The Blue Hour by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"He lay still and remembered fishing with his uncles, his dad making pancakes on Sunday mornings, the creases on the back of his mother's blouse as she walked, Barbara's expression as she came down the aisle in the church where they were married, his first dog, what the world looked like from the tail gunner's position of a B-29 thirty thousand feet above Korea."

A serial killer is stalking women in Orange County. The women disappear; only their purses are found as well as blood-drenched spots on the ground near Ortega Highway. The county sheriff-coroner asks the retired Newport Beach detective, Tim Hess, to help with the investigation. Tim, who is in treatment for cancer, will be paired with Merci Rayborn, a detective on the Newport Beach police force, an "aggressive, bright, and a little arrogant" woman, highly unpopular with most deputies as she has sued one of them for sexual harassment.

The Blue Hour (1999), T. Jefferson Parker's seventh novel, also happens to be the seventh book of his that I am reviewing here on Goodreads. To me, Mr. Parker is the quintessential Southern California author of the late 20th century, in the same way as Ross Macdonald had been about a third of the century earlier. I very highly rate their prose and believe that their novels provide more than just entertainment - they convey deeper truths about the human species. I find The Blue Hour one of Mr. Parker's best novels. As usual, I do not care much about the whodunit aspect of the plot; I am mainly interested in realism of characters' psychology and realistic depictions of human interactions and their motives.

I found so many aspects of the novel memorable! First of all, Merci Rayborn is to me quite a believable character; I feel she is an actual human being rather than just a template built of words constructed to embody the author's design. Tim's portrayal is perhaps a tiny bit less plausible but still, considering the low standards of the mystery/thriller genre, where characters serve only the purpose of advancing the plot, he also comes across believable. Mr. Parker was 46 when the novel was published yet I think he very well captured a much older person's thinking. The Merci-Tim relationship thread must have been very difficult to write, particularly the later portions of it, yet Mr. Parker pulled it all off, without resorting to cheap histrionic.

It is clear that the author did his homework researching such "exotic" topics as chemical castration by the Depo Provera treatment and the technology of embalming human bodies. The topics are covered matter-of-factly rather than with the purpose of titillating the reader.

I absolutely love the sudden appearance of Francisco (no spoilers from me!), which adds a sweetly whimsical touch. I remember my strong reaction of disbelief when I first read the Francisco passage, but massive appreciation soon followed. I love it when an author surprises me! The thread featuring the Romanian émigré is captivating, but it seems to me that for legal reasons the media would not be able to follow the situation from up close and in real time so in my view the thread loses plausibility.

To sum up: we are getting a solid portrayal of Merci, plausible dynamic of Merci-Tim relationship, unforgettable Francisco with his harquebus (yes!), castration, embalming technology, highly accomplished prose, and more. The book even works as a mystery/thriller, so my rating is quite high

Four stars.

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Neural Network Projects with Python: The ultimate guide to using Python to explore the true power of neural networks through six projects by James Loy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have become ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we are constantly interacting with AI in one way or another. And neural networks and deep learning are driving these AI advances. Powered by neural networks, AI systems are now able to achieve human-like performance in many areas."

Two days ago I posted an enthusiastic review of Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn & TensorFlow (I am "borrowing" a portion of this paragraph and the entire second paragraph from that review). This is the other book that was important to me and my students in 2020, one that helped me return to the field of neural networks and machine learning in general and helped my outstanding research student complete her challenging and advanced research project with extraordinary success.

I worked with neural networks (NN) in the late 1980s and early 1990s and even taught a course on neural network learning. However, in the 1990s it had become clear that the limits of what the then traditional NN architecture can achieve had been reached and the scientific community basically abandoned NNs as the preferred approach to machine learning. Yet beginning in the first decade of the 21st century we witnessed the rebirth of the NN idea, primarily via various multi-level NN models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), developed by Le Cun, Hinton, and others. Currently, CNNs achieve truly spectacular (one can say 'superhuman' without exaggeration) results in various areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

James Loy's Neural Network Projects with Python is a modest yet a very good text on developing NNs in Python with the Keras, pandas, NumPy, and TensorFlow libraries. The publisher's blurb on the cover, "The ultimate guide to using Python to explore the true power of neural networks through six projects," accurately characterizes the text, if we remove the hype word "ultimate." This is a perfect text for a serious student. The projects are well selected and clearly explained; the book comes with complete and meticulously checked set of instructions which help the reader - in case the reader is a Python beginner - with installing Anaconda, the free and open-source distribution of Python and its libraries. Then, it guides the reader through setting up the Python virtual environment, including all needed libraries. Setting up the environment took me only about 15 minutes and proceeded without any hitch.

The book consists of eight chapters. The first chapter, Machine Learning and Neural Networks 101 provides a nice introduction to the topic and presents the toolkits/libraries used in the projects. Then come six chapters each covering a specific project: beginning with the multilayer perceptrons, through deep feedforward networks, convolutional NNs, autoencoders, recurrent NNs (in particular, LSTM, long short-term memory networks), to Siamese NNs. The practical applications of the projects include: predicting diabetes, predicting taxi fares in New York City, image classification (the "cats versus dogs" problem), removing noise from images, sentiment analysis of movie reviews, and facial recognition system.

The last chapter, What's Next?, summarizes the projects, presents some newest methods, for instance, the fascinating GANs (generative adversarial networks) that can generate images of fake human faces indistinguishable from photographs of real people, and discusses the possible future directions of ML and AI.

I am highly recommending Neural Network Projects. A small, modest text fully delivers on its promise and gives great samples of code.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.


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Pacific Beat by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] the lopping shears moved into his field of vision, opened and shut like the mandibles of a great ant, and moved between his legs.
[He] summoned everything he had. It was a blind surge, a screaming release of fear that brought his torso up level with the floor and guided his hands for the neck of the man with the cutters."

T. Jefferson Parker's third novel Pacific Beat (1991) also happens to be the third book in my TJP Re-read project (it is the sixth novel by the author that I am reviewing here on Goodreads). It follows the weak Little Saigon - a classical case of the literary sophomore curse - and is indeed better than the predecessor, alas still very far from the stellar quality of California Girl or more formulaic yet still excellent Where Serpents Lie or The Fallen.

Jim Weir, an ex-sheriff's deputy, now a treasure hunter, returns home to Newport Beach from Mexico, where he was trying to locate a sunk pirate ship and where he got arrested by Mexican police on made-up drug charges. He lost his boat and got severely beaten, but he is coming back to a much worse disaster. His 39-year-old sister Ann had been killed and her body was found on the beach, brutally violated. Jim's brother is a detective on the Newport Beach police force and Jim is helping in the investigation.

The author masterfully sets up the plot and as the story progresses it does not lose much plausibility, although quite a lot is going on: an escapee from a mental asylum becomes one of the protagonists, and snippets from Ann's diary show she had a secret life that Jim had no idea about. There emerges an issue of ocean chemical pollution; we also read about machinations of city politics. We even have a sarcastic mention of a certain Donald J. Trump in connection with wealth and politics. The torture scene (see the epigraph) is well written so it manages to escape classification as gratuitous violence aimed at titillating the reader.

Mr. Parker's prose, absolutely brilliant at the beginning of the novel, remains in good standing throughout the entire book. As I mention in every review of Mr. Parker's work, his novels wonderfully convey the sense of place of Southern California, in particular of Orange County. However, in my view, the later part of the story that eventually leads to denouement is not very plausible. There is too much of the deus ex machina feeling to the plot twists. While it is not as bad as in Little Saigon it left me with a sense of disappointment.

Still, I recommend the novel for the good prose, solid main part of the plot, and well painted Orange County Pacific coast landscapes.

Three stars.


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Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Machine Learning is the science (and art) of programming computers so they can learn from data."

It is December 27th, four days until the end of the year, and I am four books short of my Goodreads 2020 Reading Challenge goal of 60 books. Never abandon hope! I will review two computer science books that were tremendously important to me and my students in 2020, books that helped me return to the field of neural networks and machine learning in general and helped my outstanding research student complete her challenging and advanced research project with extraordinary success.

