Category Archives: book reviews

book reviews, Writing

Book Review: “Essays of E.B. White”

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I really enjoyed this books and am glad I invested the reading time and the whole 50¢ purchase price in it.

About a month ago I finished whatever book I was reading and searched my shelves for what to read next. Should be easy, right? I make it a little complicated, however, in that I want to read books that interest me but which I don’t want to keep permanently. I want to be able to get rid of them when done. The book I had just finished was a keeper, so for sure I wanted to go on to a non-keeper. As I say, should be easy, but with thousands of books in the house it isn’t. The volume makes it harder and, alas, I don’t have a prepared non-keeper pile.

But I searched and found this in the Essays of E.B. White. While he isn’t a household name, White wrote Charlotte’s Web. Of interest to writers and perhaps English majors, he collaborated on later editions of Strunk’s book The Elements of Style, a short book about improving English composition. Some time ago, measured in years, I picked up White’s Essays from a used book or thrift store. It has sat on my literature shelf in the basement, waiting for me to notice it again. The perfect book to read now, I thought. ‘T’will be interesting to me but not one I want to keep.

And so it is. I actually know fairly little about White but learned much through his essays. First, he’s a New Englander, like me, having spent much of his life in Maine (though with sojourns in New York City and Florida). He was a newspaper columnist. Some of his essays were culled from his columns. I didn’t get a feel for who he wrote for (a particular paper or syndication), nor what type of column it must have been. In his writing I found: satire, though I wouldn’t call him a satirist; humor, though he’s not a humorist; irony, though he’s pretty down to earth; concern for the planet, though he doesn’t seem to have been an environmental writer; politics, though he was not really a political writer or pundit.

So what kind of writer was he in these essays? Interesting. Sorry, Mrs. Abrams, my 12th grade English teacher. I know that’s an unacceptable response, but I have to say it. The essays were a mix of all of those things in the last paragraph, and the variety held my interest. He wrote about the life in rural Maine and of farm chores and events. It gave authenticity to Charlotte’s Web. He wrote about apartments in New York City. He wrote about harm being done to the planet by different human activities. He wrote about Democrats and Republicans not getting along and, except for the names of the individuals involved, those essays could have been written today.

Reading these essays tickled me into a case of Sidelines Syndrome, and I felt the urge to write essays. I came to my senses pretty quickly, however, as I have too many writing projects going on right now. I suppose if a writer spurs another writer to emulate him, that writers has done well.

Now, two questions remain: Should you run out and try to find a copy of this and read it (published 1977, my paperback published 1979)? And, is it a keeper after all? The answer is no to both. First, it will be hard to find. Second, it will be somewhat boring, I think, to anyone who doesn’t currently read essays. Third, as far as keeping it, for me it’s a I’m-glad-I-read-it book, no regrets at investing some time in it, but I don’t see myself ever reading it again.

So, into the sale pile it will go. The binding is partly broken, the cover has a fold in it. I don’t see it ever selling, either in my yard sales or in a thrift store, but I can’t bear the thought of throwing it out. So to the garage sale shelf it goes.

book reviews, fiction

Book Review: The Body In The Library

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A good Miss Marple Book, but not a keeper. We will be passing it along.

Continuing with our reading books in the house that look like they would be good to read but not necessary to keep, my wife pulled The Body In The Library from the Agatha Christie box and we read it. This was the first of her books featuring Miss Marple that we’ve read.

It’s a good book, as all of hers have been. A servant, in the midst of her morning duties, finds a body in the library of a manor house. She tells the lady of the house, who doesn’t believe her at first. Finally the lady goes downstairs and sees for herself. Before long the police are called. The lady knows Miss Marple, who is from that village, and calls her to come over. She arrives before the police do. Her reputation as an amateur crime solver is already well established in the village, which seems to have an above average murder rate for cute English villages.

