Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[...] he reflected on how very little he had learned about the dead man. [...] A genius, a homophobe, adored by the world of music, a man whom a woman half his age would love, but still a man whose substance was elusive."

The audience at Teatro La Fenice, the Opera House in Venice, is waiting for the third act of the opera to begin, when the artistic director of the theater announces that Maestro Wellauer, the world-famous opera director, is unable to continue the performance, and another director will take his place. And then he asks, "Is there a doctor in the audience?"

Maestro Wellauer is dead, poisoned by cyanide in his coffee. Guido Brunetti, commissario of police for the city of Venice, is leading the investigation. Death at La Fenice (1992) is the first novel in Donna Leon's "internationally famous" series. This is also the first novel by Ms. Leon that I have read, and - unfortunately - I am unable to share the enthusiasm of millions of other readers. I have not found the novel captivating at all, and, at times, continuing reading felt like a chore.

While the prose is pleasant and readable, I find it uninspiring. The psychological portrayals of the characters feel a bit naive and superficial. Ms. Leon does attempt to provide elements of the social background to the plot in several places of the novel, yet these attempts do not blend well with the plot. Commissario Brunetti does not seem a particularly interesting character. The result feels unremarkable, particularly when compared with novels by masters like Denise Mina, Karin Fossum, or Maj Sjöwall.

Clearly, the popularity of the series shows that my lack of appreciation is an outlier, and it may indicate that something is wrong with me rather than with the novel. I will read another installment in the series; maybe I will form a more positive opinion.

This is not to say that I have not found several passages that I liked. To me, the best portion of the book is the vivid and humorous account of the high-society party thrown by Brunetti's parents-in-law, Count and Countess Falier. Brunetti meets someone there, who will help him solve the case.

Three passages made me laugh out loud, and they save the novel from even a lower rating. They are funny because they are offensive. The first two make fun of three nationalities:

"Brunetti reflected upon the possible advantage of censorship of the press. In the past, the German people had got along very well with a government that demanded it, and the American government seemed to fare similarly well with a population that wanted it."

as well as this cynical gem about aristocracy:

"Where does American money come from? [...] You know how it is over there. It doesn't matter if you murder or rob to get it. The trick is in keeping it for a hundred years, and then you're aristocrats. [...] Here [in Italy] we have to keep it for five hundred years before we're aristocrats. And there's another difference. In Italy, you have to be well-dressed. In America, it's difficult to tell which are the millionaires and which are the servants."

The following hilarious passage is offensive to teenagers:

"He was fifteen [...] He had discovered, by himself, that the world is corrupt and the system unjust, and that men in power were interested in that and that alone. Because he was the first person ever to have made this discovery with such force and purity, he insisted upon showing his ample contempt for all those not yet graced with the clarity of his vision."

Two-and-a-half stars.

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Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead by Phil Lesh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes.
Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis..."

I heard Grateful Dead's live version of Dark Star for the first time a little over 50 years ago, most likely in 1969. From that very first time of listening to the entire 20+ minutes of the glorious guitar improvisation, it has always been one of the musical mainstays of my life, along with - acquired a bit later - A Love Supreme by John Coltrane and several works by J. S. Bach, particularly St Matthew Passion and Cantata BWV 140. I am not a Grateful Dead fan and I do not really like their songs. But then Dark Star, with its minimal lyrics, is not a song; it is instead an extended piece of transcendent beauty, which goes far beyond the genres of rock or jazz.

With apologies for this insanely overwrought intro: I have now had a chance of reading Phil Lesh's Searching for the Sound. My Life with the Grateful Dead (2005). Phil Lesh was the bass guitar player for the whole lifespan of Grateful Dead, from 1965 to 1995. He was, quite likely, the second most important member of the band (if such a ranking is meaningful), after Jerry Garcia. His bass playing is an essential component of the beauty of Dark Star. And he writes a lot about Dark Star in the book.