I worked with neural networks (NN) in the late 1980s and early 1990s and even co-taught a psychology/computer science course on neural network learning. However, in the 1990s it had become clear that the limits of what the then traditional NN architecture can achieve had been reached and the scientific community basically abandoned NNs as the preferred approach to machine learning. Yet beginning in the first decade of the 21st century we witnessed the rebirth of the NN idea, primarily via various multi-level NN models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) developed by Le Cun, Hinton, and others. Currently, CNNs achieve truly spectacular (without exaggeration one can say 'superhuman') results in various areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

The recent explosion of research and commercial interest in ML resulted in an avalanche of books published on the topic, particularly "popular" books (ones that can serve as tutorials of sorts), addressed to computer science practitioners of various level of preparation, from complete novices to advanced. The range of quality of the books is even more vast. I worked with, read, or at least scanned thoroughly over 20 ML books and to me Hands-On Machine Learning is by far the best text, one that can serve for a wide variety of purposes: on one hand, it can serve as an ML textbook, on the other it can be used as a tutorial for particular methods of ML. (I will review the other great ML book, one that focuses purely on NN, the day after tomorrow. By the way, I was amazed how many bad, totally useless ML books have been published. Christmas spirit prevents me from listing their titles.)

Aurélien Géron, the author of Hands-On Machine Learning, comes with impressive industry credentials. He served as the Product Manager of YouTube video classification at Google, and held several senior positions in artificial intelligence engineering in various companies.

The first two chapters of the book, which belong to the first part entitledThe Fundamentals of Machine Learning, are an absolute must read for anyone interested in studying ML. The author presents the 'landscape of machine learning' and shows a typical ML project 'end-to-end', including data preparation and preprocessing as well as selecting, training, and fine-tuning the model.

The next six chapters of Part I focus on specific ML approaches and their mathematical background. We read about the methods of classification, the Support Vector Machines approach, including the 'kernel trick,' decision trees, ensemble learning and random forests. I love the solid yet very accessible presentation of the math background in the chapter on gradient descent, various types of regression, and regularization. Part I closes with a nice chapter about dimensionality reduction, which focuses on the method of Principal Component Analysis.

Part II of the book, titled Neural Networks and Deep Learning, gives a great overview of the so-called 'deep learning' approach: the reader will learn about the 'classical' NN approach, and then will be gradually introduced to the multi-level NN architecture, CNNs, recurrent NNs, and autoencoders.

The author's reliance on the production-ready Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow Python frameworks rather than on developing own toy versions of various algorithms is commendable. Scikit-Learn, a free software library of machine learning tools, is one of the best things developed in computer science in the last 50 years. It is a splendid manifestation of the power of open-source software.

From a teacher's point of view, the book is excellent! I believe Hands-On Machine Learning is great for the students too. It comes with a lot of interesting Python code samples, in the form of Jupyter notebooks. And the code works! The students can learn a lot by rewriting and extending the sample code.

Very, very highly recommended book! And I am going to round up my extremely high rating of

Four-and-a-half stars.

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Little Saigon by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

" Frye was sure that Nha's screaming and the sirens wailing in his own eardrums were enough to bring down the walls. Come down, he thought, come down and bury us and make this all untrue. "

Little Saigon (1987) is yet another novel in my new literary déjà-vu project. I am re-reading books by T. Jefferson Parker, an Edgar Award winner for Silent Joe, to me the quintessential writer of Southern California crime fiction of the late 1980s to 2000s. This is Mr. Parker's fifth novel that I am reviewing on Goodreads; my previous ratings are very high (for crime fiction): three four-star scores and a three-star one. Alas, this book is clearly the weakest of the five.

Chuck Frye, an aspiring journalist and an ex-reporter fired from Orange County Ledger, has lived his entire life in the shadow of his older brother, Bennett. Bennett, a Vietnam War hero and a very successful businessman, has always been the parents' favorite. Chuck's life has been marked by a string of failures. He is an excellent surfer, but even there his main claim to fame is being only "the second-best surfer of Laguna Beach."

We meet the brothers during a birthday party in Westminster, CA. This Orange County city has the largest Vietnamese population outside of South-East Asia, thus it is called "Little Saigon." Three men armed with machine guns storm the party, there is shooting, and Bennett's wife, a Vietnamese singer, is abducted. Potential connections with national politics emerge - the situation of Vietnamese refugees in California is a touchy issue in the US - Vietnam relations. FBI is involved in the case, yet also connections with local business are suspected.

While the plot in the first three-fourth of the novel develops plausibly I find the last hundred pages or so very disappointing. I value Mr. Parker's writing highly so it hurts me to call the avalanche of twists and turns of the plot moronic, yet it is a fitting term. Why do we need twists and turns in crime novels? It seems to me that Mr. Parker had quite a good novel but then he noticed the absence of plot contortions and added a lot of them, not caring whether they make sense.

Mr. Parker's prose is, as usual, outstanding. In particular, the beginning scenes at the party are beautifully written. So are the surfing scenes, for instance:

"It was a right-top-heavy, cylindrical and adamant, the sweet-spot rifling toward him as he shot through, rose to the lip and aimed back down for a bottom turn of such velocity that thoughts of disaster peeled from his mind and he finished in balls-out rush that sent him and his board rocketing skyward, then down with a splash."

Another outstanding feature of the novel is the author's sense of location. I happen to know Orange County a little and I recognize it on the pages of the novel. I also like the author's pearls of wisdom about politics, for instance:

"Communism. Democracy. We both know by now that they are only words. They are two fat old women fighting over a bowl of rice."

Very, very marginal recommendation because of the ridiculous fourth quarter of the novel.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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Catherine the Great: A Biography by Joan Haslip
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] the obscure little German princess who had completed the work of Peter the Great and made Russia into an European power."

I am coming back to reviewing books after an almost three-month hiatus caused by the demands of remote teaching. Contrary to common perception, I have found out that remote teaching takes way more time than in-person instruction, especially if one wants to do it well (virtual lectures will never be even close in quality to in-person ones, but one should try the best). I simply did not have time. Anyway...

Being Polish by birth I might be expected to have in my blood an intense dislike for Catherine the Great, the 18th-century Empress of Russia. After all, she was instrumental in arranging consecutive partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, which resulted in the disappearance of my native country from maps of Europe for well over 100 years. Yet it is obvious to me that we, Poles, ourselves brought the Polish state to ruin 250 years ago by following unwise politics, in the same way as the majority of my ex-compatriots seem to be doing it now, in 2020.

As to Catherine the Great: I am deeply impressed by the political talent of this "obscure little German princess" who "made Russia into an European power." I have to admit to a bias, though. I am blatantly sexist and I believe that it is the women who should be in charge of everything in the world while men should only engage in drinking beer, watching football on TV, pretending to be experts on everything, and some other low-responsibility activities. Thus Catherine's life story, which may appear unusual to many people, seems natural to me.

Joan Haslip's Catherine the Great (1977) is a traditional, perhaps even "old-style" biography that recounts events chronologically and reports on all aspects of Catherine's life - political, historical, and also personal (in a few places the author is quite gossipy). We follow the future Empress's life path from her birth in Szczecin (then Stettin) in 1729 as Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, through the crucial event in 1744, which changed her life and affected European history, when the then Russian czarina Elizaveta Petrovna invited teenage Sophia to come to Russia and make the Romanov's dynasty secure by marrying the grand duke Peter and producing a heir (which eventually happened in 1754).

Catherine gradually became interested in politics. She saw her chance to get to the very top and never let it go. People sometimes say "if you want something bad enough, and you work for it hard enough, it's going to happen." That's obviously not true; one has to be clever in working for "it" and one has to be very lucky. Catherine was extremely clever in plotting and scheming - for instance, she had an uncanny ability to convincingly tell clever lies on the spot - and she indeed was very lucky. Czarina Elizaveta Petrovna died at a time that was most opportune for Catherine. Peter III, who ascended to the throne, was too sympathetic to Prussian interests for Russian liking, so that Catherine could arrange an almost "patriotic" coup d'état to soon become Catherine II, the Empress of Russia.

