The Book Rescuer

There's just something that bothers book lovers about the idea of destroying a book, even when there's probably no good reason not to do it. We all know that libraries have to cull their collections in order to make best use of their usually limited shelf space and we all understand that certain books do become useless because of technological changes and the like. But, admit it. Doesn't it still kind of bother you to think of trash bins filled with still-readable books?

According to this article from The Mercury News, it bothers Robert Wright a whole lot. But unlike most of us, Mr. Wright does something about it.

With the zeal of a soul-saver, Robert Wright has delved into garbage bins, filled up his minivan and made space in his San Jose basement, rescuing books once destined for oblivion.

This week, Wright, 57, rumpled in sweatpants and a T-shirt, rushed to Morrill Middle School after the Berryessa school board had declared 686 library books surplus. The teacher browsed through volumes laid out on tables. He filled boxes until the custodian turned out the lights and chased him out. He returned Friday morning, his triumph mixed with amazement and distress.

...

A few years ago he rescued a hardback copy of "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" and read it to his son, then 11. They ended up going to the bookstore to buy the rest of the classic "Narnia" series.

"I know that an instruction book on how to use the slide rule would be obsolete, but novels by C.S. Lewis?" he asked.

Wright acknowledged that middle-school kids won't pick up a book with an unattractive or worn cover, an odd title or outdated contents. But he finds even some of those useful. "Homemaking for Teenagers," with instructions to girls on how to make a husband happy, for instance, is a historical artifact and can spark discussions about stereotypes, he said.

Many of the books he salvages end up in his English classroom at Morrill. When a student neglects to bring something for free reading time, Wright may hand him a rescued book like Paul Zindel's "The Pigman," about two high school kids who befriend a lonely man.

"After I force them to read the first five pages, they're hooked. I have to tear it from their hands," Wright said.

Robert Wright is doing his bit to extend the lives of books on the brink of destruction, once again proving that good books don't die - they are murdered.

A Quick Note

New Zealand's Hamilton County Bluegrass Band

I was a bit overly optimistic about having enough time and internet access while here in Kentucky to update Book Chase pretty much as normal. I'm finding that it won't be that easy.

The music festival is great, as always, but it totally kills the day. It all started on Thursday evening and will continue through Saturday (today). So because of a combination of way too much time spent in the sun, the relative isolation of the festival site, and the somewhat tricky weather in the area (like the tornado warnings that cleared the festival almost two hours early last night) it has been impossible to work in much reading or blog time. But I suppose that's part of the good news because I really needed a break from the usual routine.

But on this fourth day of my trip, I'm starting to suffer from "book withdrawal." Instead of my usual 150 pages a day I'm reading something like 50 pages while here - and finding it hard to concentrate even on those few pages. I keep reminding myself, though, that I'll be facing my old routine again soon enough and that my world will return to normal all too soon.

The Innocent Man

Ron Williamson was at one time one of the favorite sons of Ada, Oklahoma. He was a young man with tremendous athletic skills and many locals believed that he just might be the next Micky Mantle, who is still the greatest baseball player to ever come from that state. But largely because of chronic injury problems that started in high school, Ron was not destined to become a great professional ballplayer. He got his shot, and managed to stay in the minors a lot longer than he probably should have, but baseball is not the thing for which Ron Williamson is remembered by citizens of Ada, Oklahoma.

No, when the people of Ada think of Williamson, what they recall is the rape and murder of which he was convicted and the years that he spent on death row. They remember that he came within five days of actually being executed for a crime with which he had absolutely nothing to do. Well that’s what most of them remember, anyway. Other Ada locals perhaps still want believe the local prosecutor who refuses to admit that he was wrong to ever charge Williamson with the crime, and who still wants to hold out the possibility that the DNA evidence that exonerated him does not prove that he was not involved in some way.

When it came to pinning the rape and murder on someone, Ron Williamson was certainly an easy target. Ron’s drinking problem began in high school and, when his baseball career unraveled, alcohol, drugs, and struggles with depression made it impossible for him to hold a job or to move on with his life. So when the baffled investigators and prosecutors in Ada decided that the crime was so brutal that it had to involve two people, Ron and his running buddy Dennis Fritz were “chosen” as the crime’s most logical perpetrators.

