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
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 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
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:
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 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
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:
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
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 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
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 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 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
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 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
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
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
