The Story of My Tits Volume 1 by Jennifer Hayden

Title: The Story of My Tits
Author: Jennifer Hayden
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Rating: WARTY!

Note that there are two authors named Jennifer Hayden, so please don't confuse them! One, this one, is the graphic novelist and artist. The other isn't! I really wanted to like this graphic novel, but no matter how hard I tried, I just could not get on its side, I'm sorry to say. I think there's both a need and a market for this kind of story whether it's autobiographical, semi-auto, or purely fictional, but this autobiography just didn't work for me. Your mammary-age may differ!

I was excited to get this and volume two from Net Galley, but I had to read volume 2 first because volume one flatly refused to download until the next day, and I didn't want to wait in case it never downloaded! At first I thought maybe I should have waited, because there seemed to be parts of volume two which were dependent upon the first one for better understanding, but when I finally read one this morning, it did not clarify the things I thought it would, so in the end it made no difference that I read them out of order.

I preferred one to two, but only marginally. For me, the biggest problem was that there were no insights or points of interest in either volume for me. There was nothing really unexpected, nothing I didn't know, nothing I found fascinating, and no ah-ha moments, so for me, it did not deliver.

What I did get was too much trope and cliché for my taste. It felt like watching one of those truly crappy TV sitcoms where the wife is pregnant, and the husband can't cope, and every tired joke is tediously retold. A story like this deserved better and this one is better than those stupid, clueless, pedantic, canned-laugh shows, but it still lacked too much for it to appeal to me.

I felt really bad to feel so negative about this because it's an important subject, but I can't in good faith recommend something which I don't feel gets the job done and this one didn't, starting from the title on in. I felt that the title was slightly misleading. I do get that the title was designed to shock, to perk interest, and to be metaphorical and to show how women all-too-often feel defined by their basic physical appearance, but the story was much more about the person than ever it was her breasts. I get that for a woman, living in a male-dominated world, it can become hard to differentiate yourself from your breasts. We're mammals, defined by our milk producing ability so they are out there, so to speak, and they have unfortunately become so representative of womanhood. This is wrong, obviously, but for now, it's what we have to deal with. It would have been nice to have had more observations on, and insights into that.

For me, it was hard to empathize with this character to begin with. I think that might have been one of my root problems. She doesn't come off as very smart. She seems like a slacker with little self-motivation. She's a smoker - although commendably she gives that up, but it's because she goes on the pill, not because there's a history of cancer in her family. She didn't get regular health check-ups. Although her honesty in revealing all of this is commendable, it just didn't appeal to me or make me feel like I was on her side. If she had been more proactive, she would have been more appealing. That said, she does take more charge in volume two.

This volume deals with her childhood and youth, up to college, and meeting the guy she wants to marry, and ends with them finally marrying, but I didn't feel like there was anything new here. There was a lot of old - a lot of addressing the same issues through which everyone goes, which seemed pointless to me. It's sad to think that any of this could be news to your typical modern women, but that said, there are unfortunately too many who have not been well-educated by parents or by schooling.

I think that what I found most annoying was how over-crowded the images were. Where there wasn't too much shading and scribbling, there was too much text. I read this on an iPad, not as a print book. I don't know how large the print book would be, but the iPad screen is fairly large, yet the text was often hard to read, and I found myself skipping lots of it because there was simply too much and it was too small to bother with, and it was rambling anyway with endless asides and footnotes. It was amusing in parts, but too often tedious to read. I did get the impression that it might be more fun to listen to the author talk about this than to read what she's written about it. Maybe she should try an audio rather than a graphic novel?

The art work wasn't very good either. It was all black and white line drawings with heavy, heavy shading and overwhelming detail, and the character depictions felt more like the weekend children's cartoons in a newspaper than they did a graphic novel. I can't recommend this as a worthy read, and I take no pleasure in that.

Takedown by Tsutomu Shimomura with John Markoff

Title: Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw - By the Man Who Did It
Author: Tsutomu Shimomura with John Markoff
Publisher: Hyperion
Rating: WORTHY!

This rather un-originally titled book (I'm talking about the 'Takedown' part of it, not the mouthful that follows) is Shimomura's account (as told by John Markoff) of the tracking and eventual arrest of hacker Kevin Mitnick, but since Shimomura is an astrophysicist, used maybe to writing scientific papers and technical reports rather than popular books, how much of this is his writing and how much is journalist John Markoff's is anyone's guess.

Either way, I have to say I wasn't impressed by the writing quality, which had way too much extraneous detail for me and I'm guessing, for your average reader, including unimportant details of Shimomura's day-to-day living, his surroundings, and his travels and personal issues. If the bulk of this had been excluded, the book would have wasted fewer trees, been tighter, and made for a lot better read. When we're hot on the trail of a very elusive hacker, I don't want to keep being interrupted with the minutiae of the tracker's itinerary and interactions with his girlfriend, I really don't!

That said, it's a fun read (I skipped the boring parts) as well as being both interesting and educational, although very dated now. I doubt that anything here (other than persistence and social engineering!) would be of much use to potential hackers in 2015.

Note that according to wikipedia, author Jonathan Littman and Mitnick himself have made allegations of questionable ethics, suspect legality, and journalistic impropriety against Markoff and Shimomura. Given that Mitnick has spent some significant time in trouble with the law and has served time for his illegal activities and poor ethical considerations, I'd take his complaints - especially the legality ones! - with a very large grain of salt, but the fact that Littman makes the same kind of arguments lends the issue more authenticity. I haven't read anything by Mitnick or Littman, so I can't comment further on this or on what kind of arguments they might have made to support their contentions.

This story is antique by computer standards, but it's nonetheless very engrossing (if you can get by the fluff) for anyone who has an interest in hacking and computer security, and how computers are breached and how those who breach them are tracked and brought to book. On that basis, I recommend this book. I also recommend the movie of the same name which tells this same story more briefly and somewhat more fictionalized, but is nonetheless a decent movie.

Confessions of Teenage Hackers by Dan Verton

Title: Confessions of Teenage Hackers
Author: Dan Verton
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Rating: WORTHY!

This non-fiction book covers a host of teen hackers from the mid nineties to the turn of the century. As such it's seriously out of date now, but still a worthy read for me. I would have liked to have learned more about how these young teens did what they did, but while for me, this book skimped a little bit on that side of things, favoring hacker bios (that's biographies, not basic input output system!) instead, it did cover their exploits to an extent and was a fascinating read.

If network administrators would only do their job and stay current with security patches, and if network users would create decent passwords and never share any information with people who don't need to know, the hacker's calling would have fallen on far more deaf network ears than it has, but that doesn't excuse OS developers - who are far more interested in adding bells and whistles than ever they are in adding security - from putting out cruddy, hole-filled operating systems. Microsoft, I'm looking at you....

Having said that, it's also important to note that not all hackers are truly evil. These days, people try to differentiate the hacker - someone who is simply curious about the inner workings of systems and doesn't intend harm, or someone who believes in real freedom of information - from a cracker: someone whose intentions are far from benign from the outset, and who see systems as so many scalps to collect. While some of the hackers discussed here harmed systems, others actually left information behind, explaining to the administrator how they got in and which holes needed to be closed on that network!

