The Winds of War

The Winds of War by Herman Wouk

I love historical fiction books.  Some of my favorite authors in this genre include John Jakes, Leon Uris, James Michener, and, to some extent Ken Follett. Some of those authors, I’ve actually read their entire catalog.  Why, then, did it take me so long to discover Herman Wouk?  This book runs circles around any other book that I have read of this genre.  I’ve never felt so engrossed in a tale that is actually over 1,000 pages.  I actually wanted more, and wouldn’t mind another few hundred pages tacked on at the end. (It should be noted that this book has a sequel that is about 1,300 pages).   I would recommend that any new author that wants to try to take a stab at historical fiction to make sure that they read this book first, and use it as a template.

Unlike some other authors that tackle this genre, Herman Wouk keeps his cast of characters quite lean in the quantity department. He focuses only on one family, Pug and Rhoda Henry and their three young adult children. There are a few more main characters, but only a few, and all of the supporting cast is emotionally related to one of the Henry clan. This is good as it ensures that the reader never gets lost.  We never have to joggle our brain and ask “Who is this person again?”  Yet the story is incredibly deep.  We start our tale shortly before Hitler invades Poland, and we end at Pearl Harbor. The members of the Henry family find themselves smack dab in the middle of the most famous (i.e. worst) places of the conflict during the early years of the war.  We find our characters in Warsaw as Hitler invades, flying over Berlin on a bombing raid, the front lines of Operation Barbarossa, and, of course, in Pearl Harbor on that fateful day in December 1941.  

Despite all of these “coincidences”, this book never feels contrived. It also allows us to look at some of these events as we’ve never viewed them, which for most of us, is in hindsight.  Our main character, Navy Captain Pug Henry finds himself at some point having relevant conversations with Churchill, Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt.  The former three sort of make cameo appearances, but Roosevelt is actually one of the major supporting players in this story.  Again, none of this ever seems coincidental, as Pug is great at what he does at many levels.  With the USA neutral during the main part of this book, Pug and family are allowed to be in places such as Berlin and Moscow in the thick of the conflict without being looked at as the “enemy”.

At times this book also feels as a history book, as the author diverts from his story at various places to give his readers details about what was actually going on, and how the major players fit in with the whole scheme of things.  There’s also a side act within this book of Pug Henry (years later, after the war ended I presume) translating a book by a German officer high up in the rank, so we get the “German” perspective of the conflict after all is said and done.  It’s quite a bit jarring to read about such famous events from a different (if badly skewed) perspective.

This is actually a great love story as well.  All of the Henrys find themselves intertwined in romance, some good, some bad, some horribly inconvenienced.  The story is a great reminder of just how difficult things were for many.  Just how does a young American Naval Seamen function when his Jewish wife just gives birth to their first child, and they happen to be behind enemy lines?  I also found all of the characters to be multi-dimensional and extremely believable.  Not all of the Henrys get equal stage time.  Some of the family is featured within the pages a lot less frequently, but who can really complain when the overall book is so satisfying and over 1000 pages?

I am greatly anticipating the follow up (War and Remembrance, written 6 years after this one) as well as many other titles in this author’s works.  One of the best books I’ve ever read.

The Winner

The Winner – by David Baldacci

Baldacci is fast becoming an author that, for my tastes, I can describe as “hit or miss”. I really want to enjoy his books. Every time I pick one up, I feel like a parent cheering for someone else’s kid in addition to my own child.  I know that this other child can play well, but I also know they can really stink as well.  This book, for me, falls somewhere in the middle.  It actually had the potential to be great, but there were several things about this story that really sapped a lot of the joy I had when reading a book.

LuAnn Tyler is a poor nineteen year old who has known nothing but poverty and suffering her whole life.  She has a young baby, but really doesn’t want to marry the baby’s father that she lives with in a rusty, beat up trailer.  He’s about as low as you can go in every aspect of life.  Although LuAnn makes many of the same mistakes that young, impoverished kids make, she seems to have a better than average head on her shoulders. At times I thought Baldacci made her act too smart for someone who is supposed to be so stupid.  Or maybe it was too stupid for someone so smart?  Also, she happens to be physically “beautiful”, and the author never forgets to let us know this throughout the pages.  Over and over again.  And again.  And again.

One day, LuAnn is approached by a very strange human being named “Jackson”.  He has an offer for her.  All she has to do is buy a lottery ticket.  He guarantees that whatever ticket she buys, will be the winning ticket.  She can then leave her miserable life behind and take her daughter with her to live the glamorous life of luxury.  Of course, everything comes with a price. Those that follow the lottery winners in real life know that in many instances, life actually becomes much worse for the winner.  In LuAnn’s case, she has to abide by a set of weird rules given to her by Jackson if she elects to go through with the process.  Example: She has to leave the country, and never return.  Not a really big a deal when you have gobs of money and not much of a life to begin with, but still, in a weird way she ends up selling her soul.

