Looking for Your Next Book

 We look back at the Academy days of Jean-Luc Picard and see that he's quite the loner, focused solely on doing well and getting ahead. But his instructor, Mr. Spock, informs him that getting to know the people on his team is important when making leadership decisions and orders Cadet Picard to attend a party with his fellow cadets. Well ... Spock can order him to attend but there's nothing that says he has to enjoy it or participate in shenanigans! Through a series of incidents, young Jean-Luc discovers that there's more to being command than simply giving orders and knowing 'the book' backward and forward. This is a pretty simple story (hard to believe it makes up six issues of a comic) and frankly pretty obvious. I never felt like we were following the same Jean-Luc Picard who would go on to captain the USS Enterprise or become a Starfleet Admiral. That's not to say I think we are the same at age 19 as we are at 50. Of course we learn and grow, but I don...

A woman, model Tina Sachs, is killed, brutally slashed to death while her young daughter sat in another room, quietly playing with her doll. In the squad room of the 87th Precinct, Steve Carella asks his lieutenant to assign Bert Kling to the case. Kling has been a bit belligerent since the loss of his fiancé. He's about to get booted out of the squad but Carella still believes in him and thinks he just needs the chance to prove his worth. But Kling and Carella have an argument during the investigation and Carella orders Kling to go home. Shortly after Kling leaves, Carella makes a discovery in his investigation and heads off to follow up on his lead. Unfortunately Carella never calls in to report on what he's discovered and the criminal(s) behind the crime surprise and subdue the officer. Stripped naked and bound to a radiator, the killers torture (mentally and with doses of drugs) Carella to try and force him to tell them how he discovered them as they believed they had cover...

 The work of terraforming Mars has been a long and challenging process but just as the hopes of those living on the red planet reach an excited level as success looks to be within reach. But disaster looms as a contaminated ice asteroid threatens the planet's water supply. Professor Zambrotta “Zammi” Kaspar is charged with investigating a fatal crash on a remote ice asteroid and is surprised to discover his sister, who had been missing, working there as an indentured miner for one of the big mining corporations. After rescuing his sister, Zammi and his sibling set out to investigate the contaminated water and discover competing visions, from different corporations, for the future of humanity and the terraforming of Mars. I typically have not enjoyed books based on games (for instance, while I typically like the sword & sorcery genre, I haven't enjoyed books specifically based on D&D) but as Terraforming Mars is my most-played board game over the last five years (about ...

 Timothy O'Sullivan was an American photographer in the 19th century. Some of his photos are among the most iconic of the American Civil War. After the war, O'Sullivan traveled to the American West, raising photography to an art form with his pictures of what was still considered to be unusual locations. His work had an impact on photographer Ansel Adams. Despite the longevity of his work and his obvious skills, very little is actually known about O'Sullivan, which in many ways mirrors the locations he's photographed - unusual and sometimes forgotten locations that evoke strong emotions. Author Robert Sullivan sets out to learn more about both - O'Sullivan and his chosen vistas. Along the way, Sullivan reflects on America, the changes that have occurred over the past century, as well as how poorly Indigenous People were treated in O'Sullivan's time and how things haven't changed much there. I really thought I'd find this book to be more enjoyable tha...

Margaret Millar's The Fiend is a story of the mentally deranged individual, Charlie Gowen. There had been an incident in Charlie's past, involving a child, which has made him the town pariah.  Today, though, at least on the surface, he is more or less coping and the few people he does interact with consider him more or less "cured."  His brother, Ben Gowan, seems to be aware that Charlie needs constant watching and has given up his own life to keep a watchful eye on his brother. For good reason. Charlie is slowly showing signs of returning to his old life with an unhealthy interest in children. Charlie should not be sitting in a car across from a park and watching the children.  Charlie has fixated on one particular little girl, Jessie Brant, when he watches her scramble around a jungle gym and fall. Charlie believes it is his duty to warn her parents - that she needs protecting, from dangers like the jungle gym as well as from people like himself. The book is not so...

I started to read this book on multiple occasions but would put it away barely getting past the Introduction each time.  The problem? I really didn't care for author Tim Rayborn's 'voice'. Rayborn makes little asides and and remarks that a middle school boy would find funny (generally sexually charged comments, like:  The wonderfully named Emperor Heliogabalus (ca. 203–222 CE) apparently decided that mimes’ simulated sexual activity during shows simply would not do, so he ordered them to actually have sex onstage while performing. Well, I suppose it’s a job perk. ... Regardless, the mimes of the time were undoubtedly only too happy to incorporate him into their future farcical performances, live sex acts notwithstanding. Or, The gods weren’t happy about this, so they cut off Agdistis’s penis and buried it in the ground. From this sprang an almond tree—no jokes about “nuts.” The nymph Nana became pregnant from one of the almonds—ancient Greek contraception clearly sucked...