Since Miss Marple will be the one to solve the crime, I figured the murderer had to be someone she comes in contact with. She’s there at the manor house and encounters three people, plus the police. The story then moves away from Miss Marple and follows the police as they do their work. The dead woman is identified as an 18-year-old professional dancer at a hotel in a nearby town. She’s newly studied at a dance school. Her older cousin has a solid position as a “mingler” with the guest of the hotel, dancing and playing bridge and being friendly with the guests, who are mainly upscale tourists.

Miss Marple has a number of other contacts. A retired Scotland Yard man is called in on the case, and he knows and thinks highly of Miss Marple. It isn’t long before another woman is found murdered—or presumed murdered—in a burning car. When this happens, Miss Marple is then certain who committed the first murder. Actually, she was pretty certain of it even in the first meeting at the manor house.

My main complaint about this book is it was difficult to tell how much time passed from one event to the next. Most of the action took place in the same day, or at least I think it did. Yet, there seemed to be too much going on for it to be happening in one day. Perhaps a second read would help sort that out.

I did not have the murderer correct. My thought process as to who it would be was correct, but I chose the wrong person. In my defense, the clues were not as well laid out in this book as they were in the previous Christie books we read.

I give it 4-stars. A good read, well worth the time it took. It’s not a keeper, however. I see no chance of ever reading it again.

book reviews

Book Review: “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”

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My little gray cells were not, alas, sufficiently cognitive to solve this murder before all was revealed.

Once again, in the interest of reducing our possessions, my wife and I read a book we will want to read but will be willing to part with afterwards. For this we chose The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. When we found the A.C. books in the basement, belonging to our son but being given by him to his sister (in his own effort of dis-accumulation), along with some other of her books in the house having come to us from various sources, I put them all in order based on what I thought was the order Christie had written them. I thought this one was the next.

It didn’t read like that, however. In this book, Hercule Poirot has retired incognito to the charming village of Kings Abbot. Alas, two deaths in the two most prominent families in the village—one an apparent suicide, one a murder—result in Poirot being called in to investigate. The result is an amazing story. I, of course, don’t want to give away who the murderer is. Suffice to say I didn’t get it right, though I had an inkling into it. A weak inkling.

This book is Christie at her best. Poirot speaks often of the “little grey cells” and his “little ideas”. He muses, ponders, engages other people to help him, and keeps his cards hidden. As the story unfolds, all suspicion is on one person. After the butler is ruled out that is. (It’s always the butler, isn’t it? Unless it’s the footman, but in this book there aren’t any footmen.) But other people also had motive and means. Opportunity was a difficulty, as the apparent time of the murder was fairly precise and as alibis abounded. Two people didn’t have them. One of those disappeared. As the stories are told, it looks like everyone could have done it.

While the writing is a bit old fashioned by today’s standards it is not archaic. On occasion I had to re-read a sentence or paragraph to make sure I understood what was being said in dialog or narrative.

In detective novels earlier than Christie, such as the Sherlock Holmes series, the author did not give sufficient clues to the reader for them to figure it out. But Christie came much closer to that. When we came to the end of the novel and all was revealed, we decided to go back to the beginning and read it again, to see if we missed such clues (or “clews” as this book has it). Yes, they were there, but very subtle. I don’t feel badly for having missed them.

So this book is 5-stars. I probably won’t bother to review it on Amazon or Goodreads. Agatha Christie’s reputation is solid with out my few words. The question I always ask in all of my reviews is: is it a keeper? Alas, no. Too many other books to read or re-read to pick this one up again. Once we get through the A.C. books, they will go to our daughter as our son wanted. Too many books, too little time to keep Christie on our shelves permanently.

book reviews, Carlyle

Book Review: Sartor Resartus

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I have one Carlyle book published and two more started. And essays about him on my mind. It’s probably an obsession that I ought to get treatment for.

Of the many books, essays, and articles written by 19th Century British author Thomas Carlyle, perhaps none is more iconic than Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh. Written in 1830 and 1831, serialized in 1833-34, published in the USA in 1836 and in Great Britain in 1938, Carlyle’s life changed from landed poverty to the beginning of success by the time it came out in London. Throughout Carlyle’s life it grew in popularity. The year he died it sold seventy-thousand copies in an inexpensive edition. For the life of me I don’t know why.

