sunday march 16
Nicola Barker’s extraordinary novel, Darkmans, published in 2007 and short listed for the Man Booker Prize, didn’t reach my desk until January of this year. So it’s still “new fiction” to me. I’ve been thinking about Darkmans for a while now since finishing it. There's a lot to consider.
Barker sets her wildly strange book in Ashford in Kent, the western terminus of the Channel Tunnel. Ashford is a town whose medieval heart is circumscribed by modernity. In Barker’s novel, it’s a place where the past seeps into the present, with characters influenced by the malevolent spirit of one John Scrogin
, a jester at the court of Edward IV. Scrogin’s infamous act (can’t really call it a prank) was luring beggars to a barn then torching it.
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saturday november 24
The astounding commercial success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, with its irresistible combination of cabalistic hokum and pseudo-historical authority, spawned imitations that left many book lovers with piercing conspiracy-fiction hangovers. It happened to me. But my breaking point came when I encountered "The Da Vinci Code Diet."
Paul Sussman's new thriller, The Last Secret of the Temple, seems to possess standard ingredients found in a Da Vinci Code knock-off. It posits a deep archaeological mystery, involving a treasure from the Temple of Jerusalem, which the Romans destroyed in 70 AD. It has a mysterious document penned in coded Latin during the Crusades. And, of course, it has the Nazis storming into the conspiracy in 1944.
But Sussman aims higher in his intriguing police novel set in Israel and Egypt amid the violence and acrimony of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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wednesday august 29
Sometimes it’s worth taking a flier on a debut paperback original. I found this was the case with Plague Year, Jeff Carlson’s post-apocalyptic science fiction thriller.
A small band of men and women cling to survival on a tiny peak in the Sierra Nevada. The group made it through a terrible winter, following the outbreak of plague worldwide. They've done so by eating their dead.
Most of the human and animal life on Earth perished two months after an experimental nanotech virus was stolen from a Sacramento laboratory. The nanotech was developed with the promise of ridding the human body of disease and pollutants – such as cancer – as well as offering greatly extended lifetimes. But the untested, self-replicating machine virus was released into the atmosphere hours after it was stolen. Simply breathing it was a death sentence.
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wednesday august 08
Twenty-six years ago, Gorky Park transported American readers to a frozen crime scene in Moscow and introduced Senior Inspector Arkady Renko, a homicide specialist in a country "that had little organized crime and no talent for finesse." A murderer is frequently a drunk nearby.
But evidence of a triple murder has emerged in the thawing ice and snow of April. A KGB major is already on the scene when Renko arrives. Renko's relationship with the KGB is testy and antagonistic. The victims—two men, and a woman wearing ice skates—will be difficult to identify. Each has a gunshot wound in the head and in the heart. The hands have been removed to prevent fingerprinting.
Renko lights a cigarette. His job is to find killers, but he can’t stand the sight of a dead body.
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friday july 27
In the category of winsome, anthropomorphic nature fiction, Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg was last year's unexpected and delightful prize. This little study, translated from the German, is narrated by a tortoise named Timothy, who lived, in fact, in a garden belonging Gilbert White, an 18th century British curate and naturalist. White wrote The Natural History of Selborne, an enduringly popular work of scholarship, and recorded his observations of Timothy in his journals.
Verlyn Klinkenborg slyly turns Timothy, the object of scientific inquiry, into a watchful chronicler of the Selborne environs and a commentator on the strange ways of its human population. The action, if a turtle’s meander can be so characterized, occurs during a week of freedom that Timothy spends beyond the garden gate. I recommended Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile as an irresistible little gem in 2006.
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wednesday july 11
Shortly before the outbreak of Word War II, 16-year-old Paul Christopher resides in Berlin with his American father, Hubbard, and his beautiful German mother, Lori, a baroness. It’s a time of great tension for Jews and non-Germans in Berlin, especially for the Hubbards. They have helped Jewish families escape the Reich to Denmark on their small sailboat. The secret police, directed by an SS officer named Stutzer, are watching them.
The danger for the family increases after Paul meets Rima, a Jewish girl, and he falls in love. Their relationship possesses a fatalistic gravity far beyond their adolescent years. As the threat of arrest increases, Paul’s parents send him home to New York City for safety. But Paul can think only of Rima's safety, and he returns to Germany.
