Poison by Ed McBain
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'Twas brilliant when the slimy toads, set fire to Gimbel's underwear. Aunt Mimsy was in Borough Park, and the Nome rats ate her there."

I enjoyed this funny tribute to Lewis Carroll more than the police procedural aspects in Ed McBain's Poison, the 39th installment in the famous 87th Precinct series. The moderately interesting plot begins with Monoghan and Monroe, McBain's cliché Homicide detectives, looking at the dead body, lying "in his own vomit and shit." The 87th Precinct detectives, Steve Carella and Hal Willis, who caught this "squeal" are present too: they will be handling the investigation.

This is a Hal Willis novel, not a Carella novel, which is good news as Det. Carella has appeared way too many times in McBain's books. The other central character in the novel is Marilyn, who was the deceased man's girlfriend. In fact, the thread that focuses on the relationship between Det. Willis and Marilyn is, to me, the best thing about the novel. Unfortunately, 'best' does not mean 'very good.' I like the thread mainly because it does not conform to Mr. McBain's (Evan Hunter's) usual template of storytelling.

Another interesting component of the story is the non-exclusive nature of the relationship between Marilyn and the victim. Marilyn as a "woman with a past" is a cliché touch, but the author handles the trope in a little unusual way. The choice of the title poison is also uncommon.

Naturally, we have an awful lot of apparently authentic police procedure: to emphasize the realism the author even encloses copies of four weeks of the victim's weekly calendar (the reader would be OK without this material). The reader would also be better off without transparent "red herrings" in the later part of the plot: the author could have very well announced: "And now, dear reader, here's a red herring." The standup-comedy-style routine at the precinct reads stale and unfunny, as opposed to the story about the murder in a movie theater. Summing up, I would be hesitant to recommend this novel.

I am a little sad that my year 2019 in books ends with a whimper...

Two-and-a-quarter stars.

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Professor at Large: The Cornell Years by John Cleese
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] a danger that has been developing in our society for several years. This danger is based on three separate wrong beliefs. The first is the belief that being decisive means taking decisions quickly. The second is the belief that faster is always better. The third is the belief that we should think of our minds as computers."

The quote above comes from the first page of Professor at Large. The Cornell Years (2018) by John Cleese, one of the six members of the legendary Monty Python troupe, the funniest and most intelligent comedy team that has ever graced this Earth. The original BBC show ran from 1969 to 1974; the team also produced several famous motion picture movies, such as Monty Python's the Meaning of Life, Life of Brian, or Monty Python and The Holy Grail. John Cleese, who has frequently been called the "funniest Python", is the author of many celebrated sketches. He is also the writer (along with his then wife, Connie Booth) and the performer in another hilarious TV show, Fawlty Towers.

This is not a comedy book nor a book about comedy. It is quite a serious collection of writings that deal with sociology, psychology, religion, and art in general. In the Introduction, Stephen J Ceci, an eminent psychologist from Cornell University, explains the circumstances of nominating John Cleese as a Professor-At-Large. The book makes it evident how inspired the choice was.

Professor at Large is composed of several separate pieces: Mr. Cleese's lectures, seminars, and interviews. I will highlight a few selected pieces that I have found outstanding in this absorbing collection. Most readers will probably be interested in two chapters that refer to Monty Python's popular movie Life of Brian, which had been denounced by some as blasphemous, sacrilegious, or profane. Mr. Cleese explains

"Life of Brian was not an attack against religion. Our intention was to make fun of some of the ways some people practice what they claim is religion."

The chapter Sermon at Sage Chapel unequivocally confirms this point. Mr. Cleese writes about religion very seriously yet, naturally, he would not be himself without throwing in some hilarious passages like

"I don't think this [making people feel guilt] works psychologically because if Dick Cheney were scourged for hours and then crucified, I would genuinely feel sorry for him ... eventually."

I find the chapter The Human Face fascinating as it deals with topic, which I am currently working on with my undergraduate student - image recognition technology. While we are focusing on computer algorithms Mr. Cleese - whose objects to be recognized are human faces - writes about related social issues, and about human perceptions of beauty. For instance, he mentions studies that have shown that fictitious faces, created by averaging many real faces, seem to be more attractive to people than the actual faces, likely because of eliminating natural asymmetries.

I love the hilarious passage (I mean the writing is hilarious - the subject matter is grim and depressing) about a fundamentalist novel that envisions the final battle between Good and Evil, where the evil is embodied by the forces of globalism, and the evil army - in the service of Lucifer - is commanded by the Secretary General of the United Nations. Fortunately, the forces of Good triumph and the flesh of globalist scoundrels dissolves on their bones and "their tongues dissolve[d] in their mouths."

Strongly recommended read!

Four stars.


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The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"'I always need money. That is of course my affair. I will undertake to disembark this gentleman from his ship of vengeance, in advance of any injury to you, for the sum of ten thousand dollars.'"
(Nero Wolfe, speaking to one of the "frightened men")

The League of Frightened Men is the second novel in Rex Stout's famous Nero Wolfe series. It was published in 1935, 84 years ago: not many people born that year are still around. The prose indeed reads dated yet in a good way. In fact, I prefer Mr. Stout's earlier writings over the ones from 1960s and later: his early style is more elaborate and sophisticated.

The story begins in a way similar to many other Wolfe novels: Archie is unhappy with zero cash flow and bugs Wolfe to do something about it. Naturally, an opportunity soon arises: a young woman calls to ask Wolfe for help. Her uncle, who had unsuccessfully tried to hire Wolfe few weeks ago, has disappeared. This time Wolfe agrees to take the job and the setup of the plot is thus revealed. Twenty-five years ago, during a sort of a hazing prank at Harvard, one of the students suffered a serious injury which resulted in permanent disability. The man, one Paul Chapin, has now supposedly "embarked on a ship of vengeance" and seeks the ultimate retribution by killing the participants of the fatuous prank. Already two men are dead, the woman's uncle is missing and also presumed dead.

Wolfe soon has 11 members of the "league of frightened men" in his office: they are haggling about the details of Wolfe's potential involvement in the case. And then... Paul Chapin arrives in the office. The plot is quite complicated, the sequence of events rather plausible, and the action moves at a leisurely but steady pace. In fact, I managed to follow the plot with interest, which does not often happen. I particularly liked Wolfe's conversation with Mr. Chapin that occurs later in the novel - great dialogue. Also, (in hindsight) imagine that at one point Nero Wolfe is forced to leave the house!

The prose is dated not only in that it is more cultivated. The reader will notice the usage of many un-PC terms: 'the cripple', 'the runt', 'the lop' (for 'lopsided'). I can imagine a PC brigade valiantly working to censor the prose so that readers will enjoy only the safe material. I bet the brigade would censor the following as well:

"I felt uncertain too, when I saw her. They don't come any uglier. [...] it was more subtle than plain ugliness, to look at her made you despair of ever seeing a pretty woman again."

(I apologize for venting my anti-PC sentiments.) I learned a cool word - 'rodomontade'. I also learned that a typewriter cost $100 in 1935, an equivalent of $1874 in current dollars. Wow! The reader is also told that the previous time Nero Wolfe left home was to dine at the same table that Albert Einstein sat at.

To sum up: a good read. Interesting plot and accomplished writing.

Three-and-a-half stars.


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Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The seamen were usually loaded. If they were too big or too sober theyd hit them over the head with a brick. If they looked easy one would hold him and the other(s) would lump him. [...] Theyd hit him until their arms were tired. Good kicks. Then a pie and a beer. And Tralala. She was always there."

I am too old to cry but I somehow managed to get my eyes wet when reading a passage from Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957 - 1964). The momentary sadness that led me to tears soon morphed into extreme anger at the despicable, miserable species that we are: the only species on this planet who tortures their own for entertainment or for no reason at all, just to pass time and escape boredom. It is highly ironic that the adjective 'bestial', which means 'cruel', 'savage', 'depraved' comes from 'beast', meaning animal. It would be more fitting to call rabidly aggressive animals 'humanistic'.

Last Exit, the highly acclaimed work of Hubert Selby Jr. owes some part of its renown to the so-called taboo topics it deals with and graphic scenes of violence and sex, which were the reason for its prosecution in the UK under obscenity statute. It's curious that the other best-known work by Selby, Requiem for a Dream, also became more famous because of non-literary reasons: it was adapted as a classy and successful movie under the same title.