The author recounts Catherine the Great's reign (1762 - 1796) with great attention to detail. I am not qualified to summarize the events, so let me just use a quote from Wikipedia "The period of Catherine the Great's rule is considered the Golden Age of Russia."

Ms. Haslip pays lots of attention to Catherine the Great's romantic affairs or rather one should say sexual liaisons. The empress was known for her insatiable sexual appetite and we read about the long array of her lovers. There are authors who use salacious details to titillate the reader. This is certainly not true about this biography. Ms. Haslip focuses on how the empress' erotic affairs influenced her politics and the European affairs in general. I will use an example of the fate of Poland and the affair between Catherine and future Polish king, Stanislaw Poniatowski. Ms. Haslip writes:

"[...] it was an evil day for Poland when this cultured dilettante came under the spell of a woman as fascinating and as unscrupulous as the grand duchess."

The residual effects of this affair facilitated the dismemberment of Poland, during the "first partition" in 1772, when Russia, Prussia, and Austria took large chunks of Polish territory. According to Ms. Haslip, the second partition of Poland in 1793, as well as the third and the final one, when Poland - one of the most powerful countries in Europe - disappeared from the maps, also were at least partly affected by Catherine's erotic affairs. Ms. Haslip also writes the following about Prince Potemkin, one of Catherine's most famous favorites and lovers:

"Had Potemkin lived, the second and third partitions of Poland would never have taken place."

While this might sound reasonable, one has to realize that, first of all, any partitions of Poland were possible mainly because in the 18th century the powerful segments of Polish society - the aristocracy and top echelons of nobility - cared only about their own interests rather than about the good of the country as a whole. But I am again digressing. I am supposed to write about the book.

I find the biography very readable and certainly learned a lot from it! Ms. Haslip's writing style is likely not my favorite, but I recommend the book highly and without hesitation.

Three-and-a-half stars.


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Where Serpents Lie by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] a little girl enrobed in white netting. A serpent's scale inserted into the web of the net. The girl. The snake. The web. The net. What is the story here? "

I almost never read long books. If an author is unable to say what he or she wants to say on no more than, say, 300 pages, tough luck! Next please! I make an exception, though, for well-written books that contain realistic depictions of characters, situations or places, as far as the psychology and dialogues. Here we have the longest book I have read in a very long time - 550 pages - which is just a thriller slash police procedural. What's more, I have enjoyed it a lot.

I first read T. Jefferson Parker about a quarter of the century ago. I read all his early books and liked most of them a lot, precisely because of the prose and realism, outstanding for the genre. The author is an accomplished literary craftsman, who had a chance to practice his writing when he worked as a reporter for the Newport Ensign.

Where Serpents Lie (1998) is a good example of a thriller that transcends its genre: despite following the standard clichés of thrillers it is very well written and several characters are not just paper templates but seem almost like real people. The protagonist is Terry Naughton, the head of the Crimes Against Youth unit in the Orange County Sheriff Department. Two years ago Terry lost his son, a tragic event he feels responsible for. He is now trying to redeem himself by preventing harm from happening to children.

The novel has one of the most shocking setups I have ever encountered. Terry has infiltrated a pedophile group - men who take advantage of a very young girl offered for services by her parents. The entire scene of a "party" before the expected consummation of the deal is very hard to read, even harder because it reads very realistic. Yet this is not the main plot of the novel. Someone who calls himself The Horridus (Latin name for a species of a venomous viper) abducts little girls - so far there are no rapes and the girls are found alive, but criminals of this type are known to escalate their activities. The search for Horridus becomes the main thread of the plot. Terry's personal problems are tightly woven into the procedural thread.

The gruesome opening scene has a sort of continuation when Terry interviews the little girl prostituted by her parents. The realism of the conversation is totally depressing. The author provides a rich, plausible portrayal of the tangle of business interests in Orange County - his journalistic past is certainly an asset here. Also, the novel offers a real sense of the location; I know Orange County quite well from hundreds of visits so I recognized the locations when reading the text. The scene in the Caspers Wilderness Park provides a good example.

I don't particularly like the scene where Terry buys information from a homeless man who sells newspaper articles: it reeks of the tired "word-on-the street" cliché and it does not read as a pastiche. Also, the "profiler" stuff is so formulaic - but it was a common fad quarter of a century ago: it was almost obligatory to have a profiler in thrillers and procedurals.

Yet overall, the novel is an excellent, great read, way, way, way better than 99% of the genre specimens. Had it been shorter by about 150 pages, I might have even given it the maximum rating. Very highly recommended thriller/procedural.

Four stars

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Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failure by Robert G. Kaiser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

" In just over five years, Mikhail Gorbachev transformed the world. He turned his own country upside down. He woke a sleeping giant, the people of the Soviet Union, and gave them freedoms they had never dreamed of. He also gave them their own horrific history, which his predecessors had hidden and distorted for sixty years. He tossed away the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe with no more then a fare-thee-well. "

Robert G. Kaiser's Why Gorbachev Happened. His Triumphs & His Failure is the best of the 10 books about Soviet and Russian leaders in the second half of the 20th century that I have recently read and reviewed here on Goodreads (the list is included after the rating). The main reason for my enthusiastic recommendation is that while the book should be clear and understandable to people who have never had close contact with the Soviet ideology it is still deep enough to offer stunning insights and teach a lot of new things to people like this reviewer, who were born, raised, and spent about half of their lives in the shadow of the Soviet ideology.

For several days I have been struggling with the rating. I really wanted to give this outstanding book five stars. But I can't. I reserve the maximum rating only for perhaps one in 20 books, ones that are virtually perfect in every possible sense, in other words, masterpieces. And I see one clear flaw of Mr. Kaiser's book - the slightly misleading main title. I don't really think the author explains why Gorbachev happened. He explains how he happened, but not why. In fact, I don't think it is possible to answer the "why" question. Mikhail Gorbachev happened to be - through the most powerful force of the universe, that is randomness - the right person at the right time. Most other potential leaders would not achieve that much at that time of the Soviet empire, yet had he come at a different time of Soviet history he would have not achieved much.

I certainly lack the skills to produce a full-blown review of this wonderful book so in the following paragraphs I will just point out - in an itemized form - few things that made the strongest impression on me.

Liberation of Eastern Europe: Since I am Polish by birth the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet influence in the late 1980s was probably the most important political event I have ever witnessed. I am happy to report that the author seems to validate my point of view that the liberation was mainly due to Mr. Gorbachev's actions:

"Gorbachev did cause the revolution in Eastern Europe - with a series of practical and symbolic steps, culminating in that telephone call, which informed the East Europeans that he had abandoned the old rule book that had required them to submit to Moscow's discipline."

Mythology of the Soviet society: The author clearly and succinctly summarizes the mythology of the Soviet system. The three most important myths, freely accepted by virtually all Soviet people. were: (1) "the myth of Lenin (transformed into a deity after his death)", (2) the myth of the October Revolution of 1917 believed to be "a massive popular uprising by workers and peasants", and (3) the myth of the Great Patriotic War as "the lonely triumph of Russia over Nazi Germany." While deification of Lenin might conceivably be understood in a society where religion was not officially practiced, the other two myths are patently based on falsehoods.

Truth about Stalin: The author makes an argument that Gorbachev's persistence and successes in denouncing Stalinism were one of the main reasons of the fall of the Soviet Union. I would add here that the first time the world (and then the Soviet people) learned about Stalin being the greatest mass murderer in the history of mankind was in 1956, when Khrushchev gave his famous "secret speech." Yet the times were not ripe then for the destruction of Stalinism. The Stalin myth survived the "secret speech"! I would also add, bitterly and cynically, that even now there are millions of people in Russia who would be happy to have the deranged mass murderer back as the national hero.

Failure: The author also delivers on the promise of the second part of the subtitle - Gorbachev's failure. The reader will learn the captivating story of how Gorbachev attempted to hold the Soviet Union together in the late fall of 1990. And how the tragic events in January of 1991 (massacre of Lithuanian civilians by Soviet military force) eventually contributed to Gorbachev's fall.

