Brief Review of CENTRAL PARK WEST by James Comey

 

James Comey writes with authority about the FBI, legal procedures, the Justice Department, and the Manhattan location of this novel. The courtroom scenes are rock solid, but overall, the tale seems pretty standard.  A star witness with mob connections puts the defense of a wife accused of the murder of her husband (a former governor) in jeopardy.  A young lawyer with a passion and an old hand who can think and operate just barely inside of the law, ultimately untangle the mess in a cat-and-mouse game of secret assassins and disguises.

One problem might be that young, crusading, truth-seeking,  lawyers seem to be antiques out of the past right now. They have been replaced by morally reprehensible political lackeys. I guess one should be happy to find someone writing about the good old days, but I’m afraid they are not going to return anytime soon. I keep wishing for Perry Mason and Paul Drake, and all I get is Pam Bondi and Kash Patel.  

I give it a 3 out of 5

review of JAMES by Percival Everett

 

James by Percival Everett

Several people in our book group at Grand Living recommended this book, including my wife. It is a quick and enjoyable read, especially if you remember a little bit of your reading of Huckleberry Finn a long time ago.  James re-imagines that book with Jim as the main character. He becomes a James who develops into a man of intelligence and courage as he struggles to search out the meaning of friendship, how to become a father to Huck, and how to find his wife and family, who have been sold off to another owner after he has been declared a runaway.

Jim finds the world he needs to become “James” by sneaking into Judge Thatcher’s office and learning to read by studying the books he found there. The power of the word is made clear. As he says, “If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them.”  The impact of this was completely subversive.  The dialect of the original is deftly satirized so that as Jim finds his voice, he learns to speak “white” when necessary, which confounds most of the whites he encounters.

 Whole chapters are chock-full of sardonic humor, as when Huck and Jim meet a Minstrel company and end up with Jim being blacked up to impersonate a white man who is impersonating a black man. A bit later on, Jim teams up with a light-colored negro to work a wild confidence game. The light-skinned negro impersonates a white man and sells Jim as a slave. As soon as the money is collected, Jim promptly escapes. One memorable quote comes to mind here.  “After being cruel, the most notable white attribute was gullibility.”

The good humor and satire never allow you to escape the physical and sexual violence that accompanied slavery. The rope and whip are never far away. Virtually every black back carries the scars of bloody stripes and the rape of a black woman by her owner is given a terrifying  treatment.  Throughout the book, you are encouraged to think about what it means to be a slave and how not having freedom can destroy the soul of both the free and the enslaved. It is a fascinating companion to the original classic.

I give it a 5 out of 5.

 

  

Review: The King's Messenger by Susanna Kearsley

Kearsley, Susanna  THE KING’S MESSENGER

I wish to report today a truly happy discovery. It is an enchanting novel by Susanna Kearsley titled The King’s Messenger.  If you like historical fiction, it is based on an office that dates far back into English history. Andrew Logan is a fictional King’s Messenger during the reign of James 1^st of England or James VI of Scotland in the early 1600’s and he is a deeply thoughtful, and complex character with a dark secret. He is assigned to find and bring, Sir David Moray, a real historical figure, to London from Scotland to be interrogated and probably executed by the King or some of his scheming accolytes. A fictional scrivener is assigned to accompany Andrew and because he is not in good health, his daughter (also a fictional character) goes along. A young fictional stableboy named completes the traveling group and the interplay amongst them makes for a true love poem.

The book is fiction, but it delves deeply into a true historical mystery—the fate of the young Crown Prince Henry, son of James 1st and his Queen Anna. Did he die an early and natural death by disease or was he poisoned by the King and and/or his minions. Each new twist draws you deeper and deeper into the characters and their connection to the scheming going on above their station. I was taken especially by an overnight stop made by the group that was set inside one of the old mile forts on Hadrian’s Wall.

 

From the author: History is composed mostly of “people of name.”  Authors try to give significance to the “none else” of name by creating memorable people with complex, even heroic lives who never made the history books. This novel is full of them.

Sir David fond of quoting Marcus Aurelius   “We have but a little time upon this earth. If we do not take the chances we are given, they will go and we will go and not return.”

Definitely a 5 out of 5 

 

Handler, David The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again

This is what I would call a summer throw-a-way. Handler has written a slew of these books and their unifying feature is a lovable basset hound named Lulu who is always on hand with an important clue to help solve the mystery.  I sense that this is the one that tells you the author is running out of new ideas, so he returns to the time when he got the dog and when he returns to his old hometown that he swore he would never return to.

We get a little dose of soft-porn to keep the cozy mystery folks at bay. It comes along with the improbable plot that our hero Stuart Hoag has just leaped out of 13 years away from home trying to become a writer. Finally, his big book materializes, and money and fame come to him along with the passionate attention of a six-foot-tall blond actress who is more famous than he is.

