Tag Archives: books

Apr 30

This is how you do it

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Back in February, I gave an in-progress review of “meh” to Laugh Lines: Conversations with Comedians by Corey Andrew. Nothing in the remainder of the book improved my opinion of it any.

And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on their Craft by Mike Sacks is better. Much, much, much better. Sacks is a far better interviewer, showcasing the comedy talent to whom he’s speaking rather than showing off and injecting himself into subject matter.

Sacks’s interview subjects run the gamut from Marshall Brickman, Larry Gelbart and Dick Cavett to Bob Odenkirk, David Sedaris and Robert Smigel. He has a great interview with Dave Barry – which leaves me jealous, because the one time I got to interview Dave, for the late and lamented Wittenburg Door, I was starstruck, and too timid to push a couple of topics essential to the point of the interview. I embarrassed myself and produced a pretty pathetic interview, one of the great regrets of my writing career.

In between the formal interviews, Sacks puts in quotes, anecdotes or lists of writing tips.

Sacks’s book makes me want to start writing something – and I’m trying to figure out a good place to start.
Apr 23

‘How God Became King’

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I have preached, on more than one occasion, about the dual nature of Biblical references to God’s kingdom – some of which seem to place it in the future tense, others in the present tense.

I checked out How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels through a digital library loan. I’ve heard a lot about N.T. Wright, and read bits and pieces of things he’s written, but this is the first of his actual books I’ve gotten the chance to read. It’s a terrific book, well worth my time, and I believe it would be worth yours. Wright emphasizes the present nature of the kingdom in the light of the gospel story.

Most Christians understand, or believe they understand, the theological significance of the Incarnation and Jesus’ birth. They also understand, or believe they understand, the theological significance of his death and resurrection, and like to think of it as pointing towards their eternal reward. (A college roommate of mine, Darrell Grizzle, once complained about the music he had to play at a southern gospel radio station by inventing the satirical song title, “When Jesus Comes Back and Sends All The Communists To Hell, Won’t It Be Wonderful Up There?”) The material that comes between the birth and the resurrection is the stuff of sermons, but we don’t really incorporate it into our understanding of theology, or (as Wright notes) into our creeds. The Apostles’ Creed jumps right from “born of the Virgin Mary” to “suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

But Wright makes a solid case that the scope of Jesus’ life is vitally important to our understanding of his nature as the Messiah, bringing about God’s promised kingdom. Like the disciples of Jesus’ day, who expected the Messiah to be a military-political revolutionary, we throughout church history have overlooked and misunderstood the true nature of God’s kingdom, the way in which Jesus made it a reality, and our own responsibility for to behave as if we’re subjects of that kingdom in the here and now. Wright breaks down various New Testament passages and the Old Testament prophecies to which they relate, showing the nature of Jesus and his messianic kingdom.

The book is a little imposing at the outset, but once you get into it it’s quite readable and compelling. I had, frankly, forgotten that it was a library book; I’ve plowed through so many Kindle books recently that sometimes I lose track of what was free, what was super-cheap and what was borrowed. I was a little sad when I realized the book was going to have to delete itself from my Kindle, and I may have to take a look at picking it up some time in the future.

Strongly recommended.

Apr 13

Stranger than fiction

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In the late 1800s, a professor named James Murray led the team which was preparing what would become one of the world’s greatest and most-renowned reference books: the Oxford English Dictionary.

Murray put out a call for volunteers to help in the arduous process of scanning centuries worth of books looking for the first appearances of words in print, or for citations which demonstrate that the meaning of a word has shifted.

Many such volunteers responded to the call, but one of the most surprising was a physician, W.C. Minor. Minor’s contributions were voluminous and impeccably-organized. The address given by Minor was a short train ride away from Oxford, and Murray eventually wanted to meet his generous and able collaborator in person. But Minor refused invitations to visit Murray or to attend a great banquet held to celebrate the dictionary project. Murray then resolved that he would, instead, visit Minor.

