BOOK REVIEW - Paths of Glory

Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe
Stephen Brumwell
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006
406 pages

I find it curious that General James Wolfe languishes in relative obscurity in comparison to the manner of his death and what he accomplished in his astonishingly short life. In a military career that spanned 19 of his 32 years he rose from a 'volunteer', that is a young teen serving with a regiment in the hopes of improving his prospects for a career in the military, to Major General and commander of the British assault on Quebec (modern day Quebec City), the main British thrust in 1759. Wolfe's victory on the Plains of Abraham enabled the British to assault Montreal the following year and drive the French out of Canada. One can argue that Wolfe's victory at Quebec laid the groundwork for the troubles which led to the American Revolution a scant sixteen years later.

Wolfe began his career in the British army when the fortunes and popularity of 'Thomas Lobster', or redcoat, were at their lowest. As there was no standing police force in the early 1700's the army was often called in to quell riots and the like and thus the British soldier was not popular with the populace. Added to this was the stunning lack of success the army appeared to have, particularly when compared to the navy which, it seemed, could do no wrong. By the time Wolfe fell the worm had turned and the British soldier was well on his way to being the respected professional that springs to mind when one hears the word Redcoat.

This being the case one has to wonder why so few people know the name James Wolfe. I took an informal poll of my friends and associates and while a few knew the name and that he did something important, only one or two were able to properly place him in time and space. According to Brumwell's introduction, "Wolfe's current reputation provides a sorry contrast to the one he enjoyed a century ago." While the majority of what had been written through the end of the 1700's and all of the 1800's about Wolfe was laudatory, in the 1900's opinion in academia began to swing in the other direction. Some of this, as Brumwell observes, was an unsurprising backlash against the saccharine nature of the earlier works on Wolfe where he was capable of doing now wrong. However as is too often the case what should have been a minor adjustment towards a more reality based view of Wolfe became, in some quarters, a wholesale crusade to demonize the man and portray him as "...unpleasantly vain, smug and humorless." These efforts even went so far as to question Wolfe's military genius with some concluding that he was most assuredly not a great general and that his particular cultural life after death was due purely to the circumstances of his death.

It is in this historical landscape that Brumwell asks how Wolfe can be as celebrated as he was in death without first having already enjoyed a good reputation amongst his peers and countrymen before his death. As stated by Brumwell the central question of the work is, "Does Wolfe's fame rest upon the circumstances surrounding a single dramatic and significant victory, or is there a deeper explanation for his great contemporary reputation?"

Brumwell goes on to explore Wolfe's life and the world in which he lived in a very lively book which I found compulsively readable. I highly recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in history.

BOOK REVIEW - Storm Front

Storm Front (Book 1 of the Dresden Files)
Jim Butcher
ROC, 2000
322 pages

Like many I came to the Dresden Files by way of the short-lived television show on Sci Fi. Actually I did not even bother to watch the show on Sci Fi but rather downloaded the pilot episode via iTunes (for free) and watched it while processing data at the office. While there were some interesting concepts in there I felt the show pretty much sucked out loud and thus was done with the Dresden Files. Then I stumbled across an off-handed comment in a post* on Ragnell's Written World which indicated the sucktacular TV show was actually based on a series of books. This piqued my interest a little bit as Lisa (Ragnell) indicated she liked the books and as she has good taste in these matters I thought they might be an interesting read. Ultimately I did nothing about it because my life is already choked with tons of reading I am not getting done and the last thing I needed were more books around the house. Some time after that I ended up discussing the series with a good friend of mine who tends to have impeccable taste. (This statement ignores his love for premium tequila which will forever remain a mystery to me as all tequila, I don't care HOW good it is, tastes like ass.) He highly recommended both the Dresden series and, even more enthusiastically, Butcher's Codex Alera series. This made me even more interested in the books but again I came back to the point that I already have way too much media around the house waiting for me to consume. Finally as I was scouring the Murder By the Book website for any news of a Barry Eisler signing I noticed that Jim Butcher was going to be doing a signing in the immediate future. As I am callow and all about getting stuff signed so I walked over to the store and picked up Small Favor, the most recent Dresden book, as well as Storm Front, the premiere Dresden book. My objective was to read Storm Front on Sunday so I could know SOMETHING about the man and his writing before getting the chance to meet him.

Thanks to a late night and a somewhat liberal attitude towards what some call working hours I managed to succeed in my appointed task.