One might disagree with classifying the book as a novel since it is a set of six stories that are independent of each other. They are connected by Brooklyn location, lower-class protagonists, focus on naturalistic depiction of human activities that are usually not shown in literature, and the use of rough, seemingly anti-literary writing style. The prose reflects the way of speaking of low-educated people, with their misuses of words and grammar.

In the best of the six pieces, unforgettably called Tralala, a soldier, happy to be finally coming home after three years of service, is brutally beaten just for the fun of it. The attackers take his wallet, continue beating him, and his blood mixes with tears when he begs them to give him back the military base pass so that he can get home:

"Thats all I want. Just the ID Card. PLEASE PLEASE!! The tears streaked the caked blood and he hung on Tonys and Als grip and Tralala swung at his face, spitting, cursing and kicking."

There are strong sexual scenes in Last Exit, but to call them obscene takes a really deranged mind. The violence and savagery are obscene, the beating of bloodied people to pulp is obscene. The sexual scenes test the limits of the reader's endurance because of the pervasive violence that they entail. It's not the sex that is so disturbing, it is the participants' celebration of power, domination, subjugation of their victims. Brutality is the most elemental human trait, screams the author.

Protagonists of several stories are strongly memorable: how can one forget Georgette from the story The Queen is Dead, a transvestite prostitute, "a hip queer," "high most of the time on benzedrine and marijuana"? Nor will the reader forget Harry, from the longest story, Strike, which intermingles labor issues with tribulations of a married gay man, a masterful example of a literary counterpoint.

The prose that incorporates street language snippets of dialogue into the narration may take a while to get accustomed to but the reader stops noticing it soon. Fragments like

"Whattayamean its not cold enough yet. Im dyin a thirst. How inthefuck can yadrink warm beer. Wit my mouth, what thefuck yathink."

read completely natural. There are some passages that I don't particularly care for, like the extremely detailed and vivid description of a woman picking her nose and playing with the drying snot. Inclusion of that scene makes me a bit less impressed with the novel as it is hard not to agree that the author used it for shock value. On the other hand, I love the totally beautiful, lyrical passage that closes The Queen is Dead. It forms a gorgeous juxtaposition with the group sex scene, just a few pages earlier. That scene features an unexpected literary jewel:

"Quaff, oh, quaff this kind nepenthe."

Overall, Last Exit is an utterly unconventional and uncompromising statement of disgust with humans. Very hard to read yet the pain is richly deserved.

Four stars.


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Tricks by Ed McBain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The stripped pajama bottoms that showed beneath the hem of the robe were spattered with blood that seemed to have dripped from an open wound in his belly, where a dagger was plunged to the hilt."

The above quote comes from the first page of Ed McBain's novel Tricks (1987), the 40th novel (if I am counting right) in his famous 87th Precinct series. I am not a fan of series of novels in general, but because of heavy workload in recent weeks I had to reach for lighter, easier reads. McBain's books are perfect for this purpose: short and extremely readable. Actually, I am happy to say that I quite like this novel, which is a sort of surprise. Maybe it is because of this strong first page? I certainly got fooled by the author, and I love when it happens.

To be precise, calling Tricks a novel is sort of a reach; it is rather a patchwork of several separate threads that do not have much in common except that criminal activities and 87th Precinct cops are involved. In fact, I find it refreshing that the threads do not eventually merge together in a cliché literary device.

The most prominent thread features Eileen Burke, known from other novels in the series, who serves as a decoy to ambush a suspect in murders of several prostitutes. We witness how she and her support crew prepare for the dangerous job and how the ambush plays out. The second thread - where one of the main characters is a magician - involves human dismemberment: body parts have been found in various locations of the city.

Then we have a thread about children doing holdups of neighborhood stores; yes, children enter stores, demand money and kill the shop personnel. It does sounds a bit incredible, but when one reads the book, things get neatly explained. In yet another thread teenagers are getting shot. Moreover, in the background we have the Halloween night's wild activities.

I like the author's play with words: what is common between magic, Halloween, and prostitutes? Not a very difficult yet cute puzzle! There is a lot of humor in the novel: not only the low-brow yet funny bits like the "Have Mouth Will Travel" job description or identification of the deceased by a beauty spot located on a normally invisible part of the body, but the reader will also find a hilarious passage where Andy Parker, one of the 87th Precinct cops, pretends at a party that he is a cop, and suddenly he begins feeling like an actual cop. A viciously insightful observation of human nature.

True, the novel is a trifle, yet a thoroughly entertaining trifle! It made me want to read more of Ed McBain (i.e., Evan Hunter (i.e., Salvatore Albert Lombino)).

Three-and-a-quarter stars.

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The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think."

The Last Lecture (2008), a New York Times bestseller, is a wonderful book indeed. For once, even such an avowed cynic and elitist as this reviewer agrees with most other readers. The book was written by a professional author, Jeffrey Zaslow, from tapes recorded by Randolph Pausch, a professor of computer science who died of cancer before reaching the age of 48. The book expands on the main topics of the actual last lecture that Dr. Pausch gave at Carnegie Mellon University after he had been given a diagnosis of only a few months to live. Yet The Last Lecture is not about dying, but an upbeat meditation on how to live:

"I lectured about the joy of life, about how much I appreciated life, even with so little of mine left. I talked about honesty, integrity, gratitude, and other things I hold dear."

The leading motif in Dr. Pausch's book is the life-driving importance of striving to achieve one's childhood dreams:

Whatever my accomplishments, all of the things I loved were rooted in the dreams and goals I had as a child... and in the ways I had managed to fulfill almost all of them."

Naturally, there is a lot about teaching in this short book and as a university professor myself I read these passages with great interest. I agree with the author that although

"[i]t is an accepted cliché in education that the number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn"

a better teaching goal is

"...to help students learn how to judge themselves."

One will find a lot of first-class, non-trivial advice on how to live, where some of the recommendations are real pearls of wisdom. Just take this:

"I'll take an earnest person over a hip person every time, because hip is short-term. Earnest is long term."

And the deepest and most beautiful sentence in the entire book about one of these things that make life worth living:

"It's a thrill to fulfill your own childhood dreams, but as you get older, you may find that enabling the dreams of others is even more fun."

Down-to-earth, simple wisdom is there too, for instance about shortcuts to success

"A lot of people want a shortcut. I find the best shortcut is the long way, which is basically two words: work hard."

Very, very strongly recommended read.
(This review is dedicated to EVK.)

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Restless by William Boyd
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] face it, everything you thought you knew about your mother was a cleverly constructed fantasy. I felt suddenly alone, in the dark, lost: what does one do in a situation like this?"

A blurb on the cover promises "Boyd has written a crackling spy thriller" (New York Times Book Review), which made me reluctant to read the novel. "Crackling thrillers" usually contain not much more than the plot - not enough of a reason to read a book. Yet I know William Boyd's work from Brazzaville Beach that I reviewed here and rated with the extremely rare five-star mark so finally I decided to give the book a try. And I am pleased to report that the novel is a little more than a thriller, certainly not "crackling", well, maybe, toward the end it is crackling a little. A pity!

The year is 1976, London. The narrator, Ruth Gilmartin, a young single mother working on her PhD and teaching English as a second language, visits her mother, Sally, in her cottage in Oxfordshire. Sally is in a wheelchair, although she appears to be able to walk fine, and her behavior seems a bit strange. Ruth begins to worry about her mother's mental state, but then Sally gives her a folder with a story to read - The Story of Eva Delectorskaya, and tells Ruth that she is actually that Eva, the subject of the story.

The novel alternates between two threads: the "current" one that is happening in 1976 Great Britain, and the story of Eva D. that begins in 1939 Paris and continues through the war years on two continents. Eva is half-Russian and her family emigrated from Russia in 1917, after the October Revolution. Eva's brother died in intelligence service for the British government and his boss recruits Eva to continue her brother's work.

