By James Patterson
Reviewed by Deborah Beckers
A page turner from start to finish, 3rd Degree by James Patterson (with collaborator Andrew Gross) follows the investigation by San Francisco homicide detective Lindsay Boxer into terrorist activity in her jurisdiction. A terrorist cell made up of disenfranchised Americans. The body count begins almost immediately with the assassination, by bombing, of a greedy CEO and his family, and doesn’t let up until the nerve wracking finale.
There were points in the book where I thought that Patterson would go for the easy way out, but he never does. As we all learned on September 11th – sometimes the impossible happens.
Patterson manages to mix danger, passion and human nature into a neat package. I don’t mind telling you, the action and suspense were so engrossing that I couldn’t put it down. I had to know how it would resolve or I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. 3rd Degree grips you and keeps you on the edge of your seat for the entire ride. This book is the third in Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club series and with each book the characters get deeper and richer, a very impressive feat.
James Patterson is best known as the author of a string of thrillers (all national bestsellers) featuring detective/psychologist Alex Cross (Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls). 3rd Degree is the third in the series (1st to Die, 2nd Chance) with the next novel (4th of July – do we see a theme?) slated for hardcover release on May 2, 2005.
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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Viking Adult
By Jared Diamond
Reviewed by Malcolm Maclachlan
Stephen King’s got nothing on Jared Diamond. In Diamond's book Collapse, the author describes not only the horrors that have befallen people in the past, but also offers a model of what might happen to us, perhaps even within our lifetimes.
Diamond’s hit 1998 book Guns, Germs and Steel made him that rare brand of author: an academic who became a crossover bestseller. But while Guns was about why some societies have succeeded, Collapse examines why societies sometimes fail spectacularly. The central message of Collapse is that societies sometimes falter quickly after reaching their peaks. For instance, the ancient Mayans had one of the largest, most complex and most successful societies in pre-modern history, but in the space of a few decades they lost over 90% of their population and abandoned their great cities.
The parallels to our modern situation are obvious: while we are at the height of our power, it is clear that our environment is suffering, key resources are declining, and the pursuit of them (mainly oil) is leading us into worsening cycles of conflict.
Environmental degradation is the factor that links all of the collapses discussed in the book. To Diamond, the genocide in Rwanda wasn’t an isolated case of ethnic hatred, but instead, was the predictable result of 750 people per square mile living on agriculturally marginal land. But this hardly means he reduces the tragedy to a formula. The beauty of Diamond’s straightforward writing is that he takes academic ideas that seem abstract to many people and makes them concrete and often poignant by attempting to tell the stories of the people involved. The isolated Native American population of San Nicolas Island off the coast of Los Angeles didn’t just die out; the sole remaining survivor was a woman who lived in complete solitude for eighteen years. Throughout the book, he describes societal collapses in human terms: tortures committed by Mayans when their society fell into warfare over declining resources, tribes dying out because they refused to break their own incest taboos and, in one poignant example, Dorsett women leaving their starving husbands en masse to join Inuit villages who had mastered better hunting techniques.
Diamond’s work has been widely attacked by conservatives because he has frequently argued that environmental concerns must take almost complete precedence over economic ones, for the simple reason that, without a viable environment, the economy won’t exist. But Diamond is hardly some raving communist. Much of the book discusses his ideas for how big business can operate in ways that won’t lead to our imminent demise.
Another sobering message in Collapse is that culture is often the problem, rather than the solution. For instance, the Norse colony on Greenland developed a cultural taboo against eating fish, probably after famed founder Erik the Red got sick from eating an unfamiliar species. Even as other food sources dwindled, the Norse colony died out without any evidence that anyone gave fish another try. The Norse also refused to take on any of the customs or strategies of the Inuit, who remain in Greenland to this day, because they considered the Inuit to be pagan savages.
This lesson—that people must sometimes choose between culture and survival—seems especially relevant in modern day America, where cultural values have become a national obsession. “What was one more winter of survival, compared to an eternity in hell,” Diamond writes of the Greenland Norse. In a country where a significant portion of the population believes that we are within a few years of the Apocalypse, and that environmental problems hence don’t matter, these words sound chillingly familiar.
