Non-Fiction
 

Our Hero: Superman on Earth

by Tom De Haven

reviewed by Kevin Lauderdale

Yale University Press' “Icons of America” is one of the few series we mention by name in our reviews because it nearly always guarantees quality. De Haven continues to uphold that tradition in this examination of Superman's role in American culture. For De Haven, Superman is an intrinsically American hero because he's the ultimate immigrant. Though he is a “strange visitor from another world,” he also mirrors us. While other heroes put on masks to become superheroes (Batman, The Flash), Superman puts one on (the glasses, the three-piece suit) in order to disguise himself. His disguise as Clark Kent is “Superman's opinion of the rest of us.” The book follows the travails of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster as they first created then lost control (and didn't share in the revenue) of the empire that grew. As De Haven follows the Man of Steel from comics to the radio to television and the movies (and Broadway!), he traces the evolution of Superman from Depression-era gang-buster and orphan-saver to his wartime-era adventures. Real heroes were fighting in Europe and the Pacific, so Superman was given aliens and supervillains like Lex Luthor to battle. Come the 1950's, Superman became a “Can-Do” establishment man embodying the Eisenhower years. The bottled city of Kandor (shrunk by supervillain Braniac before Krypton was destroyed) was the first indication that some  fellow Kryptonians had survived. Soon Superman was joined by Supergirl , escaped prisoners from the Phantom Zone, and many others. Superman has gone from single immigrant to “a naturalized American citizen whose extended family—kinsmen, black sheep, poor relations—keeps showing up...from the Old Country.”

Forget Me Not

by Vicki Hinze

reviewed by Jon Land

Forget Me Not is a thriller you won’t soon forget, especially if you’re a fan of the romantic obsession mastered by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo or Otto Preminger’s Laura.  Vicki Hinze’s latest blends disparate elements together with surprising ease, and the result is a darkly original tale where hope and faith provide the light. 

The book opens with the line “You know what I want,” an elegant encapsulation that’s also ironic since Forget Me Not is all about desire trumping all else in spite of the fact that the characters aren’t always able to articulate what it is they’re after.  The central plotline focuses on the saintly Benjamin Brandt whose good efforts in running a crisis center are rewarded with the senseless murder of his wife and son.  Then, years later, the guilt-racked, lonely Brandt meets an amnesiac who bears a striking resemblance to his dead wife Susan and even has her necklace.  He resists the temptation to simply remake her in Susan’s image, a testament to his faith and strength that sends him on a twist-laden journey to unravel the woman’s true identity. 

The story, though, isn’t so much about faith conquering all so much as coming to the realization of its limitations and learning to overcome them, which comes define Brandt’s very heroism.   Such spiritual elements would’ve overburdened the tale in lesser hands.  Good thing’s Hinze’s are as sure and steady as they come, making Forget Me Not not to be missed.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

by Seth Grahame-Smith

reviewed by Kevin Lauderdale

Book editor and wit Bennett Cerf once said that a guaranteed best-seller would be Lincoln's Doctor's Dog, because it contained all the elements that everyone was already fascinated by. Not much has changed over the years, so it was only just  a matter of time before someone hit upon Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. The good news is that despite the preposterous title and the fact that it was written by the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this is not just a stunt book. It's a well-written entertainment that will appeal to both horror and Lincoln aficionados. Starting with the meta-fiction of a found manuscript—the secret, life-long journal of Lincoln—Grahame-Smith presents a biography of Lincoln filled with extracts from that journal. But the author did not just copy a 19th-Century, public-domain Lincoln biography and insert vampires. Working from the premise that a vampire killed young Lincoln's mother, Grahame-Smith spins a convincing secret history where this Lincoln is as devoted from his youth to the annihilation of vampires as ours would become in later years to abolition. Familiar incidents are subtly twisted. Young Lincoln's trip down the Mississippi  where he first sees slaves becomes the time when he discovers that vampires feed off slaves (It's nice to have a novel where vampires are the villains for a change.). Jefferson Davis, convinced that vampires will eventually rule over men, is trying to “limit it to the Negro.” Encouraged by a vampire who seeks peaceful coexistence with humanity, Lincoln hunts as a lawyer, legislator, and president, wielding his trusty rail-splitter axe through the years.

Caught

by Harlan Coben

reviewed by Jon Land

I knew that opening that door would destroy my life. 