A task, as it turns out, which was very pleasant. After reading the first novel I could see why people are such fans, but I am getting ahead of myself here. For those of you who do not know, the Dresden Files all feature the adventures of wizard Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden in his capacity of wizard-for-hire and occasional consultant for the Chicago PD. In his novel debut Harry is called in to look into a grisly double-murder where the victims hearts were ripped from their chests while they are in the midst of making the two-backed beast. At almost the exact same time he is asked to track down a missing husband who might have been monkeying around with dark magic before he went AWOL. Along with all that Dresden becomes entangled with "Gentleman" Johnny Marcone, the capo di tutti capi of the Chicago underworld who is interested in keeping Dresden on the sidelines for this particular investigation. Above and beyond all this Dresden labors under the Doom of Damocles, a stricture handed down by the White Council which puts Dresden in a precarious place when researching magic of this magnitude. Having burdened our hero with enough baggage, Butcher then allows the true fun to begin.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, so much so that I went ahead and purchased the second and third book in the series at the signing and am already WELL into the second book and I am probably going to be a little Dresden-centric until I can tear through the series. I find I really enjoy long series as it allows me to move in to the author's world, become acquainted with it and then settle in comfortably. Many series reach this point and then POOF you reach the final book and the characters and world with which the reader has become so familiar with are never heard from again. Having said this, there are plenty of series and worlds which have over-stayed their welcome (I'm looking at you Dragonriders of Pern). Keeping an ongoing series interesting, challenging, and yet comfortable for the reader has to be an enormous challenge, part of which Butcher trims away by firmly grounding his novel in the mystery/thriller tradition which has become more prevalent in fantasy novels as the genre sometimes called urban fantasy. By utilizing the police procedural as a broad setting for the Dresden novels, Butcher gives the problems faced by his characters a sense of urgency which goes beyond that conveyed in his prose as well as providing readers who may be unfamiliar with fantasy tropes an easy way in to the world he has created.

Boy howdy this place needs an editor. That last paragraph was pretty much everywhere. Let's try again, shall we?

I highly recommend the book. Butcher seamlessly blends elements from several genre's in these novels and them dips them in a coating of geek-friendly wit. If you dig my sense of humor than I think you'll dig these novels.


BONUS CONTENT TIME (aka OMGPONIES!!1!!)**

1. To illustrate how much of a geek Mr. Butcher is I can only offer this. He showed up to the signing wearing a Sunnydale t-shirt. In fact it was THIS Sunnydale shirt, or its cousin.

2. During the Q&A session, which ended up being the entire thing as Butcher does not have a little spiel he gives and foregoes a reading in the hope his fans can read***, he told the story of how Bob came to be. Before this story is funny you have to understand two things. First Bob is some sort of spirit that has been imprisoned in a skull. Bob has been around for several centuries and provides Dresden with an immense library of magical knowledge and experience from whence Dresden can draw when needed. You may find yourself wondering WTF Dresden is doing with a talking head and why doesn't he use a computer like a normal person? Well he's a wizard, you twit, and this brings us to my second point, that being that wizards cannot use electronic devices without wrecking havoc upon them. The secret origin of Bob, who is nothing more than a floating head, is a bit funnier and demonstrates the level of smart-assery Butcher likes to embrace. There comes a time in every story where you need to drop some exposition on your audience. This is done with varying levels of competence but it almost always comes off as a bit boring. Perhaps the worst way exposition happens "on screen" is when one character begins with, "As you know..." The audience is immediately thinking, "If the character already knows then WHY THE HELL ARE YOU TELLING HIM AGAIN YOU NINCOMPOOP?" Often there will be one character whose entire point is to offer the exposition necessary to advance the plot, or, as I like to call it, whip a little science on the audience's collective ass. The Austin Powers movies handled this character by naming him Basil Exposition and thus poked fun at the characters which seem to be particularly prevalent in the spy genre. During the writing of what was to become Storm Front (its original title was Semiautomagic which just reeks of teh awesome) Butcher had to find a way to explain the rules of the magic system he was developing for the novels without having a character revert to the Basil Exposition School of Exposition. Butcher already had the character of Bob in his head when he was discussing this problem with his writing teacher at the time whose advice was to be sure to not make the character just a talking head, or a character who does nothing but spout exposition and leave. Butcher's mind being what it is took that and gave us Bob as he appears in the novels. A literal talking head. Named Bob.


* I am too lazy to track down the post but I believe Lisa was discussing the Arthurian overtones present in some of the books. It has been a while since I read the post.

** I can't believe I just did that.

*** While I understand where he is coming from, I actually really enjoy hearing an author read their own work. It gives me an idea of how the characters talk in the author's head which adds a layer to the character the next time I am reading.

BOOK REVIEW - House of Cards

House of Cards (Star Trek: New Frontier #1)
Peter David
Pocket Books, 1997
168 pages

I suppose it is a good thing when my biggest complaint about a book is the value proposition in buying the book itself, something we have seen in my other book reviews so this should be old-hat for you guys. With a cover price of $3.99, which is a purchase price of $4.32 after taxes, I would like to think that I am getting more than the approximately 168 story pages offered by this book. As I am typing this it occurs to me that I buy comics every week which offer only 22 story pages for a dollar less so maybe I should just shut the hell up on this particular topic. Perhaps it is best if we just move on to the actual contents of the book and forget this ever happened, shall we?

