The Forever Watch by David Ramirez

 

I haven’t been so engrossed in a Sci-Fi story since The HeeChee Saga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee).

This is an action tale with believable transformers.

The pace is fast,

              with developments all the way through the end.
The writing is tight.!
  Few excess words -- no noticeable filler sections, paragraphs, sentences, or clauses.
It is not effusive; it achieves an harmonious balance between plot, character, description, and dialogue.

The ideas titillate the imagination.

 

The author, and I want to say She, because the protagonist is a woman, and a balanced half of the main characters are women.  She is totally believable.!

Yes, the author achieved suspension of my disbelief.

And yet the author is a recently married (to a woman) Filipino male.
 

The story takes place on a space ship of Star Wars size, like a small moon.

The crew, of maybe a million, is halfway through a thousand year voyage to a new star system.

Our cast of protagonists is a group of mid-level managers.

There have been many mysteries, over recent time in Hana’s life.  She joins with a tough cop to find answers.

She finds many answers and many more questions.

Her telekinesis and Psi abilities become radically developed with the aid of the “Builder’s” left over communication networks.

 

Many doors are left open as the story book closes.

There is plenty of room to explore the remaining questions if there is some sort of continuation of the millennial voyage of “Noah”.

 

If I were a movie or TV producer, I’d have a dozen writers going on this one.

Although I’d just be happy with a sequel book.
The author is innovative and had far more interesting ideas than one book could do justice to.
MORE.!  MORE.

Night in Shanghai by Nicole Mones

 

I mentioned this book at our last gathering in July.  I referenced “Half Blood Blues” – African-American jazz men in Germany prior to WW-II.  This is an equally well-researched and well-written story about Shanghai in the run-up to the War.

The research is excellent, mainly because it is a true story.  The pictures shown here are from the website devoted to the Shanghai experiences of Buck Clayton (tooting his trumpet here).  Buck was the “day” band leader, while the book’s main character, Greene, is the night band leader, a composite fictitious character.

 

The book provides history lessons along with cultural insights into racial issues and the similarities between the African-American struggles and the endemic slavery in China and possibly under Japan as well.  One theme is the struggle in the thirties between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists.  There is a great deal about the coming war with Japan and there is always the internationalism of Jazz. 

There is a fascinating bit about a possible refuge area proposed for escaping Jews from Europe.

The author does a commendable job of developing many sub-plot lines: Chinese-Chinese; African-American/Jewish; Japanese-Chinese; and Chinese/African-American.

 

It’s nice to see this other view of the Black struggle in the thirties.  Too often we only hear about the European acceptance (except for Jesse Owens in Germany) of African-American expatriates.  It’s a great book.  It would make a popular movie – nostalgia music – good guys (Chinese & Jazz men)/bad guys (Japanese & Hitler).

  
 
 
 
 

Quiet.!: Introverts Unite.! by Susan Cain

There are 5 reasons I have rated this book on a scale of   0 – 10   as: a    - 3- .

While sucky at writing, Ms. Cain is passionate and superb at marketing.  I’m sure her next book will be better.
1 – The topic is trite.
Research into dichotomies is middle-school level writing. 
OK, maybe at a good middle-school.  

This kind of stuff may be acceptable for the Sunday supplement.

I was actually surprised that Susan Cain didn’t delve into correlations between Taurus Introverts versus Sagittarius extroverts.  All this stuff is easy to research these days.  I look for more than dichotomy in non-fiction textbooks.

2 – The material is dated.

The bane of text books is that they are only as relevant as the length of the publisher’s production cycle.

 It used to be two years for many disciplines.  

2 – a.)     This is certainly a textbook.  I’d say Sociology 1A.  This would be required reading, to be covered for a day or two in week 6 of a 15-week course.

2 – b.)    The author, being a journalist, is well aware of these factors and has recently re-issued the book [our paperback copy].

2 – c.)     Her actual material still seems 25, 50, and 75 years old, updated with anecdotal references from the past decade.

3- The merits of what is purportedly an academic book are thin.

I’d guess that there were 300 references/examples cited to support Ms. Cain’s ideas.  These appeared in one of the following three formats: 
1-                   Two-person anecdotes
   a.                   Celia and her husband on page 229
   b.                  or Don Chen on page 45
   c.                   or Greg and Emily
2-                  Multi-Person Small Studies
   a.                   Story Brook University: (p.134) 18 people studied on sensitivity
   b.                  Berlin Academy: 3 groups on solitude
3-                   Famous Name Anecdotes
   a.                   Ghandi (p.98)
   b.                  Al Gore (p.150)
   c.                   Eleanore Roosevelt (p.131)

4. - I’m already clearly on record as finding that journalists are terrible at writing books.!.!.!.

a.)        They do things like include quizzes and self-tests, which might be popular in a Home Edition newspaper.
b.)    In a blind test across twenty books² written by journalists⁶ and read by twenty-five Guerneville Regional Library Brown Bag Book Club members³, only 10% (2 of 20) books⁴ were found to be worth reading by at least 4% (1 of 25) of the readers⁵.

5.      This is a Sunday article expanded well beyond its worth or value..!.!.!.

Neither the premise, the research findings, nor the conclusion bear any merit whatsoever.
It’s nice to re-tread the halls of corporate America.  I was there in the 50’s and 60’s; and its fun to rehash the 60’s and 70’s as Silicon Valley gave birth to its name.  This well-worn regurgitation of sociological clap-trap and personality studies might be great fun for a newspaper journalist like Susan Cain.  Maybe this worked for her as a Doctoral thesis.  No.! Wait, she’s not an academic.!, and there are no insights to probe or new theories.
Unfortunately I can not concur with the “Broadway Publishers”’s note at the back of the book:
·                her writing is not passionate,  it’s droll;
·                her research is not superb, it’s worn out;
·                her stories aren’t indelible, they’re forgettable.

The Seduction of Holly Blyss by Susan Jane Terry

This is a not a great literary masterpiece.  However, it’s a fun tell-all story. 

The novel captures a three-month period in the history of the “VACATION WONDERLAND”. 

Jamie Hart closed her business across from the “Emerald Triangle Garden” in the fall of 2009.  She had called it Bloomers, a garden shop. 

Possibly a decade too early in the legalized pot revolution, a group of Marijuana users rented the location for a Pot Garden.  This is their story.

My 2₵ worth of comment on this story and book is that Jamie moved into my house, 300 yds. east of the Gardens, after she closed Bloomers.  As a neighbor, I watched the activities at the Pot Garden for that next summer of 2010, but I was also on the Board of the Monte Rio Rec & Park, along with “Sugar” (Suzi) and “Mike”, side-line players in the novel’s action. 

Monte Rio is a small town in the wine country, population under a thousand.  Not much ever goes on here, so there is a stable market for gossip.  Thus a book like this is great cannon-fodder for a few months, while people try and figure out who’s who within the many characters of this book.  Who’s good and who’s bad.  Who’s revered and who’s disparaged.

The author makes it easy for the local reader to think they know some of the characters, if the reader already knows the real fictionalized person.  Vowel changes are common like Don becomes Dan.

The author has also used full literary license to raise the tie-dye realities of Monte Rio up three notches to Hollywood standards: all the women are beautiful and smart; all the men studly and desirable [I love this stuff: It’s Garrison Keillor: Where the women are strong; the men are good-looking, And all the children are above average], and the cars are usually Mercedes, the wine Dom Perignon in crystal.

This book follows in the tradition of John McCarty’s writings, like “In the Rough”.  This was also about the town elders versus the “people”, the focus being on a proposed plan to use beautiful Sheridan Ranch as an above ground septic processing plant.