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tuesday june 05
The inaugural Discovering New Mysteries International Mystery Writers' Festival will be held in Owensboro, Kentucky, June 12 to June 17, 2007. Some of your favorite writers of mystery and suspense novels, and luminaries from the worlds of film and television, will be on hand. New mystery plays, screenplays, and teleplays will be judged in competition and presented in live performances.
Among the writers attending will be: Stuart Kaminsky, author of more that 60 mysteries, and currently Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America;
Louisville’s own Sue Grafton, author of the bestselling Kinsey Millhone mystery series;
Kentucky native James W. Hall, author of the long-running series of Thorn suspense novels set in Key West, Florida;
past Grand Master of Mystery and Edgar Award winner Ira Levin, best known, of course, for Rosemary’s Baby;
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sunday may 13
Pleasant Hill Shaker Furniture by Kerry Pierce is a wonderful new book on the subject. Kenny Pierce is a professional furniture maker and an authority on Shaker woodworking and furniture. This attractive volume is filled with photographs of Shaker dwellings, workshops, tools, artifacts, and, of course, the furniture remarkable for its clean design and simple beauty. The Shakers worked wood as an expression of their devotion to God, and this is certainly evident in the objects they created.
Pierce selected 16 pieces from the Pleasant Hill collection for detailed analysis. A measured drawing of each is provided, with an accompanying discussion of material section, hardware, and construction techniques. So this book has practical value for the home woodworker.
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friday april 06
The Cincinnati Reds, baseball’s oldest professional team, opened their 136th campaign on Monday at Great American Ballpark. In no particular order, here are a few baseball novels this Red's fan has enjoyed over the years.
The Southpaw by Mark Harris. A 1973 film starring Michael Moriarty and Robert De Niro made famous Bang the Drum Slowly, the second book in the Henry Wiggin quartet . Published in 1953, The Southpaw was the first . Henry’s appealing, idiomatic narrative limns his rookie season in the big leagues. The Southpaw is one of those distinctive American narratives clearly descended from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock. This baseball fantasy pays a homage to another Twain novel. San Francisco newspaperman Samuel Clemens Flower falls asleep on an Amtrak train in the 20th century, but awakens on a steam train in the company of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. A well-researched baseball story about the primitive professional game.
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monday march 19
The 16th annual Cincinnati International Wine Festival will be held this coming weekend, with the Grand Tastings scheduled for March 22 and 23. These recently published books in the Library’s collection will advance your knowledge and enhance your appreciation of the vino aging in your cellar.
The Oxford Companion to Wine
Updated in 2006, this authoritative compendium contains almost 4000 entries on every conceivable aspect of wine and wine making.
Wine: the 8,000-Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade by Thomas Pellechi
Pellechi presents a fascinating overview of the commercial impact of the wine industry throughout history.
The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home by Sheridan F. Warrick
Red and white varietals; pressing equipment; techniques of the craft: this is a complete guide for novices and experienced winemakers
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tuesday march 13
The Algebraist, a novel by British science fiction writer
Iain Banks, landed on my desk a few weeks ago. But it's not a new title. It was published in England in 2004. Nominated for a 2005
Hugo Award,
The Algebraist didn't appear in the U.S. until after ballots were cast. So, it had no chance of winning. Who knows what cosmic hazards delayed it's arrival in Cincinnati until 2007? In any case, I was glad to see it.
Critics use the phrase "baroque space opera" to describe the books in Banks' series about a civilization called "the Culture." Fair enough, I suppose, but it falls a little short. Because Banks, for purposes ironic or perversely pleasurable, deliberately betrays the conventions of the form.
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monday march 05
Michael Palmer will promote his new medical thriller, The Fifth Vial, at the Oakley Branch this coming Thursday, March 8 at 7:00 p.m. Turning the Page asked the author a few questions that he graciously found time to answer.
T.T.P.: Tell us a little bit about how you came to be a novelist.
M.P.: Robin Cook and I were classmates at Wesleyan in Connecticut, and trained together at Mass General Hospital. After I read Coma, I asked myself: If he can do this, why can't I? So I started writing an adventure story a page a night.
T.T.P.: Did it come from your experience with books and reading?
M.P.: When I started writing, I began to draw from everything I knew--books I had read and enjoyed; courses at Wesleyan; experiences in the ER and the office. Pulling those things together was, and is, one of the aspects of writing fiction that I enjoy the most.