House of Cards introduces us to the new characters of M'k'n'zy, a Xenexian freedome fighter cum Starfleet officer, and Soleta an half-Romulan half-Vulcan scientist who seems to, despite her desire to be Vulcan, have a slightly rebellious streak to her. The book begins twenty years in the past with M'k'n'zy, who eventually changes his name to Mackenzie to get around people mispronouncing his name, as he fights the Danterian occupiers of his home planet as a teen. I will admit that at first I was concerned with how this might turn out, particularly since rather than just a short chapter this introduction to M'k'n'zy takes up over a quarter of the book, however in the end David's storytelling instincts were correct and this introduction does an excellent job of creating the character who will be central to the forthcoming tales.

After introducing us to M'k'n'zy, David then spends about twenty pages introducing us to Soleta and another twenty or so introducing us to Selar, the Vulcan medical officer who appeared in the TNG episode "The Schizoid Man," before we are finally brought to the present day (that being the time shortly after the events depicted in Star Trek First Contact). In the present we meet several familiar faces from the Enterprise-D as well as Admirals Jellico and Nechayev and are brought up to speed on the collapse of the Thallonian Empire, the ensuing humanitarian concerns, and Starfleet's response, which is to dispatch a single ship to observe and render aid where necessary.

When it was published in 1997 House of Cards represented a new and risky venture in the Star Trek universe. Peter David, John J. Ordover and Pocket Books were going to slip free of the bonds of Star Trek's familiar characters and explore new main characters, moving beyond the various cults of personality that each individual Star Trek series represents and pushing Star Trek as a setting and a theme. This was a risky move, despite the acclimation David's work had met with in fandom, due to the nature of Star Trek fandom. As I rule I dislike lumping a diverse group of people together however, with the notable exception of hardcore Transformers fanboys (and don't get me started on those chowderheads) Star Trek fans seem to truly be the most hidebound and vocal fans in sci fi, often dismissing new things out of hand before even giving them a chance to succeed or fail on their own merits.* Fortunately for all concerned it appears that the New Frontier experiment succeeded, quite possibly beyond anyone's expectation. With sixteen New Frontier novels now published, the recent release of the first New Frontier comic from IDW and the start of the Vanguard line of novels in 2005 it seems that perhaps fandom is more open minded than I give it credit for. Of course it does not hurt that this initial book was an enjoyable read. It was nice to escape the familiar faces and concentrate on new characters and new stories.


* For example look at all of the hubbub about J.J. Abrams changing the design of the Enterprise for the new movie, much of it coming before 99.99% of fandom had seen ANY smidge of the ship. I would also like to note that this sort of attitude is THE EXACT OPPOSITE of the ideals enshrined at the core of Star Trek. I think there are some interesting parallels between hardcore and hidebound Trekkies who have lost sight of the forest for the trees and many modern Christians who have done the same and this just furthers the idea that radicals of ANY stripe are not a good thing.

BOOK REVIEW - World Without End

World Without End
Joe Haldeman
Bantam, 1979
150 pages

World Without End arguably predates the Pocket Books Star Trek publishing bonanza with which I was to become far too familiar during my teenage years. While I am a confirmed Trekkie and have enjoyed many thousands of pages of Trek fiction I was not aware of this book's existence until I stumbled across it during a recent visit to the local Half-Price Books. I snapped it up, along with a 1968 edition of Whitfield and Roddenberry's The Making of Star Trek, for a couple of bucks and brother, those two bucks were the best money I have spent on books in a long while.

In World Without End the Enterprise encounters a spherical spaceship which uses a primitive Bussard ramjet for propulsion. The hull of the vessel is disguised as a planetoid and lined with an impossibly heavy metal which makes communication difficult at best. Then when Kik, McCoy and the away team get into a tight spot with the indigenous beings, a type of sentient bipedal flying squirrel, they realize they cannot beam back to the ship. Meanwhile the Enterprise itself has been trapped by the alien ship and is loosing power.

As I indicated earlier, I really enjoyed reading this book even if the resolution owes more to a deus ex machina than the ingenuity of the crew and I highly recommend it to any Star Trek fans out there and would go so far as to suggest it to someone looking for a light sci fi adventure along the lines of Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel or Starman Jones. No obtrusive social commentary here, just good adventure in an alien world.

When I sat down to finally write this review I was trying to quantify what it is that I like about these early Star Trek novels. So far both of them I have read (you can check out my review of Gerrold's Galactic Whirlpool here) have been mush more enjoyable than the average Star Trek novel. I think part of this may be due to the authors involved as both David Gerrold and Joe Haldeman are masters in the field of science fiction, however other Trek authors are no slouches. I think it can be boiled down to the fact that novels which predate the released of Star Trek: The Motion Picture do a better job of preserving the feeling of the television series where novels written after 1979 seem to be trying to be more cinematic in scope and thus loose something which makes Star Trek work for me.

BOOK REVIEW - Old Man's War

Old Man's War
John Scalzi
Tor, 2005
314 pages

After a year of suffering Mr. Wheaton's pimpin' (or is that Zombi pimpin'?) John Scalzi's debut science fiction novel Old Man's War I finally got off my not quiet as fat as it used to be ass and picked up a copy during one of my walks last weekend. I think the fact that I bought the book last Saturday and completed it Wednesday evening will tell you more about the book than any words I write here.