Other hackers brought systems to a slow but sure halt with DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks - hitting the network with so many trivial requests that it had no time to respond to legitimate ones. Mafiaboy, for example, brought down networks like Amazon, CNN, Dell, ebay, etrade, and Yahoo, amongst others.

Hacking has tended to fascinate far more boys than girls, but girls have been a part of the scene since it started. The only one mentioned here is Starla Pureheart, aka Anna Moore, who at fifteen in 2001, won the CyberEthical survivor contest at that year's DefCon.

Hackers covered in this volume include: Cowhead2000, Dawgyg, Explotion, FonE_TonE, Genocide, HD Moore, Joe Magee, Kr0nograffik, Noid, Pr0methius, RaFa, and Willie Gonzalez, as well as hacking groups such as Genocide2600, Legion of Doom, Masters of Deception, and World of Hell. Many more are mentioned in passing.

The focus and dedication of the hackers to their craft is truly stunning, and the extreme young age of some of these people when they started is scary. I recommend this book if you're at all interested in how hackers do what they do and what their backgrounds and motivations are.

The Mystery of Adventure Island by Paul Moxham

Title: The Mystery of Adventure Island
Author: Paul Moxham
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

This is a story, set in the fifties, about four kids who sail to an island just off the coast of England for some camping fun and end up investigating a ghostly presence. It’s written very much for the age group depicted in the story, so adults might find it a rather simplistic and unfulfilling read. it's number two in a series, and to me it felt very unrealistic, but my biggest problem with this novel was that genderism was rife in it.

I know it’s set in the fifties, so we can’t expect it to be thoroughly modern in all regards, but I don't see that setting it half a century ago gives the author blanket permission to put women in the back seat again. Yes, it if was 1943 and he's writing about a military operation behind enemy lines, then the chances are it was all men; however, this is in the fifties and it’s about kids, so why are the girls are consistently treated like they can’t take responsibility or carry heavy loads, and they are given to emotional break-downs and act like scaredy-cats? I found that obnoxious.

I know that one of them was very young (eight years old), but still, do they have to be presented in such a negative, passive light?! I realize that this book might be largely aimed at boys, but this doesn’t excuse the approach if the take-away for boys is that girls are second-rate or second best, not up to it, and in need of constant protection and direction. Any young girls who read this are going to get the same message.

The story begins with the boys and girls fixing up a small sailing boat and taking it to an island about three hours sailing up the coast from where they live. The problem is that this is the fifties and they're a mixed-gender group going on a camping trip, unsupervised by any adult. This struck me as odd for the era; it’s especially odd in that, given this amazingly liberal attitude towards norms and propriety for that time, we see a strongly contrasting conservative approach in how the girls are treated.

The boys are making all the decisions, they're rowing the boat, they’re unloading the boat while the girls are sent off to scout for a camping site. The girls are the ones shown to be scared of the ghost while the boys are all macho. The girls want to leave while the boys want to find out the truth about the ghost. It's not just the girls, either: at one point mom acknowledges her subservient place to dad in a grammatically odd statement:

Their mother smiled. “If you’re happy, then I’m too..."

I just found this to be painful to read and the mystery to be very simplistic with little motivation or rational for the children's actions. It’s obvious it's not a ghost, which means the kids could be in real danger. This is not some fictional supernatural nonsense, but a real person who wants them off the island. He could be a smuggler or a psycho. Neither one of those is likely to be very friendly towards - or considerate of - the kids, yet not a one of them ever voices any concern for what could be a very real threat to their own safety. This doesn’t impress me with their smarts.

They pass up the chance they have to sail away, and they merely row around the island from their initial camp site to secrete their boat in a small cave, before venturing back ashore to try to find out who this guy is. Maybe he's just a lonely guy who built the now ruined church and tried unsuccessfully to start a community on the island, but these kids don’t know that, and it’s really none of their business why he's there - and he's not alone. The kids discover another two guys and later a young woman arrives. This supposedly deserted island is positively crowded by this point!

Here’s another oddball piece of writing:

Will, who was now carrying the binoculars, peered through them. “It’s a rowboat. I can see one person in it.”
“Why would a person come to this island alone?” Joe wondered

Seriously? This is a huge mystery?!

This is part of a series of stand-alone books about these kids, so you don't have to have read previous volumes to enjoy this - if it’s your cup of tea that is - and because of that, I am doubtlessly missing some history from earlier volumes. Maybe one or more of the kids are children of cops and so have some sort of motivation from that, but that possibility aside, rational and compelling motivations - unless you count merely being meddlesome and tiresome - were not in evidence in this volume.

I lost interest in it pretty quickly. The writing is pedestrian at best, with nothing really Earth-moving going on. Maybe undiscriminating children in the middle-grade age range will enjoy it, and if so, good luck to them in finding a series that they can read, but nothing here made me think that my own kids would be interested, and I can’t recommend it based on what I read.

The Mystery of Smugglers Cove by Paul Moxham

Title: The Mystery of Smugglers Cove
Author: Paul Moxham
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with the 'Hardy Boys' story of the same name or with the Disney Press story Annette and the Mystery at Smugglers' Cove, or with the Syvanus Cobb story The Smuggler of King's Cove, this rather uninventively (and arguably ungrammatically) titled novel is set in the fifties, aimed at young children, and number one in a series of highly improbable 'adventures' which always seem to happen to the same few children. If they had been written better, they might have been a worthy read, but as it is I cannot recommend this any more than I could the first in this series, and after reading two of these in a row, I certainly have no intention of reading any more.

I had too many issues with this to rate it 'worthy'. One of these was in the quality of the writing. There were some spelling gaffs and some grammatical issues, such as using the term "...going a bit faster than her and Sarah..." when it ought to be "...going a bit faster than she and Sarah...". This may not bother some people, particularly young readers, but it jumped out at me. There were other weird sentences such as "...storm clouds moved inland towards the coast..." - no, 'the coast' comes before 'inland'. If the clouds are moving inland, they're moving away from the coast! If they're moving towards the coast then they might be threatening to move inland later - or they may be moving out to sea! It was just poor writing.

Another instance of thoughtless writing was when the boys were following a smuggler's tunnel dug from the beach up into a house on the headland. I've seen such tunnels in Cornwell, and they are tiny - even a child - which was what they used to run these tunnels, would have had to to crawl. Even if such a smuggling route had begun as a natural cave, there would have to have been some tunneling at some point to get them up to the house, yet here these kids are walking along the ridiculously roomy tunnel, and they come to a blank wall. That the wall was not natural ought to have clued them in that there was something else here, but instead of looking up (why does no one ever look up?!) we read: "Only a madman would build a tunnel that ended in a blank wall...". That they didn't get this right away - that either it had been deliberately blocked off, or there was a hatch above them just made the kids look stupid and short-sighted, and it robbed them of any credibility as mystery solvers. Perhaps younger readers won't mind that, but I hate stories that talk down to kids. They deserve better.

