One of the challenges I face in reviewing books is how to handle a series of books or books with reoccurring characters. When I was young, and had lots of free time, I would always read a series in chronological order (publishing order, not internal to the books). I want to read and discover how the author developed the characters and plot as the series progressed. I wanted to be in on the inside jokes and references.

In my current circumstances that really isn’t possible. There simply isn’t enough time for me to go back and read a series before I take on the latest release. I have too many other books I want to read. There are always books I want to read but can’t because tough choices have to be made. This is often one of those choices.

The reason I bring this up, is that this choice in itself presents a challenge. For example, I recently finished The Watchman by Robert Crais. The lead character in the novel is Joe Pike. Pike is secondary character in Crais’ previous series which featured L.A. PI Elvis Cole; who is in turn a secondary character in this new series. Before The Watchman I had never read anything by Crais. So I have no background on either character nor on Crais style.

This puts me at a disadvantage in many ways compared to other reviewers. I can’t comment on how this book compares to others in the Cole Series nor can I comment on how Pike is developed and presented in comparison to past stories. All I can do is judge the book as a stand alone work. Nothing terribly wrong with that, it just feels a little incomplete.

With that caveat out of the way, please see the review below.

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What is more important: doing what you love or being financially stable? What kind of risk would you take to achieve both? How corrupting is money? These are the questions that hover in the background in Keith Dixon’s recently released novel The Art of Losing .

In a recent Q&A, Dixon described the book as “literary noir” and that seems an apt term. It has the grit and darkness of noir with the style and depth associated with literary fiction. (BTW, it is a hybrid genre (not that the one precludes the other anymore) that I am rather found of these days. I think fellow Nomads Olen Steinhauer and Kevin Wignall could both be grouped in this category.)

The Art of Losing centers on the life of Mike Jacobs, a documentary filmmaker, after he has landed in New York City by way of LA. While his films have been well accepted critically they have been financial disasters. Jacobs throws his life into each only to have it flop at the box office. In rather desperate financial straits, he decides to take a risk in order to achieve some independence.

This risk involves fixing a horse race with his producer friend Selby. This plot soon involves Jacobs making contact with various bookies (Selby’s bad reputation on the gambling circuit prevents him from doing it), losing large sums of money to prove they aren’t con men, and bringing in a couple of jockeys to help throw the race. The plan is to win big by controling not who wins but who loses. As is the way with such plots, however, the supposedly fool proof plan doesn’t quite come together. This puts Jacobs face to face with some rather nasty folks. Suddenly, Jacobs is thinking about how he is going to survive as it seems his entire world is coming down around him.

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In my efforts to bail out Kevin for his lack of posting, I am trying to post more book reviews. In that vein, Stephen Coote’s Napoleon and the Hundred Days is an interesting look at the character of Napoleon and the events of his return to power in 1815.

The book begins with the Conference of Vienna in 1815 and looks back at Napoleon’s rise to power. Along the way, Coote describes the key moments in this rise and the major figures in Napoleon’s life (among them Josephine, Marshal Ney, and Fouche). Coote briefly describes Napoleon’s major campaigns leading up to the major disaster in Russia and his subsequent exile to Elba. Coote then spends the rest of the book on Napoleon’s return to power and defeat at Waterloo.

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Tom Harper’s second book entitled Knights of the Cross which chronicles the adventures of Demetrios Askiates in the First Crusade is much better than his first, The Mosaic of Shadows. This book seems to flow more than the first.

Here is an excerpt from Publisher’s Weekly about the book:

…As the First Crusaders are stuck in an interminable siege of Turk-held Antioch, Demetrios Askiates, a Greek assigned as scribe to the Byzantine emperor’s representative, must once again play detective. The discovery of a Norman knight with his throat slit and bearing unusual markings on his corpse threatens the shaky alliance among the varied European armies of the First Crusade. Amid battles and political intrigues, Demetrios desperately pursues the few clues he has, even as the late Norman knight’s companions, who may have joined him in promoting a new heretical sect, also turn up dead. …

Harper does an excellent job in developing the various characters and giving the plot several twists and turns. He also brings the time period alive for the reader - describing the city of Antioch and the battles that waged around it.