I did not tear through Old Man's War because it was an easy read but rather the quality of Scalzi's writing forced me to continue. The novel was perfectly paced and I was compelled to continue reading, even when I should have been turning out the light and going to sleep. (This book is directly responsible for me getting out of bed late twice this week.) However with all this praise I am getting a bit ahead of myself here.

Old Man's War is the story of John Perry and what he did on his seventy-fifth birthday. He visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army, or rather the Colonial Defense Forces. Mankind has made it out of our own solar system and begun to colonize other worlds. The problem is the universe is full of aliens and worlds worth colonizing are few an far between. This means competition for the usable worlds is fierce and the CDF is the only line of defense for the human colonies. The CDF does not accept young recruits. They want recruits that have a lifetime of experience thus you can only join up once you reach retirement age. Once you join up and leave Earth you can never come back. After your term of enlistment ends, which starts at two years but can be extended to ten, then you are given a homestead.

The mark of any great science fiction is that at it's core the story is about the human condition as it exists today. Actually now that I type that, it is really the mark of ALL great fiction, science or not. Old Man's War clearly fits this definition and takes a place alongside Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Card's Ender's Game as a masterpiece where the social commentary is encapsulated in a military setting. I HIGHLY recommend this book.


Bonus Content Time!!!

Here is John Scalzi speaking at an Authors@Google event in April of 2007:

BOOK REVIEW - Foreign Foes

Foreign Foes (Star Trek: The Next Generation #31)
Dave Galanter and Greg Brodeur
Pocket, 1994
276 pages

Foreign Foes opens with Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise hosting delegations of Klingons and Hirdans at a peace conference intended to end the seventy-year-old conflict between these two races as well as bring about a modicum of cooperation as they both face internal issues which the opposing party can assist in resolving. The Hirdans, having suffered decades of oppression and war at the hands of the Klingon agressors, are blinded by their hatred of the Klingons and with the death of the Hirdan ambassador, apparently at the hands of the Enterprise's own Worf, things quickly spin out of control. While Picard struggles to hold things together on Velex, Riker and Troi have gone AWOL and Data begins to act irrationally.

Before we go any further I have to let you know that of the various Star Trek novels I have read for some reason I have consistently found the Next Generation novels to be my least favorite of the bunch. This holds true across the line, regardless of the author therefore this novel started out behind the eight ball as far as I am concerned. I am not certain why this is as I enjoy the television series. Enough about me, let's talk about the book, shall we?

I picked this book up because I have recently become acquainted with Dave Galanter via these fancy internets* you kids go on about and felt it would be good for me to acquaint myself with some of the man's work. To be brutally honest the book did not grab me from the get go and thus it was difficult for me to grind through the book. Galanter and Brodeur are clearly capable authors and it shows that this was their freshman effort. I look forward to reading some more of their work and seeing them grow.


* It's pipes, dammit!

BOOK REVIEW - The Babylon 5 Scripts of J. Michael Straczynski Vols. 1 & 13

The Babylon 5 Scripts of J. Michael Straczynski Vol. 1
J. Michael Straczynski
Synthetic Worlds Publishing, 2005
454 pages

The Babylon 5 Scripts of J. Michael Straczynski Vol. 13
J. Michael Straczynski
Synthetic Worlds Publishing, 2008


I am not certain when I became aware of this collection, I know it was a couple of years ago or at least enough time for me to decide I had plenty of time to buy in and start getting these books. Now it is 2008 and according to the website they are only going to be available until May 31st of this year. I guess it is time to put up or shut up so I went ahead and ordered the first book in the series and the most recent book in the series to see how they are. While the scripts are interesting and as an aspiring screenwriter I make it a point to read as many screenplays as I can get my grubby little paws on, what makes this series of books so interesting to me is the extra materials included with each volume.

Of particular interest are the introductory essays from JMS where he discusses different facets of the production of Babylon 5 and then discusses each of the scripts contained in the volume. It is interesting to see where he was mentally when writing the scripts and the various things which influenced him during the writing of the scripts.

While I think the books could be slightly higher quality for the $40 per volume price (the plastic film which protects the covers has started to peel on both volumes and I have had them for less than a month) the materials contained between the covers are certainly worth the price of admission. Now all I have to decide is whether I want to go ahead and drop the cash for the entire series. These books are an excellent resource for screenwriters and provide fans of Babylon 5 with some interesting insights into the production of the series.

BOOK REVIEW - The End of America

The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
Naomi Wolf
Chelsea Green, 2007
156 pages

This is an uncomfortable read. In this book, framed as a letter to a young friend, Wolf delineates the ten steps dictators take to turn an open society in to a closed society and shows us how these have been taking place in modern America. The ten steps are:

1. Invoke an external and internal threat
2. Establish secret prisons
3. Develop a paramilitary force
4. Surveil ordinary citizens
5. Infiltrate citizens' groups
6. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens
7. Target key individuals
8. Restrict the press
9. Cast criticism as "espionage" and dissent as "treason"
10. Subvert the rule of law

To be honest I am not sure how to discuss this book, which might be a problem as the point of the book is to engender discussion on the state of America and what the "average" citizen can do. I know this is not much of a review but I feel like so many points Wolf makes are self-evident that I do not know how to discuss them without just copying directly from the source. At a mere 156 pages I think it would be better for you to go and read the source and I HIGHLY recommend that you do just that. This book comes at a critical time for American democracy and is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of a free and thriving America.