T.T.P.: Or did your career in medicine serve as inspiration?
No doctor could write and not have his patents and life in medicine become woven into the fabric of his work.
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tuesday february 20
The bestselling writer of medical thrillers, Michael Palmer, M.D., is returning to Cincinnati. Long a favorite of local readers, Dr. Palmer will be appearing at the Oakley Branch Library on March 8, at 7 pm, to sign copies of The Fifth Vial, his latest thriller. This may be his best novel yet!
In
The Fifth Vial, a Harvard Medical School student, a struggling private eye from Chicago, and a research scientist in Cameroon take different paths to uncover the existence of the Guardians, a secret society of infuential physicians. Using the global resources of a commercial medical laboratory, the Guardians circumvent established medical protocol for their own omnipotent ends, endangering the lives of many innocent victims. And their covert method involves a small vial of blood sealed with a green stopper: the fifth vial!
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friday february 09
There's an underrated American author of suspense fiction you may not be familiar with. P. T. Deutermann, a retired Captain in the U.S. Navy, began writing novels of naval suspense in 1992, eight years after Tom Clancy stunned the publishing world and launched the technothriller era with the surprise bestseller, The Hunt for Red October.
Scorpion in the Sea: The Goldsborough Incident, concerns the unvalued captain of an obsolete U.S. Navy destroyer who engages a Libyan submarine in a deadly duel off the Florida coast.
The Edge of Honor, a novel of the Navy during the Vietnam War, followed. In
Official Privilege, the mummified corpse of a black officer is found on a mothballed warship, and the subsequent investigation points to a high-level cover-up. These were suspenseful tales of naval action and mystery, offering authentic technical detail. But then Deutermann changed direction.
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saturday january 20
Sight Unseen is a fine new novel of literary suspense by British author Robert Goddard, a terrific writer whose work is neglected in the U.S.
In the summer of 1981, graduate student David Umber sat outside a pub in Avebury, England, waiting for a man with a book pertinent to his research: the identity of "Junius," a pseudonymous 18th-century polemicist. Umber witnessed the daylight abduction of a 2-year-old girl, in the care of her nanny, and, subsequently, the death of the child's 10-year-old sister beneath the wheels of the kidnapper's van. The case was never solved.
More than twenty years later, Umber is lying low in Prague, a broken man. Following the Avebury incident, he abandoned his studies. United by the tragedy, he and the girl's nanny fell in love then married. But unable to recover from the trauma, Umber's wife committed suicide in 1999.
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thursday january 04
This month marks the 70th anniversary of the great Ohio Valley Flood of 1937. CET, Cincinnati’s PBS affiliate, is inviting viewers to share pictures, stories, and videotape of flood film footage, as the station remembers the most deadly and devastating flood in modern memory. Selected submissions will appear on CETconnect.org beginning the week of January 15.
Following a month of heavy rainfall, the Ohio River crested at 79.99 feet in Cincinnati on January 26, 1937, the highest level ever recorded. Twenty-four years earlier, the Ohio Valley was ravaged by two great deluges. The river rose to 62.2 feet on January 14, 1913, at Cincinnati. It crested again the last week of March at 69.9 feet.
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thursday december 28
For readers of post-apocalyptic fiction, or for those of you who just can’t wait for the world as we know it to end, here are two recent novels of note.
With A Meeting at Corvallis, S. M. Stirling brings to a close a trilogy (cited in a previous posting) set in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, following a catastrophe that renders useless all technology, power generation, and gunpowder. From chaos and brutality, feudal societies emerge with medieval capabilities and equivalencies.
But liberty versus tyranny is the familiar dynamic. The Clan MacKenzie, the Bearkillers, and the city-state of Corvallis form an alliance of communities that withstands dominion by the Portland Protectorate, a fascist-feudal nation led by the ruthless Lord Protector. (A former university educator, the Lord Protector is the worst sort of villain.)
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thursday december 07
If you're going up to Cleveland over the holidays, you might want to plan a visit to Ralphie Parker’s house. San Diego businessman Brian Jones bought the very house used for the exterior shots in A Christmas Story, the satirical holiday classic from 1983, written and narrated by the late, inimitable Jean Shepherd.
