Another Grippping Story from Dennis Lehane

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Four out of five stars


Live By Night tells a broad, sweeping tale that stretches from 1926 to 1935, and from Boston to Tampa, Florida and on to Cuba. It includes a number of historical figures as well as fictional characters and follows the story that Lehane began several years ago in The Given Day.

At the center of the story is Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of Boston police captain, Thomas Coughlin. The Coughlin home was not a happy one, at least not for young Joe, who early on amused himself by doping out the combinations to the household safes where his father squirreled away the payoffs and other money that accrued to a corrupt police official at the height of Prohibition.

As a boy, Joe reacted by joining a gang that committed minor crimes, including the arson-for-hire of competing newsstands. Then one night, in the midst of robbing a poker game that is allegedly protected by one of the city's most important mobsters, Joe has the bad luck to fall in love at first sight with the woman who just happens to be the girlfriend of the aforementioned mobster. The affair will launch young Joe on the journey of his lifetime, or at least the next nine years of it, which would seem like a lifetime to any normal person.

It would be unfair to say any more about the plot, but this is a captivating story, filled with memorable characters. Lehane captures brilliantly the spirit of the age and the settings are so well rendered that at times the reader feels as though he or she is actually circulating through Boston, Tampa or Cuba along with the characters.

This is a book that should appeal to a wide range of readers and not just to fans of crime fiction. It also makes a wonderful companion piece to White Shadow, a very good book by Ace Atkins that is set in the underworld of Tampa in the 1950s and which centers on Charlie Wall, the man who was then the city's mob boss.

Clapton Is...Not Very Godlike

Clapton by Eric Clapton
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It seems as if Eric Clapton wrote this tell-all autobiography in an attempt to debunk the oft-heard graffiti-fied slogan “Clapton is God”. If so, mission accomplished.

Although I’ve loved his music since I can remember, I always thought he was probably kind of a dick. This book proves it. Oh sure, he’s got his reasons: illegitimacy, abandonment and a bevy of the usual childhood dramas. But hey, there’s a lot of people who’ve had it rough and they didn’t turn out to be cocks. Even so, I've give him credit for owning up to his dickedness.

Clapton will always hold a place in my heart for the work he did in the '60s with such legendary bands as the Yardbirds, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.





I would've been oh-so happy to read an entire book dedicated to his work during those years, but this is not it. And that's understandable. This is after all an autobiography about his entire life thus far and it's always best if those don't bog down in any one era of a person's life.

But considering the work he did in the '60s and how huge a rockstar Clapton is now, can you even imagine the level he’d be on if he didn’t waste the following decades of his life drinking and doing drugs? I mean, this guy had serious addiction problems and once the book moves on to discuss his life during the '70s it turns almost entirely into a broken record, revolving around and around, detailing year after year how fucked up he was on coke and heroine. Then, once he finally kicked drugs, it became all about the booze. How he managed to live through the '70s and '80s, never mind actually put out albums and perform, is beyond me. Seriously, by all rights the man should be dead after all the shit he’s ingested.

I was fairly sure going in that I wasn’t going to enjoy the book after he was done discussing his career in the '60s, but I read on and I don’t regret it. It’s a decently written book laid out with a linear timeline, so it’s generally easy to follow. I did have one issue. Clapton is a name dropper…no, not the kind of name dropper that tries to make themselves seem more important by mentioning the names of all the famous people they know (even though Clapton does know quite a few), but rather he seems to name just about every person whomever ever came into his life. Hell, his local pub landlord even gets a mention! I don’t have a problem with giving shout-outs and props to people who mean something to you, but the problem is that it’s difficult to keep track of all the names of the many people who apparently have meant something to him. More than once I had to ask myself, “Who’s that now?”

Clapton bravely tackles an embarrassing aspect of his life, his unfortunate, ignorant racist comments. He also touches upon the death of his child and his efforts to sober up, so for those who need to see a dose of humble repentance and redemption, you get a measure of it. Is it enough to redeem him in my eyes? Not really. Does that matter? No. The point is, this is a decent book for those looking to learn more about its author. Just be prepared to learn a little more than you might care to.


