 1973, in fact.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 36: The Last Buccaneer
This week's book:
The Last Buccaneer by Lynn Erickson
Grade: B
Dear God in Heaven and all the saints besides, this is yet another book set in Florida. I can't get away from America's wang. Maybe I'll just punch out my own teeth, grow a mullet, cultivate an oxycontin habit and move there.
Anyway... about the book. I was surprised. Honestly, pleasantly surprised. This is a romance, sure, but it's also a time travel story.
Say what?
Yup, time travel. Both into the past and then back into the future. Here's the setup: a young woman - because it's a romance, natch - who's doing her Master's in Spanish history comes across a misfiled document that points to the true location of a shipwreck, a treasure shipwreck, that people have been after for four hundred years. She dives on the wreck, touches a necklace, and is transported back in time, where she's rescued by a Spanish slave ship. She's rescued from that Hellish vessel by a dashing one-eyed English privateer, who also frees the slaves and is generally an honest, forthright man - again, because it's a romance - who mistakes her for a cabin boy. Yes, boy. At least for a while.
I have to say, the set up and plot were not what I expected. The 'romance' waters have been decidedly muddied by Fifty Shades of Porn, and I suppose I thought I'd find more of that kind of thing rather than the well-researched historical novel I got. Like I said, pleasantly surprised.
If only the dialogue and pacing had been better, I might have graded it higher.
Absent dialogue the narrative was tight and crisp. For instance, the opening scene in the prologue is absolutely riveting, as are most scenes set in the past that have to do with ships and combat and what have you. When the authors* switch to scenes involving people, however, things slow down A lot. There are a lot of sarcastic asides, arched eyebrows, misunderstood anachronisms, heaving sobs, you get the idea. Didn't do it for me.
Then there was the pacing. More accurately the pacing at the end of the book. Up until Tess, the heroine, goes forward to her own time again, the plot worked great. It was really more of an adventure story with a sex scene than a romance with history. But once back in Florida the pacing sped up unacceptably. I felt the authors were thinking through the trouble with a time-displaced privateer Englishman too much, and the narrative suffered because of it. It was rushed, and felt incomplete. It was also set in modern Florida and I just hated that.
But, for my first foray into genre romance, not half bad. If nothing else this book a week exercise is teaching me to let go of my genre snobbery.
If you're a romance reader, then you should read this one too. It's kind of old, 1994 (since when is that old?), but I think that's it's strength, there's more story than I think you'd find in a similar book from this year. If you're not a romance reader... well, I can't say you should read it, since it might be a little too far from what you're used to. But I think you should at least give it a try.
* Lynn Erickson is a pen-name for co-authors Carla Peltonen and Molly Swanton
Next week:
TekWar by William Shatner
Yes, it's that William Shatner. Don't worry, even though his name's on the cover he didn't really write it, some other guy did. First published in 1989, the Summer of Public Enemy. The two really have nothing to do with each other. I assume, maybe I'm wrong. I'll know in a week.
The Last Buccaneer by Lynn Erickson
Grade: B
Dear God in Heaven and all the saints besides, this is yet another book set in Florida. I can't get away from America's wang. Maybe I'll just punch out my own teeth, grow a mullet, cultivate an oxycontin habit and move there.
Anyway... about the book. I was surprised. Honestly, pleasantly surprised. This is a romance, sure, but it's also a time travel story.
Say what?
Yup, time travel. Both into the past and then back into the future. Here's the setup: a young woman - because it's a romance, natch - who's doing her Master's in Spanish history comes across a misfiled document that points to the true location of a shipwreck, a treasure shipwreck, that people have been after for four hundred years. She dives on the wreck, touches a necklace, and is transported back in time, where she's rescued by a Spanish slave ship. She's rescued from that Hellish vessel by a dashing one-eyed English privateer, who also frees the slaves and is generally an honest, forthright man - again, because it's a romance - who mistakes her for a cabin boy. Yes, boy. At least for a while.
