Rick

The Epic War Grinds On

Revisado: 08-31-19

The ongoing saga of the Henry family picks up where “The Winds of War” left off, around the time of Pearl Harbor and the battle of Midway. Tragedy and the wrenching separations of war stretch the extended family—and, by implication, the warring nations—to the breaking point.

The two volumes are massive, together totaling 102 hours. The King James Bible is only around 80! They require a major commitment, but are never ponderous, not for a minute. Rarely has there been a more memorable cast of characters, cleverly interwoven with many of the greatest historic figures of the era. The depth and detail of the story is simply dazzling. The continuing interwoven postwar writings of a fictional Nazi general, translated and then critiqued by a fictional American Navy officer, shedding light on the real history of WWII, is a tour de force.

Boy, do these people drink! Breakfast, lunch and dinner, followed by a nightcap. Was it really like that?

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A Masterpiece of History

Revisado: 08-17-19

Victor “Pug” Henry is a naval officer between wars who serves as a kind of wise but unwitting guide through three pivotal years leading up to Pearl Harbor. I read the book when it first came out, more than 45 years ago. It was and remains an epic in every sense of the word. An electric sense of adventure, drama, history—this book’s got it all.

The characters are rich and three-dimensional, including Pug’s fascinating, far-flung family, and others like the acting US charge d'affaires in Warsaw, Leslie Sloat, who is brilliant, a Rhodes Scholar and skilled diplomat—and whose weakness is that he is a coward.

The interstitial chapters, purporting to be Pug Henry’s translations of a book by the (fictional) German general Armin von Roon, are surprisingly revealing of multilayered motives behind the scenes in Germany, adding unexpected depth and perspective.

“The victors write the history, pass the judgments, and hang or shoot the losers,” von Roon writes. “Wars are inevitable. There will always be wars. And the one war crime is to lose.”

Pug happens to meet the leading cast of WWII: FDR, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini. He’s present at great moments in history, such as a dinner with FDR when the president receives word that the RAF has sunk the Bismarck.

Narrator Kevin Pariseau delivers a heroic performance, and may have earned him the mantle of the late Edward Herrmann. He does a passable Churchill, and a pitch-perfect Roosevelt, along with a cast of dozens more.

Wouk’s prose and Pariseau’s narration have together convinced me to proceed to the even-longer “War and Remembrance.”

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The Littlest Vampire

Revisado: 08-03-19

A vampire tale in the hands of an excellent writer, “Let Me In” is long but never slow. It’s also a story about relationships among young people and within sometimes-troubled families that seems to be exactly the right mix of reality and the supernatural. There are gruesome scenes, but that can happen with vampires.

Lindqvist has an uncanny way of talking about a character, then adding something such as, “He went up the stairs…” and it takes a moment to realize he’s now talking about someone else. By then you’ve been drawn along, and it’s an effective means of pulling you through the story. This is not an easy book to put down.

It struck me as an odd choice to use a very British narrator for a book by a Swedish author that takes place entirely in Stockholm. Nonetheless, Pacey is excellent.

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Messing with Minds

Revisado: 07-29-19

Residents come to the sparse and featureless town known as The Blinds in the remote Texas desert, most of them with a horrific criminal past. But with the help of a somewhat shadowy "Institute," their memories have been erased.

It’s better than the Witness Protection Program, where criminals have been known to use their newfound anonymity to commit new crimes. The Blinds “offers the ultimate alternative. Not even you know who you are, or what you’ve done. If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

Upon arrival, they choose a new name. They are given a list of famous movie stars and another of ex-vice presidents, and pick a first and last name, one from each list.

With this strange and creative premise, Sternbergh steadily reveals more, and the mystery deepens rather than being solved. There are endless surprises, layer upon layer of them, as the population of The Blinds and their tangled pasts are revealed to be a jumble of unexpected relationships and secret agendas.

The scenario gives him a copious cast of characters to work with – characters with names such as Lyndon Lancaster, Orson Calhoun, and Ginger Van Buren. It’s a wild ride, messing with the minds of the residents – and ours. Stephen Mendel provides an expressive read.

I only wish it weren’t written in the present tense. It seems awkward.

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An Outlaw Brought to Life

Revisado: 07-23-19

The brief and violent life of William H. Bonney is fleshed out in this work of historical fiction, painting Billy the Kid as an inventive young charmer who happens to be ambidextrous with a six-shooter. Orphaned at 14, shot dead by Pat Garrett at 21, he packed the years between as a horse thief, rustler, gambler, escape artist and outlaw who charmed the ladies as well as his public.

Ron Hansen’s account is chock full of droll cowboy humor.