A widely-reprinted story has it that Murray didn’t find out the truth until he arrived at Minor’s address. The actual reveal was a little less dramatic in how it took place, but the information would have been jaw-dropping no matter how it was revealed. W.C. Minor, a former U.S. Army surgeon and a veteran of the Civil War, was a killer, found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, and consigned by a British court to life at an asylum for the criminally insane.

I first read a version of this story many years ago, in one of the book compilations of Paul Harvey’s “Rest of the Story” radio series. So when I saw Simon Winchester’s  The Professor and the Madman available for Kindle loan through my local library, I eagerly put myself on the waiting list. I had the day off work today, and – apart from cleaning my oven and going to a Nashville Symphony concert planning meeting – I’ve spent much of it with my nose in Winchester’s well-researched, well-told tale.

Winchester lays out the basics of the relationship between Murray and Minor right at the outset, but then he goes back and gives you all the nuance and pathos, including a rather gruesome detail, a little more than two-thirds of the way through the book, which I had not been expecting. It’s an amazing story – on the one hand, the book covers the great achievement of the OED, which took 70 years to complete and which has such deep importance to language, learning and England. On the other hand, the book tells a heartbreaking story about a tortured soul, a Civil War surgeon whose paranoia may have been made worse by what he witnessed in battlefield hospitals, or by the role he was forced to take in punishing a deserter. And yet, in his more lucid moments, this mental patient and American expatriate was able to play a key role in one of the crowning glories of the British empire.

Winchester covers every aspect of the tale, including the sad story of Minor’s victim and the family he left behind. It’s the type of tale that, if created by a novelist, would be called outlandish and unbelievable.

Strongly recommended.

Apr 03

Ye gods

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Okay, here’s the deal. As previously mentioned, I read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, the public-domain source material for the recent movie John Carter. It was great fun, and as it ended in a sort of cliff-hanger I could not wait to pick up the story with The Gods of Mars.

“The Gods of Mars” continues the thrill-a-minute pace of its predecessor; you can see the influence that Burroughs and his contemporaries in pulp fiction had on Golden Age movie serials, which in turn were the inspiration for both “Star Wars” and Indiana Jones. (George Lucas originally wanted to make a movie adaptation of “Flash Gordon,” but couldn’t get the rights, and so he wrote “Star Wars” instead.)

But I didn’t enjoy “The Gods of Mars” as completely as I enjoyed “A Princess of Mars,” and I may share the blame for this with Burroughs.

“The Gods of Mars,” as one might surmise from its title, gets into religious belief and superstition on the planet known to its residents as Barsoom. But the narrative seemed unflinchingly and heavy-handedly anti-religious, presenting religion exclusively as a falsehood used by some to enslave others.

I don’t have an objection to negative treatment of religion; quite the opposite. I share with this novel the awareness that much evil has been propagated in the name of religion, that many believe in the wrong things and/or for the wrong reasons. The terrible things we do in the name of various deities or creeds can make a powerful foundation for a story. But you can usually sense whether what’s being criticized is the abuse of religion or whether what’s being criticized is the very idea of faith in a higher power. This seemed like the latter, so much so that I Googled Burroughs’ religious beliefs – a stupid thing to do while in the middle of a story. The story should stand or fall on its own, and questions of how it came about, or what in real life might have inspired it, should be left for later analysis. But I was so curious I couldn’t help but look. Burroughs was an atheist, although amiable enough, and occasionally made playful references to God (the same way you might playfully refer to good or bad luck, even if you aren’t particularly superstitious) which some apparently mistakenly took as evidence of belief.

Those people must not have read “The Gods of Mars.”

