Fenwick vs. Felicity
Students earn scholarships
Minster vs. Southeastern
Book Nook provides readers with insights into the world of books. Vick Mickunas takes you into the center of the publishing world with the latest book buzz, book reviews, and exclusive chats with authors..Home > Blogs > Book Nook > Archives > 2009 > March
March 2009
Greetings from Molokai…
Vacations are for reading. I just finished my third book of this glorious, relaxing time on the beach. Molokai is the sleepiest of the Hawaiian islands and in my view, the most wonderful.
It is so quiet (except for the wild chickens), so peaceful, such a great place to read. I’m starting another book today, THE LOST CITY OF Z by David Grann. I’ll be back to Ohio (and to regular blogging) soon…
Vick Mickunas
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falling off the grid…
I’ll be taking a break from blogging for a bit. So I won’t be posting new posts or moderating your comments. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care. You know that I do.
I’ll be back before you know it. Thanks, for being there…
Vick Mickunas
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Lake Wobegon County?!
The humorist Garrison Keillor has put Minnesota in our national consciousness with his popular public radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota exists in his whimsical radio pieces and in his series of best selling books. It doesn’t exist on any map. Yet.
If some Minnesota lawmakers have their way, Lake Wobegon will become an actual part of Minnesota. To find out how this might occur, click HERE:
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The Crisis of Credit Visualized
I just happened upon a nifty video that goes a long way toward explaining in simple terms just how we got ourselves into this humongous financial boondoggle that we all now face.
Check it out by clicking HERE:
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He wrote “I Lick My Cheese…”
Have you ever had a roommate? Most of us have had one at some point. Heck, a marriage can be the ultimate roommate situation, wouldn’t you agree?
Did you drive your roommates crazy? Or, was it the other way around? A new book takes a sordid look at real notes left by real roommates. Notes like: I LICK MY CHEESE and I Needed that ham. I really needed it. Go shopping.
These notes are reproduced in all their graphic decadence in I LICK MY CHEESE - and other Real Notes from the Roommate Frontlines (Abrams Image) by Oonagh O’Hagan.
Perhaps you are in a roommate situation at this very moment that is making you miserable? Well, a good laugh might offer a subtle balm. This book promises that “sharing spaces isn’t always fun, but at least this book is.”
Some of these notes verge on the demented. Here are a few more:
I HATE YOU MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF
I STOLE SOME OF YOUR DRUGS. Thank you very much
EITHER I GO OR YOU GO
I LICK MY CHEESE - and other Real Notes from the Roommate Frontlines will be published next month.
Do you have any annoying roommate stories? I do. Let’s share. Leave a comment.
Vick Mickunas
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do you like the taste of beer?
Back in the 1960’s our neighborhood in Des Moines used to have barbecues. Everybody would come. I can remember making a study of the stuff that they brought.
Our next door neighbor then was a doctor and he usually brought what was then known as a classy beer. When all the fathers were quaffing Budweiser Doctor Ed would turn up with an elixir that was then advertised as The Champagne of Bottled Beers. It seems hard to believe now but it was Miller High Life Beer.
I can remember sneaking a sip of my dad’s Bud. Eech! I almost threw up. It took me many years to develop a taste for beer. I finally did. I’m glad.
Talk about a dream job; Beer Taster. There are actually people who get paid to drink beer. It reminds me of L’il Abner’s job as a mattress tester. Where do I sign up?
One guy who gets paid to drink some very fine brews is Randy Mosher. His new book, TASTING BEER-An Insider’s Guide to the World’s Greatest Drink (Storey Publishing) is enough to make a guy cry in his beer… sob.
It’s a lovely book that has all kinds of great info on God’s chosen beverage. (No, it’s not wine! Forget that water into wine story. He actually turned water into beer. Take my word for it).
It’s so jammed with pictures of beer and assorted beeraphenalia that I began to drool. There’s only one thing that can help me to survive this situation - I better have a beer….now I wonder if there are any openings right now for beer tasters? Where do I apply?