I have to say, the set up and plot were not what I expected. The 'romance' waters have been decidedly muddied by Fifty Shades of Porn, and I suppose I thought I'd find more of that kind of thing rather than the well-researched historical novel I got. Like I said, pleasantly surprised.
If only the dialogue and pacing had been better, I might have graded it higher.
Absent dialogue the narrative was tight and crisp. For instance, the opening scene in the prologue is absolutely riveting, as are most scenes set in the past that have to do with ships and combat and what have you. When the authors* switch to scenes involving people, however, things slow down A lot. There are a lot of sarcastic asides, arched eyebrows, misunderstood anachronisms, heaving sobs, you get the idea. Didn't do it for me.
Then there was the pacing. More accurately the pacing at the end of the book. Up until Tess, the heroine, goes forward to her own time again, the plot worked great. It was really more of an adventure story with a sex scene than a romance with history. But once back in Florida the pacing sped up unacceptably. I felt the authors were thinking through the trouble with a time-displaced privateer Englishman too much, and the narrative suffered because of it. It was rushed, and felt incomplete. It was also set in modern Florida and I just hated that.
But, for my first foray into genre romance, not half bad. If nothing else this book a week exercise is teaching me to let go of my genre snobbery.
If you're a romance reader, then you should read this one too. It's kind of old, 1994 (since when is that old?), but I think that's it's strength, there's more story than I think you'd find in a similar book from this year. If you're not a romance reader... well, I can't say you should read it, since it might be a little too far from what you're used to. But I think you should at least give it a try.
* Lynn Erickson is a pen-name for co-authors Carla Peltonen and Molly Swanton
Next week:
TekWar by William Shatner
Yes, it's that William Shatner. Don't worry, even though his name's on the cover he didn't really write it, some other guy did. First published in 1989, the Summer of Public Enemy. The two really have nothing to do with each other. I assume, maybe I'm wrong. I'll know in a week.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 35: Bad Monkey
This week's book:
Bad Monkey by Carl Hiassen
Grade: B
Maybe I'm not that into cop procedurals or detective stories. Maybe it's just Florida...
The author is a very good writer, as he should be, since he also writes as a journalist for the Miami Herald. No dangling participles here, no fragments, no changes in voice or point of view mid-scene. It's clean and spare, sometimes to the point of being abrupt. Well-executed.
The tone, however... eh, not so much.
I did not like the tone. Not one bit. Since the action is set in the Florida Keys, mostly, maybe this is the tone it should have. I don't know, I've never been to the Keys. I do know, though, that I don't like books where the dialogue comes fast and snappy, and the banter is really just the author being clever with himself. This is what we have here. I've referenced The Gilmore Girls before, which I also never got into, and this is more of the same. Everyone's clever, everyone's got a snappy comeback, everyone's too cool for school. Real people aren't like this, real people have real conversations that don't always dive for the punch line. Matter of fact, if you know someone who always has to be clever, who always tries to speak the way the characters in Bad Monkey speak, you probably try to avoid them at all costs. Narcissists are tedious to be around.
As far as the story goes, it's not a bad premise. A disgraced detective - I presume the disgrace happens in a prior novel but I'm not certain - is allowed to stay employed by becoming a health department inspector. It's a gross job, as anyone the restaurant biz can tell you, and he hates it but it keeps him in rent money. Because of this connection and his desperate need to get back on the police force, he's drawn into a mystery when a severed human arm is snagged by a tourist fishing for sailfish. The plot proceeds from there, moving from the Keys to Miami to the Bahamas.
I think it's a very imaginative and suitably convoluted beginning. I'm not a regular mystery reader, but I'm pretty sure they don't all start out with a severed arm being dragged out of the Gulf by a tourist who wants to pose with it as if he snagged the Great White from Jaws.