Anyway, I do have some literary criticisms of the book, but it’s possible that those criticisms are really just the result of my annoyance at Burroughs’ heavy-handed approach to his theme. I thought the book had more purple prose than “A Princess of Mars.” The book is written in the first person, and so Carter’s comments about his own prowess, and the respect and admiration paid to him by others, increasingly sound like boasting, which is out of kilter with the character as we were first introduced to him. (Carter’s praise of himself is as annoyingly expository as the praise of another Civil War veteran-turned-sci-fi-hero, Cyrus Harding, which I complained about in Jules Verne’s “The Mysterious Island.”)

“The Gods of Mars,” too, ends on a cliffhanger. I’ll continue the story, but I may jump into another book first as a palate-cleanser.

Apr 01

A Princess of Mars

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As I posted on Facebook the other day, I’d been looking for some cheap Kindle reading material and decided to download some of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels about Barsoom, the source material for the current movie “John Carter.” The movie has become notorious as a flop – it was hugely expensive and would have had to become a huge hit in order to be considered successful, and it hasn’t been. But at least one of my friends commented on the Facebook post that she and her daughter enjoyed the movie (“Not our fave, but fun.”).

It’s been a crazy weekend – my father was in a wreck on Saturday; he’s bruised, has a gash on his arm, but otherwise OK. But I’ve gotten to make some progress tonight on A Princess of Mars, the origin story and primary source for “John Carter.” The story was first published in 1912. So far, I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It’s definitely better than The Mysterious Island, another proto-science fiction classic and the last Kindle public domain classic literature freebie I blogged about.

Burroughs, of course, was much better known for creating Tarzan, but some have said his Barsoom books have actually been more influential, establishing characters and situations which would be reused and expanded upon by later generations of fantasy writers.

The movie is still showing in Tullahoma, but I don’t want to see it until I’ve finished the book, and maybe not until I’ve finished all three or four of the Barsoom books I’ve downloaded. So I may just have to wait and watch it on DVD. I don’t want to spend the extra money on 3D anyway.

I like the fact that Amazon offers free public domain classic literature for the Kindle. I’m still waiting for a can’t miss deal on a non-fiction book, or a couple of books for which I’m on the waiting list at the library’s e-book site. But for now, John Carter and his adventures are childish fun.
Mar 26

‘The Hitman’s Guide To Housecleaning’

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The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning, by Hallgrimur Helgason, is one of those books I’d never have bought had it not been for my Kindle. It was on a deep, deep sale, it looked sort of interesting, and I was looking for some fiction after a number of (quite good) non-fiction books.

I can be sort of hard to please with fiction – which is why I tend to read more non-fiction — and this doesn’t seem like the type of book I’d normally choose. But I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It’s a gritty and darkly-humorous thriller. Tomaslav Boksic, nicknamed “Toxic,” is a Bosnian War veteran and a ruthlessly-efficient assasain for the Croatian Mafia. His normal policy is to assume what he calls LPP – the Lowest Possible Profile – but when his latest victim turns out to have been an undercover FBI agent, he’s suddenly on the most-wanted list. He prepares to skip the country under one assumed identity but then has to find another – and so he murders and takes the passport, airline tickets and clerical collar of Rev. David Friendly, a minor televangelist on his way to visit some supporters who run a tiny religious TV station in Iceland. Helgason ends up having to maintain Friendly’s identity for a few days. He discovers that Iceland has no handguns, and finds himself attracted to the rebellious and partially-estranged daughter of his strait-laced Christian broadcaster hosts.

Helgason is an established novelist in Iceland but I believe this is the first time he’s actually written a novel directly in English. You’d never be able to tell (although the novel is in first person, and by a non-native English speaking character, so Helgason covered his bases). The novel’s gritty but wry tone is nice because it doesn’t give away the ending; I had no idea where we were headed, and the novel could have believably gone in several different directions.

When I first read some vague description of the novel’s plot, and saw the mention of televangelists, I cringed a little bit. Trust me, I’m second to no one in being suspicious of, and embarrassed by, televangelists, particularly two of the real-life televangelists mentioned in passing in the book. But televangelists have also become low-hanging fruit from both a comic and dramatic perspective, and if the book was going to be largely about lampooning TV evangelism, jumping off to attack faith in general, I was prepared to be bored by it.