With that, Harlan Coben’s latest impossible-to-put-down bestseller is off and running on a dead sprint through a myriad of social issues.  In fact, you might say Caught is a horror story with sexual predators and child kidnappers playing the traditional monster roles. 

Or maybe not.  Because by all accounts Dan Mercer, the community center director who delivers the line above, may not at all be the predator he is accused of being.  Maybe the real monsters are his accusers, or the Dateline-like television reporter who set him up in a sting.  Wendy Tynes is ultimately fired for her indiscretion, then rehired when police find a link between Mercer and recently vanished high school wunderkind Haley McWaid.  This against the backdrop of Wendy’s problems raising her own son as a single parent.  

Indeed, his last few efforts have seen Coben transition from writing superbly crafted, wildly paced, twisty thrillers to equally well-crafted and paced, twisty thrillers that also serve as timely tales on the terrors bred by modern, techno-dependent society.  But Caught feels like his Mystic River, in many ways as heart-wrenching and cautionary as the Lehane classic.  It catches you from the first page and doesn’t let go until the very last one is turned.  This is Coben at his absolute best, which is very, very good.

Bound in Blood

by PC Hodgell

reviewed by Neal Swain

The improbable heir of her brother’s title, Jame has enrolled at a military school to prove her legitimacy in a patriarchal society. So far, this hasn’t gone well: she has a habit of creating problems, and if she doesn’t, they come and find her. 

Several assassination attempts have been made against the noble heirs attending the school just as the annual inter-house war games begin. Jame needs to keep a step ahead of them, but meanwhile numerous people want her dead or subjugated –most of them for different reasons- and local gods and ancestral portraits keep demanding her time. As Jame faces the bewilderments in her present and the nightmares in her past, she is quickly realizing that she cannot step away from what they bode for her future. 

Bound in Blood is the fifth book in P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyr series. The first book, Godstalk, was published in 1982 and its sequels were released sporadically until recently: the previous four volumes have been re-released by Baen books in two omnibus editions for readers who haven’t been lucky enough to find them on the shelves of used bookstores. Bound in Blood is not the place to start this series, but it is one well worth catching up on (and who doesn’t love it when an author already has several books for them to catch up on?). P.C. Hodgell writes an elaborate tapestry of busybody gods, old secrets, and destructive prophecies, in a unique and vibrant world.

Point Omega

by Don DeLillo

reviewed by Scott Pearson

Richard Elster, a defense scholar; Jim Finley, a documentary filmmaker; and Jessie, the scholar’s adult daughter—these are the main characters of this sparse yet challenging novella. Following a prologue in the third-person from the point of view of an anonymous man (which, at first, seems largely irrelevant), the narrative shifts to the first-person story of Finley. He has been staying at Elster’s remote cabin in the desert northeast of San Diego for a week and a half, trying to convince the reluctant Elster to be the subject of his next documentary.  

Along the way we get telling details of Finley’s past and intriguing snippets of Elster’s arcane philosophies. The characters are well-drawn, and the isolated desert setting is an evocative part of their developing friendship. Then Jessie shows up, detached from the world, socially awkward, and the dynamic between the three develops in unexpected ways. Not much more can be said without giving too much away; the story takes a dark turn but, as happens in life, without much resolution. 

The characters have surprising depth thanks to DeLillo’s careful choices with words and scenes. Given the unsettling tragedy that intrudes, however, much is left uncertain, plot threads unresolved, thoughts unsaid. As long as you don’t need everything to be neatly tied up, this is a compelling piece of fiction that keeps you thinking after you’ve turned that final page. (As an aside, the publisher should have set a price more in line with the page count.)

The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

reviewed by A.B. Mead

For a book whose dust jacket tells you that this is a time travel story—a premise that should be exciting no matter what—its first third moves at so leisurely a pace that readers might be tempted to put it down. That would be a real shame because once the second act begins and inventor Nikola Tesla and financier J.P. Morgan enter the story, the novel becomes so much more interesting. Peter Force is a young man in New York circa 1900 where he is part of the crew digging the new subway system. He meets Cheri-Anne Toledo, who claims to be from the titular kingdom, an ill-advised attempt by the Continental Congress to raise money during the Revolutionary War. The government sold a plot of land near Lake Erie to a French nobleman who promptly declared it to be a sovereign state. Cheri-Anne is supposedly not only from the kingdom, but also from seven years in the past, where she was working with Tesla on a matter-transportation device. Why then doesn't Tesla recognize her? More importantly, is there a secret in the layout of the subway tracks?  What purpose does Morgan see deep in the bedrock of Manhattan? Although the conceit of a present-day, un-named narrator telling the tale, complete with footnotes detailing his attempts to prove any of these claims, gets tiresome, the tale is otherwise simply and elegantly told.

