Category Archives: Books

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain is a fictionalized account of the courtship and marriage of Ernest Hemingway to his first wife (of four), Hadley Richardson. It is told from the viewpoint of Hadley and is a very good read. There is lots of post WWI Paris ambiance, drinking and smoking in cafe’s and bars, vacations to the Mediterranean. Lots and lots of drinking of every kind of alcohol you can think of. Ms. Hemingway suffered for her husband’s art is the message I got. She kept everything together while he wrote and moped and antagonized their friends and spent time with other women until she had enough.

So I am intrigued about Hemingway again and I am putting on my reading list, “A Moveable Feast,” his fictionalized account of his marriage with Hadley.

I give this book two thumbs up.

I read the Kindle version. I watch my Wish List pretty closely every now and then Amazon will drop the price of a book drastically for just a short while and I snagged it on such a sale. I’m so cheap!!

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin is one of those books that is hard for me to categorize. A.J. Fikry is a widowed book seller in a small island town and is pretty darn prickly. The book opens with a pretty young publisher rep coming to present her employers line of books for the upcoming season and he pretty much throws her out after demeaning and insulting her. Then I find out that he is only in his 40’s which speaking as a sometimes crusty guy myself, that is way too young to be that crusty.

And then the storied part comes. Somebody steals a prized, very valuable book from him, somebody else leaves a baby in the store that he decides to raise and then the the pretty young bookseller comes back into the story. Given all that, I wouldn’t call this a “heart warming book” it is about a life that is lived with ups and downs and two steps backwards for every step forward. I loved the book and hated when it ended.

It is a rare book that me, my wife, and my MIL all loved. I’d loan you the copy I read but MIL wants it back.

I give it five stars.

Moloka’i by Alan Brennert

Before our trip to Hawaii I asked my facebook pals for recommendations for vacation books. Anne from the UK recommended Alan Brennert’s Moloka’i. It is set in Hawaii in the early 1900’s. It sounded good to me so I loaded it up on the old Kindle and read it while on vacation.

It is a novel about a girl, Rachel Kalama, living in Honolulu in a very loving, extended family. All that changes dramatically when she is suspected of having leprosy and is separated from her family and is sent to a leper colony on the island of Moloka’i. The book is about her life there and I don’t want to give anything away but I loved this book. It is about life and death and making a life where you are. It describes terrible cruelty and great love. It has cultural references to the islander’s religion and describes some of the history and effects that the missionaries had on the island.

I give it five stars out of five. I had never heard of Alan Brennert before and I will be reading more of his work.

Writing Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

I received Writing Blue Highways as a Christmas gift. It is only 164 small format pages and I zipped through it in two days. It is not so much about the book Blue Highways as it is about the process of writing the book Blue Highways. Now there are two types of people in the world. Those who read Blue Highways and loved it and those who never heard of it. It came out in the early 1980’s and is about a 13,000 mile road trip that William Least Heat-Moon took to discover America. He follows the secondary roads, the so called “Blue Highways” of the title. He travels around and talks to people on the way. The road trip took less than a year. It took five years to write the book and the “Writing Blue Highways” is about those five years.

The pencil written first draft and the typed multiple drafts after that. The endless editing and redrafting. The submissions to publishers, editors, and agents and the rejections. It is also about the financial hardship. He had to earn a living while writing the book. Basically he wrote every spare hour that he had. The book is also about the relationships that suffered because of his writing. The book is also about the drive of the writer and the creative process and the refining process of editing and redrafting. There is not much financial reward in most writing.

I was really inspired by this book and so I am going to reread “Blue Highways” it will be one of the few books I’ve ever read three times. I love his pluck and his writing and marvel at his nerdiness. (That is a word here in Oklahoma, just so you know.)