Vick Mickunas
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Noir Nazi Thriller…
Whenever I start reading a book, I begin it with the hope that it will be so much fun to read that I won’t want to put it down. I don’t want certain books to end.
Books like “A Quiet Flame,” the latest installment in Philip Kerr’s detective series featuring the hard-boiled homicide cop Bernie Gunther. These novels are written in the classic noir style but with an unusual twist: Bernie is a German and he was solving cases in Berlin when the Nazis rose to power.
This creates a certain moral ambiguity. Bernie had to join up with the dreaded SS to survive the war. He did the best he could to avoid becoming a war criminal. Nevertheless, he has a guilty conscience.
Kerr wrote his first Bernie Gunther book in 1989. He didn’t consider writing another one until his publisher encouraged him to do so. Eventually he wrote three books which became his Berlin Noir trilogy. He thought that was the end of it.
Writers rarely have the luxury of reviving a character. Even so, after an interlude of 15 years, Kerr renewed this one. “A Quiet Flame” is now the fifth installment in this series with more to come.
The story begins in 1950. Bernie is escaping from Germany under an assumed name. His companions are Nazi war criminals. They are headed to Argentina.
Bernie is impersonating a doctor. Upon his arrival in Buenos Aires he is quickly introduced to high-ranking government officials. Bernie chooses to reveal his true identity to them. When they find out he is actually a homicide detective, he is quickly drawn into a murder investigation.
This leads him into an underworld populated by hundreds of fugitive Nazi war criminals. The circumstances of this murder seem familiar. Bernie had an unsolved Berlin case in 1932 that was quite similar.
Kerr employs substantial flashbacks to the original investigation. It took place right as Adolph Hitler was taking power in Germany. It has always struck me as a stroke of genius that Kerr placed this series within the chilling landscape of Nazi swastikas.
I called the author at his home in London and asked him why he chose to do so. He replied: “It’s easy to forget. We get fed this diet of ‘Did it really happen?’ all the time …. Were there gas chambers, or not?”
“You have to remind yourself. These kinds of things are kind of conveniently forgotten. It’s always good to stick the stick into the bottom of the bucket and stir it all up again.”
In “A Quiet Flame,” Detective Bernie Gunther repeatedly pokes his stick into Nazi-infested snakepits. It’s exhilarating and terrifying. Bernie wisecracks his way through numerous sticky spots in this thriller. And he’ll be back rather soon.
Kerr revealed that “the one I just finished is partly set in Cuba … he goes from Argentina on to Cuba.” This was during the period when Cuba was a playground for American hoodlums like Meyer Lansky. I can hardly wait for the next installment.
Vick Mickunas
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fixing the economy the easy way…
Total Economy Fix for merely 100 billion dollars or so…
There are about 40 million people over 50 years of age currently in the work force. Pay them each $2.5 million severance pay from the government, tax free with these stipulations:
1) They must quit their jobs. Forty million job openings - Unemployment fixed.
2) They must buy NEW American cars. Forty million cars purchased - Auto Industry fixed.
3) They must either buy a house or pay off their current mortgage - Housing Crisis fixed.
4) They must opt out of Social Security - Social Security fixed.
I’m in…….where does the line form??
(contributed by my buddy Pete-if only the math and the problems were this simple to calculate-this was not my math equation by the way…)
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Yellow Springs Pasta…
It’s spring! Time for some Yellow Springs Pasta, right?
click HERE for the recipe….
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my letter to the editor
On rare occasions I will write a letter to the editor of a newspaper. I don’t do it often. I wrote one this week. Here it is:
To the Editor of the Yellow Springs News:
Recently, I realized a long held dream; I interviewed Senator George McGovern. Some readers will recall that he ran for president in 1972. He lost that election to Richard Nixon.
Senator McGovern just wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln. The first half of our conversation aired last week on WYSO (91.3fm) The second half will be broadcast this Sunday morning at 10:30.
WYSO has a new station manager, Neenah Ellis. Neenah is a gifted radio producer. I’m excited to have her here in Yellow Springs. WYSO just completed their spring membership campaign. Did you make pledge?