The 1976 thread is well-written, unlike most crackling thrillers, and I find the characters vivid and believable. I have problems, though, with the other thread: not only do the characters seem less realistic, but first and foremost there is no feeling of the war, the Second World War, going on in the background of the events in the plot. The events could as well be happening in the 1950s or 1960s.

Readers who love thrillers will be excited by the passages about events happening in Las Cruces, New Mexico, late in the story. Not only do the events move fast, but their logic seems to be quite believable to the extent that this reader, not a thriller fan, got quite captivated by the action.

References to disinformation business may be amusing as they are particularly relevant to today's world. We read about "feeding careful and clever false information out into the world" and we learn about the mechanics of such fake news factories. Disinformation was a big business even before Facebook or other "social media".

Considering my limited abilities of expression in written English it is arrogant to criticize Mr. Boyd's prose, which, in general, is high quality. Yet there is one passage in the novel where the author clumsily uses three awkward adverbs - "unthinkingly", "unreflectingly", and "knowingly" - virtually next to each other. Overall, though, I have found Restless a good read.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.

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Lenin to Gorbachev: Three Generations of Soviet Communists by Joan Frances Crowley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"For both Stalin and Khrushchev, the speech fundamentally altered the way in which history would record them. In Stalin's case, the speech revealed the enormity of his crimes, while in Khrushchev's case, it lessened the esteem for his leadership."

Yet another review of a book about 20th-century Soviet leaders. The authors of Lenin to Gorbachev (1989), Joan Frances Crawley and Dan Vaillancourt, explain that the idea of the book was born based on the course on Marxism and communism they were teaching at Mundelein College in Chicago. Indeed, some passages of the text, have the characteristic college textbook "feel," a combination of rigor and simplifications needed because of the target audience. I am reviewing the original version of the book, which - as I understand - was updated in 2012.

The authors begin with a rather brief exposition of Marxism. They stress some of the main tenets of the Marxist philosophical system: the concept of history as a process of development and grounding in the method of dialectics. They also make it clear that Marxism distinguishes economics, particularly the "relations of production," as the main factor influencing human beings and societies.

The book's subtitle is Three Generations of Soviet Communists. According to the authors, Lenin, the revolutionary represents the first generation, Stalin, the social architect (and mass murderer on a scale unprecedented in the history of mankind), represents the second generation. They are followed by Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev, called "businessmen" by the authors. While in hindsight, 30 years after the book was published, lumping Gorbachev with the other four leaders, is obviously a mistake, the generational classification is helpful for readers who want to learn about the history of Soviet communism.

Having been raised and schooled in a Soviet-influenced educational system in Poland I had been taught a lot of the material included in this book. Yet I still have learned many new facts and discovered new interpretations. For instance, I now know more about the events of 1905 in Russia, the times that preceded the October Revolution and brought the creation of the first ever country in the name of ideals of communism and purported 'dictatorship of proletariat.' Naturally, only dictators enjoy the dictatorship, the proletariat has always suffered, is suffering, and will likely always suffer. I did not learn much about the subsequent Soviet leaders above what I had already known. Obviously, the book written in 1989 could not predict the role of Gorbachev in accelerating the fall of communism.

I am unable to read about Stalin's atrocities without getting emotional: This 'genius of social architecture' is directly responsible for deaths of tens of millions of people. Further millions had their lives turned into torture and suffering in the "archipelago of labor camps." Yet further hundreds of millions of people lost their chances for living their lives with even a minimum of happiness and comfort. The authors indicate how simple chance might have affected history: we read about Lenin who had plans to demote Stalin but suffered a series of strokes:

"A third stroke, however, permanently debilitated the party leader until his death ten months later. Had Lenin recovered from the stroke and lived perhaps a year longer, Stalin probably would have fallen."

Interesting and worthwhile read.

Three-and-a-half-stars


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F is for Fugitive by Sue Grafton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Southern California seasons are sometimes to subtle to discern [...] What's true, though, is that every day is a season in itself. The sea is changeable. The air is transformed. The landscape registers delicate alterations in color so that gradually the saturated green of winter bleaches out to the straw shades of summer grass, so quick to burn. Trees explode with color, fiery reds and flaming golds that can rival autumn anywhere [...]"

I am continuing the Sue Grafton re-read project with the sixth novel in her famous "Alphabet Series", F is for Fugitive (1989). Like in the previous installments I am more interested in Ms. Grafton's vivid depiction of California in the 1980s than in the plot. In fact, I am sure that even if there was no criminal intrigue in the novel at all, I would read it with the same level of interest and satisfaction of not wasting time with nice prose and always fascinating character of Kinsey Millhone, Mrs. Grafton's intrepid PI from the fictitious Santa Teresa (which is modeled on Santa Barbara.)

Yet, since F is a detective novel, at least the outline of the setup is required. Royce Fowler, a Floral Beach motel owner, hires Kinsey to help his son. Sixteen years ago Bailey was mistakenly arrested, then released, but re-arrested when his prints matched the prints that the police had. At that time, Bailey, accused of killing his ex-girlfriend, pleaded guilty of voluntary manslaughter, and later escaped from prison. Now he claims his innocence, explains that the guilty plea was a result of bad advice of his court-appointed public defender, and Mr. Fowler wants Kinsey to assist Bailey's current lawyer help clear his son.

Kinsey stays in Mr. Fowler's motel in Floral Beach, a (fictitious) California town, "six streets long, three streets wide." She meets Fowler's wife, the son's lawyer, and talks to Bailey himself at the prison. There is a spectacular and well-written scene in the courtroom in San Luis Obispo during Bailey's arraignment. I find the ending overly theatrical, and for readers who like the mystery aspect of Ms. Grafton's novels, I have a warning: I managed to figure out who the killer was quite some time before the denouement, even if I did not much care about the "mystery." Similarly to D I have a problem with the author having people too conveniently volunteering information to Kinsey. Come on! These were the 1980s - we weren't used then to the idiocy of baring our innermost secrets on Facebook and similar scams.

Anyway, F is a nice, pleasant read, and I will certainly continue with at least a few of the next installments.

Three stars.

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The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History by David A. Vise
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

" He would be living the kind of fantasy he had dreamed of for years, proving to himself that he was smarter than the FBI, more clever than the Russians, and bold enough to pull this off, without Bonnie or anyone in the family noticing."

I can believe this explanation of what led Robert Hanssen, an FBI Special Agent, to become the most dangerous "mole" in the organization's history. I have known several people who think they are smarter than everybody else and attempt to demonstrate it at any opportunity. Anyway.

I find both the title of David A. Vise's The Bureau and the Mole (2002) and the overlong subtitle, The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History, quite misleading. In fact, the book is framed as a clever juxtaposition of converging life stories and career trajectories of two men, Mr. Hanssen and Louis Freeh, the Director of the Bureau. The author does a good job of presenting the various influences that formed both men. I also suspect that he wants the readers to form their own conclusion about why both these men, driven by their hubris and the arrogance of believing how well they do their jobs (spying against the country in Mr. Hanssen's case, discovering spies in Mr. Freeh's case), eventually failed in a spectacular way.

Mr. Vise's book is to a large extent an indictment of how inept the agency was in detecting moles in their midst, how the illusions of organizational excellence fooled everybody, particularly the people on the top, blinded by their self-perceived excellence. It is quite ironic that Mr. Hanssen's wife discovered her husband's contacts with the Soviets quite early in his spying career. Even more ironic is that the Bureau received a report about Mr. Hanssen hiding thousands of dollars in cash at his home and ignored it. One would like to laugh at the negligence were it not so serious: several agents paid the ultimate price - their lives - for the organization's errors.

The book contains verbatim texts of letters that Mr. Hanssen wrote to his Russian handlers. These are truly painful to read: they reveal Hanssen's "fragile emotional state" and neediness:

"Please at least say goodbye. It's been a long time my dear friends, a long and lonely time."

Appendix II contains selected e-mails written by Mr. Hanssen; I don't find them that interesting. Neither has Appendix III, The Sexual Fantasies of a Spy captured my attention. The sexual fantasies - the reader is warned that they are "graphic" while a more fitting qualifier would be "badly written" - feature Mr. Hanssen's wife. The author - of the book not of the fantasies - states that the wife has declined to comment on the fantasies. Duh!