Mr. Jones spent a bundle of money renovating the house, transforming the interiors to recreate the rooms of the Parker house in the film (shot on a sound stage). A Christmas Story House is located at 3159 W. 11th Street in Cleveland, and A Christmas Story Museum and gift shop is right across the street.
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saturday november 18
A recent obituary in The New York Times marked the passing of Markus Wolf, the Cold War spymaster who directed the foreign intelligence service of the East Germany Ministry of State Security: the dreaded Stasi. For two decades he was known to Western intelligence agencies as the “man without a face,” because they had no photograph of the mysterious spook. Wolf used this epithet for the title of his 1997 memoir, Man Without a Face.
It has been suggested that Wolf was the model for Karla, the Russian super-spy and archenemy of George Smiley in the espionage fiction of
John Le Carre, a notion the writer always disavowed.
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monday october 30
Election Day looms. It should comes as no surprise that political fiction, especially thrillers (
David Baldacci,
Vince Flynn, Brad Meltzer, etc.), are always very popular. Novels of political satire (
Larry Beinhart, Roy Blount, Charles McCarry,
Peter Lefcourt, etc.) also have their fans. And the books by well-known pundits (
Jeff Greenfield, Joe Klein,
William F. Buckley, Jr., etc.) who dabble in political fiction similarly receive attention this time of year.
How about fiction written by politicians and their minions? Let's take a look at some titles from recent years.
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saturday october 21
Tom Callahan, a sports columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer in the early 1970s, has written a superb biography of Johnny Unitas, Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas. I highly recommend it.
A native of Pittsburgh, John Unitas played quarterback at the University of Louisville in the early 1950s. The Pittsburgh Steelers selected him in the 9th round of the 1955 NFL draft, the 105th player taken. The Steelers then cut him. After competing in a Pittsburgh city-league, Unitas was invited to a tryout in the spring of 1956 by the Baltimore Colts. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
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friday october 13
The 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s leading novelist and its best-known writer internationally. Pamuk’s approach to fiction is highly literary and postmodern, whether the setting is contemporary Istanbul, as in The Black Book and The New Life, or historical, in intrigues of the Ottoman Empire: My Name Is Red and The White Castle.
Literary suspense and murder mystery forms are employed in Pamuk’s explorations of metaphysical connections among characters, and to engage themes of loss, identity, and the influence of memory on the traditions of art and storytelling. These dense, sophisticated, philosophical novels reflect the enigma inherent in Istanbul's situation, history, and culture: the uneasy tension between East and West.
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saturday october 07
The approach of Halloween offers me requisite context to commend Severance, an unusual new book of stories by Pulitzer Prize-winner, Robert Olen Butler. Severance is based on unsettling conceits: “After decapitation, the human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes;” and, “In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute.”
In sixty-two vignettes, each 240 words in length (following the suppositions above), Butler imagines the final, impulsive reflections of characters who have met demise by beheading. The prose is fluid and lush, and the psychology is, well, consummatory. Among the “heads” are figures from mythology (Medusa), and history (Walter Raleigh), as well as victims of execution or mishap. Butler conceives ultimately of his own death by accidental decapitation in the year 2008.
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tuesday september 26
Tom LeClair, one of my English professors when I attended the University of Cincinnati, has written his fourth novel, The Liquidators. In this story, Tom Bond, of Middletown, Ohio, operates a mobile salvage enterprise, Midwest Liquidators. Bond’s caravan of independent truckers hauls a varied inventory of remaindered and discontinued goods on a circuit of tertiary cities of the Midwest.
Business is good, but Bond wants to recruit a successor. His son refuses (“I don’t want to live off failure”); his daughter sees the business as a cult of economic defeat; and his truckers aren’t interested. He considers the ephemerality of his enterprise and wonders, “What lasts?” That’s when Bond has a dream to build an enduring memorial to human industry and folly in his hometown. The Liquidators is a discerning character study and a blackly comic fable written partly in homage to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom.
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monday september 18
Brian De Palma's new feature film, The Black Dahlia, is based on James Ellroy’s 1988 novel of the same title. The book is a lurid treatment, in the noir tradition, of a notorious unsolved Los Angeles murder. In January of 1947, a woman walking her young daughter to school discovered the body of woman, hacked in half, lying in a vacant lot.