BOOK REVIEW - The Happiest Days of Our Lives

The Happiest Days of Our Lives
Wil Wheaton
Monolith Press, 2007
136 pages

I would like to start out by saying that Wil Wheaton is a bastard. As I noted in my review of Just A Geek, Wheaton's tales of his journeys through life kick my ass and quite frankly I am tired of it. Just once I would like to be able to put down something he has written without completing the damn thing in one sitting. I want to savor his prose and take my time to allow his stories to refresh my memories of my own geek life. Shit, I would like to get to bed before 3 in the morning so I am not a complete ass at the office the next day. Simple enough requests, methinks, but apparently Wheaton has other plans for my night.

As you might have surmised I received my copy of Wheaton's newest book The Happiest Days of Our Lives yesterday and once again read through it in a marathon session. Here he continues to chronicle his life as a geek with stories ranging from the dark past of the '70s all the way through the present. They run the emotional gamut as well, from the tear-inducing "let go - a requiem for Felix the Bear" in which Wil documents the all-too short time a stray cat spent in his family's life to the uncomfortably familiar "a portrait of the artist as a young geek" in which Wil details his involvement with table-top RPGs and drops the line, "...we had D&D fever, and the only prescription was more polyhedral dice." Amen to that, brother.

One of the most enjoyable things about Wheaton's writing is how accessible his style makes his stories. While he is an accomplished wordsmith his writing is not distant. There is an intimacy to it which makes you feel as though he is telling you personally. While reading the book you might as well be sitting and sharing a Guinness with Wheaton and this heightens the impact of his stories.

Go buy this book. Do it right now. Usually I would complain about this thing setting me back twenty clams for only 136 pages of product (and some of those are blank) however this book is worth twice the price of admission. If my words can not convince you then perhaps comic book luminary Warren Ellis can when he says, "Wil Wheaton's made a new career out of doing well that which is in fact the hardest thing to do at all, he writes, brilliantly and simply and gloriously, about joy." Truer words and all that.

BOOK REVIEW - Spook Country

Spook Country
William Gibson
Putnam, 2007
371 pages

William Gibson: The Spy Novel. I do not think I could have been looking forward to this book any more if I actively tried. Gibson's early cyberpunk works came along right as I was getting in to more serious science fiction and they had a profound effect on how I perceive the science fiction genre. I must admit that I have yet to read Pattern Recognition and I thought both Virtual Light and All Tomorrow's Parties pale in comparison to his work in his first three novels and his early short stories. I saw Spook Country as an opportunity to see one of my favorite writers and a master of his craft working in one of my favorite genres.

In Spook Country Gibson engages in his familiar method of telling a tale by telling the stories of people who have no connections. In this case he begins with Hollis Henry, former musician, who is working on her second career as a freelance journalist. Currently she is working on a piece about locative art for the as-yet published magazine Node. Unlike most other magazines, Node is avoiding the pre-release buzz under the direction of its enigmatic publisher Hugo Bigend, who may be familiar to readers of Pattern Recognition. Hollis has been tasked with finding Bobby Chombo, the premiere producer in the locative art world with Howard Hughes like social issues. Then there is Tito. In his early twenties much of Tito's background is a mystery. We know his family hails from Cuba and is involved in some sort of business which may or may not be espionage. Finally we have Milgrim, a white-collar junkie whose knowledge of Russian is being used by the mysterious Brown in exchange for hits of Rize, a prescription anti-anxiety drug. Eventually their individual stories all being to intersect and build towards the conclusion.

As with all of Gibson's work Spook Country was an enjoyable and challenging read. Gibson creates and explores corners of the world that I could never imagine and for me these explorations are almost worth the price of admission. Add to that Gibson's economy of prose and I can highly recommend this book. I did have one issue with the book; I had forgotten how Gibson tells his stories. Therefore when I was a third of the way through the book and still not seeing anything more than tenuous connections between the plots which were developing I started to get a little frustrated. This frustration came back at the end when the climax to the story seemed to be a bit of a let down. The climax comes and goes and yet nothing seems to be changed. Except the characters and sometimes that has to be enough. In this case it is. You really should read this book.

TPB REVIEW - The Final Flight

The Final Flight
Created and illustrated by Romain Hugault
Story and dialogs by Romain Hugault & Regis Hautiere
Editions Paquet, 2007
55 pages

I picked this up purely on the information that it was a comic book that involved WWII planes and the cover art was nice. This method of selecting comics leads to the purchase of some real crap and I should try to stop however from time to time you find a real gem like Hugault's "The Final Flight". In this rather slim volume are the stories of four combat pilots and the brief moments when their lives intersect.