Among significant criticisms about his tenure, Louis Freeh steps down as the Director of the Bureau in 2001, almost at the same time as Mr. Hanssen cuts a plea bargain deal with the prosecutors. This coincidence provides a neat climax to the story of two parallel lives.

Readable book yet I have no idea how biased Mr. Vise is in his arguments. If what he writes can be fully believed then I am scared. Quite scared that human ambition trumps national interest and that dangerous traitors can operate that easily.

Two-and-three-quarter stars.

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The Whisperer by Karin Fossum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I think that everything that has happened to me over the years has taken place underwater. Whenever I think about people I have known, their faces are like pale anemones floating on the currents of the sea. Perhaps I am still underwater. Everything seems to unfold so slowly. Reality is only visible in glimpses, like the flickering of the sun on the surface of the water."

I could not wait for The Whisperer (2016, English translation 2018), the new novel by Karin Fossum, one of my most favorite mystery writers. Moreover, my Goodreads friend, Judith, who recommended the book to me, wrote that she had found it Fossum's best. It took me just two nights, several weeks ago, to read the novel. Now, I have finally found some time to write the review, and I am a little disappointed not to consider it Fossum's best. It is still a very good book, though, way better than most contemporary mystery novels that consist of tired clichés piled upon clichés. Also, it is only the last part of the novel that I have some problems with: I loved reading The Whisperer at least until about four-fifth into the book.

The premise of the novel is fascinating. Ragna Riegel, a middle-aged woman, is in jail, presumably awaiting trial. Inspector Sejer is interrogating her. The reader is not told what her crime was. The plot unfolds slowly but inexorably towards the denouement. That's as much as I want to write about the plot. Given this particular narrative framework of the novel an attempt to provide a synopsis would necessarily have to involve spoilers.

For the most part the novel is extremely sad. It is not a fake schmaltzy sadness of popular literature. It is the sadness of loneliness and lost hopes. Ragna Riegel who works as a cashier in a store, is a desperately lonely, middle-aged woman, poor, unattractive, and withdrawn. Because of a botched operation on her throat, she lost the ability to speak - she can only whisper. Her only son left her when he was 17 and the son's father has his own family. Ragna, the Whisperer, has no one close. She has no friends other than her co-workers. Ms. Fossum offers a vivid, deeply realistic, and psychologically plausible portrait of a true "invisible woman", a total nobody in the social world.

The incident with her meeting an Englishman in the street, one of the very few people who notice her, is desperately sad and virtually painful to read. Equally sad is the thread about Ragna's son and her contacts with him. Inspector Sejer, with his trademark gentle interrogation technique, is most likely the first person in many years who is treating Ragna humanely, even if his interrogation aims at getting her convicted.

There are some absolutely fascinating passages in the novel: I love the story about "the jumper" video on YouTube and, naturally, the deeply disturbing incident with pulling the white thread (in some ways it reminded me of one of the best thrillers I have ever seen, Repulsion by Polanski). As always I love Ms. Fossum's writing: simple, economical prose, with no excess verbiage and not too many adjectives or adverbs. I love the gloomy vision of the world, somewhat cynical thus quite realistic:

"He thought about justice; there was not much of it in the world, and there was no order, no plan, no purpose. No reward in heaven, no green pastures. Just a swarming mass, where a few were granted happiness, but most were not."

On the other hand, Inspector Sejer is virtually a saint, a human being with infinite wisdom, patience, and goodness of heart. There are no such people in the world, although I come close... just kidding...

Four stars.


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Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys by Lol Tolhurst
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The last great English rock band."
(Robert Plant about The Cure)

I absolutely love The Cure's music and I am happy I am not the only one. This seminal 1980s band is experiencing a spectacular renaissance in recent years - they are touring all over the world and giving two-to-three-hour concerts that leave thousands and thousands of enthusiastic fans stunned that their music still sounds fresh, that the vocalist's voice has not diminished after all those years, and that The Cure's melodies, rhythms, and instrumentations still make people happy. The band clearly keeps having fun on the stage! Well over 20 full concerts recorded in the recent 6-8 years by The Cure on different continents are available on YouTube. Perhaps what is the most spectacular is the extremely wide range of the age of the audiences: from kids to people pushing 70, like your reviewer. Well, let's not forget that most members of this extraordinary band are in their sixties...

They gave their first gig 43 years ago and, in fact, the only member of the original band who is the current member is the heart, the brain, and the face of the band, Robert Smith, an extraordinary musician, unconventional singer, main composer and writer of lyrics. The book, Cured. The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys (2016) is an autobiography of Lawrence (Lol) Tolhurst, one of the original trio (Smith, Tolhurst, and Dempsey), the "first punks in Crawley," England. Mr. Tolhurst had met Robert Smith in 1964 when they were five and getting on the school bus. The boys became friends, based of common adoration for Jimi Hendrix, and started making music in 1972.

Mr. Tolhurst writes that the summer of 1976 was a pivotal period for the original trio. They were listening to Mahavishnu Orchestra's Birds of Fire and Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (two of the most favorite albums of mine as well, certainly not "easy listening" but rather jazzy and sort of avant-garde music in the latter case) and experimenting with making music and performing it. Mr. Tolhurst writes:

"It was a beautiful time, without artifice or pretense. We were discovering our art. Life was very simple and pure.

They gave their first concert in the fall of 1976. Since then they went through numerous personnel changes and - more importantly - changes of musical style. From lean and mean post-punk, new wave, gothic rock, through jazz-influenced melodic pop, to "symphonic" rock, the band was always uncategorizable, other than being the epitomes of the "alternative genre" in popular music.

Now about the most fascinating aspect of Mr. Tolhurst's autobiography. Throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s Mr. Tolhurst was a severe, full-blown alcoholic, permanently drunk, on drugs, or both. He stopped contributing to the band's music and became a hindrance to the band's creative efforts and tour performances. He became un unbearable burden to the band and in 1989, while working on their best album, Disintegration, the band fired him. In 1994 Mr. Tolhurst sued the band (technically he sued Mr. Smith and Fiction Records) over lost royalties and over part-ownership of the band's name. He unconditionally lost the lawsuit and the legal fees almost ruined him. And yet... Mr. Tolhurst autobiography is basically a tribute to Robert Smith, the erstwhile legal enemy.

The author pays homage to Robert Smith about whom Mr. Tolhurst writes with deep affection and reverence as about his best friend of 50 years, his musical master, and the genius behind one of the most successful rock bands in the world. During the concert in 2000 at the Palace in Hollywood he apologizes to Robert Smith in person:

"[...] I said, 'I have to make amends to you, Robert, and I'd like to do that now, if you don't mind.'
'Okay,' he said.
I proceeded to pour out my part in what had happened to me and how sorry I was that I had hurt him and The Cure [...]"

A touching moment in a very nice book! (By the way, according to sources, Robert Smith financially recompensed Mr. Tolhurst for his legal fees, after their reconciliation. How's that for a really happy ending!)

There are some weaker, amateurish passages in the autobiography, but they are balanced by some highly readable prose, like, for instance, the fragment about the beauty of nature in Death Valley. It does not matter to me to what extent Mr. Tolhurst used professional help with writing and editing. The depth of his contrition is stunning and makes this autobiography quite unique in its genre.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.


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E is for Evidence by Sue Grafton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"What I love about the rich is the silence they live in - the sheer magnitude of space. Money buys light and high ceilings, six windows where one might actually do. There was no dust, no streaks on the glass, no scuff marks on the slender bowed legs of the matching French Provincial chairs."

A wonderful observation! The rich being able to buy space and thus the silence! E is for Evidence was published in 1988 and with it I am continuing my re-read of the earlier installments in the magnificent series. Magnificent up to some point - I want to locate the exact place where the novels become virtually unreadable, like, for instance, V is for Vengeance )

The novel begins when Kinsey Millhone, the slightly unconventional PI based in Santa Teresa (Santa Barbara, California, really), learns that a $5,000 deposit has been made to her bank account; she does not know its origin. Naturally, like the proverbial Chekhov's gun, the deposit will play a significant role later in the novel. At the moment, however, Kinsey is conducting a fire-scene inspection for an insurance company, following a major warehouse fire. During the inspection, Kinsey encounters quite strange behavior from the affected company's CEO. Kinsey is learning some background via a personal connection with the family that owns the company - one of the members of the family was her high-school classmate.

