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Post by wildfire2099 on Nov 14, 2023 13:54:00 GMT -5
First Wave (Billy Boyle #2) By James Benn  This was definitely an improvement in writing style over the first book.. the author seems to have really found the voice of the main characters. Billy is a bit more realistic here, he doesn't know nothing then everything in spurts as happened a couple times in the first book. The author does a great job here mixing historical content with his story... and explained what things he had to tweak in order to properly fit in, which I appreciate. The story itself was much better, a very engaging plot that was more centered around proving what happened and catching the bad guys than the mystery, which worked alot better. I didn't have to yell at the characters for being dumb much at all in this book. There were more than a couple coincidences of place here, but I'll give the writer a break on that... I'd rather he build up some good characters and skip a bit of realism than have new sidekicks every story... as long as it doesn't get too crazy. I think that could be an issue later on.. Billy and Kaz took a beating in this book, and had 2 really near misses. I'm hoping that doesn't happen every time... if Billy gets 2 or 3 concussions per story he is definitely not going to have much of a happy ending no matter what! I can also only accept so many times when main characters get shot and it just happens to be a clean wound with no issues.
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Post by driver1980 on Nov 15, 2023 9:01:34 GMT -5
What a great cover:
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Post by EdoBosnar on Nov 15, 2023 10:26:36 GMT -5
Swastika NightKatharine Burdekin, 1937  This is a book that I did not even know existed until about 2 months ago. It was first written in 1935 and published two years later under the pseudonym Murray Constantine – and Burdekin’s identity as the author was only confirmed about 20 years after her death. The book is basically a dystopian extrapolation of what Nazism would be if taken to its logical conclusion. So the story is set about 700 years after the triumph of the Nazis in the “Last European War” (writing in 1935, Burdekin could very clearly see that a major war on the horizon). Germany now rules all of Europe (which includes Russia west of the Urals), the Middle East and Africa, while Japan holds the rest. This is a very grim world, in which the German empire is governed by an extreme hypermasculine philosophy (it’s actually the state religion, in which Hitler now has the status of god) in which the only role for women is to give birth to children: they live entirely cut off from men (except, of course, to have procreative sex) in austere barracks, their heads shaven, and baby boys are taken away from them after about 18 months to be raised by their fathers. The reader finds out about all of this mainly through a series of conversations between the book’s main characters, a young German farm worker named Hermann living near Munich, his friend Alfred, a middle-aged Englishman visiting Germany on pilgrimage, and an aging ‘Teutonic Knight’ (a member of the German empire’s ruling class) named Hess – who is considered something of an eccentric. Hess reveals many long-forgotten truths about the Reich and Hitler, and among other things shows the other two an old grainy photograph of Hitler – not the muscular, 8-foot tall blond man portrayed in the official iconography (as seen on this edition’s cover art above). Even though not much happens here – like I said, it’s mainly a series of conversations, most of them between Alfred and Hess – this is nonetheless a fascinating book to read, both because of the time in which it was written (it’s interesting how prescient Burdekin was about so many things) and also because so much of the subject matter is still, unfortunately, topical.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Nov 15, 2023 12:53:09 GMT -5
 Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham This is a little bit of a hard book to review. This is the second time I've read it. I've also seen the 1947 film starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell (I've waiting on Del Toro's 2021 film until after I'd re-read the book). Given the time that it's been since I've read the book and seen that film you'd think I'd come in pretty fresh. But no. First off both the book and the film are very memorable. Second, this book is the Ur carny noir. Its influence has permeated film, noir and the general popular culture to an extent that it would feel somewhat familiar even if you were unfamiliar with it. I was also in a bit of reader's block when I was reading it so that is something to keep in mind. Stanton Carlisle is a small-time carnival magician who becomes fascinated by by the art of cold-reading via spending time with the carnival's mentalist, who has also developed a very extensive "code act." Carlisle comes in to possession of the code and takes off with a lovely young carnival "electric girl" to act as his assistant. Carlisle starts off as a mentalist, but realizes the real money is in spiritualism particularly in starting a new spiritualist church. We see his rise to some amount of power as he works to fleece the rich and powerful. Unfortunately his inner demons, fueled by a difficult childhood lead him to seek the assistance of a psychologist, Lilith Ritter, who is one of the great femmes fatale. Inevitably Carlisle falls from his heights to lows the like of which we have seldom seen in literary noirs. Gresham gives us a deep look into the world of carnival sideshows and the world of mentalism and spiritualism that had seldom been seen by the public up to that point. And there was an emphasis on the dark side of all of them. This may well have been the first book to show us the inner workings of the Geek show. And it appears to have the first instance of the term "cold reading" in print. This is an extremely hard-hitting novel with an ending that echoes the first page of the novel and is a fitting conclusion to a life that was lived in a nearly completely unscrupulous manner. |
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Post by Prince Hal on Nov 15, 2023 15:15:09 GMT -5
