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

 

 

Review A DEATH IN DIAMONDS by S.J. Bennett

 

A Death in Diamonds by S.J Bennett

This is the fourth book featuring Queen Elizabeth II as an amateur detective doing murder investigations in Britain in 1957. Bennett gives us a plot focusing on a brutal fetishistic double murder in a London mews house that has been used as an illicit hideaway for upper-crust patrons of an escort agency.

The queen is trying her best to handle the loss of her empire after WWII and suspects that her efforts to renew the reputation of England in foreign lands are being sabotaged by some members of the old guard.  She brings into her staff and her confidence a bright young woman who had a past with the code breakers during WWII, but that does not keep the royal family from being sucked into a possible involvement with the double murders. Scotland Yard moves at a glacial pace, and the security agencies also seem to be lurking about. Several possible solutions pop up, but all end up as red herrings before the final knot is untied in the last few pages.

Bennett has a clever story, yet tells it so deliberately that I found my interest flagging before the next new development arrives. The “mews” twists are interspersed with too many overlong passages on England’s place in the post-war world, palace infighting, and society backbiting.

I love almost anything set in London, but this one leaves me lukewarm rather than wanting to read any more of the series.

I give it a 3 out of 5  

P.S. Another author, Karen Harper, wrote a series of books with the young Elizabeth I as a detective in the early 2000s. The Elizabethan ambiance was more colorfully depicted.   

 

HAIRSPRAY at TCR

 Hairspray, a classic Broadway musical that won eight Tony awards in 2003, has stomped onto the Theatre Cedar Rapids stage with splashy lighting, loud 1960’s music, splendid choreography, and wild costumes.  The matinee crowd was applauding vigorously all afternoon, but saved their biggest ovations for Michael Olinger’s drag performance as Edna Turnblad. He lived up to everything I remember from seeing Harvey Fierstein in the role in New York years ago.

All the majors except perhaps Calvin Boman as Link Larson seemed on target. Belle Canney was both earnest and buoyant. Brandon Burkhardt was oily and smooth. Larson just seemed a bit understated when thrown into the rest of the high-energy cast. He may not have been feeling up to par.

I was particularly impressed by TCR’s vast lighting and costume resources. They were put to the test and succeeded in charging every moment with color and sparkle. Hats off as well to the choreography.  for sure. These folks can dance and they were put through their paces immaculately by Megan Helmers. I have seen musicals--a lot of musicals-- and her work is right up there with anything I have witnessed in New York. 

It is also a pleasure to see that one can still find people with the courage to mount and perform a show that finds pertinence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion despite a government that has tried to eliminate the words from the English language.  The audience was filled with children and adults who didn’t seem to find a drag performance sinful or the participation and defending of protests against the established order unpatriotic.  

This is a show to see if you can. TCR seems to excel in musicals. I know they have to put patrons in seats, but one can only wish they would bring more of the same talents to bear on other kinds of dramatic works.  

 

Daniel Silva The Order

Mr. Silva is an accomplished author of over 20 espionage thrillers. This one seems long and dense--perhaps because I was reading it in a small print paperback edition. You may also not be ready for quite this much medieval church history and some of the political bias that appears. On the other hand, The Order continues to draw you in. The plot centers on the murder of a pope by an ultra-right-wing faction with a plan to take over the entire Catholic church. Silva claims the book is a fictional elegy on the age-old curse that the Jews killed Jesus and it draws heavily on Pius XII’s treatment of the Jews during World War II. The current anger and desperation over the still raging Gaza War also lurks as an undercurrent. 

The savior of the Catholic faith is, ironically, no other than a Jew. Gabriel Allon, master assassin, head of Israeli Intelligence, art restorer, and tender family man is this time summoned from a vacation holiday in Venice to investigate the possible murder of a pope. The mystery is bound up in a literary enigma. There are multiple ancient copies of biblical texts available and whether there is or was a gospel of Pilate, whether it exists but is a forgery, or whether its potential content might be terrible enough to elicit the murder a pope keeps the narrative boiling right down to the very last pages.

This is not an easy read and general critical opinion is mixed, but Silva is a master writer of location detail and Gabriel Allon is a fascinating and complicated character.   

