Susan Jacoby's Never Say Die gives us a hard look at aging
and old age in America, from the Founding Fathers to the modern era.
In a series of essays, Jacoby covers statistics on Alzheimer's and
other mental infirmities; wellbeing and the presentation of the
wealthy as the face of America's elderly population; caretaking; our
outlook on death; how Social Security doesn't accumulate for the
unemployed, which has proven a negative that mostly impacts women
who stopped working to raise children; poverty and the elderly;
portrayals in media; and the question for longevity.
Colored by Jacoby's life experiences, including the loss of her
partner, this work is perhaps more personal than her other most
recent book, The Age of American Unreason, but its evaluation
of modern American society is just as considered.
Professional film critic Adams devotes a year to watching 365 bad
movies in the hope of finding The Worst Movie Ever Made, and the
results make for very entertaining reading. He's not talking about
Drew Barrymore romantic comedies; he's talking Robot Monster,
Manos: The Hands of Fate, Rollergator, and the
complete oeuvre of Bo Derek. Adams is Australian, which is why there
are no references to Netflix in this book and he gets himself into
debt having to buy copies of everything he wants to see. But this
allows him to write knowledgeably about lesser-known Australian
films alongside the mostly American fodder. Pandemonium,
which postulates that the famous “Dingo Girl” was not eaten by dogs
in the outback, but raised by them, is one such hidden gem. She gets
involved with a descendant of Hitler’s who runs an abandoned movie
studio and hopes to mate with her to create a new Master Race. What
more could you ask for in cinema? We learn a few lessons along with
Adams over the course of the year. Avoid anything John Travolta made
in between Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. And
anything starring a former Playboy Playmate is likewise doomed, from
Dorothy Stratten’s Galaxina, where she plays a sexy robot, to
Anna Nicole's Smith To The Limit, where she plays a sexy
ex-CIA operative, to Jenny McCarthy's Dirty Love, where any
attempt at sexiness on her part is squashed by the constant flow of
humiliations to which her character is subjected. There are brief
conversations with several schlock filmmakers and critics. Mike
Nelson of Mystery Science Theater 3000 names Star Wars
Episode I and II as the worst-ever movies, but the one I
want to see is Joe Dante's nomination, 1970’s The Phynx. In
order to rescue America's greatest entertainers (Butterfly McQueen
from Gone with the Wind, Johnny Weismuller of Tarzan fame,
etc, Colonel Sanders!), from Albania, the government forms a rock
band, The Phynx, who can enter the Communist nation with impunity.
Not only are they secret agents, but Richard Nixon declares a
national holiday in their honor: Phynxgiving. Instant classic.
Media tie-in writing is based on other media such as movies, TV
shows, and videogames. It encompasses novelizations, which adapt the
source material into book form, and original stories inspired by the
source material. Two well-known examples are the myriad books based
on the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, although
tie-ins cover any and all genres from westerns to romance to
mystery.
Tied In is an in-the-trenches look at media tie-ins from
some of the biggest names in the field, edited by Lee Goldberg,
author of numerous Diagnosis Murder and Monk tie-in
novels. Nineteen essays and interviews cover a wide variety of
angles, from Tod Goldberg's hilarious “Does a Real Writer Write
Tie-Ins?” to a roundtable discussion of “The Business and Craft of
Writing Novelizations & Tie-Ins” featuring nineteen publishing
veterans, including Kevin J. Anderson, Max Allan Collins, and Greg
Cox.
A couple contributions may be too “inside baseball” for the
nonwriter, but overall the book will appeal to the reader of tie-in
fiction as much as the professional tie-in writer (or someone trying
to break in to the field). Even pieces that aren't how-tos are full
of details which can provide advice for the writer and
behind-the-scenes fun for the fan.
Although the design and layout are a bit rough around the
edges—errors of autoformatting are frequent—the entertaining and
informative content make this a worthwhile read for tie-in writers
and fans alike.