You still can. Why don’t you mail them a check today? The address is 150 E. South College Street, Yellow Springs, OH. 45387
Vick Mickunas
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book biz lopping off the pork…
Every year I attend the annual book publishing blowout known as Book Expo America. It is held in various cities around the beginning of June each year. At least they used to do it that way.
Last year’s conference was in Los Angeles. Over the past few years it has been held in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City. This year’s BEA will be in New York again. So will next year’s. And the next. And the next…They cancelled Washington for next year and Las Vegas for the following year and moved the conferences back to NYC for the near future (4 years). That belt is getting tighter. No AIG level bonus action in the book biz…
NYC is the hub for book publishing. A lot of New York book people didn’t make it to LA last year. The book publishing industry was already feeling the recession. Cross country plane fares were the first things to go.
So in the near future the big book bash will be a cab fare’s distance away for many book publishing types, in New York City.
They used to throw some wonderful parties. I wonder if that will also be curtailed? Last year I went to the party for Ted Turner at Larry King’s crib in Beverly Hills. Larry served some yummy appetizers! Oprah’s women were mingling. We got an up close view of some astounding plastic surgery. Larry King resembles King Tut! (sigh)
Vick Mickunas
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should AIG execs kill themselves?
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley thinks so. Or at least he thought it was a good way to make a point. The long-time Republican Senator knows a bit about pork. After all he’s a farmer.
This time he was talking about the most repulsive of the greedy hogs gorging themselves at the federal trough, those bonus baby execs over at AIG Insurance.
Here’s a report from WHO in Des Moines:
“Iowa’s senior senator may have gone further than anyone on Capitol Hill in expressing his outrage over AIG’s plans to use government bailout money for executives’ bonuses. In a call in to WMT Radio, Chuck Grassley suggested AIG executives apologize or commit suicide.
“The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better about them is if they follow the Japanese’s example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say ‘I’m sorry’ and do either one of two things, resign or go commit suicide.”
A spokesperson for Grassley told the website Politico that Grassley was speaking rhetorically. She says Grassley’s point was that there’s no culture of shame in the U.S. and no acceptance of responsibility for driving a company into the dirt.
She said if you asked the senator whether he really wants AIG executives to commit suicide, he’d say of course not.”
How do you feel about these hefty AIG bonuses? Wouldn’t you love to be an AIG exec right now? They thumb their noses at America. Has even one of them come forward and offered to return the money? Did they earn it? I want to hear from some of you free marketeers who will defend any bonus or profit. Are you cool with this? Greed. Greed. Greed…
There will be a slew of books written about this turbulent time in our nation’s history…
Vick Mickunas
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book sales are up…
In Europe, according to an article in the New York Times. While book sales are slowly declining in the US, in countries like France and Germany there has been a slight increase in sales over the past few months.
Now why is that? Some observers suggest that in these tough economic times books make an inexpensive entertainment option. Many Europeans are now cutting back on eating out just to save a few euros. And it seems that some are also spending more time reading books, the old fashioned way, by turning the pages.
Take note, America. Most of us can stand to enrich our lives by reading more books. Books may not solve our everyday problems but they do provide a way to forget about them for a bit.
What book are you reading right now?
Vick Mickunas
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sparing the rod…
“The Possession of Mr. Cave” by Matt Haig (Viking, 244 pages, $24.95)
My childhood was an innocent time. Kids in our neighborhood ran wild all summer long. Our parents didn’t worry very much. We never even locked the doors.
Times are different. Parents worry about their children much more now than mine ever did. So how do parents judge the level of liberty that should be allowed for kids without seeming paranoid, or over-protective? A new book ponders these issues.
“The Possession of Mr. Cave” by Matt Haig is a peculiar little novel. Haig resides in the English city of York. This story takes place there. Terence Cave is the proprietor of Cave Antiques. The Cave family, such as it is, resides above the shop.
Mr. Cave is the father of twins, Reuben and Bryony. Haig begins his story as Cave narrates a letter that he is writing to his daughter Bryony: “Of course, you know where it begins. It begins the way life begins, with the sound of screaming.”