I give it a 4 out of 5

 

Penny, Louise  Still Life

Louise Penny has been one of my go-to mystery writers for several years. How I missed Still Life, which was the first Gamache novel and introduced the hamlet of Three Pines and its residents, I don’t know.  But there it was in an unblemished paperback version on a table at the Marion Library book sale for a buck. 

What a treat it was to read and see how this marvelous writer sets the time, the place, and characters, in an orchestra that is still playing in full throat today.  They’re all there Gabri, Olivier, Clara,  Peter, Myrna, Ruth, and Inspector Armand Gamache. Each now familiar character is born here already imbued with spot-on description, color, clarity, and psychological underpinning. They will all be developed over the next years and right now Penny’s fans are waiting, perhaps even pining, for the latest installment. (Sorry about that!   Her newest book is titled The Black Wolf, and will be published this fall.

In Still Life the corpse of a dearly beloved retired school teacher is discovered in the woods. An arrow has slain her through her heart and all signs point to a local resident. But who? Gamache arrives with his detective crew and begins to ferret out the culprit methodically. Along the way, you can also see how the inspector starts to fall in love with this little village where he and his wife will later move. The plot is intricate, as usual, and grounded in long-hidden secrets.  At least two strong false trails will keep you guessing right up to the final unmasking of the villain.  As noted, I don’t know how I missed this one.

Jim De Young

I give it a 5 out of 5

 

 

Book review Danzy Senna Colored Television

 

 

 

 

Danzy Senna, Colored Television

The title is a clever play on words as the book is about the fate of Mulatto’s in the world of commercial Television i.e. they are neither black or white, brown or white, or oriental or white. They cannot pitch their tents comfortably in either polarity.  The ambiguities of race, sex, education, and social class are all put into a blender and out comes this novel that takes aim at  the futility of serious art and education when pitted against the nasty business of popular TV.  

There are some nice observational nuggets along the way. e.g. “One of the strange parts of being a teacher was how it made time stand still. If you didn’t look in a mirror, you could trick yourself into thinking that time wasn’t passing because your students kept staying young year after year.”  

The main character is Jane, an untenured adjunct English and writing professor at a Los Angeles college. She has published one semi-successful novel and is now married to an African American abstract painter who has not sold a single canvas. Jane is bi-racial and they have two small children who are also mulattos. The family is swamped with credit card debt and barely eking out an existence while she tries to finish a second novel that she hopes will make her a literary name and gain her tenure.  A further complication puts the value of the artistic life to a somber test. Jane’s sees her good friend Bret, a black man who has made millions writing popular TV programs about zombies, as someone who gave up his “promise of glory and immortality to spout drivel in that “land where original ideas come to die.” She was and still wonders whether she married the wrong man.   

Bret goes on a year-long trip to Australia to develop a new show and allows Jane and her husband Lenny to live rent free in his fancy hillside Los Angeles home in his absence.  Lenny can paint and Jane can work on her magnum opus—the major novel that her husband has dubbed her “Muletto War and Peace.  She finally finishes the novel, but her agent says it is unpublishable and the free house comes to an end when Bret, the owner, comes back early.

With two difficult children and a husband who has never sold a painting, Jane finally jumps at what looks like a chance to break into commercial television. She finds another successful black producer and pitches a TV series that will humorously explore the difficult world of Mulatto life.  Will it save the family bacon?  You will have to read it to see.

The book has sardonic humor, a bitter-sweet conclusion, and characters who keep you turning the pages. Most mortals suffer from fame deficiency. Anyone who has dreamed of making it big in art without selling out to popular culture will find something to hang on to here.  It’s not War and Peace, but it is worth a shot.    

I give it a 4 out of 5 

Theatre Review of The Wolves by Sarah Delappe

 

Saw Sarah Delappe’s play titled The Wolves last Sunday afternoon in the small studio at Theatre Cedar Rapids. It premiered Off Broadway in 2016 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in that year. It has been a popular choice at educational theatres for some time because of its cast of ten women and its treatment of the growing pains of young adolescent girls.

Set in the pre-game warm-ups for a female high school soccer season, the piece focuses on the girl’s comments interspersed with their pre-game warm-up exercises. We hear about their sexual problems, menstruation, the integration of new girls onto the team, and ultimately, an injury and tragedy.

