Category: Books

Book Review: The Last Chairlift – by John Irving

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Books (not finished reading)2 Comments

I tried. I tried really hard to read and finish this book. But by the time I got to 50%, I could not take it anymore. The problem is that the book has 908 pages in print format, so reading 50% of that is more than any normal novel already. I made a huge investment of time in The Last Chairlift.

John Irving is an icon. I read The World According to Garp when I was just 22 years old when it first came out. I remember it being controversial, I remember liking it, but I remember nothing about it after that.

I think I picked up Cider House Rules, but I don’t think I finished reading that either.

I know I read A Prayer for Owen Meany, I remember I thought it was a great book, but I remember nothing more about it now either.

Maybe if John Irving’s books were not so long, I’d read more of them.

In The Last Chairlift, the protagonist Adam Brewster tells his life story. His mother, Ray Brewster, is a competitive skier but she is very short and “little.” Being little is a big deal in this book. During a competition in Aspen when she was still a teenager, she gets herself pregnant. Adam is the result. Much of his story is trying to find out who his father is, as little Ray never reveals the secret, at least not in the first half of the book.

Irving employs a very unique writing style. One of the characters, Ray’s roommate and lover, as we find out, operates a machine that grooms the slopes at night. Her name is Molly. However, Adam, the narrator, refers to her as the trail groomer, the snowcat operator, the night groomer, and some variations on the theme. Another character is Elliot Barlow, Adam’s stepfather, who is even smaller than Ray at under 5 feet. Adam calls him the snowshoer, because that’s what Elliot was doing when he first saw him. But he also calls him the little English teacher and other variations.

For example: “…we know, Ray,” the night groomer was consoling her, when the snowshoer just showed up….

This style is entertaining and unique, and you get to love and enjoy the characters. Irving deals with transsexual issues, as Elliot eventually transitions to become a woman. Adam then refers to the little English teacher interchangeably as he or she in the same paragraph. He deals with sexual misconduct, homophobia, bigotry, and all the ailments in our divided society. He deals with art and literature, as Adam is a novelist. The whole story is framed in the world of competitive skiing – as the title of the book might indicate. And, as seems to be a staple in every Irving book, there is much wrestling going on.

I didn’t give anything away here. The Last Chairlift is a very entertaining book, often humorous, sometimes to the point of laughing out loud. But it’s too long, way too long, and by the time I was half-way through I found myself just turning pages to get on with it. Adam chronicles his entire life and family and extended family, but nothing really ever happens. There is no suspense. There is just more, endless hilariousness, and it got boring.

If you are a diehard fan of John Irving, this is your book. Otherwise, you can pass.

As always when I don’t finish reading a book, I refrain from rating it. However, I did just by Owen Meany again on Kindle to give it another read.

Book Review: Crucial Conversations – by Joseph Grenny

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Business, Two StarsLeave a comment

There are actually five authors listed: Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Emily Gregory.

Crucial Conversations is a book about tools for talking when the stakes are high, whether in a business environment, or in personal relationships. It consists of three parts:

Part I: What to do before you open your mouth

Part II: How to open your mouth

Part III: How to finish

It starts with descriptions on how conflicts arise and provides techniques and strategies to prepare for conversations that create results. Loaded with anecdotes and examples, it illustrates the various points and strategies and guides the reader. There are a lot of processes outlined by acronyms, which all made sense when I read them, but which I could not remember afterwards.

I learned a lot from the techniques it provided and I found myself nodding and agreeing. But the book became monotonous as it went on for 268 pages. This kind of self-help instruction could be provided in a 30 page article just as effectively, but of course, you can’t make money writing 30 page articles. You make money writing a full book.

If you have found yourself in struggles communicating with people at work or in your personal life, reading Crucial Conversations may just make the difference between walking away bewildered und unsuccessful, or resolving a conflict to the satisfaction of all participants.

If you are a fairly fast reader, you can work through this book in a few hours and then later put it on the shelf, so it’s there as a manual to quickly thumb through before you have to have one of those crucial conversations.