Mr. Lesh writes about his childhood in Berkeley, California, where he attends a violin school and plays trumpet in Berkeley High School. In 1957 he listens to John Coltrane's music for the first time:

"This encounter with Coltrane was my first inkling that jazz and improvised music could carry the weight and spiritual authority of the greatest classical works."

The author then embarks on a fascinating narrative about the early- and mid-1960s in the then center of the Universe - San Francisco, Berkeley, and the entire Bay Area. This is where the Sixties began, this is where the monumental cultural revolution, whose aftereffects are felt to this day, was born.

While classically trained in music, Mr. Lesh had never played guitar until his fateful meeting with Jerry Garcia in 1965, when Garcia suggested that Lesh learns bass guitar because they needed this instrument for the band. So it began: both musicians, along with Bob Weir, "Pigpen" McKernan, and Bill Kreutzmann, formed The Grateful Dead, one of the most famous and most popular rock bands in history. (The designation "rock band" is a bit misleading: as the example of Dark Star shows, they ventured into jazz, blues, folk, bluegrass, as well as avant-garde and experimental music.)

The Grateful Dead were not just passive participants in the cultural revolution; they were one of its principal forces; their music, emanating from the very heart of Haight-Ashbury, shaped the "flower power" hippie movement that culminated in the "summer of love" and the Woodstock event. Mr. Lesh beautifully writes about it:

"At the beginning, we were a band playing a gig. At the end, we had become shamans helping to channel the transcendent into our mundane lives and those of our listeners. We felt [...] privileged to be at the arrow's point of human evolution [...]"

and later

"At the end of the day [...] I felt as if I'd been privileged to be part of something that was bigger and more important even than music: a community of loving, peaceful people gathered together to celebrate a new form of consciousness -- one that I hoped would expand to embrace the whole world."

One thing is certain: in a marked contrast with many if not most rock musicians, contemporary and past, the members of Grateful Dead did not create and perform music to make money; they played to have their music serve a higher purpose of making life better and more meaningful for the people.

Mr. Lesh offers a thorough, detailed, and well written 30-year history of the band. They were mainly a "touring band," so they gave over 2,300 concerts for millions of "Deadheads" and more casual fans. Many performances are described in full detail. The Grateful Dead played for incredible range of audiences. I love the bitter irony when in the later part of the band's history the author juxtaposes two performances in 1978: one in the "shadows of the Great Pyramid of Giza", in Egypt, and the other, when they were musical guests on Saturday Night Live. Two pinnacles of human culture, heh-heh.

Mr. Lesh does a great job in this memoir. Highly recommended!

Four stars.

A well-written quote from a professional music critic:

"Dark Star, elusive, mysterious and glorious beyond description, is a cornerstone of Grateful Dead's music."
(Jeff Tamarkin)

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Walking Shadow by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'What's the hurry? We have the rest of our life to do this.'
'You know perfectly well that I am always in a hurry.'
'Almost always,' I said.
'Except then.'"
(A snippet of Spenser and Susan's banter.)

Robert B. Parker's Walking Shadow (1994), the twenty-first installment in the long-running Spenser saga, is - in my view - one of the weaker novels of the series. It seems that the unremarkable plot serves only one purpose: to give the reader a pretext to meet the four recurring characters again: intrepid, intellectual, athletic, and very manly Spencer, his psychologist partner Susan Silverman, PhD, his infinitely cool close friend Hawk, and Vinnie Morris - the best shot in the entire Universe (well, in Boston).

Spenser and Susan come to a coastal Massachusetts town, where Susan is a board member of a local theater company. The artistic director of the company suspects he is being followed; Spenser's task is to catch the stalker. Soon things get more serious: when Susan and Spenser watch a play in the theater, someone shoots one of the actors to death. Naturally, Spenser undertakes the murder investigation for the theater company.

The town has a huge Chinese population - including many people without legal immigration status - and Spenser learns that it is actually the tong that wields the power in the town. Spenser's investigation bothers the tong's bosses and he is threatened with death if he does not stay out of their affairs. Which explains the appearance of Hawk and Vinnie. And - as Anton Chekhov might say - once Vinnie shows up in the novel, there will be shooting at the end.