Thankfully, that’s not the direction Helgason goes at all. He never exactly endorses faith, but he shows some sympathy for his religious characters and never uses televangelism as a straw man to mock religion in general. In fact, the televangelism plot in general is downplayed. And this is a book that acknowledges the possibility of redemption. I’m not sure Helgason has a deep understanding of American religious culture; Friendly is eventually revealed to be a Baptist, and I don’t know that many Baptist clergy wear clerical collars. But in any case, the author avoided cheap shots or easy targets.

All in all, a surprising book and one I found it difficult to put down. Please keep in mind that the language is somewhat … earthy. It is about a hitman, after all!

Mar 22

Write More Good

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In the newspaper business, we use a reference called the The Associated Press Stylebook for a wide variety of questions about newspaper style – what to capitalize (and what not to), whether you have to say Federal Bureau of Investigation or can get by with saying FBI, and so on.

A few years ago, some very funny writers got together, calling themselves the Bureau Chiefs, and created a very funny twitter feed called FakeAPStylebook, giving hilariously bad answers to questions of style and usage.

The Twitter feed became popular even with people who’d never seen or picked up an actual AP Stylebook. It led to a book deal – but rather than just collate their Tweets, as some have done, the Bureau Chiefs wrote new material (although I think they worked a few of the original jokes in from time to time), crafting a faux reference book that parodies everything from the AP Stylebook to Strunk and White.

That book is Write More Good: An Absolutely Phony Guide. Now, parodies of advice for writers are not new; the late Michael O’Donoghue, one of the original “Saturday Night Live” writers (he appeared opposite Belushi in the show’s very first cold open) crafted this little gem, which I have in an anthology somewhere. But “Write More Good” is just terrific. I do need to alert some of my readers that there’s Strong Language.

By the way, I’ve had my Kindle about six weeks and this is actually the first book for which I’ve paid full price – sort of. Tuesday’s Kindle “special offer” was a $10 Amazon gift card for $5. I bought the gift card and ended up using it on “Write More Good.” So as far as the publisher is concerned, I paid full price.

I’ve been in the middle of a book on the history of Irish Americans. It’s a good book, but one day when I had only a few minutes to read I thought I’d dip into “Write More Good.” I ended up reading all of “Write More Good,” and it’s only tonight that I can go back to the history book.
Mar 19

Dead Air

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People today know me as a newspaperman, but I got my start in radio at an early age – 15, in fact. I had my FCC license (required at the time to operate a radio station transmitter) before I had a driver’s license. I worked throughout high school at WHAL-AM (now WZNG-AM) in Shelbyville, which was, towards the end of my time there, co-owned with what was then WYCQ-FM. I was active at the campus radio station at Oral Roberts University, and for a year after college I worked at KTCR-AM in Wagoner, Okla., which was owned by the Durfey family. The late Dr. Thomas Durfey was my academic advisor at ORU, and his son Kendall was my best friend at college, and Kendall and I roomed and worked together for that year in Wagoner. (You can learn more about Kendall, and hear some of our collaboration, here.)

Anyway, when I saw Bill Young’s Dead Air: The Rise and Demise of Music Radio on a one-day giveaway promotion for the Kindle, I jumped on it.

It’s a good book – which is incredibly frustrating, because it should have been a great one.

The (apparently self-published) book is horrifically-edited. I assumed it wasn’t edited at all – that, like the dad-blamed idiot who wrote Soapstone, Young had simply published it himself without a sounding board.