Slam_Bradley, glad you had a chance to re-read this one-of-a-kind novel. It's on my re-read list as well. If you haven't yet, check out Gresham's other books, one on carny life, another on Houdini, and his other less accomplished novel, "Limbo Tower." His life story is as bizarre as "Nightmare Alley," with stops at various religions and cults, the Spanish Civil War fighting against Franco, a long bout with TB, a lifelong struggle with alcoholism and depression, and a unique love life. Turns out that his first wife was the female protagonist of the play and later film, "Shadowlands," the story of her love affair and eventual marriage to C.S. Lewis. Can't imagine two husbands as different as Gresham and Lewis must have been. Gresham, losing his sight to cataracts and having been diagnosed with throat cancer (or tongue cancer -- I've seen that mentioned also) he checked into the infamous Hotel Dixie in New York and overdosed on sleeping pills in 1962.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Nov 16, 2023 20:51:20 GMT -5
I think I read that Swastika Night book in college in a dystopias class.... I don't really remember it much though. IT was a weird class... it also included Atlas Shrugged and Left Hand of Darkness, among others.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Nov 17, 2023 3:47:22 GMT -5
I think I read that Swastika Night book in college in a dystopias class.... I don't really remember it much though. IT was a weird class... it also included Atlas Shrugged and Left Hand of Darkness, among others. Hm, interesting. For a number of reasons, I wouldn't consider The Left Hand of Darkness (one of the best novels by my favorite-ever writer) dystopian. |
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,143 
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Post by Confessor on Nov 17, 2023 9:24:59 GMT -5
The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch, the Oldest Surviving Veteran of the Trenches by Harry Patch and Richard van Emden.  At the time this book was published, Harry Patch was the last surviving person to have fought in the trenches of the First World War anywhere in the world. For most of his life Patch had refused to discuss his experiences during the Great War until he was approached by the BBC in 1998 for the documentary program, Veterans. Realising that he was one of a fast-dwindling group of soldiers who fought in the conflict, he agreed to tell his story. This book followed in 2007, by which time Patch was 108 years old. The Last Fighting Tommy consists of Harry's recollections, interspersed with context-providing historical information by television documentary maker Richard van Emden. The book takes us from Harry's birth in 1898, through his idyllic childhood in Edwardian Somerset, and to his conscription into the British army in 1916, serving as a machine gunner in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. He describes in vivid detail the mud and horror of the trenches during the Battle of Passchendaele, the terror and noise of being under intense artillery fire, and the fear of going over the top. His time on the front ends with the awful moment when a German shell hits the Lewis machine gun team he was part of, wounding him and killing his three closest friends. I think the thing that struck me most was the calm and non-judgemental way in which Patch recalls his time on the front. Today, not unreasonably, we tend to view the soldiers who fought in the trenches as brave, but hapless victims of the blundering military leaders who sent so many of them to their deaths. We use phrases like "lions led by donkeys" to describe the squandering of so many brave young men on the fields of France by their supposed betters and superiors. But Harry himself displays no bitterness towards the leaders who sent him out to fight or caused the death of his friends and comrades. He was simply doing his duty. I found the last third of the book concerning Harry's post-WW1 life a little bit dull. The chapters about his time serving in the Home Guard in WW2 as a fire-fighter in Bath are fairly interesting, but there's quite a bit of info about Harry's later life with his beloved wife and children and grandchildren that is less than essential, and I must admit I started to skim read these parts. Inevitably, where this book really hits home is with Harry's recollections of his time on the front, fighting the Germans in "The War to End All Wars". Patch died in 2009, aged 111 years old and this book is a fitting memorial to an extraordinary man and all the other extraordinary men who fought alongside him in the First World War.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Nov 17, 2023 10:54:58 GMT -5
 Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth by Dean Mullaney & Bruce Canwell (And Alex Toth) Art books are sometimes hard to review. And this is mostly an art book. It does have some biographical content by Bruce Canwell and that is interesting. I wouldn't say that that content is cursory...but it's certainly not in-depth. Toth was an interesting individual and an important artist and I do think that a greater focus on his life and the nuts and bolts and history of his work would have been welcome. It certainly would have been welcome by me. But, at its heart, this is an art book. And as an art book it shines. Toth was an artist's artist when it comes to comic books. Seeing him cite to Noel Sickles as an influence is interesting, because he's almost the anti-Sickles. But, really, what he did was take Sickles' (and Caniff's) work and tear it down to its essence using incredibly bold blacks and whites to tell the entire story. Nobody was as good at conveying emotion, movement and pure story-telling through a silhouette as Toth. This book is jam packed with Toth's art, both as published, and in original pre-published pages. The reproduction is excellent and, if the size of the book can make it a bit unwieldy, it's necessary to do justice to the master's artwork. This is an outstanding book about an incredible artist, who has certainly been overlooked by the mass of fandom because his work wasn't front and center in Silver and Bronze Age superhero funnybooks. But his work was always there, both in comics and in animation and its influence permeates our culture. I'm very glad the book is back in print and available. I just wish that it was a shade less art-book and a shade more biography. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Nov 19, 2023 15:09:56 GMT -5