Instead of following the feeble plot, I have focused on finding funny passages and nice prose fragments. Like the following one:

"[...] looking at the people moving past us, and they seemed to me for a minute as they must have seemed to Herman Leong all the time: insubstantial, and temporary wisps of momentary history that flickered past, while behind him was the long, unchanging, overpowering weight of his race that bore upon the illusory moment [...]"

As to humor, in addition to the epigraph quote, the reader can find a few hilarious passages of sexual innuendo like, for instance

"'Do you wish my flower were like a polished pearl?' Susan said.
'I'm an old-fashioned guy,' I said. 'I prefer the original, so to speak, unprocessed model.'"

The Chinese graduate student, Mei Ling, who serves as Spenser's interpreter, is the most memorable character in the novel. There is also a thin layer of seriousness about the "have-nots" and racial conflicts in the society: Spenser is stunned by the subhuman living conditions of Chinese immigrants in Massachusetts. The reader may also be surprised by how much the language standards have changed in the recent years: the book was published only 27 years ago, yet I am afraid it would be criticized today for "insensitive language."

Two-and-a-half stars.


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Art of the Surrealists, the by Edmund Swinglehurst
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[...] Surrealism would not offer a new and easier means of expression, nor was it to be a metaphysical kind of poetry; it would be a means to the total liberation of the mind and of everything that resembled it."
(Paraphrased by the author from André Breton's Surrealist manifesto.)

Here's an attempt to review an unusual book. Edmund Swinglehurst's The Art of the Surrealists (1995) has quite an unconventional structure: it contains a short, three-page essay on the origins, nature, and evolution of the Surrealist movement in the 20th century art. The rest of the book's content is provided in the form of text vignettes that accompany the reproductions of 49 works by Surrealist painters.

Here's the list of artists whose paintings appear more than once in the collection: René Magritte (7), Paul Delvaux (5), Salvador Dalí (4), Jean Miró (4), Yves Tanguy (4), Paul Klee (4), Giorgio de' Chirico (3), Max Ernst (3), Jean Arp (2), and Kurt Schwitters (2). I am happy to see René Magritte with the most works; it is his art that made me notice and love Surrealism, and made me reach for this book.

The individual vignettes are 100-150-word short essays that - in addition to basic biographical information about the artist - offer descriptions of the artist's main motifs, influences, techniques. and provide hints as to possible interpretations of the given painting. I find this last component unnecessary and limiting the reader's enjoyment of the artist's work. To me, any attempt to explain what a surrealist painting means is ridiculous. The mystery and the "unnaturalness" of a surrealist painting are essential parts of the contract between the artist and the viewer.

Here's a fragment of one of the vignettes:

"[Paul Delvaux] has something of Hieronymous Bosch in his urban landscapes peopled by somnambulists who appear to be living out their dream lives with the same anxiety as the medieval people of Bosch's world. [...] In this painting, the juxtaposition of a conventional businessman with the nude woman provides a sexual image disturbed by the tram and volcano seen in the distance."

And to end the review, here's a different type of a mystery. The vignette about René Magritte's painting La Memoire (shown on the book cover) contains the following sentence:

"The solitary leaf in this picture strikes a note of hope and comfort."

Maybe, but the problem is that there is no leaf in the reproduced picture. Googling the title of the painting provides images that contain the leaf. Mystery indeed! Or sloppy editing, perhaps.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"'That's justice,' she said nodding at the statue. "She does not hear you. She doesn't see you. She can't feel you and won't speak to you. Justice, Detective Bosch, is just a concrete blonde.'"

I had read Michael Connelly's The Concrete Blonde (1994) for the first time about 20 years ago and I liked it a lot. I have returned to it now and I like it much less after the second read. I still think that, for the most part, it is a very good read, but in no way a great, four-star novel. Why the change? Most likely, instead of maturing, I have turned into a crotchety, grumpy, and picky old guy, who is impossible to satisfy.