Hugault starts in April, 1945 with "Cherry Blossom," the tale of kamikaze pilot Terou and the letter he writes his father before leaving on his mission. We then move to June of 1944 where in "Reprieve" we share Tom's, an American pilot, experiences as he is shot down behind enemy lines. The next story, "Iron Cross" moves us only one month further back, to March, where German ace Gunther leads a cadre of young men against a formation of American bombers. "Angel Drop", the final tale takes us to the Eastern front in November of 1943 where we meet Alain a young Frenchman who is flying for the Russians. Finally the epilogue brings us back to Tom and early in 1945 as he is deployed to an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, bringing us full circle.

The common theme which links the four pilots is the futility of war and the desperate actions one will take in service of not their countries but their comrades and while Haugult beats the reader around the head with his moral, I did not find it distracting. Over all Hugault manages to pack a lot of story in to these 55 pages along with a TON of beautifully rendered airplanes. From Zeroes and Corsairs in the Pacific, to the Thunderbolts, Lightnings, Mustangs, Yaks, Focke Wulfs, and Messerschmitts which controlled the skies over Europe each plane is incredibly detailed and accurate. About the only complaint I have about Hugault's art is that at times his faces are not right and that can be distracting.

All in all I felt the $10 price of admission was well worth it and I am very much looking forward to seeing more of Hugault's work, either in English or his native French.

BOOK REVIEWS - The Lightning Round

Since May a stack of books has been building up in the middle of my desk. I keep telling myself that I will get around to reviewing them, but then I get distracted by a new book or the huge pile of comics or vacationing or whatever and then another book has gone by unreviewed. Since I am having a marginally shitty weekend I thought I would cloister myself in the casa and work on cleaning my desk. This means these books have got to get reviewed therefore rather than trying to write a post about each book I am going to write on long post covering the stack. Lets get started, shall we?


The Foreign Correspondent
Alan Furst
Random House, 2006
273 pages

In the late 1930's hundreds of intellectuals had fled Mussolini's iron grip in Italy and settled in large communities in Paris where they waged a covert war of words against Il Duce through hundreds of journals and newspapers. In this case the title character, one Carlo Wiesz, begins as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and slowly becomes entangled in this world of underground newspapers and espionage. Part of me wants to call this another rip roaring tale of espionage but however much I may have enjoyed the book and read through it very quickly, it is not a fast moving story. Furst, as always, slowly builds towards the inevitable conclusion for his character, all the while showing us a Europe unfamiliar to most readers and yet somehow well known. I cannot recommend this book enough.


The Polish Officer
Alan Furst
Random House, 1991
287 pages

In Warsaw in 1939 Captain Alexander de Milja is given charge of the national gold reserve of Poland. His orders are to transport the gold to Bucharest and keep it out of Nazi hands. This mission is the beginning of his service in the intelligence arm of the Polish underground. His assignments take him from Paris to Warsaw to the forest of the Ukraine, all in service of a country which, for a time, only exists in the hearts of her people. Of the four Furst novels I have read so far The Polish Officer is far and away my favorite.


Heroes Volume One
Various
Wildstorm, 2007
235 pages

While not a book per se, I did not feel like creating a separate entry just for this, which can only be loosely referred to as a graphic novel. This volume is a collection of the Heroes comics which appeared online during the first season of the show. While this volume is in no way essential to understanding the events of the show, I did enjoy the several chapters which gave us the back story for Hana Gitelman (played by honorary future ex-wife Stana Katic in the series), aka Wireless, and the tale of her ultimate demise. I hope they use this in some of the forthcoming episodes. In the end this was an enjoyable read but not really worth the money unless you are a fanboy.


Guests of the Ayatollah
Mark Bowden
Grove Press, 2006
680 pages

As with the other books by Bowden which I have read, Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, the title truly sums up the book. In this case Bowden examines the circumstances which lead up to the events of 4 November 1979 and the following 444 days where a group of Iranian students managed to hold the United States hostage. Once again Bowden succeeds by showing the reader how these events, now twenty-five years gone, still reverberate in the world today. Every one should read this book as more than any other event the hostage crisis is what drives the U.S.-Iran relationship to this day.


Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team
Daniel Lenihan
Newmarket Press, 2002
287 pages

I picked this book up while visiting the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. The idea of the book, which is to document the formation and first several years of the National Park Service's Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, or SCRU (which has since been renamed the Submerged Resources Center), appeals to both my interest in history and my newly acquired hobby of SCUBA diving. In this book Lenihan, who was the founder and leader of the SCRU for several decades, ably charts the history of the unit through the time honored tradition of telling tales of their more exciting adventures. The success of this book is that rather than a dry and academic treatise on the SCRU and the issues surrounding their work, Lenihan's style is conversational and he manages to avoid ever talking down to the audience. I really enjoyed this book.