Now all they needed was the evidence to convict the two innocent men and cover themselves in glory as great crime fighters. There was no evidence to be found, however, something that did very little to slow down the police investigators or the local prosecutor who had already decided that Fritz and Williamson were guilty. A combination of creatively coerced “confessions,” testimony from local lowlifes (one who was later to be convicted of the very crime in question), sloppy testimony from experts, a judge who proved his own incompetence, and lies suggested to, and regurgitated by, jailhouse snitches, managed to convict both the men.

Their story is one that most of us would like to believe never happens in this country. Unfortunately, as Grisham proves in The Innocent Man, it probably happens much more often than we know. All it takes is the right combination of incompetent policemen, investigators, expert witnesses, prosecutors and judges to make it possible. Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz had years stolen from them and their lives were largely ruined by the very people charged with protecting the public welfare. This is one scary story.

Grisham tells the Fritz and Williamson story in a very straightforward way. There is no attempt to “novelize” what happened through the use of extensively recreated dialogue or by speaking from the points-of-view of its main characters. That does make for some rather dry reading at times but the details resulting from Grisham’s research makes his straight reporting of the facts a fascinating one. The 10-disc unabridged audio version of The Innocent Man is read by Craig Wasson who does a particularly effective job in giving a voice to Ron Williamson’s frustration and outright anger about the situation in which he found himself.

Fans of John Grisham’s novels, in which the action seldom seems to stop, might find the pace of this one to be a little slow. But Grisham had an important story to tell and he told it well.

Rated at: 4.0

On the Road Again

Somewhere in Tennessee

I'm leaving before daybreak tomorrow morning on my way to Owensboro, Kentucky, for the annual bluegrass festival held up there every June by the International Bluegrass Music Museum. I'll be checking in with updates on the music (for those few of you who might be interested) and will maybe even work in a book review or two since I have such a hard time sleeping in hotels. I'll be lucky to get four intermittent hours of sleep per night, so you might not even be able to tell that I'm away from home.

I've been looking forward to the trip for a while and can't wait to hit the road (I must have been a long-haul truck driver in a previous life or something). I'll initially be heading to Texarkana, a city that sits on both sides of the Texas-Arkansas border, and then on to Memphis before I finally turn more northeastward and home-in on Kentucky. I'll get the bulk of my driving in tomorrow and, depending on how sleepy I feel, I may just drive the 1100 miles in one very long day.

To Live's to Fly

Townes Van Zandt is a music legend in Texas and was, without a doubt, one of the most talented songwriters of his generation. In addition, Van Zandt had a memorable singing voice and style that make him instantly recognizable to anyone even casually familiar with his work. Sadly, Van Zandt also was an alcoholic of epic proportions and that contributed to the fact that, though he is legend to many, he is largely unknown to even more. John Kruth’s To Live’s to Fly, the first official Townes Van Zandt biography, could help change that.

Those expecting to read the Townes Van Zandt story in typical biography-style will be somewhat disappointed in To Live’s to Fly. John Kruth made little effort to portray Van Zandt’s life in anything remotely resembling chronological order, relying instead on recollections of Van Zandt intimates to provide details of their personal experiences with him in a way that often has the reader jumping from year-to-year and decade-to-decade in confusion. In fact, because it relies so heavily on page after page of long, detailed quotes, the book reads more like a wake than a biography, a gathering of Van Zandt’s old friends who decide to spend the night trading stories about the man they all called friend.

Kruth devotes a substantial portion of his book to reviewing the Van Zandt songbook, a review that leaves the reader with the impression that very few Townes Van Zandt recordings are even listenable due to the incompetence and poor decisions of most of the producers working on his projects. It is doubtful that many fans of Van Zandt’s music will agree with Kruth’s assessment of the recordings and, in fact, most of Kruth’s criticisms will seem strange to those who decide to listen to the music in question while reading the book (as I did). Kruth himself is a musician but the fact that he would have produced Van Zandt’s albums differently than they were, in fact, produced adds nothing to the Townes Van Zandt story and his song-by-song criticism of the actual producers soon becomes boring.