After a very strong beginning, where dramatic moments from four years earlier are replayed, the plot switches to the current time. Detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch is on a civil trial for killing an unarmed man. Bosch was sure the man was the notorious serial torturer and killer, the Dollmaker, who used to paint makeup on the faces of his victims. However, a body of a woman has just been found and a note delivered to the police station suggests that the Dollmaker is still at large and that Bosch had killed an innocent man. I think most readers will agree that the setup is interesting and promising.

Things get even better. The novel is structured around two parallel, interconnected threads: the "legal thriller" that follows Bosch's trial and the police procedural, in which Bosch investigates the newest killing and discovers crucial new aspects of the original Dollmaker case. Another "concrete blonde" appears in the plot. Both the courtroom drama and the procedural are top notch: the threads are interesting and plausible. I particularly like the clever interplay between the two storylines. Even the "romantic" thread, about Bosch's relationship with Sylvia, does not sound cheap or sentimental.

Yet, as the plot nears the culmination with its mandatory merge of the two threads, the author yields to the pressure of readers' expectations. Readers want plot twists, don't they? So let's give them a twist. One is not enough? Let's give them another one. Still not enough? Let's give them yet another one.

Alas, the avalanche of twists is accompanied by a series of feel-good passages - the author describes Bosch's good deeds, such as helping the helpless and the unlucky, righting the wrongs, punishing the evil, and making a laughingstock of incompetent superiors. So, while at about three-fourth of the novel, my rating was full four stars, the ridiculously sharp plot twists and all the artificially uplifting and crowd-pleasing snippets of the story bring the rating down.

Three-and-a-half stars.


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The Essential Rene Magritte by Todd Alden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking, 'What does it mean?' they express a wish that everything be understandable."
René Magritte

I find it a little unfair that Salvador Dalí is a household name while René Magritte is not. Magritte's contributions to popular culture are at least as important as Dalí's. Dalí's The Persistence of Memory with its melting clocks is matched in its awe-inspiring power by Magritte's Time Transfixed with its "steaming locomotive emerging from a fire place" in a living room. Dalí's Swans Reflecting Elephants is not in any way more groundbreaking than Magritte's The Son of Man where a "floating green apple conceals the face of a bowler-hatted man." Not to mention Magritte's The Treason of Images -- the image of a pipe with the caption Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe") -- whose shock value exceeds even the most outlandish of Dalí's creations. While Dalí is certainly more popular, most likely due to his persistent self-promotion, Magritte, through his art, achieved more to jolt the viewers out of their comfort zone of having everything understandable and understood.

Todd Alden's The Essential René Magritte (1999) is a nice short introduction to life and works of the Belgian painter. To me, the greatest value of this little book are the images. 47 most famous paintings of Magritte are reproduced in this volume; I have seen a few of them for the first time, even though Magritte is by far my absolutely favorite painter. Other than enjoying the art, the reader will learn about the major events of the painter's life and will follow the trajectory of his artistic evolution from the Dada movement, Cubism, and Futurism of the early 20th century to becoming one of the "grandfathers of Pop," the movement that began in the 1960s.

Yet another valuable component of the book are quotes by Magritte. Let me include one more, in addition to the epigraph:

"Surrealist thought is revolutionary because it is relentlessly hostile to all those bourgeois ideological values that keep the world in the appalling condition it is in today."

I take the word "bourgeois" to mean "the traditional, established, respected, practical, and ordinary."

Despite quoting Magritte's statement that ridicules the "wish that everything be understandable," the author tries to help the reader understand the main characteristics of Magritte's art. The reader will find several lists of techniques used by Magritte to "deceive the eye" (for instance, "isolating objects out of context," "juxtaposing elements that don't generally go together," or "changing the scale of objects and their usual relationship to their contexts") or strategies to take the viewer out of the ordinary (like "fossilization," "animism," "doubling," etc.)

Reading this book made me think about why I like Magritte's art so much. Maybe, just maybe, one of the reasons is that the artist was always mischievously intent on making the viewers doubt what they see, helping them get rid of the childish delusion that the truth can be seen.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.