The plot is very twisty and turn-y, as a mystery should be, lots of ins and outs, lots of what-have-yous. I had it figured out by page 100 or so. By that I mean I suspected the major twist - again not a Dan-Brown-style lie but a for-real twist - by page 100. I wasn't proved right until 200 or so pages later. I don't hold this against the author, I've learned this year that I'm something of a mystery spoil-sport. No harm, no foul. With the details, such as a dead man whose business was running a Medicare scam with mobility wheelchairs, Bahamians looking for voodoo curses, and desperate real-estate developers, the plot was also very Floridian. Which isn't really for me.
At times the secondary characters kind of blended for me, I wasn't quite sure who was who every so often. But the major characters all distinguished themselves, even if their dialogue devolved into the same brand of patter more than I liked.
There was, in fact, a monkey in this story. He did turn out to be a major character, though he was the only one who wasn't constantly trying to one-up the others with a punch line. He was not, in fact, a bad monkey at all.
If you like mystery novels, this is good one, you should read it. If you hated the Gimore Girls, like I did, you'll probably not like this either.
Next week:
The Last Buccaneer by Lynn Erickson
A Harlequin Romance. I'm not lying. I got it at Half-Price books by way of Goodwill. I paid a buck and I probably got ripped off. This is so far out of my genre comfort zone that I'm actually giddy and sick with anticipation at the same time.
Here's the proof that I actually have this book in my possession, and that the provenance is true. The Goodwill sticker is the upside-down one under Eyepatch's chiseled chin.
Bad Monkey by Carl Hiassen
Grade: B
Maybe I'm not that into cop procedurals or detective stories. Maybe it's just Florida...
The author is a very good writer, as he should be, since he also writes as a journalist for the Miami Herald. No dangling participles here, no fragments, no changes in voice or point of view mid-scene. It's clean and spare, sometimes to the point of being abrupt. Well-executed.
The tone, however... eh, not so much.
I did not like the tone. Not one bit. Since the action is set in the Florida Keys, mostly, maybe this is the tone it should have. I don't know, I've never been to the Keys. I do know, though, that I don't like books where the dialogue comes fast and snappy, and the banter is really just the author being clever with himself. This is what we have here. I've referenced The Gilmore Girls before, which I also never got into, and this is more of the same. Everyone's clever, everyone's got a snappy comeback, everyone's too cool for school. Real people aren't like this, real people have real conversations that don't always dive for the punch line. Matter of fact, if you know someone who always has to be clever, who always tries to speak the way the characters in Bad Monkey speak, you probably try to avoid them at all costs. Narcissists are tedious to be around.
As far as the story goes, it's not a bad premise. A disgraced detective - I presume the disgrace happens in a prior novel but I'm not certain - is allowed to stay employed by becoming a health department inspector. It's a gross job, as anyone the restaurant biz can tell you, and he hates it but it keeps him in rent money. Because of this connection and his desperate need to get back on the police force, he's drawn into a mystery when a severed human arm is snagged by a tourist fishing for sailfish. The plot proceeds from there, moving from the Keys to Miami to the Bahamas.
I think it's a very imaginative and suitably convoluted beginning. I'm not a regular mystery reader, but I'm pretty sure they don't all start out with a severed arm being dragged out of the Gulf by a tourist who wants to pose with it as if he snagged the Great White from Jaws.
The plot is very twisty and turn-y, as a mystery should be, lots of ins and outs, lots of what-have-yous. I had it figured out by page 100 or so. By that I mean I suspected the major twist - again not a Dan-Brown-style lie but a for-real twist - by page 100. I wasn't proved right until 200 or so pages later. I don't hold this against the author, I've learned this year that I'm something of a mystery spoil-sport. No harm, no foul. With the details, such as a dead man whose business was running a Medicare scam with mobility wheelchairs, Bahamians looking for voodoo curses, and desperate real-estate developers, the plot was also very Floridian. Which isn't really for me.
At times the secondary characters kind of blended for me, I wasn't quite sure who was who every so often. But the major characters all distinguished themselves, even if their dialogue devolved into the same brand of patter more than I liked.
There was, in fact, a monkey in this story. He did turn out to be a major character, though he was the only one who wasn't constantly trying to one-up the others with a punch line. He was not, in fact, a bad monkey at all.
