Books

Thoreau Called ‘em As He Saw ‘em

April 8, 2011
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Thoreau Called ‘em As He Saw ‘em

By Mike Gray “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” – Walden “The universe is wider than our views of it.” – Walden “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” – Walden “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” – “Civil Disobedience” “What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.” – Walden “The fact which the politician faces is merely that there is less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they are thieves.” – “Slavery in Massachusetts” “The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.” – Walden “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” - Walden “I would rather sit on a

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Appeasement: A Dead End in More Ways Than One

April 2, 2011
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Appeasement: A Dead End in More Ways Than One

By Mike Gray Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation. For they shall live under Allah’s law (Sharia). … Islam says: “Kill , put them to the sword and scatter their armies.” Islam says: “Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors (jihadists)!” There are hundreds of other Koranic psalms and hadiths (sayings of the prophet) urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim. … Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those are witless. — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, 1942. What do Demosthenes, the Athenian orator; Winston Churchill, the British statesman; and Jimmy Carter, the American president, have in common? They lived at a time when outside

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European Pulp Science Fiction

April 2, 2011
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European Pulp Science Fiction

By Mike Gray That indefatigable researcher Jess Nevins has published two complementary essays about pulp fiction from overseas (“overseas” of the United States and Great Britain, that is). We tend to forget (or, more likely, we never knew) that pulp was a world-wide publishing phenomenon not confined to an Anglophone readership. In his first essay, Nevins chronicles European SF pulps prior to 1914: The history of science fiction in America and Great Britain has been the subject of a number of popular and academic studies, and in general is well known, at least among science fiction fans. But the history of European science fiction, defined in this case as the countries of continental Europe, the Scandinavian countries, Russia, and Turkey, is less well-known. Less coverage still has been given to the science fiction pulps of Europe. In Europe, pulps were called everything from “dime novels” to “story papers” to “gialli” to “heftromane.” They can be distinguished from magazines by the quality of paper (poor), the level of pay for writers (worse), the number of articles or stories (fewer), and literary aspirations (none). Proto-pulps, in the form of pamphlets and chapbooks, were common by the 1550s, and the most popular printed

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The Greening of Detective Fiction Criticism—and Publishing

March 30, 2011
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The Greening of Detective Fiction Criticism—and Publishing

Critics and publishers have dumbed down our understanding of classic mystery fiction in service of a political agenda. By Curt Evans American author Anna Katharine Green’s 1878 mystery tale, The Leavenworth Case (the first of more than thirty mystery works Green penned through 1923), made quite a splash in its day, supposedly selling over 750,000 copies in the decade and a half after its publication. Yet by the beginning of the Golden Age of the detective novel (roughly 1920 to 1939) it had become one of those great, old landmarks on the literary landscape that people dutifully glance at briefly before passing on to something more modern and interesting. Perusing a reprinted edition of Green’s first mystery novel in 1929 (nearly thirty years after he had originally read it), T. S. Eliot, an avid consumer of detective fiction, was moved to wonder why Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales “reread so much better than The Leavenworth Case?”  He noted disparagingly of Leavenworth that it “is simply popping over with sentiment” and “the sentimentality throws a spotlight upon every technical flaw in the plot.” At about the same time T. S. Eliot was looking back over Leavenworth, the esteemed novelist and critic Arnold Bennett was taking a similar literary stroll down memory lane, with the

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The Dreary Cliche of Literary Fiction: Ignorant, Bigoted Treatment of Religion

March 29, 2011
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The Dreary Cliche of Literary Fiction: Ignorant, Bigoted Treatment of Religion

By Warren Moore It may seem odd for someone in my line of work, but I don’t read a great deal of what tends to be described as “literary fiction,” at least of the contemporary sort. Too much of it fits the description I once heard Sharyn McCrumb give: “Stories where nothing much happens to people you never really cared about to begin with.” Something I’ve noticed over the years, however, is the scorn I’ve seen for religion. I can’t remember the last literary novel I read in which the characters find spiritual fulfillment in what we might think of as a traditional organized religious community. In fact, what I’ve seen is that when a character is portrayed as a professing member of some organized faith tradition, it’s only to expose their “real” fanaticism (Krazy Khristians!) or hypocrisy (Kid-diddling Kultists!). A parallel trend is the ghettoization of fiction aimed at people of faith. Some of it is deserved — Sturgeon’s Law remains in force, and 90% of self-designated “Christian/Inspirational Fiction” seems to be crap. A similar phenomenon seems to have arisen in the wasteland of “Christian rock,” but that’s a discussion for another post. Back to mainstream literary fiction…. I

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Ilana Mercer Interviews Erik Rush

March 25, 2011
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Ilana Mercer Interviews Erik Rush

By Mike Gray You might be interested in Rush’s responses to these questions: (1) I would have liked to read more about your family in Negrophilia. What is it about your background that accounts for your clarity on racial matters in our country? (2) “A major tenet of ‘Negrophilia’,” you state in your book, “is that racism on the part of blacks is acceptable, or even proper” (page 96). Do you remember the odious Rev. Joseph Lowery’s benediction at Barack Obama coronation? He asked the Lord to “help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around – when yellow will be mellow – when the red man can get ahead, man – and when white will embrace what is right.” In other words, to be white is not to be right. To be black is to have an eternal claim against errant whites – for no other reason than that they are white. This is crude collectivism. But it’s also the only permissible narrative in American society. How do we get beyond such racism if: 1) it has been framed as justice and 2) whites are too afraid to

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Sleight of Hand Shows Beagle Remains Magical