View all my reviews

I Will Have Simon Pegg's Baby And There Is Nothing You Can Do About It!

Nerd Do Well by Simon Pegg
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Simon Pegg wrote a book?! He narrates an audio version of it! I just piddled my pants!

Dear review readers, please realize you are looking at a five star rating of the most gratuitous kind. Because I don't have the womb capacity to physically bear Simon Pegg's babies, giving his book an extra star or two is the only way for me to proclaim my love. Perhaps you do not feel as deeply about him --NEY!-- Since you definitely don't feel as deeply about him as I do, consider Pegg's autobiography to be somewhere closer to the high threes, maybe a four starrer.

Nerd Do Well is Pegg's reluctant agreement with his publisher to put out a "tell-all" instead of the comicy, action-filled sci-fi book he would've rather have done. The compromise will confuse and maybe even annoy some, for Pegg's non-fiction life details are interspersed with a fictional and funny-as-fuck tale of his own penning, in which he casts himself as a futuristic James Bond character.

Though Pegg says he doesn't wish to divulge personal details, he does actually get more personal than one would expect. Being that his nerd persona is based on his childhood love of the sci-fi and horror genres, lots of time is spent discussing Pegg as a youth. Since boys are almost always also interested in sex, the reader is made privy to some of his more private triumphs and failures. It's nothing too graphic...well okay, some "bad language" is used...but he doesn't go overboard. I didn't tally it up, but I'll bet there's more sexual innuendo in the fictional tale than in the real-life section.

All that silly smut is balanced out by a large helping of insight into his acting career. He begins at the beginning and marches it right through to the release of the movie Paul. If you're familiar with his career you'll enjoy the tales of how he met friends like Nick Frost and how shows such as Spaced and Big Train came about. A fan such as myself might beg for more behind the scenes details of these seminal steps in his showbiz career, but all in all, this tightly packed autobiography does what it should: satiate satisfyingly without saturating.

Deathless Lives On

DEATHLESS
Catherynne M. Valente
Tor 2011


Reviewed by carol
 ★   ★   ★   ★


Refreshing, magical, thoughtful, agonizing; Valente has re-written a Russian fairy tale into a complex love story.  It begins:

“In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later,  St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her.“

An amazing opening; one that lets the reader know the magic of names and the beauty of language and juxtaposes it with reality. Valente has taken the timeless part of fairy tales, the “long, long ago and far, far away…” away and rooted her love tale in Russia during the time of Stalin and eventually the war with Germany, although “there is always a war.” The story is about Marya Morevna, her first husband Koschei the Deathless, and her lover Ivan. Based on a fairy tale, in one of the original versions Marya has chained Koschei in the basement. Married to Ivan, she forbids him from the basement, but like all fairy-tale lovers, one day he disobeys. In the process he sets Koshei free, who heartlessly repays him by stealing Marya away. Ivan must track down Koshei’s hidden death to kill him before he can free Marya. 

Valente, however, tells the story from Marya’s point of view. But this is no simple fairy tale re-telling; this is the very idea of a fairy tale reduced to its components than put back together as a whole. This is the before story and the after story, as much as the untold one. 

There are familiar elements to anyone wide-read in fairy tales; Baba Yaga, of the house with chicken legs, and the Baba Yaga with the flying mortar and pestle; house-spirits that require nourishment of one form or another for protection; offers to teach from an elderly crone of suspicious intentions; a horse that transforms physique and personality depending on the time of day; princes disguised as birds that come courting sisters; a sorcerer’s death hidden in a jeweled egg; a trip that involves three different houses in the woods, and three different sisters; and a set of tasks that require cleverness and friends to complete. 

But at heart, it is a story about love, and relationships, and need, and dying. 