That the kids are not too smart is evidenced elsewhere in the book, too. At one point, we read, "The afternoon wore on, but Will never arrived. Wondering what could have happened to delay their friend, they headed back home disappointed." Never once do any of them think of going to Will's house to see if he's there or if he got sick or delayed or something. It doesn't imbue me with much faith in kids who are clearly unimaginative, especially in their ability to get things done, which is what this novel is supposed to be all about! If they cannot step-up with such a simple thing as finding out what happened to Will, and they all give-up and go home at the drop of a hat, where is my rational for believing that they can come through in resolving a smuggling case later? It's simply not authentic. The earlier actions betray the later premise. Again. this may not bother younger readers, but it bothers me that poor writing is being foisted on kids who can handle and who certainly deserve better.

There were some genderist issues such as the author writing, "Like many twelve year old boys, Joe was always on the lookout for an adventure", as though only boys have this desire for adventure, no girls need apply. The sentence could just as easily have read: "Like many twelve year old boys and girls, Joe was always on the lookout for an adventure". I know this novel is set in the fifties, which is a cool idea, but this doesn't mean we have to write to the mind set of the fifties, but this book definitely was, with the boys taking strong leadership roles and the girls just along for the ride. Yes, the girls were younger, but this doesn't mean they have to take a complete back seat all the time in all things and always be the ones who are scared and squealing. I resented this intensely.

In short I cannot recommend this novel as a worthy read.

The Math Inspectors by Daniel Kenney and Emily Boever

Rating: WARTY!

This is a really short (~127 pages) novel aimed at middle graders. It's book one of a series, and although I originally rated it a conditional 'worthy' the rating was a vote for improvements in future episodes. I had two issues with it which I hoped would be resolved in future episodes in this series. They were not, hence the downgrade. The first problem was with how this novel viewed the police.

I'm writing this review on the same morning that the Dallas police escaped a massacre when a severely disturbed and unfortunately also very violent person launched what appears to have been a one-man assault on a police precinct using bombs and automatic weapons - and this wasn't even a terrorist attack as such. It was just a pissed-off guy who didn't take kindly to police interfering in his cozy little abusive relationship.

Police are human, and as such they can be clueless and idiotic and even violent, but they are all we have between us and a wild west existence where might makes right. I certainly don't want my kids living there, although all too many kids do suffer such an existence. I didn't think this novel took the right tack in portraying these police as being incompetent, arrogant, and downright knee-jerk stupid. Cops are a heck of a lot smarter than that when it comes to seeing through the foggy veil of criminal theft and violence.

The other issue I had was with the portrayal of one of the female characters. One minor problem with this story is that we don't get much information about the four main characters, young children who are really good at solving problems, using math. We didn't get an info dump at the start, for which I was grateful, but we didn't get much info doled out as the story progressed either, which I think was a mistake. Maybe the middle graders won't worry about that. One character we did learn about was Gertie. I can't imagine anyone calling their kid Gertrude these days (or Stanley, or Felix for that matter. Charlotte I can see), but my problem wasn't actually with her name, it was with the fact that she's chubby and evidently sensitive to it.

The problem is that we don't know if this is merely "baby-fat" in which case it's of no concern as long as the kid is otherwise healthy, and eating wisely and exercising judiciously, or if it's really a health problem. It would have been nice to know more, but without better information, I have to say that I was sorry to see this represented as an issue in a world where women are already pressured (and yes from that age and younger) to conform to a certain male ideal as represented on fashion runways, and in movies and TV shows - as well as in an ungodly amount of fiction.

In the US, a nation which accounts for only 5% of the world’s population, 30% of people are overweight or obese, and this is going to get worse. This five percent of the population represents thirteen percent of overweight people world-wide. America is living large and that isn't a compliment - it's a tragedy which is not only waiting to happen, it's already happening. This doesn't help those women who have a perfectly fine weight and shape (ie they are neither stick insects nor Goliath beetles) to have this added pressure of feeling like they're part of the problem. This isn't just an adult problem either, it's a children problem too, and it starts at a disturbingly young age. Most people are not overweight, and that includes most women. It doesn't make things better if young children are given to understand that they're overweight when they're really not, so I wish this novel had been clearer, or had not mentioned this issue at all if it's not going to be relevant to the story.

Okay, after that rant, let's get to the story! The four afore-mentioned, Charlotte, Felix, Gertie, and Stanley are sixth-grade friends who love math and like to solve problems. It's commendable that there are books like this showing kids doing math in the real world and getting useful, meaningful results. Frankly, I never cared how many apples Johnny had or how many friends he had to share them equally between. It never happens! But to show Stanley work out that the prime suspect could not have driven his car to the point where police picked him up if he had committed the crime as first indicated, was wonderful! I would have liked to have seen more math - and seen illustrations showing how the math problems are worked rather than the handful of illustrations showing scenes from the story, which were neither very good nor particularly helpful.

I would also have liked to have seen the work-load distributed more evenly over the group, so each of them did some math, rather than have Stanley steamer the math whiz do everything while the others, including the two girls (including the "chubby" one), serve very little purpose other than be his minions. It seems that Gertie's only distinguishing feature is that she has a good memory. I felt that this demeaned her and I would have liked to see a more equitable distribution of talent, work, and drudgery, all of which is needed, and all of which merits praise.

I liked the way that clues were dropped here and there, and that there were some red herrings and wrong turns, but like I said, I was hoping that this series improved as it went on, and instead it has deteriorated. My review of volume two was in January 2017

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

Title: The Velveteen Rabbit
Author: Margery Williams
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by William Nicholson.

Everything I know about one-sided relationships I learned from The Velveteen Rabbit. Not really, but some people might genuinely feel that way! This is a pretty cool short story (~4,000 words) dealing with mature themes for young children.

"...once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” Doesn't that say it all? If you are at all familiar with the concept underlying the Pixar Toy Story movies, you will also understand what a complete rip-off they are of this 1922 classic. Toy Story itself was rooted in an earlier Pixar short, an Oscar winner titled Tin Toy. In some ways, this novel also foreshadows Watership Down.

Because I grew up outside of the US and because of family circumstances and income brackets, I actually had never even heard of this story until well into adulthood. I only just now read it because it was a free book from an on-line vendor, and therefore a golden opportunity to see what it was all about. You can read it for free here.

The plot is simple - a rabbit made from velveteen (an imitation of velvet) and stuffed with sawdust (as they were wont to do back when this book was written) feels rather unloved after Christmas day. It's only when the boy's primary toy goes missing (the rabbit is innocent, I swear!) that our velveteen friend is allowed to step up and become the new favorite.

From that point on there's no looking back, but even as he is loved, the rabbit still feels less than whole. In a real sense he's handicapped, and not by his being a stuffed toy, but because he's effectively a paraplegic, having no use of his back legs, which are essential to a rabbit not only for running, but for defense. He only realizes how handicapped he is when he encounters real rabbits during a trip into the forest with his owner.

The rabbit learns from a venerable toy horse that a toy can become real if he is truly loved. Until then, he is just a toy, and like women in the workplace (whose opportunities are thankfully improving these days), the chances for any given toy to move up are slight. Fortunately for this rabbit, the opportunity falls right into his lapin, and he and the boy become the closest of friends. Even this costs the rabbit. As the months go by, he starts growing old at a far faster rate than the boy does. His velveteen sheen is lost and his body parts start failing. His whiskers are whisked away. He was warned about this by the horse, but he realizes that the horse was right: he doesn't care, because to the boy, he is still beautiful and loved.