March 25, 2011
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Sleight of Hand Shows Beagle Remains Magical

A Review of Sleight of Hand, by Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon Publications, 2011) by Warren Moore When I talk to my students about writing, I describe it as a mediated telepathy, a sort of magic transference of people, scenes, and ideas from the writer’s head to the reader’s, more-or-less intact. Like any good sort of magic, it’s mysterious, can be dangerous, and can take a long time — maybe forever — to master. it might be easier, however, just to hand my students anything by Peter S. Beagle, who has worked his own literary magic since he wrote his first novel, A Fine and Private Place, in 1958, at the age of nineteen. Over the years, he’s written travelogues, movies, TV episodes, and songs, but he’s best known as a fantasist, and his novel The Last Unicorn (1968) is a genuine classic of the genre, having been favorably compared to such writers as Lewis and Tolkien himself. But for a man who got such an early start, and who a classmate described as the most intimidating figure in a Stanford Writing Workshop that also included Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey, Beagle’s output seemed slender for much of his career. Brilliant?

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Interview with Gary Alexander: “An Irreverent Goldbrick” and author of ‘Dragon Lady’

March 24, 2011
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Interview with Gary Alexander: “An Irreverent Goldbrick” and author of ‘Dragon Lady’

By Libby Sternberg Dragon Lady, Gary Alexander’s evocative and absurdist tale of the early days of the Vietnam War, is a page-turning read that will make you laugh and cry. Told from several vantage points in the protagonist’s life, Dragon Lady seamlessly shifts from Saigon in 1965 through to the present day . . . and beyond, as the narrator tells the story of his obsession with a Vietnamese girl named Mai, his increasing unease with the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and his reflections on his own life since his tour in Saigon. (For a brief synopsis, see the end of this post.) Here is a Q and A with its author, Gary Alexander: LS: You served in Vietnam. Could you tell us a little about that experience? Gary: Most of my Army career was spent in clerical duties. Like Private Joe in the book, I preferred a roof over my head, and a big, clunky typewriter was my weapon of choice. Even in 1964-65, many of us had doubts about the Domino Theory. Not that we had extensive knowledge of that region and its history. It was because we learned early to doubt the wisdom of those above us.

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H. G. Wells’s “The Chronic Argonauts” to See Publication

March 24, 2011
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H. G. Wells’s “The Chronic Argonauts” to See Publication

By Mike Gray . . . . as a graphic novel, we hasten to add. The short story “The Chronic Argonauts” (1888) was Wells’s first foray into time travel fiction and is very different from his famous The Time Machine (1895): This brief story begins with a third-person account of the arrival of a mysterious inventor to the peaceful Welsh town of Llyddwdd. Dr. Moses Nebogipfel takes up residence in a house sorely neglected after the deaths of its former inhabitants. The main bulk of the story concerns the apprehension of the simple rural folk who eventually storm the inventor’s “devilish” workshop in an effort to repay supposed witchery. Nebogipfel escapes with one other person—the sympathetic Reverend Elijah Ulysses Cook—in what is later revealed to be a time machine. The next part picks up with an unnamed “Author” character discovering the dazed Reverend Cook returned from unbelievable exploits after having been missing for three weeks. The remainder of the story is the Reverend’s short retelling (again in the third-person) of the events that took place that night and the revelation that Nebogipfel is an “Anachronic Man” whose genius drives him to seek out a time more suited to his abilities.

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‘The Gray and Guilty Sea’ Isn’t MacDonald, But It Isn’t Bad, Either

March 21, 2011
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‘The Gray and Guilty Sea’ Isn’t MacDonald, But It Isn’t Bad, Either

Many fictional detectives have been touted as “the new Travis McGee” since MacDonald's death, but (in my opinion) none of them has quite lived up to that standard. Nolte's detective, Garrison Gage, doesn't, either. But he's still pretty good.

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Hard Stuff Goes Down Smoothly

March 15, 2011
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Hard Stuff Goes Down Smoothly

A Drop of the Hard Stuff, a novel by Lawrence Block. Mulholland Books. Available in May 2011. A review by Warren Moore. Any mystery fan worth his or her Maltese Falcon gets excited when a new novel from Lawrence Block hits the shelves. The thrill is even greater when the novel in question is one of the adventures of private eye/recovering alcoholic Matthew Scudder. Many of Block’s fans thought the series had concluded in 2005 with All the Flowers Are Dying, the sixteenth book in what Block has described as Scudder’s fictional autobiography, which began with The Sins of the Fathers in 1976. Along the way, Block’s readers have seen his hero move in real time from an ex-cop and blackout drunk to a happy marriage and long-term sobriety. The novels are hard-boiled and gritty, and reflect a New York that remains a dangerous place. But like the rest of us, Scudder has grown older, and as Block has observed, what a man in his mid-forties might do seems less likely for a man decades older, and Block, too, thought the sixteenth novel was the end of the series. However, he realized that he had thought he had finished the

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‘The Days of Lamech’

March 15, 2011
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‘The Days of Lamech’

By Mike Gray Jon Saboe, author of The Days of Peleg (now in its 4th edition), has announced that a prequel — The Days of Lamech — is currently scheduled for release in June. The Days of Peleg deals with the adventures — and misadventures — of a man who lived in the patriarchal period of the Bible (see Genesis 10:25), the time after the Great Flood of Noah prior to the establishment of the nation of Israel. Links: A TAC review is here. Peleg’s Facebook page is here. Jon’s extensive website is here. And the book is available on Amazon.com here.

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