Kinsey's life gets much more complicated when she is summoned to talk to the insurance company's vice-president. Her honesty seems to be questioned. Additionally, Kinsey's second ex-husband suddenly appears in her life. He seems to be in dire trouble and Kinsey, despite her bad experiences with the man yet no doubt charmed by his personality, decides to help him. Then things get really serious:

"I closed my eyes again, wishing that the reeling of the world would stop before I got sick. In spite of the fire, I was shivering."

The plot of the novel is quite interesting. The ex-husband thread, is well-written and even if a bit over-the-top, it does not stretch psychological plausibility too much. Alas, the ending explains everything in a cliché kind of way.

It's funny how my ratings of consecutive novels in the Alphabet Series oscillate: almost 4 for A, not even 3 for B, solid 3.5 for C, barely above 2 for D, and now 2.5, which I am - grudgingly - rounding up.

Two-and-a-half stars.


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Elementary Differential Equations by William E. Boyce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yet another review of academic textbook that I have been using for a long time. William E. Boyce and Richard C. DiPrima's Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary value Problems may be one of the most enduring textbooks on the academic market. I believe its first edition dates back to 1971 and the book that I am reviewing here is Edition 10, published in 2012. I have been using this text for almost 20 years, beginning with the sixth edition.

Ordinary Differential Equations is an upper-division mathematics course that I have taught most frequently of all math courses - 20 times. In the 1980s and 1990s I used a variety of textbooks, none of which satisfied my needs and - more importantly - the needs of my students. They were either too superficial, where the authors attempted to avoid the mathematical rigor in order to, presumably, make the texts more "readable" by the students, or they focused too much on rigorous formalisms at the expense of readability. In my view, Boyce and DiPrima's text achieves a perfect balance between rigor and accessibility. For instance, Section 2.4, Differences Between Linear and Nonlinear Equations contains treatment of subtle issues that aren't usually discussed in "easier" texts yet the writing is not prohibitively technical for a student, not even necessarily an A student. I love Chapter 5 that deals with series solutions, where the authors were able to cleanly separate more elementary material on solutions near an ordinary point from the more advanced topics of solutions near regular singular points. I also like the coverage of Laplace transform method and particularly the topic of handling discontinuous forcing functions.

Being an applied - rather than "pure" - mathematician I emphasize applications when teaching differential equations. Boyce and DiPrima's text does quite a good job in presenting to the reader the applications not only from the traditional fields like population dynamics or mechanical and electrical vibrations. True, there are textbooks that better deal with applications, say Borelli's book Differential Equations: A Modeling Perspective, but then I have found these more "applied" texts lacking in the theoretical aspect.

In addition to the nice balance between the formal and the readable and between theory an applications, I like the problems that the authors provide for the students' individual work. Each section has a large and varied set of problems that allow me to customize homework assignments to the level of the particular set of students in my class.

I normally use only the first eight chapters of the textbook and omit the material on nonlinear differential equations, stability, partial differential equations, and Fourier series (the last two topics are the subject of another course in which I use Boundary value Problems which I have also reviewed here on Goodreads.

Other than the fact that mathematical modeling sections of the textbook, particularly Section 2.3, Modeling with First Order Equations, could be improved, I would definitely prefer an edition of the textbook that focuses solely on ordinary differential equations. Students have to pay exorbitant prices (up to $200) for a textbook whose substantial portions they do not need.

Four stars.


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Hear Me Talking to You by David Craig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

" [...] everyone recognized that in running an informant a complex relationship might hatch out. A formidable link could develop, and not at all to do with money or career. In fact, if the arrangement between the detective and source really worked, the relationship was almost certain to get warm and tender."

Sally Bithron, a Detective Constable on the Cardiff (Wales) police force, has an unofficial and unregistered confidential informant, who goes under the pseudonym Godzilla. He tells Sally about a major drug deal to be carried out on Schooner's Way in Cardiff Bay dockland area. Alas, instead of catching the criminals in flagrante, she witnesses a gun battle that leaves several people dead or dying. The carnage shocks the city that has long ago shed its brutal, "Tiger Bay" image.

Sally's superiors ostensibly praise her first-hand account of what transpired on Schooner's Way and her help in the investigation but, naturally, they suspect that she is not telling them everything. Sally cannot divulge her acquaintance with Godzilla as this would put him in danger. Her situation is additionally complicated by the fact that her childhood friend seems to be connected to the events on Schooner's Way and Sally's supervisors suspect she is protective of him. She has to defend herself not only from her superiors and peers on the police force but also from the criminals. Moreover, it soon becomes obvious that the interests of powerful drug lords and gang bosses from London may be at stake.

On the surface David Craig's Hear Me Talking To You (2005) is a police procedural. Many readers will be captivated by a fast moving plot that largely avoids the usual implausibilities and contrived literary tricks that fill up cliché stories in 95% of procedurals and thrillers. However, there are deeper layers to the novel, ones that may interest readers much more than the plot. The relationship between a police detective and a confidential informant is portrayed and analyzed in believable detail. We also get insightful observations of police department politics, for instance,

"[Disbelief] came easily to police of all ranks, but the higher the easier. For God's sake, you didn't get a beautiful smooth uniform like Bullfinch's by thinking well of colleagues."

The author has a remarkable gift for capturing dialogue. Virtually all conversations in the novel are riveting. What I find particularly stunning is that almost every spoken sentence is supposed to mean something else than it appears to mean. A character says something and their interlocutor has to internally translate it into what the sentence was supposed to mean, which is often the exact opposite of what was said. Everybody knows that everybody else is lying; what's more, everybody knows that everybody knows it, and still everybody keeps lying with straight face because it is precisely what the circumstances require. Things would get really bad if someone told the truth. Strongly recommended read!

Three-and-three-quarter stars.

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Black Sabbath by Steven Rosen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The title track ['Paranoid'] and 'Iron Man' are probably the two songs that best represent the band: full of monolithic guitar licks, lyrical venom and that unique scream/moan unique to Ozzy - not really a musical motif in any sense of the word but dripping like an overripe plum with attitude and angst."

Well, Paranoid, Iron Man, and War Pigs are the only three Black Sabbath songs that I remember. It was almost exactly 50 years ago (the winter of 1970-1971) when I first heard Paranoid and I remember listening to the song several times a day. I am not sure if the term 'heavy metal' existed in 1970 but I swear I was thinking about Black Sabbath's music in terms of it being 'heavy' and 'hard'. Late 1960s to early 1970s was the golden era of 'heavy rock.' To me, Led Zeppelin ( Stairway To Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored ), Deep Purple, and Steamhammer (little known in the U.S.) were much better than Sabbath in the 'hard and heavy' genre. (Naturally, King Crimson was the best, but that's another story.)

Steven Rosen's Black Sabbath (with Special Guest Foreword by Ozzy Osbourne) is a readable if severely overwrought history of the band. Due to personnel changes it morphs into stories of individual band members, to finally focus on the "reality TV" show The Osbournes. Four boys, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler, and Ozzy Osbourne, "street urchins" as the author calls them, from Aston, a suburb of Birmingham, grow up in the 1960s, are involved in a series of bands, and form Black Sabbath in 1968 to explode onto world scene in 1970 with their first, eponymous album, followed by massively popular Paranoid and Master of Reality.

One of the ubiquitous themes in the first part of the novel is the juxtaposition of Sabbath and Led Zeppelin: the pairing works only with respect to the general feel of the music. Led Zeppelin had much more talented musicians while in Sabbath only Tony Iommi was a virtuoso. Another motif in the book is the purportedly 'satanic' nature of Sabbath's music. The author quotes a fragment of Nick Tosches' review in Rolling Stone (dated 4/15/1971):

"No act is too depraved, no thought too bizarre, as they plunge deeper and deeper in the realm of perversion, into the ultimate 'trip' of their own self-fashioned Hell. Orgies, incest, drugs, homosexuality, necrophilia, public nose picking, Satanism, even living sacrifice."