I have read a lot of Beatles-related books over the past dozen years that I've been writing this review blog but this is perhaps the most moving and the most insightful of all that I've read. Mal Evans was possibly closer to the Beatles than other individual, from their early days at The Cavern Club, to their rise to fame, their international tours, and through their breakup. An argument can be made, of course, for a few other, perhaps more well-known individuals, but because of Mal's presence at so many places, I'd give him the edge. Who was Mal Evans? To really answer that you should read this book (you should read it anyway, even if you don't care what the answer is). He is often considered to be the Beatles' roadie, or bodyguard, but he was so much more than that. He was exactly what the Beatles needed at the time, although it's more than likely that no one realized that, or just how much he provided, beyond lugging gear and removing rowdy fans. It is ce...

Is it possible to wait 50 years for one book?  Yes. Fans of Harlan Ellison and/or his Dangerous Visions collections have been waiting for this particular book for just that long. Is it possible for a book that one has been waiting for for half a century to even come close to meeting fifty years' worth of expectations?  Ahhh, that is the real question, isn't it?  The answer is a resounding "Yes!"  The stories ... well let me get to the stories in a minute. Although this project was underway in the 1970's, the late Harlan Ellison was constantly questioned "When would it come out?" "What's taking so long?" This isn't a surprise.  The first two books garnered a lot of attention, really pushed some boundaries and quite probably changed the face of science fiction and speculative fiction. So, the last volume ... where is it?  The brilliant J. Michael Straczynski - author, editor, and perhaps Harlan Ellison's closest living friend - has pi...

DI Vera Stanhope  and her team are called to Rosebank Children's Home to investigate the murder of Josh Woodburn. Josh was a student at university and a volunteer at the home. One of the residents - 14 year old Chloe Spencer - is missing. It doesn't seem possible the two incidents aren't connected, but Vera can't imagine the young teen killing a college boy. Another murder, this time of a boy from Rosebank, is found near three ancient standing stones known to the locals as The Three  Dark Wives. Complicating the investigation for Vera and her team is an influx of tourists for the local witch festival. Prior to reading this book, my knowledge of Vera is based the long-running television series which I've been watching on BritBox. And based on this familiarity it threw me for a bit of loop that Vera's 'second' was DS Joe Ashworth.  In the series, Ashworth only lasted four seasons and it's been DS Aiden Healy for the last ten years. But it's almost ...

Jack the Ripper. The mystery, the legend, the search for his identity never lets up and every few years someone presents their case for uncovering the true identity of the Ripper. The latest in this long line of discoveries is Sarah Bax Horton's One-Armed Jack: Uncovering the Real Jack the Ripper . Horton claims a bit of genealogy to the Ripper case - her great, great-grandfather was one of the police officers tasked with the Whitechapel murders at the time. Using lots of the police notes, as well as coroners' reports and court reports, Horner tells us flat out who she believes committed the atrocities attributed to Jack the Ripper (and a few others).  I won't reveal the name of the suspect, but he is someone that has been among the names bandied about over the last century-plus, and he is not anyone of fame or repute. Like every book purporting to identify the Ripper before this, Horton does a very good job of laying out her facts and reasoning.  But that's kind of the...

I first became acquainted with the work of Pilobolus about 1980 when a theatre professor gave me a VHS tape of their performance on a local PBS station. To say that it was life-changing might be overstating it, but within a years time I had created my own 'mime and dance' company which performed locally for three years. I've managed to see them perform live a few times (including in the early 2000's with my 6 year-old, artistic-minded son at West Point where he asked, loud enough for the entire auditorium to hear, "Are they naked?!") and have enjoyed each concert I've been to. Reading about the group is clearly of interest, but there's always danger in seeing the dirty laundry of artists you admire. Author Robert Pranzatelli has taken a deep dive into the history of the innovative dance group - from the humble beginnings, expansion, international acclaim, internal strife, and individual accomplishments. As a fan, I enjoyed this x-ray view of the group....

 I'm really torn on how to rate this book.  There is some really great environmental, grassroots, activism here and author Trish O'Kane details the beginnings of her interest in bird watching and how it leads to the activism, but for me, there's something missing in the connection.  O'Kane starts us in Louisiana as she and her husband ride out Hurricane Katrina and deal with the aftermath - including the birds who return to reestablish their homes. It is watching these birds that starts O'Kane on her birding journey. That journey continues when Trish and her husband move to Madison, Wisconsin where she pursues a PhD in environmental science. Birding brings her to a local, urban park where she discovers not just a great birding diversity but an incredible array of flora and wildlife.  Spending a great deal of time in the park, Trish learns that the diversity isn't limited to the wildlife, but the humans who enjoy the park as well. And when the park becomes the lo...

 From the Goodreads description for this book:  Helen is in a hotel room with her lover when a gunman murders her husband, Federico, a high-level civil servant, less than a mile away. Helen soon finds herself entangled in a web of suspicion that involves those closest to her - Federico, his parents, and her friend and lover, Giacomo, an ex-terrorist with a new wife and a reinvented life in Paris. As Helen struggles to understand her husband's death and the extent to which she and the people she knows and loves may have been responsible for it, she is forced to examine her own past and the world in which she lives - and to realise (sic) innocence is a very scarce commodity. This book is billed as a psychological thriller, and there's certainly a great deal of psychological misdirection and anticipation going on here, but as for the thriller portion...? I don't know. The biggest issue with this book is that there are no redeeming characters.  To create a thriller you need t...