North River

For a book that includes so much actual, not to mention potential violence, Pete Hamill’s North River is at its heart a very gentle novel. 

 Dr. James Delaney, a WWI medic who was himself wounded in the war, is having a tough time of it in 1934 Greenwich Village.  Delaney’s neighborhood patients are suffering the effects of the Depression and cash money to pay for Delaney’s services is hard to come by.  Despite the fact that his wife, Molly, who suffers from depression, has walked out of his life and has not been heard from since, Delaney keeps her room as she left it in hopes that she will walk back into his world one day.

His day-to-day routine, bleak as it is, is rocked one day when Delaney returns home to find that his daughter Grace has abandoned her two-year-old son at his doorstep.  At first, Delaney is filled with anger that Grace would do such a thing.  Later, he will realize that little Carlito and Rose, the woman he hired to help him care for the little boy, are two of the best things that ever happened to him.

Delaney’s life grows complicated when he is called upon to save the life of Eddie Corso, a local mobster who has been gunned down by a rival gang.  Delaney and Corso have a history going back to the first time Delaney saved Corso’s life – when Delaney risked German snipers to get to the severely wounded Corso one horrible day during the war.  The bond the two men formed that day is as strong as ever.  Unfortunately for Delaney and his grandson, rival gangster Frankie Botts is convinced that Delaney knows where the recuperating Corso is hiding, and Botts is willing to do anything to get that information, even if it involves the boy.

But now comes the gentle (and best) part of the story.  North River is really a very well written love story that encompasses the love of a man for his lost wife, his estranged daughter, his grandson, and soon enough for Rose, the Italian illegal emigrant who has moved so seamlessly into his life.  Before long, little Carlito, who spent his first two years living in Mexico, is speaking Spanish, English, and even a good bit of Italian as he charms everyone in the Delaney household.  Carlito’s world is one of constant discovery, and before long the adults around him cannot but help see the world through his new eyes, too.

North River gives the reader a remarkable feel for life in one New York City neighborhood during the Depression.  Hamill’s sense of what everyday life was like for those who lived within a few blocks of the Village during the thirties is a key element of his story.  This is a combination of superb historical fiction, crime fiction and romance and, as such, it will certainly appeal to a variety of readers.  Don’t miss this one.

Rated at: 5.0

Charlie and the Book Factory

Once again, a child leads the way.  One little boy in Dalton, Georgia, decided that it would be nice to have a bookstore in his hometown - and he decided to do something about it.

According to PRWeb.com:

Charlie got the idea to write a letter to Books-A-Million, the nation’s third-largest book chain, after his parents told him one night they didn’t have time to drive to the store’s nearest location 30 miles away. His mom, Jody, told his third-grade teacher Debbie Reynolds about his plan. Reynolds moved up her persuasive writing lesson and encouraged her students to write letters to the CEO of Books-A-Million. By Thanksgiving, about 500 letters written by students in the Dalton Public School system landed on Anderson’s desk, begging him to open a Books-A-Million store at the local Walnut Square Mall.


On December 3rd, Anderson made a surprise appearance in Reynold’s classroom and announced that a Books-A-Million store would be opening, hopefully in time for the holidays. Anderson sealed his promise by giving each child a $25 gift card to the new store.

Charlie officially becomes the store's first customer

But that was just the beginning.  Charlie and some of his classmates were part of the store's official grand opening on December 18 when they probably took advantage of all those $25 gift cards.  Books-A-Million must have worked at record speed to get this location opened before Christmas, so here's hats off to them for what they did for Charlie, his school, and the citizens of Dalton.  After all, how can anyone live 30 miles from the nearest bookstore?  That's too horrible to contemplate. 

Thanks to Books-A-Million and to Charlie and his teacher for this just-in-time-for-Christmas feel-good story.

The Broken Shore

I have long believed that quality crime fiction, the kind built around a sense of place and well developed characters, can give the armchair traveler a better feel for a country and its culture than all but the best written travel books.  Books like Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore always remind me how true that is.