This photo shows Carlyle perhaps close to the age when he wrote “Sartor”.

I’m slowly working my way through Carlyle’s works, in the chronological order they were written. About five weeks ago I came up to Sartor. Having read little bits of it and knowing it was a hard book to understand, I waited a little while before tackling it. Finally I did, reading an e-book version. At times I read with good concentration; at other times I read in distracted conditions. Generally when I did the latter, I went back and re-read the section again in a quieter time. Did I understand it better? Alas, no. The more I read, the more I determined to stick with it and understand it, the more I would zone out after five or ten minutes.

I have no idea what the purpose of the book is/was. The fictitious professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, is said to have written a (fictitious) book on the philosophy of clothes. That much I knew before I read it. But in the book, I found precious little about clothes. D.T.’s life history is given. His lost love is described. Endless words describe…endless nonsense. Or so to me it seems like nonsense.

I purposely didn’t read commentary on Sartor before reading it, allowing me to get it for myself. But I didn’t “get it.” I found the flow of ideas almost unintelligible. I think Emerson said it well in his first letter to Carlyle in 1834: “I have now received four numbers of the Sartor Resartus…has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction?” If Emerson had problems with it I guess I’m in good company. To give you an idea of the difficulty of reading Sartor, go back and read the second sentence in this review. I purposely made that complex. Yet, it would be one of the simpler sentences in Sartor.

Carlyle’s early works I understood well. The further into his career, he found his “diction” and “style” and became less understandable. His pivotal work as to style was his essay “Novalis”. I had to read and reread that to understand what Carlyle was saying. I read it all thrice and parts of it four times and felt that I came to a basic understanding of it. The essays between that and Sartor were a mix of difficulty and clear writing. But Sartor made “Novalis” seem like a Little Golden Book.

I can’t give Sartor any more than 2-stars. Perhaps, if I read it again as planned, and come to a better understanding, I’ll come back and edit this review. If I had a paper copy of Sartor, I would keep it as part of my larger Carlyle collection, but not because I think it’s good. I’ll re-read it again someday, probably in the near future. Perhaps I’ll even understand it.

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: The Jesus I Never Knew

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We thought this would be a discard, an author we didn’t know but happened to have his book. But it is a keeper. Someday I hope to re-read this.

For our evening reading aloud, Lynda and I are looking at books on our shelves that look like good reads but which probably aren’t “keepers”, which, after reading, can be sold, donated, or discarded. Lynda found one such on our shelves, The Jesus I Never Knew y Philip Yancy. I said sure, let’s read it.

We did this over about two weeks. Our hardback copy has 275 pages not including notes. Yancy is not a writer I was familiar with, but the book sounded good and so we dove in.

Wow, what a good book! Yancy covered aspects of Jesus’ life, teaching, and ministry that I had never thought of. Makes sense, given the title. With chapters such as “The Jesus I Thought I Knew”, “Beatitudes: Lucky Are the Unlucky”, “Kingdom: Wheat Among the Weeds”, Yancy looks as the raw words of the gospel and, without an historical or political filter, tells us about the biblical Jesus.

I’m not going to quote from the book or give specific reasons why I liked it so. Instead, I urge everyone to read it [Amazon]. Published in 1995, it is still fresh and relevant in the third decade of the 21st Century.

One interesting anecdote about our reading it right now: I had never heard of Yancy. A new literary agent posted what she was looking for and said she was looking for the next Philip Yancy. Clearly, he has a degree of notoriety that escaped me for years. Not any more.

We intended to read a book that we would discard, but we are agreed that we should keep it and read it again sometime. Consequently, back on the shelf it goes. I give this an enthusiastic 5 stars.

book reviews, Christianity, Christmas

Book Review: Let Earth Receive Her King

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This is an Advent devotional book worth reading, but it won’t become a permanent part of my library.

Here I am a day late with my blog post. Sorry to all of you who came here yesterday looking for it. I knew what I was going to write and post, but just let the day get filled up with other things, other good things, and, well, I didn’t get it done. But here it is.