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All the Flowers Are Dying by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"His loins stir at the thought of what he'll do to her when the time comes. [...] oh, Christ, how he wants to kill her! He doesn't want to wait. He wants to kill her right now."

Not my favorite Matt Scudder novel (this would most likely be When the Sacred Ginmill Closes ) but I think readers may find Lawrence Block's All the Flowers are Dying (2005) captivating and satisfying. The novel has one of the most intriguing setups that I have ever encountered, and what's more, the promising setup is not "wasted" in the further parts of the book, as it is wont to happen in most thrillers, but instead grows into a consistent (if implausible) plot.

Matt Scudder is hired by a woman to find out background information on her date, whom she does not yet completely trust. Meanwhile, during an AA meeting, Mr. Scudder learns about the case of Preston Applewhite, a convicted sex murderer who tortured and killed three little boys and is about to be executed. The body of one of the boys has not been found, and Applewhite does not reveal the burial place, vehemently denying that he had anything to do with the crime.

In a parallel thread of the plot (written in the third person, in italics, ugh), the reader meets a psychologist who visits Applewhite four days before the execution. He tells the convict that he believes in his innocence, which may be a ruse to discover the location of the body. Yet very soon the reader begins to suspect that the psychologist is not who he claims to be; maybe he knows in fact that an innocent man is to be executed. But enough of the synopsis.

There are many twists in the enthralling plot, some clever and others preposterous. Alas, a few scenes in the later part of the novel are quite implausible: for instance, imagine two city detectives deliberating the case in the Scudders' living room, joined by Matt, his wife Elaine, and TJ, the street-smart Matt's sidekick.

Yet my main complain about the novel is the gratuitous porn of gore ('gratuitous' being the key word here); I have read about 20 novels by Mr. Block (and reviewed 13 on Goodreads), and this is the first time I think he goes over the top with the inclusion of excessive details of sadistic murders.

Also, from the literary point of view, in several places in the novel it feels as if the author is padding the text and artificially slowing down the progress of the plot in order to fill the quota of the number of pages. That's a pity because - as in most other books by the author - the reader will find many well-written passages. The beginning fragments of the novel evoke the mood of wistful melancholy, yet, at the same time, sparkle with dark humor:

"So that's one funeral I missed, but these days there's always another funeral to go. They're like buses. If you miss one, there'll be another coming your way in a few minutes."

Marginally recommended, mainly for the engrossing plot.

Two-and-three-quarter stars.

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Beethoven by Stephen Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) called the 'Grosse Fuge' 'that absolutely contemporary work that will be contemporary for ever.' "

A nice little book that presents the life and works of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827) comes from the Compact Companion series that combines the biography, the list of complete works, and the list of recommended recordings of greatest composers. The book, written by Stephen Johnson and published in 1994, is accompanied by a compact disk and is richly illustrated.

Considering the small volume of the text (130 pages, of which about a third are illustrations), Beethoven's life is presented in quite some detail. Beginning with the mentions of Beethoven's Flemish roots, his childhood, and his first "serious" work composed at the age of 11, we read how Beethoven grows into a brilliant, virtuoso piano performer and improviser, who - as an early teenager - gets introduced to the music of J.S. Bach, meets Mozart at 16, and studies under Haydn in Vienna.

We read about the first signs of progressing deafness, which afflicts Beethoven already in his twenties. The dramatic and famous Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter to his brothers, which the composer wrote at the age of 28 at one of the low points of his life, is quoted in its entirety, as is the equally famous Eternally Beloved - a love letter to a woman whose identity still remains a mystery. We read about the further events in his life, the struggles with deafness and other illnesses, which led to his premature death at 56.

I am more interested in Beethoven's musical output than in his biography so I am happy to report that the book guides the reader through the major works of the composer, setting them against the backdrop of turbulent times of the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. My favorite compositions of Beethoven are mentioned in quite some detail, for example the Hammerklavier piano sonata (Op. 106):

"the most agonizingly soul-searching music Beethoven ever wrote"

and piano sonata No. 32 (Op. 111)

"wildly dancing, and finally reaching an ecstatic calm."

