Friday Review 9/3/10, belated

So, let's see. This week I finished John Keegan's World War One, but I reviewed that on Tuesday, as I suggested I would last Friday.

I also read David Coe's The Horseman's Gambit


What can I say about this? This is the second book in the "Blood of the Southlands" series, of which the third has very recently been published. I read the first some months ago, and I recalled that I liked several of the characters, so when I saw Book 3, I decided to pick up Book 2. There was a lot about the book that I liked. I liked many of Coe's primary characters - they felt real, they interacted realistically, and they handled their problems realistically. (which, given that about half of them wield immense magical power, is saying something...) I liked the politics of about half of the continent - Coe has a continent, a sub-continent, actually, divided between some sovereign city states and a bunch of less established nomadic tribes. I liked the city state politics. The wandering tribes seemed unrealistically inflexible in their politics - they were very much "kill the intruders on grounds of associated guilt", and that felt a little over the top. The fact that the cause of the guilt was a magically created plague of genocidal proportions mitigates the reaction a little, but I think that Coe's "good" characters were too inclined to see both sides of the situation while his "bad" characters were too inclined to see things in black and white. I have no problem with these views being characterized, but they should be better spread out.

As I finished the book, I recalled what I didn't like about the first book - it ended abruptly, with no conclusion - because, of course, Coe is writing a trilogy (possibly longer), and wants readers to continue into the next book, but it's possible to have satisfying conclusions within the trilogy while allowing the trilogy to transcend the conclusions. That was my major problem with this book.

A minor problem - the names were too apostrophe infected. A minor quibble, perhaps.

Monday Library Post, belated - 8/30/10 + Keegan Review

So, I did make it to the library yesterday, but somehow I did not make it to the blog. Two books to add to my pile this week:

James Benn - Rag and Bone
This is the fifth of Benn's Billy Boyle WWII mysteries. They follow the career of Billy Boyle, Irish-American and distant cousin of Eisenhower. Family connections place Boyle on Eisenhower's staff, because it's supposed to be a safe place to ride out the war. Instead, Eisenhower uses Boyle to clean up difficult messes. Benn has done some very good research for these books, and includes a lovely author's note with each to explain where the history comes from and where he has stretched things a little. I think this one will almost certainly have to be near the end of the series, as Boyle is involved in looking into the Katyn Forest massacre, which didn't come out until near the end of the war. Also, I think I may well have missed one, and so will need to go back and see if I can find Evil for Evil.


Alex Archer - The Spirit Banner
If you were reading during my trip to DC last month, you recognize the author of this - this is another of the Rogue Angel books, and I'm reading it to see if the formula for the series holds up - also, does Ms. Creed continue to substitute large quantities of food for sex? Maybe not a question for the ages, but certainly a question for an hour or so of reading...

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Review of:

John Keegan - The First World War
Keegan's book is considered to be one of the best works on the war as a whole, and I think it deserves that accolade.  Keegan is an excellent historian, military, popular, or otherwise.  This book is exceedingly well researched and cited, and yet remains accessible to most readers.  Keegan does use some unusual sentence constructions, not quite passive voice, but convoluted twisting of the subject and verb. Not all the way through the book, because that would make the whole thing unreadable, but every once in a while there will be this odd sentence that Keegan has dropped in the reader's path, like a land mine. A thing to watch out for.

Keegan also uses very long chapters - the book is over 400 pages long, and there are only 10 chapters. Each chapter has some subdivisions, but it does make it hard to find organic stopping points in the work. I don't know if this is a flaw, necessarily, but it might be off putting to a purely casual reader.

It would be tragic if a casual reader, upon encountering one of Keegan's odd sentences, or perusing the book, found the length of the chapters off putting, because, by and large, Keegan's work is beautifully written. His descriptions of battles are clear, his descriptions of politics and wrangling between the authors of the war are more so.  His portrayal of the soldiers is sympathetic, and his portrayal of their commanding officers, while less sympathetic, is not as nasty as some other historians of the First World War.  This is, indeed, a point which Keegan is quick to make - in several of his periodic historiographical digressions, Keegan points out that the commanders in the war, especially the top generals, have not been well treated by history.  Keegan does not go out of his way to salvage the reputation of generals like Haig and Joffre, but nor does he go out of his way to savage them - refreshing.