Every year, for several years at least, our denomination has published a book for the Advent season. Normally the pastor of our congregation preaches a four or five week sermon series that goes along with the book. This year, the book was Let Earth Receive Her King: An Advent Devotional. I’m one of those who reads all the front matter, and I was surprised to not see who the author was. It wasn’t on the cover, the spine, the title page, or the copyright page. I figured the church didn’t want us to know who the author was. The Introduction was written by T. Scott Daniels, but that didn’t say to me that he was the author of the entire book. I figured it was a book written by “staff” and quit worrying about who wrote it. But then, as I got further into it, the book became more personal, with a lot of first person illustrations. Obviously, “Staff” was a person, but who?

The book was good. Well written, clearly written, with stated themes and points well made. I would say it’s better than the Advent books from recent years. My wife and I read it aloud in the evenings, me doing the reading. We did it every day from Dec 1 to Dec 24, skipping only one day due to extreme tiredness but making that up the next and keeping going.

As to whether I recommend the book or not, I can say I do, with a couple of exceptions I’ll state in a minute. When we finished the book, I turned to the back cover, realizing I hadn’t read that before starting the book. There it clearly said that T. Scott Daniels was the author, giving a short bio of him. I guess the pub house figured everyone reads the back cover and having the author name there instead of the front cover and title page sufficed.

The book is organized around the Advent candles that have become a Christmas tradition. Each week in the Advent season you light a candle of a certain color. One stands for joy, one for peace, etc. This is a new tradition to me, one my family didn’t follow in my childhood, one I never established with my own family. In fact, I don’t remember ever seeing it done in church until maybe the last twenty years. When and how did this become a tradition? Was it one 60 years ago and somehow our Episcopal family missed it? Perhaps it is a long-standing evangelical tradition. Since it’s not my tradition, the organization around the candle themes is meaningless to me and did not enhance the book for me. C’est la vie. I’m sure others found that not only useful but enjoyable.

The other thing that prevents me from being able to enthusiastically recommend the book is the dual emphasis on mourning and exile. Perhaps emphasis is too strong a word. But several times Daniels talked about Advent as a season of mourning. For example, on page 78 Daniels writes:

“In Advent, the church grieves and awaits the return of the bodily absent Lord. Yet, in the meantime we pray and work….”

Sorry, but I don’t see it that way. Advent is, to me, a season of anticipation and joy. Mourning during Advent would be a new interpretation to me and, well, you probably can figure I don’t cozy up to new interpretations.

As to exile, I note from the bio on the back that Daniels is the author of the book Embracing Exile. This was popular a few years back. Our pastor preached a sermon series on the theme, using the book as an outline. Since our Life Group was already engaged in another study when that one started, we didn’t participate. But I see this theme of exile creeping in a number of places. In the recent study from the book Kings and Presidents, the authors kept emphasizing how the book of 2 Kings was written while the Israelites were in exile in Babylon. I haven’t studied that, but have trouble believing it. Much of 2 Kings reads like a contemporary history, not a history told decades or centuries after.

Should you buy and read this, and is it a keeper? Sure. It should help you prepare for the Christmas season. It is well written, also well designed and laid out. I especially liked the left-only justification, as that is much easier to read than full justification. But, it goes out to the sell/giveaway pile—after I skim it some more and try to find those mourning entries.

Bible study, book reviews, Christianity, Politics

Book Review: Kings & Presidents

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A difficult read. I hope others had an easier time of it than I did.

In the last month leading up to the general election just concluded (but still being disputed) in the US, our church decided to do a study of the book Kings & Presidents by Tim and Shawna Gaines. Our pastor preached on it for four weeks. All adult Life Groups were encouraged to also study it, either the four weeks the pastor preached on it or the full eight week series envisioned by the book. Our group elected to do eight weeks. When I had coffee with our pastor during the series, he said there was no way he could preach eight sermons on this material.

Let me tell you, this was perhaps the hardest lesson series I ever taught. Five of the eight weeks were mine, three by my co-teacher. Looking back, I’m glad we studied it, because I feel that we learned something, but, man, it was difficult to teach.