To me, the five string quartets composed in the 1820s, are the pinnacle of Beethoven's work and, together with some works of Bach and Mozart, belong to the most magnificent music ever composed. The author quotes music critics, many of whom agree that the last five string quartets are Beethoven's "finest achievement."

The quartets were composed in the 1820s, yet they are timeless; their sound is not the sound of the 19th century but the sound of ageless beauty. Igor Stravinsky is right: some of Beethoven's music has always been and will always be contemporary.

Four stars.

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The Last Coyote by Michael Connelly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"At Mulholland he was about to turn on red when he checked the traffic from the left and froze. He saw a coyote step out of the brush of the arroyo to the left of the roadway and take a tentative look around the intersection. [...] The mist rising from the arroyo caught the reflection of the street lights and cast the coyote in almost a dim blue light. And it seemed to study Bosch's car for a moment, its eyes catching the reflection of the stoplight and glowing. For just a moment Bosch believed that the coyote might be looking directly at him. Then the animal turned and moved back into the blue mist."

Michael Connelly's The Last Coyote (1995) is the fourth installment in his Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch series. Harry is at the nadir of his middle-age life. He has been put on an involuntary stress leave for attacking one of his bosses. He is required to do stress counseling; we meet him in the first chapter as he refuses to open to a psychologist. Due to an earthquake, his house has been condemned as uninhabitable, his romantic relationship is over. He is angry, despondent, and feels threatened by the hostile world.

To find a renewed sense of direction in life - and also to fight the demons of the past - he begins a private investigation of a never solved murder that happened over 30 years ago. Marjorie Lowe, a prostitute, was killed in 1961. She was Mr. Bosch's mother.

Bosch finds out that the then-district attorney, an influential political figure of that time, played an important role in the original investigation. It becomes obvious that some sort of cover-up must have occurred. We learn a lot about Bosch's childhood, his life with several sets of foster parents and in a youth hall. The plot is extremely complicated yet well constructed. Some twists at the end seem artificial, though, as if they were introduced just because the readers expect plot twists.

While I very much liked the author's prose in The Concrete Blonde (to be reviewed soon on Goodreads), I do not find the writing in Coyote remarkable in any way. I have been unable to find any other spectacular prose fragment to quote, besides the epigraph. To me, the scene of Bosch's interrogation by the Internal Affairs detectives lacks plausibility. The romantic thread is very sweet, yet also cliché; I was able to easily predict the trajectory.

To sum up, a good but not outstanding read, and a memorable image of Bosch -- like the coyote -- as a lone individual on the brink of extinction.

Two-and-three-quarter stars.


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I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"But the honest truth is that it's sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere -- friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realized. There are, in short, regrets. Edith Piaf was famous for singing a song called 'Non, Je ne regrette rien.' It's a good song. I know what she meant.""

What a strange reading experience! Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006) comes highly recommended. It even made (albeit just barely) The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century! (I hope the century is not over yet.) My opinions often agree with those of The Guardian, so it was precisely their recommendation that made me reach for the book. (For whatever it is worth, I Feel Bad was also the "#1 National Bestseller.") The book is a collection of 15 short pieces/essays on various topics - mainly the so-called everyday life - strongly connected by their autobiographical nature.

Anyway, I began reading and as I kept going I started wondering whether my senility has progressed further than I realize. I could not see any greatness in the essays. The teasers for the book scream "hilarious," "laugh-out-loud," "wry observations," "memorable essays," "blithe charm," etc. I do not agree. I was finding the pieces largely predictable, superficial, and not that funny. Take the piece titled Parenting in Three Stages. The "surprising" aspects of parenting will only surprise the readers who have never been parents. A lot of the attempted humor is on a TV sitcom level (canned laughter missing).

I did not toss the book because I have a curious mental disability that prevents me from not finishing a book that I started reading. Also, some faint humor began to appear about page 100:

"My father takes one look at me as I get off the plane and says to my mother 'Well, maybe someone will marry her for her personality.'"

