I just finished “The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O’Keefe” by J. Michael Orenduff. The seventh book in his “Pot Thief” series. The book, like the rest of the series, is set in New Mexico and features Hubie Schuze, the owner of a native american pot store (the pottery kind of pot, not the Colorado variety) who buys and sells pots but is also known to take his Bronco out to the boonies and dig one up illegally on public land and sell it.
A pot on display at the Heard Museum in Phoenix
Hubie is quite the character and you can tell the author has fun with him. In the book Hubie falls in love with a beautiful woman. (Thankfully the author closes the blinds and turns up the music on the intimate scenes like I wish more authors would) Hubie also steals a pot from a top secret military installation and makes a copy of it and then finds out that his pots are changing hands way faster than he can keep track of himself and of course one of the characters ends up dead and Hubie sets to finding out whodunnit. He also gets involved in an obscure O’Keefe painting.
This isn’t a painting by Georgia O’Keefe is by Mary Cassatt and is called the reader. I don’t have any photographs of an O’Keefe painting
He spends a lot of time at his favorite bar drinking margaritas and eating chips with his friends. Orenduff lived and worked in New Mexico and knows it. I was born there and spent my high school and college years in Albuquerque and get homesick from time to time. This book is the latest mystery set in New Mexico. If you love New Mexico and fun mysteries this is for you!!
Back in the 1970’s and 80’s Linda Ronstadt ruled the airwaves as the Queen of Rock and Roll. She was the whole package, an incredible voice that could take any song and just fly, and she was incredibly cute. Later on she went off that path and got into Broadway with “The Pirates of Penzance”, then singing the “Great American Songbook” and then later Mexican folk songs. I really respected all these moves because she veered off from the sure thing and followed her heart into what she really wanted to do which by the way, were mostly commercial as well as artistic successes. She gradually faded from my musical consciousness and when I saw her “Musical Memoir”, Simple Dreams, I had to read it.
She grew up, the daughter of a Tucson, Arizona Ranch and Hardware store owner, in a musical family. She loved music and became a fixture on the Tucson folk music scene and then left for California for the good of her career. There she bounced around several years trying different things out and ended up getting noticed when she was part of the Stone Poneys. From there it was just a matter of time and some extremely hard work before she made it big. On the way she had an education on ethically challenged record executives, grueling road trips, and vagaries of loyalties in the business.
In her book she gives us a lot of the inside story into her musical career and how she had to fight to convince people to stay with her as she followed her own instincts. Later on she talks about she is retired from the music business now and is raising her daughters in Arizona. I had no idea, and she doesn’t say so anywhere in the book, that she had Parkinson’s Disease and that it has made it impossible for her to sing. She is not moping around feeling sorry for herself. Despite the disease making everything hard, she is staying involved with her extended family and adopted daughters.
I am really excited about Barbarian Days. Talk about a great read. It is a memoir by New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan and his life told through surfing. He learned to surf at a very young age in southern California and then later in Hawaii when he was about middle school age. He was born in 1952 so his early years were in the 60’s when life of course was a lot different than it is now.
In Hawaii he talks about getting up every morning before school and paddling his board out to surf before going to school. Nobody went with him, no safety gear no nothing. At that time I was in Price, Utah and Eagar, Arizona and although far from the surf, on weekends, when we were not doing chores, my brother and ranged far and wide on our bicycles and got into and out of scrapes that my parents never heard about. Such parents would make the headline news now days as they managed a perpwalk with handcuffs led by deputies. Back then, kids were on their own much of the time.
Anyways, Finnegan’s account of the social pitfalls of school and staying out of the way of the bullies really resonated with me.
From there the story takes off on his adulthood as a surf bum going around the world, cadging cash and money as he could in search of desolate beautiful waves. I’ve never been surfing and never will go surfing but he sure makes it sound fun and terrifying at the same time. He talks about being pulled down to the bottom of the ocean and held there by powerful waves, sometimes two waves in a row ( a double wave hold down he calls it.)
He writes about the social pecking order out on the “Lineup” waiting for the waves. The big dog locals get first pick, visiting kooks (newbies) get the crumbs.
