THE BLACK WIND by F. Paul Wilson

This book works well as a behind the scenes World War 2 thriller. It tries to work in a horror element, which is overshadowed by the war itself and the relationship between the two main characters, plus its overall libertarian theme.

The way both characters manage to be both main players and present at the pivotal events (Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima) it well organized but still somewhat incredible. I could believe that they'd both be in their respective Intelligence services.

Did President Roosevelt deliberately invite the attack on Pearl Harbor to draw Americans into the war? I don't know the facts. If it's true, I don't regard it as a betrayal as Wilson and others do. Would it have been better to wait until Hitler consolidates his European victories and Japan consolidates its Asian victories? Maybe they both would have avoided war with us while they enslaved those continents. Would we be a better country knowing that we stood by while that happened?

GOD DOESN'T SHOOT CRAPS by Richard Armstrong

Author Richard Armstrong is a top gun copywriter who seems like a nice guy, so I wanted to like this book . . . but although it's interesting because of its subject matter, it fails as an emotionally engaging work of fiction.

Overall, it's structured after the Divine Comedy by Dante, although with changes I'm not sure I understand, perhaps because I'm not familiar enough with that work. I do know that Dante considered a real life girl named Beatrice as his inspiration, and she's in the book, but only toward the end. The woman he loves is named Maria but she is killed early on. Yet Beatrice is shown as the Madonna figure since she's got the little brother named DeJesus, which the author points out can mean the body of Jesus, in case you miss the obvious parallel.

And I don't get how giving gifts to these two divine beings buys salvation for Danny (Dante). I understand that a SUPERGIRL comic book and a Good and Plenty candy bar are symbolic, but come on.

And then we switch the Old Testament -- Daniel must go through the lion's den to reach Paradise. But the lions had already left!

The pagan Virgil is an interesting character, although I'm not sure I understand how he got so wealthy from his ideas if he was such a poor marketer.

The driving concept of this book is that Parrando's Paradox, a mathematical technique, can be used as the basis of a winning craps system. The author performs a lot of sleight of hand to make us believe it's possible, without really explaining how it accomplishes the feat of making negative expectation bets add up to positive expectation game.

And in the end, it's revealed that it doesn't work all the time, as we should have known all along.

But that doesn't keep many people who should know better from falling for it.

This book is fun to read. The characters are just too broadly played for comedy to provide any emotional identification -- which works against the book at the end when it wants to make its spiritual points. I just don't see how or why Danny ended up happy in Italy.

AIRFRAME by Michael Crichton

This is sort of a disturbing book for anyone who's spent significant time on an airplane. I'm not one of those people who goes flying off to another city every week or so. But when I can I do like to make international flights, and that's even more disturbing in this book. Though it's reassuring that I take regular commercial carriers, not charter flights. I've never even considered that. I'm only vaguely aware of that. And I'm not about to start now, after reading this book.

It starts with a terrifying accident, though it's reassuring that a plane could go through that and still fly for hours to a destination.

Much of the book is an attack on the current media trends to attack without regard to facts. Like much of Crichton's work, it's more factual and editorial than fictional. There's a dialog late in the book between a character and the airplane manufacturer's lawyer about how the system allows the media to destroy companies without factual evidence. The lawyer just shrugs and says, that's the system.

The heros are the dedicated hard-working men and women of the airline industry and the airplanes they design and build in spite of everything. That's why in a sense it's reassuring to read this and know how well airplanes are engineered.

Of course, it's also true that poor maintenance on the part of the carriers can screw up the best airplanes. He explains how this happened to the DC-10.

From a purely fictional standpoint it's flawed because the physical threats to the main character don't come off well. She's chased several times, at first by guys presumably part of the union, which blames her for some renegade management actions (this book makes unions look bad also). The second chase seems to come from the man supposed to be watching her, but it's not clear what the purpose was, since Marder wanted her alive to screw up the live interview. So why did Richman try to kill her?

