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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 30, 2021 16:44:59 GMT -5
20 Years in the Secret Service: My Life with Five Presidents by Rufus W. YoungbloodRufus Youngblood served in the Secret Service from 1951 to 1971 serving from the Truman administration through the early days of the Nixon administration. During that time he was Head of the White House Detail from 1965 to 1969 and Deputy Director of the Secret Service from '69 to his retirement. He was in the car with Lyndon Johnson (to whose detail he was assigned) in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and it was he who jumped on Johnson and shielded him with his body. This is a very nuts and bolts look at the way the Secret Service worked in that time period and an agent's life. If you're looking for dirt on the Presidents you aren't going to find it here. That's not who Rufus Youngblood was. You will get some glimpses in to the personalities of the men who he protected. Johnson, with whom he spent the most time, gets more than a cursory look. But a lot of it is just how the agents did their jobs and the difficulties of dealing with changing times. Truman, who had never had protection, just took off on a long walk after he became President without letting his detail know he was going. Youngblood details the difficulty of protecting a President playing golf, something that was quite new when Eisenhower became President and spent a ton of time on the course. This isn't an Earth-shaking book. But it's interesting and it's well worth the quick read.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 30, 2021 19:06:18 GMT -5
Black Fire (Star Trek #8) by Sonni Cooper
This is one of a few Trek books a got a couple weeks back... they were the best item at a medicore used book store I checked out after getting my COVID shot. I figured they'd be good quick reads for while I was waiting for stuff to come in from the library. I didn't expect Theodore Sturgeon to have the dedicate, and to have written a forward about how awesome the author is! (She sounds like a amazing person, btw, if you've never heard of her).
The book is like a Silver Age comic book story.... crazy stuff happens that you would never expect (Spock is actually a PIRATE for a while), but then somehow everything is back to normal at the end. I can't imagine much of what happens in the book can possibly fit in with later stories, but that's ok, its a great adventure well worth reading if you're in the mood for classic Trek
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Post by Slam_Bradley on May 2, 2021 18:06:30 GMT -5
Red Gardenias by Jonathan LatimerBill Crane is back in his final adventure along with Doc Williams and a love interest/partner in the form of the boss' daughter, Ann. Crane is undercover with Ann playing his wife in an effort to find out who is killing members of an industrial magnate's family. Along the way we have the usual drunken escapades of Crane, though he tries to reign himself in to appeal to Ann. There's also the usual casual racism and sexism that you can pretty much plan on finding in a genre book of this vintage. Overall, Crane's adventures have been fun and interesting. Not up with the masters (Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald), but well above average for the time-period. And the more light-hearted Crane is a great change of pace. This particular book is interesting because of the addition of the love interest and its effect on Crane and how he does, and tries to do, business. The mystery itself isn't terribly difficult to figure out. I had figured out the culprit and the reason around the half-way mark. But it's a reasonably interesting reason and the modus operandi is different. A worthy last entry. While none of the Crane novels are a patch on Latimer's masterpiece, "Solomon's Vineyard," they're well worth the time and a nice palate cleanser when your detectives get a bit too hard-boiled.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on May 3, 2021 13:50:18 GMT -5
The Broken Sword by Poul AndersonBack in late junior high as we were all starting to play AD&D everyone fell in love with The Lord of the Rings. And don't get me wrong, I did too. But I preferred other books that were further beyond the fields we know. My favorite was Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword. For someone whose Grandparents came from stock of Torkelson's and Thoreson's I was predisposed to this book about elves and trolls and vikings in the Danelaw and in which the Æsir play a role. Even at that point I recognized there was no Hollywood ending in this book. Sure there was plenty of loss in LotR, but mostly they were either villains or secondary characters who didn't leave that much impression (no, I never felt bad for Smeagle/Gollum). And in the end the world was saved. Whereas in The Broken Sword, nobody ends up happy and almost everyone ends up dead. It's the original Hobbesian fantasy. The book revolves around Skafloc and Valgard, the former stolen from his birth-bed and raised by elves, the latter his changeling, conceived in magic by an Elf-Lord and a Troll prisoner and destined to wreak havoc wherever he went. Anderson works largely in archetypes...and that's fine. The book wears its influences on its sleeve and those influences are the poetic and prose sagas of the Norse, along with Beowulf and the like. And that made it different than all those books that we were being subjected to that were LotR knock-offs. And, joy of joy in the days of bloated series', it was a one and done. In (roughly) 200 pages Anderson told a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. You could re-read it without a huge time commitment. You could move on to the next great thing. It was a wonder. That it came out the same year as LoTR, but was largely forgotten except by serious fantasy fans (and not even by them at this point) was astounding. But don't kid yourself that it wasn't influential. Michael Moorcock has written and talked at length about how influential the book was on his work (along with liking it much better than LotR). And anyone who has read this one and played D&D in the 70s and 80s knows that it and Anderson's other stand-alone "Three Hearts and Three Lions" had a huge influence on the game. Still one of the great stand-alone fantasy novels.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 4, 2021 5:24:44 GMT -5
(...) nobody ends up happy and almost everyone ends up dead. (...) Oh, yeah! Ragnarok, baby!