Cave peers through the upstairs window and determines that his son Reuben is endangered. He runs to help but arrives a second too late. Reuben is dead. The twins were 14 years old when the accident happened.
Their father is filled with guilt. He had always favored his daughter while Reuben was often ignored. Bryony is the apple of his eye. She’s an excellent student. She plays cello — Daddy’s girl. Cave decides that he will do everything in his power to protect her now.
That’s when things go very wrong. She rebels against his strict rules, seeking forbidden romance with a young tough from the wrong end of town. Dad freaks out. He installs a hidden monitor in her bedroom so that he can listen in on her phone calls and conversations with friends.
He shadows her everywhere. Mr. Cave reveals his creepy behavior in the form of this long letter that he is writing to her. As he details his fears he describes a life brimming with trauma. When Cave was only three his mother took her own life and he discovered her body.
When the twins were infants there was a holdup at the shop. The robbers heard baby Reuben crying over the baby monitor. Their mother tried to run to her children. The robbers killed her. Cave always blamed Reuben for his wife’s death.
Then Reuben died. It’s quite sad. It almost seems that Cave is possessed by the spirit of the dead twin. Bryony is so perturbed by her father’s actions and the saddest part is that he treats her like she is his property, merely the possession of Mr. Cave.
Cave finally gets it: “Yet it occurs to me now that every single attempt I made had a reverse effect. Each time I tried to interfere in your life I pushed you away from me, and lost a little more of your trust and respect.”
By then it’s far too late.
Vick Mickunas
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shredding the fabric of society…
Society is breaking down. Our social fabric is being ripped apart. The dispossessed and the discontented are rending the veil. The drapes are tumbling down. The curtain is open, revealing much that is ugly.
A young man in Germany who was addicted to violent computer games went on a killing spree. Another young man in the south slaughtered his neighbors with an automatic weapon. These bloody trails of vengeance were wreaked on the same day.
The con artists are being exposed. Bernie Madoff ripped off his clients for billions and billions of dollars. He claims that he knew his day of reckoning would come eventually but he just kept stealing and stealing. A new book, Madoff: Corruption, Deceit, and the Making of the World’s Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme (The Lyons Press) by Peter Sander will be published next week. It provides some clues about the extent of this scam but there is much more that needs to be revealed. For instance, did his family know? His wife is claiming the right to hold on to over 50 million dollars. Did any of that money come from her husband’s ill gotten gains? We need to find out, right?
So far he is the most outrageous of the thieves to be exposed. But we know there will be more. Thieves. Liars. Killers.Victims.
The walls are tumbling down.
Society as we know it is being ripped asunder.
Vick Mickunas
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Miami University, the hotbed of radicalism?
When you consider Miami University - what is the first thought that pops into your head?
It is HOTBED OF RADICALISM, right? Of course! That’s what everybody thinks of MU in Oxford. A bunch of pinkos down there…
Uh, perhaps not. But that is what David Horowitz thinks! He would know. Horowitz began his career as an unrepentant leftie before he made a sudden, rather lucrative morph into pontificating neo-con know-it-all.
Horowitz has made a good living peddling his right wing rants. His latest effort, ONE-PARTY CLASSROOM: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy (Crown Forum), attempts to make the case that our university system is inundated with, gasp, LIBERAL professors who are indoctrinating our kids with the evil message of, gasp, LIBERALISM!
Horowitz names names. He offers up a list of his “DIRTY DOZEN” schools and you guessed it, Miami University is one of the worst of these hotbeds of radicalism.
Here is the Horowitz skewer tour:
Duke University “White Devils” (Durham, North Carolina)
University of Colorado “Ward Churchill U” (Boulder, Colorado)
Columbia University “Uptown Madrassa” (New York, New York)
Penn State University “Breaking the Rules” (State College, Pennsylvania)
University of Texas “Radical Degrees” (Austin, Texas)
University of Arizona “Ideology Under the Sun” (Tucson, Arizona)
Arizona State University “School of Inverted Values” (Tempe, Arizona)
Temple University “Temple of Conformity” (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Miami University “Mobilize U” (Oxford, Ohio)
University of Missouri “Politically Correct U” (Columbia, Missouri)
University of Southern California “Trojan Radicalism” (Los Angeles, California)
University of California “The Worse School in America” (Santa Cruz, California)
The book came out yesterday and it is already putting up impressive sales numbers over at Amazon.com. There’s always a market for this kind of material.