Book Review: A Door Into Time – by Shawn Inmon

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two StarsLeave a comment

A Door Into Time – an Alex Hawk Time Travel Adventure

Alex Hawk is an ex-United States Special Forces soldier. He is divorced and lives alone in a house in Central Oregon. His 4-year-old daughter Amy lives with her mother nearby, but Alex has been an unreliable father, missing too many of Amy’s special life events.

One day he notices an anomaly in his basement. He pulls down some wood paneling, only to discover a brick wall. He breaks through the brick wall only to find another brick wall. Once he breaks that down, he finds a letter of warning from the previous owner of the house, next to a black outline of a door, a portal.

After gathering some survival gear into his backpack, he takes a few weapons, including a hunting rifle, and steps through the portal just to check it out. The world he finds himself in is vastly different from what he came from in Oregon. A flock of giant aviary creatures attacks him and wounds him. Then a group of human warriors rescues him from the attacking beasts, but they don’t let him return to the portal. They take him away as a prisoner.

Will Alex ever make it back home?

Minor Spoiler Alert

The portal in Alex’s basement leads into a human world in the far, far future, so far indeed that all traces of human civilization have been erased. There is no more technology. Humans are just individual, loosely connected tribes with stone-age weapons. The most advanced weapon is bow and arrow. There is no technology whatsoever.

Alex is taken prisoner and eventually adapts to their way of life. After stepping through the portal a few pages into the book, he never comes back, and the entire story plays in that ultra-future stone age world, where Alex makes his life as a warrior of the tribe. He spends years with them and becomes a general in their wars.

There are some plot holes, though. Think of it, a guy lives alone in his house and one day disappears. Years go by and nobody seems to investigate and follow him? There is a gaping hole in his basement with a door to another world, and nobody finds it and sends law enforcement through it? I was hoping that there would be some resolution at the end.

This is NOT a time travel book. I found it by searching for time travel, and it has the words “time travel” in the subtitle, but it’s really an alternate history / fantasy /adventure novel that plays in an imaginary human stone age environment. The premise is: How would a modern human, albeit with special forces training, fare in a stone age society?

If you’re interested in that, this book will work for you. If you’re looking for science fiction or time travel, stop right here. It’s neither.

I enjoyed reading the story, I wanted to know how the hero would do, and especially how he would get back home. But I didn’t get what I was looking for.

It turns out, this is the first book of seven in this series, and the end is abrupt and completely unsatisfying, simply to set up for book number two.

The book reminded me of Stephen King’s Fairy Tale. A kid goes through a portal in a shed in his yard and ends up in another world. But he comes back in the end, and the story is done.

The story also reminded me of the Sterling books starting with Island in the Sea of Time. The premise there is that an entire ship is transported 3,000 years into the past. Not quite the “future” stone age as here, but the bronze age in human history.

Since I don’t have time to spend seven more books’ worth of reading just to find out how Alex makes it home, I decided to stop right there. I am not sufficiently interested in the stone age world and its politics to spend more time in it.

 

Book Review: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) – by Dennis E. Taylor

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science Fiction, Two StarsLeave a comment

A  long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a young computer programmer. My work was programming machines using what we called assembly language, which is basically working on the chip level. To program the machines, I had to burn EPROMS (chips) that I then plugged into circuit boards before I could run the program on a machine. Needless to say, I learned a lot about computers and particularly peripheral devices that are connected to computers, like actuators, sensors and motors that would actually make the machines move and do something useful.

During that time, I was also very interested in artificial intelligence. This was 40 years ago, and things were very rudimentary. I used to tell my associates that one day I’d be able to upload my consciousness into a computer and become independent of my body. I would be a machine who is conscious. Of course, I said I’d not want to just be some industrial robot, like the ones I was working on, but I’d want to be a spaceship. With weapons. I could just feel my ray guns itch.

I was also an avid science fiction reader, and I knew about von Neumann probes. 

A von Neuman probe is a self-replicating spacecraft without humans. It leaves the earth, spends decades or even centuries traveling to other stars, where it searches for raw materials and resources to build another copy of itself. Each copy then does the same thing. After a few centuries, the galaxy would be full of its clones.