Maybe the author is being coy when he writes about an article of his "this one reveals the ungenerous limits of my own imagination." The phrase is quite endearing and it exemplifies how light and readable the author's style is. To sum up (finally!), this a great book: informative, deep, serious yet captivating. I have already ordered two other books by Mr. Kaiser.

Four-and-a-half stars.

My previous reviews of books on Soviet leaders:

The Struggle for Russia - by Boris Yeltsin

Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin - by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson

The Andropov File - by Martin Ebon

Against the Grain - An Autobiography - by Boris Yeltsin

Lenin to Gorbachev: Three generations of Soviet Communists

Brezhnev, Soviet Politician - by Murphy

Khrushchev - by Roy Medvedev

Gorbachev and His Revolution - by Mark Galeotti

Andropov - by Zhores Medvedev


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Pandemic by Daniel Kalla
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'The clinical syndrome is worse than SARS,' he said. 'Infected patients develop a sudden severe pneumonia often leading to multi-organ failure and death in a couple of days. Sometimes faster. And it's an ugly death, too. [...]'"

The coronavirus is first found in China, then it spreads all over the world. The virus does extreme damage to lungs of many infected patients. Some patients survive thanks to ventilators. Why am I repeating things about Covid-19 that everybody knows and is tired of? Because the thriller Pandemic was published quite some time ago, in 2005, and does not deal with Covid-19 but with the fictitious coronavirus that causes ARCS, Acute Respiratory Collapse Syndrome, and is much more deadly than the worst flu.

The author of Pandemic, Daniel Kalla, is an actual MD, and the medical aspects of the novel seem to be portrayed realistically. The story is extremely prophetic and predicts events to happen 15 years in the future (from 2005 to 2020) with incredible accuracy.

Alas, the novel also contains a thriller layer: the virus is used as a weapon by a Middle Eastern terrorist organization. They acquire blood from a dying patient in China. Don't ask me how they get the blood from the patient, read the book. Just a little teaser:

"The gurgling amplified, and drool formed at the open end of the tube. The patient writhed on the bed [...] He coughed in frequent spasms. With each cough, bloody sputum sprayed from the tube's end."

The entire terrorist plot is cliché, predictable, and grossly implausible. Grossly, I mean it.

Yet this is not the worst thing about the novel. It is mainly doomed by its "human-interest story," one of the most laughably cliché stories I have ever read. This is a colossal pile of c..p including such "literary devices" as marital problems, the use of sodium pentothal, the "truth serum", "confused" sexuality, coincidences heaped on top of coincidences supported by coincidences, and - most ridiculously - James Bond-style exploits performed not only by medical school professors but also by division directors in Homeland Security Department.

Virtually all characterizations are paper-thin. From the very first pages of the novel it is obvious that the protagonists are literary characters who have nothing in common at all with real people. Absolutely worst is Dr. Duncan MacLeod, a "gangly Scottish virologist" and "emerging pathogen expert", who says "Shite!" virtually every time he speaks, and is always loud and obnoxious.

Five stars for the prophetic setup and plausible medical background of the story. 0 stars for the rest. The average yields

Two-and-a-half stars.

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The Struggle for Russia by Boris Yeltsin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Not a single reform effort in Russia has ever been completed."

I can't get away from reading books about Soviet/Russian leaders of the second half of the 20th century. Almost half of my life, until 1982, I had lived in the shadow of the Soviet empire. Boris Yeltsin's memoir The Struggle for Russia is the ninth book on the topic that I am reviewing here on Goodreads (the full list is below the rating). The publisher states that the book is a lightly edited text of Mr. Yeltsin's journal from the period between August 1991 and October 1993, one of the most turbulent periods in the Russian (no longer Soviet!) history.

Disregarding chronology, the book begins with Mr. Yeltsin's notes from 1993. Particularly captivating is the journal entry dated October 4, 1993, during the dramatic days of the so-called "constitutional crisis" - a standoff between Yeltsin, Russia's president, and the Russian parliament, freshly dissolved by the President. Yeltsin orders the army to storm the Moscow's "White House," and his opponents try to get the Air Force to bomb Kremlin. There are heavy casualties.

The journal entries are arranged in such a way that the reader can see political, economic, and social developments that led to the crisis of fall 1993; the book concludes with Mr. Yeltsin's return to reminiscing the dark days of Sep and Oct of 1993.

The actually chronological beginning, Chapter 3 of the memoir, portrays the August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. This is fascinating read, events are described hour-by-hour with high degree of realism, when no one knows anything, and all events seem completely chaotic. We read about Mr. Yeltsin's famous speech atop the turret of the tank. He writes:

"This improvised rally on the tank was not a propaganda gimmick."

I am not quite sure if I believe it. It might have been a well designed turning point in the struggle. Anyway, the coup fails, Mr. Yeltsin signs a decree to suspend the activities of the Communist party in Russia, and in a few months the dissolution of the Soviet empire becomes a fact.

Reading about the "awkward months" between August and December 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev yielded power and Soviet Union, one of the most powerful empires in the history of mankind, ceased to exist, is captivating. For me, perhaps the most interesting layer/motif in the book is the relationship between two men who managed to changed the world so significantly: Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin. Although they often were bitter political enemies, Mr. Yeltsin's admiration for Mr. Gorbachev is patently obvious from the pages of the journal.

Readers will likely enjoy Mr. Yeltsin's impressions from his contacts with leaders of other countries, such as Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl, and Lech Wałęsa. There is some humor in the text, like the passage about an incident when Mr. Yeltsin's car got stuck in the ditch; he had to walk 10 miles to the nearest village for help, yet every single resident of the village was drunk.

There is a lot of serious stuff in the memoir: about Russia, its people, its history, and its problems. I am unable to rate the book higher because I believe that the book will be fully understood only by people like this reviewer, who know what life under Soviet rule was.

Three stars.

My previous reviews of books on Soviet leaders:

Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin - by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson

The Andropov File - by Martin Ebon

Against the Grain - An Autobiography - by Boris Yeltsin

Lenin to Gorbachev: Three generations of Soviet Communists

Brezhnev, Soviet Politician - by Murphy

Khrushchev - by Roy Medvedev

Gorbachev and His Revolution - by Mark Galeotti

Andropov - by Zhores Medvedev


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A Cold Mind by David L. Lindsey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

" Particles of rat hair clung to his skin in various places from his forehead to his chin, as did reddish-gray smears and daubs of the rotting animal.

Evokes a truly yummy image, doesn't it? "Daubs of a rotting animal" has a nice cadence to it. Over a quarter of a century ago I read David L. Lindsey's Mercy and liked it very much. So I reached for A Cold Mind, an earlier (1983) book by the author, and got quite a bit disappointed. One of the publishers' blurbs screams in all capitals "DEFIES YOU TO PUT IT DOWN!" Well, putting the book down was not a problem for me - I managed to do it too many times. Picking the book up, though, was more of a problem. I found the novel overwrought, overlong, and quite a bit boring. Readers who like the 'serial killer' genre will rate the novel higher, I am sure. For me, it just barely reaches the minimum needed for marginally positive recommendation.

The novel is a police procedural with a slight components of psychology. Detective Stuart Haydon is investigating the death of a young woman found drowned in the Houston bayou. While the medical examiner suspects that the woman worked as a prostitute, the exact cause of death cannot be easily established. Soon connections emerge to recent deaths of two other women. All three were call girls and all three died after displaying signs of an illness that lasted several days.

From the web I have learned that this is the first novel in the Stuart Haydon series. I find this a little surprising since for me there is not much interesting about the detective's character. He is good at what he does, and seems to be an intelligent, experienced, and hard-working cop. Yes, he does have a dark secret, but I find laughable the author's efforts to furnish our protagonist with a memorable aspect of his persona. It feels to me like a crude attempt to entice the readers to buy next books in the series, where the secret will be explored in more detail and maybe even explained.

The detectives discover an album full of pictures that show "gloriously delicious" bodies of the call-girls involved in sexual activities. Particularly interesting are pictures taken through red, blue, and yellow filters - the colors will play some role in solution of the case.