Characters, as always with Valente, come alive in creative ways, from Marya’s many mothers, to the Tsarina of Ill Luck, to the gun-girl, and the swan-woman. I especially enjoyed Baba Yaga, who retains her old, intimidating and carnivorous ways: “Husbands, lie, Masha. I should know; I’ve eaten my share.” She also has a humorous way of refering to Marya in soup-pot terms that echo the fierce Baba Yaga in tales: “Listen, soon-to-be-soup.“

I continue to adore Valente’s writing style, a poetic sort of descriptive writing that is always looking for deeper truths. The format of the fairy tale is well-suited to her style. Particularly, there’s frequently use of the traditional repeated encounter experience that is just a little different each time, teaching the protagonist something more:


“Olga kissed his beak and drew him away with her, crooning and chirping to him in the soft, secret language of the wed.”

“Tatiana swatted his wing and coaxed him away with her, warbling and clicking to him in the bright, squabbling language of the well-matched.”

“Anna smiled at him, her face lighting like an oil lamp, took his wing and walked back towards the house, croaking and cawing to him in the strident, ordered language of the incorruptible.“

Complicated, disjointed, there are perhaps not as many transitions as I would have wished and an abundance of small stories that don’t always connect. Though Valente perfectly captures complex emotion, the allegories and flights of imaginings don’t always come clear to me. I’m left with the feeling of being sure something is significant, but not exactly why. 

The Acknowledgements thank Valente’s husband Dmitri and his Russian family, leading me to wonder if Valente was writing parts of her own relationships. All I could think when reading this is that Valente too must know the unhappiness and beauty of mismatched love. Haunting, beautiful, and like Mayra, it leaves me just a little hungry, wanting more. 

“She had not known before that she wanted all these things, that she preferred dark hair and a slightly cruel expression, that she wished for tallness, or that a man kneeling might thrill her. A whole young life’s worth of slowly collected predilections coalesced in a few moments within her, and Koschei Bessmertny, his lashes full of snow, became perfect.“


cross posted at  http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/deathless-by-catherynne-valente/

When Gravity Fails

George Alec Effinger
Orb Books
Reviewed by: Nancy
4 out of 5 stars


Summary


In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marid Audrian has kept his independence the hardway. Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he’s available…for a price.

For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can’t refuse.

The 200-year-old “godfather” of the Budayeen’s underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.

Wry, savage, and unignorable, When Gravity Fails was hailed as a classic by Effinger’s fellow SF writers on its original publication in 1987, and the sequence of “Marid Audrian” novels it begins were the culmination of his career.



My Review


In the 22nd century, the fiercely independent Marîd Audran is living in a dangerous middle-eastern city in the Budayeen. It is a rich, fascinating and diverse world where people can easily have their brains wired for “moddies”, plastic cartridges with different personality types, from fictional characters to celebrities, that are inserted directly into the skull and “daddies”, smaller add-ons that are inserted next to the moddies to enhance certain skills, like the ability to converse in other languages, and to depress certain physical and mental functions, like hunger, thirst or fear.

Marîd, son of a Frenchman and an Algerian prostitute, is proud of the fact that his brain is not wired, but instead relies on drugs and alcohol to alter his mood.

The story begins in Chiriga’s nightclub, where Marîd is supposed to meet a client from Reconstructed Russia, a Mr. Bogatyrev, who is looking for his son who was missing for three years. After Marîd receives a packet of money, holotapes, and a complete dossier of his son, a woman screams, a modified James Bond is waving a pistol, Marîd investigates and then returns to his table to find his client took a bullet in the chest.

The shooting becomes a police matter until Marîd’s acquaintances start dying off, one by one. Despite his distrust of the police, he is forced to work with them and then forced by Friedlander Bey, the city’s “Godfather” to undergo modification in order to more easily find the murderer.

This was a fun, gritty, and thought-provoking science fiction story with lots of great ideas about personality modification, knowledge enhancement and ease of changing genders that could be a very real possibility in our future. Some international intrigue caused the story to drag a little and the mystery to fall flat. I loved Marîd’s independence and honesty, though I fear that now he is under Friedlander Bey's control the things I like about him will change dramatically in the next book. I also loved the relationship between Marîd and Yasmin, his fully modified girlfriend who was not born a girl and can’t manage to be on time for anything, even after paying a $50 fine to the owner of the nightclub where she works when she is just a minute late.