Missile Gap
Charles Stross
Subterranean Press, 2006
99 pages

I purchased this book on a whim while poking about the Subterranean Press website and let me tell you the $35 cover price was a bit disconcerting. Seeing as how the book combined hard science fiction, a genre in which I am trying to renew my interest, and alternate history, a genre that I always find interesting, I thought it was worth the risk. I was relieved when upon finishing the book I was able to judge my gamble a success. Weighing in at a slight 99 pages, Missile Gap tells the story of a world which while familiar to readers is vastly different from our own. On the eve of the Cuban War of 1962 everything changed. The world suddenly became flat, the constellations were no longer correct, and rockets launched from the surface of the planet were not able to make orbit. In addition to this there are new and massive seas which connect our familiar Earth to new continents. The year is 1976 and Cold War continues apace with Britain standing as the last bastion of freedom in Europe, the rest of the continent having falling under the Soviet control and man is just starting to explore these new continents, moving across what has become known as the Boreal Ocean to establish colonies on the new land. While this is going on others struggle to prevent the scourge of communism from enveloping the remnants of the free world and yet others strive to understand what has happened to our world. While this may seem like a lot of ground to cover in just 99 pages, Stross does so masterfully, giving the reader enough to understand what is happening without delving into the minutiae of his characters day to day lives. I really enjoyed this book and look forward to tracking down his other works and adding them to the growing mound of reading I have yet to tackle.


Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
Grant Naylor (Rob Grant & Doug Naylor)
Penguin, 1989
298 pages

I blame this book for derailing the whole review process. (Well this book and the damned television, but we won't get in to that here.) I have started to review this book three or four times and each time I throw my hands up in frustration and wander off in search of easier prey. The problem with this book is that the entire concept of Red Dwarf defies description. Yes, red Dwarf is the story of one young drunkard name Lister who, after a heck of a birthday party finds himself stranded on one of Saturn's moons with no way to get back to Earth. To get home he enlists on the Red Dwarf, a mining vessel headed back to Earth. Since Lister is an incorrigible slacker he soon figures out that by getting himself put into stasis he can make it home without actually having to do any work. The one flaw in Lister's plan is that the Red Dwarf suffers a radiation leak which kills the entire crew and traps Lister in stasis for a million years or so. After the computer revives Lister the true fun begins as his only companions are the computer, who has gone a bit batty after being alone for a million years, the hologram of Arnold J. Rimmer, Lister's annoying roommate aboard the Red Dwarf, and Cat, the evolved descendant of the cat Lister snuck on board. Hilarity of the British persuasion ensues. My main worry about the book going in was that it would only really be accessible to fans of the show, of which I am one, since a lot of the humor depends on the interplay between the various characters, however the book captures that interplay brilliantly. If you are a fan of the show I definitely recommend this book and if you do not know anything about the show then you may want to check it out. It will not be a waste of your time.


Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
J. K. Rowling
Scholastic, 2007
759 pages

So here it is. After nine years and three-thousand three-hundred forty-one pages we have reached the final entry in the Harry Potter epic. When I started to read this book I had it in the back of my head that this book was going to suffer from the same impossible to meet expectations that plagued the Star Wars prequels. Fortunately for us all Rowling was able to craft a very satisfying end to her series. Can you just imagine the chaos if she had tanked? It would be like Dawn of the Dead meets the Kids Choice Awards set in Compton and nothing good can come of that! In this book she manages to tie up all of the loose threads in a manner which is consistent with the world she has created. I do not want to delve in to the book any more than that, really, in case one or two of you have not read it yet. We will leave it at the acknowledgment that the book is a satisfying end to the story and even includes one of those ten-year later post scripts that will play during the credits of the final film.


Diary of Indignities
Patrick Hughes
M Press, 2007
255 pages

This is the second time I have been suckered into buying a book comprised of material which you can read on the author's website for free, the first being Wil Wheaton's Just A Geek*. As an aspiring writer myself I do not mind paying for these books, particularly in these two cases as they are by turns poignant and funny to the point of tears. Patrick Hughes, whose website can be found here, is truly a larger than life character who is a danger to both himself and others and endowed with a razor-sharp wit which he uses to eviscerate his life and those around him. There is really nothing I can say about this book except encourage you to go and check out his website for samples. This is perhaps my favorite single story there, however his illustrated trip to the local Ren Faire is funny in a very sad I've been there and seen that sort of way. Once you have read those two stories you must go buy the book. The power of Christ compels you.


Dark Star
Alan Furst
Random House, 1991
437 pages

The second of Alan Furst's espionage novels set in Europe during the the lead up to World War II. Again it has been so long since I read the novel that I cannot communicate any useful information about the novel except that I very much enjoyed it and would unreservedly recommend it to anyone.


Requiem for an Assassin
Barry Eisler
Putnam, 2007
350 pages

This book will serve as an example of how backed up I have been on book reviews. The book was released on May 22nd. Before May 22nd I managed to score and read an advanced copy of the novel. My slacking knows no bounds. At this point it has been so long since I read the book I cannot safely comment on it except to say that I remember enjoying it very much and am once again looking forward to Eisler's next offering.


