POD Book Reviews & More

Distant Cousin: Recirculation

2012-01-25T09:47:00.002-06:00

Distant Cousin: Recirculation
by Al Past
(CreateSpace / 1-460-94624-3 / 978-1-460-94624-4 / February 2011 / 324 pages / $13.95 / Kindle $4.99)

Let me begin by saying that this is one of the most accurately proofread books I have reviewed for PODBRAM. I found exactly one extraneous word and the use of ellipses in dialog is a little overdone, but the buck stops right there. However, there are a few glitches in the formatting of the print version that I read. I cannot speak for the Kindle version, of course, and I am aware that the majority of the readers of Dr. Past's legendary Distant Cousin books read them on a Kindle, so maybe these formatting issues are somewhat irrelevant. The problems boil down to two issues. First, the front matter is all but nonexistent, and this makes the printed book appear amateurish at first glance as soon as the first page is turned. Al could spend a little time on this and the book would have a much more professional look. In contrast, the back-matter is outstanding! The final page, describing Ana Darcy's personal website, should be added to the first four books in the series. (Of course I realize this is out of the question for the print versions, but this page could easily be added to the Kindle ones.) The second formatting issue is more complicated (and more annoying). Recirculation should have been only about 200 pages, possibly lowering the price even further. The font is too large, the text is not justified, and each page begins with a new paragraph. I understand technically how this happened, but I am sure most readers would be quite confused by it. The result is that many pages containing a few large paragraphs show large expanses of white space at the bottom. Pages with many short paragraphs of dialog are less affected. Readers of a future DC6 would probably appreciate it if Al would work on some of this technical mumbo-jumbo.

I can see it coming already. Ana's half-alien, genius son will be exposed by nosy media personnel. Somebody in the editing room will see that boring footage that the gossip show left on the cutting room floor and all hell will break loose! The best thing about Recirculation is the storyline and the Spielbergian character development, as is the case with the four previous Distant Cousin books. This part of the friendly space alien saga features the teenaged twins, Julio and Clio. We learn much more detail about Julio's engineering acumen and Clio discovers healing powers she did not realize she had. There is a section of the book that takes me back to the Don Juan books of the wonderful Sixties when Clio goes to Mexico to meet with a traditional healer. Ana's flying pod takes the crew on yet another adventure, leaving the reader salivating for DC6. What more could the readers ask?

There is a lot I could say about the plot, but of course I won't. If you have gotten this far in the series, you already know what to expect. The best thing about the Distant Cousin books is that the reader can so easily visualize the movie in his or her head with very little provocation. The storyline is new, yet familiar. The essence of Spielberg's Close Encounters or E.T. remains pervasive throughout. The characters and dialog tell the story. The whole thing is show, don't tell in a manner that any reader can appreciate. The storyline flows, the characters develop comfortably, and you feel as if you are so glad that you know these people! I was particularly pleased with the pacing of this fifth in the series, the way it begins slowly and gradually accelerates to the end. Personally this is my third favorite, behind Reincarnation ( DC3) and Distant Cousin, and clearly ahead of DC2 (more action and less character development) and DC4 (emphasis on new ancillary characters rather than Ana Darcy). My final grades are: formatting C-, editing and proofreading A+, storyline A.

"Hey, Joe, come over here a minute. Have you seen this? I know most people would think that kid is just shining on his captive audience for a goof, but I've heard of that fancy thing he's talking about. It's been discussed in certain scientific papers. Some experts think it will be a real breakthrough. I'm going to make a few calls...."

See also: Distant Cousin
Distant Cousin: Repatriation
Distant Cousin: Reincarnation
Distant Cousin: Regeneration
Interview with Dr. Al Past

El Secreto Submergido

2011-07-22T13:25:00.005-05:00

El Secreto Sumergido
by Cristian Perfumo
(Amazon Digital Services / Kindle Edition B004VS7LMC / (no date of publication) / 341 KB / $2.99)
Reviewed by Dr. Al Past for PODBRAM

Although my last class in literature in Spanish was 40 years ago, I undertook to read this El Secreto Sumergido because the subject matter interested me, and I thought it would be a good review for me. It was worth it. I like a good adventure story and I like a mystery, and I particularly like stories connected with the sea. El Secreto Sumergido was both, with the dividend that it offered a glimpse into a part of the world that I was barely aware of: Patagonian Argentina. As a bonus, the unpleasantness of the "Falklands War," as the English speaking world knows it, that is, the dispute between England and Argentina over the possession of Las Islas Malvinas, in the south Atlantic east of Argentina, also figures in, mainly in the epilog.

Basically, a high school student in the (real) town of Deseado learns of a (real) British shipwreck 200 years earlier on the rocks of the mouth of the river where his town is located. As a new but enthusiastic SCUBA diver, he decides to investigate, and perhaps locate the wreck. When the retired seaman who provides him with early documentation of the wreck is mysteriously murdered, that sets off a train of events that the young man and his friends pursue to their violent end. It is a rollicking tale.

Keeping in mind that my skills in Spanish are a bit rusty, I will say that I found the book well and cleanly written. As a former non-SCUBA diving officer in the American surface navy, I'll add that the details of diving in the cold tidal waters of the mouth of a river, and of the hazards of undersea salvage, struck me as accurate.

The English-dominant reader who is intrigued by the book and who has some skill in Spanish and a decent desk dictionary should enjoy El Secreto Sumergido as much as I did.

Dr. Al Past is the author of the five Distant Cousin novels, a popular adventure/romance/sci-fi series, the photographic collaborator for Barry Yelton's On Wings of Gentle Power, the author of a book of treble clef duets from Charles Colin, a reviewer for PODBRAM, and a member of the Independent Authors Guild. He lives on a ranch in south Texas.

Uncle Denny

2011-07-15T18:43:00.006-05:00

Uncle Denny
by Don Meyer

(Two Peas Publishing / 0-984-07739-1 / 978-0-984-07739-7 / June 2011 / 318 pages / $14.95 paperback / $11.66 Amazon / $7.99 Kindle / $14.36 B&N / $7.99 Nook)

Uncle Denny is Don Meyer's completion of the Sheriff Tom Monason Trilogy, a series of crime thrillers set in an unnamed ski town high in the mountains of California. The sheriff is an experienced cop from the big city, now nearing semi-retirement age and running a tiny, informal police department in what should be a sleepy town, but rarely is, sort of like Paradise MA or Cabot Cove ME. As you may have already guessed, most of the charm of Don's trilogy comes from his quiet town of amiable characters. The main distinction from those similar settings of novels and television is that blizzards and heavy snow often play key parts in the crimes solved by Sheriff Monason, and the plot of Uncle Denny is no exception.

Key storyline elements from Winter Ghost and McKenzie Affair have been woven into this third book, but the story pretty much stands alone for any reader who has not read the earlier books. You can read my reviews of these earlier two by clicking the links, and I highly encourage you to do so, since I am not repeating much of that material here.

I personally enjoyed McKenzie Affair the most of the three, and Uncle Denny the least. This is the direct result of so much of this newest storyline surrounding two groups of feuding mobsters in Chicago. Mr. Meyer explains this concept in closing remarks at the end of the book. The author describes how he spent most of his life in Chicago and that he wanted at least one part of the trilogy to evolve from this experience. That is fine if you like mobsters, but these sorts of characters have little appeal to my tastes. Maybe yours are different. I have memorized all the Andy Griffith reruns, but I have never watched The Sopranos. Enough said?

The title derives from a mispronunciation of a lead character's name, that of a Russian mobster. An FBI agent phones Sheriff Monason to explain that several criminals from Chicago are headed to Monason’s town. Because of a severe blizzard in the area, FBI personnel cannot reach the scene quickly enough, so the sheriff and his few deputies need to head off the mobsters at the pass, as they used to say in old westerns. The reader is introduced to the malicious modus operandi of Uncle Denny early in the story, and then the plot begins to unroll.

Don Meyer writes in a very direct, concise manner, telling his story mostly through incisive dialogue with little extraneous descriptive detail. Uncle Denny is a somewhat satisfying read, but proper editing and punctuation are sorely lacking. There are way too many repeated phrases. A few examples are that cell phones are always pinched closed and Sheriff Monason’s desk chair always squeaks; however, I was most annoyed that Uncle Denny always drives a big black SUV. It is never a sport utility vehicle, a Cadillac, an Escalade, a truck, a snow-covered vehicle, or even a black SUV or a big SUV. An editor should mention these to you. Do you get my snowdrift, Don? I really like your settings, plotlines, and most of all, your folksy characters, and I think most readers will, too.

See Also: Winter Ghost at Amazon
McKenzie Affair at Amazon
The Protected Will Never Know
Don Meyer's website

Living With Evolution or Dying Without It

2011-02-12T13:25:00.003-06:00

Living With Evolution or Dying Without It: A Guide to Understanding Humanity’s Past, Present, and Future
by K. D. Koratsky
(Sunscape Books / 0-982-65460-X / 978-0-982-65460-6 / June 2010 / 618 pages / $49.95 hardcover / $37.30 Amazon / $14.99 Kindle)

Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

Koratsky's book is a heavily researched, scholarly work that gathers what science has discovered since Darwin's discoveries and fills in the gaps explaining why evolution has something to teach us if humanity is to survive. The other choice is humanity going the way of the dinosaurs into extinction.

I started reading in early 2010 and took months to finish the 580 pages. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability level would probably show this book to be at a university graduate level leaving at last 90% of the population lost as to the importance of its message. For months, it bothered me that so many in the United States do not have the literacy skills to understand an important work such as this. (The average reader in the U.S. reads at fifth grade level and millions are illiterate). This is certainly not a good foundation to learn how precarious life is if you do not understand how brutal the earth's environment and evolution has been for billions of years. As I finished reading Living With Evolution or Dying Without It, I realized that it would only take a few key people in positions of power to understand the warnings offered by Koratsky and bring about the needed changes in one or more countries so humanity would survive somewhere on the planet when the next great challenge to life arises.

On Page One, Koratsky starts 13.7 billion years ago with the big bang then in a few pages, ten billion years later, he introduces the reader to how certain bacteria discovered a new way to access the energy required to sustain an existence. By the time we reach humanity's first religion on Page 157, we have discovered what caused so many species to die out and gained a better understanding of what survival of the fittest means. To survive means adapting to environmental challenges no matter if they are delivered by the impact of a monster asteroid to the earth's surface, global warming (no matter what the reason) or by competition with other cultures or animals competing for the earth's resources. In fact, competition is vital to the survival of a species for it is only through competition that a species will adapt to survive.

The book is divided into two parts. The first 349 pages deals with where we have been and what we have learned, and the two hundred and eleven pages in Part Two deals with current ideas and policies from an evolutionary perspective.

I suspect that most devout Christians and Muslims would dismiss the warnings in this book out-of-hand since these people have invested their beliefs and the survival of humanity in books written millennia ago when humanity knew little to nothing about the laws of evolution and how important competition is to survival. Koratsky is optimistic that the United States will eventually turn away from the political agenda of "Cultural Relativism" that has guided America since the 1960s toward total failure as a culture. The popular term for "Cultural Relativism" in the US would be "Political Correctness", which has spawned movements such as race-based quotas and entitlement programs that reward failure and punish success. Even America's self-esteem movement is an example of "Cultural Relativism", which encourages children to have fun and praises poor performance until it is impossible to recognize real success. The current debate started by Amy Chua's essay in The Wall Street Journal is another example of "Cultural Relativism" at work.After reading Living with Evolution or Dying Without It, it is clear that Amy Chua's Tiger Mother Methods of parenting are correct while the soft approach practiced by the average U.S. parent is wrong and will lead to more failure than success.

Koratsky shows us that the key to survival for America is to severely curtail and eventually end most U.S. entitlement programs. While "Cultural Relativism" is ending, competition that rewards merit at all levels of the culture (private and government) must be reinstituted. He points out near the end of the book that this has been happening in China and is the reason for that country's amazing growth and success the last thirty years. In the 1980s, merit was reinstituted at the bottom and most who prosper in China today earned the right to be rewarded for success by being more competitive and adapting. Even China's state-owned industries were required to become profitable or perish.

The earth's environment does not care about equality or the relativists' belief that everyone has a right to happiness even if society must rob from the rich and give to the poor. This book covers the evolution of the universe, the planet, all life on the planet including the reasons why most life that lived on the earth for hundreds of millions of years before humanity is now gone; the beginnings of the human species; religion in all of its costumes; the growth of civilizations and the competitions that led to the destruction and collapse of so many such as the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty two millennia ago. The environment and evolution says that all life on the planet is not equal and no one is born with a guaranteed right to success, happiness and fun. To survive means earning the right through competition and adaption. If you don't believe Koratsky's warning, go talk to the dinosaurs and ask them why they are gone.

See also: K. D. Koratsky's Website

Submissions Are Closed

2011-01-08T10:21:00.002-06:00

Review submissions are closed at PODBRAM until further notice. Thank you for your support.

Dance Your Way to Psychic Sex

2010-10-17T10:04:00.004-05:00

Dance Your Way to Psychic Sex
by Alice Turing & Francis Blake, Illustrator
(Chutzpah Publishing / 0-956-65660-9 / 978-0-956-65660-5 / September 2010 / 420 pages / Amazon UK 20 Pounds Sterling)
Reviewed by Dianne Salerni for PODBRAM

We easily believe what we ardently desire to be true.

This is the tagline for Alice Turing’s novel, Dance Your Way to Psychic Sex, which tells the story of a book (called That Book) and a New Age movement called Psychic Dancing that takes Great Britain by storm. Leo, a mentalist by profession, knows it’s a scam. It has to be a scam, and he’s both envious and contemptuous of whoever thought it up first. Henrietta also thinks it’s a scam, because Henrietta knows all about brainwashing – and she really doesn’t want to experience that again. Yet, both Leo and Henrietta find themselves sucked into the Psychic Dancing uproar because Belle and Denzel believe it whole-heartedly. And Henrietta loves Belle. But Belle loves Leo. And Leo doesn’t want to believe he’s fallen in love with quirky Denzel, but Denzel won’t have sex with him until Leo admits he’s gay.

I was expecting a humorous romp from this book, and perhaps an exploration of belief, desire, and illusion, explored through a bizarre psychic hoax that might turn out to be real. From the description on the cover, I thought the romantic quadrangle would involve the farcical nonsense of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While it started out this way, I wasn’t sure what to make of it halfway through. The tangled love story is more raw and painful than humorous, and my growing dislike for Leo and Belle throughout the book made it hard for me to root for them ending up with fragile Henrietta and sweet but weird Denzel. There were lengthy internal monologues and scenes that didn’t move the plot forward. I know the current fashion in dialogue tags is to use only says (if anything) – but for me, it drained the life and rhythm from the dialogue scenes. This is, of course, only a personal preference.

The writing is technically without fault, and the book has a quality look and feel. The cover design may not be the final version, since I have an ARC, but it’s colorful and interesting. The editing is clean, and wide margins make the pages easy to read. There are some great lines in here – including some particular (but crude) advice from Denzel that I’ll probably never forget. The overall premise is intriguing, but the execution did not win me over.

Editor's Note: The cover shown here is the final cover. The reviewer had a pre-release copy. This book is currently available only from Amazon UK or directly from the author. See her website for details.

See also: Alice Turing's Unusual Website
Another Review of the Book

Talion

2010-09-09T14:15:00.003-05:00

Talion by Mary Maddox

(Cantraip Press / 0-984-42810-0 / 978-0-984-42810-6 / March 2010 / 296 pages / $12.99 / Amazon $9.35 / Kindle $1.99)

Reviewed by Dianne Salerni for PODBRAM

When Lisa Duncan’s parents decide to separate their daughter from her pot-smoking friends, they send her to spend the summer at Hidden Creek Lodge in Utah, which is owned by her aunt and uncle. They have no idea that there is much greater danger to their daughter than normal teenage hijinks: Lisa has attracted the attention of a serial killer who has chosen her as his next victim and who is more than happy to follow her to a remote Utah vacation spot. In her first days at Hidden Creek, Lisa meets Lu Jakes, the abused and timid daughter of an employee at the lodge. Although Lu is below Lisa’s perceived social status (Lisa calls her Trailer Girl), the isolation of the lodge throws the two girls together, and the stalking killer decides that two victims could be better than one. Lu Jakes is particularly interesting to him because she is already dazed and downtrodden. Little does he know that Lu sees things others do not – shining ethereal creatures called Delatar, Black Claw, and Talion, who may just provide her an edge that he won’t expect.

Mary Maddox’s tightly woven thriller is a smooth read, with clear vivid narration and fully formed characters. Writing in third person narration, from multiple perspectives, Maddox has used the clever strategy of placing narration from Lu’s perspective in present tense, while everyone else’s perspective is past tense. This serves to make the text surrounding Lu just a little disjointed from the other scenes – as if she doesn’t quite share the same timeline as everyone else. The strange creatures that she sees, including the Talion for which the book is named, provide an interesting twist to the story – although Talion is not as significant in the climax as I expected. Were Talion and his fellow creatures guardian angels, demons, or the hallucinations of a mentally disturbed girl? I expected some room for interpretation here, but considering his title role, I did expect to see a lot more of Talion.

Despite the two teenage protagonists, this is not a book for YA readers. The violence is on par with adult thrillers along the lines of Thomas Harris or James Ellroy. I’m not crazy about the cover image; I’m still not certain what it is meant to portray. The supernatural element of the story might have been more thoroughly explored, but overall this is an excellent suspense thriller, smoothly written, and well edited.

Divine Right

2010-08-28T22:16:00.003-05:00

Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie
by Jacqueline S. Homan
(Elf Books / 0-981-56794-0 / 978-0-981-56794-5 / September 2009 / November 2009 / 456 pages / 422 pages / Hardcover $27.95 / Amazon & B&N $25.15 / Kindle $5.99)

Jacqueline S. Homan is one of those special authors that I discovered because of PODBRAM. If I had not begun PODBRAM just over four years ago, Jacqueline never would have found me, and therefore I would never have heard of her or her books. Out of the many new authors who have submitted multiple books to us for review over the past four years, Jacqueline is the most improved. Her writing and book production have gone from somewhat crude, repetitive, and only adequately proofread to outstandingly researched and detailed and proofed at a professional level. Her chosen nonfiction subject matter has reflected Ms. Homan as a compassionate muckraker in four separate areas of American culture, and Divine Right is arguably the most important of these to America’s future as a nation of honorable leadership.

Divine Right is a detailed exposure of the deep history of religion in America. If the book has a fault, it is that the author expends a considerable amount of print space on too much detail from the B.C. period and the early days of A.D. time. For example, I could not care less about the birth and death dates of early rulers. The second, much lesser, negative issue with the book is that there are no front matter pages including the technical publication elements and such. I got the ISBN from a sticker on the back and the November publication date from the printer’s notation on the last page. The reason I mention this is that both Amazon and B&N list the book as being published in September 2009 with 34 more pages than are in my copy. I wonder if the front matter has been accidentally deleted from my copy? Regardless, I have no complaints about the 422-page edition I received. I want to mention one final little negative: if you are of the modern, rabid Christian Evangelical bent, I cannot be held responsible if this book gives you a heart attack!

Although Divine Right is not a comedy in any sense, Ms. Homan made me laugh out loud numerous times with her phrasing. Her carefully composed, brief statements of scathing poignancy describing certain taboo religious issues are what pushed this book over the top for me. She is obviously a feminist of the deepest sort, and she knows how to pointedly describe the misogynistic destruction of freedom in America! What is the book about? This is it, the bottom line, and Jacqueline tells the story from the bottom up. Christianity has been a male dominated subculture from its earliest beginnings to the modern takeover of America by Tim LaHaye’s Council for National Policy. Ms. Homan minces no words when she tells us what she thinks of these ideas!

But seriously, folks, Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie is a hell of a book (pardon the apropos expression). I did not find it as singularly engrossing or riveting as her Eyes of a Monster, but the overall significance and comprehensive, professional presentation of Divine Right make it Jacqueline Homan’s best book. Considering that Monster is about the first gay hate crime prosecution in America, but Divine Right is a subject that has been affecting the lives of millions for centuries, I think you get my point. If you are a feminist, have a deep mistrust of what has become of Christianity in modern America, or just want to read a well researched tome on the subject chocked full of irreverence, rather than holier than thou arrogance, then you will love Jacqueline Homan’s Divine Right.

See also: Jacqueline S. Homan's Blog
Nothing You can Possess
Classism for Dimwits

Noah's Wife

2010-08-08T12:52:00.004-05:00

Noah’s Wife: 5500 BCE
by T. K. Thorne
(Chalet Publishers / 0-984-08364-2 / 978-0-984-08364-0 / October 2009 / 366 pages / $16.95 / $15.25 Amazon / $4.99 Kindle)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

The title is a little deceptive, in that this is not a Bible-based retelling of the story of Noah, his family, their animals and an ark that enables them all to survive a flood. It is rather an attempt to recreate a very particular world, that world of Neolithic humans, over 7,000 years ago, living along the shores of a freshwater lake in what is now Anatolia, a world just beginning the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and farming, where tribal peoples are beginning to settle into established towns. It is a new world, torn between worship of an earth-mother-goddess and a sky-father-god, where time is measured by seasons and the phases of the moon, and where a human is old at forty. There is no such thing as a written language; knowledge, traditions, and skills must be passed verbally and by demonstration, and the people living in the villages across the mountains are foreigners. This world is realized very thoroughly and skillfully; the author conveys very well the feeling that this is truly the dawn of civilization, the seed time from which all the rest of human history sprouted. This material was the dimmest of cultural memories to the various writers of the Old Testament books of the Bible – as well as scribes recording in other traditions. A scattering of these traditions and names are worked into the story: Tubal-Cain, Vashti, a garden in Eden. Accounts of a horrific, world-ravaging flood is common currency in folklore; a race-memory which argued such a shattering event had really occurred – and if not extended world-wide, at least happened in a place where humans lived, and survived the experience, passing down the stories to their descendants.

While many historians had placed the source of the Noachian flood tale in pre-historic Mesopotamia, in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, T.K. Thorne moves it to the shores of the present Black Sea. Recent explorations have pretty well proven that the lake was once much smaller, and river-fed, rather than a salt-water body, open to the Mediterranean, although it is still a matter of conjecture as to whether it filled gradually, or in one catastrophic rush of salt-water. The author builds her plot around the catastrophic-rush scenario; but takes the time and the most of the book to relate the lives of Na’amah, the wife of Noah, her family and her friends, and the circumstances which lead to them and their herds and working animals, all taking refuge in a house built like a boat. Besides being a wife, Na’amah is also shepherdess, seer and priestess – and afflicted with Ausberger’s syndrome, a relatively mild form of autism. Na’amah sees and notices much, being almost inhumanly observant and hypersensitive to certain stimuli. She relates very well to animals, obsessively well, but less well to people. Being a story written in the first person has its limitations, in that we hardly ever see the character telling the story from the outside, but in this case, it makes for a tightly focused tale, and a singularly unforgettable character.

See also: The BNN Review
Theresa Thorne's Website

The Brimstone Papers

2010-08-01T12:15:00.003-05:00

The Brimstone Papers
by David Chacko & Alexander Kulcsar
(Foremost Press / 1-936-15440-4 / 978-1-936-15440-1 / June 2010 / 244 pages / Amazon $13.47 / Kindle $5.99)
Reviewed by Dr. Al Past for PODBRAM

The Brimstone Papers is a worthy successor, or perhaps more accurately, a worthy predecessor (though published later) to Gone Over, reviewed by me for PODBRAM on September 16, 2009. Taken together, the two books amount to a fictional narrative of the adult life of a real historical character of note during the American Revolution, Israel Potter. The Brimstone Papers deals with Potter's life as a young man as the Revolution lurches into motion. Gone Over opens with Potter as a captive of the British and his recruitment by them to spy on his countrymen. It is an extraordinary life, and Mssrs. Chacko and Kulcsar have rendered it in a highly readable and absorbing fashion.

Recapping the Wikipedia entry, "Israel Potter (1744-1826) was... born in Cranston, Rhode Island. He had been a veteran of the Battle of Bunker Hill, a sailor in the Revolutionary navy, a prisoner of the British, an escapee in England, a secret agent and courier in France, and a 45-year exile from his native land as a laborer, pauper, and peddler in London." Such a man is clearly a fine subject for fictional treatment, all the more so because most details of his life are largely unknown.

The two books flesh out Potter's life in most convincing and stylish manner. Perhaps their finest accomplishment is conveying the sense of the times – grand times, we think today: revolution was in the air. Great deeds were being done, by our worship-worthy forefathers. But few people would have thought that at the time. The colonists would have felt terribly over-matched against the mighty British Empire, sandwiched between British Canada and the (mostly) British Caribbean, threatened by large, well-equipped armies (including German) conquering American cities at will. Spies and loyalists were everywhere. Everything was in doubt, living was hard, and fear and anxiety would have been the order of the day. Chacko and Kulcsar convey this ambience well, much better than conventional histories— but then ambience is one of the strengths of good historical fiction, or it should be.

As The Brimstone Papers opens, Israel Potter is a young man who obtains some land at long odds and is beginning to work it and make a life for himself (after an unhappy episode as a sailor, not described in the book). Harshly raised by his grandfather and inclined to oppose British oppression by whatever means necessary (rendering him a lapsed Quaker), he is sent to report to a relative, a rich, domineering merchant opposed to independence in Providence, Rhode Island. The events which follow result in his joining the militia and seeing action at the battle of Bunker Hill, splendidly described and perhaps the most riveting section of the book.