Unfortunately, the production falls considerably short of the serious themes presented. The chosen production style was a tunnel with the audience divided into two facing sets of seats. I suspect this was to mirror the competitive stadium sides during matches. The director put his cast into exercise circles a great deal and that managed to give as much face time to the unpeopled sides as to the peopled sides. This meant that every patron saw ¾ of the show in either profile or full back. In our seating position to the right of center in a corner where there was no entrance at all, we had even less full-face contact with the actors.  

This might have worked out if the actors had sufficient vocal strength to be heard and understood even when turned away. I know that these days young actors expect to be miked, but sufficient volume should not be a problem in a theatre that seats barely a hundred people.  More lines were mumbled and spoken to the floor than not. The constant movement and ungainly twisted exercise positions also did not help with breath support. This show desperately needed a vocal coach.

Had I not seen a previous production of the piece, I’m not sure I would have been able to follow the narrative. In one scene the goalie spent scads of energy throwing a ball against the back wall and running laps until exhausted. The folks next to me, who apparently did not hear much of the dialogue that came before, were totally mystified as to what was going on. The death of one of the team’s members in a car crash had been missed. Finally, the big ending featuring the arrival of the mother of the dead girl bringing a bag of oranges, was squashed by lights going down too soon for us to register its importance. She had brought oranges before to help spur the team on earlier. A better and more emotionally riveting lighting choice at the end would have brought the lights down slowly until only a pin spot on the bag of fruit for the team was lit. Then a fast blackout. 

I cannot recommend this production.

The Serpent Under by Bonnie Macbird

 

The Serpent Under by Bonnie Macbird

The Serpent Under is another of the multitude of titles offered as knockoffs of the exploits of the world’s most famous detective—Sherlock Holmes. They have been appearing regularly ever since the original Arthur Conan Doyle copyrights expired.

In this adventure of Holmes and Watson, Bonnie Macbird, a transplant from California who now lives in London, takes on murder, snakes, and gypsies. A wealthy young royal retainer named Jane Wandley has been found strangled in Windsor Palace. Her face has been garishly tattooed with a snake swallowing his own tail. Holmes is summoned to the palace to investigate. The back story takes us into a fatal fire on the woman’s father’s estate that killed a Gypsy woman and her child. There are suspects and additional bodies aplenty as the story unfolds.   Holmes and Watson do their best to identify the killer in the face of an impatient Queen, bombs, suffragettes, and a deadly King Cobra.

Macbird sticks to the Victorian period for her setting and does a good job of parodying the Holmesian style of questioning to deduce and then confront the miscreant. She knows her London streets and weather and evokes the Victorian atmosphere with competence.

This is a pleasant read if you have run out of the original stories and novels.

I give it a 4 out of 5    

Death Comes in Threes book review

 

Michael Jecks, Death Comes In Threes

I enjoy historical mysteries. They are a fun way to read a popular genre while getting a refresher on the ambiance of whatever period they are set in. to that end, I picked up a copy of Michael Jecks’ Death Comes in Threes on the recent acquisition rack at our local library and found out rapidly that I had come upon a loser. It was touted as one of a series of Bloody Mary Tudor mysteries and was set in England in the late 1550’s. Mary is on the throne and Elizabeth I is waiting in the wings. 

The main character is Jack Blackjack, a resourceful low-life who lives easily in the lowest brothels as he does in gentleman’s residences. He is supposedly a secret assassin for the young Elizabeth but while defending himself from two murder charges he also manages to get himself seen as a supporter of Bloody Mary.

The narrative is first person and plods along through a revolving sequence of characters. Mostly we hear the story from Blackjack himself, but we also get chapters narrated by a bawdy housewife and his ostensible employer. The joking self-deprecating style gets tiresome quickly and the plot seems full of ridiculous coincidences and pasteboard minor characters. Even though the 16^th century London place details are accurate, they don’t make up for the less-than-convincing plot.  

About halfway through I started skipping whole passages without feeling deprived of anything. I should not have finished it, but I did.

I give it a 1 out of 5. 