I just wished the author used the same loving care in writing a satisfying conclusion as he did in creating this fascinating world.

Also posted at Goodreads

A Weak Rule

Emperor
by Stephen Baxter
Published by Ace Hardcover

Reviewed by Amanda 
2 Out of 5 Stars

You know that whole "don't judge a book by its cover" thing? Yeah, well, I totally did. In a heady bit of book buying when I graduated from college and got a full time job, I may have celebrated by overindulging in a Books-a-Million and grabbing anything that struck my fancy. I may or may not have read the book blurbs. After all, I was young, financially independent, had a whole life ahead of me to read--who cared how many books I wantonly threw into my book basket? Life was a library, baby, and I was going to spend it all in the stacks.

Tragic mistakes were made that I'm still paying for 7 years later.

For example, Emperor, a book that I feel must shoulder some of the blame for underwhelming me because of its blatantly misleading cover. There's a statue of Julius Caesar on the front pictured over what is clearly Rome. You might think that this is what the book is about. As did I. We're both mistaken because the book takes place in Britain and focuses on the rule of Claudius, Hadrian, and Constantine. It's the literary equivalent of being roofied and waking up next to an ugly book.

Emperor revolves around a prophecy passed down from one family's generation to another in Britain around the time of Roman rule. Unable to understand the enigmatic message in its entirety, each generation uses it to its own ends: during the reign of Claudius, it is mistakenly believed to vouchsafe Britain against conquest by Rome; during the reign of Hadrian, it is used to gain the family profit by manipulating the emperor into building an ill-advised stone wall to protect his empire in Britain; and during the time of Constantine, it is used to make an assassination attempt on the emperor's life.

Consisting of three interlocking narratives that necessarily skip forward in time with only loose connections to the previous tale, the reader never really gets to know any of the characters--which is a shame because many of them could be fascinating if given more depth. Baxter writes with authority about the time periods involved, but the novel is billed as an alternative science fiction history. Without a historian's understanding of the time period, it is difficult to ascertain which parts are alternative and which are authentic. And the science fiction bit is definitely AWOL. There's some very brief philosophical debate about the nature of time (is it linear, or do the past, present, and future coexist at the exact same time?) and about whether or not the prophecy was sent by someone in the future (known only as the Weaver) attempting to change the past, but nothing that I would classify as "science fiction."

The novel would have been far more successful for me if it had been a straight historical fiction (really the alternative part is virtually nonexistent and seems to stem entirely from the prophecy, which never really changes events) and focused on one of the three narratives presented. Baxter has the ability to bring the past to life in a real and satisfying way, but the lack of payoff in terms of the novel's presentation and in its use of the prophecy as an unnecessary device to explore the past make it a tedious read. While I will not read the other books in the series, I would not entirely rule out reading another Baxter novel.

So, the moral of the story is: the next time a cute little book starts making eyes at me from the shelf, I'm damn sure going to take the time to read the blurb before I take it home with me.

What was the Fuss All About?

The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie

Review by Zorena

Four Stars

Summary

“Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.”

My Review

I remember I was working in a book store when this was first released to much controversy over death threats and due in part to that it became a best seller. I am pretty sure that is one of the main reasons I didn't read it then. The other being I didn't always want to read the newest releases. Even then I was reading books from older generations as much if not more so than the latest read. Now that both the book and I are older it was time to see what all the cartoons and threats were about.

I can see where the threats came from but not for the reason I had suspected. This book doesn't treat the prophet well but it definitely parodies the well known Ayatollah Khomeini and Rushdie does a superb job of it. It's unfortunate that he didn't do as great job with the rest of the book. I really feel that all the subplots didn't jell with one another. Each on it's own was better than the whole. I know this can be done better. Just look at Cloud Atlas.