The problem arrives on hot wings: scarlet fever, a much more serious illness in 1922 than ever it is now. Make note of this all ye who think the past was somehow cleaner, better, brighter, whatever, than is today! There is no vaccine for what was once known as Scarlatina, but antibiotics currently work since it's actually a form of strep infection; however, scarlet fever caused two deaths in 2011, so it is no less deadly now than it was when this fairy tale was written, given the right circumstances.

The doctor, who is rather clueless, advises the parents to burn all the boy's toys. Unless the toys are going to be given to other kids, burning them isn't going to do a darned thing! Does the doctor somehow think that the boy will re-infect himself with his own variety of the bacterium? If no one else became sick, it's run its course in this household. However, this was 1922, and the rabbit is collected up and bagged with the rest of the toys, but there's an escape clause, and it doesn't involve rabbit claws. I'll leave the details to blossom for you as they did for me. To cut a short story shorter, the rabbit rabbits!

I don't have any emotional investment in this story, not having read it as a kid, but I do recommend it. Within its parameters, it was realistic, charming, inventive, warm, and quite remarkable for its time.

The Story of Squanto, First Friend to the Pilgrims by Cathy East Dubowski

Title: The Story of Squanto, First Friend to the Pilgrims
Author: Cathy East Dubowski
Publisher: Dell
Rating: WORTHY!

Contrary to the other review I did today, purportedly about the life of Thomas Edison, this story of Tisquantum (and kudos for using the guy's real name as opposed to an ignorant white man's clueless 'grasp' of it) tells a good story in a voice suitable for the target age group without glossing over or fabricating anything. We are told the unvarnished events, starting briefly with his childhood, and later how as a grown man, he was captured by an unscrupulous English captain who transported him and many other native Americans to Málaga in Spain, where he tried to sell them as slaves.

Tisquantum eventually made it back to the US, but his life was never smooth. Before he could go back to his own village, he once more had to visit England and finally, when he did get home, he discovered that his entire village was gone - wiped out by "plague" which may have been smallpox or possibly leptospirosis.

He served as a liaison between English colonists and native Americans for many years, performing invaluable services and helping the colonists to survive, but eventually, neither the English nor his own people felt they could trust him completely. He seemed to each people that he was playing both sides against each other in the hopes of his own personal aggrandizement.

Tisquantum died of what was referred to back then as "Indian Fever" - an evidently deadly disease which resulted in bleeding from the nose and death shortly afterwards. He was buried in an unmarked grave which showed how little regard he was held in at the time of his death, despite all he had done for his "friends". I recommend this book.

The Story of Thomas Alva Edison Inventor by Margaret Davidson

Title: The Story of Thomas Alva Edison Inventor
Author: Margaret Davidson (no website found)
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WARTY!

I am rating this book negatively because it's such a lightweight mash-up of truth and fiction that it's nothing short of a disgrace that Scholastic ever allowed it to be published. The author should be ashamed of herself for some of the things she's written here. Yes, it's true that Edison's mother took him out of school and educated him at home, but no, he did not suffer deafness because some guy pulled him aboard a train by his ears. That was a lie that Edison promulgated. His deafness came from repeated illnesses he had as a child.

Neither did I like the way this author uncritically parrots things she's evidently cribbed from some official biography or other and then adds bits she apparently made up. Yes, he was taken out of school, but for this author to suggest that we know exactly what transpired, or what Mrs Edison thought at the time is misleading at best. The author quietly glosses over parts of his life, too - such as Edison being ejected from the train on which he worked because he had turned one of the cars into a research lab without permission.

The newspaper which Edison started was the Grand Trunk Herald, named after the railroad line, not the 'Weekly Herald'. Yes, he did save a kid from a runaway train, so we get a version of the truth there, but we don't learn that he was fired from his subsequent job as a telegraph operator because once again he was abusing his employer's premises and caused damage.

The story of Menlo Park isn't quite accurate, but yes, Edison did view it as a research lab and eventually it was huge. The author glosses over how much work Edison's employees did though, effectively making it look like Edison did everything with no real input or help from anyone.

You will not learn here of how much of Edison's work built upon inventions (and occasionally infringed patents) of other inventors, such as people like William Sawyer and Joseph Swan, nor will we learn from this author that Edison and his business partners were bilking every penny they could get from their customers for his electric light until George Westinghouse produced sufficient competition that the price came down. To suggest that Edison was trying to create the Volkswagen of electric lights and provide cheap lighting for everyone is dishonest.

You will read nothing here of the power struggle over power! There was intense competition between Edison and Tesla over distribution of electricity to power these electric lights and machinery. While Edison was stubbornly promoting DC (direct current), Tesla was offering the real solution: AC (Alternating Current), but Edison would not have it and organized tours where animals were cruelly electrocuted to 'prove' how 'dangerous' Tesla's invention was. Yes, AC power is deadly, but safe if handled wisely.

You will read here of Edison's invention of motion picture phtotography, but though Edison was granted his patent for his "Kinetograph", he was responsible only for the electromechanical design. William Dickson, a Scots photographer, working for Edison, was responsible for the optical side of things, which is what movies are actually all about.

So in short, no, I am not impressed by this "impression" of Edison's life, and I cannot recommend this book.

Ladybird Explorers Plus Native Americans by Fiona MacDonald

Title: Ladybird Explorers Plus Native Americans
Author: Fiona MacDonald (no website found)
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!

This was an amazing little book about native Americans, ideal for young children to learn something useful, and designed in such a way as to encourage kids to work for their knowledge. There are little fold-outs concealing pictures, and spin wheels, and mini-books within this book, and images on otherwise clear mylar, tauntingly concealing text underneath a picture of tipis. There's a glossary and an index, and maps and images of people, places, and things. As a kid, I would have been complete enveloped by this for an hour and then for more hours on endless other days.

The book begins with a discussion of the land and the people, because you cannot separate the two no matter how much invaders and usurpers have frequently and desperately tried to do so. It discusses the first Americans and then covers various regions such as the great plains and the Arctic, the south west and the woodlands, because each has its own story to tell.

Beyond this it goes on to talk about elders and warriors, the spirit world, and then...the settlers, the beginning of the end. Commendably, it also talks about native Americans today because although the old life ended, the people fortunately continue. I recommend this book.

Magic Tree House Mummies and Pyramids by Osborne

Title: Magic Tree House Mummies and Pyramids
Author: Will and Mary Pope Osborne
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Sal Murdocca.

This was a great little fact book for young children about ancient Egypt. My biggest problem with it was that it was focused on death rather than on life, but apart from that, I really liked it. It would have been nice of it had said a little bit about modern Egypt too, but since it was focused on mummies and pyramids, this omission was understandable.

The book is gorgeously illustrated with gray scale drawings to back up the text, We get an introductory chapter on ancient Egypt and a chapter on everyday life, and then it's into Egyptian religion, mummies, funerals, and the pyramids. I liked that it gives a brief history of how pyramid building began, so there's no room for the nonsensical claims of ancient astronauts or magical pyramid construction! They do err in talking of using wooden rollers for moving the building stones. Anyone who disagrees needs to ask themselves how, exactly, these rollers rolled over soft sand with the weight of a twenty ton block on them. I think sleds were a better bet.