In Ellroy’s story, ex-boxer and cop Bucky Bleichert becomes so involved in the investigation of the murder of Elizabeth Short -- aka the Black Dahlia -- that he loses his career and the woman he loves, compromises his principles time and again, and sees his life go down the proverbial tube.
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saturday september 09
Pound for Pound, a posthumously published boxing novel by F. X. Toole has received a lot of critical attention. It's the story of an emotionally scarred Los Angeles trainer, Dan Cooley, and his association with Chicky Garza, a rising young Hispanic fighter from San Antonio. The novel provides an unsentimental treatment of the redemptive power of boxing drawn from the elemental relationship between trainer and fighter.
In 2000, at the age of 70, F. X. Toole entered the literary world with a debut collection, Rope Burns: stories from the corner. He'd worked previously in boxing as a corner “cut man,” giving him an insider’s knowledge and perspective of the fight game. Toole died of heart disease in 2002, and never saw his story “Million $$$ Baby” translated into an Oscar-winning feature film in 2004.
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tuesday august 22
As noted on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, a new biography of James Triptree, Jr. written by Julie Phillips (James Tiptree, Jr. The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon) has been published. Writing under the Tiptree Jr. pseudonym, Alice B. Sheldon started publishing science fiction short stories and novellas in the late 1960s. By that time, she had led a busy and interesting life, serving as a WAC in the Second World War, working for the CIA, and earning a PhD. in experimental psychology.
As a science fiction writer, Sheldon carefully guarded her identity as a woman, until the editor of a fanzine ferreted out her cover in 1976. With Kate Wilhem and Joanna Russ, Alice B. Sheldon is counted among the preeminent women science fiction writers of her day.
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thursday july 27
African-American science fiction author
Steven Barnes has a new book,
Great Sky Woman, a compelling epic of human prehistory filled with fascinating anthropological speculation. Forty thousand years ago, at the foot of the Great Sky Mountain (Mount Kilimanjaro), the Ibandi people live as peaceful hunter-gatherers. His story concerns the maturation of two Ibandi children linked by destiny: Frog Hopping, a boy with prescient ability raised to be a hunter; and T'Cori, a girl fostered by a medicine woman and reared as an apprentice.
The Ibandi are attacked suddenly by the Mt*tk, a savage warrior tribe from the south, who conquer and enslave them. Frog Hopping and T'Cori undertake a journey up Great Sky Mountain to beseech Father Sky to save their people.
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thursday july 20
Mickey Spillane, author of the hardboiled Mike Hammer mysteries, died Monday at his home in South Carolina. He was 88. In I The Jury in 1947, followed by My Gun Is Quick and Vengeance Is Mine in 1950, private eye Hammer meted out hard justice to “the rats that make up the section of humanity that prey on people.” The stories were notable for Hammer's brutality and the willing nature of the dames he encountered. They sold like crazy in paperback editions.
While
Hammet,
Chandler, and later,
Ross Macdonald brought a literary sensibility to mysteries from the pulp tradition, Spillane was a boilerplate practitioner. Critics scorned his work, but he didn’t care. Like his character Mike Hammer, he was a veteran of World War II. His readership was composed of the men returned from war experience glad to be alive and eager for escapism with tough guy action and sex.
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tuesday july 18
Hot enough for you? Afternoon temperatures hover in the mid-90s, but the level of discomfort is minor compared to the experience of the characters in David Hewson's scorching 1999 thriller, Solstice. Scientist Michael Lieberman studies an alarming increase in sunspot activity that is overheating the Earth. Another influence is at work, as well. When Air Force One burns in midair, torched like a paper airplane, eco-terrorists called the Children of Gaia claim responsibility.
Gaia computer engineers have seized control of an orbiting solar power station and its super-weapon, Sundog, that harnesses the energy of the Sun. Lieberman, himself, and French physicist (and ex-lover) Charley Pascal designed the station. Never mind that Charley is insane and dying of cancer. She and her zealots are determined to destroy the modern world and return the air, water, and Earth to a state of pre-industrial purity. Solstice is a gripping, superior, infernally hot technothriller.
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monday july 03
At a recent neighborhood potluck I was pleased to meet singer-songwriter
Andrea Dale and her musician friends. They are
Filk performers. Filk is a subgenre of folk music that incorporates the imagery and motifs of the literature of science fiction and fantasy. I've been reading science fiction books all my life, but I was unaware of Filk music.