Gaining a measure of responsibility from his experiences, Potter joins the crew of a hastily prepared warship, badly outfitted under a captain of dubious effectiveness, and sails into a complete disaster. This is the point at which the companion volume, Gone Over, opens. The venality of war profiteers, the incompetence of authority, and the turning of the coats of those of feeble loyalty make today's diplomatic snarls seem tame, however similar. Even Israel Potter was not immune. If he is a hero (I wouldn't call him one), he is a hero with an asterisk by his name.

Both The Brimstone Papers and Gone Over are first-rate, worthwhile reads. I would rate them with the Aubrey/Maturin series of historical novels by Patrick O'Brian, surely the touchstone of the genre.

See also: David Chacko's Echo Five
David Chacko's Devil's Feathers
David Chacko's Website

Blogging for Authors

2010-07-28T14:00:00.003-05:00

I have been mulling over for months writing an article about blogging for the many authors who read PODBRAM, and the time is finally here. My personal history is that I bought myself a Christmas present in 1998 so I could jump onto the much ballyhooed super highway at the beginning of 1999. I had been waiting for the Windows 98 era to usher in a decent level of computer power and I was not disappointed. I spent most of 1999 learning about the internet and the new phenomenon of POD publishing; then I spent most of 2000 editing and technically preparing my first book, derived from articles that had already been published in a local newsletter during a period spanning more than a decade.

My next order of business was getting involved in the publishing of my own website. In order to learn as much as possible about the many procedures and concepts of website development, I wanted to learn each technique on my own. My first website was a very simple one built with Netscape Composer and hosted for free from my local dial-up ISP. It did not take very long to discover the many limitations of that concept, so the next thing I did was to buy a copy of FrontPage 98 and learn the intricacies of that software. I put up with many aggravations from FrontPage 98, combined with a basic pay site server at WebIntellects, until WI changed over to the later FP 2002 system. I got the '02 update, learned that system, and soldiered onward, but the whole thing was slowly becoming more unwieldy. The last straw for me was when I could not hang onto Windows 98 SE any longer and the time for this IBuyPower beastie that I use now had arrived. FrontPage had to be retired at that point.

Although I did not mention it earlier, I purchased the e-tabitha URL for ten years back in early '01, and I have been carrying my little URL from server to server and system to system during most of the past decade. By 2005 I could no longer ignore this thing called Blogger. The more I struggled with Frontpage 2002, the more I felt like an idiot when Blogger was essentially a free website server. I do not even remember what my first blog was - I have had so many. I began by setting up a blog separate from my e-tabitha website, but the more I worked with Blogger, and the more the company kept updating their software, making website management easier and easier, the more deeply I became entrenched as a serious fan of Blogger. At this point, you may be wondering if I have tried WordPress. The answer is that I have considered it, but the bottom line is that I like the KISS Principle too much. WordPress seems to offer a higher level system that caters to those who are more than a little computer literate, but whenever I have compared WP with Blogger, the direct simplicity of the latter wins every time. This is going to be a strong recommendation for Blogger. You will have to look elsewhere for information about WordPress because I know very little about it.

I have ten blogs now. Don't panic: only four of them are active. Two are just placeholders from older blogs to direct readers to their new equivalents. The remaining four are ones that I staked a claim to because I may want them later. They happen to be political subjects that someone else might suddenly claim at any time if I had not already done so. The placeholder blogs are just one of many concepts why I like Blogger so much. You can add, subtract, delete, archive, or rename your blogs at any time, and the Blogger system supports your efforts without a big cat fight. In other words, Blogger is very good at evolving and adapting to your needs, and that is one of my favorite characteristics of Blogger.

One of my cats could probably set up a blog at Blogger, at least a blog of the more basic, default nature. All you have to do is go to Blogger and follow the simple steps. My purpose in writing this article is not to take you through the process step by step, although that might have been my plan at one time. I think by this point, most everyone who reads PODBRAM is already more than a little familiar with how blogs look and operate. They are basically designed to look like a newspaper with three vertical columns containing a center column of text called posts and side columns of basic, strategic information and links that is used to guide the reader to whatever particular information he seeks. As soon as you sign up at Blogger, you have to select a theme. Some of these themes, or formats if you will, contain only two columns instead of three. The Harbor theme I have chosen for all my blogs is one of those few containing only two columns. I particularly like this theme because I do not want my blogs to look like a newspaper layout. The newest theme-oriented addition to the Blogger system are somewhat more exotic layouts with pictures that do not scroll and center columns of text that do. There may even be one of these with only two columns, but I have not investigated this issue because I am happy with the Harbor theme I have. Anyone who is setting up a new blog should experiment with these themes and formats, as well as colors, fonts, and other details until you have found the style that suits you. As I said, one of the best things about Blogger is how easy it is to make changes as you go. As an author, of course I want all my proofreading to be perfect, and this was always a headache with FrontPage and other systems I have used. With Blogger, if you find a missing comma when and where you have least expected it, on a post you just made or one you wrote a year ago, you can fix the mistake quickly and easily.

Google owns both Blogger and Picasa, and this makes the whole system even more agreeable. Just sign up for a Google account and password and then use it at Google, Blogger, and Picasa, the photo wrangling program similar to Yahoo's Flickr. I installed Picasa directly on my computer, as well as use it to store my photos at Blogger. The online Picasa stores all the pictures that are in all my blogs on their server. All the photos in my computer are in the Picasa version that is installed inside my computer. I use the at-home Picasa almost exclusively to crop photos because the Picasa cropping system is the simplest I have found. Remember that I love The KISS Principle! All of this stuff is totally free. Remember when I said I was feeling like an idiot struggling with FrontPage?

One of the neatest things about Blogger is their Elements page. You can go to what is called Design and click on Elements to add to your blog. These include link lists, photos, slide shows, polls, archive lists, and others of somewhat lesser common interest. Whenever you write a post, the title of that post is also a link back to that post. You can build your blog navigation however you want, using link lists, archives, or whatever. My blogs are designed to all be identical in their navigation. I build an alphabetical link list of every post I write. The archives by month and year are retained further down the left column, or sidebar, as most bloggers call it. I often put a poll at the top of the page that I set to expire at the end of the month and then I usually compose a post about the results. You can set up these lists, polls, and other elements in many different ways, in alphabetical order or in the order you choose.

The biggest limitation I have found to Blogger is the insertion of photos. You can choose the photo from your files, select small, medium, or large for its size, and left, right, or center for its placement, but that is about all you can easily do. The photo can be very large if you want, and the viewer can click it and the large version will open in another window; however, without using the HTML page offered by Blogger, this is about all you can do with pictures. If you are more adept with HTML than I am, you may wish to venture into these deeper waters where you can place your pictures more specifically within your posts. As I have mentioned, though, if you are this competent with HTML, you may wish to go check out the WordPress competition. If you look at the layout of not only PODBRAM, but any of my blogs, you will quickly notice that each post has exactly one photo. There are a very few exceptions to this. You can place a pair of medium-sized photos side by side or three small ones in the same manner without too much despair, but when you look at the column widths, particularly with the three-column layouts, you will see why it generally looks better with only one photo per post. As the commercials always say, your results may vary.

The next limitation at Blogger I want to point out concerns the use of text. There is a drop down box with a few font choices for each post, and you can choose the size as well. However, I strongly recommend that you check out some of these choices in several different browsers and monitor resolution sizes before settling on your final choice. There is a lot more variation in exactly how the page displays according to the browser and resolution setting than you would expect. The next hint I am going to tell you should be in bold red text. If you compose directly into Blogger, fine, but if you compose in a Word document and then copy and paste it into Blogger, you might be heading for the biggest Blogger storm of all! When you least expect it, some bit of Word formatting will block Blogger from accepting the post. The trick is very simple: copy and paste your Word composition into WordPad and then copy and paste that into Blogger. It's works like a charm every time! You will likely lose any italics or other formatting details, but you can go through your Blogger document and easily correct these. You are likely to have a number of links in mind as you compose your post and you can add these in the final Blogger version, too.

Soon after you get your blog up and running, I recommend that you go to Google Analytics and set it up for your blog. This may require a bit of copying and pasting a little HTML code into your blog, but the instructions at Google Analytics are quite simple. You also should add your blog's URL to Google's search engine while you are at it. Remember when I mentioned that e-tabitha had traveled with me through many different systems? You can also purchase your own URL and use it on your blog instead of something like elmerfudd.blogspot.com. If you stay with the default system, you can name your blog whatever you want and the dot blogspot dot com will follow it. Once you have selected your URL and turned it into Google's search engine, and set up Google Analytics to track your traffic, the next thing you should do is to add Feedjit. Go to Feedjit.com and follow the instructions. As with GA, the instructions are very easy and straightforward. You can even tell Feedjit you are with Blogger and Feedjit will know just what to do. The result of all this is that Google will have your blog's URL in its system so when a potential reader puts Elmer Fudd in Google, your blog will come up on the list. Of course it helps if you are a lot less famous with a name like Floyd M. Orr so your blog is not listed on page 5000 of the Google results. If your name is too similar to a much more famous name, you might wish to consider naming your blog something else. Google Analytics will track your traffic on a day to day, week to week, month to month, and even year to year basis. Feedjit tracks your visitors on a right now basis. When your blog is young and attracting very few readers, watching your Feedjit results will be less exciting than watching grass grow or paint dry. After it picks up speed, and this could take a lot longer than you would like, you will find Feedjit's results to be fascinating reading! Feedjit will tell you where your visitors are coming from and where they are going when they have had all they can stand of you. It will show you the cities they live in and the types of computer systems they use, and of course, it will tell you which pages they are hitting and how long they are staying there. The one flaw I have found is that when you have a link to something in the post, even a picture that blows up when you click it, the visitor might leave soon after her arrival and appear not to return. The catch is that she is probably hitting the Back Button after visiting the link you inserted, but when she returns to continue reading your post, Feedjit does not seem to respond to her use of the Back Button.

Here is the hardest question in blogging, folks. How do you attract the largest number of visitors of the type you wish to attract, and how do you keep them coming back for more? The bad news is that a huge number of people out there surfing the innertubes seem to have the interests of Wal-mart shoppers in the checkout line with the patience of four-year-olds! In other words, a lot of potential readers are going to respond only to your latest posts and the latest links to those posts from other blogs and websites. When I mentioned link lists earlier, I said they could be configured in several different ways. One of the neatest things about Blogger is that you can set up a type of link list that allows new posts from any other Blogger blog to which you link to float to the top of any link list as a new post is added to that particular blog. Of course you can set up a link list, usually in alphabetical order, of a type that is static, but everywhere your blog is listed in a floating list, this is an issue that can affect your traffic. This system is really neat in the way it brings attention to new posts for readers, but you can see how an unscrupulous blogger could easily abuse this system. Let's hope that PODBRAM readers and bloggers are of a higher caliber.

The traffic issue continues as a function of how often you choose to post. The more often you post, the more visitors will continue to come to see whatever new stuff you have added. The downside of course is that if you try to post too often, with most of your posts offering very little value to your readers, they are not going to be happy with that arrangement for very long, either. Some people, particularly established celebrity commentators and such, post at the same time once a week instead of trying to constantly keep up with The Joneses. There is usually very little need to post more often than once daily, but after a while, you will see how difficult even this repetition can get. Twice or three times a week has usually worked well for me, and when I say that, I am not referring to all four of my blogs. Most of the time at least a couple of them are being ignored for weeks or even months at a time. Assuming you are only setting up one blog, I would recommend that you shoot for regular posting no less than once a week, but rarely more than once a day. Keep in mind, too, that if you do not set up a specific link navigation system in the sidebar, as I have done with all my blogs, the regular Archive system can get really unwieldy over time, with respect to a reader seeking out a particular post or subject.

This brings us to the final issue, one that should specifically be vital to any author setting up a blog. The subject matter can vary all over the map. You can be very specific or very general in your choice of subject matter. You can cover several different subjects if you choose. You can cover all your books or only one. The big catch is that unless your name is Stephen King or Anne Rice no one gives a rat's ass about your stupid little POD book. You have to offer the readers a reason to come visit. Of course your mom will read your blog just because you are you, but attracting strangers to read your little blog of twenty ways to say buy my book because it's good can be a real challenge. When I explained to you my personal blogging history, what I was trying to show you is that you can evolve your blog as your ideas grow and develop. Some of my blogs do not appear to be as old as they actually are when you look at the dates of the posts. That is because some of the material has been shifted around and linked to other sources as the Blogger system and my knowledge of my own goals has evolved. If you have only one book or several books, all about the same subject matter, this process will be much simpler for you, but the more convoluted your subject matter or the information you wish to impart with your blog, the more complicated these traffic issues will become.

Try to envision what kind of readers you wish to attract and where they will come from to your blog. The more links you can put out there on other blogs, the more traffic you will get. Just remember, too, that the more specific these linking blogs are to the subject of your blog, the more attractive your blog will be to that potential traffic. On the other hand, the wider the span of material covered on your blog, the more blogs there are that might be appropriate to link to your blog. This system presents a particular Catch 22 for relatively unknown authors. If your material is very specific, you might attract some very voracious readers of your material, but their numbers could be very distinctly limited. On the other hand, if your material is more varied, you have more options open to you when choosing the subjects you post about, as well as the number of blogs upon which you can offer your link. Only a tiny percentage of your potential audience is going to visit your blog just to buy your book. You have to offer them whatever more than that that you can conjure up. The more diverse reasons you can offer a potential audience to visit your blog, eventually the traffic will increase and watching Feedjit scroll will become more exciting than reading ten different ways to buy my book!

No Good Like It Is

2010-07-26T07:51:00.004-05:00

No Good Like It Is
by McKendree R. Long III
(CreateSpace / 1-450-58078-5 / 978-1-450-58078-6 / April 2010 / 332 pages / $15.00 / B&N $10.80 / Kindle $4.99)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

No Good Like It Is is one of those narratives usually described as episodic, rambling and picaresque. The plot is the journey – and the point of the journey sometimes seems like an afterthought. If it were a motion picture, it would be that kind of Western wherein a pair of oddly assorted pals wanders through adventures involving the usual genre Western characters: Indians, bad-men, renegades, an assortment of women of rather elastic virtue, drunks, crooked sheriffs and former slaves.

The story of West Point officer Thomas “Dobey” Walls and his sidekick, enlisted soldier Jimmy Melton really seems to fall into three separate parts. The first is a prologue of how they meet and become acquainted during the late 1850s, when both are in the US Army, stationed on the wilds of the far frontier. It takes about ten chapters and seventy pages to establish their friendship and their characters – and since the whole meat of their adventure is their Civil War experience as part of the fabled cavalry unit, Terry’s Texas Rangers, and their journey home from the war, those first chapters seem a little like marking time, waiting for the real adventure to begin. Conversely, the Civil War portion of the book seems also a little rushed. Surely Terry’s Rangers had a great deal more going on during 1861-65, which would have given enough scope for a full set of wartime adventures and derring-do for the two of them?

Anyway, the real adventure begins when the two of them head home again, across the war-blasted South, with the eventual goal of finding Dobey Walls’ surviving family, who may or may not be still at an isolated trading post in the present-day Panhandle. Who knows if they are still alive, for what with the war and all, he hasn’t been in touch with them for years?

The historical research regarding things like military gear and uniforms is impeccable, if sometimes a little overly detailed, and including elements like the Confederate Cherokee characters is an excellent touch. The Civil War was extremely complicated – even in Indian Territory. I would wish for a little more of a sense of place, and landscape, since the journey of Walls and Melton takes place over a wide swath of the South and West. And what seems like an irrelevant development regarding a stolen payroll is a lead-in to a sequel – so, the rambling journey will continue, for sure.

See also: Celia's BNN Review
McKendree R. Long's Website

Kidnapped

2010-07-09T08:28:00.003-05:00

Kidnapped by Maria Hammarblad
(CreateSpace / 1-451-59470-4 / 978-1-451-59470-6 / May 2010 / 268 pages / $12.95 / B&N $11.65 / Kindle $2.99)
Reviewed by Donna Aviles for PODBRAM

Tricia Risdon is a young woman, driving home on a winter’s night, when she is suddenly and frighteningly taken aboard a spaceship after nearly colliding with a man who appeared from nowhere in the middle of the road. Confused and unaware of the dire circumstances she now finds herself in, Tricia is confronted by the only occupant of the spaceship – Alliance Commander Travis 152 – an intimidating man with a disfigured face who speaks an indecipherable language. After the Commander places a machine around Tricia’s head, she is able to comprehend his words as if translated into her own native English.

Travis soon learns that he has taken Tricia prisoner in error – that she is not working in partnership with William, the rebel who had appeared in front of her car on the lonely Colorado road. He is now faced with the dilemma of what to do with her and decides that she is not a threat to him or his ship and lets her roam freely.

Travis and Tricia find themselves attracted to one another and they soon become lovers, with Travis replacing his lifelong programmed allegiance to The Alliance with a newfound allegiance to Tricia. The remainder of Kidnapped, by Maria Hammarblad, is the adventure-packed and sometimes harrowing journey of the unlikely couple’s quest to break free from the ruthless control of The Alliance and make their way safely back to Earth.

I would have liked to have had more of a background on Tricia since the story takes place over the course of a year’s time and we never learn anything about her life or family on Earth. Additionally, there are many characters in the book that were not fully developed that would have given the story more depth.

I found this to be an interesting storyline that began a bit slowly but picked up the pace as it went along. Two thirds of the way through, it became harder to put down as the action heightened. Technically, there were some spelling errors but not enough to cause serious distraction. If you’re looking for a science fiction novel with a romantic twist, Kidnapped is worth a look.

See also: Maria's Amazon Page
Maria's second book, Undercover

Knoxville 1863

2010-07-04T19:39:00.003-05:00

Knoxville 1863 by Dick Stanley
(Lulu/CS / 0-557-29707-9 / 978-0-557-29707-8 / February 2010 / 228 pages / $14.50 / B&N $13.05 / CreateSpace $7.98 / Kindle $1.99)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

The American Civil War began nearly a hundred and fifty years ago and ended after four years of savage fighting. There is no one left alive today with first-hand memories of that paroxysm of incredible violence that shattered the United States and then roughly stitched it together again. And the memories, especially in the South are barely diluted, even after all this time – for it was the bitterest kind of war, happening among kin and one-time friends, as it did. Fighting took place along the Washington DC/Richmond axis as the opposing armies menaced each others’ capitals, slashed across the South from Atlanta to the sea, all down the trans-Appalachian waterways and the Mississippi River, in Kansas and Missouri, which bled and bled again – and even as far west as Texas and New Mexico. Even places far removed from battlefields were not left unscathed, for the armies in blue and grey were recruited and marched away from everywhere, to the cheers of the hometown folks. But after three years of fighting, the cheers are muted, the war seems to have lasted forever, and blasted the ordinary pre-war lives of its characters into a thousand fragments. But still they carry on; and this story touches on some of the reasons why and how.

Knoxville 1863 is a worms-level view of a shatteringly unsuccessful Confederate assault on a heavily fortified earthwork bastion, a key part of the Union Army lines defending Knoxville, Tennessee. Knoxville was a strategic nexus, in an area of East Tennessee which had not favored secession, but where many local citizens had familial connections to the Confederacy. This is made plain in the opening chapter, where Leila Ellis, the young widow of a Confederate officer brings a special meal to the young Union officer commanding the Sanders redoubt. The Union was besieged at Chattanooga; and a force under General Longstreet was supposed to prevent the Union Army of Ohio from coming to reinforce. Longstreet threw elements of three brigades at Ft. Sanders in a bungled surprise attack, thinking that his infantrymen would be easily able to climb the sides of a ditch before the redoubt and overwhelm the relatively untried Union garrison. Instead, the ditch below Ft. Sanders turned into a kill-zone, with one of the most lopsided casualty rates of the whole war: more than 800 Confederate to a dozen Union.

This reconstruction of the event, the days leading to it, and the existence of those involved, and the aftermath, conveys the fluid mix of 19th century stoicism and elaborately observed social custom. Knoxville 1863 and A Civil General are two of the best recent novels that I can think of which bring out a sense of this. These are not modern Americans, dressed up in period clothes. The author weaves an intricate web of characters, of soldiers and artillerymen on both sides, men and boys – the relatively untried Union troops on reduced rations, the battle-worn Confederates starving and shoeless, all of them feeling the cold of a bitter winter in east Tennessee. The various characters are expertly drawn; the details of their lives, their friends and their various sympathies are conveyed in spare and workmanlike language. Each chapter and each character is almost a period steel engraving, full of vivid and authentic detail. The only criticism that can be made of this structure is that readers expecting a single straight-line narrative, featuring an unmistakably central character may be a little disappointed at having their attention and sympathetic interest split among that handful that carry the story more or less equally.

See also: The Author's Website
Dick Stanley's Amazon Page
The PODBRAM Review of A Civil General
Celia's Review at The Deepening
Celia's BNN Review of Knoxville 1863

Still a Bitch

2010-07-01T15:50:00.003-05:00

Rachel Cord, P.I., Still a Bitch:
A Confidential Investigations Mystery
By R. E. Conary
(Outskirts Press / 1-432-75879-9 / 978-1-432-75879-0 / May 2010 / 270 pages / $16.95 / Amazon and B&N $12.20)
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

Rachel Cord is a private detective, who wants to save enough money to have a breast reduction from double H to a C-cup or at least a B. She is also a lesbian who picks up beautiful women easier than cutting ice cream with a red-hot knife. Most men would envy how fortunate Cord is. I did.

When Cord is handed a missing person's case, she cannot turn it down since she needs the money to make her house payment. However, there are plenty of challenges. Rachel has a PI license to practice in Philadelphia, PA, but not across the river in New Jersey. She also has beautiful lovers on both sides of the river, and she's in danger of losing Wendy when her kinky tryst with Danny (the missing man's sister) is discovered.

Cord's problems get worse when most of the clues turn up in New Jersey, and there's a New Jersey cop who hates her and wants to throw her in jail. If she doesn't have enough challenges working on the wrong side of the river, the Philadelphia police want to know where Cord's former lover Karen is hiding. It seems that Karen is a serial killer who has been leaving a trail of dead bodies across the country, and she may be back in town.

Although I ran into a "few" missing commas and a typo or two, I read Conary's book in three days. I do not read books that fast unless the story hooks me. In fact, my favorite mystery authors are James Lee Burke, Dick Frances and Tony Hillerman. Conary brews a plot to compete with these three.

See also: R. E. Conary's Website
Review of the first book in the Rachel Cord, P.I., Series

The Lake

2010-06-27T15:02:00.006-05:00

The Lake by William P. Crawford
(BookSurge / 1-439-23530-9 / 978-1-439-23530-0 / February 2010 / 308 pages / $18.99 / B&N $17.09 / Kindle $9.99)
Reviewed by Dr. Al Past for PODBRAM

What might happen if a lake, say, in California, contained water that for some reason not only kept people healthy but also caused them to speak the truth? It's not hard to imagine that there would be consequences. The Lake is basically a thought experiment which attempts to imagine just that situation, and, of course, many of those consequences.

The lake in question, located over an unstable geological area, is presumably contaminated, if that word may be understood in a good sense, by magma underneath. The exact mechanism of the beneficial effect is never identified. News of the health effects become public knowledge, with predictable results.

With no more information than given above, one can create a considerable list of possible effects: on the health care industry and doctors, for one. As for speaking the truth, Hollywood and politics might be expected to suffer severely from such an affliction. Both are dealt with in the story, as are a myriad of other notions, the whole being shot through with a wide variety of esoterica on geology, chemistry, biology, and even Ireland.

As interesting as this book might sound, there are problems: with the capitalization (as in Science, Tropics, Boomer Generation, and so on), with the narration (As he was idly reading…, As his eyes grew heavy…, and As he squirmed restlessly… occurring within four consecutive sentences), and with generally awkward style—too much telling and not enough showing. Characterization (there were many, many characters) was thin.

Independently published books need to be particularly sharp and appealing. The title of The Lake could use some punching up, as could the cover design, and the sans serif font is not especially friendly to the eye.

This is only one reader's opinion, of course. The other end of the spectrum may be found in the back cover blurb, which claims the prose is nothing short of pitch-perfect. Anyone who finds the premise of The Lake appealing might do well to use Amazon's "Look Inside" feature or try the free sample of the Kindle edition, to make an informed decision about his or her position along that scale.

See also: Another Review of The Lake

The God Patent

2010-06-25T08:23:00.002-05:00

The God Patent by Ransom Stephens
(Numina Press – Vox Novus / 0-984-26000-5 / 978-0-984-26000 –3 / December 2009 / 298 pages / $14.95 / Amazon & B&N $13.45 / Kindle $9.99)
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

Ryan McNear, the main character in The God Patent, is behind on his child support payments and on the run from the Texas law. North of San Francisco, he meets Katrina, a troubled eleven-year-old math prodigy with a mother who lives in a mental fog waiting to die and join her husband in the afterlife. A friendship blooms between Ryan and Katrina as he uses his skills to develop her talent.

Ryan needs money to catch up on his child support payments so he can see his son again and rid himself of the arrest warrant and a possible prison sentence. When a friend working at a small Christian college in Texas offers him a job, he has no choice but to accept. It doesn't help that this Christian college wants to prove the existence of God using Ryan's computer programming skills to tap into the power of God providing an endless supply of electricity ending the need for America's oil dependency. How can Ryan say no?

Then there is the lovely physicist from UC Berkeley who captures Ryan's heart. Her brother, Dodge Nutter, is Ryan's landlord and his scheming lawyer.