The book also discusses tomb robbers, which I found rather hypocritical given that this discussion was followed by a discussion of how Tutankhamun's tomb was robbed by Howard Carter & co. Yes, those artifacts ended up in museums so everyone can see them, but this was no less tomb robbing than what the thieves had done. Egypt itself was robbed of these treasures, but that said, and given what Muslim extremists have done with ancient religious artifacts in other countries, perhaps the safest place for these things is well-away from such fanaticism.

So, in short, some issues, but overall, a nice little introduction to ancient Egypt for young minds. I recommend it.

Can a Robot be Human? by Peter Cave

Title: Can a Robot be Human?
Author: Peter Cave (no website found)
Publisher: One World
Rating: WORTHY!

This is a non-fiction book featuring "33 Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles", and take it from me as a person who despises philosophy (which is indeed a cereal box religion), it's the most entertaining introduction to philosophy that you can buy. Think of it more along the lines of logic puzzles, and you will have a better feel for it than thinking of it as a philosophy 101. Its actually not a logic puzzle book as such, but it presents one conundrum after another which will stimulate your logic cells as you try to make sense of the challenge and figure out the best answer. It will also stimulate your compassion cells, your moral cells and a host of other cells, including prison cells and terrorist cells!

The book covers morality and decency and hits you with sometimes-almost-impossible-to-figure or counter-intuitive responses to real life situations which are here stripped down to the simple bare bones, to hone in on the crux of the issue. The chapters are really short, and they cover health, religion, Zeno's paradox, love, what makes a sand castle a sand castle, contrariness, hungry donkeys, wolf whistles, and saints, sinners, and suicide bombers. Who wouldn't want to read this? It's almost as good as an exploding wicker chicken.

Its recommended that you tackle a couple of chapters each day, but I found that once I began, I was reading scores of pages at a time.
Each chapter has a brief discussion of the issues at the end, with references to other chapters which feature related issues. You by no means have to read this linearly.

I recommend this. If you're a fan of Sam Harris, particularly his The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, then you might find this a refreshing alternate way to approach that topic.

Keep Austin Weird by Mary Jane

Title: Keep Austin Weird
Author: Mary Jane (no website found)
Publisher: Smashwords
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"He then flawless recited..." should be "He then flawlessly recited..." (note I read this on a smartphone which means that page numbers are useless and locations are pretty much worthless when we can simple do a search).
"when I picked up you backpack" should be "when I picked up your backpack..."
"...once or twice.”“Really, just one our twice..." should be "...once or twice.”“Really, just once or twice..."
"Texas’ capitol building" should be "Texas’s capitol building". Texas isn't a plural so it's apporpriate to add apostrophe 's'.
"...if she was like that when they first meet..." should be "...if she was like that when they first met...".
"knew each other at UT.”They shake hands and exchange pleasantries, Kim mentally trying to place the term, 'know each other..." should be ”They shake hands and exchange pleasantries, Kim mentally trying to place the term, 'knew each other..." (Tense is changed).
"You’re Bitchy Barista reputation" should be "Your Bitchy Barista reputation"
"I’m violating the only philosophical tenant..." should be "I’m violating the only philosophical tenet..."

Mary Jane may be male or female (I am by no means convinced by the Goodreads blurb for this author! Is "Mary Jane" really comedian Lindsay Rousseau? Who knows?) and it doesn't matter, except that this author treasures anonymity so highly that I can't give you an author's website, although you can try here to get a sampling of this author's writing which sports titles such as, "Like Water for Macaroni". The title of this novel is unfortunate because if you enter it as a search term on the web, you're going to get everything but this novel showing up, including an ungodly number of tie-dyed T-shirts! That and a few too many typos aside, it was a fun read.

The story is about Eleanor Cooprider and Kim Park, who are people I would definitely like to know. Having said that I wouldn't want to go to one of their soirées, which I confess struck me as slightly tedious. These two are at their best when it's just these two, and they're talking about any topic. They're playful, smart, interesting, eclectic, off-beat, irreverent, supportive, and very warm people who dearly love each other no matter what.

This story begins at the beginning - they day they met, but then it jumps around a lot, be warned - perhaps a bit too much for some readers, but for me it wasn't too annoying, just a little confusing here and there. The chapters have a sub-heading giving time and place, full of pseudo-self-importance which is always a bad sign, and which assumes that the reader actually remembers the time and place from the previous chapter, which is neither a wise nor is it a safe assumption given how engrossing their story is when it's really good. It's not very flowing either, in addition to being rather non-linear.

I had some issues with the story in general. For example, Kim is 23 but she references Larry Bird. Bird was a Boston Celtics player who had a distinguished career, but he retired in 1992, before Kim was born. It’s not really very likely she would recall him or esteem him as a player. It's possible, but a much more recent reference would have made more sense here. The problem was that the author was so locked into the name that she evidently forgot to check for appropriateness.

The Christmas play they put on as the story gets going is one about Charlie Brown and Christmas. We read, "...actually entitled 'Linus and Lucy'...", but entitled is used wrongly. It should be 'titled'. 'Entitled means something different, although I see more and more authors using it wrongly like this.

If you can handle this however, you're in for a treat. This story follows the two from their first meeting at the school where they teach, until Eleanor retires - and it's quite a short book. Kim is convinced that Eleanor is a super hero because she can detect which career is best for her young school charges, but even super heroes make mistakes. The question is, what will happen to their relationship if Eleanor's "high flying" days come crashing down around the two of them?

I loved this story (mostly!) and recommend it.

Magic School Bus Science The Truth About Bats by Eva Moore

Title: Magic School Bus Science The Truth About Bats
Author: Eva Moore (no website found)
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Ted Enik.

My kids used to love the Magic School Bus when they were younger. This is the first print book I've had a chance to read based on the show, and it was a charmer. It's a chapter book with some very nice grey scale illustrations by Ted Enik. I love bats, so it was nice to see some solid science put out there about them, and some myths dispelled. The whole regular crew - Arnold, DA, Keesha, Phoebe, Ralphie, Tim, Wanda, and Ms Frizzle head out to Yosemite to check out the bats, and then go down to Texas to check out some more.

During the trip we get a host of bat facts and science info which is intelligently presented and accurate. We learn of endangered bat species and how to avoid endangering them further. The kids go camping in Yosemite and later travel to Austin, Texas to experience the massive flight of an estimated million bats from their home under the Congress Avenue Bridge, out into the night where they consume maybe 30,000 pounds of insects on a good night. It's a popular spectator sport!

Yes, the magic bus is a bit wild and crazy, and highly improbable at best, but it is very educational, and a fun way for kids to learn important stuff about nature. I recommend this book and would probably recommend any others in this series, too, judged by the quality of this one.

Ben Franklin and the Magic Squares by Frank Murphy

Title: Ben Franklin and the Magic Squares
Author: Frank Murphy (no website found)
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Rating: WARTY!

Illustrated by Richard Walz (no website found)

I picked this up because it was described as a "math reader" for grades 2 to 3 (~six-year-olds for non US residents), and the reason I am rating this negatively is tri-fold: one that I don't see what it has to do with teaching math, the second that it's really a hero-worship book about Ben Franklin more than it is anything else, and finally that it contains outright lies. I honestly don't get the OCD in the US to label everyone a hero. When everyone is a hero, then the appellation loses all currency and becomes meaningless. In fact, it becomes an insult to real heroes. Yes, Ben Franklin was a remarkable person, but no, he wasn't a super hero, and no, he wasn't noted for his outstanding contributions to math.