All in all, not his best work but certainly fascinating for what you learn, which is part of Crichton's attraction.

TICK TOCK by Dean R Koontz

Dean R Koontz has had a strange career. He started off very young in science fiction. Didn't get the recognition there he felt he deserved. Moved on the thrillers, often under pseudonyms, and eventually surfaced with a bunch of bestselling novels that combine the two genres.

This is offbeat in that he's also adding up the screwball comedy of such movies as THE PHILADELPHIA STORY. It starts out routinely enough -- with a Vietnamese-American mystery writer suddenly experiencing attack by a horrible creature for reasons we can't figure out.

Once he teams up with the waitress from the restaurant and things get humorous as well as weird and scary, you start to figure out that Koontz is having a joke with this book.

I'm not sure I really get the family dynamics -- as the ex-husband of a Lao refugee I do know something of how 2nd generation Americans come into conflict with their parents. But since it's all in fun anyway, it doesn't really matter.

BUFFETT: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein

As a biography, this is not too interesting. Buffett was an annoying kid who did little interesting except work hard and make and save up money, and continued to do so through his college years, and that money because the basis for his investing.

His domestic life is somewhat interesting. His wife left him in their forties after the children were pretty much grown, and moved to San Francisco to pursue a singing career and who knows how many affairs (only hinted at in this book).

But they stayed married and evidently in love. So his wife recommended he meet a local young waitress named Astrid who soon moved in with Buffett and takes care of him in every way, with the wife's blessing.

Not the kind of marriage you expected from Warren Buffett, I bet.

Still, his investing career is really why readers will want this book. Without his tremendous investing success, who'd care about his personal life?

And this story of how he began investing and took over Berkshire Hathaway and some of his other investments are worth going over.

Although some of what he does can't be duplicated by us ordinary investing mortals, most of it can be. We can learn a lot from Mr. Buffett -- but I've noticed that few people do.

Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

This is the best book I've read by Clancy. I've only read 3 in total, so that may not be a fair judgment of his body of work. I started with THE SUM OF ALL OUR FEARS and thought it pretty good but too long, and the bad guys were poorly drawn and unbelievable. THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER I barely remember, buried with so much technical detail about sonar and submarines.

But this book focuses on Jack Ryan and his personal life (albeit intersecting with nasty Irish terrorists), nicely unified by the pregnancy of his son. The middle could be tightened somewhat, but it's overall fast-paced and about the right length for the material.

The terrorist attack on his wife and daughter is harrowing stuff. I'd fault the finale because it depends on a subsidiary character being in the bathroom at the right time. Also, he leaves a thread hanging -- what happened to the terrorist's plot to simultaneously kill off rival leaders in the IRA while he was kidnapping Prince Charles and Lady Di in America?

It was odd to feel such outrage about terrorists who're not Muslims, especially since the IRA threat has died down. And truly odd to see French security forces acting so decisively against a threat and actually helping the U.S.

The other 2 Clancy books I read made me feel like I didn't want to read any more for about a year or so -- but this one makes me feel like picking up some more soon.

Congo by Michael Crichton

Here's a pretty good book which will never be optioned for the movies, despite the author's many other filmed novels. It reeks of unforgiveable political incorrectness.

The surface events involve a team of scientists exploring the Congo for diamonds. They're suddenly killed in a mysterious way, so the company launches another expedition.

The events are a pretty good, modern Africa adventure. Rough landscape and jungle, encounters with animals, river rapids, bad weather, they're racing a similar group from a rival company and so on.

Plus, Crichton had the smart idea of making a language using ape, a fictional versio of Koko, as a character. She goes along with the expedition and is one of the interesting parts of the book.

The final solution to the mystery is a let down, at least to me. I'm not sure I buy the basic thesis.

Below the surface, it's an interesting exploration of what it means to be humans. When apes can learn to talk and people eat each other (Crichton's portrait of tribal fighting in the Congo will certainly never be filmed!) and plan to fight war by computer, where is the line properly drawn?