I measure how good a book is by how fast I read it. I read Ransom's book in less than a week. Books that don't hold my attention are never finished. This is a story about relationships, life, death, science, computers and spirituality. I highly recommend The God Patent, which will do more than entertain you. It will make you think.

See also: The Author's Website
Ransom Stephens' Amazon Page

McKenzie Affair

2010-06-20T10:00:00.004-05:00

McKenzie Affair by Don Meyer
(Two Peas Publishing / 0-984-07735-9 / 978-0-984-07735-9 / May 2010 / 308 pages / $14.95 / Amazon $11.66 / B&N $10.76 / Kindle $7.99)

Although I have never read any of Robert B. Parker's books in the Spenser or Jesse Stone Series, I absolutely love the movies made of the Jesse Stone books by Tom Selleck, and Meyer's Tom Monason Series is sort of a mirror image of those. Whereas Stone is an alcoholic LA cop who retires to a little seaport resort in MA, Monason is a big city cop who retires to a mountain resort town in Northern California. Think Tahoe or Big Bear for the basic scenery, although Monason's town is a bit quieter and more isolated.

A couple of people get murdered and Monason solves the case with old-school craftiness and small-town charm, sort of like Andy Taylor without the laugh track. Monason rarely fires his six-shooter he calls a wheel gun and he has an ongoing relationship with a cute deputy a few years younger. This description could more or less be applied to Winter Ghost, the first in the series, as well as McKenzie Affair. There are many plot twists and turns in this mystery that have been deliberately not mentioned here. Just as in a typical Law & Order episode, somebody discovers a body or two in the opening scene, and then the cops and medical examiner put their heads together to try to find the perpetrator. As in the best of these episodes, the unexpected plot twists make the story entertaining.

The biggest difference between the Parker and Meyer books is probably length. Don Meyer's books are quick reads of show-don't-tell characters and dialog, with very little detailed description. I usually prefer the lengthier type of read, but not in this case. I LOVE the story lines, characters, settings, and compositional style of both McKenzie Affair and Winter Ghost! This is a review of McKenzie Affair, of course, but you may wish to go back and read Winter Ghost first for a little more background on the characters. The previous crime mentioned several times in McKenzie Affair is the same one covered in detail in the first book in the series. An addendum in the back of McKenzie Affair mentions that the third book in this mystery series will be released in 2011.

I would give McKenzie Affair five stars for providing entertaining reading except for one glaring flaw. This book, and Winter Ghost as well, need to be edited and proofread a lot more effectively, particularly the proofreading. There are missing commas and overused ellipses out the wazoo, and most of the ellipses are missing their ending punctuation. There are a number of other common mistakes, too, but much lesser in frequency. These mistakes did not slow down the reading, but I did have to consciously look past them. The publisher of McKenzie Affair states on its website that its releases display distinctively constructed design details, and these are quite evident. The printer did an excellent job, but the final proofing leaves a bit to be desired. The final verdict: technical production, C-, engrossing storyline, A+.

See also: Dr. Al Past's review of Winter Ghost
Review of The Protected Will Never Know

Reefer Madness

2010-06-09T18:35:00.004-05:00

Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
by Eric Schlosser
(Houghton Mifflin / 0-618-44670-2 / 978-0-618-44670-4 / Hardcover 2003 / Paperback April 2004 / 352 pages / $13 / B&N $9.36 / Amazon $9.10)

Reefer Madness is not the absolutely must read that Fast Food Nation most certainly is, but it’s a worthwhile history lesson in America’s underground economy. In fact, The Underground Economy should have been the title, and I am not sure why it was not used instead. In deference to the 1930’s scare tactic movie about the ridiculously overstated dangers of recreational marijuana use, the topic is covered extensively in the first fifty or so pages of Reefer Madness, but that should hardly be sufficient to entitle the book. Reefer Madness was promoted as Eric Schlosser’s follow-up to his groundbreaking, muckraking, and excellent Fast Food Nation, and to some degree, it is successfully so; however, I think this book misses the obvious topicality it should have had.

I expected Schlosser’s second work to cover three major players in America’s underground economy: recreational drugs, illegal immigration, and pornography. I can hear you say Huh? already. The first two, yes, but pornography has been legal for some time and the internet has virtually exploded with free access to such, so how can it be considered a part of the underground economy? The answer would be as an historical perspective. A large portion of the book, way too much in my opinion, is devoted to the long career of one pioneer in the pornography industry and the federal agent who worked diligently for years to bring him down. The illegal immigration part of the story is covered exquisitely and with genuine compassion, but it is far too limited, covering only the strawberry portion of the agricultural industry in California. If I had composed this book, I would have cut the porno section by two thirds and doubled the page count allotted to drugs and immigration. The drug section should have covered cocaine and other drugs more extensively, and of course, the immigration section should have covered far more industries than strawberries!

Aside from these complaints, I have to say that Mr. Schlosser’s research is impeccable and his writing style strikes a perfect balance between information and entertainment. As a modern muckraker, Eric Schlosser has few peers. He chooses his subjects carefully and bulldogs the details diligently. Reefer Madness may be a little misleading in its title and a little off the mark of the real problems of 2010, but for an historical perspective on exactly how our various black markets have developed, Schlosser’s second book is an informative read. The back pages of the book indicate that Eric Schlosser’s next subject will be our prison system, but I would prefer to read an expansion of the strawberry fields.

See also: Eric Schlosser's Amazon Page

Inside the Kill Box

2010-05-25T14:13:00.003-05:00

Inside the Kill Box
by Michael W. Romanowski
(Foremost Press / 1-936-15419-6 / 978-1-936-15419-7 / April 2010 / 256 pages / $14.97 / Amazon $13.47)
Reviewed by Dr. Al Past for PODBRAM

We are all familiar with the police procedural, but is there such a genre as a military procedural? A police procedural is "a piece of detective fiction which attempts to convincingly depict the activities of a police force as they investigate crimes" according to Wikipedia. With only a few modifications, then, a military procedural might be "a piece of military fiction which attempts to convincingly depict the activities of military special forces as they perform missions." If we can accept that, then Inside the Kill Box is a military procedural, and not a bad one at that.

Set in the early 1990s during the first Gulf War and featuring a large cast of participants all over the globe, the basic story involves suspected betrayal a decade earlier, mysterious well-funded assassins wreaking death and destruction, a Saddam Hussain turncoat to be extracted, and an assortment of military personnel and civilians of several nationalities thrown together in various military actions. Gunnery Sergeant David Sweet, a participant in most of the conflicts, provides continuity throughout.

Organized in short scenes that switch from venue to venue, the story does not invite speed-reading, at least not to me. To derive the full effect, one must carefully keep track of who is who and what is what. The technological aspects are covered thoroughly and convincingly, from the procedures to the speech to the specifics of the gadgetry. I must admit, knowing the exact model of an AK-47, or the particular modifications made to a Beretta automatic did not help me enjoy the story, but those who are attracted to military procedurals might feel differently. I was gratified, at least, that all the technology and machinery did not always perform perfectly. The "fog of war" was definitely a factor, and every mission did not always end satisfactorily. That in itself was convincing. In this respect, Inside the Kill Box is an improvement upon the Tom Clancy-type tale.

Nor are well-rounded characters typically characteristic of military procedurals. Sergeant Sweet is an individual, several cuts above a Rambo-like automaton, and several other characters were fairly interesting as well. The writing style and editing were impeccable. All in all, this is an enjoyable action story that should appeal to a large readership.

See Also: More About the Author

Above the Fray, Part II

2010-05-20T12:07:00.003-05:00

Above the Fray:
A Novel of the Union Balloon Corps, Part Two
by Kris Jackson
(CreateSpace / 1-449-51924-5 / 978-1-449-51924-7 / Spetember 2009 / 392 pages / $19.95 / Kindle $3.99 / B&N $14.36 / B&N e-book $2.85)
Reviewed by Malcolm R. Campbell for PODBRAM

Part I of Above the Fray (CraigsPress, May 2009) follows the exploits of protagonist Nathaniel Curry, a fifteen-year-old telegraph operator from Richmond, with the Union Army Balloon Corps from the Peninsula Campaign during the spring and summer of 1862 through the Battle of Antietam that September.

Part II begins as General Ambrose Burnside, who was placed in command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, is pushing into Virginia with the objective of capturing the Confederate capital at Richmond. En route, the Union Army will suffer a costly defeat at Fredericksburg in December with a battle plan that Nathaniel sees as “simple to the point of folly.”

Richmond will not fall until the spring of 1865, two years after Chief Aeronaut Thaddeus Lowe has resigned from the balloon corps due to pay and logistics disputes. The Union Army Balloon Corps, a civilian contract organization, disbands in August 1863. Curry, however, is not out of the war. There’s no precise way to say just how he stays in the war without giving away the inventive plot. Both the Union and the Confederacy want him to spy for them, for he is either an exceptionally streetwise chameleon or a man protected by the gods. He is equally at home with generals and prostitutes, with Southern slaves and northern infantrymen, and with soaring above the fray of a battlefield and with slogging it out under fire on both sides of the lines.

Taken together, parts I and II of Above the Fray give the reader a balloonist’s view of the Civil War from Atlanta to Richmond to Washington, D.C. Jackson’s research is broad and impeccable, his ear for dialogue is well tuned, and his rendering of the war from multiple theaters and perspectives is stunning.

One evening Curry and his friend Vogler are sitting in camp with several of the many historical characters, Thaddeus Lowe, James Allen and Ezra Allen reading mail:

“‘Solly,’ Nathaniel Curry said, ‘you get more mail than the rest of us together.’
“‘Vogler looked over his glasses at him and smiled.
“‘What are you reading now? What language is that?’
“‘It’s German. This is the journal of the Royal Society of Prussia.’
“‘Wouldn’t they speak Prussian?’
“‘No. You’re thinking of Russia where they speak Russian.’
“‘Oh. The letters aren’t the same as ours.’”

Vogler then tells his fellow aeronauts he’s reading an account of several record-setting balloon ascents by aerialists Henry Coxwell and James Glaisher in England who reached a height of over 37,000 feet. The second flight occurred about the same time the balloon corps was at Antietam. The aeronauts are excited about the record, and they discuss the impact of the cold temperatures and thinner atmosphere on both the aerialists and their balloon.

Such accounts expand the reach of the novel to events far from the field of battle, greatly adding to the perspective of both the characters and the reader. Similarly, events Nathaniel observes at the Second Battle of Bull Run in Above the Fray, Part I, bring him to the attention of those conducting the controversial court-martial of Union General Fitz-John Porter in Part II where the issues of politics, command competency and scapegoats intertwine.

Is it likely that a young telegraph operator from Richmond would be on speaking terms with President Abraham Lincoln, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and multiple officers in both the northern and southern chains of command? Perhaps not, but Kris Jackson makes it credible and entertaining. Above the Fray, Part II is fine storytelling by an author who knows the territory. When Nathaniel Curry approaches Appomattox Court House in the spring of 1865, he has come a very long way from that long ago day when he inadvertently rode a balloon into the sky with Professor Thaddeus Lowe, that day when Lowe said, “The sun’ll not rise today, Nathaniel. You and I shall have to rise to meet it.”

See also: The PODBRAM Review of Above the Fray, Part One
The March of Books Review
Malcolm's Round Table Review

The Key of Solomon

2010-05-14T14:21:00.003-05:00

The Key of Solomon:
A Novel of the Last Days
by Howard F. Clarke
(CreateSpace / 1-440-48631-X / 978-1-440-48631-9 / March 2010 / 406 pages / $16.53 / B&N $11.89)
Reviewed by Dr. Al Past for PODBRAM

Jack Salter is a problem-ridden New York cop with unconventional detective skills who is sent to Albuquerque, New Mexico to bring down a wealthy CEO he believes to be exceptionally dangerous. The CEO, named Kale, uses his corporation as a cover for his ultimate goal: to acquire the ancient occult key of King Solomon, which will enable him to turn the spirit world to his purposes, the better to dominate the globe, one supposes. Murder and human sacrifice are but tools to this end. Mix in Kane's bald, ex-military security advisor and enforcer, a brave Navajo policeman, a Baptist minister unafraid to step into the battle, several rare book dealers, miscellaneous associated local policemen, a New York mobster on the hook to Salter, a couple of vicious demons from the spirit world, a troop of gangster motorcyclists, and for good measure, a centuries-old conspiracy by trusted authority figures, and you have quite a pot-boiler of a story. Will Salter put the kibosh on the bad guy? Will he even survive? Or will it be the end of the world?

Fans of this genre of tales will recognize the pattern. It need only be added that the prose is readable, with few typos and not too many miscues (such as the word "touristo”, which is not a Spanish word— the word is "turista").

Readers who anticipate a plot-driven story will not be disappointed. For my part, I found the characterizations thin and the action predictable, with everything arranged to best achieve the desired end. The plot element that came through most vividly was the city of Albuquerque, a lovely city indeed.

Nonetheless, stories where the fate of the world hangs in the balance and only One Man (or Woman) can save it are evidently quite popular. If such is your cup of tea, then you might enjoy The Key of Solomon.

See also: The Author's Website
The Author's Amazon Page

Midnight Tequila

2010-05-12T13:41:00.002-05:00

Midnight Tequila by Suzann Kale
(CreateSpace: Stardust Zoo / 1-449-51564-9 / 978-1-449-51564-5 / March 2010 / 232 pages / $12.00 / Kindle $6.39)
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

Solange Duval, the fifty-two-year-old main character in Midnight Tequila, is a woman who enjoys her hot flashes, her booze, and her drugs, but misses her husband Paul-Michel, who died from cancer years earlier. Although it is never clear where the money comes from that supports her almost plush lifestyle, she does earn cash as a 900-line telephone Tarot Card reading fortuneteller. I suspect Paul-Michel may have had money or an insurance policy but that is never mentioned.

Solange also dreams of success playing the harp, and when it finally looks like she's made it in Rio, she sabotages the chance by a few flawed notes and returns to Texas.

Throughout the novel, Solange often remembers moments with Paul-Michel. To me, it was obvious her depression and need for booze and drugs was to stay numb. He may have been the only person who understood her. Even having regular sex with kinky Carlo, who tries hot-wax sex, seems to be an attempt to forget. In fact, Solange doesn't seem to have much to enjoy from life. For a companion, Solange has Bunny May, a wise, toothless diabetic cat, who shouldn't be drinking milk but does.

The story is nicely balanced between the 900 calls and Solange's "trips" through life with her equally strange friends. Solange is not a stereotypical character. She is a uniquely challenged individual and an almost lost soul, and that is what makes this story worth reading.

At times, Solange comes off as a sexy, ditzy airhead, who even in her 50s turns heads with her cute figure. She writes in a dream journal of dark places that reminded me of someone suffering from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). There are hints that she may have been sexually abused earlier in life and Paul-Michel rescued her, the only man she probably ever loved, and losing him solidified her PTSD.

This novel, which meanders through the head of someone who has almost lost herself to darkness, is an intriguing character study and it isn't a nice place to be if you are Solange, but it is worth the read if you are someone who enjoys stories that do not follow a formula genre outline. I enjoyed reading Midnight Tequila and recommend it.

See also: Suzann's Amazon Page
Suzann's Authors Den Page
The Author's Stardust Zoo Website

Love and Synergy

2010-05-04T08:04:00.004-05:00

Love and Synergy: Words Dedicated to Family and Friends By Rebecca Loyd
(AuthorHouse / 1-438-99955-0 / 978-1-438-99955-5 / November 2009 / 160 pages / $13.99 / Hardcover $22.99)
Reviewed by Malcolm R. Campbell for PODBRAM

“Rev. Jimmie Ray Loyd, age 61 of Jacksboro, died June 27 at his home. He was an Ordained Baptist Minister in 1980 and was founder and pastor for the past 25 years of the Pioneer Baptist Church. He was loved by family, friends & all who knew him.” -- The LaFollette Press, LaFollette, TN, July 3, 2004

Obituaries are news carefully written in an age-old, one-size-fits all style, that informs readers about what happened without—in most modern newspapers—conveying the full emotional import of the event and the days leading up to it from the perspective of family and friends.

When Jimmie Ray Loyd was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, he asked his daughter to share his story. In Love and Synergy, Rebecca Loyd accomplishes this request in a straightforward, heartfelt manner that honors her father and family while offering comfort to others facing a terminal illness.

Love and Synergy is a story about the last year of a man’s life, and it begins with a memory of Jimmie and his wife Beatrice building a fire in the potbelly stove of the church that Loyd founded while their children Yvonnia, Jimmy and Rebecca play nearby and try to ignore the cold.

During the first fifteen years of his ministry at the Pioneer Baptist Church, the Reverend Loyd continued his day job in the construction business. However, the congregation wanted him available on a full-time basis. Rebecca Loyd writes that “when Dad was first diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, we became angry that his retirement has been taken from him. In retrospect, he had been given the opportunity for ten glorious years to focus on what he loved most—serving as pastor of Pioneer Baptist Church.”

The journey Jimmie Loyd and his family took during his last year moves quickly from old memories to a doctor’s appointment to learn why he looks and feels so tired. After his physical, Loyd says he’s okay and that he will check in with the doctor again after they get back from a trip to Oregon to visit his son Jimmy and his wife Amy.

Once in Oregon, it’s obvious Loyd is more than simply tired. Hospital tests show he has leukemia and more testing shows that the form of leukemia he has is “a vicious disease… that affects red blood cells, platelets, white blood cells, and bone marrow.” The family fathers, an aggressive treatment program is prescribed, and remission comes and goes on a hope-against-hope rollercoaster ride of emotions during good days and bad days.

Known up and down the hall as “the preacher man from Tennessee,” Loyd fights his vicious disease with a positive attitude and determination that endears him to the hospital’s staff and volunteers. The staff sees the love and support of his family as they face each turning point and hard decision including the one to go home to Tennessee when there is nothing else the hospital can do. His doctors and nurses give him a standing ovation on the day he is discharged.

Love and Synergy is a story about the Reverend Jimmie Loyd, and his faith runs through it like a deep river. Love and Synergy is also a story about a family’s unconditional love and support for each other, and it ends as an inspiration to all who face similar journeys. The author’s father would like that.

See also:Malcolm's Round Table Review
The March of Books Review
The GoodReads Review
Rebecca Loyd's Website

Liberty's Call

2010-04-24T08:07:00.003-05:00

Liberty’s Call: A Story of the American Revolution
by Donnell Rubay
(Xlibris / 1-436-39646-8 / 978-1-436-39646-2 / April 2009 / 452 pages / $23.99)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

This is a curiously old-fashioned historical romance, which should provide a satisfactory reading experience for those who do have a fondness for such. The hero and heroine have nothing more than one seriously intense petting session over the course of an eight-year-long love-hate-mutual-attraction romance, until their inevitable marriage in the last chapter. (Sorry, I found that one romantic interlude rather uncomfortable to contemplate: on the floor of the hall? Yeesh and ugh!) Otherwise, the very old-fashionedness of it all should surprise no one who reads any further than the description on Amazon and on the dedication page. This is a careful rewrite/re-imagining of a best-selling historical novel of 1899 entitled Janice Meredith: A Story of the American Revolution by a then-leading popular historian, Paul Leicester Ford. My Grannie Jessie actually possessed a copy of it, along with a shelf-full of other turn-of the-last-century bodice-rippers by authors with three names. I remember reading it, during a long summer vacation, and I have to admit upon comparison with the original that this is a much more popularly readable and serviceable rendition of the story. This is a rather sad thought, as well as a sorry reflection upon the state of current education standards – that the original version would be as impenetrable to the popular book-reading audience as something written in the same idiom of Beowulf or Geoffrey Chaucer would be today.

But to return to the story itself – Janice Meredith (I am pretty sure that the popularity of both names is due in large part to this novel) begins as a sixteen-year-old girl, the charming and willful only child of a well-to-do landowner in the valley of the Raritan River. Her father is a bluff and hearty man, a stubborn Loyalist to British interests; her mother is deeply religious and suffocatingly respectable. They are comfortably well off, and scorn the whispers of rebellion against The Crown which are beginning to roil the quiet tenor of their lives. Their mutual ambition is arranging a marriage between Janice and Philemon Hennion, the son of a neighboring landowner of almost equal wealth. Alas, fate and The American Revolution intervene, as well as the appearance (and then disappearance) of a mysterious bondservant, Charles. It is evident almost at once that Charles is most definitely not an illiterate lower-class farm worker. He has the bearing and manners of a gentleman. Who he really is, as well as his reasons for quitting England – and a famous British regiment – at speed remain a mystery almost to the very end of the novel, even as Charles metamorphoses into a Rebel, and an aide to General Washington.

The story arc places Janice and her parents in encounters with many real-life historical characters, or as witnesses of significant events throughout The Revolution. Janice gradually matures, as events conspire to shatter the comfortable world of the Colonial squire-archy. Her parents remain Loyalists, but even so, are under suspicion from both sides, in a war that occasionally resembled more of a civil war. It was a rough rule of historical thumb, that only a third of the American colonists were outright rebels; another third were loyalists, and the remaining third in the middle maneuvered uneasily, attempting to be on whichever might turn out to be the winning side. Plot-wise, the long arm of coincidence is stretched to gossamer thinness, but this is more the doing of the original author, who in any case was attempting to educate about The American Revolution as well as to entertain with a ripping good yarn about a lively and appealing young heroine and her true love.

See also: Celia's BNN Review

The Cigar Maker

2010-04-19T11:03:00.005-05:00

The Cigar Maker
by Mark Carlos McGinty
(Seventh Avenue Productions / 0-615-34340-6 / 978-0-615-34340-2 / June 2010 / 464 pages / $19.95 / Kindle $9.99 / B&N $13.46)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

One of the joys of reading historical novels is that the reader is afforded the opportunity to open a window into another dimension, to venture into places, people and events – and as nearly as possible and given a writer of sufficient skill and imagination – to explore and experience them at first hand. There is even a bonus, when the author like Mark McGinty takes up the story of his ancestors, weaving together the many threads of the vibrant and lively community they lived in: the Cuban community of Ybor City, now part of Tampa, Florida, at the turn of the last century.

In basing a story on actual recorded historical incidents and real people, the reader is blessed with a narrative more incredible and fantastic than anything a writer could create of whole cloth – such as the incident that opens the story. Did it really happen, the losing bird in a cockfight in Ybor City, eleven decades ago, having its head bitten off by its humiliated owner? The writer’s grandfather insisted that it did, and thereby opens the tale of Salvador Ortiz, one-time rebel and bandit, and his fiercely proud and independent wife Olympia. Salvador is now a cigar maker, a man with a particular and valuable skill, but Cuba is torn by war and ravaged by epidemics. For the sake of their children, they move to Florida; not quite an out of the pot and into the cook=fire move, but not without perils and dangers. At first Ybor City is a safe refuge for the Ortiz family, an escape from violence and famine and disease. Alas, they have exchanged one set of challenges and risks for another set, only slightly less challenging. In the next few years, Ybor City and the cigar-making industry will be racked by strikes and violent confrontations between the cigar workers, the factory owners and the Anglo establishment. Salvador Ortiz, a modest man of flinty integrity, soft-spoken and yet capable of decisive action when the necessity calls for it, will almost by accident become a leader among his coworkers. He struck me as a reader, as being the most fully-developed character, the moral center of a world filled with either well-intentioned characters without the courage to act on their good intentions, or amoral barbarians all too eager to act on their bad ones. Salvador is an immensely appealing character, not least to his wife Olympia; the daughter of an aristocrat who nonetheless say something worthy in a man several degrees lower than she on the social scale.

The working-class Cuban émigré world of Ybor City, in the first years of the Twentieth Century, is lovingly detailed in the vigorous personalities, customs, conversations, foods, festivals, and the workday world of the cigar factories. The recreational cockfights and bolita games were only a small part of the entertainments brought by the Cuban cigar workers. I had never realized that there was a substantial Cuban community in Florida that early on; I had assumed that Castro’s Revolution was largely responsible for the current Cuban Diaspora. For a window into an unexpected and fascinating world, The Cigar Maker is recommended.

See also: Mark McGinty's Blog
The Cigar Maker Website
Celia's BNN Review

Al & Dianne

2010-04-17T09:15:00.003-05:00

Al Past and Dianne Salerni are two of the notorious ringleaders of IAG and PODBRAM. Al was the first author to join the review team at PODBRAM and it was Dianne's idea to form IAG. These two have belatedly become the two most gregarious and well known members of the gang.

Dianne's new traditionally published version of High Spirits, retitled We Hear the Dead, hit Amazon running just yesterday. Dianne has been spending the last few months preparing this new publication and working on the screenplay for the same story. You can keep track of Dianne and her projects at her High Spirits blog.

Al is the only PODBRAM team member who has personally met any other team member, and he knows three of us! This photo was taken a few days ago when Al met Dianne for a few hours in her home state of Pennsylvania. Celia Hayes, the mistress of the IAG website, and her daughter, have visited Al at his ranch in South Texas, and Al has been to my house in the Texas Hill Country. Al's latest release is Distant Cousin: Regeneration. You can track the adventures of Al and his alter ego, Ana Darcy, at Ana's blog.

Call Me Ted

2010-04-15T10:59:00.002-05:00

Call Me Ted
by Ted Turner with Bill Burke
(Grand Central Publishing / 0-446-58189-5 / 978-0-446-58189-9 / November 2008 / 448 pages / $30 hardcover / $11.70 Amazon / $11.55 paperback)

Call Me Ted is the best autobiography I have ever read. Of course there are many reasons for this opinion that have little to do with the quality of the composition, but I shall get to those in a minute. As a fan of Ted the businessman since he launched WTBS in the mid-‘70’s as the first satellite-powered cable station, I was eagerly looking forward to the release of this book, and I was not disappointed with any element of it. From the traditional layout of the birth, childhood, rise, and aftermath storyline to the passages written by Ted’s associates and inserted into the appropriate points within the autobiographical text, Call Me Ted is a five-star success. Harrold Robbins could not have made up a better or more topical fictional story!