He gets a little older and finds a calling as a journalist and not a reporter who reports on the latest zoning fight at the board of adjustment. He reports on Apartheid in South Africa and Latin American revolutionary wars. He goes where the action is and sometimes where he can find a wave.
He gets a job at the New Yorker but still finds waves in the Atlantic and he is getting older but he still enjoys them backs off a little bit from the big ones.
This in one of the best books I’ve ever read and recommend it highly. It is still $14.99 for the Kindle version. I got my copy at the library. It took me longer than two weeks to read it and I’ll get it back to them today because I am getting daily emails about all sorts of terrible things are going to happen to me if I don’t return it soon.
Morten Storm is a Dane who had troubles growing up. A rough and tumble household led to him being involved in gangs and drugs and lots of fights and even more chaos. As he tells it, he happened upon a book about the prophet Mohammed and liked what he found. He jumped into this with both feet and got involved in the growing Danish Muslim community and converted and then sent to Yemen for further study.
He tells about his growing radicalism and brings up many of the things that I’ve heard over the years but you hardly hear anything about in the USA. The resentment that many Muslims have over the US military being on Saudi Arabian soil is chief among them. Radical Muslims have a world view, according to Storm, that is totally alien to western views. Democracy for example is a big no no because that is man acting like Allah. Storm become more and more radicalized after he returns to Europe and then of course we have the attacks on the American Homeland on 9/11.
He is repulsed at first by the huge loss in innocent lives in direct contradiction of the Koran but is slowly brought about by the viewpoints of the radical mullahs who now say killing innocent people is God’s will. All during this time he is traveling throughout the Mideast and Europe meeting with various terrorists and raising money to support them. He has increasing doubts however about the killing of innocent civilians and then later has religious doubts about Islam, especially their concept of predestination and realizes that he can’t believe in a religion that predestined the murders of so many thousands of people.
He ends up offering his services to the Danish version of the CIA, the PET who get him involved him with the two British versions of the CIA (MI5 for internal affairs, and MI6 for overseas threats) and eventually the American CIA. His disclosures about these various agencies is hardly flattering to them. He talks about the briefings and debriefings done a very expensive hotels by these agencies and the debauchery of the PET in particular. The British agencies get a little break because they are very ethical and very reluctant to put innocent civilians in harms way.
The CIA he portrays as having very sophisticated technology but are very arrogant and also very willing to kill innocent people if necessary. He spent a lot of time with the CIA and feels that screwed him out of some major cash for tracking down some major bad guys but not paying him. Where he decides to leave his life as a double agent is when he is helping track down an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and is tipped by somebody else that he doesn’t want to be sitting by him ever because the Americans will fire off their hellfire missiles from drones or helicopters whenever they are sure of his exact position and don’t really care who else may be around at the time.
So he gets out and goes rogue, writes a book, and gets interviews on 60 Minutes. The book reads like a spy thriller but seems very believable. Storm has had an adventurous life meeting with many of the middle eastern bad guys and even finding a third wife for Anwar al-Awlaki on facebook and taking her to him in Yemen.
The book is a great read and I highly recommend it. Not only does he tell a heck of story about his life as a double agent but he also talks about the grievances that many Muslims have against the US and many of the countries in the Arab world that are seen as lackeys to America. Couter terrorism is a messy business. Our enemies are very smart and adaptable and are very committed. What struck me is the ease that terrorists can move around the world. They fight in Yemen, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Chechnya, and then go home and spend some time with the family in England or Denmark or wherever until they decide to go and fight somewhere else. It is also remarkable how dogged and determined the US and allied military and intelligence agencies are going after the bad guys.
This is a heck of read. I’ve been trying to figure out if Storm is legitimate or not. Who knows with a double agent. I hadn’t seen much in the way of people discrediting him besides the usual conspiracy lovers who point out things that don’t really matter. So sure he is gaming us a little bit but a lot of what he claims rings true.
Here is a 60 Minutes segment featuring Morten Storm and his claims.
Hey, I bought my book in the Kindle format on Amazon for about $3. I have put my Goodreads list on my Amazon wish list and check it regularly. Every now and then Amazon will cut the price of a book drastically for a short while. So I check my wish list regularly and grab books when they get cheap. The price for the book is back up around $10. I also download books for free from library but in these tea party crazed days, libraries here in Oklahoma have less and less money available.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