This is hilarious because it is 100% fake news! Sabbath used the 'satanic image' solely for commercial reasons, to sell their concerts and albums. Young adult audiences are suckers for 'depraved', 'bizarre', and 'perverted' acts. This is not to say that the band members were saintly in their behavior. The author spent some time with the band in 1974 and he reminisces with affection how the band completely thrashed a hotel room in St Louis.

In the second half of the 1970s Ozzy's alienation from the rest of the band begins and 1978 marks the end of Sabbath as it had been known. Tony Iommi remains the only permanent fixture in various personnel configurations. Until 13 July 1985 when Black Sabbath re-unites for the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia.

I will not pretend that I read the passages about the TV series The Osbournes with interest. I still cannot understand the concept of the so-called "reality show" because in my view nothing can be farther from reality than acting it out on commercial TV. Yes, I am elitist and snobbish, and proud of it. I haven't ever watched the show but the author describes it vividly as "in large part unadulterated, unfiltered profanity." Well, let me show the full degree of my wretchedness: I could do without Ozzy Osbourne and, in fact, I would like Black Sabbath much more if not for him and his antics.

I find the writing style a bit annoying: circular and repetitive: the author comes back to the same subject many times without even trying to approach it from a different point of view. The author is quite generous with bold metaphors and similes and some of the analyses - probably designed to make the text look deep and respectable - are quite far-fetched. For instance, the author claims that the roots of Black Sabbath's musical style can be traced to the "multitude of bombs that rained upon [Birmingham] during the war":

"The anger and venom and unreality of their music was a natural outgrowth of living amidst air-raid warnings, demolished buildings [...]"

Two-and-a-half-stars.

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D is for Deadbeat by Sue Grafton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"There are laws for everything except the harm families do."

What a phenomenally insightful statement in a not-that-good book! In my view, Sue Grafton's "Alphabet Series" trajectory has so far followed an oscillating path: after very good A is for Alibi came considerably weaker B is for Burglar . Then came quite good C is for Corpse and now again a weak D is for Deadbeat (1987).

A man who introduces himself as Alvin Limardo hires Kinsey Millhone to deliver a $25k check to someone who had done him a favor in a time of trouble. I can't explain it, but when I saw the name on page 3 I immediately knew the name was not real. By the way, a Google search shows that there exists a Facebook account under that name; it might though be a homage to Ms. Grafton's novel. Anyway, the story continues: the check bounces, "Alvin Limardo" turns out not to be a real name, Kinsey gets another client and the complications begin.

The plot is rather interesting but, unfortunately, the writing is mostly quite uninspired and the conversations are psychologically implausible - in some places even ridiculously so. Amateur/pop psychology abound! Even worse, the way that the plot unfolds is quite far-fetched. People tell Kinsey too much: everybody seems to be eager to share their deepest innermost secrets with her (people weren't like that before this Facebook scam began, I happen to remember). Kinsey gets a lot of information from conveniently overhearing conversations, spying through windows, etc.

Jonah Robb appears again, which provides for a sort of romantic interlude in the plot. Yet Detective Robb is mostly a convenient crutch to move the plot. Through his acquaintance Kinsey learns various facts about her case thus giving the novel a sort of procedural component. In fact, I much prefer Billy Polo thread: Ms. Grafton is able to create some implicit erotic tension between him and Kinsey, despite their implausible conversations.

I much regret the unnatural dialogues because there are some good passages in the novel:

"The ocean was silver, the surf rustling mildly like a taffeta skirt with a ruffle of white."

or my favorite, other than the epigraph:

"I'm not an outdoor person at heart. I'm always aware that under the spiritely twitter of birds, bones are being crunched and ribbons of flesh are being stripped away, all of it the work of bright-eyed creatures without feeling or conscience. I don't look to nature for comfort or serenity."

Well said! I also like the vivid and mocking account of a funeral ceremony in a fundamentalist Christian church.

I would like to pull the rating up but I am unable to: the naive pop psychology of conversations in the novel is exasperating.

Two-and-a-quarter stars.

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Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"My most persistent memory of stand-up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next."

The third autobiography of a stand-up comedy performer (after Eddie Izzard's Believe Me and George Carlin's Last Words ) that I have read very recently, Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, is another great read. Particularly for me: my job of teaching mathematics at a university has a lot in common with a stand-up performance. Math is perceived as a difficult subject by many students so teachers must often go out of their way to make their lectures captivating. I identify with almost everything that Mr. Martin writes in his autobiography about the stand-up techniques. The phrase shown in the epigraph above is particularly fitting: when I teach math I often do not think about math - this comes automatically or, perhaps, subconsciously - but instead I observe, analyze, judge, worry, and decide when and what to say next.

Of the three autobiographies Mr. Martin's is by far the best written (no wonder, he is a successful writer himself: I quite liked his novella Shopgirl ). On the other hand, it is less passionate than Mr. Carlin's book, and certainly not as bitter and cynical about human nature. Instead, it is more technical, and one might say even more scientific. Mr. Martin writes a lot about techniques of making people laugh. In one passage he quotes an observation from a psychology 'treatise' on comedy

"explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it."

He then relates how this banal observation might have led him to develop successful comedy routines that lacked punch lines. I wish he dwelled more on the technical side of the art of stand-up comedy, which to me would be more interesting than celebrity name-dropping.

Naturally, the main parts of the autobiography are dedicated to the story of Mr. Martin's career, to his growth as a performer and a comedian and his professional evolution with various emphases on different stages: verbal, visual, physical. From this entertaining and captivating account we learn about his first performances in the third grade when he was doing magic shows, through employment in Disneyland and then as an entertainer in Knott's Berry farm, to his professional breakthrough at the Boarding House club in San Francisco. Then came TV (Saturday Night Live), movies, and the peak of popularity in the late 1970s, until as Mr. Martin writes himself he "exhausted" his act in 1981.

Again, naturally, there are many hilarious passages in the book, of which I will quote two. When in college, Mr. Martin had an opportunity to interview Aaron Copland. When he and a friend arrived in the composer's house they noticed "a group of men sitting in the living room wearing only skimpy black thongs":

"[we] got in the car, never mentioning the men in skimpy black thongs, because, like trigonometry, we couldn't quite comprehend it.

Among many comedic gags the author describes I particularly like the one when he asks the audience during the performance:

"'How many people have never raised their hands before?'"

The autobiography is much richer than just the account of the author's career and remarks about techniques of stand-up comedy performance. Mr. Martin offers a moving, tender thread about his relationship with his father. It adds a deeper dimension to the text. So even if I do not totally subscribe to the "Absolutely magnificent..." blurb on the cover (courtesy of Jerry Seinfeld) I agree that it is a very good book. Strongly recommended.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.

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Hope to Die by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The double murder was more than front-page news. It was, in journalistic terms, a wonderful story. The victims, a prominent attorney and a published writer, were decent, cultured people, murdered brutally in their own home. She'd been raped, always a bonus for the tabloid reader, and subjected to a second violation [...]"

Hope To Die (2001), the fifteenth installment in the successful Matthew Scudder series by Lawrence Block, suffers from the usual malady of later novels in a series: boring familiarity of characters and repetitiveness of themes. The soap opera feel is particularly oppressive in the beginning parts of the novel and since I am strongly allergic to conceptual continuity in literature I had difficulties plodding through the pages. Well, the later parts of the novel focus more on the case rather than on Mr. Scudder, Elaine, or TJ, so I finished reading the book with some interest.

Briefly about the setup of the plot. The Hollanders, murder victims, have just come back from a classical music concert when they apparently interrupt a burglary. Coincidentally, Matthew and Elaine have attended the same concert. If this weren't enough coincidence, the victims live only about a mile away from the Scudders. There is even more: TJ, Mr. Scudder's young protégé and frequent helper, happens to know the murdered woman's niece. Naturally, Mr. Scudder is unable to avoid getting interested in the case.

The first major twist happens very early in the plot - I am not giving any spoilers - it turns out that there is much more to the originally accepted story of the murder caused by interrupted burglary. Then, about one-third into the novel Matthew Scudder offers an alternative version of the events, and to me the exposition of his theory is one of the highpoints of the book. Alas, it follows one of the lowest points, where the author begins a new thread, in the third-person narration. The thread relates thoughts, emotions, and activities of a man who is obviously in some way connected to the events. I find the parallel running of good-guys thread and bad-guy thread a particularly lame literary device, and the use of italics a horrible cliché.