This book abounds with short digressions, historiographical and otherwise.  While I have, in past reviews, complained that books were too short to contain such digressions, this is certainly not the case with Keegan.  This is a massive book - as one might expect, given the scope of the conflict that Keegan is attempting to cover - and he uses the space masterfully, expanding his points carefully and clarifying areas where he thinks readers might get lost.

Even given the length of this book, there is room for more. Keegan is a British historian, and so the British Army is given pride of place throughout the book. Historians and budding historians-to-be would be well advised to find histories of the war from a French perspective, and from the perspective of the "Dominion" powers - Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. A German history, a Russian history, and an Italian history would also probably be a good idea.  That being said, Keegan covers all of the various and diverse theaters of the war, including the Pacific (Japanese capture of German positions in China and elsewhere) and post-Tsarist Russia (both the landing of Americans and British troops in the far North and the landing of Americans and Japanese in the Far East).  The non-standard theaters - the Mid-East, Pacific, and Russian theaters - are not covered in the same depth as the Western and Eastern fronts, but this is entirely justifiable - the fact that they are included at all is admirable.

I have only a few complaints.  The first is that, as a Canadian, I felt that the Canadian troops were given short shrift here, which probably reveals the effects of my early education more than a lack in the text. I will be seeking out a Canadian history of the war, however, to fill in the gaps for my own purposes - watch for that. Second, Keegan, or his editor, needed to include more maps! I see no particular reason that each battle described could not have had a series of small sequential maps, instead of the more general maps which were included. The maps which were included (and there were many - just not nearly enough) were clear, well drawn, and easy to read, but I would gladly have sacrificed some of the glossy photos (very nice!) for more maps, if that was what it took. Finally, I wanted more on the air war. Keegan barely mentions this aspect of the war.  My desire to read more on this topic may, again, be a reflection on my own inclinations rather than a lack in the work, but, in this case, I don't think so. Aerial combat was entirely new during WWI, and added a third dimension to the battlefield. I think there could easily have been a sub-chapter on the air war, perhaps as part of a chapter on the technology of the war - a fuller explanation of tanks, the new sorts of artillery, gas weapons, the U-boats - actually, now that I think about it, this was something that was missing from the book as well.

A brilliant book nonetheless, a fantastic place to begin an investigation of the First World War, and heartily recommended to established historians, historians in training, and the purely curious.

minor dilemna, and Friday review (belated) for 8/27/10

So, I have a chapter and a half to go in Keegan's First World War. I'm pretty sure what I'm going to say about the book, but I don't want to do a review of it until I've honestly finished it. So, perhaps I will review it later this week - Wednesday, maybe.

I did read some other stuff this week, however, so I should post reviews of them.

Tanya Huff - Blood Price


This is the first of Huff's vampire quintet. Over our trip, we managed to find (at a very nice used bookstore in Palo Alto) the short story collection which comes between book 4 and book 5 of the series, and so my wife re-read the whole series. She suggested that the first book had not aged well, and I wanted something light to transition to the Keegan, so I grabbed it. In many ways, she's absolutely right - this book has not aged well. It (just) pre-dates wide spread cell phones, so there are several minor crisis points where people cannot contact other people because people are either screening their calls (people used to let their answering machine pick up phone calls, to see who was calling. Did you know that? Did you do that? Anyway.) or are away from their phones. Huff's detective, Vicky Nelson, is supposed to be in her early 30's, but on a couple of occasions she voices opinions that make her sound much older - a short rant on the decline of the verb "to say", for instance ("so then she goes 'nuhuh!', and I'm like, 'unhuh!', etc") doesn't strike me (as someone in my early 30's) as something that someone in their early 30's would worry about. Perhaps. Finally, the antagonist in this book, unlike some of the later ones (as I recall) is a little flat - he's a nerd, and he's a caricature, too complete in his nerdiness. (He's also a demon summoner - that's why he's the antagonist).

All that to one side, this is still a good read. Vicky is a strong female protagonist before there were a lot of strong female protagonists. She has real relationships with the people around her, and the plot never takes back seat to her sex life. It's easy to see the influence of Huff on the authors of later paranormal romance novels (now a valid sub-genre, folks!), but this is not, and none of the books in the series ever are, a paranormal romance. Plus, in order to get to the later books, you need to read this one; it sets up the characters.