“I’m a motherless child and I’m so broke I can’t even pay attention,” says a prospective gunslinger. The Kid replies, “Well, I grew up with nothing and I still got most of it. Welcome to our fraternity.”

Be prepared to remember lots of names. One of them is Lew Wallace, a former Union general and the governor of New Mexico Territory with whom Billy tried to negotiate clemency, but Wallace was mostly distracted by authoring “Ben Hur,” the greatest US bestseller until “Gone With the Wind.”

Personally, I grew weary of the recitation of full-length song lyrics of the era. Maybe it would be less intrusive in print form. But it’s a well-told yarn, and Mark Bramhall is just the one to spin it.

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Secrets That Consume a Life

Revisado: 07-21-19

It’s worth being reminded now and then of the unspeakable barbarism that slaughtered so many of an entire generation in what came to be known as The Great War.

“I didn’t think it was all that Great,” muses Tristan Sadler, late in life. But he was a young soldier then, so young that he had to lie about his age. Soon he would have more secrets, painful ones, and as this story slips seamlessly back and forth over more than 60 years, they are steadily revealed. With a skill that is to be expected from the author of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” we are hand-fed Tristan’s agonies one at a time, right up to the very end.

A spare, compact, wistful novel, skillfully read by Michael Maloney.

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Not Your Standard World’s End

Revisado: 07-13-19

A refreshing and imaginative perspective on the post-apocalypse story, from the viewpoint of a teen named Griz whose dog is stolen, and who sets out to retrieve her, sailing into a harrowing world with a total remaining population of about seven thousand.

In a way, it’s reminiscent of the “Life After People” documentary on the History Channel; not identical, but just as ingenious.

Griz sits in an ancient church and tries to imagine what those organ pipes sounded like—and can’t. People have been gone for more than a century, along with their recordings and the ability to play them. No antibiotics survive, but folk remedies are often effective.

Train tracks are the first things that forests take over, because the gravel roadbeds are better landing spots for windblown seeds than pavement. Walking the railroad routes has become impossible in an age where walking is about the only means of transportation. Who knew?

And then, in the last 90 minutes, everything changes. Everything.

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American Quagmire

Revisado: 07-09-19

In the dead-end southern Ohio hollow called Knockemstiff, most characters would assume that their gray and gloomy lives could never improve. And they’d be right.

Drunk abusive fathers, abandoned mothers, delinquent teens on speed. Nobody in this collection of strangely seductive stories likes anybody else. They inhabit a world of white bread with baloney gravy, RC cola, and lard sandwiches, living in a perpetual fog of booze and drugs.

“The damp gray sky covered southern Ohio like the skin of a corpse. The landscape was a seemingly endless row of squat metal buildings full of cheap junk for sale—carpet remnants, used furniture, country crafts… but still, the cold air blowing through the windows was refreshing after a month spent penned up in the trailer.”

The fictional Knockemstiff in this collection of short stories figures prominently in Pollack’s first novel, “The Devil All the Time,” that takes some of the people and places and the same miserable circumstances into a spellbinding book.

Witness the lives of these unfortunates and feel better about your own, maybe because they are so vividly realistic. Although fiction, it is sad that these accounts are so grounded in the bleak reality of Appalachia.

An all-star cast of narrators gives “Knockemstiff” even more impact.

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Wild Things

Revisado: 07-07-19

This is a weird but compelling story of postwar Appalachia, peopled with losers, grifters, bogus preachers, bigots, whores, killers, crooked cops, backwoods lawyers, dirty old men and doomed hillbillies who cling to hopeless dreams. It’s gritty, but relentless in its pace of outrageous events.

Mark Bramhall delivers a flawless narration on behalf of a large cast who truly are characters.

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A Tale of Babies Switched in the Cradle

Revisado: 06-30-19

I’ve had the good fortune to examine an 1894 first edition of “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” festooned with line drawings in the margins, and it’s a reminder of how far ahead of his time Mark Twain could be. He saw the cruelty of slavery and discrimination, and wisely employed warmth and humor to chide Americans into a degree of enlightenment just 30 years after the Civil War. He was prescient about the use of fingerprints, before they were admitted as evidence in the courts, in this case making for high and highly entertaining courtroom drama that makes a hero of the forlorn title character.

And his legendary mastery of storytelling is nowhere more on display than in this lineup of characters, from small-town Missouri busybodies to a pair of aristocratic Italian twins (see “Those Extraordinary Twins” for a kind of first draft of this book, included in the 1894 edition).

Richard Henzel, who for many years has performed the one-man show, “Mark Twain in Person,” delivers a robust multi-character reading, while Twain delivers a work of the imagination that offers surprises right up to the closing paragraph.

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