Then, I read the copyright page, and Young actually credits his editor, who has worked at Texas Monthly and been published in Esquire, GQ and the New York Times. Well, I don’t care about the editor’s CV; he did a crappy job of editing this particular book. Young has a lot of fascinating material here – the makings of a great book – but it’s bogged down in almost every kind of mistake that an editor is supposed to catch:

  • There are infuriating copy-editing mistakes, such as possessives in place of plurals. I’m not talking about a mistake here or there; I’m talking about tons of them, throughout the book, front to back. There are also a few easily-corrected misspellings or other errors. Some of these, like “Silvia” Plath, could have been looked up from legitimate reference sites in 15 seconds on the Internet. Even the title of the Kindle book as uploaded to Amazon has a typo, with the letter “I” in “Air” wrongly capitalized. “Forty” is misspelled in the heading over chapter 40.
  • There are numerous explanations or definitions, and even a couple of anecdotes, repeated in the book. One particularly-egregious example has to do with a story in which a radio station, as a publicity stunt, publishes an ad apologizing for the use of bad language by someone interviewed in a news report. The entire story, including the entire paragraph-long wording of the ad, appears at two different places in the book. Did the editor not notice that? Did the author not notice that?
    I’ve counted at least three different instances in the book where Young explains that, in the mid-60s, KILT promoted its own concerts, but then by the end of the decade, professional concert promoters took over and KILT became the “media sponsor” for concerts in return for giving them advertising time. Each time, he writes as if he’s presenting new information. Again, the editor should have caught this and fixed it. 
  • The book seems to be a little unclear on its purpose. The title promises a broad look at the radio industry, while the book itself is more of a personal memoir, a Texas-centric account of that industry as seen through Young’s eyes. There’s nothing wrong with a memoir – Young was such a key player and knew so many of the other key players that his personal story is well worth a book, maybe more than one – but it’s a little bit of a bait-and-switch. If the book really is a memoir, change the subtitle to reflect that, and focus it a little bit more on the personal story. If the book is really about an industry, don’t bother taking time to tell us about the fast-growing tree in the front yard of Young’s newlywed home. That’s the kind of detail that, even in a memoir, is of questionable interest. A good editor would have insisted that the book take one path or the other, and suggested that the marketing match the content.
  • Most of the book is arranged in loose chronological order, so a section about two-thirds of the way through about the birth of Top 40 radio is out of the timeline and feels completely out of place. There are also some other instances where the book starts to ramble a little bit and a good editor could have roped it in.
  • Some of the chapters near the end of the book read almost like lists of names — “Hey, I worked with these people, and they’ll be disappointed if they don’t get mentioned in my book.”

I swear, this book makes me want to advertise my services as a book editor. It’s a good book – very much worth reading, in spite of my complaints, if you have any interest in radio. But I, or any of a number of other people, could have made this a much better book than it is.

Mar 06

One small hop for beer, one giant leap for mankind

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I am not a beer drinker. I’ve had two, maybe three beers in my life, although I occasionally buy a single can of beer for making chili or beer can chicken. (I do enjoy a glass of wine every now and then.)

But when I was scanning the library-affiliated system for borrowing Kindle books, I came across this:

The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World, by Stephen Mansfield.

I’d read something in the past – perhaps it was a review of this book, which was published in 2009 – and I had, scampering around in the back of my head, the notion that Guinness, the legendary Irish brewer, had been founded by a religious man. The description of the book intrigued me, and I decided to give it a look.

I’m so glad I did. This is a fascinating tale, lovingly researched and told, about the history of a business and about the Guinness family, some of whom pursued religious vocation instead of brewing success. I hated to put it down.

The story starts with Arthur Guinness the first, a man heavily influenced by John Wesley, among others. Guinness played a key role in introducing  the Sunday School movement, which had only recently been created in England, to Ireland. While some tales of Guinness seeing his brewery as a divine calling have been overblown, it is clear that Guinness – like many other Christian leaders of his day – may have considered drunkenness a sin but saw beer in moderation as beneficial, even healthful. And, in fact, in Dublin of Arthur Guinness’ day the other choices – disease-ridden water or hard liquor – were both detrimental. Guinness had every reason to believe that he was producing a benign, perhaps even beneficial, product that was completely compatible with his devout Christian faith.