While the repetitive stuff about Alcoholics Anonymous and the soap-opera passages about Mr. Scudder and his family are superficial and uninteresting I have found the two young female characters, the victims' daughter and their niece, very well written and psychologically plausible (as opposed to some of Mr. Scudder's sides of conversations with them). Despite the overall grim mood, there are some nicely humorous scenes like the passage when Elaine, annoyed at her husband's interest in a woman 40 years his junior, engages in a suitable counteraction.

To sum things up: a marginal recommendation from me, based almost entirely on the strength of the plot and ignoring the weaknesses of character portrayal. Very, very far apart in quality from, say, the same author's The Sins of the Fathers Yet for readers who are interested in lives of Matthew, Elaine, or TJ this will likely be a much higher rated novel.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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Brain Droppings by George Carlin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"They say if you outlaw guns, only outlaws and criminals will have guns. Well, shit, those are precisely the people who need them."

Note to myself: Never again read a collection of George Carlin's musing on the trolley, when commuting to work! The trolley was quite crowded, only one available seat which I took, my co-passengers cramped and then I started exploding with laughter. I did everything to contain myself: to no avail! Poor people around me were stiff with fear of this giggling maniac in their midst.

Not everybody will like Mr. Carlin's humor: dark, cynical, deeply disappointed with the human species. George Carlin, famous for his "seven dirty words" routine, is one of the most influential stand-up comics of all time. Extremely opinionated and ruthless in his criticisms of all manifestations of human stupidity, hypocrisy, and evil:

"This species is a dear, hateful, sweet, barbaric, tender, vile, intelligent, confused, virtuous, evil, thoughtful, perverted, generous, greedy species. In short, great entertainment."

I am also opinionated and my opinions coincide with his in almost every aspect of his criticism of the human race. I am just thousand times less funny than he is and also I do not have the courage to express my opinions out loud. Take the epigraph quote about guns: why would any normal, average person need a gun? How would I ever use a gun in my life? I believe that only outlaws and criminals really need guns. I am certainly for outlawing guns for regular people.

Mr. Carlin is merciless particularly about us, the "Americans":

Traditional American values: Genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, hypocrisy, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods."

Also:

"The keys to America: the cross, the brew, the dollar, and the gun."

In addition to making bitter fun of people's fascination with violence, religion, sports, television, etc. the main target of Mr. Carlin's hard-hitting satire is the language. First, he attacks the various language inconsistencies, clichés, oxymorons, and redundancies, like in

"Unique needs no modifier. Very unique, quite unique, more unique, real unique, fairly unique and extremely unique are wrong, and they mark you as dumb. Although certainly not unique."

But it is the critique of euphemisms ("I don't like euphemisms. Euphemisms are a form of lying." Precisely!) and politically correct speech that is the most devastating. I do not have the courage to quote Mr. Carlin's musings in this area. But I certainly agree with him.

The reader will find some bittersweet humor, slightly tinged with melancholy, like in:

"There's an odd feeling you get when someone on the sidewalk moves slightly to avoid walking into you. It proves you exist. Your mere existence caused them to alter their path. It's a nice feeling. After you die, no one has to get out of your way anymore."

and also completely silly yet unbelievably hilarious quotes like

"One time, a few years ago, Oprah had a show about women who fake orgasms. Not to be outdone, Geraldo came right back with a show about men who fake bowel movements."

The reader will also find the famous monologue about "stuff" in its entirety.

George Carlin's Brain Droppings (1997) is the third most hilarious book I have read in my life (after Wstep do imagineskopii (not translated from Polish to English, and most likely untranslatable) and The Third Policeman . I am rounding the rating up. Yay!

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Conviction by Denise Mina
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Our stories weren't disguised curriculum vitae. We didn't tell them as a way of boasting or declaring our relative place in the social order. There was none of this crap. These were the stories to entertain, told for the shape of them, for the sake of them, for the love of a tale. It was all about the stories and the shape of the stories. Round ones, spirals, perfect arcs, a ninety-degree take-off with a four-bump landing [...]"

One of the most extraordinary books I have read in many years! Extraordinary not in the sense of uniformly excellent - oh no! Extraordinary as in "mostly a masterpiece, partly crap." (Sorry for the word, but it appears in the epigraph too.) I feel very strongly about the book and am unable to be balanced or dispassionate in this review.

I love Denise Mina's writing; she's one of my most favorite authors of all time. Having just finished reading her newest book - Conviction (2019) I love her work even more. To me one of the marks of great literature is that the writer does not pander to the public by giving them what they expect and want. Remember, it is the writer's art not the public's. When writers begins to cater to the public's wishes and reading habits they cease being artists and become craftsmen manufacturing replaceable items to order.

Conviction is totally unlike any previous novel by Ms. Mina (I have read them all). In the beginning I found it hard to believe she had written it and I was reading stunned and totally awed by a non-Mina (occasionally even anti-Mina) plot and prose.

A review requires at least a brief mention of the plot. Anna McDonald, a housewife, mother of two pre-teen girls, is married to a much older, successful lawyer. The author tells us that Anna has had a turbulent past and that McDonald is not her real name: I love it that we have to wait for the details until the midpoint of the book when we read:

"I have to explain who I am, where I come from, why I ran. [...] You will have been told this story before but only in one way and not in this way."

In the meantime, Anna, who is a fan of true-crime podcasts, is listening to the podcast Death and the Dana about a family dying in an explosion on a yacht named Dana, a famous and "cursed" boat. Anna realizes that she knows one of the victims. The Dana thread and Anna's past thread merge and the whole thing mutates into an insanely-paced thriller, which I find completely silly at the end. I am unable to treat the last part of the novel seriously - I think it is a parody or pastiche of popular thrillers, with all their clichés and idiocies.

Maybe I presume too much but I don't think that Ms. Mina wrote Conviction for the plot. Yes, a plot is needed to keep the readers reading, but here it serves just as a grounding for two powerful messages that the author conveys. One is about the art of storytelling. The stories are "told for the shape of them, for the sake of them, for the love of a tale." In this sense Conviction is really a metafictional novel. Ms. Mina is winking at us: I am feeding you crazy stories because I am writing about making crazy stories.

The other message is less veiled. The novel is a passionate and powerful critique of celebrity cult and the role that the so-called social media play in fostering the cult. The particular target is the "virality" of messages sent via, say, Instagram. The social media provide the global dish that feeds the viral information culture and kills the human culture.

I am also unable to refrain from quoting one of the funniest punch phrases I have ever read:

"For the rest of the journey, whenever there was a pause or the mood dipped, someone would repeat the punchline and everyone would laugh. This went on until the garroting in the toilet."

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] there's your Splanchology, Innardry, Disemboweling and Reembowelment, Viscerators and Eviscerators. [...] here's flaying alive, there's playing dead, hamstringing, stringing up, tests of personal endurance [...] Bruises on the left, and on the right, Juices. [...] Empaling. Mahagony, birch, oak, ash."

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961) is perhaps the most cryptic and unclassifiable work in Stanislaw Lem's entire opus. Lem began in the late 1940s as a science fiction writer. When in the 1970s he achieved the distinction of the world's most famous sci-fi author, he had already moved forward and became a philosopher of science and technology and a futurologist who widely published about the directions and dangers of the evolution of human civilization. Lem was by far the most favorite writer of my entire youth and early middle age, and I believe I have read virtually every word he had ever published.

The novel is framed as a fragment of a manuscript from distant past, from the times of the Late Neogene civilization (roughly, mid-20th century), that was discovered during archeological excavations conducted in 3146. This was a precious find because (as explained in the Introduction) it came from the period before papyralysis a civilization disaster that had destroyed all papyr, which was the only mass medium of storing information. The document is narrated by an unnamed agent who reports to the Commander in Chief to receive his special mission assignment. However it seems the mission is so top secret that its nature cannot be revealed to anyone, even to the person who is supposed to carry it out.