My review sounds pretty vicious so far but the novel is not without strengths. I find it well written - in fact, very well for the police procedural genre - and I liked reading small snippets of text about Houston. I know the fourth largest city in the country only from driving through it: Mr. Lindsey's novel made me want to know it quite a lot better:

"The tunnels that honeycomb almost fifty blocks of downtown Houston and interconnect a fraternity of corporate buildings can be attributed not to a single Daedalus, but to a host of architects employed by the city's billionaire corporate powers. [...] the disparity of the design from block to block produces a true subterranean labyrinth."

I have also enjoyed repeated mentions of PCs (personal computers) used in police department. 1982/1983 were the very early days of the PC era.

If not for the accomplished writing and Houston bits A Cold Mind would not clear my threshold of recommendability.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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Live from New York: An Oral History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Saturday Night Live is more than just a television show. Since its premiere in 1975, the show has served as a trendsetter in American humor and had a remarkable effect on American mores, manners, music, politics, and even fashion. "

What a lame way of choosing the epigraph to a book review! The above quotes the first two sentences in Tom Shales' and James Andrew Miller's Live From New York. An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (2002). In contrast to the reviewer's cliché approach, the book itself is actually unconventional. Almost the entire book is a compilation of quotes (on average a paragraph long) from interviews or conversations with people connected with the show: actors, writers, producers, TV network bosses, and - of course - the one and only Lorne Michaels, the Main Guy, the Boss, the creator of the show and its Guardian Angel. That the resulting mélange of monologue snippets, arranged chronologically, reads astonishingly well is due to skillful editing of the authors, who provide occasional segues.

In 1975 the bosses of NBC network needed to fill schedule space left after the network agreed to Johnny Carson's demand to stop airing the reruns of the Tonight Show on weekends. The network wanted to produce a comedy show aimed at a younger audience, they wanted to have "the first television show to speak the language of the time", something like - in words of Lorne Michaels - a cross between Monty Python and 60 Minutes.

The first show aired on October 11, 1975, with George Carlin hosting and the famous Not Ready for Prime Time Players cast (Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, and Gilda Radner). This cast, little changed, lasted until 1980, and established a standard of excellence for several "generations" of casts that followed. The seamless merging of the actors' outstanding performances and excellent writing produced one of the best things ever on American television. The following insightful quote comes from the authors of the book:

"Saturday Night Live invigorated viewers because it represented so many departures from the safe, the sane and the expected."

I first watched the reruns of the "first generation" of the show about 1983 (I found the 1983 version of it, despite the presence of Eddie Murphy, completely unwatchable) and I remember being quite surprised that one could see a show as good as SNL. 99% of everything else on television was seemingly aimed at middle-school-level viewers. Who can forget Aykroyd's "Bass-O-Matic" sketch? His Julia Child's parody? Belushi's Samurai Deli? Radner's Emily Litella? Weekend Update with the strait-laced Jane Curtin being called "an ignorant slut"? And so many excellent hosts giving lifetime best performances, such as, say, Julian Bond's in 1977. Sorry for the reminiscences, back to the book.

In 1980 came the low point of the show's history, Lorne Michaels left and neither Jean Doumanian nor Dick Ebersol managed to attain the greatness of the original. I have to credit the authors of the book for attempting to classify the show's changing casts into several generations. The book ends in spring of 2002, with the sixth - I think - generation of casts, so the 21st century shows are not mentioned at all.

What I mainly like about the book, other than its unconventional form of conversation/interview snippets, is the clarity with which it shows that making TV shows is first of all a business, a money-making venture, and it takes a genius like Lorne Michaels to sneak in some quality despite the guidance (i.e., harmful interference) of the total morons at the helm of a TV network. I very much like that someone in each generation of the show reminisces about Gilda Radner. She was the best and the sweetest! Bill Murray comes across as the most insightful, eloquent, and convincing raconteur of all performers. His tribute to Ms. Radner is truly touching!

Readers interested in dirt will find a lot of it here. The legendary drug abuse and sex excesses of the first generation are frequently mentioned as are the intrigues, conflicts, loves and hates. Ms. Curtin says it well:

"The fact that here we all were, our lives forever intertwined, and you had these love-hate relationships with people, and things got said that were just so incredibly perfect and mean and funny and honest. Some people laughed, some people gasped. It was pretty cool.

Apologies for an overlong review, but the book's size is 565 pages - the longest book I have read in many years. Way too long but very interesting!

Three-and-a-half stars

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Ice by Ed McBain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] and suddenly she was more frightened that she'd ever been in her life, and she heard herself telling them the name, heard herself giving away her secret and her freedom, saying the name over and over again, babbling the name, and thought that would truly be the end of it, and was astonished to see the razor flashing out again, [...]"

Ice is quite a strong entry in Ed McBain's formidable 87 Precinct saga. Published in 1983 it is the 36th installment in the series, one in which the author has some fun with the title. Polysemic words are fun in general, but one of the possible meanings of the title is far from obvious (at least that's what I, a non-native English speaker, suspect.)

A young dancer and aspiring actress is gunned down when she is walking back home from a performance. The 87th Precinct detectives are drawn into that case but not until we witness hectic scenes at the precinct that involve a band of drunks arrested along with a pregnant hooker. Naturally, the story culminates with childbirth in the precinct. The author uses the scenes to introduce the group of characters - Carella, Hawes, Genero, Willis, and Meyer Meyer, with all the unbearably repetitive phrases - "white streak," "slanted eyes," "five feet eight inches tall," etc.

Carella finds out that the same gun was used in killing the dancer as in a shooting that happened a few days earlier. There occurs yet another murder and the complexity of the case grows. The author uses various side stories to enliven the procedural plot. Some - not all - are maudlin, lame, or cliché, like, for instance, Detective Kling's tribulations after the divorce from Augusta, and his obsessive thinking about "the gun."

There is an uncharacteristically brutal, for McBain's books, scene of torturing a woman with a razor (the epigraph contains a short passage) This horrifying scene is central to the arc of the plot and is certainly not gratuitous like brutal scenes in so many authors' books, aimed at titillating the readers with porn of gore. Also, the scene is even more gut-wrenching because it does not show much of what is done to the victim but is viewed partly from the victim's point of view who imagines what will be done to her.

There is even some humor in the book. My wife tells me that I have a 12-year-old-boy's sense of humor, but isn't the following passage really funny:

"[he] had an erection, but perhaps that was due to the supreme satisfaction of having beaten that pool hustler to within an inch of his life; it was sometimes difficult to separate and categorize emotions, especially when it was so cold outside."

And finally, perhaps the best feature of the novel: the characters of Brother Anthony and Fat Emma - an unforgettable duo whose portrayal confirms Ed McBain's literary talent: they seem to be such cliché evil characters, yet from the pages of the book they come close to real people.

Three stars.



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I Am America by Stephen Colbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Now I know that there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias."
(From 2006 speech by Stephen Colbert during The White House Correspondents' Dinner)

I have not watched television since mid-1990s so I missed the Colbert phenomenon: his work on The Daily Show, then his own The Colbert Report and The Late Show. The only two things I had known before reading Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) was that my acquaintances tended to consider his TV shows very funny, and - way more important - that he is credited with coining the word 'truthiness.' In the dark old days statements could be qualified as true or not true. Nowadays, with the advent of social media, statements can be qualified as 'truthy' or not based on preconceptions and biases, intuition and 'gut feeling', guidance of peers, and own hierarchy of values rather than on evidence (facts) assisted by logical reasoning and scientific method.

Naturally, because of Colbert's dichotomy between truth and truthiness I expected that I will substantially share his worldview conveyed in the book. Indeed I do, particularly his scorn at people who disdain science and consider it elitist:

"So who gave some lab-coated pipette wielder permission to act like he knows more than I do about mitochondria, just because he spent twenty years of his life studying them in a laboratory? PhDs and 300-page dissertations don't make his opinion any more valid. I happen to have some mitochondria myself, and I can tell you that mine don't take their marching orders from Cal Tech."

What surprised me a lot, though about the book was that it was not as funny as I had expected. I cracked the first smile when reading page 45. The writing was bowdlerized to make most of the potentially funny passages "safe" for any reader. Unfortunately, some jokes must be offensive to someone to be funny, and I will stop here to make my review safe for PC adherents.