Contrary to the impression given here, he did not invent magic squares, which have been around for a least two and a half millennia. He did not start the first ever fire department - the first in Pennsylvania maybe, but not the first ever in the US, which preceded him by a century or so. The city of Boston, Massachusetts, established America's first publicly funded paid fire department in 1679. He didn't have "a pet squirrel called Skugg" - squirrels were simply known as "skuggs" in his day. He did not invent flippers - such as swimmers wear on their feet today - he merely used paddles which he wore on his hands. Franklin himself reported all of these things - which doesn't mean he necessarily invented them. We don't know where he got the ideas, because he never said. The "kite surfing" he did was across a pond, not "for a mile down a river" as is indicated here. Franklin wrote to someone that he was "happy in the invention of double spectacles" which to me doesn't tell me that he invented them, merely that he was thrilled that someone had.

To its credit, this book doesn't try to promulgate the lies that credit Franklin with inventing air conditioning, bulkheads, and daylight savings time, but it was more of a surprise that it didn't than credit-worthy. In short, this book tells too many lies, offers no a whit of math education as such, instead touting gimmicks as math, and I flatly refuse to recommend a children's book like this.

Foreverland is Dead by Tony Bertauski

Title: Foreverland is Dead
Author: Tony Bertauski
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

The blurb really did its job here because it drew me in and for once in a rare while, I wasn't disappointed, although this novel is obviously intended as the beginning of a series (actually I later discovered it isn't even in the first volume of an ongoing series, but you didn't have to have read the first to get the most out of this one), and I don't do series unless they are really, really compelling. This one was a worthy read as far as it went, but I felt no compulsion afterwards to read more about this setting or these characters.

The story begins with half-a-dozen teenage girls waking up in some sort of dormitory, and not a single one of them can remember who she is. Their heads are shaved and they discover labeled clothing under their beds, which is how they arrive at their names, but they don't know if these names are really theirs anymore than they know if the clothes are really their own clothes. Everything is very basic and spartan, with a limited amount of food, and winter is evidently on its way, so even though they appear to be on a ranch or a farm, rationing seems like a good idea.

'
The girl who is evidently named Cyn takes charge, and the obvious plan is to walk out of here back to civilization, which can't be that far away, right? One problem with that: each of the girls has some sort of device embedded in her neck, right below her skull, which pains them increasingly as they try to cross boundaries, and which eventually knocks them out cold.

Om the wall under Cyn's bed, she discovers a host of scratch marks by which someone has evidently been keeping track of how many days go by. There are a lot of days. The farm seems to have been surrounded not only by a fence, but by wilderness, of a kind which is creepy to say the least, Also, there is a dead adult. Her decaying corpse lies on the path to a shack in the trees, to which there seems to be no ingress.

One of the girls is not a part of the group in the dorm. She wakes up in the house, to which none of the other girls can go. Her head isn't shaved, but she has no more idea who she is than they did. At first she befriends the other girls but soon retreats to the house where she barricades herself in. This is how the status quo stands when a strange mature guy turns up out of the wilderness, accompanied by a young man who is as dangerous as he is vacant. At first the guy seems friendly, confused, in need of help, but slowly he begins to assert his maturity. What the heck is going on here?

I found this novel engrossing, intriguing and entertaining. I should warn you that it reads a bit slowly at times and you want to yell at the girls to get a grip and get organized, and get moving, but aside from that, it was a decent read - and that's all I ask for! It seems a bit obvious after a while what's going on, but it takes some time to get there and be sure of where we are. The question is, is what seems obvious really the truth, or is it just another delusion? The novel is well written overall, and the descriptions of winter chilled me. I am not a fan of the cold! There were some instances of typos or poor grammar, but nothing egregious or outrageous. I recommend this novel as a worthy read.

Are You Sleeping Little One? by Hans-Christian Schmidt

Title: Are You Sleeping Little One?
Author: Hans-Christian Schmidt (no website found)
Publisher: Abbeville Publishing Group
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Andrea Nemet
Text by Cynthia Vance
Translated by Laura Lindgren

I have no idea who Hans-Christian Schmidt is. I know he isn't to be confused with Hans-Christian Schmid, whose name doesn't describe him to a T, yet with whom Google is quite evidently obsessed. He's not a Danish politician and former Minister of Transport, but the author of this charming children's story, and he has an easy voice and a sleepy way with words. Having said that, we need to recognize that this is a translation, so we don't know exactly what he said, which leaves a rather philosophical question as to whose sweet words we're really reading here; however, your child probably won't be as picky as we adults can be, so we'll let that slide this time.

The important thing here is that the sole purpose of this little book is to send your child efficiently off to noddy-land, and I think it fulfills its purpose rather well. We're presented with a rather mantric approach to inducing sleep, which I haven't tested but which seems to me to be hypnotically well-advised. Each page has a fun illustration, with which you might want to acquaint your bairns beforehand so they're not constantly re-awakening themselves with an urgent desire to see to see the image. This approach, in fact, serves double duty, because it's a teaser. Once the kids know there's an engrossing story in the offering, they'll be all the more ready to go to bed, the better to become acquainted with it! Just don't try tackling the pictures on a smartphone which isn't so smart when it comes to reading children's books with images containing very small text.

The book cycles through a commendably diverse array of animals, all of whom are settling down for the night with a parent (or guardian!): dogs, caterpillars, owls, giraffes, kangaroo, fish, hens, crabs, bees, sloths, bats, hedgehogs, flamingos, snakes, moles, ducks, and finally, humans. You don't usually see some of these animals portrayed in a positive light and sans stereotypes. I think it would have been fun to have seen a plant in the line up (or the lay down, in this case!). Plants sleep - kinda - but other than that, I have no complaints at all. The images are delightful, and the text easy on the ears.

In short this was a wonderful book for inducing sleep, and how often do you get to say that about a book and mean it in a positive light?!

Disposable Assett by John Altman

Title: Disposable Asset
Author: John Altman
Publisher: Severn House
Rating: WARTY!

This one annoyed me in the second sentence, where I read, "To anyone watching, she would look like an average young woman of nineteen or twenty, perhaps a bit prettier than most...". I had two issues there. If she was prettier than most, then certainly she wasn't average, but what actually bothered me was this "prettier than". Why? Why is it necessary to make this woman prettier than most? Why is this shallow, skin-depth assessment so vitally important to authors when dealing with female characters?

The front cover describes this as a "riveting espionage thriller", but even by grandiose publisher standards, that doesn't even begin to describe this novel It's superficially espionage, but it's neither riveting nor thrilling. At best, the blurb writer is batting a .333.

Superficially, the story is supposed to be about CIA assassin Cassie Bradbury, who was set up to kill a defector in Russia before being abandoned by her agency. This is the reason I picked-up the book, but as usual, the blurb lied. It's not really about Cassie, although she does make a few cameo appearances in this story. It's really about supposedly disgraced ex-CIA agent Sean Ravensdale and how he 'undisgraces' himself when turned loose in pursuit of this supposed rogue agent.