With that said, I still Harper could trim some of the text from the book. There are times when the story drags with subplots that are not relevant to the story. For example, I found myself skimming some of the text when Harper delves into the religion of some of the characters.

Overall, Harper’s second book is an improvement over the first and I think anyone interested in the Crusades from a different perspective (a Byzantine one) would do well to read this book.

Colonel Robert Black’s The Battalion: The Dramatic Story of the 2nd Ranger Battalion in World War II is a fascinating account of the unit that was made famous by the assault on Pointe du Hoc during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Black interweaves the individual experiences of the men with the operations of the battalion.

The book more or less covers the exploits of the battalion from its formation, April 1, 1943, to its deactivation on October 23, 1945. The book’s primary focus is on the battalion’s training and assault of Pointe du Hoc. It covers the battalion’s march to Germany and the end of the war with a special emphasis on a crucial battle in early December 1944 - Castle Hill - where the battalion captured the hill and fought off five German counterattacks.

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Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is not typically viewed as airport reading these days. The treatise weighs in at 1200 or so pages. So perhaps it is appropriate that I bought and read P.J. O’Rourke’s take on the famous tome instead. A book about a book - and often a humorous one - seem more like airport fare.

On a recent trip I found myself perilously without reading material as I had finished the lone book I brought with me. Browsing through an airport bookstore I stumbled up On The Wealth of Nations by P. J. O’Rourke and read most of it during my travels. The book is part of a series by Atlantic on “Books That Changed the World.” Sort of like Cliff Notes for adults or something. Seemed like an interesting concept for an interesting writer on an interesting subject. I succumbed to the power of marketing.

Was it worth it? Well, as is so often the case, yes and no. Was it an entertaining read? Yes. O’Rourke has a witty way with words and the prose was smooth enough that it was an easy read. It kept me from focusing on all the wasted time spent sitting in an airport or airplane. The real question is: did I learn anything? And this is where things break down. I am not sure O’Rourke really captures anything quintessential or insightful about Adam Smith’s famous work or helps the reader understand it better. It is an interesting journey but you end up with little to hold onto in the end.

James Panero over at Armavirumque captured a telling critique in the Baltimore Sun (that seems to have disappeared behind a subscription archive):

O’Rourke’s book is a peculiar kind of satire. By turns smart-alecky and oracular, it gives readers something to do instead of thinking. O’Rourke professes to share Smith’s skepticism about all-encompassing systems, but he applies the economic theories of The Wealth of Nations indiscriminately, indifferent to the changing realities of a post-industrial age of information. Laughs aside, O’Rourke’s “Cliff’s Notes” to Adam Smith are an abridgment to nowhere.

Allan Sloan had a more positive review in the Wall Street Journal that I wanted to note for two reasons. One, is that Sloan, like almost all reviewers, notes the enjoyable aspect of the book:

The 1937 Modern Library edition of Smith’s work, which O’Rourke cites as his text and I borrowed from my local public library, runs 903 pages, not counting introductions and indexes. Those pages are in small type. Make that very small type.

O’Rourke’s book, by contrast, runs to fewer than 200 pages before appendixes and notes, and has a typeface and layout suitable for modern eyes. And unlike Smith, O’Rourke is a wonderful stylist. Even if you disagree with his conservative political and economic views, as I sometimes do, you’ve got to admire his facility with words.

Two, I wanted to point out that Sloan gets to the heart of the matter and encapsulates the basic libertarian position in one short paragraph:

Smith’s thesis, which still resonates today, is that setting people free to pursue their own self-interest produces a collective result far superior to what you get if you try to impose political or religious diktats. Free people allowed to make free choices in free markets will satisfy their needs (and society’s) far better than any government can. Finally, Smith believed passionately in free trade, both within countries and between them. He felt that allowing people and countries to specialize and to trade freely would produce enormous wealth, because freeing people and nations to do what they do best will produce vastly more wealth than if everyone strives for self-sufficiency.

So to conclude, O’Rourke made for entertaining travel reading, but didn’t leave me with any real insights into Adam Smith or the Wealth of Nations.

BTW, it should be interesting to see where the series goes from here. The Qur’an: A Biography by Bruce Lawrence has recently been released and Darwin’s Origin of Species: A Biography is set to be released in March. I might have to check out the next two volumes to see how the concept plays out with different authors and subjects.