I highly recommend this book if you liked Blue Highways or if you like reading books about the process of writing. I am not giving this copy away. I’m keeping it. I very rarely keep books these days. Apparently I gave away my copy of Blue Highways so I bought a Kindle version of it. Obviously I’m not giving it away either. Kindle is forever, or at least until Amazon has decreasing sales for three for quarters in a row. That is forever these days. Believe me, I work for a master limited partnership.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer

I was visiting my Uncle, Glenn, last summer during a family reunion and he said that he had just go through reading a great non-fiction book called The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors about a battle in Pacific Ocean during World War II between the United States and Japan where a small contingent of US Navy destroyers and small (“Jeep”) Aircraft Carriers fought off a force of Japanese Battleships and Heavy Cruisers who were intent on attacking General McCarthur’s invasion force of the Philippines. These small ships were the only obstacle the Japanese navy faced. His recommendation got my attention. My uncle is a former naval officer so when he says such a book is good then it probably is.

So I put it on my Goodreads list and being the bargain hunter that I am, when I saw go on sale on Amazon Kindle for $2 I bought it (It is no longer on sale, sorry). Anyways the book kind of starts out slow as it provides a lot of background for the characters involved but once it got going it really zinged. The Japanese had lured the American’s battleships and large aircraft carriers away from the area with a ruse and were hard charging to attack the American invasion force. This led to what was called the Battle off Samar.

The Japanese navy sunk four American ships by naval gunfire including one aircraft carrier (the first and only time that an aircraft carrier was sunk by surface ships) and sunk another carrier by Kamikaze attack. The ships fought back though even while they were sinking and the Japanese turned away.

This part of the book reads as good as an action thriller I’ve ever read. The next part of the book is about how the survivors were left adrift for over two days because the Navy didn’t promptly start a search and rescue operation. This is heartbreaking as it talks about the sharks showed up and started picking off the sailors one by one.

The author of the book spent some time researching the Japanese side of things also. It turns out the the Japanese did not know that all they were facing was small ships. They thought that they were engaging the US Navy’s main force. The book also talks, from both the Japanese and US points of view how the Japanese deliberately did nothing to kill sailors who were abandoning their ship and were in the water and in fact one Japanese vessel’s crew saluted the sailors of one ship who were in the water after their vessel sunk. Another Japanese warship deliberately stopped firing at sailors who were still on a ship but were climbing down nets to the water.

The book makes heroes out of the ordinary sailors and ship commanders and is hard on many of the US Admirals who were more interested in their press clippings than the welfare of the sailors under their command.

This is an inspiring book and I recommend it highly.

Woody Guthrie’s “House of Earth”

Woody Guthrie wrote House of Earth in 1949 and set in the 1930’s on a farm in the Texas Panhandle. It has two main characters Tike and Ella May Hamlin who are struggling to make a go of it sharecropping wheat on a dry farm during the depression. The book was never published until recently when it was discovered and published in 2013.

Three things about the book interested me. First the book is unabashedly political in tone. Guthrie speaks about the various interests in business and government that he thinks keep people down. Nothing surprising there, many people here in Oklahoma, where he came from regard him as a communist. Second, the first part of the book features a long very explicit sex scene that is very raw and down to earth. It will probably curl the toes of almost anybody that reads it. Toward the end of the book is a very graphic baby delivery scene. I guess the one leads to the other you could say. I am thinking no wonder the book wasn’t published, who would touch it back

The third, is the voice of the book. You can sure tell that Guthrie is a song writer. The language is strong,direct and very readable and like a song. Some books I read for the plot, others for the action, I loved this book for the writing. Guthrie can write and comes out like a song, it flows and it goes here there and everywhere. The writing really surprised me. I was not expecting much and boy I was surprised in a good way. I like the good way surprises.

The fourth thing, and another surprising thing, was that Guthrie used the book to push adobe home construction. He saw it as a way of building inexpensive, durable, comfortable houses for the people. In fact that is where he got the title of the book.

(House in Santa Fe, 1974, Photograph from US National Archives on Flickr Commons)

He spends considerable time in the book writing about shoddy wooden shacks with no insulation, termites, and rot. Adobe is basically dried mud and comes from the earth. He saw adobe houses as houses for everyman

I don’t know how great a read this book is but it certainly was interesting because of who the author was, the intense scenes and language, and the strong (not obscene) language, plus the outspoken political tone and the surprise interest in adobe. All I can say is that I liked it.

Below is a time lapse video of the construction of an adobe house in Peru.