On March
30, 1981, John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan, his press
secretary James Brady, police officer Thomas Delahanty, and Secret
Service agent Tim McCarthy as Reagan left the Washington Hilton
Hotel. Wilber gives us an exquisitely-detailed chronicle of that
day, the events leading up to it, and those immediately following,
missing neither the gold bear cuff links that the president wore as
a memento of his California governorship nor the No. 10 scalpel the
doctors used to make their first, life-saving incision. Reagan ,
whose Secret Service codename was “Rawhide,” had been in office for
just over two months, and despite his jokes about it, at 70, he was
the oldest man to ever to lead the nation. The White House went to
extraordinary lengths to portray him as vigorous, so it was all the
more important that while he was being operated on the public, not
to mention America's enemies, hear nothing but optimism. But behind
the scenes, things were very different. The doctors initially
couldn't find the bullet. If it had entered a vein, it could be
pumped straight to the president's brain. Meanwhile, at the White
House, deputy White House press secretary Larry Speakes was
flustered by questions he didn't have the clearance to answer,
confusing viewers. There was a power struggle over who would be in
charge until Vice President George H.W. Bush returned from Texas,
and Al Haig, the Secretary of State, famous declared “I am in
control here,” skipping over the next in succession, the Speaker of
the House. Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger ordered two hundred
crews of nuclear bombers to their planes, just in case; the opposite
of what Haig had announced to the press, that there was no increase
in alert status. Drawing from such diverse sources as the
president's medical records, FBI reports released under the Freedom
of Information Act, and interviews with seemingly everyone who had
anything to do with the event (over 125 people), Wilber's work makes
for exciting reading, even though we all know how it turned out in
the end.
So opens the first in a new series by Preston and Child and the
perfect compliment to their string of bestsellers featuring the uber-cerebral
Aloysius Pendergast. In stark contrast Gideon’s Sword has a
noirish, more plot-laden feel complete with a Batman-like set-up.
Our dark hero Gideon’s life has been dominated by the pursuit of
vengeance after witnessing his father gunned down in the wake of
being accused of a crime he didn’t commit. As we know from Batman,
though, vengeance proves only to be the first step in the pursuit of
justice in general and such is the case and then some with Gideon.
This first entry finds him hot on the trail of a spanking new
super-weapon currently in the hands of a rogue Chinese scientist.
The Chinese, of course, are fast becoming the new Soviets of
thriller lore, Preston and Child hardly missing a beat in taking
advantage of the paradigm shift.
Structurally, Gideon’s Sword combines the mysterious elements
pioneered by Trevanian in his Jonathan Hemlock featured Sanction
tales with the moral ambiguity of Donald Westlake’s (writing as
Richard Stark) Parker novels. A stunningly effective tale featuring
the most exciting debut of a hero since Lee Child introduced us to
Jack Reacher, Gideon’s Sword is honed to a razor-sharp edge
that never wavers or misses.
The
Passages of H.M.: A Novel of Herman Melville
by Jay Parini
reviewed by A.B. Mead
Many
readers of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick might wish they had a
version with all of the adventure, but none of the cetology. In this
biographical novel of Melville's adventures in “the watery part of
the world,” we get just that. Alternating between Melville's time as
a seaman in his younger days and his wife Lizzie's accounts of their
economic and social hardships in later years, Parini gives us “the
good parts version” of Melville's life and the events that inspired
his writings. Turning a novelist's eye to life aboard the whaler
Acushnet, and her tyrannical Captain Pease, we see the origins
of Moby-Dick. When Melville and his shipmate Toby jump ship
in the South Seas and spend time with the native Typee, Parini
depicts the events with more detail than Melville himself dared in
his book of the same name. The Typee are naked, tattooed, and
cannibalistic. When not making love to a nymph-like girl, Herman is
in direct danger of being eaten. Years later, a couple of adventure
novels under his belt, Melville meets and befriends Nathaniel
Hawthorne, who encourages him to turn the whaling story he's working
on into something greater: “Every real book is a form of Scripture.