Ted Turner was not born chewing on a silver spoon, nor was he in any manner coddled or spoiled throughout his childhood or young adulthood. His father instilled a powerful work ethic, sent Ted to military school, and drove young Ted toward a disciplined diligence. There were many stressful family issues involved in young Ted’s life, too, but the real action began when his dad committed suicide and thrust Ted into the family billboard business just before he was to obtain his college degree. There was a mass of mitigating circumstances surrounding even this change in Ted’s life, which I shall not reveal in this review. He developed passions for ocean sailing and business that would tend to cloud his attention to his love and family life. There is no doubt you are interested in his relationship with Jane Fonda, and this issue is covered in the story, although maybe not as completely as many readers would like. Ted’s central accomplishments of winning the America’s Cup, the building of his television empire, the development of The Turner Foundation, and his acquisition of more land mass in the USA than any other American are all covered in exhilarating detail. Is there an arrogant Mr. Turner that you might occasionally feel like bitch-slapping? Absolutely. Is there an unpretentious billionaire who has nearly always remained ethically scrupulous and relentlessly passionate? Yes. Does he operate from a pragmatic viewpoint while religiously retaining compassion for all human and environmental consequences? Yes, probably more than any other living business magnate.

This brings us to the #1 reason for my obsession with this particular businessman. As the creator of CNN and its associated Headline News cable channel, Ted always kept scruples on the conference table. Those scruples have been splattered like billiard balls on the opening break by the scumbags who forced Ted out of control of his media empire, beginning January 3, 2000. That was the date on which Jerry Levin of Time Warner decided to close a deal with Steve Case of AOL. Although it would be years before Ted actually, totally resigned from AOL Time Warner, the explanation offered in Call Me Ted by not only Ted himself, but other contributors, clearly shows how those two CEO skunks were up to no good from the beginning of that legendary mega-merger flop. Their intent was to force Ted completely out of control of the television empire he had created, even if they had to pay him a huge salary to do practically nothing. As a person who has watched CNN ever so slowly dive down into the greedy, unscrupulous, right-wing sewer pit that it has become, I was looking forward to reading the details directly from The Mouth of the South, and Call Me Ted delivers.

See also: Ted Turner at Wikipedia
Media Man: Ted Turner's Improbable Empire

Going Rouge

2010-04-10T09:22:00.005-05:00

Going Rouge:
An American Nightmare
Edited by Richard Kim & Betsy Reed
(Health Communications / 0-757-31524-0 / 978-0-757-31524-4 / December 2009 / 336 pages/ 6 x 9 15-oz. format / $15.95 / Amazon $10.85)

(Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd, London / 1-873-26251-5 / 978-1-873-26251-1 / October 2009 / 5.1 x 7.6 x 1.1 – 11.4-oz. format / Turnaround has about thirty releases at Amazon UK and a dozen at Amazon US dating from 2004-09, all in the same small format.)

(First released by O/R Books / 978-0-984-29500-5 / October 2009 / 336 pages / $16 direct / $10 e-book)

Going Rouge is a collection of recently published articles by well-known left-leaning political journalists. The list of contributors includes Jim Hightower, Naomi Klein, Jane Hamsher, Thomas Frank, Robert Reich, Gloria Steinem, Max Blumenthal, Matt Taibbi, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and many other familiar favorites. The book includes fifty articles, including an introduction by the editors. Although I had previously read practically every article in the book in the originally published online version of each article, considering my personal involvement in this release, as well as my intense study of the subject matter since August 2008, I could not resist reading the whole thing again. Part of my purpose from the beginning was to write this special review for PODBRAM. Unlike practically all other books, there will not be a version of this review released anywhere else.

A lot of specific technical and promotional knowledge concerning publishing issues can be revealed by the publishing history of this book. John Oakes and Colin Robinson are a pair of traditional publishers who founded O/R Books in 2009 to release POD books. Going Rouge is their first release under this new imprint. They have since released two more books under the O/R imprint. Through my constant research of political blogs and POD sites, I came across the news of this upcoming release last October. The publisher claimed at the time that Going Rouge would never be released for sale anywhere outside the direct O/R Books website. Due to my knowledge of the lack of success of similar projects, particularly Two Babies, a book published by an author who will not even use his real name, even when the books are marketed directly from his website, I immediately jumped into the fray. I not only contacted John Oakes directly, but I let several bloggers whom I knew to be interested in this vital subject matter know about the situation, also too! I described this marketing boo-boo in detail in an article at one of my other blogs on 10/24/09. The publisher changed his mind and released the book to Amazon in December and I posted an update to NIAFS 12/7/09.

There are actually three versions of Going Rouge. The O/R version is still available only directly from the publisher, and it is the only version that has been released in any electronic format. There are no Kindle or Smashwords versions. At about the same time last December when the book was finally made available at Amazon, an English edition was released by Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd. of London. The third edition is, of course, the Health Communications, Inc., version I have read for this review. The Turnaround edition can be ordered directly from Amazon UK and the HCI version can be ordered directly from Amazon US. Each of these can be ordered from other sellers at the opposite Amazon. All three versions are listed as having 336 pages, and there is no question that my copy has this number. The Turnaround edition is listed as a smaller, thicker format with the same number of pages. There is no question that smaller format is accurate because all the Turnaround books at Amazon are exactly this size. Is the paper thicker in the Turnaround version? Possibly. Is the page count incorrectly stated? Possibly. Although it is not stated on the O/R website, the O/R edition is most certainly the same format size as the Turnaround edition. How do I know this? My book includes the subtitle on the spine and an additional blurb by Geoffrey Dunn on the back. These were obviously added when they increased the format size. I strongly suspect that the Turnaround version is also POD, like the O/R version, although there is no mention of this on the Turnaround website. My best guess is that the owners of O/R Books managed to sell the rights to HCI, the publishers of the ubiquitous Chicken Soup books, at the last minute before making the Amazon deal. The contentious issue from the beginning was Amazon’s fat cut of the book’s list price. It is certainly not a stretch to sell a book such as this one to a traditional publisher.

What about the content of this collection of articles by famous writers for The Nation? For a reader who has been following the story since the beginning, there were, of course, few surprises. Matt Taibbi deserves special mention, not only because he is the spring chicken of this bunch, and one of the best new political writers of modern times, but his article is one of the best in the book. I use the term chicken on purpose because I am thoroughly convinced that descriptive applies to anyone in the MSM writing or speaking about The Palin Clan. I am apparently one of the few who is certain that Babygate is bigger than Watergate simply because so much of the mainline media and political establishment are obviously complicit in the cover-up. I have less than zero respect for any journalist who is a part of this wretched story, and that is that. The list of other Palingates is surely long enough to satisfy any journalistic hound in need of a fix, but for the pragmatic intellectuals among us, Babygate is the main issue that matters.

Do I recommend Going Rouge: An American Nightmare? Absolutely. I am not going to bother trying to get noticed on Amazon by adding another review to a long list, but if I were to post a review, I would easily rate it at four stars. No Babygate, no fifth star. Just call me hardheaded. Should these writers be considered mainline establishment? That’s a good question. Most of them seem to be caught in the purgatory between the MSM and the liberal bloggers. Libs love ‘em, but most of cable news hates them. The bottom line is that everyone should be fully cognizant of the issues covered in Going Rouge, but unfortunately only half the participants in The Second Civil War will be inclined to read this material.

See also: The Palin Digest
Assholiness Validation
Why She's Dangerous

Let's Play Ball

2010-04-08T19:05:00.003-05:00

Let’s Play Ball by Linda Gould
(iUniverse / 1-450-20760-X / 978-1-450-20760-7 / February 2010 / 248 pages / $16.95 / $13.22 Amazon / $26.95 hardcover / $17.79 Amazon)
Reviewed by Malcolm Campbell for PODBRAM

If author Linda Gould isn’t an avid baseball fan, she covers it well, for her descriptions of plays, players, locker rooms, owner’s suites and game-time tension in Let’s Play Ball will easily take readers out to the ball game. But the games between the Washington Filibusters and the Florida Keys feature more than pitchers’ duels and homeruns. A conspiracy is brewing during the game that will decide the National League championship. Fraternal twins Miranda and Jessica are at the stadium, Miranda as a guest in one of the owner’s suites and Jessica to cover the came for her sports magazine. Jessica’s fiancé, Manual Chavez is at the game, too. He’s the Filibusters right fielder.

The highly competitive sisters snipe at each other during the game. Perhaps Jessica is envious of Miranda’s marriage and her high-paying career as a budget analyst for a government agency. Perhaps Miranda is jealous of Jessica’s high-profile job and her engagement to a handsome baseball star with an exciting past in Cuba. After the game, while the teams are in their locker rooms, Manual is the victim of a crime. As the true scope of this crime looms larger and larger in the days that follow, logic might suggest that the sisters should work together, to support each other and help the police find out who’s behind the outrage.

Instead, Gould ramps up the tension with twins who become openly hostile. Miranda’s marriage to Tommy, an attorney with political ambitions, is less than perfect, so she has her own distractions. Yet, she thinks Jessica’s shock over what happened to Manuel is impairing her reporter’s instincts about the case. After all, how realistic is it to suggest that the owners of the Washington Filibusters and the Florida Keys, the President of the United States, the Cuban dictator and an assortment of baseball players and shooting range friends who are actively racist and/or promoting an invasion of Cuba were all in bed together plotting against Manual Chavez?

Jessica is convinced the police and the FBI aren’t handling the investigation properly and that everything will be swept under the rug if she doesn’t get personally involved. When Miranda urges caution, Jessica suggests that Miranda and Tommy, who both have agendas as well as skeletons in their closets, may even be involved in the conspiracy and the cover-up.

Gould’s inventive plot features feuding sisters who become tangled up with baseball strategies, high-profile officials and international politics. Jessica thinks criminals lurk in every shadow. She follows real and imagined leads with a vengeance. Ultimately, when she goes on bed rest because of her pregnancy, she must ask Miranda to help uncover the secrets behind the crime. This forces Miranda to risk her well-paying job and step outside her comfort zone.

However, the novel’s potentially taut pacing bogs down, in part by the insertion of back story information during the police investigation to cover the twins past history and partly because the conspiracy’s probable ringleaders are outside the sisters’ amateur investigative reach. Without the authority or resources for confronting government officials or engaging in private undercover operations, Miranda and Jessica spend a great deal of time speculating about the involvement of major suspects while trying to maneuver the more minor suspects into making inadvertent confessions.

The action leads toward a dangerous confrontation that fittingly unfolds during another tense ballgame. Most of the suspects are near at hand with a lot more than a game to lose, and Miranda is in a position to either act with courage or to pretend the FBI will eventually figure everything out. Gould handles the resulting showdown well. But it’s not closure. Most readers will expect the novel’s next chapter to show how the feisty twins will resolve the rest of the story.

Instead, the author appends a 23-page epilogue. Since the twins are interesting characters, some readers will come away from this epilogue feeling that Miranda and Jessica have successfully navigated a major crisis as well as many crucial personal issues and can now get on with their lives. No longer in the forefront of the action required to bring the conspirators to justice in the epilogue, Miranda and Jessica are suddenly—figuratively speaking—sitting on the bench as Let’s Play Ball wraps up the fortunes of the good guys and bad guys at some distance in summary fashion well after the fact. Action-oriented readers may feel cheated when Let’s Play Ball lifts its primary characters from the game before the final inning.

See also: The Rock Star's Homecoming
The PODBRAM Review of Secretarial Wars
The PODBRAM Interview with Linda Gould

From AA to AD, A Wistful Travelogue

2010-04-04T08:02:00.002-05:00

From AA to AD, A Wistful Travelogue
by Mike Donohue
(CreateSpace / 1-449-58367-9 / 978-1-449-58367-5 / December 2009 / 142 pages / $9.00 / Kindle $6.00)
Reviewed by Dr. Al Past for PODBRAM

Books by alcoholics who beat the odds and save themselves from that deadly disease are not rare. Often, Alcoholics Anonymous plays a central role. However, I would think that books by someone with Alzheimer's Disease who similarly rises above his affliction (also with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous) must be almost non-existent. But in fact, From AA to AD, A Wistful Travelogue, by Mike Donohue, is such a book, and I found it fascinating and inspiring.

The young Mr. Donohue was expected by his lawyer father to follow in his footsteps, and he did, for ten unsatisfying years. He entered an unhappy marriage that ultimately fell apart. Those situations and others, including a bad chain-smoking habit, left him with a terrible drinking problem that nearly destroyed his life. He bottomed out, as so many alcoholics do, and turned to AA out of desperation. Their twelve-step program finally enabled him to stop drinking and turn his life around. One can only imagine his exhilaration at being able to begin a glorious new life, a second, happy marriage, and to set new goals and repair his shattered relations with friends and family.

That all crashed in an instant when several odd symptoms sent him to a doctor and he was found to have Alzheimer's Disease, an implacably debilitating and ultimately terminal condition. It is impossible to imagine the shock of going from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. The questions one would have are easier to predict: why me? After such a great personal triumph, why this horrible fate?

Mr. Donohue did ask himself those questions. Incredibly, perhaps conditioned by his habits of introspection and personal analysis learned from Alcoholics Anonymous, he set himself to come to grips with his new reality. This book was partly the result. In clear, straightforward style, he relates his personal search for meaning in his life in a systematic, even lawyerly, manner.

The Catholic faith of his upbringing, with its rigid rules, offered neither answers nor comfort. He studied Judaism and Jewish historians, and made a trip to Israel. He moved on to the Jewish existential philosophers, Herschel and Buber, and found their ideas fit nicely with the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous. Both stressed the transcendence of the mundane: turning oneself over to the Thou, or higher power. From those he extracted three helpful tenets: do good for others, pray, and study.

Feeling at that point that he understood his own history, he went on to try to identify the spiritual significance of his life. He turned to Buddhism. Its meditations taught him ultimately to turn his disease over to his higher power as he had done with his alcoholism, to accept his suffering, and understand that having compassion and doing good for others was his final purpose in life. Thus he achieved serenity.

This review, condensed as it must be, cannot do justice to Mr. Donohue's description of the process of his journey, which, as I said at the outset, I found fascinating and inspiring. Each person's journey is his or hers to cope with, of course, and Mr. Donohue does not intend his book to be in any way a how-to volume. It is an account of his own personal journey only. For my part, I took it as a startling example of the power of the human mind to heal itself and to arrive at its place in the greater scheme of things. Surely, whatever our own individual situations might be, we can all take comfort in that possibility.

Note: I discovered Mr. Donohue's book by virtue of the fact that he mentioned one of my own books on his blog, specifically here (near the bottom, just above the red graphic). He wrote this in an email: "I am aged 73, on the down hill slide. Do not be sorry about my affliction. Even though it has me sliding it has forced such opportunity on me to get everything in my wavering brain expressed in writing or in digital art. 43 years I was a successful trial lawyer traveling throughout the country handling cases. That is small potatoes to where AD has now placed me. Now I am totally involved with who I am, have always been but could not see it until all the glitter was removed. This parting segment of life is just not all that bad.... I work feverishly at getting it all done before my mind beats me to it. This provides me a pretty satisfying life in race with the demons."

See also: Mike Donohue's Blog
Distant Cousin Touches Another Soul

America Reborn

2010-03-31T09:22:00.006-05:00

America Reborn:
Book III of the Clash-of-Civilizations Trilogy
by Lee Boyland (with Vista Boyland)
(Booklocker / 1-601-45912-2 / 978-1-601-45912-1 / July 2009 / 496 pages / $21.95 / Amazon $19.75 / Kindle $9.95)
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

America Reborn is the third novel in the Clash of Civilizations Trilogy. The first novel is The Rings of Allah and the second Behold, an Ashen Horse (great title). The United States has been attacked by Islamic Extremists showing 9/11 as a possible preview of worse things to come. Five nuclear devices have destroyed five American cities and killed millions—Washington D.C. is one of the five cities and most of the government is gone.

The trilogy was written by author and wife team, Lee and Vista Boyland. Lee has a degree in Nuclear Engineering and is a weapons expert. His knowledge rings true and readers are witness to what America's military is capable of when unleashed. Considering the state of affairs in the Middle East, this is something that may be long overdue. Too bad it only takes place in books.

I read Tom Clancy's work once-upon-a-time, and when his work was passed off to someone else to write, I lost interest. Reading America Reborn was a blast (pun intended) and the Boylands brought back the energy Clancy lost.

At first, I wasn't sure if The Boylands weren't using their novels as a soapbox against so-called "liberals" (a catchall stereotype that only exists in the minds of Rush Limbaugh ditto heads and Tea Bag people). The truth is, even in World War II, when America was fighting for survival against Hitler's Nazis and Japan, there was a movement in the United States to get out of that war early—back before the word "liberal" had been invented and used as a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in America.

In the first half of America Reborn, the "liberal" term was tossed around like popped corn labeling characters that fit the stereotype. The fact that The Boylands used the term as they did is evidence of the impact the conservative media machine has had on Americans. Come on, even stereotypical "liberals" don't all look like slobs and act like snobs. I've known far right conservatives that also act that way.

Other than this minor "liberal" glitch, the story is well written with plenty of action using high tech weaponry—something the United States has developed far ahead of the rest of the world. The American military has the ability to kill millions while losing thousands and that is without nuclear weapons. An example would be the Vietnam War (which the United States lost) where America suffered 58,193 military deaths and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong losses are estimated at over 1.3 million.

In America Reborn, George Alexander, the newly un-elected, statuary President is my kind of guy and he knows how to fight. If Islamic terrorists did nuke Washington D.C. and obliterate our elected government, we can only hope that a man like Alexander is waiting in the wings, and he is not modeled after Dick Cheney, who fumbled the second Iraq War. Fictional President George Alexander is likable and efficient. I don't think he would shoot anyone by accident while on a hunting trip. I recommend this trilogy to everyone who liked the old Clancy.

See also: Lee Boyland's Amazon Page
Lee Boyland's Website

The Fairest Portion of the Globe

2010-03-19T11:04:00.003-05:00

The Fairest Portion of the Globe
by Frances Hunter
(Blind Rabbit Press / 0-977-76360-9 / 978-0-977-76360-3 / February 2010 / 428 pages / $22.95 / Kindle $4.99)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

Once there was a time, at the turn of the century before the century before, when the United States was an infant country clinging to the Atlantic seaboard and just barely clawed together out of the original colonies by the stubborn valor of a handful of men. But even at that early date, twenty years after the Revolution, the far-sighted were already spilling over the Appalachians and into the unexplored wonder of those lands beyond, to the Mississippi River. Once there was a time, when having gone toe to toe with the parent nation of England, emerging victorious by the skin of their teeth, it seemed as if the United States might also take on another European power; that of Spain, which controlled the lower Mississippi. This time again, it seemed the former colonists could call on the aid of France, caught in the throes of their own revolution.

This is the dangerous political milieu in which two young Army officers meet and become firm friends, stationed at a crude frontier outpost commanded by a gouty and irascible hero of the Revolutionary War, General Anthony Wayne, nick-named by his comrades “Mad Anthony” and by his sometime Chickasaw Indian allies “The Black Snake Who Never Sleeps.” Both young William Clark and Meriwether Lewis have connections of a sort – Clark’s older brother is the hero of the Revolution in the west, George Rogers Clark, and Lewis is a neighbor and admirer of Thomas Jefferson. This is a small country – everyone knows everyone else, a circumstance that is very well drawn by the author. Both young men have a passionate interest in exploring the vast and untouched country that is just opening to the United States – but threats of war and treachery swirl around them both. George Rogers Clark is planning to redeem himself with a freelance march on Spanish-held New Orleans, aided by French funding and the reluctant assistance of naturalist Andre Michaux. And among the senior officers of Wayne’s garrison is the slippery and amoral James Wilkenson; paid agent of the Spanish, persistently undermining Wayne’s authority as commander and for what ends? As the tightly woven plot unfolds, the question of who is gaming who, and who is set on betraying who - and will they get away with it? - becomes ever more urgent. Woven into this tangle are such disparate characters as Clarke’s family, especially his sister Fanny and her brutish husband, fascinating details of the natural world, folk medicine, and military practice and custom of the time.

The Fairest Portion of the Globe is a very readable and lively portrait, not only of a period of American history which is underserved in popular fiction, but of the foundations of an enduring friendship between two young men, who within a few years would make an epic journey of exploration – a journey which like themselves, would become legend.

See also: To the Ends of the Earth
The Frances Hunter Website
Celia's BNN Review
The Deepening Review

Blind Delusion

2010-03-14T10:19:00.003-05:00

Blind Delusion by Dorothy Phaire
(iUniverse / 1-440-16822-9 / 978-1-440-16822-2 / October 2009 / 476 pages / $25.95 / Hardcover $35.95 / Amazon $19.72 / Hardcover $27.32 / Kindle $7.96)
Reviewed by Dianne Salerni for PODBRAM

The second novel in Dorothy Phaire’s romantic mystery series is a satisfying read and an admirable follow-up to her first novel, Murder and the Masquerade. Commencing a few months after the conclusion of the first novel, the book opens with Dr. Renee Hayes, a mature black psychologist living in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, trying to repair her damaged marriage. Renee has broken off her affair with handsome police detective, Deek Hamilton, seeing no future with a man a dozen years her junior, no matter how much attraction there is between them. She is determined to rekindle the flame of love in her own marriage, although it sometimes seems that her continued attempts to woo Bill Hayes are nothing but a blind delusion. While Bill is happy to accept any accommodations she makes for him, he is more interested in pursuing a start-up business with a shady Washington lawyer than in making his wife happy. With the arrival of her 45th birthday, Renee wonders if her dreams of love and a child of her own will ever be fulfilled.

Meanwhile, Renee’s new secretary, Brenda Johnson, is wondering if she’s been blindly deluded about her own husband. She believed that the ne’er-do-well Jerome had managed to keep himself drug-free for eighteen months, but he is unexpectedly fired from his job after a random drug test. Jerome protests his innocence, but that doesn’t change the fact that Brenda is now supporting them on her income, while attending night school and taking care of their baby. Brenda’s mother always said Jerome was trouble, and it turns out that she was right. Jerome’s work troubles eventually lead to blackmail, arson, kidnapping, and murder.

Ms. Phaire’s strength is character building. She has created a cast of believable and likeable women: We sympathize with Renee and Brenda, each bound to men who cannot give them what they want, and each of them reluctant to abandon her marriage anyway. Ms. Phaire’s narration is, for the most part, smooth and highly readable. There are some editing errors in the book, but not enough to distract the reader. I do think the novel could have been trimmed by 50 pages or so. Repeated information and unnecessary scenes slow down the pace of the story, preventing it from achieving the really taut and gripping suspense that could have been there with a more judicious editing.

Overall, Blind Delusion fulfills the potential I saw in Murder and the Masquerade and promises the continuation of a fine mystery series with a smart, professional, and highly sympathetic heroine.

See also: Dianne's High Spirits Review
Murder and the Masquerade Reviews
Dorothy Phaire's Website

The Red Turtle Project

2010-03-10T10:33:00.002-06:00

The Red Turtle Project
by Don Westenhaver
(Xlibris / 0-738-86648-2 / 978-0-738-86648-2 / April 2001 / 437 pages / $24.99 / Kindle $2.00)
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

The main plot for The Red Turtle Project is a fascinating concept and for that reason, I stayed with the story until I finished reading the book. Sam and Liang Weber are the main characters. Sam is a former Vietnam Veteran and earned enough money over the years from the oil industry to live a comfortable life with his wife in Paso Robles near the Pacific Ocean close to William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon.

Sam met his wife while he was in Vietnam during the war—sort of like the musical Miss Saigon but with a happy conclusion. They fall in love, lose contact with each other in the turmoil of the war's final days and meet again seventeen year later. This information is dealt with quickly in a few pages.

As the story opens, Liang's father, Sing Han, is murdered in Singapore. He leaves his daughter a fortune earned from legitimate businesses funded by previous criminal activities. Chinese Mandarins in Hong Kong had him killed. They are in the process of stealing the business empire Sing built, which is worth close to a billion dollars.

However, Liang's father discovered what was going on before his death and managed to hide five-hundred million around the world in various accounts. The Hong Kong Mandarins, worth billions from organized crime, are angry and they want that money. There is no limit to their greed and cruelty. They send killers to find who has the money with instructions to torture or kill anyone that gets in the way.

What Sam and Liang decide to do with the money after her father's death is what holds this story together. The couple goes to Vietnam and offers to use the fortune to help Vietnam recover from the war with America that left the country economically destitute. The title for the book is also the name for the project they fund. The Red Turtle Project is designed to build a market economy in Vietnam from the ground up instead of trickling down from the wealthy.

There are times that the story drags with too many descriptions and loose plot threads, and I found myself skipping paragraphs and some pages to catch up with the main story that involves the Hong Kong Mandarins and their endless thirst for money and power.

There were scenes in Europe that did not ring true when the killers from Hong Kong were searching for Sam and Liang. These thugs are threatening hotel mangers to gain information about Sam and Liang's whereabouts, and the police never get involved. It was as if there were no police and the thugs were free to do whatever they wanted to anyone.