Big city Australian cop Joe Cashin has been exiled to the little police station responsible for the security of the small South Australian coastal town he grew up in – not that the citizens there have much crime to worry about.  He has ostensibly been sent to the area to recover from a serious physical injury, but Cashin is the kind of cop whose superiors sometimes need a break from him, and no one seems in a hurry to call him back.  Perhaps that is because he is not much into political correctness or going out of his way to make his fellow policemen look good when they do not deserve it.

When local millionaire Charles Bourgoyne is discovered in his mansion with his head bashed in, Cashin soon finds himself at odds with others in the department who are determined to pin the crime on a group of aboriginal teens caught trying to sell the man’s watch.  After the case is officially closed, Cashin, ever the introspective loner, decides to investigate the crime on his own.  His investigation, made more difficult by the town’s instinctive racism toward its aboriginal population, will lead him deep into a part of the community’s past tainted by child pornography and sexual abuse. 

Joe Cashin is not a perfect cop.  In fact, he sometimes tends to make the kind of careless or lazy mistake that can place him, his fellow cops, or the success of an investigation in danger.  The older he gets, the more Cashin questions what he has done with his life.  He is close to no one, including his mother and only brother, but despite not being happy about the situation, he does little to remedy it.  But the man has a good heart, and a very big one, at that.  He is a staunch defender of the underdog and he believes in second chances, two qualities that mark him as a misfit among his fellow policemen.

The Broken Shore is filled with memorable little moments, unforgettable characters, and complicated personal relationships.  It is about much more than the murder of one old man with a past of his own to protect.  Peter Temple uses dialogue to develop his characters much in the way that Elmore Leonard has become so celebrated for doing.  It works well for Temple, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting into the revealing conversational rhythms of his characters.  Readers will be well advised, however, to familiarize themselves with the Australian slang terms in the book’s glossary before beginning the novel (a fun, standalone read, that is) in order to keep the conversation flowing at the pace at which it is meant to be read.

This, my first Peter Temple novel, is actually the author’s ninth, and I look forward to reading the others.

Rated at: 4.0

Do E-Books Even Need Covers?

I got my Sony Reader back from my granddaughter last weekend so that I could download a review copy of Pat Conroy's first novel, The Boo.  I was a little disappointed to learn that the review copy has a built-in ticking time-bomb that will destroy it exactly 60 days from the moment I completed its download.  I can understand the publisher's reasoning for doing it that way (I suppose), but that got me thinking again about the difference between e-books and real books - and why I will always prefer the real thing to a stupid digital file that has no personality or eye appeal.

 I went out of my way, and spent a good deal of money, to place a whole wall of built-in bookshelves in the study of this house when we built it eleven years ago.  I still enjoy puttering around the shelves, coming up with new filing schemes and presentations as the mood strikes me.  Try doing that with a collection of e-books.  Bookshelves reveal much about their owner, sometimes more than the owner intends, I'm sure.  Are your shelves filled with James Patterson and Danielle Steele novels to the exclusion of most everything else?  Do the Twilight novels occupy a prominent position on your shelves?  Right alongside your collection of multiple copies of the Harry Potter series, perhaps?  If so, you might want to make sure that your boss doesn't peruse your shelves during your next Christmas party if being taken seriously by her is important to you.

When given a chance to study the bookshelves of friends or family members, heavy-duty readers cannot resist.  And, whether they will admit it to you are not, they make personal judgments based on what they see on those shelves.  Savvy book owners know this, of course, and they use their books to tell others about themselves. All e-book collectors can do, on the other hand, is call up their little digital bookshelves and pass the e-reader or iPad around the room.  Not quite the same, is it?

Then, there are the book covers.  Simply put, I love book covers.  They are often pieces of art, much like those LP recording covers of the past (I still keep some of my favorite LPs in frames in my office and they get an amazing number of comments from visitors).  The first thing a potential buyer sees of a real book is its dust jacket and, if that cover is bad enough, it can end up being the only thing a potential buyer will see.  Some dust jackets are so bad that male readers cannot imagine being seen in public with them.  I'm sure the same, in reverse, is true for female readers.