Does anybody think for a minute that Miami University is a hotbed of radicalism? I don’t buy it.
And where are the schools that you might expect to be on that list? Where’s the University of Wisconsin? The University of Kansas? Harvard? Grinnell? Antioch College? Oh, that’s right. Antioch closed. Horowitz is probably depressed about that….
Vick Mickunas
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Wot!? political correctness?
Last year I interviewed the “author” of A Field Guide to Racism.” The book was supposed to be funny. It wasn’t.
This year’s addition to the racist bookshelf is another “humor” tome, Hechinger’s Field Guide to Ethnic Stereotypes (Simon&Schuster) by Drs. Kevin and Curtis Hechinger.
There must be a market for this stuff, right? The Hechingers are described as “world-famous cultural anthropologists. Home schooled for their entire lives, they awarded each other PhDs upon successfully completing Hechinger’s Field Guide to Ethnic Stereotypes…”
Are you laughing yet? Here are some examples of the information contained in their field guide:
F. “Midwestern Cheese-Loving Porkers. Any pasty-faced, rotund women who live in or near Minnesota and/or Wisconsin are certain to be of German ancestry. Although the Hindu prays to the cow, these people pray to what comes out of the cow; mainly milk fat in the form of cheese (although they also love veal, which technically comes out of a cow, too).
Midwestern Cheese-Loving Porkers are fiercely patriotic. They’re generous and family-oriented but have absolutely no feel for interior decorating. We found that only Thai-Americans have less aptitude when it comes to knowing where to put things in a home.
MCLPs love the Packers, Jesus, and their mothers (in that order). Some of them might even slide a nice, juicy bratwurst in between Jesus and their mothers (figuratively speaking, of course).
B. The Anti-Semite Semite. Fully culturally assimilated, the Anti-Semite Semite vocationally takes professional advantage of his or her “Jewishness” but is vocally critical of the religion and its customs. The Anti-Semite Semite invariably marries outside his faith in a blatant attempt to enrage his parents. They are suitably enraged, until he gets a divorce, has a religious awakening, and marries the rabbi’s daughter - just as his parents always planned.”
I know, you can’t stop laughing. I had a tough time picking out stuff that was tame enough to publish in this family oriented blog.
If you want to be truly disgusted you’ll have to buy the book. It is even more outrageous than you might imagine…
Vick Mickunas
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Meghan McCain gnaws on Ann Coulter
Republican Party in-fighting continued today as Meghan McCain, the daughter of John McCain, went after the blonde neo-con Ann Coulter in her column on the blog The Daily Beast.
Here’s an excerpt:
“To make matters worse, certain individuals continue to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Republicans. Especially Republican women. Who do I feel is the biggest culprit? Ann Coulter. I straight up don’t understand this woman or her popularity. I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time. But no matter how much you or I disagree with her, the cult that follows Coulter cannot be denied. She is a New York Times best-selling author and one of the most notable female members of the Republican Party. She was one of the headliners at the recent CPAC conference (but when your competition is a teenager who has a dream about the Republican Party and Stephen Baldwin, it’s not really saying that much).
Coulter could be the poster woman for the most extreme side of the Republican Party. And in some ways I could be the poster woman for the opposite. I consider myself a progressive Republican, but here is what I don’t get about Coulter: Is she for real or not? Are some of her statements just gimmicks to gain publicity for her books or does she actually believe the things she says? Does she really believe all Jewish people should be “perfected” and become Christians? And what was she thinking when she said Hillary Clinton was more conservative than my father during the last election? If you truly have the GOP’s best interests at heart, how can you possibly justify telling an audience of millions that a Democrat would be a better leader than the Republican presidential candidate? (I asked Ann for comment on this column, including many of the above questions, but she did not answer my request.)”