On the other hand his characters were wonderful and some of the scenes had me chuckling. Poor Saladin, when he experiences his change and is confronted by the local police is hilarious. The glimpses into Indian culture were most welcome as well. I love learning especially if it's fun or done with beauty.

This is well worth reading because the writing is wonderful even if the cohesion isn't. I look forward to Midnight's Children.

THE MARTIAN BY ANDY WEIR

The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



”So that is the situation. I’m stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks I’m dead. I’m in a Hab designed to last thirty-one days.

If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.

So yea. I’m fucked.”

When I read the line “kind of explode” I couldn’t help thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Total Recall, face contorted, eyes bulging as the oxygen deprived atmosphere of Mars was about to detonate his head.


I’ll wait for the next mission to a blue planet thank you very much.

Mark Watney, Mars astronaut, has a lot to worry about. It is hard to say if he has more to worry about than Douglas Quaid/Hauser (Arnold’s character in the movie). At least he doesn’t have people trying to kill him on Mars. In fact, when his fellow astronauts left he effectively became:

EMPEROR OF MARS

It might be the shortest reign in history.

”Mars keeps trying to kill me.”

He amends that thought with:

”Mars and my stupidity keep trying to kill me.”

Watney is far from stupid. He scavenges like a futuristic version of Robinson Crusoe from the left over debris of the Hermes crew’s hasty departure. The incident that “ended” Watney’s life had them in a panic.

”Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

He finds a whole memory stick of seventies sitcoms to keep him occupied and more importantly stuff to keep him alive.

Watney becomes the first farmer on Mars. He knows he doesn’t have enough food to last until the next mission to Mars is scheduled so he has to improvise. Luckily the crew was to be there over the Thanksgiving holiday and for morale purposes NASA sent along potatoes with those all important eyes intact.

”My morning piss goes in a resealable plastic box. when I open it, the rover reeks like a truck-stop men’s room. I could take it outside and let it boil off. But I worked hard to make that water and the last thing I’m going to do is waste it. I’ll feed it to the water reclaimer….

Even more precious is my manure. It’s critical to the potato farm, and I’m the only source on Mars. Fortunately, when you spend a lot of time in space, you learn how to shit in a bag. And if you think things are bad after opening the piss box, imagine the smell after I drop anchor.”

When he finds a way to communicate with Earth in one of his more spectacular MacGuyver moments they tell him that he is going to have to drive to another site where there is a rocket ship, already delivered, waiting for the next mission. He will drive on terrain that looks like this:



The ship is in Giovanni Schiaparelli’s crater. Watney being Watney has a few juvenile observations about his arrival at the crater.



”Tomorrow night, I’ll sink to an all-new low!

Lemme rephrase that…

Tomorrow night, I’ll be at rock bottom!

No, that doesn’t sound good either….

Tomorrow night, I’ll be in Giovanni Schiaparelli’s favorite hole!

Okay, I admit I’m just playing around now.”

The science is unbelievable and since Andy Weir was a fifteen year old prodigy and is obviously still extremely bright in middle age I have to believe him that he has this all figured out. Watney injects humor as he explains his innovative scientific brilliance which at times had my eyes glazed over trying to keep up. So even as you are getting overwhelmed by the science Weir will elicit an eye roll from the more sophisticated reader. He might even inspire an outright chortle if you are of the low brow variety of humor lovers. I must be more of the pan-humor variety as he elicited a wide range of sniggers, snorts, and raised eyebrows from me.

”I tested the brackets by hitting them with rocks. This kind of sophistication is what we interplanetary scientists are known for.”

The one thing that might save your life on Mars, Earth or any other planet you might want to visit is something that NASA didn’t invent.

“Also, I have duct tape. Ordinary duct tape, like you buy at a hardware store. Turns out even NASA can’t improve on duct tape.”

Watney worships duct tape and given the hairbrained ideas he puts into practice he needs miles and miles of it.


It turns out duct tape has a variety of uses for providing additional support. We are such an ingenious species.