* Incidentally Wil recently finished his latest book The Happiest Days of Our Lives. If it is half as good as Just A Geek then it is well worth your time and hard earned ducats.

BOOK REVIEW - In the Presence of Mine Enemies

In the Presence of Mine Enemies
Harry Turtledove
New American Library, 2003
454 pages

In the Presence of Mine Enemies is set in the year 2010. Germany conquered Europe in World War II and then went on to conquer the United States in World War III, dropping atomic weapons on Washington, D.C. in the process. Hitler's solution to the "Jewish Question" has been carried out on a world-wide scale. Against this backdrop we meet Heinrich Gimple and his family, Jews living and working in Berlin, the heart of the Greater German Reich. His family and the other jewish families they know have disguised themselves as Aryans. They have forged their family trees and histories. The men go uncircumcised. They eat pork. They do not celebrate any of the usual Jewish holidays in the traditional manner but rather they celebrate in their heart. They do the best they can to lie low and pass without notice. The biggest problem in their life is their three daughters. As the novel opens they are telling their eldest, Alicia, that she is a Jew. Alicia is just ten years old and has spent all ten of those years learning the same lessons every other good German has learned; how the Jews are to be reviled and are untermenschen. The novel follows the day to day lives of the Gimples and their friends through what, in the end, becomes a tumultuous two years for the Reich.

I absolutely loved this book! Despite my misgivings about the premise and the cognitive dissonance I would suffer at times in the book, this is an excellent tale that deserves to be read by everybody. I really do not know what else I can say. I plowed through this book in a little less than a week and was so into it that I actually ended up taking it to work and reading it at my desk rather than the text I am supposed to be reading right now. The last seventy pages are very close to the best seventy pages of prose I have read this year.

As I noted I have some misgivings about the premise and suffered from some cognitive dissonance while reading this novel. The misgivings I have surround the possibility of Germany being able to win the Second World War and then turn around and prosecute a war against the United States and win. Even if the United States stays out of World War II or is effectively bottled up on North America, the Wehrmacht would have been ground to pieces against the Soviet war machine and I think that even a generation later Germany would still be too weak to fight a war across the Atlantic. The cognitive dissonance I suffered from while reading this novel is that, despite knowing it was set in 2010, I could not help but visualize things as though they were still stuck in 1945. When Turtledove talks about riding the bus I see the bus as a curvy diesel affair rather than the more modern and boxy buses we have today. When he talks about Luftwaffe Alfa, the Fuhrer's plane, I cannot help but see a Junkers Ju-52 and when he talks about the Messerschmitt 662 jets which escort Luftwaffe Alfa I cannot help but see the Me 262 jets fighters. While this did not distract me at all while reading the book, I found it amusing once I sat down to think about what I had read.

In the final analysis this book is important and while Turtledove does not have anything new to say about our all too human failings, it is an interesting look at a world that might not be as far away as you think. Go forth and read this book. You will not regret it.

TPB REVIEW - Empowered Vol. 1

Empowered Volume 1
Adam Warren, writer & artist
Dark Horse Books, 2007
248 pages

So an entire graphic novel based on a character the artist designed specifically as a commission for parties unknown who like girls bound and in very little clothing; what could possibly go wrong here? Of course since it is by Adam Warren, the OG of the OEL, I had to pick it up and see what the fuss was all about. In a nutshell the book is pretty much what you would expect from what I described, except that while the bondage situations and lack of clothes are clearly exploitive, they never cross the line into pornography.

This book chronicles the life and times of Empowered, the central character's admittedly lame nom de hero. She gets her powers from a supersuit which is SKIN tight and for some reason, not very resilient. As the suit gets torn up her powers diminish until she is a mere mortal...and bound and gagged. While the first few stories in this volume seem little more than excuses to put the heroine in such situations, Warren's affection for the character and desire to do something more with the book shows through. This is particularly evident in his characterization of Empowered, who has very low self-esteem and only starts to get a little better when she builds a support structure around her.

As the stories get a little longer Warren introduces a couple of new characters which help pull the stories away from their bound and gagged origin and flesh out Empowered's world. First there is Thugboy who goes from being a generic henchman to Empowered's live-in boy friend, and then Ninjette, a female ninja, comes along and, after tying Empowered up, decided to go ahead and move in with the couple. My favorite addition to the cast is He Whose Name is Too Scary to Be Spoken, a demon lord who ends up trapped in some alien bondage gear. In typically ludicrous Warren fashion Empowered has to hang on to the caged demon lord because of zoning restriction on the Super Homeys' HQ. His dialogue is over the top enough to compete with the likes of Dr. Doom and Darkseid*, however he comes with a voyeuristic streak about a mile wide.

All in all I really enjoyed the book however it is only going to appeal to those who like their super-heroing with a liberal dose of absurdism and bondage.

* As I was reading the book I found myself reading this character's dialogue out loud and cracking myself up. I am not sure if this speaks to how funny the dialogue actually is or how sad my life is, take your pick.