As did some deeper observations like the following quote from E. L. Doctorow:

"I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative."

And then comes page 112 (out of the total volume of 138 pages). The formless, ugly pupa of a book metamorphoses into a beautiful butterfly. The essay The Lost Strudel or Le Strudel Perdu is an insightful, almost cliché-free, and beautifully written reflection on the passage of time. The piece On Rapture is about the love of books, and could serve as mandatory reading for members of Goodreads. Next comes a little stumble: cliché-full What I Wish I'd Known (for example,

"When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.")

The last essay, Considering the Alternative, stunning and memorable, is the high point of the book. This piece alone makes the entire collection worthwhile. I will not expound on this essay because I agree with Ms. Ephron when she says "Let's not be morbid!" Let's not!

It's hard to assign a summary rating for such an uneven work. Well, two stars for the first 100 pages, four-to-five stars for the last 40 pages.

Three stars.

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The Professional by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Outside my office window, a couple of solitary snowflakes spiraled down. I watched them as they passed.
'Après vous,'I said, 'le déluge'."

I reached for Robert B. Parker's The Professional (2009) encouraged by Hush Money , which I liked a lot and reviewed here a few days ago. Well, this novel, the 37th (!) installment of the Spenser saga, is not as good. Yet, it still is a pleasantly readable, quite lighthearted mystery novel.

Spenser is hired to represent four women who are blackmailed by a man with whom they had affairs over the last 10 years: if they don't pay the guy, he will reveal the affairs to the women's rich husbands. Spenser's task is to "make him cease and desist, without causing a stir." Spenser quickly discovers the common link - all four women were members of the same gym - and finds the blackmailer. Enough of the synopsis, let me just say that the plot is quite interesting and relatively plausible. I particularly liked the account of Spenser's meeting with the blackmailer.

Susan Silverman, a psychotherapist and Spenser's friend and lover, helps him with the investigation. Readers new to the Spenser epic will find the dialogues between Susan and Spencer witty; however, when one has read several novels in the series, the wittiness turns into cliché repetitiveness. I am unable to imagine anyone wanting to read 37 installments of these conversations. Yet, even in this novel, very late in Mr. Parker's opus, one can find some really funny bits, like the following risqué passage:

"I woke up in the morning with Susan's head on my chest. I shifted a little so I could look at her. She opened her eyes and we looked at each other. She moved a little so we were facing.
'You've always been an early riser,' Susan said.
'Is that a double entendre?' I said.
'I think so,' Susan said."

Sigh... A successful PI, a witty, intelligent, and handsome man, a good boxer, who speaks French and is good in bed... Every man's dream!

Two-and-three-quarter stars.


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The Supreme Court by William H. Rehnquist
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] the Supreme Court is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing toward individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity."

This interesting observation about the workings of the United States highest court comes from William H. Rehnquist's The Supreme Court (originally published in 1987; I have read the edition that was "revised and updated" in 2001). The author may safely be assumed to know what he is writing about. Mr. Rehnquist was a Supreme Court justice for 33 years (1972 - 2005), and he served 19 of these years as the Chief Justice.

The author quotes a standard, textbook-type definition of what the Supreme Court does:

"Congress and the president enact laws, the president executes the laws, and the Supreme Court decides cases arising under those laws or under the Constitution."

The book clearly shows how misleadingly straightforward that description is, how much more is at stake when the court decides cases, how the court's decisions affect every single resident and shape the future of the country, and - in turn - how various social, political, and personal factors influence the court's decisions. I have read and reviewed here on Goodreads about 10 books about Supreme Court, and in many of these reviews I expressed my belief that Supreme Court is the most important branch of the government, more important than the president or the Congress.

The book begins with Mr. Rehnquist's personal recollection of the travel to Washington in January 1952 to begin his law clerkship for Supreme Court and the first few days on the job. Then he begins the journey through the 19th and 20th century history of the court, highlighting the most important cases and most influential justices. Marburg vs. Madison is the first major case discussed in considerable detail. Then comes the infamous Dred Scott decision, which became, as the author states, "a 'self-inflicted wound' from which it took the Court at least a generation to recover."