S. M. Stirling wrote a sequence of post-apocalyptic novels (Dies the Fire and The Protector's War) set in Oregon's Willamette Valley, in a world where all technology has been rendered suddenly useless. Out of savage chaos follows a struggle for survival, wherein those accomplished in the medieval skills of bow, spear, and sword tend to prevail. The farmer, the smithy, and the tanner are people of importance in this new order, which looks to the crafts, rituals, and mythology of the past for structure.
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thursday june 22
While the
Reds remain in contention in the pennant and wild card races (I'm typing as fast as I can), it seems a good time to remember
Jim Brosnan. The Elder High grad was a big, bespectacled, right-handed pitcher, used primarily in relief, whom the Reds acquired from the St. Louis Cardinals in midseason of 1959. As it happened, Brosnan was writing a personal account of the daily life of a professional baseball player that year.
The Long Season was published by Harper in 1960, and what an account it was.
Brosnan's singular chronicle of life in the big leagues was frank (but without vulgarity), funny, and the first of its kind. Never before had fans so intimately glimpsed the sport of baseball behind-the-scenes. Readers were rewarded with surprising observations, such as this one about old Crosley Field: "Life in the Cincinnati clubhouse in midsummer is lived in the raw. Pregame uniform is jock strap and shower clogs. The thought of putting on a flannel uniform over woolen socks and undershirt starts the sweat rolling."
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saturday june 10
In a desolate region of the world, two rival expeditions, one British and one Scandinavian, race to achieve an objective known as the Agreed Furthest Point (AFP). Both parties are well supplied and reliant on mules to haul equipment and provisions over the rocky and barren terrain. The AFP lies an unknown distance away.
The latest little gem from Magnus Mills, Explorers Of The New Century, begins as an adventure tale about competitive exploration in a remote and unidentified land in the 19th century. It becomes clear, however, following an unexpected revelation, that Mills' intention is a satirical fable of the Swiftian sort.
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friday june 02
The fringes and sub-genres of mystery and suspense fiction offer many curiosities: a
eunuch sleuth in the Ottoman Empire; a bizarre 5000-year-old
hallucinatory ritual involving cobra venom; a
Neanderthal investigator in prehistoric Europe; a
deadly terrorist who sheds (quite literally) his skin. Which brings me to Ralph "Sonny" Barger's new novel,
6 Chambers, 1 Bullet. Readers may recall Sonny Barger from Hunter S. Thompson's breakthrough 1966 account of riding with outlaws,
Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. Back then, Barger was leader of the Oakland Chapter of the Hell's Angels MC. Over the years, he has been arrested some 22 times (a paltry sum considering the criminal history of the Hell's Angels), served 4 years in federal penitentiary, survived throat cancer, and reinvented himself in the Arizona desert as an American outlaw celebrity and author.
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Readers who are fans of HBO's The Sopranos witnessed recently the violent demise of Vito Spatafore, the chubby, ruthless soldier belonging to the New Jersey crime family. But you may not be aware that actor Joseph R. Gannascoli, who played Vito, is a former chef and restaurateur who published a collaborative (with Allen C. Kupfer) novel earlier this year. A Meal To Die For: A Culinary Novel of Crime features Benny Lacoco, a fence for boosted provisions, who is also a gourmet chef. Benny is selected to prepare a farewell feast for a capo facing incarceration. Benny suspects that someone at the table is in bed with the feds. Over the progress of the meal--the novel is structured like a nine-course dinner--the snitch is certain to be revealed.
So, show some respect! Vito may be gone, but the man who inhabited his character serves up a crime story including roasted lamb shanks with orzo, marinated bocconcini, crab meat and cheese fondue, and pancetta-wrapped shrimp that will have you salivating and begging for more. Hungry yet?
Joe Haldeman, the outstanding science fiction writer, served as a combat engineer in Vietnam (1967-9), where he was seriously wounded. He is best known for
The Forever War (1974), winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The novel posits an interstellar war that cynically exploits conscripts who become isolated and disillusioned through the relativistic effects associated with faster-than-light transport to battle after battle, across hundreds, even thousands, of years. Haldeman calls it “my science fiction novel about Vietnam.” The antiwar sensibillity implicit in
The Forever War seems to
refute the mililtarism of its antecedent, Robert A. Heinlein's
Starship Troopers, published fifteen-years earlier (and also a classic).
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