If you like mystery novels, this is good one, you should read it. If you hated the Gimore Girls, like I did, you'll probably not like this either.
Next week:
The Last Buccaneer by Lynn Erickson
A Harlequin Romance. I'm not lying. I got it at Half-Price books by way of Goodwill. I paid a buck and I probably got ripped off. This is so far out of my genre comfort zone that I'm actually giddy and sick with anticipation at the same time.
Here's the proof that I actually have this book in my possession, and that the provenance is true. The Goodwill sticker is the upside-down one under Eyepatch's chiseled chin.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Put The Chicken Before The Nugget
There’s a fast-food worker strike brewing. What started in NYC as essentially a protest has gained populist steam in larger cities across the country. People working in McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and similar places are agitating for an increase in their wages. The workers state that it’s impossible to live on $7 or $8 an hour in New York. Or Chicago. Or San Franscisco. And they’re right.
But they’re also wrong. These jobs – unskilled and entry-level – aren’t supposed to be jobs you make a living wage at. These are the kinds of jobs the minimum wage laws were designed for, the kinds of jobs that the employer would absolutely pay you much less to do, if the Federal Government would only let them. Once you’ve gone from table-wiper to order-taker to fry-o-later wrangler to grill guy, there’s really nowhere else to go unless you want to be the manager, which requires an entirely different set of skills. Sorry, fast-food workers, but you’re not doing the kinds of jobs you’re supposed to support a family doing.
Yet… many of them are trying to do exactly that. And failing, of course, simple arithmetic proves you can’t feed a family of four with two parents doing minimum-wage jobs. The profile of the fast-food worker has changed over the past decade, and what was once the province of the high-school first-job-taker or retiree with too much time on his hands has now become the land of uneducated mid- to late-twenties fathers and mothers. These are people who would once have been receptionists, or simple laborers, or factory workers. Except those jobs don’t exist any more, and the living wages those jobs provided vanished too.
The real problem here is not that McDonald’s pays minimum wage for horrible jobs, it’s that people who would otherwise be productive members of the American workforce are relegated to those horrible jobs instead of working a solidly middle-class job they might have enjoyed twenty or thirty years ago. Do you think a grown man with a wife and two kids actually wants to take your order at McDonald’s? Of course he doesn’t, but it’s the best job he could get. Which is a modern tragedy.
So what’s the solution? If it were a simple problem I’d have a simple solution and I’d be a billionaire. Full disclosure: I’m not a billionaire. I do know that employers – even evil corporations like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart who routinely abuse and take advantage of their workforce – cannot pay a family-supporting living wage for unskilled labor. But they could pay more than they do now. And they could pay for health care benefits. And they could work with local employment agencies to help their mid-twenties workers who shouldn’t be trying to make a career out of a minimum-wage job in the first place. At least part of the solution is for these fast-food companies to recognize that their workforce is drastically different now than it was even five years ago, let alone twenty, and to adjust their wages, prices, and expectations accordingly.
Another part of the solution would be to repair the middle class that the NeoCons have so expertly dismantled over the past 30 years. That’s going to take a lot of work, because older people have just accepted the terrible changes to our society and younger people have never known anything else. Maybe this new wave of activism and populism will shake things up again. Fingers crossed.
But they’re also wrong. These jobs – unskilled and entry-level – aren’t supposed to be jobs you make a living wage at. These are the kinds of jobs the minimum wage laws were designed for, the kinds of jobs that the employer would absolutely pay you much less to do, if the Federal Government would only let them. Once you’ve gone from table-wiper to order-taker to fry-o-later wrangler to grill guy, there’s really nowhere else to go unless you want to be the manager, which requires an entirely different set of skills. Sorry, fast-food workers, but you’re not doing the kinds of jobs you’re supposed to support a family doing.