Write your own Bible.” Depressed by the subsequent failure of
Moby-Dick and the books that followed, Melville travels again,
this time as a passenger, through Greece to the Holy Land. There he
experiences a form of peace that his globe-circling had failed to
bring him. Though grounded in reality, this book, like Melville's
own autobiographical writings, takes some liberties as it enters the
characters' minds. But, as Melville tells Toby, “Everyone knows”
that memoirs “are made up. Only novels tell the unadorned truth.”
How I can be at peace for what I’ve done? I don’t know, but I am.
What Allison Glenn has done forms the heart of Heather Gudenkauf’s
second novel, These Things Hidden. Part literary fiction,
part romantic suspense, and part family saga, it evokes Judith
Guest, Alice Hoffman and Jodi Picoult at their level best while
building an almost Dennis Lehane-like sense of foreboding and
tension.
It might be Allison who’s in jail when the book opens, but her
younger sister Brynn is equally imprisoned in a high school world of
gossip and innuendo. The lives of both sisters face fresh
complications when Allison is released and tries to resume her life,
the secret that has bonded them tragically now certain to tear them
apart in the same fashion. Stylistically, the book shifts
viewpoints between them by chapter, perfect for a tale about
tortured souls enduring different levels and definitions of pain.
At its heart, Lehane’s tragically brilliant Mystic River is a
soap opera, Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place with unwed
pregnancy replaced by child molestation. Well, the same can be said
for These Things Hidden, a similarly tragic and also
brilliant treatise on the deconstruction of the modern nuclear
family. Gudenkauf paints a dark picture indeed but it’s one she
shades in wondrous tones of both character and subtext. To
paraphrase Hemingway, it’s a hard tale but well worth the effort.
My Reading Log by Jeff Ayers, Associate Editor
Ethan Cheeseman, along with his three
smart, polite, and relatively odor-free children, have successfully
gone back in time, but can they help their pirate friends reverse a
curse? In “Another Whole Nother Story” (Bloomsbury, $16.99), every
well thought out plan doesn’t seem to go as planned. The second
book by the founder, president, and vice president of the National
Center for Unsolicited Advice, Dr. Cuthbert Soup, continues the
strange and quirky adventures of a unique family and their bizarre
friends and enemies. For the kids and the kid in all of us.
Scott Hilburn fills the void that
appeared when Gary Larson quit the Far Side. Hilburn’s twisted view
of the world has been collected in the hilarious treasury of his
Argyle Sweater cartoons, “Tastes Like IChicken.” (Andrews McMeel,
$16.99) Full color and full of commentary from Hilburn, the book
ends up being a value not only for the laughs, but also the insight
into the writing and creating process.
’m
a big fan of the family comic Stone Soup and the latest collection
of strips; “We’ll Be Really Careful” (Four Panel Press, $14.95)
continues the saga of a single mom trying to raise two kids in an
ever-increasing hectic world. If you are like me and disappointed
that Lynn Johnston went back to the beginning of her strip, then
this will definitely appeal to you.
I’m a huge fan of the fake news site,
The Onion. Now that I have taken the plunge with a Kindle, I was
thrilled to discover two books highlighting some of the quirky and
silly news. “The Onion Presents The Finest Reporting On Literature,
Media, And Other Dying Art Forms” and “The Onion Presents Americas
Finest Tech News” ($2.99 each) are worth the small investment.
Where else can you find such stories as "Even CEO Can't Figure Out
How Radio Shack Still In Business," or "First-Time Novelist
Constantly Asking Wife What It's Like To Be A Woman?”
“In Service To The Mouse: My
Unexpected Journey to Becoming Disneyland's First President”
(Chapman University Press, $26.95) by Jack Lindquist chronicles the
life of the man who spent the majority of his life working for Walt
Disney and his parks. His anecdotes are insightful, funny, and most
have never been heard until now. If Disney is your bag, then
definitely pick this up.
My Reading Log 