Chapters Six and Seven deal with the Supreme Court in president Roosevelt's times. I find the coverage of Roosevelt's "court-packing plan" absolutely riveting; the author presents the political and personal factors that contributed to the eventual failure of the plan. Yet, from a long-term perspective, Roosevelt succeeded in influencing the ideological direction of the court: during his 12 years of presidency, he appointed eight associate justices, and put a clear imprint of the New Deal ideas on the court's decisions.

The next two chapters focus on yet another remarkable and momentous case - the "Steel Seizure Case." Facing Korean war and the fiasco of negotiations between the steel mill workers and the steel companies, President Truman ordered the government seizure of steel mills. The author convincingly explains the background of the case and presents various forces and factors that contributed to the majority of the justices eventually voting against the government.

Next, Mr. Rehnquist discusses the "Warren Court" and the major changes in the constitutional law that began happening in the early 1960s. He also portrays the highly influential justices, such as Brennan, Douglas, and Warren. Chapters Twelve through Fourteen illustrate the procedural details of the Supreme Court's functioning; the reader will learn about the three main stages of the court's work: how the petitions for certiorari are chosen, the details of the oral arguments, and how the cases are actually decided. The last chapter, The Court in Its Third Century nicely summarizes the main emphases and motifs of the book. The very last sentence is worth quoting:

"[Supreme Court] will continue as a vital and uniquely American institutional participant in the everlasting search of civilized society for the proper balance between liberty and authority, between the state and the individual."

I find The Supreme Court an interesting and worthwhile read, and Mr. Rehnquist, although considered a staunch conservative by virtually all commentators, comes across as balanced and remarkably non-partisan in his writing.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.

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Hush Money by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Whenever I got involved in anything related to a university, I was reminded of how seriously everyone took everything, particularly themselves, and I had to keep a firm grip on my impulse to make fun."

This funny and insightful observation comes from an unlikely source: Robert B. Parker's Hush Money (1999). I had read quite a few Spenser novels before I began reviewing books on Goodreads and generally liked them: they provided uncomplicated, leisurely reads, great for before-bed time, when the mind needs rest from work issues. Well, the characterization is no longer precise, as this installment of Spenser's adventures is about university faculty, and I happen to have been such a specimen for quite some time. Yes, indeed, we do tend to treat ourselves way too seriously!

Hawk (a recurring character in the series) brings Spenser a new client, Mr. Nevins, "a professor at the university, author of at least dozen books [...], and a nationally known figure in what the press calls The Black Community." A graduate student committed suicide, alleged to be the result of a sexual relationship with Mr. Nevins. As a consequence of these allegations, Mr. Nevins has been denied tenure. He suspects the real reason for the denial is that his viewpoints are "relatively conservative," not fitting the progressive bent of many faculty in his department. As the case grows more complicated and additional motivations of some of the personae are discovered, Susan (also a recurring character in the series) brings Spencer another client. Enough of the setup - the story is indeed very interesting and highly recommended for those of us who read crime novels for their plot.

I am impressed by the author's astute observations of university faculty politics, particularly the deliberations of a tenure committee and dynamics of the entire tenure process. The realism of the presentation of the university environment has increased my confidence in Mr. Parker's depiction of other social settings. On the negative side, I am really tired with all the cliché banter between Spenser and Hawk as well as between Spenser and Susan. What was funny for the first three or four times becomes hard to stomach for the twentieth time.

On the other hand, the following quote is very funny:

"'Someone once remarked [...] that the reason academic conflicts are so vicious is that the stakes are so small.'"

I could also quote a viciously funny critique of university faculty that can be found on page 141 (hardcover edition), but considering the remote possibility that some of my university colleagues read this, I will not yield to the temptation.

To sum up, this is one of the best Spenser novels that I have read.

Three-and-a-half stars.


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