Goblin Reservation Cliff Simak  This book feels like it was a bet... like someone challenged the author to just throw as many sci fi and fantasy elements as possible in one story and have it still hold together. The main character Charlie Maxwell, was hunting a dragon on planet Coonskin when his signal got intercepted and he ended up on a strange crystal planet. When he gets back it turns out he was cloned and the clone was killed. Then there's sabertooth tigers, goblins and trolls fighting with one another, evil aliens, good aliens, a comic strip Neanderthal, ghosts, and William Shakespeare. It's a very odd book, but it sorta works.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Nov 25, 2023 18:22:17 GMT -5
Blood Alone (Billy Boyle #3) James Benn  This 3rd chapter sees Billy in Sicily, with no memory and not even sure if he's still on the right side. The whole 'lets give the main character amnesia' thing to have an excuse to recap old events is pretty annoying, and I'm concerned at the amount Billy has gotten banged around in just 3 books when there is another 13 or so to go... especially considering the ending. Good book though, and a fun exploration of the Mafia's role in the Invasion of Italy. I've never been a huge fan of World War II books (just too many of them I guess) but this series is serving to be a nice summary for me.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 26, 2023 13:23:55 GMT -5
Subway: The History, Curiosities, and Secrets of the New York City Transit System
John E. Morris What a quirky find! I was searching for something completely unrelated on Amazon and this popped up. I've always loved trains, and that included spending time on the NYC subway system when I lived there as a young child, revisiting many times over the years growing up even after we had moved to New England, and then later moving back as an adult and working and living in Manhattan for a time with my wife (during the early 2000's, a time of relatively much better safety). I loved getting around on them and the underground world that seemed to exist for vast stretches. So this book may have been really made for me, including a delightful ton of content on the long history with plenty of pictures. Lots of fun anecdotes too, and even touches on the less savory side of the subway system at times...just chock full of pretty much everything you could ever want to know about. Stuff like abandoned tracks and closed stations really interested me as well. I'm not sure how much a non-NYC reader might similarly appreciate, but I suspect the content would appeal to anyone fascinated with a major subway system's evolution and overall history. 
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Nov 26, 2023 13:49:15 GMT -5
Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier's First Gunfighter by Tom ClavinWild Bill Hickok was a rock star before there were ever rock stars. America's first wild west gunfighter, Hickok was, in many ways, America's ideal of the "old west" until Hollywood changed the perception to that of the mythological cowboy. Hickok was involved in one of the first, if not the first, and one of the most famous quick-draw gunfights in the west. He was a plainsman, an army scout, a lawman, a gambler and a pistoleer. He, along with his friend, Bill Cody, were very much foundational in the mythology of the American West. Clavin gives us the first major biography of Hickok in a decade and it's very well researched and is very well written, as is to be expected from Clavin. It covers all the aspects of Hickok's life. His many different jobs. His loves (and those that weren't...I'm looking at you Calamity Jane). It's well written, comprehensive but still fairly concise. It's not, however, without faults. Clavin has a habit of running down rabbit-holes that don't need exploring, particularly with folks that are only peripheral to the story. He did it in Dodge City and he does it here. In this one, though, he makes two very odd and, honestly, off-putting decisions. The first is that he goes to silly pains to try to connect Hickok with Jesse James just because they were in the same place at the same time twice, even though there is zero evidence that they ever met. At least Clavin kind of acknowledges that he's reaching with this...though there's just no excuse for it. The other is his inexplicable decision to completely omit he encounter between Hickok and 7th Cavalry troopers Lonergan and Kyle while Sheriff in Hayes, Kansas. There is ample evidence of the encounter and it's one of the more important encounters of Hickok's career. Still, this is a very solid biography and it's readily available and without most of the apocryphal stories that permeate earlier "biographies" of Hickok. |
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Nov 27, 2023 1:01:22 GMT -5
Been reading a lot of "new" sword & sorcery during the months I have been away from the site and found some new favorites. Three new anthologies-one I backed on Kickstarter and got the PDF version and two others I got print copies of, one at the Yellow Springs Book Fair where one of the authors was set up... First up Swords in the Shadows an anthology edited by Cullen Bunn that I backed on Kickstarter...  and in it I discovered a number of authors (Jonathan Maberry and Charles Rutledge primary among them) that were also in this anthology that Rutledge pointed out to me when I asked for new S&S recommendations on the hellscape formerly known as twitter.  that featured a cover, spot illustrations and a couple of story/character contributions by Dan Brereton. Some of those authors were also featured in this anthology I got at the YS Book Fair  Maberry had a story featuring Kagen the Damned who starred in 2 novels (a 3rd is due in 2024) which have become among my favorite S&S series outside of Conan. Maberry builds the mythos based on Lovecraftian entities, Howardian entities and the King in Yellow from the works of Hastur but weaves an entirely original world in which those entities play apart.   and the last discovery also came by recommendation from the S&S authors I have been interacting with online, Christopher Beuhlman's The Blacktongue Thief, which is the first book in a series (nook 2 not out yet). This one is a little more traditional fantasy, but has a lot of S&S elements and themes in its DNA.  Also reading more older S&S anthologies, a lot of southern Gothic horror and many other things. -M |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Nov 27, 2023 7:39:53 GMT -5
ohhhh... I've always liked Dan Bereton's art.... that definitely needs to go on the list.
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