Luckily, in the later parts of Colbert's book there is some humor, like this gem coming from the author's take on Hays Code guiding the production of movies in Hollywood:

"If a scene includes a train entering a tunnel, the tunnel shall not be portrayed as enjoying it."

The chapter Sex and Dating tends to be funny too - in this cloying safe sense of humor:

"A Real Man is someone who walks through life the way a pilot walks through an airplane. Cool, calm, and checking out the sexy stews. No matter how tough the situation gets, a Real Man never lets on about the faulty landing gear."

It is really the Appendix that saves the book for me. Stephen Colbert was invited to give a speech at the traditional White House Correspondents' Dinner. In 2006 the author was roasting George W. Bush. The speech is (in)famous for the originally mixed reception in the media and its extreme popularity on YouTube. I can see two reasons for the original cool reception: First, Colbert's speech went way beyond safe humor - some of his statements could be construed as offensive - and therefore it was deadly funny. The other reason is that the speech contained, rather veiled, but very biting criticism of the press.

So yes, mild thumbs up from me, but mostly for the inclusion of the speech, which raises the rating by almost one star.

Two-and-three-quarter stars.

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Mirror Maze by William Bayer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

" Remember: Somewhere in here lies the answer to a riddle. I'm not sure what the riddle is, except that it had to do with the way the mirrors catch the light and make something out of it, something you can't touch, but that's real - and that never existed before."

I have reviewed two novels by William Bayer here on Goodreads: very, very good Switch (solid four stars) and almost as good The Magician's Tale (also four stars), which the author published under the pen name of David Hunt. For me, these are extremely high scores for crime novels/thrillers, which means I must like the author's prose. On the other hand it also allows me to state major disappointment with Mirror Maze (1994). I am unable to rate the novel anywhere near the four-star territory.

Captivating first chapter: an attractive woman prepares herself for another episode of her game: finding a suitable mark in a Manhattan bar and allowing herself to be picked up. Naturally, a dupe is instantaneously found, happy to invite her to his apartment and finalize the easy catch. But it is not to be: the woman drugs him, he falls asleep, she steals some valuables from him and "inscribes" the guy - with indelible black marker she writes a phrase on his chest, in mirror-reverse. Wow!

Meanwhile, Detective Janek, whom we know from Switch, is meeting with an informant, who might have new details on a notorious unsolved case from the past - the Mendoza case. These two threads - the exploits of and search for the mirror-reverse writer and revisiting of the Mendoza case - form the two parallel axes of the novel.

I much prefer the "Mendoza" thread, which exposes the enormous complexity of the case in all kinds of dimensions: legal, psychological, human, and - most of all - the inextricable entanglement with the power games of office and city politics. Janek is sent to Havana to interrogate a potential witness in the case. I find the Havana episode the best part of the novel - well written, plausible, and devoid of affectation.

While Mr. Bayer's prose is, as usual, accomplished, what bothers me is how pretentious the main theme - fascination with mirrors - is. The following passage epitomizes it:

"The world of mirrors. Mirror-madness time. Reflections that don't show who you are [...] Mirrorworld. The mockery of mirrors. Their cruelty. Infinite corridors. Galleries of images. [...]"

This is just one of the many, many, many fragments exploiting the world of mirrors. Actually what bothers me even more is that the author does not explore the reflection metaphor, instead focusing on titillating the reader with continual repetition of the word 'mirror.'

Sexual abuse of children by their parents is a horrible thing. Yet it happens not as often as the "asexual" abuse, which routinely occurs in a frighteningly high percentage of families, where parents wreck their children's lives as a result of their own inadequacies, complexes, and plain stupidity. I would like to read more books with this in the background rather than cliché sexual abuse.

At least the ending is quite good. The mandatory "final twist of plot" is unexpected in a completely unexpected way.

Two-and-a-half stars.


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The Great Movies II by Roger Ebert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[Kieślowski] is one of the filmmakers I would turn to consolation if I learned I was dying, or to laugh with on finding I would live after all."

I typed the epigraph with a feeling of deep sadness. Roger Ebert, to me the best film critic ever, died in 2017. I do hope he looked to Kieślowski for solace in his most difficult moments.

Roger Ebert's The Great Movies II is a collection of 100 reviews of movies, which made a very strong impression on the critic. Few months ago I reviewed here the third set and in another few months I will review the original volume. As I explained in my review of The Great Movies III instead of reviewing the reviews, I will quote a few fragments of Ebert's analysis of four films out of the 100, which made the strongest impression on me, plus two "honorable mentions." Very few people can match the outstanding literary quality of Ebert's writings.

Let's begin with one of my most favorite films ever, Coppola's The Conversation, ostensibly a thriller, and a great one, but really a marvelous psychological drama, full of wisdom about human life. Ebert writes:

"The Conversation comes from another time and place than today's thrillers, which are so often simpleminded."

Then, for me, comes Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy, where

"Blue is the antitragedy, White is the anticomedy, and Red is the antiromance. All three films hook us with immediate narrative interest. They are metaphysical through example, not theory [...]"

Red is absolutely stunning in its depth of perception of randomness of human life. Blue, beautifully filmed, is painfully sad yet makes it clear that life is worthwhile at least to see films like that. I don't particularly like White, which I find not metaphysical enough and too topical in its plot. Mr. Ebert's review of Trilogy is the best film review I have ever read. Written in wonderful, evocative prose it virtually bursts with wisdom:

"On another timeline, in a parallel universe, the judge and Valentine might have themselves fallen in love. They missed being the same age by only forty years or so."

Now, Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Absolutely unforgettable film, even if based on rather absurd premise and surrealistic plot about people who

"constantly arrive for dinner, and sometimes even sit down for it, but are never able to eat."

I love how Ebert summarizes Bunuel's art:

"[...] the more I look at his films the more wisdom and acceptance I find. He sees that we are hypocrites, admits to being one himself, and believes we were probably made that way."

My fourth choice is Fellini's Amarcord, as Mr. Ebert writes, "a movie made entirely out of nostalgia and joy." A movie built of "memories of memories, transformed by affection and fantasy and much improved in the telling."

My first Honorable Mention goes to Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, a classy horror/thriller, which transcends its genre in the same way as Let the Right One In, a vampire movie made 30 years later transcends the vampire genre. Ebert writes:

"I've been through the film with students a shot at a time, paying close attention to the use of red as a marker in the visual scheme. It is a masterpiece of physical filmmaking, in the way photography evokes mood and the editing underlines it with uncertainty."

And finally, one of the most haunting and enigmatic films, also by Nicolas Roeg, Walkabout, about failure of human communication. Mr. Ebert writes:

"The film is deeply pessimistic. [...] all of us are captives of environment and programming: [...] there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we cannot see."

Another great volume of reviews! Four stars.

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One Police Plaza by William J. Caunitz
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[...] was down on one knee putting a new clip into his weapon when a spray of slugs tore into his body. His Uzi clammered to the ground. The last thing he saw before he slumped over was his right eye dangling out of its socket, held by a twisted white cord."

I don't have time to conduct a thorough analysis of the crime novels that I have read and determine the percentage of books that start well but then degenerate into an idiotic, ludicrous mess at the end, "enlivened" by a shootout or a massacre that produces geysers of blood, intestines popping out to see the light of day, arms and legs twitching after being separated from the body, eyeballs hanging by a thread, and other yummy cinematic images. I would guess that about 50% of crime novels follow this path.

One Police Plaza by William Caunitz (1984) is a well-known book, the so-called "national bestseller", set up in New York's Fifth Precinct. The beginning is intriguing and captivating. Lieutenant Malone is called to the precinct on his day off because his people caught a homicide that "could be a problem." The deceased is a priest and a transvestite prostitute was with him when he died. Malone "smoothes" the case for the priest's superiors. But this is just a "false start" of the plot, designed to show the pervasive corruption, where paybacks for favors replace the search for truth. I appreciate these layers of the novel; Mr. Caunitz, as an actual detective lieutenant in the New York City Police Department, knows well what he is writing about.