There are other plot threads too, like the one with Gabriella, the daughter. This thread could have been woven better with the main plot. Gabriella is attending the University of California at San Diego as a sophomore. For a time, we join Gabriella during a romance that has nothing to do with the main story. Later Gabriella, after an attempted suicide, joins her parents in Vietnam.

Then there's another loose thread with a character named Harry Collins, a POW who escaped from a North Vietnamese prison decades earlier and has hidden out in the jungles of North Vietnam ever since. I'm not sure why he was in the story, and I imagined better ways to use this character to propel the plot forward. Maybe Harry should have had his own book.

If the flaws I discovered in the story were fixed, this could be a four-star read.

See also: The Author's Amazon Page
PODBRAM Review of Nero's Concert

Editorial

2010-03-06T05:19:00.003-06:00

Editorial by Arthur Graham
(CreateSpace / 1-450-55078-9 / 978-1-450-55078-9 / February 2010 / 136 pages / $9.99 / B&N $8.99)

This little book named Editorial has its flaws, but it does, indeed, channel Kurt Vonnegut in the same manner that Mahogany Rush and Randy Hansen channeled Jimi Hendrix shortly after his death in 1970. I could stop right here, because this is all you really need to know about Editorial. I have been a Vonnegut fan ever since my sister gave me a copy of Cat’s Cradle for my birthday back in the late ’60’s, just as I have remained a Hendrix fan since the first time I heard “Purple Haze” on my AM transistor radio. Although I have read many more of the Vonnegut classics, none has impressed me more than Cat’s Cradle, and I am pleased to report the similarities expressed in Editorial. If you liked Kurt’s famous, strange little excursion into the ozone, you should give this little copycat a read. Even if you are not impressed, the experience will not take long.

There are several obvious weaknesses in Editorial. The book is exceptionally short: with its large font and low page count, it is considerably shorter even than Cat’s Cradle. Every time ellipses are employed, and Mr. Graham has given them a full-time job, there are no periods closing the sentences. The usual lack of POD proofreading is evident, too, although it is not excessive. The author must have spent at least ten minutes designing the cover, and there are places in the terse but convoluted plotline that easily leave the reader a bit confused.

I know nothing about this author, as nothing seems to be available online about him, not even his age, although the narrator of the strange tale claims to be mature. If Mr. Graham had not mentioned the name Vonnegut in his review request to me, I would have dismissed this short, silly little work out of hand. However, the author did mention one of my favorite classic authors, so I read the first few pages of Editorial at Amazon before rejecting it. In spite of my complaints, I was not disappointed! Like The Milkman I reviewed here a while back, Editorial is clever, tacky, and even a bit obscene. Since Porky’s and American Pie are two of my favorite comedies, I can obviously handle a few of these stated qualities. The crude hand drawings and the unexpected use of XXXX’s instead of words in a few places are particularly clever.

Don’t shoot the messenger if you choose to read Editorial and find my comparison to Vonnegut ludicrous. There is only one Mahogany Rush album in my collection. Although Mahogany Rush 4 has always been my favorite, there is no substitute for the original, so my Hendrix collection is extensive. Kurt Vonnegut was one of the original masters of what you might call psychedelic reading material. There’s a new Randy Hansen on the scene carrying his magical banner.

See also: Editorial at B&N

West to the Sun

2010-03-03T19:34:00.003-06:00

West to the Sun by T. G. Good
(Outskirts Press / 1-432-75162-X / 978-1-432-75162-3 / December 2009 / 262 pages / $16.95 / Amazon $12.20)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

It is a good omen for the cover of a book intended to tell the story of the great emigrant trails across the far western frontier to feature an illustration of a covered wagon pulled by the appropriate numbers of the appropriate draft animal. The cover art for all too many works of fiction about the California/Oregon trails appear to feature a huge covered wagon hitched to two horses, an arrangement as impossible in practice as it was historically inaccurate. The unvarnished fact was that most emigrants crossing to California or Oregon prior to the Civil War hauled their worldly goods there in relatively small wagons, pulled by at least three yoke of draft oxen – for it was a brutally wearing journey, where there was often not much of a road at all, and horses were too fragile and expensive to serve as team animals. Having written my own novel about a wagon-train party, venturing to California in the early years, I can attest that having an accurate cover is a promising start for readers hoping to learn more about the wagon-train emigrants.

This young-adult historical, follows the Symons family – father Jedediah, mother Mary, eleven-year old Jeremiah, little sister Bitsy and an assortment of old friends and new-made acquaintances, as they leave their farm in Tennessee and take to the trail for Oregon. They do so with the advice of Jedediah’s brother Peter, a knowledgeable veteran of the far west, in the days when everything west of The Mississippi-Missouri was a trackless wilderness. In fact, the character of Uncle Peter affords a graceful means of acquainting young Jeremiah and his family with many of the old mountain men, such as Jim Bridger, and of relaying bits of western lore, and practical wisdom of the trail. The family is also religiously devout, in a way that is true to the historical record, although displaying a more 20th century degree of tolerance towards other faiths.

In a fairly straightforward way, this account fills in many little details of the wagon-train pioneer’s journey: the politicking which went on, all along the trail as bands of travelers elected leaders, found fault with them and elected new leaders, dealt with lawbreakers, split apart into more congenial groups and negotiated a safe passage for their families and wagons with potentially hostile Indians. West to the Sun is also a full and heartbreaking account of fatalities from accident and disease encountered by the Symons party. It was a rare wagon party that did not leave a member, or sometimes several members of it behind, in a lonely and unmarked grave along The Platte or The Sweetwater.

I would criticize this book on only one account, which would be that the narrative voice sounds a little too modern, occasionally dropping into 20th century turns of speech which struck me as more than a little jarring. This would have been a quite satisfactory read if Jeremiah had sounded a little more like a 19th century voice; if his narration sounded more like Tom Sawyer’s or Huck Finn’s – or even Jaimie McPheeters.

See also: The Deepening Review
Celia's Review at BNN

Distant Cousin: Regeneration

2010-02-28T08:31:00.006-06:00

Distant Cousin: Regeneration
by Al Past
(CreateSpace / 1-448-69856-1 / 978-1-448-69856-1 / September 2009 / 306 pages / $12.95 / Kindle $5 / B&N $9.32 / B&N e-book $3.57)

Dr. Al Past spreads his literary wings outward to encompass the details of more characters in Distant Cousin (4): Regeneration. Like many later sequels in a series, this chapter of the saga of Barbie from Outer Space broadens its context. Ana Darcy and Matt Mendez are still the stars, but the page count of DC4 covers a lot of terrain inhabited by their teenage kids, one of the kids’ friends, and an ex-Navy Seal who is sort of Ana’s personal bodyguard. Many new family members and others are included, too, in this new volume, but probably the most interesting is daughter Clio’s pet caracal, essentially an African bobcat. Regeneration is paced much like DC1 and DC3, somewhat slowly and emotionally involving, as opposed to action-packed like the shortest of the series, Distant Cousin: Repatriation. Unfortunately, I think this fourth book could have used just a little more of the taut excitement of DC2.

Plot details should always be held to a minimal level in reviews. Anyone who plans to read Regeneration is most likely already familiar with the characters and storyline. Ana and Matt are a number of years older, the babies are now teenagers, and they have all settled down into a routine in recent years. The kids are stronger participants now, leading to questions concerning whatever special abilities they may have inherited from their Thoman mom. Characters introduced in the previous books develop new relationships and new villains carry the plot into new dark alleys, adventures, and exotic locations.

Regeneration wobbles back and forth a little in its lack of a headlong rush to its final conclusion. The good news is that the adventures of Anna Darcy and Matt Mendez are still quite satisfying as the author takes his professionalism in editing and proofreading to a new level. The show-don’t-tell dialogue is particularly adept throughout, subtly placing the reader squarely among the characters, however, I felt that the Spanish dialect followed by English translations in parentheses just bogged down the storyline, as did the detailed descriptions of food at every meal. Yes, I am being quite critical, but only because the other Distant Cousin books are so emotionally gripping. Regeneration to me was like a roller coaster that was a fun ride, but that first hill that defines the speed of the coaster just wasn’t quite high enough. The villains could have been a little more sneakily tenacious and Ana could have stretched my heartstrings a little tauter. DC4 gets an A in show-don’t-tell, but its plot momentum leaves a bit to be desired. There is no doubt that I thoroughly enjoyed this fourth Ana Darcy adventure from beginning to end. It just lacks the wow-factor so prevalent in the first three books of Al Past’s Distant Cousin Series. What more can you really ask of a third sequel?

See also: Al Past's Website
The BNN Review of Regeneration
Reviews of DC1, DC2, & DC3
Al Past's Smashwords Page

Cloyne Court

2010-02-24T15:47:00.002-06:00

Cloyne Court by Dodie Katague
(Three Clover Press / 0-981-95533-9 / 978-0-981-95533-9 / December 2009 / 328 pages / $15.95 / Amazon $11.48)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

Cloyne Court is billed as a kind of real-life Animal House – a nostalgic memoir-novel about a rollicking all-gender-and-orientation cooperative residential house in Berkeley in the late 1970s, after the flower-power generation had moved on to something resembling an adult life practically everywhere else. Derek Marsdon has just turned 18, a college student, commuting from his family home and wrestling with incomprehensible academic courses – and much else besides.

Spurred by an impulse and the advice of an odd and witchy old woman he sees on the train going home one day, he decides to move into a college residence – and thereby takes the first steps onto the necessary path of becoming something a little more than a teenager. Cloyne Court is, as I interpreted it, not so much an account of four years of carefree pranks, debauchery and substance abuse with a little academic enrichment squeezed in between – but a rambling account of how a young man first encounters the larger world, that world outside the shelter of a family. Going to college, joining the military, or generally moving out into the world of work on our own is the time when most of us are establishing an identity of our own, something beyond just being a son or a daughter, an extension of our parents. This is where we first encounter straight-on a lot of things: all the pitfalls of sexuality and sexual attraction, of responsibility for ourselves, of coping with a bureaucracy which (if we let it!) would control our adult lives, and the randomness of fate. We encounter people very, very different from ourselves on a great many levels, we first cope with love and unrequited devotion, acquire junk furniture with a strange history, taste adult beverages, and get caught up in a student demonstration when all we really needed to do was turn in some necessary paperwork. All these things happen, not to mention that strange camaraderie that arises when you spend a great deal of time with other individuals in an odd environment, where everyone knows the rituals and the place, as well as the importance of seemingly inconsequential things.

Derek wanders through those undergraduate years, feeling some of the pains and disappointments – but always with a steady and observant eye, and a whole heart. One senses that he came through as a complete and secure adult – and that the author had an unerring eye and no little sympathy for those years – which now and again, may have been rather embarrassing for the adults who emerged from the antics of their college years, especially if they now have near-adult children of their own. There is something about those first years which keeps a hold on us for the rest of our adult lives, sometimes making us wince, and sometimes brushed with the golden highlights of nostalgia, something which the writer has caught very well.

See also: Celia's BNN Review
Dodie Katague's Website
Dodie Katague's Authors Den Page

Nero's Concert

2010-02-19T09:19:00.005-06:00

Nero’s Concert
by Don Westenhaver
(Xlibris / 1-441-50109-6 / 978-1-441-50109-7 / February 2009 / 312 pages / $19.99 / Kindle $2.00)
Reviewed by Malcolm R. Campbell for PODBRAM

A Nero: Any bloody-minded man, relentless tyrant, or evil-doer of extraordinary cruelty; from the depraved and infamous Roman Emperor C. Claudius Nero. – Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable

Almost twenty-one centuries after the Great Fire of Rome, most people believe that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. In reality, Nero—who ruled as Emperor between AD 54 and AD 68—played a lyre, and the fiddle as we know it had yet to be invented. Even the historian Tacitus discounts the rumor that Nero sang and played his lyre while enjoying the six-day spectacle of his city on fire. But the fiddling myth lives on.

Nobody knows whether the fire was accident or arson. Disgruntled Romans said Nero started it for reasons of insanity or to clear away land for a new palace. Nero blamed and persecuted Christians to direct the public’s antagonism away from himself. Don Westenhaver’s well researched novel Nero’s Concert provides readers with a what-might-have-happened scenario for the calamitous days of July, 64 AD and their aftermath.

In Nero’s Concert, Nero does not start the fire. He asks his close friend Rusticus to investigate in hopes of proving Christians are responsible. Nero doesn’t get the answers he’s looking for. Tensions mount and the friendship between Nero and Rusticus becomes strained. Subsequently, Rusticus’ life and safety are jeopardized when Nero turns to Tigellinus, the sadistic prefect of the Praetorian Guard, for more appropriate conclusions and when Rusticus falls in love with a Christian.

In addition to Nero and Tigellinus, Westenhaver’s novel includes Seneca, Poppaea, St. Peter and other historical characters. Rusticus, who is wholly fictional, attends to both his duty and his heart, making him a wonderfully level-headed protagonist for a story about a chaotic city with an erratic Emperor.

When Camilia, a nurse helping the injured during the fire, tells a Tribune she’s found a murdered senator among the dead, the Tribune says he will take her information to Rusticus rather than Tigellinus.

“I don’t know Tigellinus obviously,” says Camilia, “but his reputation is that he punishes those who bring bad news.”

“Yes,” the Tribune responds. “Whereas Rusticus seems quite different—analytical and professional. Somewhat distant rather than friendly. But I worked with him on the fire and he was fair to everyone.”

Through the novel’s wide window into the past, readers see the workings of the Roman hierarchy via Rusticus’ investigation and his interactions with Seneca, Nero and Tigellinus. As Camilia and Rusticus spend time together, readers learn about daily life and about the horrors of being a Christian at a time when such beliefs are likely to lead to imprisonment, torture and death. The author has taken great care in his presentation of facts about Rome’s rulers, buildings and people. An author’s note at the end of the novel supplies additional details.

While Westenhaver’s writing is highly readable, his modern-day words and phrases add a disruptive casualness that doesn’t fit the time or place. When Thaddeus calls out to Rusticus with the words “Hey, boss,” the reality of Rome within the novel crumbles a bit. So, too, when Nero’s efforts to improve his image are referred to as “public relations,” an individual is called “your guy,” a parade is called a “big deal,” and sexual encounters are described as “getting laid.” Personal taste may dictate whether or not this is distracting.

The research behind the story gets in the way of the story occasionally when the primary plot line is diverted into travelogue-style moments around the city and a vacation trip Rusticus and Camilia take to the Bay of Naples. Likewise, a visit with an imprisoned St. Peter strays past its intended purpose into a monologue about Christianity. Such information does provide interesting facts and insights into the characters and the times, but at the expense of the novel’s pacing. Some readers may skim these sections while others may enjoy the additional atmosphere. On balance, Nero’s Concert is an engaging love story as well as an entertaining and informative account of a time that lives in our consciousness as myth more than fact. Readers will come away from the novel knowing that, in all likelihood, Nero neither played a violin nor fiddled around while Rome burned.

See also: Malcolm's Good Reads Review
Malcolm's Round Table Review
The Author's Smashwords Page
Review of The Red Turtle Project

Trailerable Cruisers and Runabouts

2010-02-12T09:27:00.003-06:00

The Boat Buyer’s Guide to Trailerable Cruisers and Runabouts By Ed McKnew
(International Marine McGraw-Hill / 0-071-47355-6 / 978-0-071-47355-2 / April 2006 / 384 pages / $24.95)

Ed McKnew has been producing his Boat Buyer’s Guide series for many years. He had a successful career as a yacht broker in an area full of boat dealers south of Houston TX near the Gulf before he set up his American Marine Publishing operation in Traverse City MI to publish an annual CD-ROM of all the categories of boats. Until this year, McGraw-Hill has been publishing paperback versions of Ed’s CD in segmented form. According to his website, this 2006 edition is to be the last of the print versions. The big CD version will continue to be sold for $70 directly from the website. The other sections from 2006 still available in print form are Motor Yachts and Trawlers, Sportfishing Boats, and Trailerable Fishing Boats. Since I have spent the last year developing the only book that seems even remotely to be a competitor to this one, I have thoroughly read Trailerable Cruisers and Runabouts and here is my report.

Ed McKnew claims his books were initially compiled for boat brokers and dealers to use as a reference for price valuations of used boats of recent years, and that most certainly is a strongly applicable statement. This book should have a lesser appeal to individual retail boat buyers; however, for anyone planning to drop ten grand (or far more) on a used boat, what’s another $24.95? There is very little else out there that offers even similar information to that contained in Ed’s book. Any potential boat buyer could get a look at a lot of brands and compare price values and other details, model against model. This is not a book to read cover-to-cover, although I just did. The only straight text in the book is contained in the introductory pages. The remainder is composed of individual boat models, two to a page, with a 1 ½” x 2 ½” photo, a photo or line drawing of similar size showing the seating layout from above, a few minimal specifications, a basic price chart for the production years up through 2004, and a short descriptive paragraph of each one. What you see is what you get, page after page.

As a buyer’s guide for retail boat shoppers, I could make a lot of noise about the lack of certain complete information and the consistent emphasis on certain elements. For example, I could care less about the draft up and down, water capacity, or deadrise that is stated for every boat in this book. Performance figures are often quoted for engine options not reflected in the price chart, too. The photos are too small to discern very much detail. Certain issues are mentioned repeatedly in quite an unnecessary manner, such as the choice of standard or sport seating in a runabout. Newsflash, dude, they all have it! You can buy practically every runabout being produced with either jump seats or a large bench in the stern. Fortunately for Mr. McKnew, he makes no incorrect claims about his book. If you think of boats as product, as any dealer does, this book makes perfectly good sense.

Anyone considering buying a boat and entering the recreational boating hobby should purchase one or several appropriate books beforehand. Knowledge before you buy is always a good thing. Beginners should read the books for Dummies or Idiots, whichever style suits you best. I have read a number from both and I personally prefer the Dummies Series. If you want to get into the depth of boat design or seriously compare specific models, then the Sorensen’s Guides are for you. Ker-Splash 2: The High Performance Powerboat Book schools the novice buyer with an ocean of data while seasoned hobbyists swim its entertaining waters. If you want to get into specific valuations or details as described above, Trailerable Cruisers and Runabouts is for you.

Special note to Amazon & McGraw-Hill: This book is not 384 pages covering more than 600 boats. Sportboats are listed as a category on the cover, but there is no Sportboat section in this book. The book is 312 pages long covering 555 boats in four categories. Since I love boats, I liked the book anyway, but this is a detail that potential buyers should know beforehand. I intend no animosity toward the author, publisher, or retailer over this issue. Someone just made a little boo-boo.

See also: Ed McKnew's Website
All the Books in This Series

Shades of Gray

2010-02-09T16:16:00.003-06:00

Amaranthine: Shades of Gray
by Joleene Naylor
(CreateSpace / 1-449-51181-3 / 978-1-449-51181-4 / September 2009 / 246 pages / $11.00 / Kindle $1.99)
Reviewed by Dianne Salerni for PODBRAM

Katalina is having trouble getting over the sudden, violent, unexplained death of her lover Patrick. Perhaps that explains why she is willing to take the risk of responding to a mysterious phone call from a man who says he knows who killed Patrick. She agrees to meet him after sundown at an abandoned shack outside town. Certainly, she would have been better off if she had listened to her friend Sarah and stayed away, because Katalina’s meeting launches her into the middle of a violent power struggle between vampire covens. Her only chance at survival is the man who summoned her, Jorick, who takes on the role of her protector when things are at their darkest.

Shades of Gray is a paranormal romance with intermittent scenes of graphic violence. One thing that puzzled me about the book was the title itself. It is not a memorable title (there are many listed on Amazon with the same title), and it suggests a moral ambiguity that just isn’t there. The vampires in this book are vicious and amoral, with one exception, and that exception doesn’t seem “gray” to me. He is clearly meant to be the good guy. However, the strongest reservation I had about this book was the lack of a compelling plot. The coven wars, which are revealed to the reader primarily through third-hand accounts, seemed to be only a vehicle to string together scenes of Katalina and Jorick hiding out in motel rooms and falling in love between scenes of violence. I found Jorick to be an interesting character, but what he saw in the dim-witted and easily manipulated Katalina was as much a mystery to me as it was to all of his vampire enemies.

One of the most singular things about the book was the early introduction of a vampire family: a husband and wife, a small child, and a vampire infant—but these characters were not in the book long enough to make a difference, and I felt that this was a missed opportunity.

I enjoyed Ms. Naylor’s style of prose, which is vibrant and full of precise imagery. The book itself is well edited, with only minor and rare snafus such as inverted quotations or typos. There is humor, eroticism, lush vocabulary, and great potential here, but what I was craving was a plot that made logical sense and provided original ideas that had not already been used by Anne Rice or Stephanie Meyer.

Editor's Note: This book is advertised on the author's website as the first book in the Amaranthine Series, but this name is not listed at Amazon or anywhere else except on the cover (before the title).

See also: Joleene Naylor's Website
Joleene' Authors Den Page

On Wings of Gentle Power

2010-02-06T16:42:00.003-06:00

On Wings of Gentle Power
Poetry by Barry D. Yelton
Photographs by Dr. Al Past
(Strider Nolan Publishing, Inc. / 1-932-04570-8 / 978-1-932-04570-3 / November 2009 / 110 pages / $9.95 / B&N $8.95)
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

In life, sometimes we take a sip that is too hot and we burn ourselves. Other times, it is just right – a nectar that warms our bones and soothes our nerves.

It isn't easy to review a book of poetry because each poem offers a different image. On Wings of Gentle Power, I discovered a theme whispering through the poems that was like a welcome mug of hot chocolate or coffee running toward empty – an ode for mortality and life's downward spiral reminding us that after all the hard times and the good times we are on our way out. No one beats the conclusion to life.

On page 11, Al Past's photo of a small town with a wide street stretching toward the horizon was a metaphor for life, and the poem on that page ends when "a flop-eared hound sums it all up with one huge sigh". That sigh could have been mine.

Later, in "This is No Boy Scout Trail" I read, "The first backpack is always the toughest. They say it gets easier. Today seems to go on forever until finally I can only walk a hundred feet at a time…."

Reading that poem stirred memories when I backpacked into The Sierras. I want to go back and do it again. But the friends I hiked those trails with are no longer here – they've moved on. Only through these words was I able to return for a moment and like the hound, I sighed again.

I understood when in "Cante Libre" on page 80, "There is no greater freedom than that found in the mountains where no alarm intrudes or schedule inhibits."

We lost something when we left the wilderness to grow crops, tend herds of cattle and sheep, and build cities of concrete interrupted by endless alarm clocks and buzzing cell phones and the hum of tires and grumble of internal combustion engines.

On Wings of Gentle Power reminded me of the long, hard road already traveled and of the few miles left before walking into the endless night, and near the end, in "The Last One" the final stanza says, "The house was quiet, just the old man and me. I nodded yes and he nodded, too. The last of his family, the rest all gone and he alone just waiting for the final reunion."

My mother was 89 when she said she was ready. Her hands were twisted and gnarled and her face was etched deeply with a freeway-map of life. Her friends gone—my father and brother, too, and her memories heavy with grief at their loss—so heavy that she didn't want to carry the burden another mile, another step. She wanted to go.

Through poetry like this, we may capture the past and hold onto it a little longer. Too bad, we can't take those words with us when we leave.

See also: Scarecrow in Gray review
Barry Yelton's website

Whipping Out the Big Guns or...

2010-02-04T17:09:00.002-06:00

The Ten Most Valuable Lessons I Learned Over the Past Year Preparing a Very Complicated Book Project for Submission to CreateSpace

My biggest fear over the past year has been that one day I would suddenly realize that I had shot myself in the foot this time, that I had simply bitten off more than I could chew, that Ker-Splash 2 would never make it to the boat show. (Photo courtesy Al Past.)

My mammoth book project entitled Ker-Splash 2: The High Performance Powerboat Book has been submitted to CS after a year of very intense preparation. When I say mammoth, I mean 400 7”x10” pages, 152,000 words, 135 photographs, three tables, and an extensive glossary, bibliography and index, and a 95 MB file size. When I say intense, I mean ten hours or more a day for most of the days from early ’09 until February 2010. If I can set up Ker-Splash 2 for CreateSpace, I can set up any book for that medium; however, I never intend to do it again. My next book is going to be half the size and without pictures! Of course Sean Connery said Never Say Never Again….

10. You can set up an ISBN at CS long before your book is ready. You can then go into Cover Creator and begin work on the cover. I developed several cover variations for K-2 before the text was even half completed. Make notes to yourself about each of the component choices you made in CC so you can go back and recreate it at any time. You need to do this because certain procedures, such as changing the format size of the book, will require you to start over in Cover Creator. Your ISBN stays with your book from then onward. If you had created more than one ISBN for more than one cover design, you can simply delete the unwanted ISBN as your project develops.

9. The file size limitation at CS is 100 MB. It took almost exactly two hours to upload my 95 MB book using a cable connection. This was a lot quicker than the all-nighter it took back in 2000 to upload Daydream with its 35 photos to iUniverse with a phone line!

8. I utilized a lot of tricks to stuff 135 photos into 95 MB. Photoshop Elements allowed me cut the JPG quality down to 10 from 12 on a few piggy-sized files. I also used PE to expand some of the less than 300 dpi shots up to 300 and I dropped many monsters down to 300 from as high as 900. The largest photo I began with was 203 MB! The smallest was an Instamatic slide from 1966 that I had scanned with my slide scanner at 1800 dpi. I used Picasa to crop all my photos and perform minimal modifications on a few of them.

7. I kept a running file folder of all my selected and prepped photos. I numbered all the photos within parentheses at the beginning of the name so that they would constantly line up in the order they would appear throughout the book. Of course these numbers had to be manually reshuffled repeatedly throughout the process, but this plan was worth the trouble! I could not only see at a glance the book’s photo layout this way, but the procedure easily led to #6 next.