Yet… many of them are trying to do exactly that. And failing, of course, simple arithmetic proves you can’t feed a family of four with two parents doing minimum-wage jobs. The profile of the fast-food worker has changed over the past decade, and what was once the province of the high-school first-job-taker or retiree with too much time on his hands has now become the land of uneducated mid- to late-twenties fathers and mothers. These are people who would once have been receptionists, or simple laborers, or factory workers. Except those jobs don’t exist any more, and the living wages those jobs provided vanished too.
The real problem here is not that McDonald’s pays minimum wage for horrible jobs, it’s that people who would otherwise be productive members of the American workforce are relegated to those horrible jobs instead of working a solidly middle-class job they might have enjoyed twenty or thirty years ago. Do you think a grown man with a wife and two kids actually wants to take your order at McDonald’s? Of course he doesn’t, but it’s the best job he could get. Which is a modern tragedy.
So what’s the solution? If it were a simple problem I’d have a simple solution and I’d be a billionaire. Full disclosure: I’m not a billionaire. I do know that employers – even evil corporations like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart who routinely abuse and take advantage of their workforce – cannot pay a family-supporting living wage for unskilled labor. But they could pay more than they do now. And they could pay for health care benefits. And they could work with local employment agencies to help their mid-twenties workers who shouldn’t be trying to make a career out of a minimum-wage job in the first place. At least part of the solution is for these fast-food companies to recognize that their workforce is drastically different now than it was even five years ago, let alone twenty, and to adjust their wages, prices, and expectations accordingly.
Another part of the solution would be to repair the middle class that the NeoCons have so expertly dismantled over the past 30 years. That’s going to take a lot of work, because older people have just accepted the terrible changes to our society and younger people have never known anything else. Maybe this new wave of activism and populism will shake things up again. Fingers crossed.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 34: City of Bohane
This week's book:
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
Grade: A+ for originality
B for accessibility
You have not read this kind of novel before. I can guarantee it.
Many times, with many books, you know the story. There are only supposed to be seven plots after all, which means that if you read eight books you're guaranteed to encounter a plot you've read before. I suppose that's at least partly true with City of Bohane, it's almost like Julius Caesar as far as plot goes. Generally speaking, of course.
But, man, the execution is stunningly unique.
I've said many times that I want fiction to transport me, to take me somewhere else, and Mr. Barry certainly did that. Set forty years into a bleak version of the future Ireland, the plot follows Logan Hartnett - the current criminal kingpin of the city - as he deals with a challenge to his authority in the form of the man he replaced twenty-five years prior, The Gant Broderick, who has come back to town for reasons only known to himself. That's as simple as I can make the plot, but it's far, far, far more involved than I can relay. There are minor characters who become major, major characters who 'disappear,' twists, turn, double-dealings, triple-dealings, and base betrayals. It's a ride.
Anybody ever read 'Ulysses' by James Joyce all the way through? Of course you haven't, no one has. I've read parts of it, and this book is reminiscent of Ulysses, but in a very good way. Joyce was Irish, as is Mr. Barry, and those Irish are a clever people. The Japanese might be weird, the Germans efficient, the Russians melancholy, and Americans crass, but the Irish are clever. And literary. And poetic. I think Mr. Barry adds to the proud Irish tradition of amazing fiction.
Now for the down side. I don't know how far my tastes will translate to the average reader. I loved this book, but I can easily see where someone else might find it so dense and stylistic that they might abandon the effort it takes to read it.
The author has his characters speak in a made-up patois - and there are even upper- and lower-class variations on it between characters - which I think adds to the mood and tone. Defines it, even. But other people hate reading dialect. Plus, it's dialogue-heavy, so if you're not inclined to make the effort there's nowhere to go to avoid it.
The narration is also stylized, though not as much as the dialogue. It's not plain-jane, it's peacocking.
Finally, while sympathetic, the characters are not particularly likeable. This is as much by design as the dialogue and the narration, the City is intended to be a rough, corrupt, terrible place. But sometimes readers want their heroes to be heroes instead of the least villainous of a disreputable bunch. I loved it, but I can see where others might not.