The main plot begins with discovery of a woman's body in a bathtub, in advanced stages of decay. The author titillates the readers by providing gross details of the physical decomposition of human body after death. I really don't mind gore as long as it is not gratuitous. Obviously not the case here.

The woman is an Israeli and connections with CIA are suspected. The author offers the readers another yummy bit: cops are watching an orgy through binoculars. Malone gets a clear warning from someone in the police force to stop the investigation. Being a hero, he carries on working on the case.

We have several cringeworthy, gratuitous sex scenes, very badly written. Sex scenes are extremely difficult to write, the author is certainly aware of this, yet persists, likely in pursuit of the lowest possible denominator for the novel. Towards the end clichés abound:

"[He] was shaken, his face drained. An adage came to mind: If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. [...]"

For comedy relief, the last page has a publisher's blurb that says "One Police Plaza is a first novel of rare authenticity." Yes, maybe in showing the ubiquity of corruption. But the characters are pure paper, ratcheting violence and gore replaces plot development, and the prose is mediocre at best.

Two stars.

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Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin by Dusko Doder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"There are two ways - one realistic, the other fantastic - for resolving the crisis of the Soviet economy. The realistic way is to have people from outer space come and straighten out the mess. The fantastic way is for the Soviet people to sort it out on their own. "

Yet another position in my ever-growing list of reads about Soviet leaders of the 20th century. This has always been a compelling topic for me as I had lived in the shadow of Soviet ideology for the first 31 years of my life. Gorbachev. Heretic in the Kremlin (1990) by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson is certainly one of the best - probably the very best - books that I have read on Soviet leaders. (An index of books that I reviewed on that topic may be found after the rating.)

The authors do not spend much time on the early life and career of Mikhail Gorbachev. The one aspect of his career that they do emphasize is the mentorship of Yuri Andropov whom Gorbachev met in 1971. It was undoubtedly Andropov who "propelled Gorbachev into a far higher political orbit than he would have been able to reach on his own." The authors also mention a curious historical tidbit: in September 1978, at a train station in the Stavropol region, four men met and talked on the station platform: Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev - these four men would rule Soviet Union in succession. Brezhnev will die in 1982, Andropov will succeed him and die after just 16 months in power. He will be succeeded by Chernenko, who will also die soon, and Gorbachev will be elected as the general Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985. It may be worthwhile to remind the young and middle-aged readers that in the 1980s Soviet Union was still one of the only two superpowers in the world.

The political biography follows Gorbachev's years in the Kremlin. Like Andropov, during his brief stint as the General Secretary, Gorbachev realized that the Soviet empire was doomed if it did not change. Over the seven decades of Soviet rule

"the system has degenerated into one that penalizes initiative, efficiency, decency, and responsibility while rewarding opportunism, laziness, sloganeering, and deviousness."

Gorbachev was acutely aware of various insanities of the Soviet centrally planned economy, nationwide corruption, cynicism, alcoholism, overall inertia, and, perhaps the worst of all, the unparalleled degree of resistance from the party bureaucracy. From the very beginning of his term Gorbachev wanted to reform the Soviet empire so that it could overcome the monstrous crisis and perhaps even thrive.

Gorbachev's first major initiative was 'perestroika' (restructuring, rebuilding), an extremely wide-ranging program of economic reform that just stopped short of a full market reform. Perestroika eventually failed, economy kept disintegrating, and society remained stagnant. Almost at the same time as perestroika, Gorbachev also embraced another major initiative, 'glasnost' (usually translated as 'openness', but the word has also a semantic component of 'loudness'):

"[...] the term has acquired more complex political connotations. It stands for greater openness and candor in government affairs and for an interplay of different and sometimes conflicting views in political debtaes, in the press, and in Soviet culture."

The authors show that Gorbachev used glasnost as a strategy to overcome the monstrously immovable, entrenched party bureaucracy, totally unable to change.

While perestroika, naturally and expectedly, failed - the magnificent joke quoted in the epigraph reflects the complete truth: the only realistic way of reforming Soviet economy was through supernatural intervention - glasnost remained. And it was glasnost that eventually led to the end of the Communist party's monopoly on power and the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

In liking this book I may be displaying a bias: I have always believed that the fall of Communism and Soviet empire was due to Gorbachev's actions much more than to anything else. I don't believe the American or any other nation's policy alone was sufficient to end Communism in the Soviet Union. This extremely well researched book seems to confirm the notion of Gorbachev as a revolutionary whose vision and charisma impacted history in an unprecedented way. What is most special is that his impact was almost entirely positive, unlike the way that mass butchers of nations, like Stalin or Hitler, influenced history by murdering tens of millions of people and taking hope away from hundreds of millions of others. In its ultimate effect, thanks to the fall of Soviet ideology, Gorbachev's vision, charisma, political talent, and energy gave hundreds of millions of people a chance. (Naturally they will squander the chance, but that's another story.)

Very good book! Highly recommended!

Four-and-a-half stars.

My previous reviews of books on Soviet leaders:

The Andropov File - by Martin Ebon

Against the Grain - An Autobiography - by Boris Yeltsin

Lenin to Gorbachev: Three generations of Soviet Communists - by Joan Frances Crowley

Brezhnev, Soviet Politician - by Paul J. Murphy

Khrushchev - by Roy Medvedev

Gorbachev and His Revolution - by Mark Galeotti

Andropov - by Zhores Medvedev

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Trunk Music by Michael Connelly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

" The dead man was on his right side in the fetal position except his wrists were behind him instead of folded against his chest. It appeared to Bosch that his hands had been tied behind him and the bindings removed, most likely after he was dead. "

Detective Harry Bosch is back in Homicide after his involuntary stress leave and a stint in Burglary Division. Michael Connelly's Trunk Music (1997) begins with the body of a man shot dead found in the trunk of a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. The car is found on a fire road off Mulholland Drive, on a bluff above the Hollywood Bowl. In a curious coincidence a month ago I reviewed here the same author's The Overlook, where Bosch's first case after his transfer to Homicide Special involves a man, shot execution style, whose body is found at an overlook above Mulholland Dam. The scenic locations and the word 'Mulholland' evoke the Hollywood magic.

The similarities between both book go deeper. In Trunk the detectives immediately notice that the case has all the aspect of a mob hit. Bosch is worried that the case will be taken away from him by the secretive OCID (Organized Crime Investigation Division). In Overlook the investigation proceeds almost as a competition between Los Angeles Homicide Special department and FBI.

However, there is one significant difference between the two novels, separated by just nine years: Trunk is much better. In fact, the first half is an outstanding police procedural, very tight, fast, and well written. The second half, though... Technically, what I will write now is not a spoiler, so I am cautiously proceeding. The second half of Trunk Music is a completely different book. Basically a waste of time. Things become grossly implausible. Bosch and his team, with tacit approval of his superior officer, are conducting private investigation. Yeah, right. Double positive! There is a serendipitous meeting on Mulholland Drive. Sure, yeah, right! Triple positive. Bosch has a hunch... And so on and on...

I really wish I hadn't read the second half of the novel and finished somewhere in the middle where the book was still great. I am asking this for the tenth or twentieth time: why do crime novels have to be about 350 - 450 pages long? Why not 250 pages? What's wrong with a short novel? Why waste the writer's time to produce filler stuff to pump up the volume and the readers' time who have to plough ahead to get to the denouement?

I am still recommending Trunk Music because of the outstanding first half. Go ahead if you want to read the second half, but I have warned you!

Three stars.

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The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years by Joseph A. Califano Jr.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] I shall not seek - and will not accept - the nomination of my party for another term as your President [...]"

The above is the famous sentence from President Lyndon Johnson's speech on March 31, 1968 when he announced he would not be seeking the second term in office. I vaguely remember the surprised reactions of Polish press and TV (I lived in Poland then and was a high-school senior) and I mainly recall being aware that I was witnessing a historical moment.

Joseph Califano's book The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. The White House years (1991) is an extremely detailed account of the author's three-and-a-half-year work for the President. Being one of the closest advisors Mr. Califano had the opportunity to talk to the President virtually every day, which explains the tremendous amount of factual material in the book.