Well, on that latter point, i.e., liking it better than LotR, I think that's a pretty low bar for Moorcock.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on May 4, 2021 9:11:53 GMT -5
(...) nobody ends up happy and almost everyone ends up dead. (...) Oh, yeah! Ragnarok, baby!
Well, on that latter point, i.e., liking it better than LotR, I think that's a pretty low bar for Moorcock.
That's fair.
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Post by Deleted on May 5, 2021 22:27:43 GMT -5
Ok, so it's been a while since I finished a prose book. I was in a bit of a funk so far this year. I usually get to read for an hour or so each night after I get home from work before turning in, but over the last 3 months, we have been so short-staffed I wasn't getting out of work until after midnight most nights instead of between 10:00 and 10:30, so by the time I got home, had a bite to eat unwound for a few minutes and sat in the chair, I was ready to reach for my c-pap mask and go to sleep instead of reaching for a book. And I wasn't finding or making time to read at other times either, so I just wasn't reading any prose. It didn't help that the Fires of Heaven, the fifth volume of the Wheel of Time that I started in December, had slowed to a crawl for me even when I had time. Large ensemble casts have pros and cons, but when there are parts of the ensemble you like a lot, and others not so much, it becomes a bit of a slog when the current volume puts the ones you like on the back burner and the ones you don't on center stage, which is what happened with Book 5. But since I got out of the hospital and am not working, I have slowly gotten my groove back, and tonight, I finally finished The Fires of Heaven... This was obviously my least favorite of the series so far, and the one volume I always seem to stall in because of the focus on parts of the cast I am not as fond of as the others. There were still large chunks of this book I liked and that read well, but the rest, ugh. Overall it moves the story forward in many important ways and is a vital part of the story so far, it just took a route to get there I found tiresome at times. Overall, I still give it about 3.75 (out of 5), as the parts I liked, I really liked, but I hope the spotlight switches ot some different cast members next volume (and it should based on where Jordan left the cast members at the end of this book). I am not sure I am going to dive into Book 6 right away, I have a few other things I want to finish and might need a palette cleanser, but I will get to it here soon. -M
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Post by The Cheat on May 6, 2021 14:09:30 GMT -5
Hate to dispirit you, but I found the quality of the WoT books to take a pretty big nose dive around book 7/8. Books 9-11/12 should basically have been a single book and were a huge slog to get through. It finishes strongly once Sanderson takes over though.
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Post by wildfire2099 on May 6, 2021 19:48:01 GMT -5
I don't remember which, (9? 8?) where the big thing happens at last (I wont spoil what), I remember thinking, finally, progress. Then the next book explored what every minor side character was doing when the big thing happened for a good chunk of the start, and I couldn't read it anymore.
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2021 19:59:32 GMT -5
Still haven't bothered to pick up The Fires of Heaven.
The Shadow Rising wasn't bad, but I've enjoyed being able to read 3 to 4 books in the same time it takes to read a WOT book. And I feel like I have to be far enough that when they finally give us a date for the Amazon series, I can remain ahead of it.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 8, 2021 12:18:48 GMT -5
Kabu KabuNnedi Okorafor, 2013 Man, it took me over a month to get through this book - not because it's a bad book or difficult to read or anything, but because I've been swamped with work for the past few weeks (in terms of work, the s**t kind of hit the fan just after I picked up this book to read). I just haven't had the time for leisure reading, so one day I'd maybe read a bit in the morning over tea, or maybe in the evening before crashing and then not pick it up for days at a time. I haven't touched any comics at all recently, either. Anyway, though, on to the book: it's a collection of short stories, most published previously, but a few that first saw the light of day here. Okorafor is a fantastic writer, so there's not a dud in the lot. They run the gamut of characters, situations and styles (including a horror story or two), but pretty much all of them contain her usual mix of science fiction and/or fantasy and West African mythology and foklore. A few stories are otherwise adapted chapters from novels she never had published for whatever reason (but I kind of wish she had). The title story, "Kabu Kabu," by the way, was co-written with Alan Dean Foster of all people. It's set in Chicago, with a young Nigerian American woman who needs to get to the airport in a hurry to catch a flight to Nigeria for a family wedding and the only ride she can get is from a weird looking cab that reminds her of a kabu kabu (a slang term in Nigeria for an illegal cab). The eccentric driver assures her that he'll get her "to where she needs to go," and he does, but with some interesting detours. It's a fun story. I highly recommend this book: if you've read anything else by Okorafor, you'll enjoy this. If you haven't, this is a good sampler of her work. One thing I *really* didn't like, though, has nothing to do with the author or the content of the book, but a decision by the publisher. Namely, the fact that the edges of the pages are cut like this: It made flipping pages to go back and forth in the book really hard - particularly annoying here because Okorafor included little comments and explanatory notes on each story at the back of the book.
