Books for Soldiers

As we pause to thank the soldiers, past and present, who have protected and kept us all safer, let's consider, too, one of the little things we can do for them.  Our fighting men  and women are not living under the most pleasant circumstances - and they are stuck that way for months at a time.  Reading, however, does make it possible for them to escape into entirely new worlds for at least a few minutes at a time, so please consider sending books to these men and women.

One way to do that is through organizations such as "Books for Soldiers."  There are probably other organizations that do the same thing (and other ways to get books overseas), so please let me know if you have experience, both positive and negative, with any of those groups.

A few other photos to help motivate you to donate books to the cause:

Ireland's New Short Story Stamp

In recent years, very much to my surprise, I have become a fan of short stories.  Most surprising, though, is that thanks to Britain's Nik Perring I discovered a whole new (to me) genre called "flash fiction," those stories so short that the time it takes to read them can be measured not in minutes, but in seconds.

All of that, to introduce this new stamp from Ireland that actually contains an entire 224-word short story on its face:

Now, that is what I call a short story (although, I might call it more a short essay rather than a short story).  But, whatever you want to call it, this is probably the coolest stamp I've seen in a long time.

(Click on the link shown above the stamp for more details.) 

The Devoted

When it happened, Ryan Brooks thought it was the hands of God pulling him from the burning wreckage of the Brooks family car.  Later, he knew that he had been saved by a Wyoming rancher - the same man who had to watch his parents burn to death because he could not do the same for them.

Now, thirty years after that horrible 1960 accident, and despite an exchange of birthday and Christmas cards during most of those years, Ryan has still not met the man who saved his life.  And it is now or never because his rescuer is terminally ill - and has, at most, a few more weeks to live.  Both men fear the painful memories that their meeting might reawaken, but they know that if it is ever going to happen, it has to be soon.  What neither of them could have anticipated is how greatly Ryan's visit will impact lives other than theirs.

Ryan, unsure how to handle the visit, and struggling to say everything he feels, is so welcomed into the O'Donnell home by Alessandra, Mike's wife, that he grows more confident by the hour.  Too, it doesn't hurt that Mike's pretty daughter, Shannon, has come home to be with her father during his final days.  But the longer Ryan stays in Wyoming, the more complicated things become.

Jonathan Hull

The Devoted is a story filled with surprises, surprises that are revealed one-by-one until the reader's (and Ryan's) initial assumptions about the accident, Mike, Alessandra, and Shannon are largely proven wrong.  The O'Donnells are a family with lots of secrets - secrets that they have kept even from each other for decades.  Shannon's parents brought secrets into their marriage that go all the way back to World War II Italy where Alessandra had a passionate love affair with a German soldier who was part of the group that occupied her tiny village.  Now might be the last chance to finally share those secrets with each other and Ryan.  But the real question is whether any of them will emotionally survive the revelations.

Bottom Line: The Devoted is a good story and Jonathan Hull tells it well.  Fans of historical fiction and readers who like romantic literary fiction will particularly enjoy this one.  Too, World War II history buffs are sure to appreciate Hull’s version of life on the Italian home front for those Italians not pleased to be allied with Adolph Hitler.  

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Thieves of Book Row

Travis McDade's Thieves of Book Row covers a remarkable number of years (much of the 1920s and 1930s) during which East Coast public and university libraries were systematically looted of their most precious books.  What makes the organized thievery so remarkable is that major New York book dealers (such as Harry Gold, Charles Romm, and Ben Harris) were not only eager to put the books on their bookstore shelves, they actively recruited the very thieves who were so good at stealing the books. 

This was all much easier than one imagines it would be today.  Most law enforcement officials, including judges responsible for determining the penalties for book theft, did not consider rare book theft to be a crime worthy of an extended prison sentence.  Even librarians, both public and university ones, were not overly concerned about loosing a few books - until the magnitude of their losses finally became impossible to ignore.  And rich, prominent Americans were so keen to build private libraries of their own (also recognizing that rare books were one of the better investments available to them) that stolen books quickly changed hands and were lost to their original owners forever.  One suspects, in fact, that some of the finest collections in the United States were greatly improved during this period.  Finally, one man decided that enough was enough.

Travis McDade

Thieves of Book Row is his story.  William Berquist, investigator for the New York Public Library, made it his life's mission to prosecute book thieves and recover stolen books.  He organized his fellow library detectives, librarians, and honest booksellers - and worked directly with law enforcement officials who took the crime seriously - to finally break the backs of the book theft rings.  Sadly, however, no one will ever know how many thousands of rare books were never recovered or were inadvertently destroyed by the thieves.