Quite often these days when people ask how things are going I am reminded of that FedEx commercial (watch it here)where the guy pretends to be busy and says things like “Worky work! Busy Bee!” Except, I really do have a lot of things to do and FedEx ground can’t really help.

Anyways . . . in lieu of more substantive posting allow me to note here some interesting books that have been sent my way of late. Yes, that’s right. It’s another installment of In the Mail!

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

From Publishers Weekly

Stoker-winner Hill features a particularly merciless ghost in his powerful first novel. Middle-aged rock star Judas Coyne collects morbid curios for fun, so doesn’t think twice about buying a suit advertised at an online auction site as haunted by its dead owner’s ghost. Only after it arrives does Judas discover that the suit belonged to Craddock McDermott, the stepfather of one of Coyne’s discarded groupies, and that the old man’s ghost is a malignant spirit determined to kill Judas in revenge for his stepdaughter’s suicide. Judas isn’t quite the cad or Craddock the avenging angel this scenario makes them at first, but their true motivations reveal themselves only gradually in a fast-paced plot that crackles with expertly planted surprises and revelations. Hill (20th Century Ghosts) gives his characters believably complex emotional lives that help to anchor the supernatural in psychological reality and prove that (as one character observes) “horror was rooted in sympathy.” His subtle and skillful treatment of horrors that could easily have exploded over the top and out of control helps make this a truly memorable debut.

Black Monday by R. Scott Reiss

From Booklist

Screenwriter Reiss (the name is a pseudonym) plants himself firmly in Michael Crichton territory with this techno-thriller. A microbe that eats oil has somehow appeared in oil fields around the world. Any machine that runs on gasoline is rendered inoperable by the microbe. Greg Gillette, an epidemiologist, tries to beat the clock and find an antidote to the techno-plague before society collapses. Written with urgency and wit, the novel (already snapped up by Hollywood) is imaginative and plausibly plotted. The book doesn’t feature Crichton’s lengthy scientific explanations, but it does have the same sort of plucky characters and high-octane pacing. Sure to be a crowd-pleaser.

POSH by Lucy Jackson

From Publishers Weekly

The pseudonymous Jackson (an “acclaimed short story writer and novelist”) plumbs the lives of those who pace the halls at New York City’s exclusive Griffin School in this accomplished novel. Varied in age and income bracket, the cast is finely drawn if familiar: Julianne Coopersmith, a middle-class teen with an overprotective mother, attends Griffin on scholarship; Morgan Goldfine, Julianne’s best friend whose mother recently died, is awash in grief; Michael Avery, Julianne’s boy wonder boyfriend, is Harvard bound; and Kathryn “Lazy” Hoffman, Griffin’s headmistress, is having a professionally verboten affair with a teacher. Cracks form in Julianne and Michael’s relationship after Michael shows signs of mental instability, though Julianne’s loathe to give up on him, even when his symptoms hint at violent tendencies. Morgan mopes her way through the school year, and Julianne’s mother strikes up an unlikely friendship with Michael’s mother. Kathryn’s affair, predictably, becomes public knowledge, sparking domestic and professional upheaval. If the plot packs few surprises, Jackson’s rendering of relationships—both toxic and positive, filial and friendly—is flawlessly executed as she flits from social strata to social strata. The similarity in cover art between this novel and Prep isn’t for nothing.

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I just finished the fourth book in the Amelia Peabody Mystery Series by Elizabeth Peters - Lion in the Valley. It is kind of a continuation of the third book - The Mummy Case - in that Amelia, Emerson, and Ramses are dealing with the “Master Criminal” in Dahshoor.

Here is a brief summary from the book cover:

The 1895-96 season promises to be an exceptional one for Amelia Peabody, her dashing Egyptologist husband Emerson, and their wild and precocious eight-year-old son Ramses. The much-coveted burial chamber of the Black Pyramid in Dahshoor is theirs for the digging. But there is a great evil in the wind that roils the hot sands sweeping through the bustling streets and marketplace of Cairo. The brazen moonlight abduction of Ramses — and an expedition subsequently cursed by misfortune and death — have alerted Amelia to the likely presence of her arch nemesis the Master Criminal, notorious looter of the living and the dead. But it is far more than ill-gotten riches that motivates the evil genius this time around. For now the most valuable and elusive prized of all is nearly in his grasp: the meddling lady archaeologist who has sworn to deliver him to justice . . . Amelia Peabody!