Guinness started his brewery with a 9,000-year lease (!) on a plot of land at St. James’ Gate, a historic entrance to Dublin. The signature used in some of the company’s packaging is Arthur Guinness’s signature from that lease.

Successive generations of the family went in their own separate directions. Some went into banking; others continued to run the beer company; but several went into the ministry.

As for the brewery, Mansfield tells the story of its remarkable operating principles and charitable efforts, at least in the 1800s and early 1900s. The firm was a leader in how it treated its employees, providing amenities like  on-call doctors and dentists, reading rooms, and expenses-paid vacation trips to the countryside. It spent enormous amounts of money addressing horrific poverty in Dublin and improving living conditions there.

Fans of the recent Ken Burns documentary will be interested in Mansfield’s claim that Prohibition, by shutting off the market for commercially-produced beer and wine, actually drove many Americans to harder forms of alcohol. I was fascinated to hear from Burns that many Americans who supported Prohibition did so under the misapprehension that it would apply only to hard liquor and were shocked when beer and wine were outlawed as well.

Mansfield – who, according to his blog, is not a beer drinker – lays out the story with obvious affection. He goes over the top and gets a little gushy in a few places, rather than letting the facts or the people being quoted speak for themselves. (In most cases, they speak  quite well for themselves, and would do so even more effectively without the gush.) But such excesses are relatively sparse, and seem to come from a deep affection for the subject matter.

You know, St. Patrick’s day is coming up. I’ve never had Guinness before ….

Feb 25

Crossing the Delaware

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It was not my conscious plan to spend the President’s Day month of February reading books that focused on Abe Lincoln and George Washington; it just worked out that way, because both books were readily available. I guess that’s why Amazon and/or the publishers put them on special. (Sadly, both specials have since expired.)

The first book I read was The Siege of Washington : The Untold Story of the Twelve Days That Shook the Union, by John and Charles Lockwood, which I’ve already blogged about. It’s a terrific tale of the days immediately following the fall of Fort Sumter, when Lincoln and Gen. Winfield Scott braced for an immediate Confederate attack of Washington — an attack that, had it taken place, might have changed the course of history.

I moved on from that to Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book is about George Washington’s attack on Hessian forces in Trenton, N.J., in December 1776, as depicted in the famous painting by Emanuel Leutze.

Somewhat surprisingly, Fischer begins with an impassioned defense of the painting, derided in modern times for its supposed inaccuracies, among them the fact that Washington is standing up. Fischer notes the remarkable symbolism contained within the painting, and later points out that, given the types of boats being used, and the weather conditions, many of those crossing the Delaware that night would have been standing up in their boats. By the way, “night” is correct; the time of day is, in fact, one thing the painting gets wrong.

Fischer’s book is meticulously researched, with appendixes, footnotes and annotations nearly as long as the main body of the text. But it’s readable and inspiring. He notes how the American Revolution’s egalitarian spirit found its way into George Washington’s leadership style, and how that played a role in Washington’s success. At the same time, he is also quick to praise examples of integrity, courage and compassion among the British and the Hessians. Contrary to what you may have heard in history class, the Hessians were not, repeat not, drunk or hung over from Christmas merriment when Washington’s forces attacked Trenton.

Reading this book makes me want to re-watch “The Crossing,” an excellent TV movie starring Jeff Daniels as Washington. It was produced for A&E and pops up occasionally on the History channel. But I also now know that a few things in the movie were inaccurate; while Alexander Hamilton played a key role in the New Jersey campaign, Fischer doesn’t indicate that he was Washington’s right hand, as portrayed in the movie. (IMDb also lists this as a factual error.) But it’s still a terrific movie, and well worth watching.

Anyway, “Washington’s Crossing” is a wonderful book, and I can heartily recommend it. But my next non-fiction book won’t be American History; I’ll wait and tell you about it once I start reading it.