I had the dubious pleasure of interviewing Ann Coulter a few years ago. I have the incisor marks on my ankle to prove it. (I’m kidding!) That is one fierce blonde!
So Republicans keep bowing before the scared, I mean sacred microphone of Brother Rush Limbaugh. And now Meghan McCain just took a big bite out of Sister Ann.
The right mocks with CHIMP!
The left parries with Chump!
Meghan nibbles on Ann…CHOMP!
I’m starting to enjoy this circus.
Vick Mickunas
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the mug shot of the week…
The other day I wrote a post; Limbaugh’s Loose Lips Swamping GOP Ships.
There was quite a reaction. No middle ground on that post. Apparently the pundit and radio celebrity Rush Limbaugh is either The Second Coming to some readers or a puffed up wind bag for others.
This blogger took a lot of punches from Rush lovers. I even took punches from readers who seemed intent on emulating the classic Limbaugh style of insult and mockery. There have been 140 comments (so far) on that post. Meanwhile the Limbaugh brouhaha continues to rock and roil the Republican Party.
A lively time was had by all!
Vick Mickunas
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Knockemstiff all the way to Dayton…
Knockemstiff, a collection of short stories by Donald Ray Pollock was one of my favorite works of fiction last year.
The paperback of Knockemstiff just came out and Pollock will be at Books&Co. in the Town and Country Shopping Center at 7pm on Monday, March 9 to introduce it.
If you only go to one book signing a year this is the one you should not miss. Here’s my original review of this fabulous collection:
Donald Ray Pollock grew up 13 miles southwest of Chillicothe in the holler known as Knockemstiff, Ross County, Ohio. He spent 32 years toiling in the paper mills at Chillicothe. He really wanted to be a writer. Dreams can come true.
Pollock has written 18 short stories about Knockemstiff. The actual community has faded away. You would never know that from reading Pollock’s literary debut, a collection aptly called “Knockemstiff.”
In Pollock’s fanciful imagination, this hardscrabble swath of Appalachia in south central Ohio is gritty and nasty and downright terrifying. His version of Knockemstiff is peopled by losers. Druggies, grifters, rapists, thieves, perverts, killers — every manner of dead-end situation ricochets across these pages with the lethal force of flaming cars skittering toward that looming abutment. No happy endings should be expected.
These stories detonate. Pollock’s readers become horrified spectators of tragedy and disaster. We are mortified by the violence yet, strangely thrilled. There is that sense of being a voyeur observing repulsive but fascinating behavior. Pollock writes with incendiary verbal pyromania.
The first story, “Real Life,” sets the tone for what is to come. A boy remembers. “My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was 7 years old. It was the only thing he was ever any good at.”
Most of these stories seethe with an undercurrent of violence. Many of the characters are hopeless, ignorant or cruel. In “Hair’s Fate” a sad youth named Daniel reflects that “when people in town said inbred, what they really meant was lonely. Daniel liked to pretend that anyway. He needed the long hair. Without it, he was nothing but a creepy country stooge from Knockemstiff, Ohio.”
Pollock’s hillbilly ne’er-do-wells will strike some readers as politically incorrect stereotypes. If you are offended by prose that punches you right in the nose, you should avoid this book. Deeply unhappy people take drugs and abuse each other in this tortured fiction. “Daniel tried to laugh, but that had always been too hard for him. He’d never had anything to celebrate, not once in his whole life.”
The tale “Pills” descends into darkness. “Wanda tended bar at Hap’s and sold the black beauties on the side. The hilljacks loved them because a three-dollar capsule made it possible to drink four times as much and still miss the telephone poles on the way home.”
Speed kills. Some guys don’t miss the poles. “Knockemstiff” is populated by the damaged specimens who crashed through windshields and survived. Another unlucky fellow becomes a vegetable after a drug binge. The unfortunate caretakers of these sad cases are driven to their own extremes of behavior.