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Eleanor Rigby: A Novel Bloomsbury
By Douglas Coupland
Reviewed by Russell Bartholomee
If you passed Liz Dunn on a city street, chances are you would not notice her. Even if you noticed her, you would not likely be able to describe her in any meaningful way. In fact, the way Douglas Coupland describes the protagonist of his latest novel, Eleanor Rigby, Liz Dunn could probably commit a crime in front of three witnesses and stand a good chance of not being picked out of a lineup. She is average in every conceivable way—plain looking, overweight, and clad entirely in ‘sensible’ attire. Her apartment is without character, the furniture practical, and the walls unadorned. She doesn’t even have an interesting personality, spending every solitary night watching rented tearjerkers. She’s a blank. Like the title character from the Beatles’ classic, she’s a terribly lonely soul. Our hero.
Most authors would have a great deal of difficulty crafting a compelling tale out of the story of a person with no life. Douglas Coupland, thankfully, is not as limited as most authors. He’s always had a knack for making the lives of unremarkable people seem fascinating, whether it’s the computer programmers in Microserfs, the typical dysfunctional family in All Families are Psychotic, or the cubicle-dwellers of Generation X. In a Coupland novel, character development often involves some sort of cosmic or supernatural intervention, and this novel is no exception.
In this case, Coupland forcibly removes Liz from her complacent routine with the appearance in the night sky of a comet and the simultaneous discovery that she has an adult son she hasn’t seen since birth who is in the hospital and who needs her help. His name is Jeremy, and after years of living with one foster family after another, he’s grown to be charming and talented in the same way that Liz isn’t. Among his many skills, Jeremy is able to do things most people can’t, like sing songs backwards, and have apocalyptic visions. He also has M.S. and a dismal prognosis.
Liz takes Jeremy in, and in the process of learning about him, she discovers that she’s not nearly as dull and hopeless as she (and everyone else) thought. If this sounds like an ABC after-school special, rest assured that Copeland never resorts to cheap sentimentality as the story unfolds. Liz’s journey is never trite, and for everything she gains, she loses something just as valuable. For every question she is finally able to answer, a new dilemma presents itself. Every character’s growth comes at great personal cost. And even though the story reaches a resolution of sorts, much is left unsettled.
In the hands of a lesser author, this could be a depressing, maudlin mess. Coupland infuses his poetic prose with enough hope, wit, and lighthearted humor to avoid this common problem in modern fiction. He allows us empathize with his characters without beating us over the head with overemotional melodrama. And while the ending isn’t Hollywood happy, it allows for cautious optimism that is intellectually honest and emotionally gratifying.
Eleanor Rigby is not Coupland’s best novel (that would be Microserfs). Nor is it the best starting place for someone unfamiliar with his work (that would be Generation X). But it’s first-rate fiction; Coupland has become his generation’s Kurt Vonnegut (I mean that as a compliment to both of them). He creates a funny-yet-touching page-turner out of three unexciting elements: the life of a fat, plain spinster aunt, the dynamics of suburban family relationships, and the possible theological and philosophical significance of dreams and illnesses. That he pulls it off so adroitly is a testament to his unique gift for storytelling and his considerable insight into the post-modern mind.
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Hot Target: A Novel Ballantine Books
By Suzanne Brockmann
Reviewed by Deborah Beckers
Suzanne Brockmann’s book Hot Target is a romance in every sense of the word, but at the same time it is different from any other that I’ve read.
Mercedes (Jane) Chadwick is making a WWII epic that focuses on a love story between two soldiers at a time when being gay in the military was not even discussed, let alone accepted (which I know it's still like that today, but at least the public is aware of homosexuals). When Jane’s life is threatened, Trouble-shooters Inc is called in by the studio to keep Jane safe and (more importantly) keep the filming going. Enter the hero, Cosmo Richter (Navy SEAL on leave) and let the head butting begin.
There are no real plot surprises in Hot Target, but the novel is pulled through by the realness of the characters. Both the primary and secondary characters are well-developed, each with their own distinctive voice. You’ll find yourself identifying with them and feeling like you know them and their families.