Weir convinced me that Watney could live on Mars for over a year while awaiting rescue. With mangled equipment, a harsh unforgiving terrain, and the ever present, one more thing going wrong, depression that Watney has to overcome everyday, this reader started feeling the pain of failure and the elation of success right along with him. As the world learns he is alive humanity began rooting not for the American to live, but for the human species to triumph.

In the 1970s when I was old enough to watch what NASA was doing and marvelled at our ability to do the impossible. It was a time when absolutely anything seemed achievable. We’d had leadership that insisted that we needed to go to the moon. We still built things, now it feels like the monuments of our times are being built other places. I do think we all miss having a common goal. Something that we all feel we are a part of, something larger than ourselves. With a space program gutted and the idea of a manned mission to Mars staggeringly expensive it makes me realize how lucky I was to grow up in a time when it really felt like the impossible was possible. I’m probably the last of the optimists who still believes that we have to go see it; we have to put our footprint on it; we have to scatter our debris around and say ‘yes we were here’. We need a Mark Watney to be lost on Mars so we have something to cheer for that brings us together as a species.











View all my reviews

A Peek into the World's Strange Past

Planetary, vol. 3:Leaving the 20th Century

Warren Ellis and John Cassaday

Wildstorm (DC Comics)

Reviewed by: Terry 

5 out of 5 stars

 

In this third volume of Planetary stories we not only get to step back for a moment and have a bit of a look at the adventures of Elijah Snow in his century of existence trying to keep the world strange, but we also get more details on the Four and their intersection with the Planetary organization prior to the current story arc. Ellis is able to play in a lot of cool sandboxes as a result and the genre mashing continues much to my personal glee!

Issue 13 – “Century”: Just how did Elijah Snow form the Planetary organization and why did he do it? Well, not all of the answers will be provided here, but we get an intriguing glimpse at young Elijah Snow circa 1919 as he tracks down the members of a secret organization from the 19th century whose goal was to “better mankind” from behind the scenes. Elijah doesn’t like that kind of meddling, but he just might have something to learn from one member of the cabal at least. Really cool stuff involving Frankenstein’s Monster(s), Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and some shout-outs to other luminaries from the penny dreadfuls and pulp fiction of an earlier day. Cool stuff.

Issue 14 – “Zero Point”: A flashback story showing just why (and how) the Four were able to mind-wipe Elijah. We get to see just how dangerous an opponent Snow and his group can be as they handily take down two members of the Four before being overcome by the ridiculously superior firepower the Four can bring to bear. There is also a chilling opening sequence that pulls some cool references from both Marvel’s Thor comic book and Alan Moore’s more esoteric work in Miracleman that serves to once again highlight the utter evil bastard status of the Four and help explain Elijah’s driving desire to stop them at any cost.

Issue 15 – “Creation Songs”: Back in the present we join Elijah, Jakita, and Drummer as they attempt to intercept the Four who are analysing Ayers Rock for their own arcane purposes. This in turn leads to a flashback story where Snow explains the significance of the place and just how it ties in to the wider cosmology that Ellis has created for his multiverse.

Issue 16 – “Hark”: The mysterious figure of Anna Hark, with links to both Axel Brass’ former team of superhumans and the Four, is brought from out of the shadows to play a central role in this issue. Snow is working hard at consolidating his power and ensuring that his upcoming standoff with the Four is his final one. No mistakes this time. To that end he will need all the allies he can get. Will the enigmatic and unpredictable Anna Hark play ball? This issue also has a cool intro that brings the popular wuxia films like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” to mind. It’s great to see how Snow is the kind of character who thinks out his moves and is playing the long game, he’s not just going to barge in and try to bash the villain’s head in (though of course if that’ll work he’s not averse to incorporating it into his plan).

Issue 17 – “Opak-Re”: Another flashback to Snow’s earlier journeys and discoveries when Planetary was still a relatively new organization and the fieldwork was primarily done by Elijah himself. Great homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Philip Jose Farmer, and the Indiana Jones films. We also get a tantalizing glimpse of Ellis’ Tarzan analogue Lord Blackstone and some significant revelations about Jakita and her very long relationship with Snow. Lots of fun.