Tim & Shawna (T&S henceforth) developed the book following the 2012 presidential election, when they were pastoring in California. Members of their congregation were apprehensive about what would happen. The book came from the sermon series.

The book takes stories from 2nd Kings 1-7, the days of Elisha the prophet, and contrasts the workings of God with the workings of kings. The kings were unable to see what God could do, whereas the prophet always could. Messages to the king weren’t understood. In the end God always prevailed. That’s fine. But how does that help us approach politics if we are devout Christians?

The purpose for the book is stated thus in the Introduction:

Our purpose…is to offer a vision of political life that takes discipleship to Jesus Christ seriously and treats it as primary.

Okay, that’s all well and good, but how do you do that? They sort of answered that question in the Afterword:

If you’re wondering So what exactly are we supposed to do politically? our guidance would be something along the lines of: Gather with other believers, empty yourself, lovingly deliberate, humbly discern, and then go and be persistent. Engage the world according to the way of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Take that vision that the ancient stories of our father open to us and act according to the world of the kingdom.

All well and good again. Except this said “gather with other believers.” If I take that literally, does that mean I should not engage in politics with non-believers? T&S do say “engage the world”, which implies we should engage in political discussions with non-believers. I think what they mean is: engage in political discussions with whoever, but don’t lose your faith over it. Come at it from a disciple point of view, not a worldly point of view. To help me help the class to understand this, I developed this chart which summarizes my understanding of T&S’s message. Hopefully I’m right or close to right. Click on the chart to enlarge it.

The best I could come up with on what the book teaches. Christians should approach politics and governance from the right side of the continuum, and seek to move the world in that direction.

In the final lesson—or maybe it was in an earlier lesson—I suggested to the class that they engage in political discussions with non-believers in such a way that, immediately after the political discussion they could present the gospel to them with no loss of credibility. Maybe that’s what T&S are saying.

Here’s a quote from the last chapter of the book.

[A]t its fullest and deepest, politics has always been about being reconciled to God and to one another.

No, no, no, no, no. Unless I’m misunderstanding them, they are proposing dropping the separation of church and state. Politics (by which T&S mean both what I call politics and governance, but they don’t really define their meaning) has nothing to do, and should have nothing to do, with God. It is a secular thing. Governance is about governing, of doing what the people want as far as rules and laws that regulate human civic behavior. Politics is about getting into the position to govern. Politics and governance should be separate from religious practice. We should not be hoping for a theocracy—a blending of church and state.

T&S say some negative things about the concept of the individual. The state regulates individual behavior, they say, so that everyone has the space they need to conduct their life and exercise their rights without stepping on the rights of others. It results in tolerance of each other Yes, they seem to be a bit negative on this, although they also say,

Tolerance is not a bad thing, but we need to acknowledge that a Christian view of politics, a sanctified vision of what politics is mean for, is so much more than simply putting up with one another.

Maybe. Maybe in a world (or a subset of the world) that is 100% devout Christian that would happen. But not in the world we live in. Sorry, T&S, but I can’t grasp your vision in a secular world.

So, it comes down to two questions: do I recommend this book to you? And is it a keeper? No, I don’t recommend it. It was difficult to read and seemed a little long for the material covered. I had to read each chapter a minimum of three times before I could grasp it enough to teach it, and even then I went into each lesson feeling unprepared. As for keeping it, the jury is still out. I may keep it and re-read it before the next election, to see if seasoning by years will make the message of the book clearer and thus be more useful to me. But it is not a long-term keeper. Three stars on Amazon.

Oh, one last thought. T&S kept calling the Christian faith “subversive.” Sorry, but I just don’t see that. I thought a long time about it, but I don’t see it.

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: “Then Sings My Soul”

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A great singer, a hard worker, and a wonderful man of God.