 

Andrew McCall Smith A TIME OF LOVE AND TARTAN

 

A book in the 44 Scotland Street series from 2018

This guy pops out books like an AK 47.   We are back with Domenica and Angus and all our friends like Pat and Bruce, Matthew and his triplets, Big Lou, and of course Bertie and his parents--Bruce and Irene. Irene is the marvelous mother who decides that men are overrated and decides to go off to get a PhD with her apparent lover while Bertie's dad quits his job as a government statistician. The book was so  appealing that I reread it in its entirety before I discovered that I had read it in 2018 when it first came out.

It is filled with local color, rib tickling humor, sly cultural observations about art, history, philosophy, literature, music, and poetry. You name it.  McCall Smith seems to have been to every nook and cranny in Scotland and read every book published since the beginning of printing. And he remembers them well enough to bring them to bear on his delightful characters and their foibles and troubles. Among other things, he takes on the loss of civility, women’s rights, bureaucracy, and the general lack of kindness to others. I liked it seven years ago and it still passes muster. A joy to read and a joy to re-read. There is a bon mot on every page e.g. “The truth then dawned . . . . that everything was finite and that what was taken for granted had actually been paid for by years of work for somebody whom one would never know, and who might never have been able to enjoy any of it anyway.”

 

Thorns, Lust, and Glory by Estelle Paranque

 

With a sub-title of “The Betrayal of Anne Boleyn, this book goes over the well-known conflict between the English King Henry VIII and the Pope. I knew the basics from my previous knowledge of English history and my familiarity with some of the fictional treatments of the struggle in The Royal Gambit and The Lion in Winter.  Paranque’s book concentrates on Anne’s French connections and the secondary struggle of Henry with his French counterpart Francis 1^st.

Lots of names of minor courtiers are mixed in with the well-known personages like Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. I guess it told me more than I needed or wanted to know about the circumstances leading to Anne’s beheading in a courtyard at the Tower of London on May 19,1536.  

I give it 2 out of 5

A review of Wolf Pack by C J Box

 

C.J. Box is a Wyoming native and he has been hunting and fishing his entire life. He has written eighteen mystery thrillers that feature Joe Pickett, -a Wyoming game warden.  

In this book, Pickett is faced with an assassination group called the Wolf Pack that carries out hits for a drug cartel and a mysterious local with no discoverable past, who is flying a drone that has stampeded local animals. The case becomes personal when he discovers that his teenage daughter is dating the man’s teenage son. The FBI enters the picture and tries to keep Pickett from investigating the man further while the connections between the so-called Wolf Pack assassinations and the mystery man start to become apparent. The action tends to go back and forth between the pastoral countryside and the brutal killings by the Wolf Pack.

The book is nicely paced, but once you get used to his method of alteration of violence with calm, it does become pretty predictable. I figured out that the man with no background was in the Witness Protection program before our detective got to it. From there on it was clear that the four killers would have to meet Pickett and friends in a bloody conclusion. 

I enjoyed the background nature descriptions a lot because on a trip to the west years ago, we drove through the Big Horn mountains and were inspired by their rugged beauty.  If all of Box’s books are like this one they will be competently written and appealing perhaps primarily to male readers who are drawn to old style cowboy westerns in the more modern west.

On the other hand, If you don’t have a hankering for senseless killing and graphic violence, you might want to stay in the “Cozy Mystery” section of your local Barnes and Noble. The book is organized chronologically and each section begins with a literary quote about wolves. I liked the final one the best since it was from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, a universal wolf,.

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce a universal prey,

And last eat up himself.   

The Late Show by Michael Connelly

 

Connelly, Michael The Late Show Review

THE LATE SHOW is Connelly’s 30^th book and it introduces a new lead character--a woman named Renee Ballard. One thing you can count on is that Mr. Connelly will give you a solid ride. He knows the back streets of Hollywood and his police procedures backwards and forwards. You can also count on the fact that his lead character pushes the edges of the rules, but not so far as to become unbelievable.

Ballard has been relegated to the so called “Late Show” as a penalty for resisting the advances of a senior officer. Overnight cases are often small-time and routine and she does these happily, but when large cases do appear she goes after them like a bloodhound in heat. Her juices start to flow when faced with a trans man is assaulted and left for dead in a parking lot. Before she has time to take a breath comes a vicious shooting of several people in a night club. 

Since Ballard is a new character for Connelly, we do get a fair amount of personal background as she digs into the cases. It points to a difficult early life and a still troubled current one. She had an absent mother and a father who died in some kind of surfing incident and now spends a lot of time with her elderly grandmother and paddleboarding at the beach.

