Category Archives: Reviews

How could I resist any book that had the seal of the CIA with a pair of hot-red lips superimposed? Claire Berlinski’s Loose Lips is the story of Selena Keller, a Sanskrit scholar who– failing to find a real job– ends up as a CIA case officer. Berlinski makes Selena likable and engaging enough, and the dialogue is pleasing, but the book just sort of meanders along until the end. Speaking of which: the end is terribly ambiguous, and leaves no sense of completion. I don’t know if Berlinski did it on purpose or not, but I was unsatisfied by the loose ends she left flapping in the breeze. Not a bad library read; just don’t expect Vince Flynn or Barry Eisler.

It’s all <a href="http://www.denormalize.net John‘s fault for getting me interested in WRC racing. I saw that RalliSport Challenge 2 was getting buzz in a variety of places (including here). OXM rated it a 9.0, so I decided to pick it up. So far, I’m very impressed: the single-player mode is extremely well executed, with a co-driver who tells you what’s coming up on road rally sections and brilliant graphics. (side note: the word “stunning” is often overused when it comes to Xbox game graphics, but I can fairly say that it applies here– the terrain and lighting effects are the best I’ve ever seen. Driving at night in the snow is an extremely tense experience). The kids and I had a great time racing Saturday night, even though driving a rally car is much more difficult than most of the cars in PGR2. I haven’t had a chance to try racing on Xbox Live yet, but that’s on my agenda for the week.

We used three guidebooks for our Disney visit: Fodor’s, the Birnbaum guide (which is actually published by Disney), and The Luxury Guide to Disney. The Birnbaum guide is relentlessly upbeat, never mentioning a flaw or blemish, but it’s quite detailed and includes lots of information on nearby hotels and resorts. The Fodor’s guide has a good sense of humor and points out which rides and attractions aren’t really worth going to (hint: Spaceship Earth) but doesn’t include as much detail since it also covers Universal, Sea World, and other area attractions. The “Luxury Guide” was pretty worthless, since we didn’t do lots of shopping. If I could only pick one, I think I’d go with the Birnbaum.

I saw this book before its predecessor, and it looked intriguing enough that I wanted to read them in sequence– I’m glad I did. Like Rain Fall, Hard Rain features the half-Japanese, half-American John Rain, a Vietnam veteran turned assassin-for-hire. As the novel opens, Rain is trying to determine what to do after having his identity– and career– exposed to the Japanese equivalent of the FBI and the CIA. Before he can get out of town, he’s compelled to infiltrate a school for training assassins run, more or less, by an opposition political party. Mayhem ensues. All die. (Well, not all, but most). As with the first book, Rain is a somewhat unlikely protagonist: he is exceptionally ruthless, but that ruthlessness (which in a lesser book would be slathered with smart-mouth quips at every opportunity; cf. Robert Parker) is tempered by Eisler’s ability to show us Rain as a human who loves jazz, knows where all the good whisky bars in Tokyo are, and can recognize the possibility of changing his life for the better. The descriptions of Tokyo are again outstanding, as are the descriptions of Rain’s many fights with various mobsters, killers, and assorted undesirables. The book ends on an uncertain, yet hopeful, note that’s left me eager to read the next installment. (The first chapter’s posted at Eisler’s web site, too). I’m inclined to like it even better since Eisler dropped by here the other day 🙂

Brian Haig has quickly become one of my favorite thriller authors. His books, featuring an incorrigible smart-mouth Army JAG officer named Drummond, are quickly paced, witty, and suspenseful; this latest, in which Drummond is seconded to a white-shoe law firm, where he quickly makes himself unwelcome after a close friend is murdered by what appears to be a serial killer. Haig keeps the plot moving briskly, with plenty of amusing asides about the world of corporate law. A good read; recommended.

How could I resist a book with a giant moose on the cover? Flynn’s book is an entertaining chronicle of his year in Alaska as an Air Force officer. He has a pleasant writing style, and the book is really a collection of short essays or columns, so it goes by pretty fast. If you’re looking for deep social thought or self-examination, look elsewhere– this is cotton candy, but nonetheless entertaining.

If you’ve never heard of Barry Eisler, and you like thrillers, you’re missing out. His first book, Rain Fall is the story of John Rain, a half-American/half-Japanese assassin living in Tokyo. The plot details, although interesting, are secondary to Eisler’s outstanding scene descriptions, characterizations, and dialogue. His descriptions of Tokyo by night are superbly evocative, right up there with James Lee Burke’s descriptions of bayou thunderstorms. Rain is a complicated character; it was initially tempting to write him off as a cardboard killer-with-a-heart-of-gold, but as the novel develops, his character is more fully revealed. Highly recommended; if you’re not convinced, Eisler’s web site has the first chapter available– a move which I heartily applaud.

A disappointment. When I found this, I was hoping that Swanwick had extended the punch and range of his short story “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” to a novel. Wrong. Oh, don’t get me wrong; it’s an interesting story, full of time travel and a great deal (too much, in fact) detail about dinosaurs of various kinds. Swanwick tells it well, but the fact that his main character is the biggest narcissist since Narcissus makes it hard to swallow. Recommended only if you have a dinosaur fetish or are stuck in an airport.