The narration begins in July 1965 when Mr. Califano gets a call from the White House and learns that the President wants him to take on the job preparing legislative programs, manage domestic crises, "and act as a general utility infielder on the domestic scene." Two days later Mr. Califano joins the President at the pool in Lyndon Johnson's Texas ranch and gets driven around the ranch.

These are turbulent times for the country. The President issues a statement about escalation of American involvement in Vietnam - 50,000 young men are sent to the war, many of whom will return in caskets draped with American flag. Amidst this tragedy Lyndon Johnson continues implementing his Great Society policies and his push for civil rights: the Congress passes the Voting Rights Act. The list of Lyndon Johnson's legislative successes in 1965-1966, "taking the federal government on the side of the little person," is extremely impressive:

"the war on poverty, health care for the elderly and the poor; aid to education for poor children; voting rights; immigration reform; and regional heart, cancer, and stroke research facilities in every section of the nation [...]"

But then comes 1967, when the anti-Vietnam-war protests explode all over the country and the President appears powerless and losing his mandate to lead the bitterly divided country. 1968 is the "Nightmare Year," and Lyndon Johnson decides to do a honorable thing and not seek re-election.

On the lighter side, we read about the President's tendency to micromanage, for instance about his involvement with egg prices, and - on a larger scale - his successful fight against price increases attempted by aluminum, copper, and steel companies. We also read about President Johnson's views of other politicians. Mr. Califano uses three "d's": the President despises Nixon, detests Senator McCarthy, and distrusts Robert F. Kennedy. I will add the fourth "d" - the text makes it clear that he also continually demeans his own Vice-President Hubert Humphrey.

I do not buy the theory that a President should be a paragon of morality and ethics to lead the country. For instance, the ability to convincingly lie on demand is, to me, one of the basic requirements of being a successful politician. If one were to read Mr. Califano's memoir selectively and with a bias, one could form an impression of Lyndon Johnson as an arrogant, cheating, macho scumbag. While I do not share such an opinion, I certainly do not admire Lyndon Johnson as a person. Yet I certainly admire him as a president, in my view one of the better the country has had. And I admire him for his courage and wisdom to step aside.

And as to Mr. Califano's book, despite tremendous amount of information about the highest levels of US politics it provides I am unable to rate it higher than three stars. The reason is that it just overwhelms the reader with zillions and zillions of facts that are not filtered in any consistent way. It is like a huge database of tidbits with just a scant synthesis.

Three stars.

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The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] we were sitting in a Blimpie Base on Broadway, planning the commission of a felony. That set us apart from the other customers, who looked to have gotten well past the planning stage. "

I read Lawrence Block's "Burglar" series only for the wonderful prose and humor. The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams is not as great as my previous read in the series The Burglar In the Rye but still, I had fun reading this installment of Bernie Rhodenbarr saga and finding many jewels of witty prose. I also think that many readers will appreciate the meta-literary motif of this novel. While in the other novel You-Know-Who was constantly in the background (and in the rye, obviously), here we have recurring allusions to Sue Grafton's series. For instance, how about G is for Spot and D is for Cup?

The story begins when a customer visits Bernie's used book shop to buy Ms. Grafton's B is for Burglar. Yet the customer happens to be Bernie's new landlord, who announces that he is increasing the rent by 1200%. Poor Bernie! How can he get that much money to pay the rent! Wait! After all, Bernie has a real job in addition to being a bookseller! He is so accomplished at it that he could get a PhD in burgling!

Amidst the rent increase trouble, Carolyn, Bernie's best friend, gets him a cat. Bernie hires Raffles as an employee in his bookstore, responsible for rodent control. But where does Ted Williams come in? Well, baseball cards collecting is the other main motif in the novel. We also have a mysterious young woman whom Bernie meets at night and who asks him to walk her home. I will not explain any more of the plot; I could truthfully say that it is too complicated and has too many twists, but the real reason is that I totally don't care about what is happening and it is only the witty prose and instructional descriptions of burgling activities that keep me reading.

The novel ends conventionally, with the horrendous (for me) Wolfean-style gathering of all characters in one place, which allows Bernie to announce the guilty party. Yuck! Also, there is quite a bit less humor in this novel than in Rye, but still, I had lots of fun reading. How can one not smile when reading the phrase coup de foie gras. Or the following cute passage:

"The dress was a perfect choice; it made her look as respectable as a Junior League luncheon while leaving no doubt whatsoever that she was a female member of her species, and that it was a distinctly mammalian species at that."

Also, let me mention that the introduction of Raffles to the cast is not just a random component. The cat plays quite an essential role in helping Bernie solve the case. I don't have the faintest idea who did what in the novel but I certainly liked reading it! Recommended!

Three-and-a-quarter stars.


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The Andropov File by Martin Ebon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Andropov's experience in manipulating others, his shrewd appraisal of human nature and his quintessential toughness, are sharp weapons in the fights he has to wage. [...] A few spectacular cases of punishment - and in relatively high places, at that - can make routine [Soviet] corruption less brazen and less tolerated. No ruthless KGB methods need to be used; tried-and-true Andropov techniques will suffice. "

Yet another item in my series of reads and reviews about Soviet/Russian leaders of the 20th century and the second biography of Yuri Andropov that I am reviewing here after Zhores Medvedev's Andropov . Martin Ebon's The Andropov File (1983) descriptively subtitled The Life and Ideas of Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR is similar in that both were written very soon after Andropov was elected the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. (For younger readers: the party was the actual center of power in Soviet Union, which at the time was the only other world's superpower and whose military might equaled that of the United States.) Consequently, neither of these biographies provides a historical perspective. Not that such perspective is sorely needed. Andropov died only 14 months after assuming the leadership and did not have many chances to influence the course of Soviet politics or world events in a meaningful way. His most important contribution to world's history is mentioned later in this review.

Ebon's work is a traditionally structured biography. The author recounts the arc of Andropov's political career, beginning with his participation in partisan movement in Karelia in 1941 - 1945, and Otto Kuusinen's role as Andropov's first mentor. The years 1953 - 1957 mark one of the most important stages in Andropov's early party service: he was the Soviet ambassador to Hungary and his role in the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 is still the subject of speculations. (It also connects with me, personally, as I still have vague memories of the drama of 1956: I lived in Poland at that time and I remember Polish people donating blood for victims on the Budapest massacre by Soviet troops.)

In the mid-1960s Andropov gains the most powerful supporter in the person of Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Communist Party main ideologue. Andropov becomes the Candidate member of the Politburo in 1967. The trajectory of his career is not traditional, though. Andropov is named the Chairman of the KGB in 1967, the organization that had long been dreaded in the Western world. Andropov remains the KGB boss for 15 years and molds the organization in his "modern way": it begins to rely on more "sophisticated" methods of psychological and social harassment rather than on physical torture and outright murder of the olden days.

The author does not spend much time on "humanizing" Andropov's portrait. True, he quotes observations, stories, and anecdotes by other people who have worked with Andropov, but does not put much credence in them as possibly being created by sensationalism or even planted by Andropov people. We only get the image of Andropov as a "well-mannered workaholic" and his personal style is presented as "ruthlessly fastidious" or "fastidiously ruthless."

In the final chapters the author conveys his pessimism as to Andropov's chances of instituting substantial changes in Soviet politics, economics, and social life. We will never learn what might have happened had Andropov lived longer and had more time as the Soviet supreme leader. The book was written before Andropov's death, so the author did not have the opportunity to note what I consider Andropov's most important contribution to Soviet (and the whole world's) history: his mentorship and support of the future Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who - partly purposefully partly accidentally - managed to dismantle Soviet Union (at least for a period of time until it is now restored under the Russian flag).

In Appendices the author provides full texts of many, many speeches given by Andropov between 1964 and 1982. This is most mind-numbingly boring reading and I have to admit I just scanned the pages. With the exception of one speech, honoring one of the early builders of future Soviet Union, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the fist chief of Cheka, the precursor of KGB. The paean to Dzerzhinsky reads almost like a series of Chuck Norris jokes. I am now convinced that Dzerzhinsky could teach God quite a few tricks. And he was Polish by birth!

Two-and-a-half stars.

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