We all love browsing in bookstores, even if we are supposedly there on a mission to buy one particular title.  If you are like me, and I suspect that most of you are, the majority of the books you buy are those that just happen to catch your eye as you wander around the store.  Some books just seem to call to you; others slap you in the head, they seem so perfect - and that's before you even open them.  I don't know what percentage of a book's sales can be attributed to the eye appeal of its cover, but I am willing to bet that the positive impact of an attractive cover is substantial.  How can browsing through tiny little icon book covers on your browser compare to the experience of a real bookstore?  It can't, of course, it can't.

Planet of the Apes

This is the second time I have read Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes, but the first time since 1968.  It is so much different than I remembered it.  My memories of that first reading were tainted over the years by the awful movies that followed the original Planet of the Apes movie.  The first movie was not completely true to the novel, but it was at least an above-average movie that deserved its popularity and box office success.  The subsequent movies were just terrible in every sense of the word and, unfortunately for me, they tainted Boulle’s book beyond my recognition of its positive aspects.

For starters, author Pierre Boulle is as French as his name sounds, and the astronauts who embark on a special mission in the year 2500 are French, not the Americans of the movies.  Unfortunately for our French friends, however, they find themselves in much the same position as their American movie counterparts.  Their world has been flipped on its head in more ways than they can count.  They are fortunate to have landed on a planet hospitable to human life, but they find that it is a simian-dominated world, not one dominated the human tribe they soon encounter.

Men are hunted for sport and for scientific purposes by gorillas sent to gather more research specimens for the chimpanzee scientists who need them for study purposes.  Men, after all, are the nearest animal to the apes who dominate this world and that makes them very valuable to the chimpanzee scientists and doctors searching for the medical breakthroughs that will save simian lives in the future.  In a matter of hours, Ulysse Merou is running for his life, part of a group of humans being systematically slaughtered by a hunting group of gorillas and their wives.  Ulysse is one of the lucky ones; he escapes the hunters shotguns long enough to get himself entangled in one of their nets, meaning that he will become a lab specimen rather than a trophy.

Pierre Boulle

This sounds like sensational science fiction, and it is.  But Pierre Boulle manages to create memorable characters (some of them men, some of them apes) along the way, characters with personality, depth, and the motivation and reactions that make them real.  Planet of the Apes is a satirical novel, one that uses the simian society of this strange new world to reflect on the strangeness of our own 1970s world.  Within this amazing story, Boulle explores politics, social mores, authority figures, human vanity and, of course, scientific research.  This slim novel of just 128 pages manages to make the reader reflect a bit on his own world while entertaining him within the fantastic situation into which Ulysse Merou and his two comrades have been plunked. 

There is even a “Statue of Liberty” type ending for the book, perhaps the only aspect of the novel surpassed by its movie version (the ending of the first movie is still, by far, the highlight of that whole series of films).  But, I am pleased to say that, as is almost always the case, the book is much better than the movie  - and, in this case, deserves to be read as the standalone story it was meant to be.  I had fun revisiting the Planet of the Apes.

(Free trivia fact: Pierre Boulle is also author of the respected novel Bridge Over the River Kwai, which became another very successful movie.)

Rated at: 4.0

Happy Birthday, John Kennedy Toole

John Kennedy Toole, if he were alive, would be 73 years old today.  Sadly, Toole chose to take his own life on March 26, 1969, at age 31.

John Kennedy Toole is, of course, best known for the wonderful novel he was unable to get published during his lifetime, A Confederacy of Dunces.  I defy anyone to read Confederacy and then tell me that they will ever forget the book's main character, Ignatius J. Reilly.  That is not to say that Ignatius is a lovable, or even a likable, character; it is simply to say that he is unforgettable because of his unique approach to life.

Several years after his death, Toole's mother was able to get novelist Walker Percy to look at A Confederacy of Dunces, and Percy eventually saw that the novel was published.  In 1981, twelve years after his death, John Kennedy Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Note: Readers familiar with Confederacy might also want to find a copy of The Neon Bible, written by Toole at age 16.  This one is no Confederacy, of course, but it is a rather remarkable effort for a 16-year-old high school student.  Toole did not believe that the novel held up very well over the years and considered it to be an "adolescent" effort.  I wish I were capable of something so "adolescent" today.