Von Neuman is an interesting figure in his own right. Read up on him here. Sadly, he died in 1957 at the age of 53. He was a child prodigy. From Wikipedia:

Von Neumann was a child prodigy. When he was six years old, he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head and could converse in Ancient Greek. When the six-year-old von Neumann caught his mother staring aimlessly, he asked her, “What are you calculating?”

When they were young, von Neumann, his brothers and his cousins were instructed by governesses. Von Neumann’s father believed that knowledge of languages other than their native Hungarian was essential, so the children were tutored in English, French, German and Italian. By the age of eight, von Neumann was familiar with differential and integral calculus, and by twelve he had read and understood Borel’s Théorie des Fonctions.

Now let’s get to the book We Are Legion (We Are Bob).

Bob Johansson is a software entrepreneur in our time. He has just sold his software company, he is wealthy, and he is just starting to look forward to a life of leisure. He signs up with a cryogenics company which, upon his death, will deep freeze his head, with his brain and presumably his consciousness, until sometime in the future when technology is far enough along that his mind can be loaded into a machine.  As (bad) luck would have it, as soon as the contract is signed he is hit by a car crossing a road. The world goes dark and he dies.

He snaps into consciousness in the year 2133. It’s a very different world from the one he knows. The United States, as we know it, no longer exists. The religious right had won several elections, the country went through an economic meltdown, and eventually a theocracy arose as the leading power in what used to be the United States. Also, the world political situation was drastically different, with a Eurasian block, the Chinese, Australia, and a Brazilian militaristic power.

Bob finds himself a replicant, which is a consciousness without a body, basically a computer program. He can be turned on or off from the outside and he can be backed up and copied. He is destined to be sent off into space in a von Neumann probe to explore other star systems.

While political unrest escalates on earth, he barely gets away before disaster strikes and a nuclear exchange decimates the people of earth. Bob reaches another star system and starts making copies of himself.

This book explores the feasibility of von Neumann probes, and it speculates on what the world would be like from the perspective of a human being who is completely disembodied and exists only as a computer program.

This is a debut novel and as such well-written and paced. There are none of the annoying problems we often encounter in debut novels, like poor writing, grammatical and spelling errors, and the like. The author must have used a good editor to make sure the book is clean of such distractions. The character development is a bit awkward, and the dialog sometimes stilted. But the subject matter kept me – obviously – interested and I wanted to find out what would happen next.

There was no ending. The book stopped virtually mid-paragraph. While this is a series of four books, and the author thinks of them as one story, he should have done a better job of finishing up book one for those who will only read it. But he didn’t even make an attempt of that.

While I enjoyed the book, I think I have absorbed the main concepts of human intelligence embedded in space ships. The rest is now just drama and more politics, and I can do without. So I won’t be reading the rest of the series.

 

 

Minor Spoiler Alert

The author chooses to make one of the factions of villains the leaders of the theocracy in the former United States. He portrays them as zealous, stupid, cunning and manipulative. Obviously, the author is an atheist and he does not have much respect for Christianity or religion as a whole. When I read some of the 1-star reviews on Amazon, it became apparent that he pissed off many religious people who took the book as an assault on them, their values and of course their religion. Some called it a diatribe, a left-wing assault on the country, and the like.

I didn’t see any of that when I read the book, but then, of course, I am not religious and I don’t make any effort to place myself into the shoes of religious people. I certainly think that theocracies are terrible for humanity as a whole, and I don’t have any praise for Christianity.

When it comes down to it, the author could have left all this theocracy stuff out. It didn’t really matter much in the plot, since Bob freed himself early on from the shackles his masters tried to put him into, and for the rest of the plot, Christianity had no valid active role. The way I see it, the author drew the ire of a large part of the population of the country, and therefore potential readers, by presumably ridiculing them and their beliefs, when he could have achieved the very same plot and story and message without doing that. Any other regime would have worked just as well.

Maybe his critics are right, maybe he did want to spread his message and agenda with this novel, but I think it backfired.

We turn to science fiction to let our minds reach, to experience wonder and awe, and for entertainment. We don’t turn to science fiction to get political rants or religious or anti-religious doctrine.

So, if you are a Christian, you might not like this book, and you best leave it be.