I like this series, but this book did not particularly grab me. I found it harder to get into the plot and the characters - this might be the book or me. The character development was as strong as Peters’ past books and the story seemed to be pretty solid. I cannot put my finger on it, but a few times I skimmed a few paragraphs because the dialogue was boring and impertinent to the story.

I still look forward to reading the fifth book - The Deeds of the Disturber.

For reasons I won’t get into at the moment, I will be very busy over the next few weeks (maybe months). I am not sure how much blogging I will be able to do. Heck, I don’t really know how much reading I will be able to do. I might find the time to read, and post reviews and links, as a way to relax and reduce stress or I might find that I am just not focused on reading or blogging. Given that this isn’t exactly a post-a-minute type of place anyway, that probably isn’t a big concern. But I just thought I would let you know, in case anyone cares. If content drops precipitously you’ll know why.

In the meantime, here are some links worth checking out:

- Matthew Omolesky reviews the latest from Martin Amis over at the American Spectator:

After Martin Amis, the renowned but polarizing English writer, tackled the issue of Stalinism and its moral legacy in his non-fiction work Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, it was only a matter of time before the same historical and emotional terrain was trod in novelistic form.

This has happened in House of Meetings, in which depictions of the personal and political consequences of the Gulag slave archipelago combine to form a work of unsettling moral power. House of Meetings is at its core the story of a love triangle (an “isosceles,” Amis tells us, “it certainly comes to a sharp point”) involving two brothers and a Jewish girl in a post-WWII Moscow on the verge of a pogrom. But Amis’s latest offering is also a profoundly political work, concerned with the impact of Communism on today’s Russia, both on the level of the individual and the state. As such, Amis is a worthy heir of a long tradition of Western eyes trained on Russia.

- And if you didn’t catch it, also in the Spectator was Larry Thornberry’s review of the latest Rumpole book:

The point of this novel, the most political and most topical of the Rumpole stories, is to give Mortimer some space to vent on the steps New Labour has taken to protect the UK from terrorists, steps Mortimer feels tread unnecessarily on the rights English citizens have traditionally enjoyed. In previous stories Mortimer has given us gentle wit and satire, with Horace playing off against an ensemble cast of slightly off-plumb judges, prosecutors, and his colleagues in chambers at 4 Equity Court. (And of course Horace’s formidable and worthy wife, Hilda, known to Rumpole as “She Who Must Be Obeyed.”) These judicial short-rounds (an artilleryman’s term — think about it) are present in Reign of Terror, and amuse us as always. But they share a stage with some real names and real offices and real contemporary issues.

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I wanted to quickly mention a book that I just finished today - The First American Army by Bruce Chadwick. As explained in the subtitle, it is the untold story of George Washington and the men behind America’s first fight for freedom.

Here is an excerpt from Publisher’s Weekly:

In this novelistic treatment of the Revolutionary War, Chadwick (George Washington’s War, Brother Against Brother) uses the experiences of eight men to give the reader a “bottom up” look at the war. Drawing on their letters and diaries, he follows them through their years in and out of the war, from the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 to the American victory at Yorktown in 1781. Although the horrors of battle are a main focus of their writings, everyday activities and concerns-romance, food, clothing, leisure and friendship-reveal much about these early Americans’ lives. Readers will find little academic analysis of the subjects; except for a few expansive chapter introductions, Chadwick keeps standard history writing to a minimum. Instead, he focuses on these men’s day-to-day and writes in lively prose, although some accounts push the limits of reconstruction and read like fiction.

I thought it was interesting to read about the war from the perspective of the common soldier. This seems to be a common theme in academic books - the generals and other famous people in wars have been written about to death and now writers are looking for a different perspective of wars - the common soldier. I don’t think this is a bad trend, but I think that there needs to be a balance of a history of a war by blending descriptions of the generals and the privates.

With all of that in mind, the average reader will enjoy the stories as told by the participants.