Issue 18 – “The Gun Club”: Ellis takes nineteenth century space travel, Jules Verne, and a new plan by Snow to draw out members of the Four and deal with them individually and does his usual trick: incorporate cool ideas from across pop culture boundaries and not only use them to build a strange and wonderful world, but tie them in to an intriguing story of the battle of superhumans for control of the kind of world we live in.

What can I say? Still great stuff. Even when there are weaker issues they’re fun and everything contributes to the wider story arc and the further fleshing out of Ellis’ cool world. Also, Cassaday’s art remains consistently beautiful…this is really some of the best art I’ve seen in the comic book medium and it just makes Ellis’ ideas pop off the page that much more. If you want to see something new being done in comics (even though it ironically makes heavy use of what’s old) then go read it!

 

Also posted at Goodreads 

Benny and Jenny

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore
2013
Reviewed by Diane K. M.
My rating: 3 out of 5 stars



This is an interesting biography of Jane Franklin Mecom, who was Benjamin Franklin's sister. Everyone knows Mr. Benjamin as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, but his sister Jane was almost lost to history. 

Benny and Jenny, as they were nicknamed as children, were kindred spirits and exchanged many frank and personal letters during their lifetime. "The two eyes of man do not more resemble, nor are capable of being upon better terms with each other, than my sister and myself," Benjamin once wrote.

Jane was born in 1712, when Benjamin was 6 years old. It was Benjamin who taught Jane how to write, which was a rare skill for women. From the viewpoint of the 21st century, it is still disturbing to learn how little of an education girls were given back then. No public school in Boston enrolled girls. "Everyone needed to learn to read, but there was no need for a girl to learn to write ... At home and at school, when boys were taught to write, girls learned to stitch. Boys held quills; girls held needles."

In addition to writing, Benjamin also urged his sister to read, and often sent her books from his travels. She had little free time while doing chores and raising her children, but she was eager to read whenever she could. She confided to her brother: "I read as much as I dare."

Sadly, most of Jane's letters appear to have been lost to time. We know they existed because Benjamin references them in his own letters, more of which have survived. Lepore pieces together Jane Franklin's life from other documents, including newspapers, Benjamin's letters, and also a small book that Jane herself wrote, which she titled Book of Ages. It was a chronicle of births and deaths in her family, including her 12 children. 

Lepore quietly and repeatedly points out that Jane was smart and shrewd, and perhaps if she had been given more of an education or if women's roles weren't so restricted, she might have played an important role in society and politics, similar to her brother. It's always fun to play the "What If" game with history, and in this case, I think it might be true. 

In the Appendix about her research methods, Lepore admits how frustrating it was to try to learn more about Jane when so little of her writing has survived. "For a long time, I was so discouraged that I abandoned the project altogether. I thought about writing a novel instead. But I decided, in the end, to write a biography, a book meant not only as a life of Jane Franklin Mecom but, more, as a meditation on silence in the archives. I wanted to write a history from the Reformation through the American Revolution by telling the story of a single life, using this most ordinary of lives to offer a history of history and to explain how history is written: from what remains of the lives of the great, the bad, and, not as often, the good."

The book is a bit slow at the beginning, but I did enjoy reading about life in colonial America and the challenges Jane faced, especially during the War of Independence. Jane and her family fled for their lives on several occasions, which made it even more difficult to track down relatives later. It was also fun to see the different spellings of early English. Lepore noted that the idea of "correct" spelling didn't come until there were rules for printers. "People used to spell however they pleased, even spelling their own names differently from one day to the next ... But only the learned, only the lettered, knew how to spell."

The book also has good details about Ben Franklin's career, but not so much that it overwhelms the narrative about Jane. I would recommend it to fans of history, especially to those who want to know more about the lives of women in early America. As Ben Franklin once wrote in Poor Richard's Almanack, "One half of the world does not know how the other half lives."