Book Review: The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver – by Shawn Inmon

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Time Travel, Two and a Half Stars2 Comments

In 1976, Thomas Weaver is a sophomore student at Middle Falls High School. He is a socially awkward kid with mediocre grades. His father abandoned the family several years before. His mother raises him and his brother Zack, a senior, as a single mom working as a nurse. Zack is a star of the high school athletic team and one of the most popular kids in school.

One day Zack invites his younger brother to a party. There is heavy drinking going on, and Zack passes out cold. Thomas drags him into the passenger seat of Zack’s Camaro. Even though he only has a learner’s permit, he decides to drive the two of them home. Due to Thomas’ inexperience as a driver, the car spins out of control, flips a few times and when it’s all over, Thomas walks away and his brother, who was flung out of the car during the flips, is dead.

Neither Thomas nor his mother ever get over the loss. He ends up an alcoholic without a job at age 54 and decides to end it all by a massive overdose of pain pills.

And then – he wakes up in his 15-year-old body in the spring of 1976 in his old bedroom. After the initial shock, he realizes that he has a chance to do it all over again, and his most important goal is not to kill Zack this time around. But the business of changing history is not that simple.

I enjoyed reading this story. When I was done, I realized that the author has made a series out of this concept of people reliving their lives, and there are 18 standalone books, all part of the Middle Falls series, apparently all based on this premise. I am sure many of them will be quite entertaining. But one is enough for me.

Book Review: The Sheep Queen – by Thomas Savage

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

I recently watched the movie The Power of the Dog, which was based on the novel by Thomas Savage, an author I had never heard about before. A friend saw that post and commented that Thomas Savage was one of her favorite authors and that The Sheep Queen was one of the greatest novels she had read. Enough reasons for me to read The Sheep Queen.

The Sheep Queen is the matriarch of a family of ranchers and the story spans the time from the late 1800s into about the mid 1960s. We learn about mining, ranching, the economics of sheep ranching and life in the American West through the points of view of some of the ancestors of the family and, of course, her children and grandchildren.

Savage’s style of storytelling is discontinuous. Sometimes the story plays in the present, sometimes long ago, and it’s up to the reader to figure out what’s going on and who is talking. This is one of those novels where you realize, about 30 percent in, that you might have to read it again to figure out all that is really going on. Some critics call that part of a literary style, and that may well be true. For me, who has little extra time, I don’t usually have the patience to read books twice, so I resign myself to not fully understanding all the connections and details, and I miss some of the plot.

I am not sure whether I like Savage’s style, or if it’s too pretentious for me. I can definitely say it’s different from anything else I have read.

The fact that the book is titled The Sheep Queen is a bit misleading. She is not really actually the main character in the book, if there is a main character at all. She does connect all the characters, but the story is less about her than it is about her children and grandchildren. And that is the whole plot. This is a family saga about life in Idaho and Montana, and the pleasures and pains that make up the essence of human existence.

It’s a book about people.

 

Book Review: Shucked – by Erin Byers Murray

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three Stars2 Comments

I have never eaten an oyster in my life, neither raw nor cooked, at least as far as I know. Maybe there was one in a Jambalaya or other dish once. But I can say with confidence that I have never been much interested in oysters.

I am not a cook. I always say that I am a grateful eater.

I am also not a foodie. I just came back from three days in Washington, DC and I stayed downtown, a couple of blocks from the White House, surrounded by great restaurants, and I didn’t step foot in one of them. When I am alone, Subway and Chipotle seem to do the trick.

So what was it that had me read a 352-page non-fiction book written by a culinary writer about working on an oyster farm in Duxbury, south of Boston? Simple: a friend recommended it, and I loved reading Shucked.

Erin was a young food writer who wanted to fully understand the farm to table process. Where does food come from, and  what does it take to bring it to her table?

She quit her job writing, and started working on the Island Creek Oyster Farm. Initially she was going to just do one season. She went out on the bitter cold New England bay and did backbreakingly hard labor harvesting oysters in March, learning everything about the farming of oysters over the months. Later on she worked with the seeds, the younglings that would have to be raised to be next year’s crop.