I learned a long time ago that some of my tastes aren't for everyone.* For instance, when I drink wine, which happens very infrequently, I prefer the kind of dry red wine that makes most people pucker. I like seriously overcooked lasagna. I think Picasso was a better artist before he moved to Paris. I actually like the look of the Disney Concert Hall. You get the idea.
I also loved this book. I just don't think everyone will. Maybe I'm second-guessing myself, I don't know.
If you only read certain things and don't like moving out of your comfort zone, then give this one a pass. If, however, you like your fiction to slap you around a little before it takes you on a ride to some unknown destination, definitely give City of Bohane a read.
* and some are very, very, very proletarian. I do watch NASCAR every weekend, after all.
Next week:
Bad Monkey by Carl Hiassen
No sci-fi, this is a contemporary mystery. Set in Florida. America's wang. Where the underwhelming Book of Fate was set. Why did it have to be Florida?
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
Grade: A+ for originality
B for accessibility
You have not read this kind of novel before. I can guarantee it.
Many times, with many books, you know the story. There are only supposed to be seven plots after all, which means that if you read eight books you're guaranteed to encounter a plot you've read before. I suppose that's at least partly true with City of Bohane, it's almost like Julius Caesar as far as plot goes. Generally speaking, of course.
But, man, the execution is stunningly unique.
I've said many times that I want fiction to transport me, to take me somewhere else, and Mr. Barry certainly did that. Set forty years into a bleak version of the future Ireland, the plot follows Logan Hartnett - the current criminal kingpin of the city - as he deals with a challenge to his authority in the form of the man he replaced twenty-five years prior, The Gant Broderick, who has come back to town for reasons only known to himself. That's as simple as I can make the plot, but it's far, far, far more involved than I can relay. There are minor characters who become major, major characters who 'disappear,' twists, turn, double-dealings, triple-dealings, and base betrayals. It's a ride.
Anybody ever read 'Ulysses' by James Joyce all the way through? Of course you haven't, no one has. I've read parts of it, and this book is reminiscent of Ulysses, but in a very good way. Joyce was Irish, as is Mr. Barry, and those Irish are a clever people. The Japanese might be weird, the Germans efficient, the Russians melancholy, and Americans crass, but the Irish are clever. And literary. And poetic. I think Mr. Barry adds to the proud Irish tradition of amazing fiction.
Now for the down side. I don't know how far my tastes will translate to the average reader. I loved this book, but I can easily see where someone else might find it so dense and stylistic that they might abandon the effort it takes to read it.
The author has his characters speak in a made-up patois - and there are even upper- and lower-class variations on it between characters - which I think adds to the mood and tone. Defines it, even. But other people hate reading dialect. Plus, it's dialogue-heavy, so if you're not inclined to make the effort there's nowhere to go to avoid it.
The narration is also stylized, though not as much as the dialogue. It's not plain-jane, it's peacocking.
Finally, while sympathetic, the characters are not particularly likeable. This is as much by design as the dialogue and the narration, the City is intended to be a rough, corrupt, terrible place. But sometimes readers want their heroes to be heroes instead of the least villainous of a disreputable bunch. I loved it, but I can see where others might not.
I learned a long time ago that some of my tastes aren't for everyone.* For instance, when I drink wine, which happens very infrequently, I prefer the kind of dry red wine that makes most people pucker. I like seriously overcooked lasagna. I think Picasso was a better artist before he moved to Paris. I actually like the look of the Disney Concert Hall. You get the idea.
I also loved this book. I just don't think everyone will. Maybe I'm second-guessing myself, I don't know.
If you only read certain things and don't like moving out of your comfort zone, then give this one a pass. If, however, you like your fiction to slap you around a little before it takes you on a ride to some unknown destination, definitely give City of Bohane a read.
* and some are very, very, very proletarian. I do watch NASCAR every weekend, after all.
Next week:
Bad Monkey by Carl Hiassen
No sci-fi, this is a contemporary mystery. Set in Florida. America's wang. Where the underwhelming Book of Fate was set. Why did it have to be Florida?
