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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