In the process, not only did she learn the mechanics of farming oysters, but also the business of oysters. Working on a renowned farm, she had access to some of the country’s most famous chefs. She was invited for a one-day internship in New York’s prestigious restaurant Per Se, and then partook in a 23-course meal that lasted for five hours.

The author vividly describes work on an oyster farm, shows the challenges of the trade, and provides a glimpse behind the scenes of the running of world-famous restaurants.

I learned a lot. I found myself googling the names of many of the chefs she talks about, and their restaurants. The book was very engaging, informative and never dull.

Now I’ll have to go out for an oyster meal, don’t I?

Book Review: Fairy Tale – by Stephen King

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Charlie Reade and his parents lived in a small town in Illinois. When he was just eight years old he lost his mother in a horrific accident in the winter when a plumber’s truck lost control on an icy bridge that she was walking across. Charlie and his father called it the goddam bridge after that, and neither of them quite recovered. His father was taken over by alcoholism, and Charlie not only had to deal with the tragic death of his mother, but also the loss of his father to the stupor and catastrophe of drinking.

Adversity caused a lot of trouble for the young boy, but it also made him strong. Against the odds, he helped his father overcome the drink. He became a popular kid in high school and he was a star athlete in several sports. One day when he was 17, walking in his neighborhood, he heard the pained howl of an old dog behind a dilapidated old Victorian house. Old Mr. Bowditch, a recluse, had fallen off his ladder when cleaning his gutters and broken his leg. His old German Shepard Radar was trying to get him help.

Charlie called emergency services and thus saved Mr. Bowditch’s life. He also volunteered to take care of Radar while she would be alone when her master was in the hospital. Boy and dog became friends.

Then Charlie noticed strange and frightening mewling sounds coming out of the locked shed behind the old house. Thus started Charlie’s adventure in a completely different world of magic and gruesome fairy tales.

Stephen King is a master story teller, as I have said many times. He also likes to create alternative worlds parallel to our own, like he did in the book he authored with Peter Straub called The Talisman. There is a world called “the Territories,” a strange fantasy land parallel to the American heartland where there are equivalent characters to our world, and some of them can cross over.

In Fairy Tale, most of the story takes place in such an alternative universe where magic is commonplace, and where the struggle between good and deep evil consumes the people. Of course, Charlie stumbles into this struggle and finds himself in the role of “the Prince” whose mission is to save the world and restore its beauty.

This book is not for everyone. The Fairy Tale world is pretty whacky and I admit that you had better be a Stephen King fan, otherwise you might fade about 30% into the book. But out of this world as it was, I stuck with it. I wanted to find out what would happen next, and whether Charlie and Radar would ever return back to Illinois.

Fairy Tale is partly a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and there are concepts of illness, disease and societal destruction that take place that clearly influenced King’s thoughts. It is not his best book, but it is truly a Stephen King book and therefore entertainment through and through.

 

Book Review: The Power – by Naomi Alderman

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two StarsLeave a comment

The Power is a what-if book.

Stephen King is a master of what-if books.

For instance, his novel Under the Dome is based on this premise: What if a bubble-like, transparent, but completely impenetrable dome a few miles across suddenly was placed over a New England town? Nobody gets in, nobody gets out. What would happen? Then King builds an entire novel around this unlikely, impossible and ridiculous assumption.

In King’s novel The Stand, he speculates that a human-made deadly virus accidentally gets out and kills 99.9999 percent of the population. Only a handful individuals survive. That’s the what-if scenario. Then a novel of well over a thousand pages follows, building an entire world based on that premise.

Stephenson also likes to write what-if novels. Seveneves starts: THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. What would happen if that actually occurred?

The Power is a what-if book. What if women all of a sudden had an electrostatic power that they could use just by touching something or someone? What if a woman could touch a person’s hand and inflict an electric tingle, or a shock that would cause severe pain, or an immense jolt that would even kill a person? If women had that power, would there still be rape? How would society change?

This novel follows a handful of diverse characters, including a young Nigerian man, the daughter of a London organized crime boss, and abused orphan in Florida, an ambitious politician, and many others. The story develops as the world discovers this new reality, and society goes through massive changes.

Those changes are not pretty.