6. I knew from the beginning that the file for this book would be huge, and that I would need smaller versions for several reasons. I created a Word page of my Table of Contents and all the subsections therein and tracked the placement of the photos throughout the book with their respective numbers on this page. I created a second Word page of all my captions with their corresponding photo numbers. I did all this while continuing to compose the book in a Word document without photos.

5. I created what I called a mock-up, a sort of dress rehearsal document for the book. I created a mock-up folder of all the photos with the same numbers, too. After each photo had been selected, cropped, and prepped into its B&W 5.75-inch width in 300 dpi, I made a copycat version that was only two-inches wide. I then inserted the copycat into place in the mockup text file, clicked the tiny photo and had Word blow it up to 5.75-inches wide. What this produced was an 8 MB Word document that was easy to work with, and would be the foundation for my future Kindle and Smashwords versions. I am therefore creating a 95 MB document that will be converted to a PDF and sent to CS, but I am also creating a smaller Word version that can be developed into an e-book. After I completed the writing of the text, I just plugged in my captions with large photos in one version and small photos in the other.

4. Before I got deeply onto the project, I was more frightened of what might happen with the PDF conversion than with any other step in the process. This was, of course, because I had had the least experience with this particular process. My fears were totally unfounded. I downloaded the free Open Office software and the learning curve was only a few minutes. It worked like clockwork with no problems at all. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!

3. Word has been making me want to take a brick to my computer over a particular issue with Kindle and Smashwords formatting, but I found the solution during this past year. Kindle automatically indents your paragraphs even if you don’t, but it does not like the line spaces between paragraphs that are so compatible with Smashwords. If you format a book with the Smashwords Meatgrinder with line spaces, the home boys will love it, but Kindle will add additional line spaces if you submit the same formatting to DTP. The trick is to turn on the show paragraph marks and delete all the extra ones before sending the document to Kindle.

2. Word has reeeaaaaallly made me mad over a second issue. The nature of my writing is like that of a magazine columnist whose work is constantly edited and altered in the process of its creation, as well as moved about in its placement within the final product. There were at least eight places in the final version of Ker-Splash 2 in which Word just refused to move a particular Paragraph #2 up to the line just below Paragraph #1. I would fix it and Word would move it right back where Word wanted it! The secret is that many of those times that my composition had been edited or moved about, I was moving Size 12 TNR in Normal mode into a spot previously occupied by 14 Bold in Heading 4 mode (or some other such mismatch). In my toolbar, the text that was jumping around was shown as TNR 12, but Word had buried secret code in my document. The solution is similar to the posting on this blog that I do all the time. Cut and paste the jumping-bean paragraph into WordPad and then copy and paste it right back. As soon as you do, you will probably see a lot of big, bold text that you had never intended to be there! Just highlight it, turn it back into TNR 12 in Normal, and you’re done! The Wicked Witch is Dead!

1. Lloyd Lofthouse, a member of our review team, has discussed at IAG the many ways he has tightened up the formatting of his book that was first published by iUniverse. I agree in principle with everything he has said about iU utilizing a somewhat standardized format, but in detail we must each make our own personal decisions. His advice was to clamp down the size of an iU book and re-release it at CS. I am sure that concept applies to many authors, but not to me. My interest was in making the interior look just a bit more professional, and a little more like the types of nonfiction car and motorcycle books I was emulating. I had already tightened down my last iU book just to keep the retail price down as much as possible. If anything, in my opinion, Timeline came out a wee bit overcrowded, but I would still do the same thing to keep the price down to its whopping $21.95. (I actually loosened that one back up again in a later Kindle edition.) I have a little more price leeway to work with than does Lloyd with his fiction novels, but as I said, the principle is the same.

You can reduce any line spaces you want down to 8 instead of 12. You can condense letter spacing wherever necessary, too. You can use different font sizes, if appropriate, in certain parts of the document. I left all my major text in TNR 12, but the photo captions were put in 10 and the photo credits in 8. The corporate contact addresses were changed to 10 and the extensive Acknowledgements went to 11. Parts of K-2 are centered, parts are left aligned, and parts are justified. As I said, Lloyd wanted to reduce the cost and retail price of his book. I wanted mine to look less like a POD novel. The technical formatting procedures were the same. I found online an outstanding guide in PDF form for the book creation process. It’s called Build Your Book, by Walton Mendelson, published by One-Off Press in Prescott AZ in 2009. It’s a quick, free, 1.8 MB download. Mr. Mendelson’s instructions helped me a lot with my project, particularly in the latter stages of the CreateSpace process. Google it, or download it from the link above if you are already signed up at CS. I highly recommend it!

Stunt Road

2010-02-02T10:59:00.005-06:00

Stunt Road by Gregory Mose
(Pays d’Oc Press / 0-615-30663-2 / 978-0-615-30663-6 / July 2009 / 306 pages / Amazon $14.00 / B&N $12.60 / Smashwords $3.99 / Kindle $.99)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

Stunt Road is a novel – almost a roman-a-clef – which examines a fairly simple and straightforward experience, what I called the ‘Oh-s**t!’ event. At the top of a steep, snowy mountain, a small child casually makes a snowball and starts it rolling. He then watches in absolute horror as the snowball gets bigger and bigger as it rolls down the mountainside, gathering mass and density. When it reaches the bottom of the mountain, it swiftly derails a train, bounds across a highway, sending automobiles and trucks flying every which way, and finally smashes into the outskirts of a city below, wrecking houses and heading toward downtown, still getting bigger and even more destructive. Less imaginative people might call it a narrative of unintended consequences, most of them very, very bad, especially for the relatively innocent person who set the snowball to rolling.

In Stunt Road the snowball is started off on its journey of destruction by Peter McFadden, once a designer of computer generated imagery, now unemployed and reduced to living in his increasingly resentful girlfriend’s condo. He can’t seem to find a job in the field that he loves. His oldest and dearest friends – Diego the movie director, Emily the math teacher and former girlfriend he has never gotten over, and Susan, his oldest friend and now psychologist – are worried about him. They are also relieved, when a chance encounter at an upscale party affords him a challenge that might lead to gainful employment. Peter must create from whole cloth a system to tell fortunes, make it all up, every detail: a pinch of astrology, a touch of Scientology, a scoop of pseudo-science, a sprinkling of practical psychology and there it is: Horokinetics. Before Peter’s disbelieving eyes, the snowball is halfway down the mountain, having become Hollywood’s next big spiritual fad. His innocent and seemingly harmless invention is taken up all too efficiently by a manipulative guru who becomes the public face of his fortune-telling, fortune-generating machine, a corporate mogul whose connections and motivations Peter can only guess at. And there is not a damned thing that he can do to redeem himself, except to watch the destruction, and wonder if he could have done anything else.

Although a large part of the interest in Stunt Road is the path of the snowball downhill – that is, the marketing of Horokinetics, and how a little invention can be induced to become a major fad – for me, the physical setting of Stunt Road was a major charm. I grew up in Southern California, and was quite familiar with many of the locales: Topanga Canyon, the suburban San Fernando Valley – both the well-to-do, and the not-so-well-to-do parts, and those stretches of chaparral and dirt roads which reach back into the hills – where you can indeed go horseback riding among the live oaks and mountain laurel, and think that you are the only person around for miles.

The author is a more than competent storyteller; the plot unfolds in a straight line, more or less. My only criticism would be that the various characters are not as individual in their speech and actions: I needed to refresh my memory now and again of which character was which, and what was their relationship to Peter. If anything, though, reading this account should disabuse anyone from putting any credence in any popularly reported spiritual fad.

See also: The Author's Website
Celia's BNN Review

Extra! Extra!

2010-01-22T08:33:00.002-06:00

Extra! Extra! The Orphan Trains and Newsboys of New York
by Renee Wendinger
(Legendary Publications / 978-0-615-29755-2 / 2009 / 180 pages / Hardcover $29.95)
Reviewed by Donna Aviles for PODBRAM

The orphan train movement of 1854-1929 was a 75-year period in American history when over 250,000 orphaned and abandoned children were transported by train from East coast cities to farming communities in the Midwest in search of homes. The brainchild of Rev. Charles Loring Brace who founded the Children’s Aid Society, the process was soon duplicated by other agencies, including the New York Foundling Hospital. Known at the time as “placing out”, the orphan train movement has come to be recognized as the forerunner of today’s foster care system.

Renee Wendinger, president of the Orphan Train Riders of NY and daughter of orphan train rider Sophie Kaminsky Hillesheim, has recently released Extra! Extra! The Orphan Trains and Newsboys of New York. A wonderful addition to other books available on this subject, Extra! Extra! takes a unique approach to the topic, educating the reader through archival materials such as newspaper articles, rider biographies, letters written by mothers who were forced to abandon their children, and original poetry. There are several books that delve deeply into the history of this time, but this work puts a very personal face on the subject that will no doubt grab the interest of anyone who is fortunate enough to pick it up.

A 170-page hardcover, 8 ½ x 11 book using high quality gloss paper, Extra! Extra! is divided into two sections. The first half of the book gives a concise history of the orphan trains, the Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital. There are many wonderful photographs and drawings on each page and, as someone who has studied and written about the orphan trains, I was thrilled to find new and interesting material and pictures. There are over thirty biographies of children who rode the trains and there is even an entry by Baby Peggy, a child star from the 1900’s who visited the Foundling Home in 1923.

The second half of Extra! Extra! is devoted to the Newsboys and Bootblacks of the time period. I was most struck to learn that although these boys worked for pennies a day, they had a strong code of conduct and were especially protective of one another. The reader will learn – through photos and news articles of the day – about the lodging, lifestyle, and struggles of the thousands of adolescent boys who often opted for the chance of a better life in the West (via the orphan trains).

Extra! Extra! is well designed and edited, published independently through Legendary Publications. This documentary type book has already gained the attention of professors at Brooklyn College who have developed a graduate level course based on Extra! Extra! entitled, Flight of the Social Classes in Urban Communities.

Extra! Extra! The Orphan Trains and Newsboys of New York is sold exclusively through Renee Wendinger’s website at The Orphan Train.

See also: The Author's Website
Donna Aviles' Orphan Train Blog
Donna's Orphan Train Review

Oilspill Dotcom

2010-01-18T10:05:00.003-06:00

Oilspill dotcom by Alon Shalev
(BookSurge / 1-439-20651-1 / 978-1-439-20651-5 / May 2009 / 294 pages / $14.99 / Kindle $4.99)
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

Imagine going on a first date hoping to have hot sex and you end up being the Webmaster for a site that is part of the defense against a libel suit brought by one of the largest oil conglomerates on the planet. In addition, you are fired from your high-paying job and start working for nothing, except for the sex. It must have been incredible sex since this huge oil corporation hires an army of lawyers and is willing to spend tens of millions of dollars in court to stop Suzie, the new girlfriend, and send her to jail for a few years. The oil company even hires two security companies to infiltrate the environmental group Suzie works with.

I guess I should slow down and mention that Suzie's environmental group is fighting for a tribe in South America to keep this oil company from spoiling the land this primitive tribe has lived on for centuries. There is oil under the rainforest and money to be made, but there is an obstacle: the locals who want to live as they've always lived without losing the trees.

Several years later, Suzie is still in court and the website Matt built has had almost two hundred million hits, and he has altered history by showing the world what can be done with the Internet, things Matt didn't even know could be done. The story takes place in the 1990s. Boy, love is powerful! The Website is called Oilspill dotcom, hence the name of the book.

When we first meet Matt, he has no girlfriend but wants one and he's talking to his cat Gates. Since Matt is a computer geek, who gets paid big money and is a member of a programmer dream team, I wondered if the cat was named after Bill Gates. Smart cat.

Oilspill dotcom turned out to be a speedy read, since I had trouble putting the novel down. I've read two other books in 2009 that impressed me as five star books, and those books took a bit longer to read. As much as I liked 600 hours of Edward and At the Table of Want, Shalev's book grabbed me and wouldn't let go. The only thing better in this world is chocolate, and sex, of course. I started reading Sunday night and was done Tuesday morning. I haven't read a book that fast in years. I've read James Patterson, Dan Brown, Michael Crichton and John Grisham, and in my opinion Shalev is a better writer. More than once, he had me laughing and getting teary eyed while smiling. Those other four guys never did that. Don't get me wrong. I like those other guys, but Shalev told a better story with more depth. The book's cover is unassuming and in no way hints at the treasure hidden inside.

See also: Alon Shalev's Website
Alon Shalev's Authors Den Page

The 2009 PODBRAM Awards

2010-01-10T08:33:00.015-06:00

This has been a banner year for PODBRAM, our best yet by far. The illustrious review team read and reviewed eighty-four books in '09, and many of them were outstanding. The high quality level of the books we read in 2009 has literally delayed the posting of these awards until now. We wanted to squeeze the total number of awards down to the number of winners in 2008, but the task was all too daunting. We presented twelve awards out of fifty-three books reviewed in '08. Now twelve outstanding works will receive official awards, but in addition, four more will receive honorable mention, and stay tuned for the special honorarium later in this post. Regular readers of PODBRAM know that in order to acquire a review here, an author's book must pass the gatekeeper's initial examination, be specifically selected by one of our reviewers, and then survive our legendary book strip-search and dunking tank. These are the best of the best. Without further delay, here they come!

Honorable Mentions

Faust by E. A. Bucchianeri
This study of a famous classic is a massive, two-volume work of dedication and research, far beyond the realm of ordinary POD releases.

Peeper by Paul Chandler
This book missed an award for contemporary fiction and another one for its cover by a mere eyelash.

In Her Name by Michael R. Hicks
This beginning of a new science fiction series is already receiving accolades everywhere from Amazon to the Kindle Boards.

Women of Magdalene by Rosemary Poole-Carter
The only reason this book missed an official award is that it has very recently been taken out of print.

The Official Awards

Best Cover: Winter Ghost by Don Meyer

Historical Concept: Voices Under Berlin by T.H.E. Hill

Christian Lit with Universal Appeal: Saints in the City by Andie Andrews

Science Fiction: Shifted by Colin D. Jones

Mystery/Thriller: Dark Shadows Red Bayou by John Atkinson

Coming of Age: Calling Out Your Name by Ned White

Historical Fiction: Boxcar Down by Charles L. Lunsford

Contemporary Fiction: Ghost Notes by Art Edwards

2009 Relevancy: The Crusading Spirit in Modern America by Richard J. Bazillion

Poignant Historical Fiction: Gone Over by David Chacko & Alexander Kulcsar

Contemporaneous Literature: The Saga of Beowulf by R. Scot Johns

Stunning Originality: Six-Hundred Hours of a Life by Craig Lancaster
(Re-released 10/23/09 as 600 Hours of Edward)

Special Honorarium

The world of quality POD authors, and specifically, the Independent Authors Guild, lost one of our own a few weeks ago. Steven A. Knutson had published a particularly entertaining, autobiographical trilogy during the last few years of his life, the third book of which was reviewed at PODBRAM in 2009. Steve's Valley of the Shadow is our final 2009 Honorable Mention Award. Lloyd Lofthouse will now present his elegy for Steven A. Knutson.

"Long after I'm gone, when my children tell their children, 'your Grandfather was crazy,'—I have lived a wild life, walking on tiptoes and holding in check any hint of a timid spirit. …" Steven A. Knutson

These words captured the Steve I met on the Internet in and out of the virtual IAG (Independent Author's Guild) discussions we had. I never met Steve in the flesh, but I read and reviewed the three books that make up his memoir. You can meet a person and never get to know him but through Steve's writing and e-mails, I got to know him better than most parents know their children these days.

Although Knutson admits to his wayward life as a kid in It Takes One to Catch One, after reading Confessions from the Last Frontier, I want to say that this former Alaskan Wildlife Trooper and Fish Cop made up for whatever transgressions and sins he wrote about in the first installment of his three-part memoir.

In Valley of the Shadow, I wrote, "I cannot imagine this book and the story of raw truth it vividly shows being published by any traditional publisher. I cannot imagine Hollywood making this book into a movie since it would go against the engineered political correctness that seems to rule American thought these days.

"After all, since Vietnam, it’s been a challenge to find the truth from the antiwar American mass-media machine. When you read or watch the news, do so with a grain of salt and consider that Hitler once said if you say a lie enough, it becomes the truth. On the other hand, Steve told the truth."

As long as one of his books survives, Steve's memory will live on. If possible, I'd like to combine all three of Steve's books into one volume with a different title, a new cover, a new ISBN and a new publisher, Three Clover Press. If his children hold the rights to Steve's books, my offer on royalties is 80% to Steve's family and 20% to the publisher, and Three Clover Press will pay the bills to keep Steve's work in print.

Goodbye, Steve, you may be gone, but your memory will live on through your work.

Editor's Note: A special thank you goes out to T.H.E. Hill for creating our new PODBRAM Awards Logo.

Searching for Pemberley

2010-01-06T17:37:00.004-06:00

Searching for Pemberley
by Mary Lydon Simonsen
(Sourcebooks Landmark / 1-402-22439-7 / 978-1-402-22439-3 / December 2009 / 496 pages / $14.99 / Amazon $10.19)
Reviewed by Dianne Salerni for PODBRAM

Maggie Joyce, a young American living in post-World War II England, begins this novel by searching for Pemberley – or, rather, visiting a Regency-era home that may have been the inspiration for the stately home of Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s famous novel. However, a simple afternoon excursion and a conversation about a beloved book ultimately lead Maggie into a soulful search for her own heart’s content.

I read the original, self-published version of this novel, Pemberley Remembered, and enjoyed it very much. This newer, enriched version, published by Sourcebooks in December 2009, is superior, however, in that it weaves multiple layers of history and romance into a compelling tale and satisfactorily wraps up a narrative that was left open-ended in the original book.

Maggie’s interest in the story of a Regency-era family who may have inspired Jane Austen’s timeless book Pride and Prejudice blossoms into an enduring friendship with the British couple who have kept and catalogued the family letters and diaries. Through these historical documents, readers are treated to a retelling of the P & P story, with characters and events just different enough from the Austen novel to keep things interesting. Soon, however, we become immersed in the story of the British couple themselves, Beth and Jack Crowell. Beth is a descendent of the Darcy family (here named Lacey) and Jack is the son of her family’s butler. Their unorthodox and class-breaking romance is set against the backdrop of World War I, when a generation of young Englishmen were killed, maimed, or emotionally-scarred by the horrors of war.

Meanwhile, as Maggie grows closer to these people, she begins a romance of her own with a former American flyer, Rob McAllister, who bears visible and not-so-visible scars from his own experiences bombing Germany. As Maggie tentatively embarks on her first true love affair, she finds herself conflicted. She loves Rob, but he will not commit to her, and she is undeniably attracted to Michael Crowell, the son of Beth and Jack, a man she barely knows, but whose family (and ancestors) she has come to love.

This novel intricately weaves multiple timelines of British history – the Regency era and both World Wars – and also includes an engaging glimpse of Maggie’s own hometown in the coal-mining region of the Pennsylvania Pocono Mountains, near Scranton. Simonsen has created characters who tug at your heart and skillfully paints an emotional picture of the devastation of war. When Jack Crowell, who lost a brother and two brothers-in-law in the first war, reacts to the news that his younger son has been assigned to combat in Burma, I was reduced to tears. However, there were also plenty of joyful and truly funny moments, such as a diary entry in which “Mrs. Bennet” gives advice on the marriage bed to her daughters and a humorous retelling of the eldest Crowell son facing a “privacy hole” cut into the bedcovers on his wedding night in Italy.

Searching for Pemberley is a historical romance of complexity and depth, with skillfully layered characters that readers will remember for a long time.

See also: The High Spirits Review
Dianne's review of The Second Date
Mary Lydon Simonsen's Blog

At the Table of Want

2010-01-03T13:43:00.007-06:00

At the Table of Want
by Larry Kimport
(Foremost Press / 1-936-15402-1 / 978-1-936-15402-9 / October 2009 / 344 pages / $16.97 / Amazon $15.27 / Smashwords $4.97)
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

At the Table of Want by Larry Kimport is a five-star story. I've read only one other book this year that earned five stars (at Amazon) and that was 600 Hours of Edward, a novel by Craig Lancaster. I may have given five stars to books I read and reviewed prior to adopting Alice Wakefield's rating system in June 2009, but those reads are four-star books, all of them.

After I started reading At the Table of Want, it was a struggle not to drop everything else and read nonstop. Hooked, I was, but I managed to resist the urge to throw everything else aside, like my marriage, putting out the trash, eating and sleeping, and only read late at night or early in the morning for a limited time. Still, I finished Kimport's novel in record time, and I often thought of the story during the day. Each night as I picked up the book, it was like that slice of apple pie after not having one for several months.

Truman Kramer is the main character. He is orphaned young and ends up being raised by his loving Aunt Mabel, a widow. However, the story doesn't start with Truman's childhood. Chapter 1 starts in 1980 at 35,000 feet in a wide-bodied 747. Truman is on his way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, because he joined the Peace Corps soon after high school graduation. The other Peace Corps volunteers, mostly college graduates, are of the opinion that Truman will be one of the first to quit and return home. How wrong they are and Truman's decision to stay in Malaysia and work with poverty-stricken, abused, handicapped children, a job none of the other Peace Corps volunteers want, is what makes this story powerful.

The structure of the story may not make sense at first (it's still good reading), but by the time you are halfway through the book, you will be glad that the author wrote it that way. In the early chapters, the story alternates between Malaysia and Truman as a child seeing his mother die, being taken care of by an older man, then his Aunt Mabel, and the bully incident that sent Truman to a juvenile boy's home prison-like facility for a year when he was a teen (he was framed, but the bully got what he deserved). Because of the structure the author uses, we learn why it makes sense that Truman would have so much compassion for the abandoned, abused handicapped children, all special education types. Truman is not a teacher, he's never been to college and has no training to work with these kids.

The conditions these children live in are horrible. When Truman first sees them, most are naked, filthy and live in a concrete structure surrounded by trash and weeds, sort of like a rundown, bombed-out storage facility after a war. They have been abandoned by their families and their culture to be hidden away with no chance at any life worth living. Then Truman makes his decision, and just thinking about what he did for those kids brings tears to my eyes. Don't jump to conclusions. Truman is no saint. He drinks too much and has an affair with a skinny, bony, married, Malaysian Chinese woman, who is several years older than he is. This is not your standard, escapist, formula romance, and that plot line adds to the story, too.

Malaysia is an Islamic country and adultery is a risky venture at best. That is why I did something I've never done before in the fifty-plus years I've been reading books (thousands of them). With more than a hundred pages to go, I was worried that Truman was going to be caught and punished by the Islamic government of Malaysia, so I read the ending several days before I finished the book. If you want to discover what happens, you will have to buy the book and join Truman in Southeast Asia. Know this: the pleasure I gained from reading this book was not from the conclusion but in the story that a skilled pen crafted. The story is so convincing, I suspect that Larry Kimport must have been in the Peace Corps and lived in Malaysia for a few years. Halfway through the book, I wondered how much of this story was autobiographical. The details are that rich, that vivid.

I highly recommend At the Table of Want. Occasionally (only a few times), there would be a phrase or clause that didn't make sense to me as the author attempted to construct a sentence that had a poetic quality to it, but that was rare and it didn't diminish the story. The story works and so do ninety-nine percent of those poetic sentence constructions. Thank you, Larry Kimport, for taking me on a trip to Truman's Malaysia. I started a boutique press this year, and this is the kind of book I want to publish, one that goes beyond assembly line, formula fiction.

See also:A Small Harvest of Pretty Days by Larry Kimport
Lloyd's PODBRAM review of 600 Hours of a Life (original title)
Larry Kimport's bio at Foremost Press
A recent article about author Larry Kimport
Larry Kimport at Smashwords

Tell Me When It Hurts

2009-12-17T14:07:00.004-06:00

Tell Me When It Hurts
by Christine M. Whitehead
(Hadley Press / 0-982-29460-3 / 978-0-982-29460-4 / June 2009 / 298 pages / $15.99)
Reviewed by Dr. Al Past for PODBRAM

Here's the setup: a woman graduates from an Ivy-League college, and, uncertain of her career path, begins working as a low-level paper-pusher deep within the Justice Department, where she's eventually encouraged to volunteer for "special training" leading to advancement. It's a two-year course, but when she realizes she's being trained as a hit person (a skill at which she excels) she quits.

She goes to law school, marries, and has a daughter. The daughter is murdered by a sexual predator who gets off due to legal technicalities. The woman's marriage falls apart and she becomes a hard-drinking recluse, blaming herself for her daughter's death.

Then she's contacted by a shadowy group of "volunteers" who have organized to correct just such injustices, mainly by bushwhacking those miscreants who have managed to avoid the wheels of conventional justice. Let us not forget the woman is already trained as a professional assassin. Is this a great premise or what?

Archer Loh is the woman, and the Berkshires of Massachusetts is where she goes to lose herself. Connor McCall is the sheep-owning rancher from Wyoming who becomes her neighbor, thanks to a vacation from sheep shearing. McCall is a low-key, semi-wealthy, secure male, single, crinkly handsome, and a terrific cook among his other appealing attributes, and he begins to draw Archer Loh out of her isolation. Archer has deep psychological problems, however, so can McCall overcome these, and can Archer even grant herself permission to leave the past behind?

That's all the plot this review will mention, or needs to, surely. Any fan of the romance genre should be salivating by now. It's enough to note that the story is a romance, and that the author, for whom this is apparently a first novel, is devoted to the healing arts. The story winds to a conclusion that should satisfy fans of the genre. We will not split hairs over the ethics of private citizens deciding to eliminate other private citizens without the messy imprecision of the legal process.