The entire plot takes place in an immensely huge, labyrinth-like building ('Gmach' in the original Polish) and the narrator wanders through the maze of offices, corridors, and other spaces in search of his instructions, meeting various people, witnessing and often causing strange events. On the very surface Memoirs may remind the reader of Kafka and his nightmarish worlds of existential anxiety and surrealistically depicted alienation of a human being from the society (Kafka was born and spent most of his life in Prague, which is only a short hop away from Krakow, where Lem lived almost his entire life).

However, while the overall mood may indeed be termed a bit kafkaesque, Lem seems to be more interested in posing deep philosophical questions. What is truth? What is the meaning of meaning? The Building may be viewed as metaphor for the world and the search for instructions is akin to looking for life's meaning. A reader who likes political readings of literature may find the Building and the presumed Anti-Building a metaphor for the 1960s-period of two superpowers locked in a deadly embrace.

I have re-read the novel (after the first read, roughly 55 years ago) through the prism of one of the most important themes in Lem's opus: randomness and chance as the forces governing the Universe (I still hope to re-read Lem's main work (in my opinion), The Philosophy of Chance). At some point the narrator begins to believe that his every move so far had been plotted out, planned in advance, including the moment that he realizes that his every move had been plotted out, planned in advance. The plot oscillates between pure randomness and complete predetermination.

In my uninformed view, Lem might have been influenced by the so-called multiple-universes theory, where different histories happen simultaneously. I find the reference clear in the passage where the narrator finds a man lying alongside the tub (the fourth paragraph of Chapter 8). To me, the man is the narrator himself, from a different thread of the time-space. Another bit to support my "theory" is a fragment where the narrator sees people working on drying and combining the torn scraps of paper that have been flushed down the toilet. Soon, the narrator will tear some papers into these scraps and flush them down the toilet.

Now my main point: the prose. Lem's writing, as in most of his books, is a tour-de-force of language, a celebration of exquisitely crafted prose. Memoirs like many other Lem's work is a triumph of the author creating words that do not exist (many of them should!), all kinds of wordplays and puns. I have been asked by my Goodreads friend Jerry (whom I also know personally from way back) to compare the translation with the Polish original. So I have read the two texts side-by-side. I have been deeply surprised by two things. First, the translation by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose is excellent. Obviously, the language in the Polish original is richer, more colorful and stylish (as well as masterfully stylized to sound a little archaic). But the translation conveys the general feel and mood of the prose very well.

My second surprise as to the translation is how loose it is. Naturally, almost the entire text is translated literally, wherever possible. Yet I was surprised at the number of deviations from the original text in places where the deviations are not needed or justified. Let me quote just one example. In the already mentioned passage where the narrator finds a man lying alongside the bathtub the translators omitted the entire phrase that the man was lying in almost the same place where he had been lying before.

Four-and-a-half stars.


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Betrayers by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Dimly, through a haze of hurt, she saw [him] come inside and push the door closed behind him, throw the dead bolt to lock it. Then he was standing over her, a smile like a rictus on his ugly, blocky face."

As I mentioned several times in my reviews of Bill Pronzini novels I don't really like the newer installments in the Unnamed Detective series (certainly, the detective is not nameless). Well, they are sort of readable, do not require any thinking on the part of the reader, and provide few hours of marginal entertainment. While the soap opera aspect of the novels and the conceptual continuity - the never-ending stories of interconnected lives of the same group of characters - likely make new books in the series easier to write - same old people, same old problems, same old setups - I find it boring not to meet a different set of characters in each novel. So why am I coming back? Just being lazy, I guess.

Anyway, Betrayers (2010) interleaves three separate criminal threads, with the fourth thread emerging later in the novel. Tamara, who runs the agency together with Bill (Mr. Unnamed's given name), is looking for a guy who

"[...] used her, scared her, made her feel bad about herself just when she'd been starting to get her stuff together again [...]"

and who happened to be a small-scale grifter with a stolen identity. Meanwhile Bill works pro bono for two elderly women who hired him because one of them experienced late-night harassment by a specter. The apparition doing the harassment looks like a ghost of the woman's late husband. In the third thread Jake Runyon, who has grown close to Bryn (whom he met in Fever ), has been hired by a bail bondsman and is trying to find a small-scale criminal who has jumped bail.

The target of Tamara's pursuit happens to be a "switch-hitter" (yay! I have learned a new Urban Dictionary term) and we learn a bit about a sports fan club that groups men with similar sexual interests. Tamara's investigation is by far the most interesting and keeps the reader's attention. Bill's case soon loses any paranormal aspects. Instead, in a somewhat unexpected twist, a new thread appears, one that involves Bill and Kerry's 13-year-old adopted daughter, Emily.

The novel could be separated into four individual short stories without any loss of context. Clichés aplenty and the stories are of "paint-by-numbers" variety. Bad guys and gals are really bad, good gals and guys are really good. The stories have a didactic, edifying feel, almost like in the unbearably moralistic late works by John Shannon. The novel is somewhat readable but maybe I should stop reaching for later Unnamed Detective novels.

Two stars.

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Last Words by George Carlin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Words - the thing he loved the most."
(From Tony Hendra's Introduction to George Carlin's Last Words)

Another difficult review to write. A reviewer of a biography needs to be careful not to let their opinions of the biography subject bias their opinion of the biography itself. I have to be very careful not to let my admiration for Mr. Carlin's worldview influence my perception of this biography as a literary "product." So let me say upfront: My worldview matches Mr. Carlin's almost perfectly. Like him I love words (a right word is worth a thousand pictures!) Like him my heart is on the left side of the political spectrum but I can't stand most leftists. And like him I am disappointed with the human species (including myself, of course). Anyway, I hope that my liking Mr. Carlin is not the main reason for me liking his autobiography - Last Words (2009).

This is a very solid, detailed, insightful, and - I believe - as objective an autobiography as humanly possible. It is also a captivating read that cost me one three-hours-of-sleep night. The book begins with colorful descriptions of Mr. Carlin's childhood in New York. The portrait of his parents is multifaceted and realistic. He berates his alcoholic father's fondness of beatings:

"And off they go to the bathroom, father and son, to continue the grand American tradition of beating the shit out of someone weaker than you."

He also makes it clear that most of the time he was not able to stand his mother with her higher-class pretensions, yet the author's love for his parents clearly shows.

Similarly to many other performers, Mr. Carlin's career as a comedian began at school, where he was a class clown. Military career spent as a deejay led to employment in radio stations. We read about his partnership with Jack Burns, performances in comedy clubs, acquaintance with Lenny Bruce, and his appearances on the popular Merv Griffin Show on TV.

One of the most interesting fragments of the autobiography deals with the "transformational period" of Mr. Carlin's career, roughly the years 1968 - 1969. From a "nice" stand-up comedian whose routines were suitable for all audiences he morphed into an angry anti-establishment performer, an outspoken social critic. From "old-fashioned, square culture" to counterculture. The sources of his radicalization may be found in the turbulent political events of the time, including the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Chicago Democratic Convention riots. Mr. Carlin's most famous routine, Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV (unspeakably dirty words like 'tits', words "that'll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war.") Unfortunately Mr. Carlin's career stagnates in the 1970s, likely due to drug abuse. The period of his "financial and creative swamp" lasts until the turnaround which begins in 1982 with the famous Carnegie Hall performance.

The later portions of the autobiography resonate with me particularly strongly. Mr. Carlin, essentially a political left-winger, writes how the "liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant [to him] as conservative orthodoxy":

The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with."

( I have a simple-minded and naive explanation to that: any orthodoxy is repugnant!) I also love Mr. Carlin's passages about "old American double standard" (why only American, I ask; double standard and hypocrisy in general are the trademarks of human species.)

I love the closing pages of the autobiography where Mr. Carlin bares his scathing views on a very basic human characteristic - the instinct to form groups. He demonstrates the superficiality of groups of various types and writes how he has found "all the group stuff: rules, uniforms, rituals, bonding [...] a distraction."

Finally, throughout the autobiography, but particularly towards its end, Mr. Carlin writes about his performance techniques. I have found these passages extremely interesting and instructive. When I teach mathematics at the university I also try to do a bit of stand-up comedy to enliven the occasionally intimidating material; I have learned a few technical tricks from Mr. Carlin. Highly recommended autobiography!

Four stars.


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