The other book I read this week was:

Richard Wilson - Don't Even Think About It
This is a take-down of the whole Dangerous Book phenomenon, what Wilson describes as the "good childhood gestapo", which contends that there is a perfect way to raise your child, and that it doesn't involve any sort of electronic games. Wilson goes through most of the activities that such books prescribe - making things out of wood, running around outside, taking family vacations "away from it all", and deflates the whole thing with dry English wit. The central premise is that authors of "ideal childhood" books are remembering an idyllic childhood that never really existed - Wilson contends that, looking back at his pre-computer, pre-electronic childhood, he found it less than idyllic, and wonders why you would wish it on anyone else.

I found his discussion on tracking wild animals to be particularly amusing, such that my wife had to steal the book and read the section herself, to see what I was laughing at.

The whole book was largely rant-y, but it was an amusing rant. I'm not sure that I accept all of the premise - surely there is a happy medium between constant video games and entirely no video games - but as an assault on the "this is the best possible way for your child to live", I found it valid.

Monday Library Post, 8/23/10

On time this week!

Alas, only one book this week:

Richard Watson - Don't Even Think About It!: 101 Dangerous Things NOT to do Before you Grow Old
Obviously a riff on the whole Dangerous Book For Boys phenomenon, Watson takes issue with the whole concept of "what your child SHOULD be doing instead of playing on the computer" industry. I read it this evening while waiting for the baseball game to start (it didn't - rain delay became rain cancellation) (our annual trip to the local AAA baseball club, courtesy of the library's summer reading program), so I will review it on Friday.

Friday Review, 8/20/10

Ok. Two books today. While travelling, I got 2/3s of the way through Glen Cook's Book of the South, and will review that when I unearth it from a suitcase and read the last of it. I did nibble on John Keegan's World War One as well, and will return to that next week, perhaps with a break for something light. I did, however, finish two books this week, and they are:

Carrie Vaughn - Discord's Apple
A book with a great deal of potential. Vaughn tells a nest of linked stories here, all revolving around a storeroom of magical artifacts - a pair of glass slippers, a sword for the Once and Future King, and many others, including a golden apple once rolled across a table at a feast of the Greek gods, resulting in the Trojan War. This primary story line focuses on Evie Walker - the current heir to the storehouse. Evie returns to Colorado to be with her dying father, and discovers that her family history is far more complicated than she could have imagined. She meets some very interesting characters, including Robin Goodfellow, Sinon the Liar (who convinced the Trojans that taking the big wooden horse into Troy was really a good idea), and Hera, queen of the gods.

Other story lines - a series of short notes detailing the Walker family history backwards to it's start; a series of chapters detailing the history of Sinon forwards from the fall of Troy, some glimpses of the world outside small town Colorado (the novel is set in a dystopic near-future teetering on the verge of various wars - between China and Russia, between terrorists and the terrorized, between the various street gangs which the Department of Homeland Security deputized in Los Angeles to keep the peace. Evie's co-worker, the artist for the comic book she writes, is trapped in LA during a clash between gangs.), and several chapters of a novel that Evie writes throughout the book. The novel chapters are only tangentially related the remaining work, unless you consider that what Vaughn is really writing about is not golden apples and glass slippers, but rather stories and the things that make us tell stories. Looked at in that context, this is actually a moderately complex novel with a somewhat simplistic facade. I liked the complexity, that was the bit that I felt Vaughn did quite well. However, in discussion of the book with my wife, we concur on a couple of things which Vaughn could have done better. They are as follow:

1) tie up loose ends in a satisfying fashion, rather than cut them off abruptly with no warning - alternatively, let the loose ends lie without tidying them up at all.
2) Expand characters beyond Evie and Sinon - in particular, Hera assembles a group of potent magicians in order to break into the storeroom. These magicians sound fascinating, but are not fully realized as characters.
3) Focus on one storyline rather than wander all over the place. Actually, that's not fair - I just said that I liked the multiple stories - but this book could easily have been twice as long, allowing the stories to unfold naturally and completely.

I did like Vaughn's central characters, and won't go out of my way to avoid her series of novels about Kittie Norville, the Denver based werewolf radio host. The fact that Vaughn cut her teeth writing paranormal fantasy  (now a big enough sub-genre to rate it's own section in the bookstore, folks!) prompted some speculation that this was what led to a novel which focuses very strongly on a few specific characters. That, perhaps, is fodder for a later discussion of the genre as a whole - watch for that.