Also, he hits upon his recurring theme of people doing things that have unexpected consequences. This was the backbone theme of JURASSIC PARK. Here, it buries the ruins of an ancient lost city under tons of volcanic lava.

Deep in the Woods by Nicholas Conde

DEEP IN THE WOODS by Nicholas Conde was an early serial killer novel. And deep in the woods is where it belongs. It's mostly competent. I did care enough about the main character -- a children's book author and illustrator, and to keep reading. Plus, there was a lot of material hinting at depths that ultimately weren't there.

Once you learn the puzzle, you realize it doesn't fit together.

Why did the mysterious private detective hunting the serial killer focus so much on the book writer? Yes, she was the killer's sister, but she knew nothing of value to him.

Aside from getting us hooked at the beginning, the killing of author's best friend is gratuitous and an unnecessary coincidence, since killer knew her.

I can't detail the violations of police procedures, but I'm sure a professional would total scoff at the lack of detail and organization.

The ultimate psychological/family secret which supposedly explained the serial killer doesn't even make sense. OK, his real father was mother's husband's good friend. So what? How did that play a role in making him a serial killer. Mother acted seductively toward him and didn't love sister as much? Why? Did she really love the family friend and not her husband? So how did that make boy a serial killer? How did the "seductiveness" (actual incestual acts not included) make him a serial killer? In final murders he's describing as raping the women, but that's not mentioned in regard to early murders. Why?

The author worked with some heavy material but was nowhere near up to it. Threw some good pieces into a stew pot but couldn't make them into an organized, emotional novel.

If you see this in a used book store and you're tempted to buy it . . . re-read THE RED DRAGON instead.

The Mind Thing by Fredric Brown

I've actually finished more fiction books in the past 1 1/2 weeks than in the past 8 months, thanks to riding the bus thanks to a blown out transmission.

Most recent -- THE MIND THING by Fredric Brown. Hey, I didn't promise that I'm reading contemporary books.

Fredric Brown is more or less forgotten now in both fields, but he used to be a pretty big name in both the mystery and science fiction genres. Say, during the 30s thru 50s. I'm not sure when he died. He was one of those guys who trained in the pulps and paperbacks and could always be relied upon for a good yarn -- and sometimes he reached for heights.

Once he wrote a thriller that started out something like, "John (main character) wanted to spend the night with Jane (beautiful woman)." By the end of the book, he'd gotten his wish, but of course it was nothing like he expected or wanted. (Jane was a homicidal maniac and he wound up having to spend a night keeping an armed watch on her. If his attention wavered, she'd have killed him.)

In science fiction he's known mostly for his short stories -- he put out many collections of them. THE MIND THING is one of his few sf novels. Maybe the only one.

It's a fairly good story of an alien stranded on Earth who can take over the bodies of other living creatures, but can't get out without killing them.

This alien's eventually done in by not understanding that a series of both human and animal suicides would attract attention.

Also, there's the happy coincidence that a satellite electronics engineer happens to be spending the summer in that tiny rural area, and needs typing done by the local spinster schoolmarm who does typing and bookkeeping during summer months and just happens to be a science fiction fan who guess there's an alien involved -- that is not very likely now and was even less likely during the 1950s. Plus, I wonder why an electronics expert who does work on satellite could take off for an entire summer. Small wonder the Soviets go ahead of us.

Anyway, nothing outstanding but Fredric Brown was always a good pro.

Dedicated to reading

This blog is dedicated to writing about books I read. I used to read a lot of books. Now I have cut way back, especially on fiction, due to working so much. But I still enjoy reading, thinking about the books and also reading book reviews. Heck, I published a few book reviews in a local newspaper when I was much younger. Also, I published book reviews in various science fiction fanzines what seems like a million years ago.

So, although I can't promise this blog will be updated regularly, or that I will stay on the topic of books I've read (since many other things of interest come to my attention), that is the basic purpose here.