The good thing about this book is that Baldacci keeps the whole “lottery” process real.  This isn’t some spooky, supernatural “make a deal with the devil” story that you might find in a Stephen King book. No, it seems that it’s quite feasible to rig the lottery, and we see how it’s done.  Regardless of whether or not such an idea can happen in real life, Baldacci makes it believable, and that’s the author’s job.

So then we come to the parts about this book that fail.  To put it quite simply, our bad guy just reeks of unbelievability.  Now, let me digress and say that I’ve found instances in Baldacci’s books where the author seems to get lazy and uncreative when he’s looking for a way to move his plot forward.  Example: If two characters are trapped within the confinement of a fifteen foot wall outdoors, it’s particularly distressing to then read that one of these characters “discovers” a ladder partially buried beneath the dirt.  What luck!!  Baldacci uses a similar method with his Jackson character in this book.

You see, apparently, Jackson is a “master of disguises”.   Every time we turn around, we meet a new character in this book that somehow crosses paths with LuAnn and company.  We then find out that (-GASP-) it was actually Jackson in another disguise!  You have to be pretty good at disguises when you can fool your own sibling.  I imagine that maybe such things are possible, but when I read stories in real life about actors spending eight hours in a makeup chair to don such a getup (and you can always tell who the actor is anyway, no matter how made up they look), it seems a bit silly when, in this story, Jackson is applying such a trick in the back of a limousine on a fifteen minute ride to the airport.  It just seemed a lazy way to move the story forward.  It was a big letdown.  There were many times when I wanted to throw the book across the room whenever Jackson would “appear” again in a disguise.  The only thing that prevented me from doing such a thing is that I read this on a $199 kindle.  Oh, but how I was tempted.

Had this major flaw been done away with, or modified significantly, I think this would have been a great book. Because of this factor, though, it caused me to have a bit of an unsatisfied feeling. This could have been much better.

The Golden Buddha

The Golden Buddha by Clive Cussler and Craig Dirgo

Good God this book was awful.  

A trend that I notice when people review books that they don’t like (and I’m guilty of this as well) is that they’ll state “(Author’s Name) could NOT have possibly written this book!....”.  The sentiment being that the reviewer has read previous offerings by the author that they really enjoyed, yet the current book being reviewed is way under par.  In many cases, the reviewer is just blowing off steam.  This book, however, I will go to my grave firmly convinced that Clive Cussler had virtually nothing to do with this disaster.

It should be pointed out that in the last 15 years or so, Cussler “writes” a multitude of books every year, each with different co-authors.  It really doesn’t take a genius to see that so many  undertakings are simply impossible for anyone, no matter how talented.  I’ve read several of his books that have been co-authored, and most fall in the range of anywhere between “o.k.” to “excellent”, so I don’t mind reading these other excursions.  This book, however, set a new low.

This is the first of his “Oregon Files” series.  He authored it with Craig Dirgo (the two collaborated on a couple of non-fiction books, I think).  Cussler is still releasing “Oregon Files” books, but he’s moved on to working with at least one other author (you need a mainframe computer to keep up with all of Cussler’s writing buddies).  The only other “Oregon File” I’ve read was “Plague Ship”  which Cussler wrote with Jack Dubrul.  I really didn’t care for that one either, but it’s miles ahead of this one.

Unlike some other of Cussler’s series of books, the Oregon Files really doesn’t have a central character.  Yes, there is a “main guy” (Juan Cabrillo), but he’s not allowed the same amount of spotlight time as characters such as Dirk Pitt, Kurt Austin, Or Isaac Bell.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but Cussler and Dirgo simply have too many characters on the Oregon ship for the reader to stay focused.  I simply couldn’t remember who was who, and what everyone’s role was.  It seems that this “Oregon” ship, is sort of a spy ship that Cabrillo and company use to perform mercenary missions that are too dangerous for legitimate government agencies.

When the Dalai Lama was exiled out of Tibet in the 1950s, a 600 pound “Golden Buddha” statue was stolen from him.  With the powers that be working on reinstating the Dalai Lama, it makes sense that an effort be put into place that will recover the mammoth statue.  A pretty monumental task.  So Cabrillo and company are called in to set the wheels in motion.  O.K.  So far, so good.