One character carries fish sticks around in her purse. Another overdoses on steroids trying to win a bodybuilding title, Mr. South Ohio. The freak show that is “Knockemstiff” unspools with brutal precision. Donald Ray Pollock is a keen observer of the human condition. This is a fantastic debut.
Vick Mickunas
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brew up a cozy mystery…
A friend of mine loves to read mysteries. She bemoans the fact that most modern mystery novels are violent, graphic, way too explicit for her taste.
So she sticks with old reliable favorites like the classic mysteries of Agatha Christie. She prefers a subgenre of mystery which is known as the “cozy mystery.” Originally these books featured protagonists who were women of a certain age. These amateur sleuths were sweet, harmless, yet quite proficient at solving crimes.
These books usually open with a murder. Readers then sit back and try to solve the crime with the same clues that the sleuth is turning up. Modern variants of the cozy style are expanded a bit. There’s even a little sex in them. Heaven forbid.
One of our leading contemporary practitioners of the cozy mystery is Jacqueline Winspear. Her series which features Maisie Dobbs, a private investigator who also is a psychologist, has been attracting more new fans with each installment.
Winspear’s most recent book, “Among the Mad,” begins in late 1931 as England is beset by the Great Depression. Maisie Dobbs served as a nurse in World War I.
As “Among the Mad” begins, Maisie is walking down a London street with her assistant, Billy Beale. She sees a wounded veteran sitting by the curb. As she approaches him to give him some money, he detonates a bomb.
This explosive opening hints at a larger plot. Terrifying notes are being sent to high government officials. Scotland Yard asks Maisie for her assistance in tracking down an individual who is threatening to carry out terrorist attacks.
Maisie works closely with a pair of dashing detectives. Both men offer clues that their interest in Maisie is more than platonic. But nothing happens in that regard. One detective holds her hand for a second longer than might be proper. They drink lots of tea.
That’s the classic cozy mystery. Many clues to solve. Minimal sex. No gratuitous violence. The only truly graphic moment is when a character commits suicide. The way it is described in the book is explicit. It also was physically impossible unless the man possessed three arms.
Maisie methodically examines clues and follows hunches and her splendid intuition. The men of Scotland Yard keep sending special cars to pick her up to pick her brain for answers. She is often one step ahead of them.
This genre is popular because these books are light reads. They stimulate the mind of the reader.
I enjoyed it. Now I think I’ll have cup of tea.
Vick Mickunas
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Anne Rice wonders about stem cell research…
My Facebook friend, the novelist Anne Rice, just posted this comment on the social networking site:
“Anne Rice is wondering what people on Facebook feel about stem cell research. So puzzling, this issue.”
While Anne Rice is best known for her vampire novels she has most recently been writing about early Christianity in books like Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana.
President Barack Obama just announced that he plans to restore government support for stem cell research. This reversal of previous policy under George W. Bush has gotten people thinking and talking about this issue once more.
Anne Rice wants to know; how do you feel about stem cell research??
Please, leave a comment. Thank you.
Vick Mickunas
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WATCHMEN buzzzzzzz…..
Everybody and her sister is trying to peddle a copy of her Watchmen comic book right now over at Amazon.com.
No wonder, Alan Moore’s 1995 DC comic book has vaulted to #1 best selling book on Amazon currently, with a mega- boost from the just released film adaptation.
The New York Times is taking graphic books more seriously too. This weekend they will debut some special graphic book best-seller charts in their Sunday book section.
Comics and graphic books are clearly here to stay…
Vick Mickunas
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fantasy baseball is just around the corner…
Fantasy baseball is one on my greatest pleasures. I’m in a league with a bunch of guys who have been together for quite a few years now. It is a National League only group. (These guys are mostly Reds fans).
Right now we are plotting and planning for draft day. I just picked up my Baseball Prospectus 2009 (Plume) and I’m studying the mountains of stats that it contains.
Do you play fantasy baseball? If so, what is your strategy? Who are the key players that you want to draft? Who are your sleeper picks?
I need some help here. Thanks.
Vick Mickunas
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Limbaugh’s loose lips swamping GOP ships…