Hidden Cities – A Memoir of Urban Exploration by Moses Gates

Hidden Cities: A Memoir of Urban Exploration is a chronicle by Moses Gates of his and his friends explorations into places where he is not supposed to go like the catacombs of Paris, the subway systems of New York City and London as well as climbing various bridges and buildings and sewer systems the world over. No trespassing signs just seem to attract him. It turns out that there is a huge subculture of urban explortionist’s that love to to do these things. For example I think that I am the only guy in Tulsa that hasn’t sneaked into the Tulsa Club for a look see. I went very shallow into Tulsa huge storm sewer system to find a geocache once but I haven’t ventured into the Elm Creek Tunnel to find it’s geocache. Supposedly it would require five miles of walking through the storm drain. I’m not doing that!!

Speaking of Elm Creek Tunnel, which drains into the Arkansas River. It seems to be hot on the list for Tulsa area urban explorers and You Tube has lots of videos of parties that have gone on. They look absolutely miserable to me. But I would go!! I wouldn’t stay long though. I did go into it a few feet to take a pic though.

I’m too much of a rule follower plus kind of a chicken. In my geocaching I get to talk to enough security guards without having to explain why I am in a building where I don’t belong. I do feel free though when a door is left open and there is no signage to go check things out if I feel interested.

Back to the book, it is a good read although a bit scattered. It kind of convinced me that I would not be a good urban explorer but I am fascinated by people who have to venture over the ropes and beyond the no trespassing sign.

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe is set in present day Miami, Florida and it is a highly politicized, racially charged, and ultra class conscious Miami. It’s main characters include a young Cuban American policeman whose heroic efforts made him a hero to the Anglo community and a pariah to his fellow Cuban American people, a class climbing celebrity porn doctor and his young pretty nurse whom he uses and abuses, a thuggish , possibly violent, Russian oligarch with a taste for fine art.

I loved this book and its various characters who are either rejecting their own class to advance up or are rejected by their class or are wanting to morph into new identities.

I feel that I’m kind of on my own in liking this book. Apparently it was a commercial failure. Good thing I don’t read reviews before I read books or I would have missed this one.

I give this book five stars!! So take that professional book reviewers!!

“Hidden History of Tulsa” by Steve Gerkin

I found “Hidden History of Tulsa” at our local Barnes and Noble. The author, Steve Gerkin, was having a book signing and I grabbed a copy and talked with him a little bit about the book. I mean I love hidden things, history, and Tulsa so it was like the holy trinity.

The book is a compilation of several articles that Mr. Gerkin wrote for “This Land” magazine. I thought I knew a lot about Tulsa history but the author brought a lot of new information to me. He writes a lot about Tulsa’s racial history, in particular the prominent role the Ku Klux Klan played in the early 20th century including the participation in the Klan by several of our prominent civic citizens at the time. He also provides new (to me) information about the Tulsa Race Riot. I found all that fascinating. Personally I think the scars from that era affect Tulsa today.

He covers a lot more including a 1929 dirigible flyover by the US Navy’s USS Los Angeles including pictures of downtown with office workers crowding the rooftops of the highrises downtown watching the spectacle. He also gets into some of Tulsa Oilman Harry Sinclair’s participation in the Teapot Dome Scandal.

Anyway, I loved this book and give it a five star rating.

Mr Mercedes by Stephen King

This is a little bit of a change for Stephen King. This is a detective novel and a darned good one at that.

A man drives a stolen Mercedes Benz into a crowd somewhere in mid America a few years ago and kills several of them. He leaves behind a mask and hardly anything else and is known only by his media given nickname Mr Mercedes. The lead detective on the case Bill Hodges works on it for a time and then retires without solving it.

His retirement is not going very well and gets so bad he considers suicide from time to time. Mr Mercedes decides to try and nudge him over the deep end and sends Hodges a letter taunting him. That gets Hodges back involved in the case on an unofficial basis.

The story, like in a good detective novel, has lots of twists and turns and unexpected events. Hodges finds an unlikely pair to team up with as they try and solve the case. Mr Mercedes himself is quite the interesting guy and it is entertaining to see point/counterpoint as the story develops.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and give it five stars out of five!

This book is the first of a planned trilogy. I can’t wait for the next installment.

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