The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin

by Josh Berk

reviewed by Hayden Bass

Will Halpin knows that transferring from his all-deaf school to a public high school won’t be easy; he’s not only deaf, he’s also overweight.  But despite these two social strikes against him, Will slowly becomes friends with Devon, a target of the school bullies, and develops a crush on the most beautiful girl in school.  When the school’s most popular student dies on a class field trip, Will and Devon vow to get to the bottom of his mysterious death.

Since the mystery plot doesn’t begin until more than halfway through the novel, it may come too late for fans of that genre.  Instead, hand this book to older middle school and younger high school readers looking for a likeable character with a funny, original internal voice.

Green

by Laura Peyton Roberts

reviewed by A.B. Mead

Lily Green has just turned 13, and with a new year comes a family secret:  she's part leprechaun. More than that, she's the hereditary “keeper” of the Clan Green. After being whisked away from her suburban California home by her tiny relatives to the land of the little people (a magical place, not Ireland), she learns the complex history of human-leprechaun interactions and especially of gold. In order to stop battling clans from stealing each other's gold, spells have been put in place so that only human keepers can actually remove the gold from the vaults.  Each clan has a keeper, who spends most of his or her time in the real world, but who comes to the land when necessary.  The problem is, first Lily has to pass three tests in order to officially earn the title, and one of them involves stealing from the Scarlet clan, whose keeper is a cute fifteen-year-old boy.  And, if she doesn't pass the tests, not only will she fail the legacy of her keeper grandmother, but she'll have to stay with her clan and never return home.

Sports Camp

by Rich Wallace

reviewed by Hayden Bass

Riley knows he’s not the biggest kid at sports camp—in fact, he’s one of the smallest.  He’s also not great at team sports, and has trouble making friends with the other guys in his cabin.  But will his swimming skills be enough to help his cabin win the Big Joe Trophy, and the envy of the other campers?   

Initially, Sports Camp seems to be a book about outsiders and bullying; then it feints towards light horror with stories of ghosts and lake monsters.  But in fact, this is a straightforward sports book with lots of play-by-play descriptions of basketball games, water polo matches, swim races, and more.  Though Wallace never builds any real tension and delivers few surprises, many older elementary and younger middle school boys may appreciate this depiction of a realistic camp experience with an emphasis on sports.

With baseball season almost here, I thought it would be fun to mention a couple of baseball related books.  In Baseball’s Greatest Series (Rutgers University Press, $24.95), author Christ Donnelly looks back at the amazing playoff games at the end of the 1995 season between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners.  Many of the players are now or will soon be in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and for the city of Seattle, the results led to the creation of a new ballpark.  This book will appeal to baseball fans everywhere, not just fans of either team.

Journalist Dave Jamieson collected baseball cards when he was a kid, and discovers that his prized memorabilia are practically worthless now (with the majority of card stores closed and EBay not reflective of a particular card’s true value).  Jamieson examines the history of baseball cards in the compelling Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession. (Atlantic Monthly, $25).  I was shocked to learn that what I thought the rarest baseball card, the T206 Honus Wagner, is actually not the rarest. 

One of my favorite web comics, Sheldon, has a new collection.  In Still Got It, the boy CEO, his grandfather, and their pet duck continue to poke fun at popular culture and geekdom.  Guaranteed belly laughs.

One of my favorite authors is David Rosenfelt, with whom I was privileged to chat - see the interviews page.  Known primarily for his humorous legal mysteries featuring Andy Carpenter, Rosenfelt has written a stand-alone chilling thriller called Down to the Wire.  (St. Martins, $24.99).  A reporter receives a tip from an informant that appears to implicate the mayor in a huge scandal.  When he shows up to meet this mysterious source, he sees a building explode and rescues five people from certain death.  Unknown to him, this reporter/hero is about to experience revenge that has been several years in the making.  Tense and shocking. If thrillers are your game, it’s not to be missed.

See you next month...