Needless to say, she gets the bad guys a bunch of twists and push-back from the higher-ups. I am intrigued enough to look for the second novel in the series. It is called DARK SACRED NIGHT and in it she gets together with Connelly’s iconic major character—Detective Harry Bosch.

I give it a 4 out of 5. 

 

Review of Where Madness Lies by Lyndsy Spence

 

Spence, Lyndsy.  Where Madness Lies

The sub-title of this waste of time book is The Double Life of Vivien Leigh. It chronicles her life and her bi-polar condition in an age when there was limited understanding of the disease and treatment was still bordering on the medieval. None of the characters around her come off as admirable. The entire book seems exploitative and tries to fill a niche that needs no further filling. Take a pass on it.

I give it a 1 out of 5.     

 

Book Recommendation--ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD BY Patrick Bringley

 

All the Beauty in the World (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me) by Patrick Bringley

This little book by Mr. Patrick Bringley is what I call a sleeper. It is a short and pleasant read by a most unlikely author.  The title refers to the art contained in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the author is a man who worked there for ten years as a security guard.   My wife and I were members of Chicago’s Art Institute for many years and have visited most of the major galleries of Europe in our travels. In all those years we have never run across a book by one of the museum guards. 

Bringley takes the security guard job after his older brother dies of a deadly form of cancer. It could be penance or perhaps a search for peace, but it provides a suitable station for him to observe his fellows, the visitors, and of course the art itself. He glories in the fact that this kind of unskilled job attracts a huge variety of ages, skills, races, and religions, whereas a Manhattan lawyer’s office attracts abysmally similar types. He quotes one retiree saying, “It really isn’t a bad job.  Your feet hurt, but nothing else does.”

The visitors obviously also come from every corner of the world and he takes pleasure in finding meaning in them. He revels in observing the clothes people choose to wear and how they wear them. He finds interest in how they style their hair and how they hold the hands of a companion. He reflects on how some avoid his eye, how some have continuous questions, and how others express rapt attention or boredom.  He insists he takes no meaning from this but just the pleasure of noticing the huge span of reactions.

As the chapters progress, the Art becomes more central. His developing approach to it is deceptively simple. “The first step,” he says, “is to do nothing, to just watch.”  Art, “above all needs time to apprehend and a guard has all the time in the world.” Let the work perform its work on you. Over time certain pictures or objects grow on you, become more abundant, or as he says, they simply “won’t conclude.” Then you can absorb “the holiness of that moment.”  This does not mean you should look without knowing. Knowing develops from looking and each thing you learn about an artist and his work deepens your ability to look at it.   “Too many people think the museum is a place to learn about art, rather than from it.”

At the end of his ten years, having acquired along the way a wife and family, he recognizes that nature favors hardiness over simplicity and that his life of standing, observing, and learning must end. You can only watch and inhale so long.  Sooner or later you have to face the real world which is not nearly as orderly as a museum.

Loved this one.  I give it a 4.5 out of 5

 

 

The Spamalot Diaries by Eric Idle

 

Idle, Eric The Spamalot Diaries

When it rains it pours and when you have an accomplished wordsmith and musician who has just authored a Tony winning musical and it has been directed by Mike Nichols, you can count on it being entertaining. His personal diary during the creation of the musical Spamalot is a pleasant read for anyone familiar with the show, and also instructive for folks who are still in, retired from, or thinking of joining the theatre business.  As someone who was in the directing business once upon a time, I didn’t learn much new.  There was the “two block rule.” You never speak ill of your show within two blocks of the theatre as someone on the cast or crew or a friend of theirs might hear it and report it to others. Then there was a nice term I had never heard of before.  It was called the ‘Sitzprobe”.  According to Mr. Idle, it is a term in Opera and Musical Theatre that comes from German and means a special kind of “seated rehearsal.” It is where the singers sing for the first time with the orchestra and focuses on integrating the two groups and getting them balanced. 

If you are not at all familiar with the pattern of theatre rehearsal, this is a nice inside look at the real dirty work of rewrite and cut and even occasionally put back in changes that always occur along the way to an opening night. Idle is a talented and funny man. This humorous read goes fast and you will enjoy it. Give it a 3.5 out of five.