Bottom Line: Thieves of Book Row will most appeal to those who enjoy reading "books about books."  It belongs in the True Crime genre but, both in the author's style and in the nature of the crimes detailed, it makes for some rather dry reading.  Exciting, it is not - but book lovers and avid readers are likely to enjoy reading about a crime wave that forever changed the way public libraries handle rare books.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

The Turk Who Loved Apples

What happens when a New York Times travel writer, a man who actually depends on traveling for his living, becomes bored with the routine of traveling on someone else's dime?  If you're Matt Gross, author of The Turk Who Loved Apples, you stop writing the paper's "Frugal Traveler" column and start writing its "Getting Lost" column instead.  (Despite Gross's claim that his sense of direction is so good that it is almost impossible for him to get lost in a strange city, his new column was a success.)

 The man is a natural born traveler.  Upon finishing college, when he was just 22 years old, Gross did something that would change the course of his life: he moved to Viet Nam pretty much just to see what would happen.  There he would eventually go to work for one of the country's English language newspapers, a job that brought him the credentials he needed to freelance a few travel and review columns on the side.  That work led to the Times job and Gross has been writing about travel and food ever since.

The Turk Who Loved Apples is all about the evolution of one traveler, a man who traveled so much in just a few years that he quit enjoying it - especially the "frugal" part of the equation because, as he puts it, there are only just so many ways to save money while on the road, and recycling them and trying to make them seem fresh became more of a chore than it was worth. 

Matt Gross

The book begins with Gross's Viet Nam experiences and, with flashbacks now and then to Viet Nam, covers some of his other travel "adventures" as well.  Travelers who prefer to stay off the much beaten tourist paths of the world will find Gross to be a kindred spirit.  As the years went by, the author more and more often decided that the most important thing about traveling is making new friends.  He began to focus more on experiencing new countries and cities the way the locals experience them, hoping to make - and keep - friends from each of the places he visited.  As a self-styled "wanderer" myself when time allows, I was both intrigued and inspired by his experiences in this regard.

I recommend The Turk Who Loved Apples to travel memoir enthusiasts with one minor caveat.  Gross presents a rather cavalier attitude toward women that can be a bit off-putting, particularly as regards his relationship to one Vietnamese prostitute.  The relationship he describes, whether Gross intends it or not, makes the prostitute appear to be a very sympathetic, if not tragic, character while leaving the reader wondering a bit about Gross himself - a case of, in my opinion, too much information.

Bottom Line: Good book for real travelers and armchair travelers alike.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Blood Drama

Blood Drama, the new crime fiction thriller from Christopher Meeks, is Meeks's first venture into genre fiction.  Now, let's hope it is not his last, because this one is great fun.

When Ian Nash, a Southern California graduate student, unexpectedly finds himself callously dropped from his theatre Ph.D. program, he realizes that more than just his future expectations have changed.  Now, because he was fired from his teaching duties at the same time he was booted from the program, Ian is also without a source of income.  And because a man needs money to survive, Ian decides to apply for work in a little bank lobby coffee shop on his way home from the university. 

His day is about to get a whole lot worse.

What begins as just another Los Angeles bank robbery suddenly goes very wrong.  As Ian watches from his assigned spot on the coffee shop floor, shots are fired, people die, and, when the police show up, he is horrified to be chosen as the designated hostage to accompany the robbers to their escape vehicle.  He will be even more horrified when he realizes that one of the robbers is determined to eliminate any chance that Ian will be around long enough to identify the gang to FBI investigators.  If he wants to live, Ian has to find a way to escape – and soon.

Christopher Meeks

Blood Drama is very much a thriller, but it is a thriller with a romantic twist.  Ian Nash, as are several male characters from previous Christopher Meeks novels and stories, is a well-intentioned, but rather naive, bumbler who sometimes overestimates his own abilities.  He combines innocence and recklessness in a way that endears him to the reader as much as it confounds the other characters in the novel.  One can only imagine why he believes himself more capable of finding the bank robbers than the FBI, even to running his own sting, but he does.  And when Ian begins to woo the beautiful Latina FBI agent officially in charge of the investigation, we see that his basic optimism about the future remains intact. 

Ian Nash is not an easily defeated man.  He is a winner in spite of himself, and we love him for that.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)