It should be added that the editing and proofreading are nearly flawless, though the pacing flagged occasionally, and the style, while adequate, did not quite sparkle. The cover, which makes sense in retrospect, could be "grabbier" as well; especially more colorful. Still, the story was a fun read, and given the great concept with which it began, makes it worthwhile to look forward to other fiction by Ms. Whitehead.

See Also: Christine M. Whitehead's Website

The Saigon Connection

2009-12-14T15:34:00.005-06:00

The Saigon Connection
by Darrel L. Rachel
(CreateSpace / 1-448-69334-9 / 978-1-448-69334-4 / August 2009 / 294 pages / $14.99)
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

The Saigon Connection is a mystery thriller that starts in Saigon, South Vietnam, in August 1969. The first chapter does not tell us who is risking his life spying on a bunch of criminals. Even by the end of the book, I wasn't sure. The mystery man in the first chapter takes a few pictures, then, discovered, is on the run being chased through the streets of Saigon. At the end of the chapter, he barely escapes in a boat.

Chapter Two introduces a new character, Charlie Manwalker, an FBI agent working in the Oklahoma City area in 1981. At first, I wondered if Charlie was the unnamed character in Chapter One but soon discover that it wasn't him. However, Manwalker was in Vietnam, and may have been in the same military police unit with the mystery man.

Soon, Manwalker is investigating the deaths of other members of that military police unit he was part of twelve years earlier. One after another, members of that military unit are being murdered. There is an envelope full of pictures and copies of a ledger that makes no sense. Charlie is on a short leash since his boss wants him working other cases in a week or so. That's when the clock starts ticking, and Manwalker is off to California, following the evidence trail. It doesn't help that his wife may leave him if he stays away from home for an extended time.

Manwalker also has what appear to be flashbacks. He has trouble sleeping and seems riddled with guilt for something that happened in Vietnam. This plot device didn't work for me. It was more of an irritant. To find out what was behind the nightmares and guilt, I had to read most of the book. This device might have worked better if I had known the reason much earlier. Knowing what happened would have helped develop Manwalker's character.

Even with this flaw and a few others, The Saigon Connection held my interest, but I was often distracted by the poor copy editing like this one on page 282: "Where these warning shots, or was the (I'm leaving this word out so I don't reveal the mastermind behind the bad guys) a poor marksman?" That "Where" should have been "Were". Blemishes like this appear often.

I may be wrong, but The Saigon Connection reads like a rough draft that didn't go through much editing and maybe one or two revisions. With competition like the Dave Robicheaux novels by James Lee Burke, Darrel Rachel doesn't stand much of a chance to gain a loyal following of readers in this genre. Burke's character, Dave Robicheaux, is a police detective and a Vietnam veteran with a serious case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I am a Vietnam veteran with a case of PTSD too, and I've read all of Burke's novels and I identify with Dave. I could not identify with Charley Manwalker. The "head" problems Manwalker brought back from Vietnam did not ring true.

Editor’s Note: Darrel L. Rachel apparently has no web presence at all outside Amazon. He has also released Cherokee Morning (2009) with CS and six earlier books through iUniverse: Letters from Abigail (2000), Nora’s Song (2000), No Man’s Home (2001), The Magnolias Still Bloom (2001), Balinger’s Lake (2002), and The Circling Eagle (2007).

When Mermaids Sing

2009-12-09T08:50:00.004-06:00

When Mermaids Sing
by Mark Zvonkovic
(iUniverse / 1-440-16717-6 / 978-1-440-16717-1 / September 2009 / 248 pages / $16.95 / B&N $13.56 / hardcover $26.95 / Amazon $19.40)
Reviewed by Malcolm R. Campbell for PODBRAM

Larry Brown's musings about life as he observes it are insightful, humorous and often jaded. Outwardly, the protagonist of Mark Zvonkovic's gently written novel When Mermaids Sing is a pleasant, unassuming Medford, PA, high school English teacher who tries to get along with everyone and avoid conflicts.

He often feels manipulated by the requirements of his teaching job and the endless expectations of his parents and his girlfriend Millie. Brown's parents, both college teachers, expect him to play a role in their world, while Millie, an actress who might be cheating on him, expects him to make dutiful appearances in her social and family life. At work, where he may not really be happy, he's hoping to be granted tenure, and his cousin Bradley has joined a cult and might have lost himself in the addictive peace it provides.

Brown can ponder the humor and the irony of such realities because he has a "cure”. He copes with the chaos of his job and his relationships by retreating into memories of the halcyon summer days of his youth at a Cape Cod vacation house with his siblings and cousins. Those were the best years of his life. The present cannot compete with them. He doesn't want it to. Henry David Thoreau once said of Cape Cod's Outer Beach, "A man may stand there and put all America behind him." Likewise, Brown retreats to the house of his youth to put all of life's troubling challenges behind him.

While making an obligatory appearance at his father's annual party for freshmen college students, Brown meets a personable young woman named Jenny with a strong aversion to cults. Her brother Josh has joined the charismatic Path to God, the same group to which Bradley has sworn allegiance, if not his soul. Jenny complains that Josh has repudiated their father as Satan and "become a different person”. A psychiatrist at the party remarks that the sudden personality change exhibited by cult members is due to brainwashing, not hypnosis. This, and the lack of fences and armed guards at an ashram, make it difficult for families to intervene.

Brown vacillates about the difference between the freedom to choose a path others don't agree with and losing one's freedom through brainwashing and choosing the same path. Jenny's family is no longer splitting hairs. They've engaged the services of a well-known deprogrammer to help them extract Josh from the Cape Cod ashram even though everyone involved might end up being charged with kidnapping.

When Jenny points out that Bradley and Josh are together at the same place and enlists Brown's help, he can no longer ignore the issue as a mere philosophical topic for debate. Will Brown help Jenny, Bradley and Josh? He would rather not, because if he does, he will have to admit there's more involved here than the rescue of two impressionable young people from the brainwashing of a cult. He will finally have to take a stand on something and answer a lingering question. Is escaping life by running away to a cult different than running away to the past?

The title of Zvonkovic's carefully written novel is suggested by a line from John Donne's playful “Go and Catch A Falling Star”. Catching falling stars and hearing mermaids singing are, in Donne's thinking, rather unlikely events. Readers of When Mermaids Sing may wonder whether substantive change in Larry Brown is also unlikely. As literary fiction, the story relies heavily on theme, interior monologue and a strong sense of place rather than non-stop action on its introspective journey to a powerful conclusion.

See Also: The March of Books Review
The Good Reads Review

Holt Uncensored

2009-12-01T15:43:00.004-06:00

A few minutes ago I stumbled upon the fact that Patricia Holt is once again writing her outstanding blog about writers entitled Holt Uncensored. Pat Holt is absolutely my favorite of all the many writers who blog about authors and writing from a traditionally published perspective. She used to be the Review Editor at The San Francisco Chronicle. The first version of Holt Uncensored was launched in 1998. Back in the good old days of my naive ignorance of the real truths concerning the POD industry, I used to read her blog religiously. When I discovered her work in 1999, I even went back and read the whole damn thing from the very first post. Pat Holt has a very intelligent, candid, compassionate attitude toward writers of all types. Now after a three-year hiatus, she has brought Holt Uncensored back to life! From this point forward, I recommend that all readers of PODBRAM check out Holt Uncensored for a nice, alternative, unbiased viewpoint. You can start with this excellent post. A link has been added to the left column for future reference. I offer a hearty Welcome back, Pat!

Going Rouge

2009-11-25T16:10:00.008-06:00

Going Rouge:
A Candid Look Inside the Mind of Political Conservative Sarah Palin
by Bob Silber
(CreateSpace / 1-449-58794-1 / 978-1-449-58794-9 / November 2009 / 102 pages / $19.95)

Released just days before the fantasy tome penned by legendary Christian author, Lynn Vincent, Going Rouge is jam-packed with facts, figures, and an extensive display of carefully researched historical data missing from Ms. Vincent's best-selling release. Mr. Silber goes one better than the similarly titled Going Rouge: An American Nightmare, by Katrina van den Heuvel, Jim Hightower, Naomi Klein, Max Blumenthal and other luminaries. Whereas that book re-releases many insightful articles concerning the depth of the brain matter of its subject, Bob Silber goes right to the center of the madness.

Many questions have been asked recently concerning foreign policy, economic policy, and most of all, whose baby is that, really? Bob Silber's book answers all your questions in a stunningly factual manner. There is no obfuscation or word salad to confuse the pertinent issues. Mr. Silber lays it all out in black and white. Or at least I would like to think he has. Actually, as in Sarah Palin's world, there is no black, only white. This book carries on that great Civil War tradition in a manner heretofore unparalleled. The invisible text says it all: there is nothing between those ears but air!

From a perusal of the Amazon sales ranking, you can see exactly what sort of POD book sells really well in America today. Note that the coloring book version is selling even better! Now that's how you market and sell a POD book! Just the facts, ma'am.

CreateSpace Pictures

2009-11-22T12:24:00.004-06:00

Unlike most of you, I never write fiction novels. I like to read them, not write them. My thing is nonfiction concerning modern American pop culture. I read a lot of books that by intent and design have a lot of pictures, mostly of cars and motorcycles. My first book, about cars, contained 37 photos, the inclusion of which cost me $100 with iUniverse. I paid another $100 to put a single photo of my ugly mug in the back of my third book. My second book, about boats, could have used pictures, but it was not worth the cost in time or money. Photos in most POD books still cost way too much money, in both upfront costs and the retail prices set by page count, but CreateSpace has changed all that. When you create your book yourself for CS, you can include as many B&W (grayscale) photos as you want and the company will not charge you a cent. CS does not care if you add a single huge TIFF or two-hundred tiny JPG’s. When you pay the $39 upfront fee, the cost per page is only 1.2 cents. This means that a large number of photos may raise the retail price of the book a tiny bit, but nothing to the rip-off degree that iU does for large page counts.

I am quite buried in boat pictures these days. The book I am working on is called Ker-Splash 2: The High Performance Boat Book. I hope to release it on schedule 1/1/10. Why, you ask? It’s not Christmas I am concerned with; it’s the winter boat show season that begins the following weekend. CS allows a maximum file size of 100 MB, so I have to choose my selections carefully. Since the file sizes of the photos generally vary around one or two MB each, you can see where the limited number kicks in. This would be yet another limitation on the design of a color CS release. It would be nifty if they would offer something like a ten-color-pages option within a B&W book so you could have some color shots without breaking the cost or file size limitations.

As for putting photos in a CS book, I can tell you this much. I enjoy the hell out of the process. It is one of the main reasons I got interested in computers in the first place. I can also tell you that it practically doubles the time it takes to completely publish a book. I think I have a very good grip on the process, and I think the programs I have chosen are probably the easiest way to create the project. There will be about seventy photos in my book. This number has been steadily growing over the past couple of months until it has reached the maximum allowable 100 MB.

In the world of POD publishing, the physical size of a printed photo and its actual file size are everything. Just because a picture looks huge, colorful, and beautiful on your computer monitor does not mean this photo is suitable for printing in your book. The experts will argue all day long about how dots per inch (dpi) is a printer measurement and pixels per inch (ppi) is a screen resolution. Don’t let this silly, but true, argument distract you. It’s just like the old POD slap-fight in which POD is actually a process, but it’s really the birth of iUniverse and all its print-anything-you-submit competitors that really puts their panties in a wad! This is just like that. CreateSpace insists that any photos embedded in your manuscript must be of at least 300 dpi, just as iUniverse used to, and I assume, still do. The only difference was that when I submitted my earlier books to iU, the photos had to be TIFF’s and it literally took all night with a phone line connection to send them the books. CS does not require TIFF’s, although you can certainly submit your photos in this format if you want. Some people claim the photos will look better if you do, but I doubt that I can personally tell the difference. What I can tell you is that with the 100 MB file size limit, you will not be able to include very many TIFF’s in your book, at least not large ones. Most of the seventy pictures in Ker-Splash 2 will be much larger than many of the thirty-seven in Plastic Ozone Daydream.

All the photos in Daydream were taken before I was even very involved with computers. Most of that book was written from 1985-94. The photos were 4” x 6” snapshots that had to be scanned into the computer at 300 dpi resolution each. The fact that these shots began as scanned, small, non-professional photographs hurt their quality level far more than the fact that they were submitted as huge TIFF files helped. I really cannot imagine that if they had been converted to JPG’s and submitted that they would look significantly of any lower quality in the book.

The photos I am working with now are from an entirely different origin. Although I scanned a few shots from prints in the beginning, none of these will be in the book. The two weakest shots were taken with my Kodak Instamatic as Ektachrome slides in the late Sixties. These have been scanned in with my slide scanner at 1800 dpi and then processed into the system. The easiest and best way to include photos in your CreateSpace book is to simply take them with your own digital camera. Most digital cameras spit out very large, high-resolution JPG’s with nonchalant ease. All you have to do is to crop and shrink these to whatever physical size you need and insert them into your document. They will automatically be of a high enough resolution to use in any book in most any size you want without creating too large a JPG file size. A small number of the photos in my upcoming book originated in this manner.

Most of the photos I am publishing originated with boat builders and their publicity firms, and this is one of the leading reasons I thought some of you might find this article relevant. I am describing for you in detail the processes you may have to utilize in order to take photos from a wide variety of origins and place them into your book. I sent out requests to selected boat manufacturers describing my book and what I wanted from them. The replies I received were all over the map. Some companies obviously have paid large publicity firms to take hundreds of high-quality, posed shots, and others may have only taken quick snapshots of a few models. In some cases I had tons of photos to look through and in others I had to hope that at least one of the shots was technically acceptable to use. I had originally wanted the book to be in the 8 x 10 size so the photos could all be larger, but due to the necessary file specifications, I opted for the 7 x 10 size instead. Too may of the precious few photos that I had from some sources were just too small to use without serious cheating; i. e., using too many photos of too low resolution below 300 dpi. Some of the former files were humongous while many of the latter were just a few shots sent to me directly by the small boat builder. A lot more of this latter group could meet the 300 dpi level, or come close to it, at 5.75 inches wide than at 6.75 inches wide. How did I arrive at these dimensions? After comparing the look of a number of books on my shelf, I selected the margin sizes I wanted to use. The really sophisticated providers had set up what they call a Media Page in which every promotional photo of every model was posted in both a small JPG format for the web and a large TIFF or JPG for printing. Later on in this article you will read how I built a quickie version of my book in Microsoft Word utilizing many of these smaller file versions, while downloading the large file versions to actually use in the book. The quick versions could be downloaded and copied into my book’s file folder in moments. I would literally go make a sandwich or do some other mundane chore while each of the monsters downloaded! I hope I can cover every contingency and answer all your questions about this process in this very long article. Let the explanation of the process begin.

I download a bunch of photos from a boat builder's media page on his website or I receive the photos in e-mails. I look at the properties of each picture to see the size and resolution. All my pictures will be 5.75" wide and vary in height, probably from about two to seven inches. This is why I agonized over the 8x10 format for so long: the pictures could have been printed larger, but less of the ones I have could meet the minimum resolution requirements at the 6.75" width. After I check the size of a picture, compared to its resolution, I can decide if it passes technical muster. In this case, if it is 1800 pixels wide at 300 dpi, it passes. The larger format would have required 2100 width to be acceptable. (Both these stated dimensions offer a little margin for error, of course: 1800 divided by 300 = 6, not 5.75.) You may remember that I spent a bit of time trying to ascertain if I could cheat in my CS submission, and if so, how much could I cheat. A lot of that issue was over the 8"x10" format concept, when so many of my pictures were not making the grade. Any photos that I have pulled directly out of the camera can pass the test without question, so if you were working on the same process, the problems I had would probably not apply to you.

After the photos have shown to meet the minimum technical specifications, I open a photo in Picasa. Whatever program you like probably offers much the same functions. (I need to point out here that a few of the boat media pages use TIFF's. When I downloaded a bunch of these, in one case I created a folder on my desktop that was 339MB! In that case, the first thing I do is to convert them all to JPG's and dump the big TIFF's in the trash. You can use the TIFF's in your book if you want, but the file size would be a monster, and 100MB is the total size of manuscript that the CS system can handle. Obviously my book could not be made from TIFF's; although Daydream was, as iU accepted only TIFF's. It was an all-nighter to upload that book, too!) All I do in Picasa is to crop the picture and save the newly cropped copy. Then I close Picasa and open Photoshop Elements, the basic form of Photoshop that came with my slide scanner. (Of course, I don't really do this process one at a time. I prepare a bunch in Picasa and then I finish the job with Elements.) I open the newly cropped version of the picture in the Image Resize page of Photoshop Elements. In this program, you must select do not resample image, and then I put 5.75" in the width box and watch the new listing of the resolution. As long as it states 300 or higher, I am not cheating. I click to resize the image and then I save it as a JPG. When I do this, the box pops up asking for the specifications I want and I choose the highest quality level; then I save the new JPG with a notation that it is ready for the book, such as Sonic Prowler 26 Crop Trim. The original photo has already been saved as Sonic Prowler 26, and the version cropped in Picasa has been saved as Sonic Prowler 26 Crop. After I have completed this process, I change the Crop Trim notation to just CT and move all the CT-designated photos into a special folder of actual possibilities for the book. The first two versions of the photo are left in their original folder in case I need to change the cropping of the photo later. The shot of the Sonic Prowler 26 shown here is my favorite photo out of hundreds that did not make the cut: Sonic sent me a couple of others that were even better!

The use of Picasa and Photoshop Elements is purely my own choice. Most of my face time with these photos is actually spent in the Windows Picture Viewer that comes with Windows XP. In 98% of the cases, Picasa is capable of doing about four times whatever is necessary to modify a particular photo, and Elements does about ten times as much, so the process I am using is meant to honor the KISS Principle more than anything else. I am sure some of you would prefer to open up the big, bad Photoshop and modify the hell out of your pictures; whereas, I am much more concerned with how many minimally modified photos I can include in the book. With the quantity of photos I am working with, my little KISS Principle methodology still requires an enormous amount of time, probably as much as the creation of the text portion of the book!

There are three small picture modification tools that I have utilized on just a few of the photos I have prepared for publication. I have used the sharpen tool in Picasa on a few shots that I took of moving boats at full zoom. I used the blur tool in Picasa to distort a few state license numbers on boats. I read somewhere a while back that you should not publish photos with identifying license plates on cars, just as you should not publish identifiable faces without the subjects’ permission. I assume the license number concept would apply to boats, too, so it gave me an opportunity to check out the effectiveness of the blur tool, which works surprisingly well. The third modification tool I utilized was the JPG quality setting in Photoshop Elements. A few of the shots that had arrived in my computer as humongous TIFF’s needed to be reduced in size just to allow room for more photos inside the 100 MB limit imposed by CreateSpace. I was shocked to discover that the largest of these was 203 MB!! Even after converting some of these to JPG’s, cropping the photos, and trimming the size down to 5.75 inches wide, they were about 6 MB each. I saved a few of these with slightly reduced quality in order to bring them down to about 2 MB each, a file size at least somewhat comparable to the rest of the photos in the book.

Word is still a wonderful, quickie way to create a version of the book that isn't real. If I want to test what a picture looks like in a particular part of the book, I insert the photo from any format and just let Word resize it the width of the page setup (7") and click the grayscale button to see what my book will look like. All of this is a complete no-no for actually creating a CS manuscript. After much research, I have learned that Word will actually decrease the photo's resolution if you insert the picture and then resize it. It will also decrease your resolution if you copy and paste the photo into Word, even without resizing it. The only issue I have not concluded yet is that if I take that color Sonic Prowler 26 Crop Trim above and insert it into Word and then change it to B&W, will I lose anything? It may or may not be necessary to first change that finalized photo to B&W in Photoshop Elements before inserting it into Word. The experts are certain that you should not resize a photo in Word, but I have yet to verify if you can change to B&W in Word without a problem. Take note, though: the experts agree that each photo should be changed to B&W individually before submitting the book. You can submit the book with all color photos and CS will change them all to B&W, but the program will treat them all identically rather than on a case-by-case basis, possibly causing less than perfect results. To be on the safe side of these issues, I have saved a B&W version using Elements of every photo in my Crop Trim (CT) File, so when the book is finally put together, if there is any inserting of photos in Word, no modification to the photo will be necessary after the picture has been inserted in place.

I keep three Word documents for Ker-Splash 2 active at all times. The first is the actual text that I am constantly writing, editing, and updating as a regular 8.5 x 11 document. The second is a 7 x 10 mockup of what the actual book will look like with all the photos inserted in place in their actual sizes. This is the document I referred to above as not real, because the pictures can be inserted quickly as low-res JPG’s and converted to the size and grayscale in Word. Take note that the file size of this document can be only a fraction of the size of the genuine book. After working with this pseudo-document for several weeks, I have already created an updated version with the real photos in place. This monster is, of course, about 95 MB in size now. The third Word document I utilize is a conglomeration of all my notes for the book. The reason it is important is that one part of it contains a charting of the chapters, sub-headings, and other components of the text in the book. As I worked through the hundreds of photo choices, I used this as a template to decide which photo should be selected and exactly where it should be placed. This process allowed me to slowly build what would become the final template for the book, a template in Word that is 95 MB large and too unwieldy to actually work with on a daily basis. The last step I have completed is to set up the final order and placement of the photos and to number them in chronological order through the book. I removed any photos that have been eliminated from the competition, as well as all color versions, from my Crop Trim folder, leaving the photos sorted in order by their numbers. Now I can examine this folder at any time to see if I am satisfied with each and every issue concerning the photo selections. When I am ready to actually build the book, all the photos are ready for me to simply look at my chart and plug in the correct photo numbers.

There is one last project that I have yet to undertake, but I expect it to go quickly due to all the template setup I have already completed. I need to compose any photo captions and credits that I wish to place under any photos. The plan is to write each of these and give them a number in the chart in my Word Notes document, and then copy and paste each of them into place. The whole process will have taken only a million hours, but as I said at the beginning, I love doing this stuff!

See Also: The NIAFS Website/Blog
The CreateSpace Specifications Page

Nothing You Can Possess

2009-11-10T18:55:00.004-06:00

Nothing You Can Possess
by Jacqueline S. Homan
(Eagle Eye Publishers – Elf Books / 0-981-56793-2 / 978-0-981-56793-8 / June 2008 / 412 pages / $21.95)

Jacqueline S. Homan has carried her crusade for the less fortunate population of America to the next logical step. At least it is logical to a certain degree. Ms. Homan is apparently a combination of Whoopi Goldberg and Ralph Nader, with a little hot sauce provided by Michele Bachmann. It’s this last point that confuses me a bit. If all the Wall Street movers and shakers have ever wanted is to completely enslave the entire American workforce, then why would they want to go all wingnutty Hitler on us and exterminate most of their own slaves? Ms. Homan has defended tobacco smokers in her first book and now she has railed against the secret concentration camps coming for us all in Nothing You Can Possess. I do wonder at times if this author is the one who is possessed!

No, I cannot give Jacqueline Homan’s third book five stars because she has let the error count creep up all too easily as the text progresses toward its Glenn Beckish conclusion; however, the proofing of this book is a definite improvement over her first two. Jacqueline’s relentlessly detailed research and her control of the English language bring Nothing You Can Possess into the four-star realm quite easily, but the best is yet to come. Jacqueline S. Homan is the most socially and politically important non-famous writer I have ever read. She is a rarity among the many thousands of self-published, independent, and POD authors hawking their wares all over the internet. She writes what she knows. She writes nonfiction. She is a crusader for the poor and the underprivileged. She went after the multitude of side effects emitting from extreme poverty in Cla$$ism for Dimwits. She displayed an intensity for her subject matter combined with a deferential look at her own weaknesses in Eyes of a Monster. Now she has gathered up her facts, figures, and other data, and compiled it into a financial history of that side of our culture we had just as soon leave buried under a rock. Her next book attacks the subject of religion. I bet Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens would love it!

The title and cover of Nothing You Can Possess do little to impress me. If I had not read Ms. Homan’s first two books, I could easily have ignored this one wherever I might have seen it. Jacqueline has another, much bigger problem: all her books are overpriced and none are available in the Kindle format. I really wish she would get her act together about these issues. She so much deserves to be read by a lot more people! If you know anything about Ralph Nader or Whoopi Goldberg, you probably know that Ralph is the real deal when it comes to consumer protectionism and Whoopi really did once live on the streets as a very poor drug addict. Jacqueline Homan is very real in the same way as these two, except she isn’t famous. She has brought herself up financially from nothing but tragedy. She has educated herself to a surprisingly literate degree. Like the two better-known left-wing heroes, she has never forgotten from whence she came.

I recommend Nothing You Can Possess to the reader who likes to learn something from whatever he reads, a person who follows the premise that, at least to some degree, history does repeat itself. There is a lot of historical detail in the book, but not so much that the text is boringly bogged down like my Economics 101 professor that kept putting me to sleep. This book does not grip the reader by the throat like Eyes of a Monster does, but it is a much more mature and thoroughly developed one than Cla$$ism for Dimwits. I really wish more of the new horde of internet-based authors were interested in writing highly topical nonfiction like this instead of endlessly repeating genre fiction reruns.