What really impressed me were the secondary characters. They grabbed me. Sure, I was pulling for Cosmo and Jane, but I was really interested in the love triangle between FBI Agent Jules Cassidy, his former lover (who ends up working on the film) and Jane’s closeted brother, Adam. While sometimes resorting to clichés, Brockmann manages to make the gay characters real and not just props for the story. They are living, breathing, and loving human beings instead of the usual stereotypical portrayals; it was nice to see.
Suzanne Brockmann has written over forty books and won numerous awards. She is recognized as a leading voice in the Romantic Suspense Genre.
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How We Are Hungry McSweeney's Press
By Dave Eggers
Reviewed by Ross Simonini
The best way to read this collection is probably from back to front. The last story, “After I was thrown in the river and before I drown,” is by far the best in the book. It might also be the best dog’s perspective story I’ve ever read. It is simple and fantastic and almost cartoonish at points. It has all the qualities of everything Eggers does best – intensity, honesty and naiveté. It starts like this:
“Oh I’m a Fast Dog. I’m fast-fast. It’s true and I love being fast I admit it I love it. You know fast dogs. Dogs that just run by you and you say, Damn! That’s a fast dog! Well that’s me. A fast dog. I’m a fast fast dog. Hoooooooo! Hoooooooooooo!”
And this doesn’t stop. He keeps up this tone for thirteen vibrant pages. He moves into a world of talking squirrels and people with “horrible slits for mouths” and he even answers the question of God without the smallest hint of pretension. He does what a short story writer should do, he provides the reader with an entire but brief glimpse into a fully imagined world.
The rest of the collection is good, but not as good. The other stories are not like the last story. They mostly focus on travel-like writing (“Another”) or adventure stories (“Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly”) and they all seem to lack the spark that exists solely in the dog story. However, there are a handful of gems certainly worth reading. “The Only Meaning of Oil-Wet Water” and “Quiet” both employ some incredibly unique narrative techniques where trees banter with clouds, the Moon imparts wisdom to lonely people and Horses converse with their own shadows. Here is God talking to the Ocean:
“God: I own you like I own the caves.
The Ocean: Not a chance. No comparison.
God: I made you. I could tame you.
The Ocean: At one time, maybe. But not now.
God: I will come for you, freeze you, break you.
The Ocean: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me.”
These are difficult sorts of technique to maneuver through and Eggers certainly pulls them off. Even the drama of his prose is balanced with a certain wry cynicism that never allows itself to be taken too seriously. It is a tone exemplary of our generation and Eggers has captured it better than any other writer today. Through these passages, he proves that he still has something new to say and that he won’t be lost among the slew of talent in the short story world. However, even with these sorts of powerful passages, a lot of the stories end up revealing the weaker spots in his writing, most noticeably, his sense of character. Eggers’ personal tone is always so strong that it often leaves no room for individual personalities to emerge in his writing. The stories in How We Are Hungry almost all lack the very quick development of character visible in master short story writers like Alice Munro or John Cheever or Richard Yates. There is a subtlety to these writers’ voices that allows for individual characters to surface in the short span of eight or ten pages.
But maybe it’s unfair to compare Eggers to giants like Munro, who do one thing and do it very well. Eggers is obviously from a more jack-of-all-trades type of talent pool. He has already written music journalism (for Spin), a memoir, a novel, a biography (forthcoming) and a political pamphlet. Plus, his voice, his eye for design and his position as a sort of literary ringleader are all qualities that everyone in modern literature should be acknowledging with respect. This collection of stories is certainly not his best work but it does provide a handful of significant contributions to the current canon of the short story. It is even better when viewed in context with his entire oeuvre. It is, at the very least, another step towards capturing a modern voice that Eggers himself can claim distinctly as his own.
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Life Expectancy Bantam
By Dean Koontz
Reviewed by Deborah Beckers
… the expectant-father’s lounge churned with the negative energy of colour overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a nightmare about a children’s show host who led a secret life as an axe murderer. The chain smoking clown didn’t improve the ambience.
The night that Jimmy Tock came into the world was a night filled with death, joy, grief, homicidal clowns, prophesies and megalomaniac aerialists. With a start like that there is no wonder that Jimmy has a date with destiny.