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Post by Deleted on May 10, 2021 11:13:43 GMT -5
Finished the first Avon Fantasy Reader last night, an anthology of fantasy stories that were published in the Avon Fantasy Reader (though many appeared in Weird Tales and other pulps previously). The cover is by Gray Morrow... featuring a characters from Moore's Black Thirst. The stories include: The Witch from Hell's Kitchen by Robert E. Howard (a.k.a. The House of Arubu) The Black Thirst by C.L. Moore (a Northwest Smith tale) A Victim of Higher Space by Algernon Blackwood (a John Silver tale) The Sapphire Siren by Nictzin Dyalhis A Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson The Crawling Horror by Thorp McClusky The Kelpie by Manly Wade Wellman the stories wound up being a mixed bag. Going in I was familiar with Howard, Moore, Blackwood, Hodgson and Wellman, though I had only previously read that particular Howard story. I was most looking forward to the Blackwood and Wellman stories, as I have liked what little I have read of their stuff (I've read more Wellman than Blackwood). Arabu/Witch is not one of Howard's better efforts, and I believe it was not published during his lifetime. It really is a paint by numbers effort from him and I believe it's one Roy Thomas filed the numbers off of and used for a Conan story. I'd not read any of Moore's Northwest Smith stuff. I have a collection of it, but never dove in. I had read a bunch of her Joirel stories though and liked them. Parts of this story reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith's more esoteric stuff, but overall it just didn't jibe with me. I still may try the other Northwest smith stuff, but I am in no rush to get to it after this one. The Sapphire Siren was an interesting sword and sorcery tale. A lot of good elements but it felt rushed. It might have been better if it had been a novella or a novel and had room to breathe a bit, and included the sequences that were glossed over in a sentence or two where lots of plot and character development seemed to have occurred but which we the readers only got told about and didn't experience. A Voice in the Night by Hodgson was pretty typical pre-Lovecraftian cosmic horror fare. A solid read but again told second hand by the characters rather than experiencing it with them. quite a common storytelling technique for the genre in that time period. The Crawling Horror felt very Lovecraftian and reminded me in theme and execution of the Colour Out of Space in a lot of ways. McClusky here though is a poor man's Lovecraft in terms of ability it seems-just a small sample to judge by though. The Kelpie by Wellman answered a question for me through that has plagued me since my adolescence. Why is the kelpie that appear in the AD&D module S2 White Plume Mountain so different from the traditional kelpie of folklore? The version in the module are a sort of seaweed siren while traditional kelpie in folklore have a more horse-like appearance. But here in Wellman's tale is the seaweed siren in all her glory. This must be one of the stories that influenced the early D&D crew even though it didn't make Gygax's list of literary influence in the DMG's appendices. The collection wound up being more interesting than good, but still worth a read for the historical sampler of weird fiction it provides. -M
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 10, 2021 12:19:03 GMT -5
(...) I'd not read any of Moore's Northwest Smith stuff. I have a collection of it, but never dove in. I had read a bunch of her Joirel stories though and liked them. Parts of this story reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith's more esoteric stuff, but overall it just didn't jibe with me. I still may try the other Northwest smith stuff, but I am in no rush to get to it after this one. (...) Yeah, I can relate. As I noted in my own review of a book collecting Moore's stories last summer, I found that neither the Jirel nor NW Smith stories agreed with me.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on May 10, 2021 13:10:17 GMT -5
Finished the first Avon Fantasy Reader last night, an anthology of fantasy stories that were published in the Avon Fantasy Reader (though many appeared in Weird Tales and other pulps previously). The cover is by Gray Morrow... I've had this book for decades. My gut tells me that I've read it but if I have it's been a long long time.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on May 10, 2021 13:59:47 GMT -5
Madame Buccaneer by Gardner Fox
Fox is clearly best known for his comic book work, particularly on the JLA and JSA. But he also wrote a number of novels over the years, both under his own name and with various pseudonyms. Prose-wise I was only familiar with his later sword & sorcery work such as Kothar and Kyrick. Based on those books I wasn't really expecting a lot from any of Fox's prose work. And while I wouldn't say that this paperback original belongs in the ranks of great literature it was a surprisingly readable pirate romance. Merchant sea captain Martin Chandos finds himself forced into the buccaneering life after his ship is illegally boarded and sunk by Spanish ships that consider the Caribbean to be their personal pond. Showing an almost supernatural aptitude at naval combat Chandos finds himself at odds with the Spanish, another pirate captain and a number of women who want him or want to use him. While it's not going to make anyone forget Sabatini, for someone expecting the likes of Fox's S&S books this is a pretty high quality read.
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