This business of having a retired agent brought back in to do something no one else purportedly can is nonsensical, but it's what we have to deal with here, and the story checks off pretty much every cliché in the book: Disgraced, retired, disaffected agent, check, check and check. Has old contacts inside the Soviet Union, er Russia? Check. The guy is in a poor relationship? Check! Ravensdale is a single dad, who, though retired and disgraced nevertheless doesn't think twice about sucking up to the very agency that treated him like dirt, abandoning his kid, and taking off to some dangerous pursuit where he might die. Some dad, huh? I sure didn't like him and wasn't interested in him.

The problem for me is that this was neither riveting nor thrilling, which is why I gave up after reading just over a quarter of the story. Life is too short to spend any more time on a novel than that if it isn't doing it for you, especially when there are scores of other novels out there begging to be read, many of which actually are going to be thrilling and riveting, I have no doubt.

The bottom line is that this one was boring for me. There was nothing interesting happening, and what did happen was tedious and repetitive. The entire story of Cassie, in the portion I read, was of her running and hiding, and hiding and running - all the time.

Ravensdale was doing much better, hanging out with old cold war contacts, drinking cognac and vodka, and seemingly making no effort to actually find this supposedly rogue agent. There was no urgency to his actions or to the endless leisurely descriptions of the faded glory of tsarist Russia. I had to quit this and move on. The novel is baroque and badly in need of a Renaissance.

Fleeting Visions by Rene Natan

Title: Fleeting Visions
Author: Rene Natan (no website found)
Publisher: (no publisher found)
Rating: WARTY!

I made it only a quarter of the way through this. I could not get interested in any of the characters or in the plot, which seemed to be about so-called ‘white slavery’ and organized crime, but which was jumping around between endless characters so much that it was vague very nearly to the point of non-existence. I lost track of who was who and found that I didn’t even care. The novel has a list of main characters at the start, like it’s a play! This suggested to me that the author realized there was a problem here, but the "fix" just struck me as weird.

The actions, behaviors, and attitudes of the characters were often inexplicable. For example, the story starts with Jocelyn driving home in the snow and she stops at a pharmacy to get something for her stuffy nose. When she comes out, she’s handed a package by some guy she doesn’t know who evidently has confused her with his contact. She thinks it’s some sort of a promotional "flyer" and she drops it on thr ground like so much litter before getting into her car and driving off.

The guy who handed it to her doesn’t even retrieve it, neither do the police who are sitting right there in a car expecting just this transaction – police who were noticed by the woman but not even considered by the guy! The package evidently contained two hundred thousand dollars. That’s not the kind of thing someone hands to you as a promotion. Two hundred thousand dollars is hardly equivalent to the weight of your average flyer, even if it’s in large denomination bills. This entire beginning lacked credibility for me.

The woman immediately goes on vacation for two weeks, and the cops somehow fail to intercept her on the way to the airport, neither were they able to follow her in their car, nor were the two of them able to split up, enabling one to follow her while the other followed the guy. None of this made any sense or had any credibility either.

The woman’s attitude was completely wrong. When she was finally picked up, she showed no concern whatsoever that she had been implicated in some sort of illegal deal. She was flippant to the point of being at best, outright rude and at worst mentally deranged, yet it’s painfully obvious that one of the incompetent cops is going to end-up romantically involved with her. At least that’s how it seemed to me when I quit reading.

From that point, believe it or not, the novel went downhill even further, devolving into endless round robin exchanges between the cops on the one hand, and between the criminals on the other, and with some activity going on in a brothel, which I couldn’t follow by this time, so I gave up. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel. To me it was a disspitaed mess with no characters worthy of attaching myself to.

Killing Secrets by Dianne Emley

Title: Killing Secrets
Author: Dianne Emley
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
There wasno..." - space missing, should be "There was no..." (p10 Adobe Digital Editions version).
There were a couple of other errors of this nature, but otherwise the writing was pretty well done.

This is your standard murder detective story with all the associated tropes and clichés. That doesn't mean it can't be an engrossing story, just that it was too early to tell in chapter one. I had some issues with it as detailed below, and in the final analysis I can't recommend it. I quit reading twenty pages from the end as soon as the supposedly ruthless villain began monologuing and we had a précis of the entire novel. Not only was it boring, it was the last straw in what had been a very borderline novel even to that point!

The vics, a teacher and a teenage boy were found by Emily Vining, daughter of detective Nan Vining, in a park. So already we have a family involvement and a conflict between daughter and mom since Emily is at the park after dark with a boy she knows her mother will not like. We're pretty much telegraphed that there's a conspiracy going on here, up the highest levels, as the saying goes.

One thing that immediately bothered me is that the female vic is described as pretty and young - as though the murder wouldn't have been so bad had she been old and/or 'ugly'. We're told that she's young twice in almost as many lines, but when the guy is described, we don't get pretty for him, or 'studly', or handsome, or beautiful, or good-looking. He's just a guy, so obviously we need to go deeper than mere skin for him than we do for a female, where a simple definition by age and skin-deep appearance is apparently quite sufficient to categorize her.

I don't get this obsession with describing all women as pretty or beautiful in novels (except for where the plot calls for them to be old or repellent in some way, of course). Why do writers do this in such a disturbingly knee-jerk manner? Why do they - and I'm concerned about female writers especially here - feel this evidently overwhelming need to make even victims of a murder pretty rather than just regular everyday people? I'd rather read about real people in my fiction, not caricatures or fantasies, or popular habits. But that's just me.

"Police Detective" Nan is advised that she will probably want to drive Emily home, because no teen girl can possibly drive herself home after this, no matter who she is. She's only a weak woman after all (and pretty, too!), a girl of at least sixteen who Nan nevertheless infantilizes by calling her "sweet pea" which could with a slight change of spelling just as ably describe the constitution of her urine as it can a wilting flower. No wonder she can't drive herself home. She's been disabled since birth by her own mom. We see this friction in stark profile later.

Another thing which was really confusing was the hierarchical relationship within the Pasadena police department. We learn that Sergeant Early (and she is consistently described as a sergeant, never as a detective sergeant) is Nan's "commanding officer" but a sergeant really isn't a commanding officer. She may be Nan's superior officer, but only if she's a detective sergeant and Nan a lower-ranked detective. The problem is that we're also told that Nan is the senior officer in Homicide, so there's a lot of confusion as to what this means.

Senior could mean that she's the highest ranked officer, or merely that she's been there longest, but that latter option begs the question as to why her rank isn't higher. We're not initially told her rank, but later, a superior officer refers to her as 'corporal'. I have personally never heard of this actually being a rank in the police (as far as I can recall), although I understand it's considered one in some unformed branches. It's not a detective thing as far as I'm aware. But that's only as far as I'm aware.

I skipped chapter fifteen because it brought a huge screeching halt to the story just as I was actually beginning to become somewhat interested in it. Another thing which bothered me came right after this when they had a memorial service for the vics, which took place breathlessly close to the discovery of the bodies, but the problem was that some known gang members and prison parolees were in the crowd. Instead of being asked to leave, they were allowed to stay. I didn't get that at all. It was in no way appropriate for them to be there.