Life Expectancy follows the life of Jimmy Tock, focusing on the five “horrible” days predicted by his dying grandfather and written on the back of a circus admittance ticket. Told in the first person, from Jimmy’s point of view, we experience the days as foretold, as one horrible life-altering thing happens after another.
Everybody loves the circus. What’s not to love?
Dean Koontz is a master storyteller who takes us through the emotional wringer with Tock and his family of eccentrics. He manages to combine suspense and humor in a way that doesn’t take away from the heart of the story: that even within evil there is love.
The book itself is laugh-out-loud funny, with the humor coming at you when you least expect it. The characters are well-loved. Life Expectancy does not disappoint and may be Koontz's best work in a decade. The epic struggle between good and evil doesn’t take on the soap opera-ish sheen that it might given the plot. There is an overlying connectedness that manages to make this a deeper, more engrossing work.
You’ll find yourself rooting for Jimmy and his family, sympathizing with the “evil doers,” laughing and crying with them, along for the ride till the end. Hope will shine through the darkness and you will definitely never look at a circus in the same way again.
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Tori Amos: Piece by Piece Broadway Books
By Tori Amos & Ann Powers
Reviewed by Lisa Hood-Anklewicz
“I’m trying to get back to a sense of what it means to be an artist in a community. The story teller brings forth what is hidden, and what is being erased.”
For years, Tori Amos has carried a mystic in her music that permeates into her live performances and her public persona. To be a Tori Amos fan is to understand; that to understand that which is Tori takes understanding. On the precipice of the release of her ninth album The Beekeeper, Amos has unwoven some of that mystic in her book Tori Amos: Piece By Piece, which as it is with Tori Amos, is not your typical autobiography.
With the release of Little Earthquakes in 1992, Tori Amos has been one of the women who redefined what it is to be a woman in the music industry. With eight platinum selling albums under her musical belt, and the ninth about to be released, Amos and co-writer/music journalist/historian Ann Powers have unleashed a book which not only delves into the life of Amos, but the mystical goddess and god archetypes that Amos has come to know and embody in her life and work, how to marry the sacred and sexual in ones being, as well as what it is to be an artist and to fight against the powers in the music industry. In a way, these goddesses and gods become the backbone of Piece By Piece, with each chapter taking an archetype for not only a theme but a title.
If you have ever seen an interview with Tori Amos on television, not a clip or sound bite, but a real interview, then you will have a sense of the understanding required to understand her. Amos weaves metaphors, myths, legends, archetypes and even history into the conversations she has with her interviews so deeply, that it can become a discipline to follow her thoughts. Though the book is still thick with Tori’s language, I think that by working with Powers to write Piece By Piece, Amos’ tapestry of conversations have been translated to the page in a way that both honours Amos, and allows the average reader, not just a avid fan, to follow along.
Working your way through the pages, you move between conversations between Powers and Amos, interviews with family, friends and colleagues, and portions that are solely Amos’ musings. This is not a linear life map of Amos, but rather the stories that Amos has chosen to share, with the understanding that at mid-life, creatively and spiritually her life is far from over. Amos keeps nothing back, from her childhood growing up in a strict Christian home, to her miscarriages and fight for motherhood, to her quest to understand her own being and her own mortality. Stories that may already be known in the public consciousness still provide new insight, and other stories never told before open new doors. Ultimately, Amos always comes back to her “sonic children” in all of these conversations, how the experiences of her life have affected her creative process and woven itself into her songs.
What is unique about the book are the “Song Canvas” portions. Popping up sporadically throughout each chapter, the “Song Canvas” focuses on one particular song and allows Amos to open up her paints and lay out its musical landscape or perhaps its creative muse. The Song Canvas becomes something different for each of the 24 songs - sometimes a recollection of writing the material, or how the song has changed for Amos herself over the years - but each are unique to themselves. For the fan, the Song Canvas can redefine the music they have been listening to for years. On the other hand, the majority of the songs profiled are from Amos’ newest album The Beekeeper. Either way, it is an exceptionally interesting insight to the creative process.
The tales Amos, Powers and others contribute to Piece By Piece can move you into moments of laughter, moments of disgust, moments of sadness and pain, but overall, will leave anyone with a deep regard of respect for Tori Amos the artist and Tori Amos the person.