This is not a comfortable read because of the way that Kruth jarringly switches between first person narrative and third person narrative at odd times and because he does not always make it clear exactly who it is he is extensively quoting from page to page. Some of the quoted passages run together and it is only well into them that the reader realizes that the speaker has changed from one paragraph to the next. Those geographically familiar with the ground covered in the book will also be irritated by the kind of sloppy fact checking that places the University of Texas in Houston rather than in Austin and mislabels Houston’s Interstate 45 as Interstate 35, a designation it picks up somewhere near Dallas.

But despite its numerous flaws, To Live’s to Fly has something to offer those who are curious about Townes Van Zandt, the man. The numerous stories told by his friends paint the picture of a generous man with a keen sense of humor, a womanizing gambler and substance abuser who was probably lucky to make it all the way to 52 years of age. Those closest to Van Zandt were generally not surprised by his death, some of them remarking that toward the end they could not help wondering if they were seeing him for the last time each time he walked out the door. The poignant chapter detailing Van Zandt’s sudden death at home, and what led up to his final day, is by itself enough to make this book worthwhile. Townes Van Zandt, though, deserves to be remembered for the music he created and left behind rather than for his destructive lifestyle. He will have to wait a while longer for his definitive biography. This is not it.

Rated at: 3.0

Review originally published at CurledUp.com

The Bookwoman's Last Fling

I was excited to find a nice first edition hardcover copy of John Dunning’s The Bookwoman’s Last Fling at a bargain table price a few weeks ago. Knowing how popular the previous four Cliff Janeway novels had been with book collectors did make me wonder at the time why such a nice copy of this 2006 novel was still available in mid-2008. Now I think that I can answer that question.

Cliff Janeway, bibliophile ex-cop turned bookstore owner/detective, finds himself in Idaho at the behest of the executor of the estate of H.R. Geiger, a wealthy racehorse owner, in order to appraise the dead man’s book collection. Geiger’s wife, who has been in her grave for two decades, had been an avid collector of juvenile fiction and she left behind a collection of some of the finest first editions of their type known to exist.

Janeway is quick, however, to notice that the collection is not what it appears to be at first glance. Rather, it is a combination of beautiful first editions set along side much more common later printings of other books of the genre. This is no surprise to the man who has asked him to appraise the collection because he already knows that many of the books have been stolen from the shelves and replaced by much less valuable editions. Janeway also realizes almost immediately that he and Junior Willis, the estate executor, have a tremendous personality conflict and that there is little chance he will ever be able to work for the man despite how badly he wants to study the collection’s finer books.

While waiting around to see if he and Junior can come to an agreement about the job, Janeway makes a fateful visit to the deceased woman’s daughter who is in possession of fifty percent of her mother’s books. There he learns that the daughter has long suspected that her mother had been murdered and he agrees to work for her, not only to discover who has been stealing from the collection, but also to determine whether or not her mother was murdered and, if so, who did it.

Janeway’s search leads him into the world of California horseracing and the bulk of the story takes place inside the racetracks where he is convinced the killer will be found. John Dunning has lived and worked in that world and he writes comfortably and capably about the experiences of those who work behind the scenes to make sure that all of that expensive horse flesh is ready to run when the gates fly open. He writes about it so well, and so comfortably, in fact, that The Bookwoman’s Last Fling reads far more like a Dick Francis novel than it does the next Cliff Janeway novel, ensuring disappointment for Dunning’s bibliophile fan base, especially those of us who are not particularly fans of Dick Francis mysteries even when they are penned by Dick Francis himself.

But even more irksome to me, personally, was what appears to be Dunning’s decision to play unfairly with his readers. This is, after all, a mystery and mystery writers know that their readers try to solve the mystery along with the fictional detective working the case. When all the provided clues end up leading nowhere because the murderer turns out to be a minor character thrown into the mix near the end of the book and the detective has nothing more to go on himself than a “feeling” about that character, the covenant between mystery writer and mystery reader has been broken. Such is the case here.

Cliff Janeway is an interesting character and I probably won’t let my disappointment with The Bookwoman’s Last Fling keep me from reading the next installment of his story, if there ever is one. But now I will definitely come to that one a little more skeptical about what I might find within its pages.

Rated at: 3.0