One Good Turn

One Good Turn - by Kate Atkinson

Here’s essentially how it happens: It’s a busy traffic day somewhere in Scotland due to some sort of festival.  In the bumper to bumper traffic, one car hits another.  The two drivers get out, and they’re angry.  One has a baseball bat and he’s about to attack.  A “Good Samaritan” happens to walk by on the street and sees what is about to go down.  Instinctively, he throws a satchel containing his laptop computer and the would be assailant.  He doesn't really hurt the guy, but he delays the attack just long enough for the police to arrive and arrest the bat wielding thug.  

That’s really about it.

For the few people that are involved in this incident, including a couple of bystanders, author Kate Atkinson dives into these people’s lives before, during, and after this event.  Why are we reading about all of this?  After all, these people just happen to be at a certain place at an exact time, yet Kate Atkinson starts telling us their life stories.  A bit strange, you might say, but this really isn’t that much out of the ordinary for Atkinson.  She has the ability to go on and on about not much of anything, but still keep the reader entertained.  As our story (which only takes place over about two days) unwinds, we find that in some bizarre way, all of these characters are somehow connected with each other, and we see many paths cross amongst these random individuals.  One of them being Jackson Brodie, who’s one of Kate Atkinson’s regulars.  Jackson is a private detective (retired, actually in this book), yet don’t ever think for one minute that these books resemble any sort of crime solving mysteries and whatnot.  Yes, there are bizarre events that bear scrutiny in this story, but Jackson is really just another character within the pages with life happening all around him.

Of all of Kate Atkinson’s books that I’ve read, this one was the least depressing.  She has a subconscious trait of telling stories that center around hard luck characters that seem to be dealt many of life’s unfair blows.  It seems like every character in all of her books is either in a rotten marriage, a rotten relationship or has a rotten family.  Sometimes all three.  That’s not really to say this book is all sunshine and roses. It’s just that the overall doom and gloom isn’t quite as prevalent here as in her other books.  It’s also nice that, since this story only takes place over a few days, there aren’t that many different people within the pages for the reader to have to keep track.  Sometimes you need a mainframe computer to keep up with all the people in an Atkinson book, yet there’s only a dozen or so main players to keep score of throughout this particular story.

Still, Atkinson’s books are an acquired taste.  Not a lot ever really happens in the “action” department. Her strength is mainly character revelation and development, and she always  dives deep into the soul of many of the main players.  She has a way of hooking you into these individuals’ lives, making you want to cry for their pitiful circumstances, yet howl in laughter at the author’s off the wall observations.

Most of what this author writes is well appreciated by me, and I felt that this was probably one of her strongest overall.  

It was nice to see a “good turn” set the stage for a story in Atkinson’s repertoire.

The Twelfth Card

The Twelfth Card - by Jeffery Deaver

Another Lincoln Rhyme book.  A good one.  Very good.  Great?  Mmmmmmm….don’t know if I would say that.  Maybe it depends on how many of these books you’ve read before.  Jeffery Deaver’s favorite recurring character, Lincoln Rhyme, is a quadriplegic criminalist. A former detective who was darn good at what he did, managed to suffer a major injury on the job several years ago, and he’s now basically restricted to solving crimes in his lab in New York City overlooking Central Park.  Fortunately, his brain his so good at solving unsolvable crimes, that he really doesn’t need the rest of his body.

Geneva Settle is a poor, yet very smart, high school student living in West Harlem.  On a personal level, this poor young girl has almost nothing going for her.  When she’s spending a Saturday in an African-American museum researching one of her ancestors - a hero of the American Civl War, she barely escapes being murdered as she’s sitting at a microfiche machine.  So the questions arrive at Lincoln and his team of regulars.  Who?  Why?  What clues are available?  And so the hunt is on.

Here’s where things do get a bit monotonous for one who has read these Lincoln Rhyme stories before.  It must be said that Deaver does do a good enough job mixing things up a bit - his villain is very well developed character wise, and is a bit of fresh air from some of the usual psychopaths that Deaver uses that seem to be obsessed with insects, bones or some other weird fetish.  Many other aspects of this book, however, seem somewhat repetitive, or not quite believable.  We know for example, that when the good guys are closing in on the perpetrator’s hideout fairly early in the story, that the villain has some sort of devious mechanism in place that will allow him some sort of miraculous escape.  We’ve simply seen such things happen many times before to be fooled again.

Then, for once, the obligatory Jeffery Deaver plot twists don’t really seem to work as well here.  There are a couple of abrupt 90 degree turns in the story that fans now expect, yet the author was obviously very dry with good ideas this time for most of the story.  You know nothing is as it seems when things seem to be nicely wrapped up yet you still have about 100 pages of story left to read.  Deaver seems as though he’s trying a bit too hard to make things work and, for once, probably shouldn’t have tried so hard to fool his readers and just focus on a linear plot.