The rest of the story goes downhill fast.  REAL fast.  There really isn’t any “story” from this point on.  The remainder of the book is basically one long action sequence with a multitude of people running around in every possible direction.  I simply couldn’t keep track of all of the players in this farce, but to be honest, at some point I refused to continue to make any effort.  I simply didn’t care.  The actions within these pages were so absurd, that this book might have actually been better had it been written as a slapstick comedy instead of any attempt at a serious tale.   As a “real adventure”, this book simply doesn’t work.

Example:  Near the beginning of this caper, the Golden Buddha is “owned” by a billionaire who is throwing a lavish party.  Cabrillo and crew figure that they must “infiltrate” the party to steal this thing.  The way the crew does this is flat out ridiculous.  It seems as though there is a band that is supposed to play at the party, so the Oregon crew somehow prevent the real band from showing up, and several members on the Oregon that have no musical talent nor expertise whatsoever masquerade as the “real” band so they can place themselves directly at the scene of the upcoming crime.  They really don’t “need” any musical experience since they have “computers” that they can hook up to the sound system that will masquerade their lack of talent, and they do practice together for a few hours rehearsing all of the hand movements necessary to play the instruments.  I can’t believe the authors would believe that their readers could possibly be this stupid to believe such a tactic could possibly work.

Then we have other members of the crew that “disguise” themselves as real people to infiltrate the gathering as well.  No problem. They just kidnap the real people and hide them.  You would think that people who know these kidnapped individuals would be able to tell the real person from an amateur in disguise.  Never mind.  There are other ridiculous occurrences as well, but I won’t divulge them in case someone reading this might want to actually tackle this book.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you if you do.

The book only gets worse.   I tend to be a completest when it comes to reading some of my favorite authors, but someone is going to have to twist my arm pretty hard before I read another one of these “Oregon” deals.  A big big waste of time, effort and money.

V is for Vengeance

V is for Vengeance – by Sue Grafton

As author Sue Grafton gets closer and closer to the end of the alphabet, I’m sure one of the most frequently asked questions that she receives is “What are you going to do when you run out of letters?”  I’m not sure how she answers this, but I would like to respectfully suggest that she retire Kinsey Milhone and move on to something else.

That’s not to say she should retire from writing permanently.  Oh no.  Sue Grafton is still a great writer.  It just seems to me that the Kinsey Milhone shtick is now just old, and it’s time for something fresh.  Actually, I think Grafton is somewhat aware of this as well, and she’s done things a bit differently on this, and the last couple of books.  She’s telling a portion of the story in third person about other characters in the book besides Kinsey.  It’s only after the reader is well into the book that they see how these narratives will eventually connect.  This new direction seems very fresh and exciting, and the author shows us that she’s capable of telling a great tale, even if her focus isn’t on her favorite private investigator.

In fact, when the book changes chapters and we go back to the “first person” narrative of Kinsey, I noticed that I tended to get disappointed.  You see, nothing really that exciting ever happens to Kinsey as she’s sleuthing her way through these third rate crimes.  I feel like I’ve read all of this before.  Many times, in fact.  This really isn’t a bad thing for a handful of books – reading the same observations from a character about life over and over again, but after 21 books, well……

Then there’s the problem that Grafton (and maybe this is actually Kinsey) has “Description Diarrhea”.  Nobody goes into as much descriptive analysis about anything and everything as Milhone/Grafton.  Whenever Kinsey gets out of her car, for example, and walks into a restaurant, it takes the reader three pages to arrive at the same destination.  We have to hear everything about the neighborhood, the parking lot, the restaurant décor, the people she sees in the parking lot, etc.  etc.

At one point in this book, Kinsey is going on a stakeout.  It would be sufficient if the author would tell us that she “packs a lunch”.  But no.  We have to hear about every single item that is going into the lunch bag, along with why she is choosing the particular foodstuff.  She even goes into detail about how she packs all of these items, along with the description of the baggies, how she folds them, etc.   

Oy.

Still, this book was par for the course.  Plot wise, it’s a bit inconsequential for me to describe.  Again, these tales aren’t really the makings of major blockbuster whodunnits, this is simply a thirty something private eye trying to make a living by putting together pieces of a complicated puzzle.  I imagine if you’re brand new to the series, you could really like this book.  If you’ve read every volume (such as myself), you might be tempted to yawn at the repetitive nature of every one of these books.  If you’re somewhere in the middle, you’re likely to enjoy the overall narrative.  I was pleased.

I just hope one day we get different tales from this author.  I have a feeling that they would be stellar.  I just hope if we do see such works, Grafton realizes that “more” isn’t necessarily “better” and eases off on description overkill.