See Also: Cla$$ism for Dimwits
Eyes of a Monster
Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie
Jacqueline S. Homan's Blog

The Boleyn Wife

2009-11-05T13:48:00.003-06:00

The Boleyn Wife by Brandy Purdy
(Kensington / 0-758-23844-4 / 978-0-758-23844-3 / January 2010 / 384 pages / $16.00 / $10.12 Amazon)
Reviewed by Dianne Salerni for PODBRAM

History is not kind to losers, and Lady Rochford, Jane Parker Boleyn, is certainly one of history’s losers. She lost out against her sister-in-law for her husband’s love, and she lost her husband’s life while ingratiating herself to the king and Cromwell. She lost the respect of the Tudor court for her transparent perjury, and she eventually lost her life through her unaccountable involvement with the most foolish Queen ever to grace England’s throne.

Lady Jane, the narrator of Brandy Purdy’s newest novel The Boleyn Wife, is described on the back cover as shy and plain. Personally, I felt that based on this portrayal, better words to describe her would be manipulative and avaricious. Any sympathy I felt for her vanished on Page 29, when Jane’s father expressed misgivings about the proposed match between his daughter and George Boleyn, and Jane flung herself to the floor in a tantrum worthy of a three year-old toddler. Jane’s obsession with George seems ill-advised – they had nothing in common and George never showed anything but disinterest in her. Nevertheless, she desired him in a most obsessive way and resented everyone he truly cared for – most of all, his sister Anne.

In Purdy’s version of the tale, the Boleyn siblings were innocent of physical incest, but strangely connected in spirit. “It was as if they were made to be together and, as blasphemous as it sounds, God had made a mistake when He made them brother and sister so that full passionate love between them was forbidden.” There are few likeable characters in this story, but George Boleyn perhaps comes closest. His devotion to Anne is touching and would have been incredibly romantic – if she hadn’t been his sister – but since she is, it’s slightly creepy. Purdy’s portrayal of Anne Boleyn is a little different from others I have read: I found her dislikeable at first, but more sympathetic as the novel continues, until she reaches full dignity during the trial for her life.

One of the things I like best about Purdy’s writing is her ability to paint clear images with her words. Her style is very visual, and I have always found it a pleasure to read. Take this description of Henry’s infatuation with Anne: “And so it began, the chase, the hunt, that would consume the better part of seven years, shattering and destroying lives, and shaking and tearing the world like a rat in a terrier’s mouth.” How better to describe the manner in which one foolish love affair could forever change the history of religion and world politics? I also enjoy her non-standard approach to familiar characters – an Anne Boleyn who truly despises Henry, a Duke of Norfolk who would wrestle Lady Jane for the privilege of telling bad news to the Queen and provoking a miscarriage, and an Anne of Cleves who was cleverer than anyone suspected.

I had only a few, small reservations about the novel. One of the key aspects of Anne Boleyn’s character is her true love for Harry Percy in the beginning of the book, and yet I was never comfortable with their relationship. Purdy portrays them as opposites, and therefore I would have liked to have seen them together more often, so that I could truly believe in their love. Another is Jane’s propensity for eavesdropping and spying. Don’t get me wrong – I believe she was capable of such sneakiness, but sometimes the convenient availability of keyholes, tapestries, and shrubberies when important events were about to happen strained any credibility. Still, I found The Boleyn Wife to be a very enjoyable novel – for all that, it is full of despicable characters and follows a plotline that would have been completely unbelievable, if it hadn’t really happened!

PODBRAM readers may find special interest in the fact that Brandy Purdy first published this novel independently through iUniverse under the title Vengeance is Mine. It was snapped up by a traditional publisher in under a year, making Purdy one of the many success stories featured on this blog!

See Also: The High Spirits Review
The Confession of Piers Gaveston

The Crusading Spirit in Modern America

2009-10-28T15:44:00.007-05:00

The Crusading Spirit in Modern America:
George W. Bush and the Radical Conservative Elite
by Richard J. Bazillion
(BookSurge / 1-439-22944-9 / 978-1-439-22944-6 / May 2009 / 410 pages / $20.99)
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse for PODBRAM

If you want to have a better idea of what is going on in American politics, Crusading Spirit is an important book, not only because of the author's anger but also because of the evidence used to support that anger. There's a reason why America's two major political parties are polarized. Crusading Spirit provides another piece to the puzzle for those who want to unravel the misinformation used to mislead voters.

Reading Richard J. Bazillion's book caused me to do a bit of research where I learned that in 2006, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that about ninety-six million Americans over the age of eighteen voted. One hundred-twenty-four million old enough to vote did not. Of those that didn't vote, forty million were registered. I will address this tragedy later in this review.

I've read two disturbing, but "necessary" books this year. The first was Murder of an American Nazi by Tim Fleming—a book that convincingly connects the far right, radical conservative movement in America to Nazi fanaticism. The Crusading Spirit in Modern America is the second book, and Bazillion's specialty is the history of modern Germany. The main reason I find these books disturbing is that only a few people may read them. Neoconservatism, like Nazism and Communism, also supports and pushes dangerous ideas.

Irving Kristol (mentioned on four pages in this book) is considered the godfather of American neoconservatism. While speaking at New York University, the professor once said, "I'll put it bluntly: if you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship." He has also said, "What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived." After his recent death, he was described by The Daily Telegraph (a British paper that has been politically conservative in modern times) as being "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the 20th century": great praise from the conservative media.

What did Kristol say about truth? "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults; and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."

The godfather of neoconservatives said that telling people what you want them to hear is okay. After all, Kristol was up front about his belief in the "noble" lie. Today's neoconservatives claim they are not telling lies, but how can we believe them? Before you decide for yourself, read the AARP Bulletin for September 2009.AARP published a piece on the hype, lies and facts regarding health care reform revealing one lie after another coming from the political right and their allies.

The Crusading Spirit is a disturbing book because it reveals dangers to the American way of life that are real. Here's a quote from page 346. "So-called 'dominionists, (not demonists)' who occupy the far right fringe of Christian fundamentalism, are the vanguard of a fascist movement in the US."

This is a powerful claim supported with compelling evidence. Two men are mentioned often in the book, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. Schmitt joined the Nazi party in May 1933, and is sometimes referred to as "the crown jurist of the Third Reich." He has had a powerful influence over neoconservatives. Crusading Spirit maps the connections in convincing ways linking these dangerous Straussian ideas to the George W. Bush Whitehouse and many of his influential advisors, including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Abram Shulsky, Stephen Cambone, Elliott Abrams, Stephen Hadley, and Douglas Feith (page 65) explaining in detail why America went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and how these wars were botched and why.

It is a tragedy that this book will not reach a wider audience. Like most books written by PhDs spending decades lecturing to students in universities, Crusading Spirit bogs down with a reading level far above the average American. I had to treat this book like the textbooks I studied in college by highlighting and underlining important passages to keep the connections straight.

Although this process was painful (like walking slow on a bed of hot coals), the reason why I kept at it was because I know someone that matches the description Bazillion uses to describe the characteristics and beliefs of the average far-right radical neoconservative/evangelical. That description matches a friend of mine, who, like George W. Bush, was born again.

Before I go any further, I recommend that you read Bart D. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. After all, radical evangelicals are part of the unholy alliance between neoconservatives and Christians, so it is a good idea to understand them. If you research Ehrman's book, you will discover that he stirred up a controversy and that evangelicals scrambled to defend their beliefs.

Recent discussions with my born-again friend taught me that evangelical neoconservatives only see good and bad, black and white, no gray or in-between. It's as if they lost the ability to reason and are more of a cult than a religion. Biblical scripture, as literally interpreted by them, is their guide (read Ehrman). You either agree with them or you have been brainwashed by the so-called liberal media. Strong evidence supports the fact that the liberal media is an invention of the far right to confuse and influence America's non-reading millions. Consider that Rupert Murdoch, a known neoconservative, owns Fox News, along with News Corp, a media empire. (To learn more, read Ann Sanner).

Neoconservatives and their allies believe there is one way to rule the world, and they have a loud voice. The loudest comes from Rush Limbaugh, mentioned on page 331 in Crusading Spirit. This talk-show king of neoconservative radio has a listening audience between fifteen and thirty million people making his show the number one radio talk show in America. Rush often says that his audience, referred to as "ditto heads", does not have to think because he will think for them. It's scary when you consider that there are that many willing, easy to influence people in America, and they vote.

The second loudest mouth is Ann Coulter, who calls liberals and Democrats godless. There are others that belong to this mud-slinging, fire breathing, right-wing political mafia besides Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter: Glen Beck, Sean Hanity, Dennis Prager, Mark Levin, Michael Berry, Hugh Hewitt, and Mike Gallagher.

If you have swallowed the right-wing propaganda that the media is liberal, you probably do not trust anything you hear unless it is from a one-hundred-percent biased neoconservative pundit who may believe it is okay to tell a "noble" lie.

Now, back to my earlier statement about eligible voters compared to the numbers that did vote. To make this American experiment in democracy work, people must be involved and be literate enough to understand the issues. They have to read, too. Literacy plays a vital role in democracy, so let's learn a few things about literacy in America.

Truthdig.com says, "There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. In addition, their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.”

"The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information (unless someone like Rush Limbaugh tells them what to think). American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda (mostly misleading lies and half truths) now masquerades as ideology."

In 2003, the government center of national assessment for adult literacy reported the
number of adults in each Prose Literacy Level. The Prose Literacy Levels are defined as:

Below Basic: no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills – 30 million Americans (14% of the adult population)

Basic: can perform simple and everyday literacy activities – 63 million Americans (29% of the adult population)

Intermediate: can perform moderately challenging literacy activities – 95 million Americans (44% of the adult population)

Proficient: can perform complex and challenging literacy activities – 28 million Americans (13% of the adult population)

Consider that Rush Limbaugh has an audience of thirty million (probably below basic) and a book like Crusading Spirit will be fortunate to find a few hundred and most if not all of those people will be "proficient" readers. To find a larger audience, Bazillion should slim down his book by cutting about a hundred pages (due to repetition), and simplify the language. However, the odds are that even if Bazillion rewrote his book so someone with a sixth-grade reading level could read it, they wouldn't be able to understand the importance of the information.

That's why a neoconservative voice like Rush Limbaugh wins with his "noble" lies, and the majority of Americans will eventually lose. Pundits like Limbaugh know how to reach intermediate, basic and below basic readers and control the way they think and vote. This explains why America ended up with George W. Bush in the White House for eight years. Liberal authors like Richard Bazillion should learn how to communicate from right-wing pundits to get his message out.

See Also: Richard J. Bazillion's Amazon Page
The PODBRAM review of Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy

Honest Sid

2009-10-24T08:18:00.004-05:00

Honest Sid:
Memoir of a Gambling Man
by Ronald Probstein
(iUniverse / 1-440-14187-8 / 978-1-440-14187-4 / May 2009 / 208 pages / $17.95 / $12.21 Amazon / $27.95 hardcover / $19.13 Amazon / $9.95 Kindle)
Reviewed by Donna Nordmark Aviles for PODBRAM

Sid Probstein lived the life of a gambler and bookie in and around the area of Broadway in New York City during the post WWI and Great Depression era of the 1920’s and 30’s. Sid lived by the motto, “If you’re going to live outside the law, you’d better be honest.” Friendly and well liked, as well as a master of impression, Honest Sid (as he came to be known) was skilled at covering up his shortcomings, creating the guise of success and accomplishment while in fact, he was often just one bet away from financial ruin. Ever the optimist, Honest Sid was quick to find the silver lining in every cloud that darkened his path. He lovingly pursued his wife-to-be, Sally and doted on his only child, Ronald, whom he came to view as his one big success.

Author Ronald Probstein provides for us, in Honest Sid: Memoir of a Gambling Man, a peek inside the social scene of two important decades in American history through the daily life and experiences of his father. Much more insightful than a typical history textbook outlining the facts and figures of a generation, memoirs such as Honest Sid serve to reconstruct the fabric of daily life for which written evidence is often scarce and would otherwise be lost to those of us who have not lived it.

Ronald Probstein left his father’s world of illegal gambling after graduating from high school in 1944 and enrolling at New York University where, during his sophomore year, he was offered a paid research position and awarded an academic scholarship to continue his studies. Probstein went on to become an eminent scientist and is now Ford Professor of Engineering, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although they came to lead dissimilar lives (My father neither knew nor understood anything about science or engineering), the father-son bond remained strong until Sid’s untimely death. Mr. Probstein’s book is a loving tribute to his father’s life and is of greatest value to both his family for generations to come, and to those of us who savor the opportunity to step back and experience life in a different time.

Technically this book is very well done with a uniform, visually appealing layout and only a few errors in spelling and punctuation – easily overlooked by the engaged reader. I would have enjoyed the addition of some period photographs not only of the book’s characters but also of the NYC landmarks mentioned in the book and the family’s various living and workspaces. I enjoyed reading and learning about Honest Sid and can readily recommend Mr. Probstein’s book to anyone with an interest in the memoir genre or life during the pre-depression and Great Depression era.

See Also: Ronald Probstein's Wikipedia Page
Ronald Probstein's MIT Page
Amazon Listing of the Author's Nonfiction Works

Success Story: Donna Nordmark Aviles

2009-10-19T09:56:00.003-05:00

Good Morning!

Thank you to everyone who has supported my books and Oliver's story. Whether you are a teacher, a family member, or a friend, I value each of you and appreciate your interest and enthusiasm in support of my efforts to bring back the history of the Orphan Trains and their riders.

I was very excited to wake to the news this morning that the audiobook version of Fly Little Bird, Fly! and Beyond The Orphan Train, which was read by voiceover actor Drucilla Nordmark and produced at SubCat Studios in New York, was named the WINNER in the Non-Fiction Narrative Audiobook category of the National Best Books 2009 Awards sponsored by USA Book News. Peanut Butter For Cupcakes was named a FINALIST in the Non-Fiction Narrative category of the same Award Contest. Books entered in this award contest were from all types of publishing houses - both traditional and independent.

Additionally, for those who have not heard, I will be traveling to Salina, Kansas, for two weeks in April for a Book Tour sponsored by the Salina Arts and Humanities Commission. I will speak to over fifteen schools and many community groups, as well as participate in a fundraiser for the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kansas. Many thanks to Sara Gault of the Salina School District for making this Book Tour a reality!

And finally, In November I will be in NYC at the First Annual Self Publishing Book Expo representing my books and Wasteland Press.

Many thanks again for the blessing of your continued support, without which this story would likely still be sitting on my shelf!

Donna

God's Money

2009-10-17T17:34:00.004-05:00

God’s Money:
A Novel Based on Actual Events
by Tad Hutton
(Foremost Press / 0-981-84189-9 / 978-0-981-84189-2 / August 2009 / 134 pages / $11.97)
Reviewed by Dr. Al Past for PODBRAM

In my previous review for PODBRAM, I observed that since books are food for the soul, then one might think of a particular book in terms of specific dishes. That tactic is useful with the present book. Take several nicely fried Filipino lumpia, a Vietnamese spring roll, a small saucer of Japanese sushi, some Chinese moo goo gai pan, and a bowl of steaming jasmine rice. Add a bottle of fish oil, Chinese mustard, plum sauce, a good soy sauce, chopsticks, and an American fortune cookie. The result: a small, exotic pan-Asian feast, highly satisfying and perhaps leaving you in good humor but wanting more. That's not a bad extended metaphor for God's Money, by Tad Hutton.

If the book is based on actual events, as is claimed, I have no knowledge of them, but they're not needed to enjoy the story. Basically, pirates sink a freighter, and a fortune in American money floats off, to be found years later by humble fishermen who must decide what to do with it. If you are thinking that the former owners of this money might get wind of the find and try to get the money back, you would be correct: thereby hangs our tale.

That bare outline could suggest yet another conventional boilerplate thriller, but that is not the case at all. Set among the thousands of islands in the South China Sea, the story is staffed with a marble cake of cultures, most of the representatives thereof qualifying as "characters" whatever their culture. The author seems well versed in the details of those cultures: of daily life, religion, bureaucracy, politics, and languages, all of which add to the sense of authenticity and local color. As for the characters themselves, start with a former Peace Corps volunteer/former financial manipulator, who got a little too clever in his dealings and decided to retire in obscurity to a small village on the South China Sea. Add a small group of poor but generous Christian fishermen and villagers, one timorous, bibulous Catholic Father, a boy who seldom speaks but who has a compass in his head and can commune with dolphins, a Filipino police lieutenant who has eyes for the village babe, comically grasping church officials, and an abandoned WWII Japanese soldier who has become a hermit and turned to meditation and the martial arts. Crown all with a truly scary pirate, and you have the makings of a juicy yarn.

The blurb says the story is unforgettable. This is a common claim for novels, but in this case it is justified. The writing and editing are pristine. My only complaint is that this "meal" (at only 134 pages) amounts to a working lunch. It could easily have been a banquet.

See Also: The Author's Website

Special Note: This is Tad Hutton's fifth book. His first two, published in '92 and '93 respectively, are out of print, but his third and fourth are available at Amazon alongside God's Money.

Recipe for Murder

2009-10-10T05:51:00.003-05:00

Recipe for Murder: A Patrick and Grace Mystery, Book 2
By Janet Elaine Smith
(Star Publish / 1-932-99348-7 / 978-1-932-99348-6 / August 2006 / 160 pages / $16.95 / Amazon $13.22)
Reviewed by Dr. Al Past for PODBRAM

Patrick O'Malley is a retired New York City cop. Grace Johnson, a recent widow, does volunteer work as a cook at a homeless shelter. Though they have a bit of difficulty admitting it to anyone, the two are an item. In this second of three (so far) Patrick and Grace Mysteries, the duo, no longer young but as inquisitive and determined as ever, are perplexed by a letter from their gentle friend Walter, who has unaccountably disappeared from the homeless shelter's kitchen days earlier. Walter writes them he has returned to his childhood home in Albany, Nebraska, because of the death of his father. He adds that he needs a favor. He has found a “recipe for success”, but someone doesn't want him to have it, and in case anything happens to him, he is enclosing the key to his safety deposit box, the contents of which could make them millionaires.

Worried about their friend, they call his mother only to learn that Walter has died and his death was ruled a suicide. His mother, however, believes that cannot have been the case. Patrick and Grace decide to travel to Albany and investigate the matter.

What you have there, obviously, is a recipe for a murder mystery, one with detectives who call to mind the television show Murder She Wrote, which is in fact referred to in the story, since the characters themselves realize the parallel. Once in Albany, they encounter a number of citizens of the tiny town, leery of outsiders, and many of whom are worthy of suspicion. A gratifying number of complexities and reversals ensue before the guilty party is nabbed.

Recipe for Murder comfortably fits the classic definition of a cozy, light detective story with well-educated protagonists and little explicit violence. The title stayed in my mind as I coasted through the story, meeting the various odd characters of the town and pondering the mystery. Books are indeed food for the mind. Some amount to roast beef and mashed potatoes. Others might recall a hamburger and fries. An exotic, international volume might bring to mind General Tso's chicken, or even spigola arrosto alla ligure. Not a cozy, however. A cozy, to me, would be a dessert: a strawberry tart, pistachio gelato... or, in this case, applesauce and oatmeal cookies. Yes, that's it! How can I be so certain? It's easy: not only do applesauce and oatmeal cookies figure in the plot, the recipe is included at the back of the book. It's a fitting finish to a sweet mystery.

See Also: Interview with Janet Elaine Smith
Review of A Lumberjack Christmas
Review of A Christmas Dream

Above the Fray

2009-10-04T15:27:00.005-05:00

Above the Fray: A Novel of the Union Balloon Corps, Part One
by Kris Jackson
(CraigsPress / 1-607-48002-6 / 978-1-607-48002-0 / May 2009 / 304 pages / $19.95 / Kindle $3.99)
Reviewed by Malcolm R. Campbell for PODBRAM

Thaddeus Lowe said, “The sun’ll not rise today, Nathaniel. You and I shall have to rise to meet it.”

And so it is that a fifteen-year-old telegraph operator from Richmond inadvertently helps Professor Lowe direct a Federal artillery barrage by transmitting air-to-ground telegraph messages about the range and direction of fire. Lowe is pleased with the results, for the test further demonstrates the viability of aerial reconnaissance in the Civil War. Nathaniel Curry is conflicted when he realizes the target wasn’t a land formation but a secessionist battery at Falls Church, Virginia.

Kris Jackson’s protagonist in Above the Fray is in Washington, D.C., to help with the telegraph equipment while fellow operator Charlie Spence makes the ascent with Lowe. At the last minute, Charlie backs out, telling Lowe, “I’ll not go up in that thing again. I was scared to death the last time.” Charlie refused to reconsider even after Lowe tells him the test depends on him. Nathaniel suddenly blurts out, “I’ll do it.” Destiny, it seems, has called him into the war against the Confederacy— his family, his friends, his country.

In July 1861, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Thaddeus Lowe Chief Aeronaut of the Union Army Balloon Corps. Kris Jackson’s meticulously researched and well written novel brings to life a little-known civilian contract organization that supported Federal troops during the Civil War with real-time information and maps based on observations made from hydrogen balloons.

Part I of Above the Fray follows the battles of the Peninsula Campaign while Lowe’s Balloon Corps is assigned to General George McClellan. Mainstream readers will enjoy a dramatic story, while civil war enthusiasts will also appreciate Jackson’s attention to battlefield detail, balloon handling and equipment, and the highly credible interactions between the novel’s fictional characters with historical figures.

Service in the Balloon Corps represents a rite of passage for Nathaniel. Ballooning not only widens the physical horizons of his world, but plunges him into a role that exposes him to the ugliness of war and the condemnation of his brother who supports the South. Nathaniel’s sweetheart’s family is also fighting for the Confederacy, but she cautiously suggests that the Union cause might also be just if it brings an end to the immoral institution of slavery. Jackson has created a likeable character who questions why he is doing what he’s doing while learning to rely on spunk and grit to survive the war on a diverse team of aeronauts. For Nathaniel Curry, being above the fray does not mean being out of danger.

In addition to Lowe, the novel includes aeronauts John Wise and John LaMountain as well as the visiting Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Since most readers aren’t familiar with these individuals, the novel would be helped by an introduction or an author’s note that separated fictional characters from the obscure historical figures. The count’s presence foreshadows future developments in aviation while LaMountain’s presence brings another fine element of tension into the novel by illustrating differences between aeronauts. LaMountain was critical of Lowe’s reliance on tethered (secured to the ground with ropes) flight; Lowe thought LaMountain’s untethered flight made communication with the ground more difficult while adding control problems and other risks.

POD Book Reviews and More was sent only Part I of Above the Fray for this review. We don’t know why Above the Fray was split into two volumes or why those volumes are being offered as standalone books rather than a boxed set. Part I ends with a cliffhanger soon after the September 1862 Battle of Antietam. History tells us that Lowe resigned from the Balloon Corps in May 1963 due to continued pay and logistics disputes with the army. With Lowe’s absence, the corps folded up by August. This review, then, is provisional since we only considered half of the novel. If Part II measures up to the standards of Part I, then Kris Jackson has created a wonderful and informative story about a young protagonist who comes of age under fire at the same time the military’s use of balloons comes of age under fire.

See Also: Above the Fray, Part Two in Amazon Kindle
Kris Jackson's Authors Den Page
Kris Jackson Design
The March of Books Review
The Goodreads Review
The Amazon UK Review
The PODBRAM Review of Above the Fray, Part Two

The Fuhrer Virus

2009-09-19T19:28:00.004-05:00

The Fuhrer Virus by Paul Schultz
(Eloquent Books / 1-606-93117-2 / 978-1-606-93117-2 / November 2008 / 320 pages / $17.50 / Amazon $14.18)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

This espionage-suspense caper is set during World War II, but during that odd and brooding breath-of-a moment-time period during 1941 when Russia and England were in a desperate, full-out balls-to-the wall war effort against Nazi Germany. America was officially a neutral nation but teetering on a knife-edge, with powerful and influential people and organizations – within the government and without, within America and without – pulling one way or the other, according to their own dictates and reasons.

The characters and their reasons for launching a scheme to infect Hitler, then riding high as the Third Reich looked to be all but unstoppable, are intricately linked. An American industrialist and his good friend, the Senator, have good reasons for wanting to keep America neutral. There are the German army officer and his old university friend – now influential in German Intelligence – who come up with a scheme to infect Hitler with an obscure viral disease. It is supposed to be only temporary and done from the very best of motivations: to sideline the Fuhrer just long enough to keep him from interfering in the conduct of the war on the Eastern Front, and allow his generals free hand to win in the campaign against Soviet Russia.

Roped into this convoluted plot is a disgraced American Army officer, with just the right medical background… and working against it is Michael Barnes, a military intelligence agent from the loose organization that would become the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. In an ironic contravention of the usual sort of World War II espionage thriller, his mission is to save Hitler’s life, rather than end it; since it is in the best long-term interests of the US that Hitler be allowed to thoroughly bungle his military’s war against Russia. The tangle of plots and cross-purposes are very well worked out, and in accordance with the actual historical circumstances; there were indeed substantial influences working against any involvement in a European war at that time. The FBI and other anti-espionage bodies were also quite efficient at keeping tabs on German efforts to extract an advantage from association with German-Americans. In my opinion, the one structural weakness in developing the plot was that the coincidence of Doctor Ross being exactly the sort of medical expert necessary AND being German-American, and fluent enough in German, as well has having just that very week been caught in a honey-trap. It struck me as being altogether just too much of a contrivance, and contrary to Mark Twain’s advice for those who write fiction: “confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.” Aside from that turn of plot and character, The Fuhrer Virus is a brisk and entertaining tale, and a look into a period of WWII which is usually rather underrated by the writers of this kind of adventure.

See Also: Celia's BNN Review
Paul Schultz at Eloquent Books