As part of our clean-up and dis-accumulation efforts, my wife and I have been going through boxes and bags we haven’t looked in in years. Part of the curse of having much storage space in the house is the ability to shove something against the wall or on a shelf and put off dealing with it. Maybe ten years ago a cousin brought us books that had belonged to her father-in-law, a retired preacher. I graciously accepted them and pushed them against a wall in the garage. In the last two months I finally looked in them. Well, I had looked in them previously and pulled a few old books out, but not looked fully in them. Now, I did.

A few of those books caught my eye as being good for the wife and I to read aloud in our evenings. This is one of them. Then Sings My Soul is an autobiography of George Beverly Shea. I suppose many who read this post will not have heard of Shea. He was a singer of gospel hymns and other songs, most famous for his solos at the Billy Graham crusades of the 1950s-60s-70s-and maybe 80s. A deep bass, Shea had a voice that would sooth you and at the same time challenge and encourage you. I know, that sounds strange, but that’s how I saw it.

I saw Shea a number of times on televised crusades in the 1970s and once in person in a crusade in Kansas City, either 1976 or 77. His voice was powerful, and he worked well with the choir. However, I didn’t know much about him. This book gave me that background. A Canadian by birth, Shea was the son of a minister who had churches in both Canada and the US. It was in the latter, in New Jersey just across the river from New York City, that the family was when Shea was old enough to begin his career.

The book goes through much about his upbringing, his encouragement in music by his mother, his meeting and courting the girl who would become his wife, his early work with a life insurance company, his rise in radio singing ministries, and his notice by those who formed the Billy Graham organization.

Reading this book was easy and fast, at only 103 pages, but it gave much information. We finished the book feeling like we had what we needed to understand Shea’s life, and appreciate his ministry. Afterwards we spent much time on YouTube listening to his songs.

I’ve always been fascinated at the stories behind the songs. This book was thus fulfilling for me.

But, the book actually had a bonus, because it is two books in one. Turn the book over and you have Songs That Life The Heart, also by Shea (both books coauthored by Fred Bauer). This is a two-in-one crusade edition. In this second book, Shea talks about various hymns and gospel songs that have touched him and the world, and about the composers of those songs. In these 75 pages are many anecdotes of how the songs came to be and how Shea interacted with the composers. This also was a very good book that we are glad to have read.

If you can pick up one of these, the reading will be well worth it. I don’t know how widely available they are.

Is this a keeper? Alas, no. Too many books being kept on our shelves, too few years left in the world, to assign permanent space to this. So into the sale/donation pile it goes, having graced our lives much, and now ready to grace others.

book reviews, fiction

Book Review: Assumed Identity

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Morrell is a master of the plot and an amazing character developer. This book doesn’t disappoint in those areas.

Some books you read you remember very well, some books you forget almost entirely. Some books you sort of remember, but can’t figure out specifics. Assumed Identity by David Morrell is in the later category.

David Morrell taught a half-day class on fiction writing at a writer’s conference I went to in 2006 in New Mexico. As chance would have it, he and I wound up at the same table at lunch and we had a good conversation. Many people don’t know his name but you know his most famous character: Rambo.

I read Assumed Identity in 29 sittings in August and September this year. My paperback is exactly 500 pages, so my reading averaged 17 pages per sitting. Not bad, but I’ve done better.

The book is about a man who worked in Army special forces, in a task group that tried to infiltrate and then root out drug lords in various places. Some of his assignments may have been with other situations as well. It was kind of hard to understand all his backstory. In this book he had six or eight different identities as situations unfolded. One mission went awry when, through bad luck, someone he’d know a few identities prior ran into him in Mexico when he was trying to infiltrate a drug organization. Four drug lords/their body guards turned on him. He killed or wounded all of them, was wounded in the gun fight then again in his escape.

But escape he did—not once, but multiple times in the book. His work was perfect. He approached each situation kind of like a Jedi knight in Star Wars, you know how they seemed always confident, always ready in every situation, always undaunted when taking on multiple enemies, alway having the right equipment, the right stamina, and oodles of mental tenacity. That was the protagonist in this story.