Monday, August 19, 2013
Another Day At The Grind...
This past weekend I was having breakfast with a friend of mine and I happened to look out the window to see two men passing by the cafe. They looked pretty much like any of the other people passing by, and they seemed to be having a pleasant conversation. I didn't really notice them other than to see that they both needed a shave. So did I at that point - nine days without a razor - and it was no big deal, beard brothers one and all.
Fast forward about thirty minutes. Our breakfast finished and paid for, my friend and I walked out of the cafe and on our way. A few blocks later we came upon those same two men again. This time they were propped up against lamp posts at a busy intersection, now wearing dirty, ripped t-shirts, with cardboard signs on their stomachs that said 'homeless, please help.' Evidently their leisurely stroll and polite conversation had been a prelude to fraudulent panhandling.
You ever see those Roadrunner cartoons where the sheep dog and the coyote are just regular Joes working a shift? They walk in with their lunch boxes, punch a clock, and then get to the business of cartoon anvils? That was these guys. Except they were going to their work of... not working.
I was incensed at first - how dare they? Then I realized I hadn't finished that thought. How dare they what? Walk past a restaurant where I was eating? Plant themselves at a busy intersection to increase the odds of getting a handout? Ask for the handout in the first place? What, exactly, was I getting upset about?
Then it hit me. I was upset that this seemed to be their job. When I saw them they were going to 'work.' But that work involved putting on a grody shirt and pretending to be homeless. They had probably driven in, parked down the street from the cafe, three or four blocks from their 'office' and then planted themselves where gentle souls would be assured to see them.
I used to live five blocks over and four blocks down from a Salvation Army residence, and I walked to work essentially across the street from it. I encountered the destitute, the barely-hinged, the drug-addled, and the hopeless every single day. I bought them cigarettes and handed them spare change and gave them $5 bills on Thanksgiving. I know homeless people. These guys weren't. They were lazy. That's what I objected to. Sons of bitches. They could have honed a talent - that same intersection hosts sax players and tap dancers - but instead they sat around, trying to look pitiable.
I left them alone, and later I saw them run off by the cops. Who did not, regrettably, use their tasers. And that's the pity.
Fast forward about thirty minutes. Our breakfast finished and paid for, my friend and I walked out of the cafe and on our way. A few blocks later we came upon those same two men again. This time they were propped up against lamp posts at a busy intersection, now wearing dirty, ripped t-shirts, with cardboard signs on their stomachs that said 'homeless, please help.' Evidently their leisurely stroll and polite conversation had been a prelude to fraudulent panhandling.
You ever see those Roadrunner cartoons where the sheep dog and the coyote are just regular Joes working a shift? They walk in with their lunch boxes, punch a clock, and then get to the business of cartoon anvils? That was these guys. Except they were going to their work of... not working.
I was incensed at first - how dare they? Then I realized I hadn't finished that thought. How dare they what? Walk past a restaurant where I was eating? Plant themselves at a busy intersection to increase the odds of getting a handout? Ask for the handout in the first place? What, exactly, was I getting upset about?
Then it hit me. I was upset that this seemed to be their job. When I saw them they were going to 'work.' But that work involved putting on a grody shirt and pretending to be homeless. They had probably driven in, parked down the street from the cafe, three or four blocks from their 'office' and then planted themselves where gentle souls would be assured to see them.
I used to live five blocks over and four blocks down from a Salvation Army residence, and I walked to work essentially across the street from it. I encountered the destitute, the barely-hinged, the drug-addled, and the hopeless every single day. I bought them cigarettes and handed them spare change and gave them $5 bills on Thanksgiving. I know homeless people. These guys weren't. They were lazy. That's what I objected to. Sons of bitches. They could have honed a talent - that same intersection hosts sax players and tap dancers - but instead they sat around, trying to look pitiable.
I left them alone, and later I saw them run off by the cops. Who did not, regrettably, use their tasers. And that's the pity.
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