Book Review: Split Second – by Douglas E. Richards

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science Fiction, Time Travel, Two StarsLeave a comment

A brilliant physicist discovers that he can transport matter back in time, but only by 45.15 millionths of a second. That does not seem like a capability a that has any practical applications. However, as soon as the physicist sends an email to a close associate asking him to check his math, he and his girlfriend are abducted by a black operations team.

While that does seem like really bad news, it quickly gets worse, when the government team gets attacked on route by another force, which results in a gun battle that kills everyone but the girlfriend, who barely escapes. She hires a private detective to help her figure out what is going on.

What could possibly be so important that the government is literally willing to kill for it in cold blood?

Douglas E. Richards knows how to write page turners. His heroes are the most brilliant in their fields in the world. His villains are the most ruthless.

The concept of time travel in Split Second is based on leaving a copy of an object in the same space, while the earth moves to a different space in a given time interval. The earth rotates in 24 hours, which means that any point on its surface moves faster than a jet plane toward the east. The earth also circles around the sun in 365 days. The sun circles around the center of the galaxy once in about 250 million years. And our entire galaxy moves in yet another direction in space. Physicists have determined that this means that you and I move about 242 miles per second. This means that we, and any object, move about 58 feet in 45 microseconds. With the technology these guys invented, you can make a duplicate of any object and have it appear 58 feet away from where you copied it. It’s all very complicated and makes for a good story.

But somehow the author glossed over the minor point that the direction of the duplication always needs to trail the movement of the earth in the universe, which is in a constant direction. So as the earth rotates, this can be up, or down, or towards the west or east or anything in between. It can’t be controlled.

Yes, this is science fiction and you just have to accept that there is some magic tech involved. However, it bothered me that a book based on this much Einsteinian thought experimentation left this minor detail out of the equation. It kept getting in my way as I followed the plot.

Richards lives in San Diego, and so do I. This means that many of the locales he uses are very familiar to me and I can actually almost follow along, from Torrey Pines to San Ysidro, from Camp Pendleton to Orange County. Most importantly, I have spend a lot of time hiking and off-roading on Palomar Mountain, which is an important location in the plot of this story, and I therefore had very vivid and clear pictures in my head as I read the book.

I enjoyed Split Second enough to read it within a few days while traveling. I bought the second book in the series titled Time Frame since I was sure I’d want to know how the story continues. But after reading a few dozen pages into the sequel I quickly lost interest. I am sure it’s also a very fast-paced plot but I just wasn’t interested in reading more about this specific cast of characters and I decided not to read the next one after all.

Book Review: Unidentified – by Douglas E. Richards

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science Fiction, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Jason Ramsey is a science fiction writer who becomes obsessed with UFOs, particularly in light of the huge media activity about UFOs in the years between 2017 and 2021. He is on a quest to find out what UFOs really are, why they are here, and what their intentions are.

In his quest for the truth, he discovers realities upon realities that none of us are aware of, right in front of our faces, as he unravels not just the role of humanity on this planet, but the role of humanity on a galactic scale.

Of course, no good science fiction story would be complete without a heroine who is exceedingly smart, superbly attractive, trained as a lethal combatant, and of course in love with the hero.

Unidentified tries to grapple with what UFOs are and what role aliens play in our lives. It speculates extensively about alien technology and alien motives. The book is extremely well researched and documented with literature references.

It is definitely a page-turner, and it had me interested to find out what is going on. There is a lot that got me thinking, but there were also many areas that I felt were over the top, particularly where it concerns alien invasion of human minds, implanting memories, and controlling human actions.

I liked the fact that the author made this a stand-alone book. He could have easily made it a setup for a series, but he chose to finish the story.

I enjoyed it enough to pick up another book by the author right away which I am reading now.

 

 

Book Review: The Devil in the White City – by Erik Larsen

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three Stars4 Comments

The Eiffel Tower was built for the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889. It was meant to be one the main attractions at the Fair,  and its focus was the vast constructions in iron and steel that were the great industrial advancement of that time. It took about two years to build and it inspired the world and became one of the most iconic architectural structures in the world. You cannot think of Paris today without the Eiffel tower.