Arlene got me a SPOT watch for Christmas, and I picked it up yesterday at CompUSA. Here are some of my impressions from a day’s use– but first, a primer on SPOT technology. Microsoft’s trying to build objects like watches, alarm clock, etc. that deliver useful information at the point of use. This watch is a good example: it can give me local weather information for wherever I am, along with other preprogrammed channels. You can send calendar events from Outlook to it, and MSN Messenger users can send messages to it.
The watch was $129, plus $59/year for the MSN Direct service. There are other, more expensive, watches from Fossil and Suunto, but they don’t add any functionality, just nicer cases and bands. The watch itself is relatively large, but it feels lighter than my Citizen Titanium even though it’s quite a bit bigger. Included in the box is a little inductive charging stand; you put the watch on it every few days to charge its battery. This is a little weird, since most of us don’t have to recharge watches, but I’ll just set up the charger next to my cellphone charger and start a volt farm.
The watch display is clear and bright, but there’s an included backlight for low-light situations. This is one of the things I missed most on my previous watch; since it was unlit, it was impossible to tell the time in a darkened area. There are five buttons: two small ones on the left side for activating various modes, and two small ones and a large one on the right side.
The service itself works very well. The watch has multiple “channels”: one for the time, one for news, one for stock information, and so on. You go to the MSN Direct website to customize which channels your individual watch gets; this includes telling MSN where you live so that you can get local weather information, You can also specify a list of cities (in the US and worldwide) to get weather information for them. After I activated the watch, it only took an hour or so to get a full load of channels. When the watch is on the “glance” channel, it sequences through content from all the channels you get, including stocks, headlines, and weather. A travel feature allows you to specify where you’re going to be, and when; this is required so that your personal information (like IMs and calendar events) can be broadcast only in the area where you are. There are still some things I have to check out, like whether I can send calendar events from more than one Outlook profile and whether there’s any way to develop my own custom channels. Overall, though, it’s a neat gadget, and I’m excited about its future potential and about its current capability.

I accidentally discovered Lee Child when I bought Echo Burning at Sam’s, and since then I’ve been a big fan. Without Fail is another of Child’s Jack Reacher mysteries. Reacher is much like Robert Parker’s Hawk: a man of few words, great physical power, and a supremely calm and confident demeanor. In this installment, Reacher is hired to help the Secret Service figure out how to protect the Vice President-elect after he starts getting death threats. I can’t say much about the plot lest I spoil it; one thing I can say is that I don’t think the villians would have had the necessary technical skills to pull off their crimes in the manner Child depicts. Apart from that, though, this is a quick read– I powered through it on the flight between Cincinatti and Seattle and still had time for a (bad) dinner and a (good, but short) nap. Recommended.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of military history, and when I saw this book I decided to give it a try. I’m really glad I did. As a Marine, I was familiar with the outline of what happened on Wake in December 1941, but I had no idea how tenacious and brave the defenders were, what kind of odds they faced, or what kind of obstacles they had to overcome. Sloan’s account is riveting; unlike Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers, there’s more emphasis on the actual battle than on the personalities involved. Having said that, it’s clear that Sloan spent a great deal of time interviewing survivors, because the book’s liberally sprinkled with quotes and anecdotes that help drive home just how bravely the Marines, sailors, and civilians (!) who were on Wake fought. Stirring and highly recommended.

Stunning. We watched this on the projector, so that may have had something to do with it. The cinematography is beautiful; we were all wondering how the photographers were able to get close enough to get some of the shots they got. We see migratory birds in coastland, desert, Arctic, and estuarine environments, along with villages and a nasty-looking Eastern European factory of some kind. Incidental characters include some goose hunters, a French Navy frigate, penguins, an an old lady with a pot of corn. This was great family fare, and I’m glad we bought it– we’ll be watching it again. Highly recommended.

Typhoon is ty-riffic; it’s the kind of book that Tom Clancy used to write before he began having delusions of self-importance. Basic ingredients: the Russians are selling a Typhoon SSBN to the Chinese. Unfortunately, there are two minor problems: a) the Typhoon has all of its ICBMs aboard and b) the US has already paid Russia to scrap it. This obviously requires that the Typhoon be handed over without detection by the US, and that’s where the crew of the USS Portland comes in. Of course, the captain turns out to be crazy, and the presence of a female Navy linguist doesn’t help matters much. Tense, realistic, and fast-paced. You might be better off to wait for the paperback, though, as this is a quick read.

Think of a doctor. No, a surgeon. Make that a heart surgeon. Better yet, a heart surgeon who specializes exclusively in fixing congenital heart defects in newborns. Now, imagine what that person would be like, and I bet it’s nothing like Roger Mee, the world-renowned surgeon profiled in this book. Michael Ruhlman convinced Dr Mee, and his surgical team at the Cleveland Clinic, to give him an all-access pass; after, of course, some initial reluctance. The result is a sensitive and nuanced profile of how one small corner of a complex and difficult medical specialty works. Mee and his team do several operations a day, almost every day. Remarkably, the vast majority of their patients live– Mee’s surgical mortality hovers in the 2% range, and the story of how Mee works his magic (one grandmother says, without any apparent irony, “They say Dr Mee has the hands of God” while Mee describes himself as “a regular bloke”).
Ruhlman writes with a great deal of sensitivity and skill (as you’d expect, given that all of his books focus on craftsmen of various stripes). I was impressed with his ability to convey the pathos of the Cleveland pediatric ICU without being saccharine or phony. In fact, I was in tears several times while reading accounts of the trials faced by various patients (and there are lots more of them at the Congenital Heart Information Network). Reading this has certainly helped renew my appreciation and thankfulness for my three wonderful, healthy sons, and it taught me a great deal about a fascinating medical subspeciality of which I was heretofore ignorant. I’ll be looking for Ruhlman’s other books. This will be on my year-end top-10 list.

OK, so it’s an old album. It still rocks. Great work music.