One problem with Detective Nan Vining is that she seems to be incompetent. Despite being told that the teen victim, Jared, was researching his father's death, not believing that it was a suicide, she fails to take the boy's laptop, which is the obvious repository for any research he might have been doing, and then the laptop is stolen. She fails to pursue any laptop or other device for the female Victim Erika, and later those things are evidently not in evidence as well! This didn't imbue me with any faith at all in her ability, and this faith further retreated into inaccessibility the more I read of her actions.

Just before the half-way point in the novel, Nan calls a guy who is in DC, and who is obviously more than just a friend, but the assumption here is that every reader knows who this is. Since I have read no other books in this series, I had no idea who he was or what he really represented to Nan, but there was nothing in the text here to offer even a modicum of guidance. This was came completely out of the blue, especially since he hadn't been mentioned at all, not even in passing, up to this point. That struck me as odd.

I managed to stay with this story almost to the end, but as I said, it wasn't credible, there were what seemed to me to be pointless digressions from the investigation which served only to irritate me, and I didn't find the story overall to be credible. I didn't like the main chracter and had no desire whatsoever to read more about her. Your investigation may yield different results!

The Seeker by Karan Bajaj

Title: The Seeker
Author: Karan Bajaj
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"utersus" should be "uterus" (p17)
"out of batter power" should be "out of battery power" (p58)
"every hue of color" is wrong. Hue relates to variation of a color, not to all colors. It should be something like "all hues and colors" (p82)
"...perineum - the region between the navel and the anus..." No! The perineum is the region between the scrotum (or the fourchette of the vulva) and the anus! (p92)

Let me note to begin with that I am certainly not into New Age (so-called) or mysticism. Nor do I have any faith whatsoever in organized religion. Everyone's religion, or lack thereof is their own choice. The minute you start allowing someone to tell you what to believe, you're already and hopelessly lost. For me, I don't buy any of it and I don't buy reincarnation, which makes just as little sense as does a single life followed by judgement and an eternal jail sentence based on a tiny three-score years and ten "test". That said, I love an engaging story about good v evil, or about mysticism. This novel is in the latter category, and I confess I had a few issues with it, but overall, I liked it. There were some parts where I doubted I would, and the last forty pages were turning me off, but the very last few pages brought me back.

This book seemed to my weird and warped imagination to be a companion read to the Superyogis book I reviewed recently. Although the two are by different authors and not at all connected as stories, they do have a common thread in eastern mysticism, specifically yogis and gurus, and what can be called super-powers, so I thought I'd give it a look. I'm glad I did because I liked this better than the other. It's divided into three sections: The Traveler, The Yogi, and The Sage. I assumed that sage referred to a wise person and not to the herb!

It begins with Max and his sister Sophie, exiting the hospital where their 49-year-old mother lies dying of cancer. When she dies Max, frustrated and disillusioned with his job, suddenly quits and travels to India, looking for a yogi to give him spiritual enlightenment. There's really no good reason given for this, and the first real enlightenment he gets is how blisteringly cold it is in the Himalayas in winter! Why didn't he stay with his sister, whose very name means wisdom? I don't know! I thought she would play some part in this later, but she really didn't.

Max also seems to have all the luck in the world in getting where he wants to go through the snow-covered and frozen mountains, but once he starts up the mountain, heading for his final destination, he becomes lost in the ice, snow, and bitter cold, on a mountainside hundreds of feet above the river Ganges, and night is falling. When he thinks he is about to die, he starts thinking of someone called Keisha. I had no idea who this was - the name was never been mentioned until then, and we have to wait for a flashback many pages further on to learn about her. Even then it really wasn't that important - except to Max, evidently.

There was some odd writing in this novel. For example, on page 73, I read this:

"They were good for my purpose," he said
"To express love for the divine?" he said

The first person speaking was Anand, the second, Max. That's not at all clear from the way this is written. Other than one or two instances like that, the writing in general was very good, the descriptions very evocative. This is one of the reasons I liked this novel.

Max seems to be rather ill-informed about the planet's capacity to support a large population. He rages at one point: "The planet can't support so many people. There has to be an end to this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth." This is the guy who just a short time before didn't believe in reincarnation (for which there is zero evidence beyond anecdote and wild new age claims), but the fact is that the planet could quite easily support this population if we were actually smart about using our resources. If everyone became vegetarian for example, it would free up all of the grain we now feed to livestock, and this would feed all the starving people. Giving up even a fraction of your meat diet would work, too.

Plus we do not make anywhere near good enough use of marginal land, especially given the technology that we have. On top of that, farmers pretty much everywhere rely purely on rainfall instead of making irrigation work using other means. The planet's surface is some seventy percent water. Yes, it's salty, but this can be fixed using filtration plants. Yes, they demand energy, but this can be supplied using solar panels - which are especially apropos given that most of the water shortage is in the areas of the planet which get the most sunlight.

I think that, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with this Eastern religion approach to life - it relies too much on ancient ignorance and gullible and/or delusional thinking, like all religions do. You cannot rely on things which go through your head when you're hyperventilating and/or starving yourself and baking in the heat of some Ashram somewhere as Max was when he made this ignorant assertion. This doesn't mean of course, that it's wise to go on populating the planet at the rate we have been doing over the last two or three hundred years. Moderation isn't a bad thing!

But at the Ashram and later back in the mountains, Max really departs from reality and the story takes on increasingly absurdist tones. Fortunately by then it was very close to the end so I didn't anticipate quitting reading before the end. One of the absurdist claims sounds disturbingly realistic: Max claims that your navel has 72,000 nerve endings but to my knowledge this is nonsensical.

The T10 dermatome is there, but that's one nerve! Other than that, your navel has no more nerve endings than the rest of your abdominal skin. At one point your belly "button" was an open tube connecting you to your mom's placenta, but other than that, it's nothing special. That doesn't mean some people don't have ticklish or sensitive navels, however.

Once Max reaches his guru, we get into the meditation and breathing practices, and some of these struck me as ill-informed at best. At one point we're told that oxygen is energy, oxygen is life, and oxygen would revitalize the cells, but the fact is that oxygen is one of the most corrosive and dangerous gases on the planet, notwithstanding our acute reliance on it.

Radicals (commonly but redundantly referred to as free radicals) are very dangerous to the body, and most of them are derived from oxygen! Too much oxygen is just as bad for you as too little. In some circumstances, radicals are helpful; one of these is in fighting invasive germs, but the reason they are so useful for this is because they are highly destructive. Radicals possess an unpaired electron which is the source of their deadly behavior, including damage to cell membranes (hence death to germs). This is why antioxidants are good for you and your body loves to manufacture them if it can.

Some of the descriptions used in the mountains lacked a little something - such as describing ice sheets as glaciers, for example - but other than that, I enjoyed the mountain and the subsequent trek to the opposite end of the temperature scale when Max heads to an Ashram in a desert region, This is where he finds his path, even though he doubts it every day, It's also where the story lost me a little bit, towards the end, when he begins developing super powers, That was a but too much, but I survived it and enjoyed the end whee he really does learn some truth, and if you've read this review closely, you might guess what it is. In short, I recommend this novel as a worthy read even though in some regards it was unsatisfying to me. Your karma may differ!