After that, the architects in the United States and particularly in Chicago, the city that was vying to host the next World’s Fair in 1893, were challenged to come up with something greater than the Eiffel tower.

The result was “The White City” built out of swampland along Lake Michigan.

Why do I know all that now?

The Devil in the White City is not a novel. It’s a documentary about the building of the World’s Fair in Chicago. There is no dialog in this book, but narration and exposition of minute facts about the vision and the people who made that vision happen. Real-life characters who were associated with the fair included Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, whose assassination on June 28, 1914 provided the spark that ignited World War I, and many others. The father of Walt Disney was a carpenter at the fair. Walt probably learned a thing or two there. Finally, there  was a young engineer named Ferris, who had to try several times to propose his idea to build a giant wheel in an effort to out-Eiffel the genius in Paris and his tower. His name eventually also became a household name, as we have all been on a Ferris wheel.

And most of all, Daniel Hudson Burnham, the genius architect who went on and gave the world many buildings, both before and after the Fair, was the relentless driving force behind making the vision a reality. Beyond the White City, one of Burnham’s most recognizable buildings is the Flatiron Building in New York City.

There was also a notorious serial killer associated with the Fair. H. H. Holmes was a young, dashing medical doctor who moved to Chicago and started a spree of fraud and killing, all seemingly in plain sight. Holmes was obviously a psychopath, someone who cares about nobody and nothing but his own ego and satisfaction. To him, human beings, friends and enemies, were simple toys in the game of cat and mouse that kept him entertained. Humans were completely disposable. The book got me into the mind of the psychopath and I must honestly say that Holmes was the most evil person I have ever read about.

In The Devil in the White City, the author Erik Larson switches between telling the story of the Fair and the story of the killer, and it reads like a cliffhanger novel.

Seldom have I read a documentary that is so gripping, so life-like, and one that taught me so much about a time and a place in history that I really had not paid much attention to.

Book Review: Sea of Tranquility – by Emily St. John Mandel

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Pandemic, Time Travel, Two StarsLeave a comment

Sea of Tranquility is a misleading title for this book. This is a book about a pandemic (which came out just in April of 2022) which is meaningful as we all have learned a thing or two about pandemics in the last few years. It’s a book about time travel with an unusual twist, and of course it was the time travel part that got my attention first. It has very little to do with what we associate with the Sea of Tranquility, the location of the Apollo 11 moon landing, other than there are several moon bases near that location by the year 2200, two of which play a major role in the plot.

It’s also about the idea or concept that our entire world is just a simulation, an elaborate video game that someone or something else is playing.

The story starts in 1912 with the hapless son of a British aristocrat who has been sent to exile in British Columbia, and plays in part in the late 20th century, and then again in early 2200 and 2400.

There really is not one single protagonist to follow. It’s a group of people and it takes some time for the tale’s threads to get woven together into a consistent tapestry, but in the end it all makes sense.

It made me marvel about what it would be like to live on the moon and it provides some good and descriptive passages. It’s a quick read, and I enjoyed the book.

 

Book Review: Dylan and Me – by Louie Kemp

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Four StarsLeave a comment

Louie Kemp was 11 years old when he was at summer camp in northern Wisconsin. There was another 12 year old boy with a guitar by the name of Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota. Along with a third boy, Larry Kegan, the three became best friends, for life.

Louie Kemp had unparalleled access to Bob Dylan, starting in their youth when Bobby already knew that one day he’d be a rock ‘n roll star. They were best friends throughout their lives. Louie tells anecdotes from their childhood on through Bob Dylan’s early years that bring the musician’s elusive and almost reclusive life to light. Most of the substance of the book focuses on the years of the Rolling Thunder Review, which Louie produced for Dylan at his request. He tells some backstories of the makings of Blood on the Tracks and Desire. Much of the narrative focuses on the 1970ies, when Dylan did some of his best work, went through his Christian transformation and then back to his Jewish roots.

I have read other Dylan biographies over the years, but this one was the most enjoyable. It’s not a biography, it’s a best friend telling the story of his youth and younger years, providing insight into the formation of a music legend, and doing it simply by telling little stories and vignettes that shed some light on the person we all know as Bob Dylan, but just Bobby to Louie Kemp.