Why does he go home again? Well, the librarian back in his old hometown was one of the few women who treated him well when he was growing up. She has been murdered at her desk and Mr. Hoag “Hoagie” decides to return for her funeral with his puppy and new squeeze. Soon, he is involved with the task of finding the killer and that means involvement with all the low life created by the Hoag family’s now defunct business that poisoned all the water in the town and shot the cancer rate through the roof.  Handler tries to write with humor, but to give you an idea of the level of it, all I need to do is mention that there is a running joke about the town’s current police chief who was called “Peter the Beater” by Hoagie and his old school pals. Nuff said.  Check this one out only if you are desperate.

I give it a 1.5 out of 5  

Book Review The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl

 

Ruth Reichl, THE PARIS NOVEL

Stella is a lovely young woman with a literary bent and a taste for good food. She has had a lonely and miserable childhood with a mother who doesn’t seem to care about her and an absent father whom her mother doesn’t want to talk about. When her mom passes on, the single bequest to Stella is strange indeed. She leaves her only a plane ticket to Paris and a few traveler's checks. Stella works up enough courage to take the bait and goes off to Paris to find both herself and the father her mother refused to talk about. What ensues is a pleasant, warm-hearted love affair with food, books, and France. Stella ends up as a so-called “tumbleweed” living at the famous literary bookstore Shakespeare and Company. She meets famous authors, French food, and a rich patron.

I don’t want to spoil the dinner or the search, so let’s leave it with this. The Paris Novel is a delicious little book that will delight any lover of gastronomy, literature, and travel. Do I need to remind you that Ms. Reichl is a former editor of Gourmet magazine and was also the restaurant critic for the New York Times.

I give it a 4.5

Play Review AMADEUS at Theatre Cedar Rapids

 

 

On April 17,1980 I was on a sabbatical in London. I got up at 6:30 AM to get to the Waterloo tube station and the National Theatre of Great Britain. I wanted to arrive by 8:00AM to join the queue for day tickets to see  Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus, which had opened to acclaim the year before and was still running with the original cast of Paul Scofield and Simon Callow in the two lead roles of Salieri and Mozart.

Upon arrival there were already 30 ahead of me. By 10:00 AM the line had doubled. I got a ticket and my single seat was dead center in row 3. I could see the hairs in Paul Scofield’s nostrils every time he came downstage. “At the end of the production, Salieri pleads for pity on the mediocre souls of the world. He knelt dead center not ten feet from me. As the music slowly faded out, he directed it with his arms, then with smaller gestures, until his head sank and said “Oh Lord have mercy on we who are not the geniuses of the world.” Blackout.

That account of the first production of Amadeus was adapted from my 1980 journal. I am not going to claim that the Theatre Cedar Rapids production I saw in their small Grandon experimental theatre last Sunday afternoon, was better than the British National Theatre’s lush and award-winning production in the large Olivier Theatre, but their rendition was damn good. The singular advantage was that the tiny space permitted every spectator to focus on the key dramatic conflict. In Amadeus, that is the collision that occurs when a good, but mediocre artist, is faced with the arrival of a genius who would become a giant for the ages.  As another giant once said, “Oh what fools these mortals be.”

Matthew James plays Salieri with fervent excellence in both his aged years and his prime. He moves between the two time periods by the simple addition of a cloak and a hood to cover his wig and silky waistcoat when he is playing the elderly man. Ethan B Glenn’s ebulliently crude and massive Mozart crushes Salieri as if he was driving a steamroller over a creampuff. Age and disease catch up to both men and what remains is the tragedy. God has unexplainably given the talent to the boor and left the journeyman to take his place with the rest of us poor mortals. Kehry Anson Lane also deserves mention for a strong and nuanced portrayal of Joseph II.     

Director Patrick DuLaney moved his actors confidently on the tiny Grandon stage making sure that every audience member had ample full-face views. No one felt ignored. And we could hear the actors clearly in their true voices without amplification.  The scenic design was simple and demonstrated that this was a play about people, not an ode to baroque splendor. The evocative blocked floor was spattered in what appeared to be blood. Scene changes were smoothly performed by the actors by simply moving the few pieces of furniture around into different configurations.   

Although the play was reduced in visual grandeur by being crammed into a 100-seat black box, the superiority of Mozart’s music came through at every turn. This is a show you must make an effort to see. It runs until June 22^nd, but you had better hurry to get tickets. According to the stage manager, the advance was strong.

 

 

The Quantum Spy by David Ignatius

Mr. Ignatius is a distinguished foreign affairs columnist, and it is no surprise that he should take advantage of his international knowledge to pen a thriller. THE QUANTUM SPY is a pretty much run-of-the-mill piece of work. China has a mole deep in our intelligence world, and a young Chinese-American is on the team to track him or her down. This is paired with the race to develop a super-fast quantum computer between the USA and China. There is a lot of technical talk about stuff well beyond bits and bytes and plenty of tradecraft that involves meetings and psychological sparring at secret locations around the globe.  My only sense is that there may be too much computer jargon for one group of readers and too little physical action for another group of readers. That leaves the book firmly ensconced in the less-than-blockbuster middle.

I give it a 2.5 out of 5