Through most of the book he was worried about a certain woman he had worked with a few identities ago, as he received a note from her to meet at a certain place at a certain time in New Orleans, which was an indication she was in trouble and needed his help. With considerable difficulty he got to that place, but something bad happened and he didn’t see her, being injured in a knife attack. Later, he becomes involved with another woman, a newspaper reporter, who was trying to make a name for herself by exposing this secret army operation.

As I’ve been writing this some of the details of the book have come back to me, such as the next-to-last plot twist that was very major. Such as the destruction of an archaeological site in the Yucatan Peninsula by one of the world’s wealthiest men looking for oil, an operation that kept being mentioned in seemingly meaningless chapters that finally came together in the end.

This was a good book. It blended together Army operations, secret missions, civilian news, petroleum, drugs, and archaeology, with much action. I recommend it to anyone who likes a good action book.

As to the question of whether I’ll keep it or not: no, I won’t. I have around five or six Morrell books. This was the last one to read. I’m going to put them together in a lot and sell them on Facebook Marketplace. Perhaps a David Morrell fan will see it and want them. If not, after a couple of months, I’ll just mix them in with the 500 other books I’m currently trying to sell. I think, among my David Morrell reads, this was my least favorite. Still I’m going to give it 4 stars. It lost a star for a few confusing parts.

book reviews

Book Review: Murder In Retrospect

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I suspect this book belonged to my sister, and that I took it with other books from Dad’s house when he died.

I continue to work my way through books in the house with an eye toward reducing our inventory, selecting some for reading and discarding. With around 4000 to 5000 books in the house, we are making slow progress—but we are making some.

A while back I transferred some books slated for donation from shoe boxes to plastic bags (because the wife doesn’t like to discard shoe boxes). Then the pandemic hit and we haven’t been to a thrift store since. Hence the two bags of books still sit in our garage. On top of one was an Agatha Christie mystery. I thought maybe we could read that aloud together and we did so. When I returned it to the pending donation bag, I dug a little deeper and found three other Agatha Christie books. Having enjoyed the first, I rescued these (along with three other books) and formed a new reading pile for our evening reading.

The browning of the inside pages speaks to the book’s age. I suspect mid-1960s.

This one was Murder In Retrospect. Originally copyrighted in 1941, my copy, a mass-market paperback, doesn’t have a printing date. It appears to be from the 1960s, just like the other one we read. MIR is a Hercule Poirot mystery. Poirot is hired by a woman who has just come of age and is planning on marrying. But, when she was five, her mother was convicted of killing her father by poisoning, was sentenced to prison, but died there within a year. She left a note for her daughter, proclaiming her innocence. Except by all reports, during the trial she made a very poor witness for herself, which was a significant factor in her being convicted. Now, before the daughter marries, she wants to know the truth and hires Poirot to investigate.

What ensues is Poirot interviewing the surviving parties, sixteen years after it happened, to discover the truth if it can be found. The woman’s father was a painter—and a philanderer. He was painting his latest fling, in their own house so to speak, or at least in the garden. Other parties are: the woman’s 15-year-old aunt, half-sister to her mother; the governess; two brothers who lived at an adjacent country property; and the woman who was being painted. Also to be interviewed are various police officers who worked the case.

Even the back cover gave information about the plot, although I didn’t notice it until I was writing this blog post.

The book was a fascinating, easy read of 239 pages that we read in eleven sittings. It was a real opportunity for the reader to try to figure out who did the murder. I decided right away that the accused/convicted didn’t do it, but couldn’t decide on who it was among the other six. I don’t want to give it away by saying too much, just in case one of my readers wants to read it. I was leaning toward one person, but then a late clue led me to conclude it was another. I felt pretty good about myself recognizing that clue (which I figured out about an hour after reading, just after I’d gone to bed). It was an important clue, not because it told you who the murderer was, but because it let you know who the accused thought the murderer was and thus governed her subsequent actions.

This was a good Christie mystery and I’m glad I read it. If I didn’t already have so many books in the house, I might have kept this. Alas, it goes back into the donation bag. Someday we will get to a thrift store once again and it will go on a shelf for someone else to read.