Then, the character of Geneva is a bit of a stereotypical stretch.  You would think a young high school girl who is being chased by a murderer would be scared out of her wits, yet nothing seems to faze her.  “I can’t stay hidden - I have to go to school to take a test!”  We hear this quite often.  Talk about dedication.  The dialect between her and her Harlem friends seems awfully forced in the Ebonics area as well.  The author is trying very hard to be hip and/or accurate, but it just comes across as embarrassing.

Still, though, to compare this book to the rest of his works almost seems a bit unfair.  I still enjoyed the story overall, and although there seemed to be a lot of unnecessary diversions, I felt that the story was overall positive.  It seems as though Deaver devotes about half of his literary library to Lincoln Rhyme, and when he writes about something else, he always does a great job as well.  Reading this book almost makes me wish that he’d retire from Lincoln Rhyme for a bit, but it could be just a minor setback.

Even though I really did like the book, I’d recommend any of the other prior Lincoln Rhyme stories before this one. It’s not really necessary that you read them in order, but there a few instances in the books where certain things are revealed that move the overall saga along.

John Quincy Adams - American Visionary

John Quincy Adams - American Visionary by Fred Kaplan

John Quincy Adams is one of those earlier presidents that most people know very little about.  In fact, had it not been for the fact that his father was also president (something not repeated until the George Bushes), I seriously doubt that most would even recognize the name.  Fortunately, the Steven Spielberg movie Amistad gave many a good look at what was probably the man’s most memorable achievement - serving as defense attorney for the mutineers of the infamous slave ship (Adams was played wonderfully by Sir Anthony Hopkins, I might add).

That event happened after Adams was president, and I probably should immediately point out that this book really isn’t a book about the sixth President, but rather about the man himself.    In fact, this man had a rather unmemorable term as president.  I’m not sure I could even tell you exactly what he accomplished during the four years he was in office.  Strangely, I didn’t really care that much.  I’ve read presidential biographies where the author gets so bogged down with the intricacies of the presidential goings on, that it becomes a chore to get through all the every day events affecting the country that never really seem that interesting.   This man, probably because of his upbringing, actually served his young country throughout his whole life, and we read about it all.

Of course, we must always remember when reading a biography, or any book for that matter, that takes place over 150 years ago, that we really don’t have much information to rely on - at least compared to modern times, and much of this information can almost be dismissed as somewhat speculative.  Fortunately, since these individuals didn’t have telephones, internet, nor cable t.v., there really wasn’t that much to do, so learned men like Adams spent much of their time writing - recording events in diaries and penning long letters, so we do, at least, have reliable sources to some extent.

We first read that Adams was a world traveller.  Even as a young man, he accompanied his father to England and France on diplomatic assignments.  Now, we must remember that traveling to another continent was never an easy task.  It would often take six weeks to make the journey across the Atlantic, and there were only certain times of the year when such a journey was considered safe.  In fact, as an adult, Adams and his wife actually take such a journey later in life, and they leave their two oldest sons (who were still fairly young boys) back home with relatives.  I can only imagine the horror of only being able to communicate via pen and paper with your children.  Because of the various assignments of Adams during this time abroad, he and his wife are separated from his children for over eight years.  Unbelievable.

But Adams is devout citizen.  He does whatever his country asks him, considering it his patriotic duty.  Even when he runs for President, you get the feeling that he really doesn’t want the job, but if the people want him in office, who is he to argue?  Without going into details, he actually isn’t the people’s first choice, but the way the electoral college works, he gets the job anyway.  For his entire four years in office, the political pundits that oppose him expose this fact anyway they can.  Adams really doesn’t care.  He simply isn’t a political creature.  It seems quite refreshing to read about such a character when all we hear about today is the constant political bickering and backstabbing between the parties.  It should be pointed out that even though Adams isn’t necessarily a political player, we find out that he’s definitely an anomaly.  That fact is somewhat scary.  Anyone who things our present two party system is some sort of recent cancer, really should study history.

So we actually read very little of the political events during Adams tenure leading up to, and during, his presidency.  Things such as the XYZ affair are barely mentioned, and the Monroe Doctrine (which really was Adams’ baby when he was Secretary of State) doesn’t seem to take up as many pages as I would have thought.  The one area that does, rightly, get plenty of attention, is Adams’ view on slavery.  He truly was the first abolitionist president that the country ever had.  Slavery was a very hot issue throughout his whole lifetime, and he rightly predicted that only war would solve the problem one day (he died many years before the American Civil War).  It’s quite refreshing to read about such an educated, somewhat wealthy early figurehead be so passionate and argue so eloquently about the evils of such an institution.  Especially since the issue of slavery seems to be the major factor that tilts the country politically during this time.  In fact, this book heavily demonizes the extremely popular Andrew Jackson, who seems to be the biggest nemesis of Adams (he would succeed him as the seventh U.S. President).

Another fascinating thing about Adams is that after his presidency is inadequately over, he is then elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (I’m not sure if that has ever happened again to any President after he left the office).  He essentially serves in this capacity until his death, doing everything he can to serve his country with everything he has.  It’s during this stage of his life where he defends the would-be slaves of the Amistad after they revolt and kill the ship’s crew.  Again, this was another area that I wish could have been covered in more detail.