Deborah Blum, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York


I'm pretty sure I heard a review of this on NPR when it first came out a couple of months ago, which is why I picked it up at the library.  This was a fascinating book about Charles Norris and Andrew Gettler, two men who reformed the way that autopsies were done in New York City, and the United States.  Norris was the Chief Medical Examiner during the 1920s and early 1930s, and Gettler was his forensic chemistry expert - the father of forensic medicine. Together, they reformed the way that the coroner's office operated, established forensic evidence in legal cases as reliable, consistent, and understandable, and developed many of the forensic practices we consider pretty basic now.  Norris, for instance, insisted that forensic experts be on hand at the site of questionable deaths as quickly as possible in order to a) determine time of death as accurately as possible and b) to gather as much forensic evidence as possible with as little contamination as possible. These two factors, which are pretty rote for anyone who has ever watched a police procedural television show, were unthinkable prior to Norris. Gettler, in addition to refining the various tests designed to determine how people died, cemented the idea of the medical expert in a court case - previous forensic experts were often laughed out of the court room, or brought in largely to perform for jurors.  Gettler established a method of presenting the evidence he had gathered which was neither sensational (no killing animals in the court room to demonstrate toxicity) nor beyond the comprehension of the jury.

Blum focuses on the use of poison in murders during this period, because poison was difficult to detect, and poisoners were often able to evade conviction.  Each chapter focuses on a specific poison - chloroform, or methyl alcohol, or arsenic, for example - and usually revolves around a specific case or group of cases involving that poison.  Beyond that, the running theme of the book was Prohibition, and the ways in which government efforts to make industrial (methyl or wood) alcohol unpalatable resulted in considerably more deaths than would have occurred otherwise. I've often heard that the government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition, and assumed that this meant they deliberately placed poison into confiscated alcohol and then allowed that alcohol to be re-released into the public. This was not the case. Instead, they forced increasingly stringent standards upon producers of industrial alcohol (which was the base for most of the affordable bootlegged alcohol during Prohibition; the bathtub gin, and such), ensuring that the industrial alcohol, already poisonous (methyl alcohol, unless treated exceedingly carefully, will make you blind, and then kill you), became more poisonous. Producers were required to add things to the alcohol to "denature" it; bitter substances, petroleum derivatives, and other things.  Gettler, Norris, and many other medical examiners across the country decried these practices, and pointed out that by making alcohol illegal, Prohibition meant that people actually drank more "hard" liquor than beer or wine - bathtub gin and its ilk were easy to make; bathtub beer was an entirely different story. Morally, Blum argues, the government was responsible for the deaths caused by methyl alcohol, even if they did not force anyone to drink the poisoned brews.

I quite liked Blum's overall organisation, but occasionally found her digressions within chapters to be distracting. Additionally, the work of Gettler was very "wet" chemistry, involving a great deal of dissection and the like, and so the book was quite grisly in several places - not for the faint of heart. Blum includes a short bibliography and several pages of footnotes, about on par for a popular history, if not quite up to the standards of academia.

Friday Review, West Coast Edition, 8/14/10

So, I'm in the Sonoma region, just north of San Francisco. We've been running around, looking at really big trees and the like, which hasn't left much time for reading. So, only one book today. (And it's late! I know!)

K.E. Mills - The Accidental Sorcerer


So, this was billed as comedic fantasy, and there was some funny stuff in it. The premise is a modern world (not our world, but there are cars and telephones and such) where magic works. The hero is a minimally magical civil servant who accidentally finds himself imbued with considerable magic power, and then becomes the royal magician for a small kingdom (somewhat analogous to Australia, perhaps). The prince seems feckless, but is actually power crazed, his sister projects a frumpy and ditzy facade, but is actually quite bright, and cleans up quite well.  There is plenty of potential for a laugh riot here, but about 5/8 of the way into the book, it becomes quite dark - an exploration of evil and what it does to normal people.

I quite enjoyed the book - it was well written, and the characters were well developed - but I don't know that I would have started it if it were clear that it was as dark as it turned out to be. That being said, I will probably pick up the second book when I'm back home.

Monday Library Post, belated - 8/9/10

I did go to the library yesterday, however I did not borrow any books for myself. The family and I are headed out west for a wedding tomorrow, and it seemed silly to add more books to my stack when I won't be here to read them. I will (of course) be taking some books with me, and there will be a review on Friday.