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Seize the Night St. Martin's
By Sherrilyn Kenyon
Reviewed by Deborah Beckers
New Orleans at night is a lush and dark place, a place that holds its secrets close. Tabitha Deveraux knows more about what goes bump in the dark streets than any other human, because she’s a Daemon hunter. Aiding a team of supernatural Dark-Hunters, Tabitha battles nightly against an evil that preys on the living.
Due to a slight miscalculation on her part (she thought he was a Daemon), she is forced to partner up with a Dark-Hunter that is shunned by his own kind. A mortal enemy of Tabitha’s twin’s husband (a former Dark-Hunter) whose hatred towards the Roman Hunter covers the last 2000 plus years. You’d think that that would be enough tension to sustain the novel, but there’s more. Tabitha’s family and the team of Dark-Hunters are being stalked by a Daemon who has the powers of a God and is determined to see them all dead. The group must learn to work together or everything will be lost.
Oh, the melodrama! I went into this book thinking that it would be a quick, spectacularly bad read. I am happy to report that I couldn’t have been more wrong. The characters are vivid and her descriptions and dialogue make them leap off the page.
Although wrought with melodrama, the plot moves swiftly and builds tension. Sherrilyn Kenyon manages to enthral the reader, drawing them deep into a fantastic world. The tension in the book is tight and leaves the reader unsure of a happy resolution to the myriad of problems. I, for one, loved being strung along so masterfully!
Visit Sherrilyn Kenyon’s web site at: http://www.sherrilynkenyon.com
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The Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac Viking
By Jack Kerouac, edited by Douglas Brinkley
Reviewed by Josh Spilker
“When shall we again frankly enjoy a bowel movement, like children?” - Jack Kerouac, Wednesday, November 3, 1948.
This quote may be what Jack Kerouac would say to us now amidst all of the many biographies, writings and idealistic thoughts about him. He probably wouldn’t understand the fascination with the minutiae of his life, and instead, point us towards Dostoevsky. Kerouac is the writer that “defined a generation” and all that jazz, but all of those books are written by others about Kerouac, and this is the first time that we get to read Kerouac writing on Kerouac.
The Windblown World is a published collection of journals written by Jack Kerouac from 1947 to 1954 which specifically illustrate his more formative years. The first half of the book focuses on the time he was writing his first novel, The Town and The City, and the second half relays the thoughts and travels which were the foundation for On the Road.
The first section is a true delight for writers, if not necessarily for readers. Kerouac basically writes about word counts and his “batting average,” a formula he develops for his writing productivity. He sets stringent goals for himself that he accomplishes during the wee hours of the night, all on his mother’s dime. Yes, an idealistic writer’s world. Kerouac sets up this framework in the same way that he tries to write The Town and the City: with strict narrative structure that ends up getting a little frayed at the ends.
The second section, about On the Road, is a lot more interesting and introspective, as Kerouac narrates his travels in excellent detail, but without the reporter’s terseness that dominated the first section. What is also revealed is the time and forethought that Kerouac put into On the Road, going against his own mythic stories about the frantic nature and speed in which the novel was written.
What is most surprising about Kerouac’s musings are his thoughts about Christ, and the power these images have for him, in contrast to the traditional Zen mysticism that he is lumped into with Allen Ginsberg, et al. He writes about the “dualism” between “critical Christianism-and charm, open-mindedness… humorousness, Faustian power and lust for experience.” This conflict dominates many of Kerouac’s feelings on women, philosophy and the human experience.
Douglas Brinkley is a good editor for this edition, which is more scholarly than popular. For reading ease, he creates a cast of characters to help keep Kerouac’s friends straight. Brinkley provides footnotes on the pop culture references of the time that may be obscure for some, but probably not for those interested enough in Kerouac to be perusing his personal diaries.
The greatest fascination in reading The Windblown World is not to understand writing, but to understand the frantic mind of Jack Kerouac. It is reality TV. The thoughts and internal workings of Kerouac’s mind are exposed. We see Kerouac’s America -- the parties, conversations and thoughts -- played out in real time.
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