The Boys From Biloxi

 

The Boys From Biloxi – John Grisham

Since I started blogging/writing book reviews in 2013, I’ve read and reviewed 17 by John Grisham. That sounds like a lot, but it’s less than half of his literary output.  I’ve frequently commented in my reviews of his work that he writes too much and many of his stories don’t seem to get the refinement needed to make good books really great.  Many times, it seems as though he’s under the gun to get a project completed.  Even though his writing is always stellar, there have been too many times when it seems as though he’s metaphorically checking off a box so he can hurry up and move on to the next one.

This book is a refreshing change.  This book was excellent, and I would rank it among Grisham’s very best.  Since I read an e-version, it’s hard to judge the volume in comparison to most of his work, but this book seemed to be about 50% longer than his average output.  That’s a good thing when you’ve got a great story.  This book was packed.  If anyone wanted to make this into a movie, a movie wouldn’t do the story justice due to its density.  This book deserves a mini-series; perhaps even a season or two on Netflix.  Yes, it’s that good, and that detailed.

The story happens over a span of about 40 years.  We begin in Biloxi during World War II. It seems as though Biloxi is a pretty hefty military training base for soldiers during the war. Whenever you have soldiers far away from home and getting ready to fight, it’s not difficult for greedy capitalists to set up bars, gambling joints, and establishments featuring shady women performing illegal acts for lonely G.I.s.   It doesn’t take long for the unpleasant, unsavory criminals to move in and capitalize on such endeavors.  Pretty soon, the town of Biloxi is run by the “Dixie Mafia”.

The main focus in this novel is on two youths in the 1940s, their friendship, their love for baseball, and their families.  One of the families is sucked into the rabid criminal underworld.  The other family is passionate about law and order.  So even though these two boys are friends, their paths take them on radically different directions and, as you can imagine, eventually become hardened adversaries in such a sleazy town as Biloxi.  

The plot of this story is well told, but what makes this book so special is that Grisham manages to feature so much here.  We meet so many characters, witness so many atrocities, see so much litigation in the courtrooms, and are exposed to so much shady politics.  The reader never feels overwhelmed nor exhausted by the revolving door of events nor characters, which is quite the accomplishment.  Grisham is masterful in his juggling and delivery, and we’re engrossed with every aspect of the story.  There’s so much here, that once we get to, say, page 250, we may have forgotten a lot of the somewhat minor details that happened on page 100, yet this really isn’t a hindrance as Grisham does a great job to always remind the reader of the who’s, the when’s, and the why’s.

For those that were around and in the deep south in the late 1960s, they easily remember Hurricane Camile which, in many ways, was even more devastating than Katrina in 2005.   You can’t tell a 40-year old story about Biloxi from the 1940s to the 1980s without talking about Camile, yet Grisham uses this event masterfully within his story and the devastation caused by the hurricane serves as a catalyst in swaying the public’s minds and attitudes.  People suddenly realize that maybe there is more to life than the alluring elements of the underworld.

This is the book that I always wish that John Grisham would write every time.  Yes, he’s written several that are of equal caliber, and as I’ve mentioned here and in my other reviews, I’ve always felt that if he slowed down his output a bit and focused on, say, half of what he normally writes, he could make all of his books this strong.  This one should be remembered as one of his best of his best.

The Choice

 

The Choice – Bob Woodward

I still remember when this book was released.  I was working for an entertainment distributor and one of our tasks was supplying Wal-Mart with their books.  It must have been around July 1996 and the presidential election was still about four months away.  When I first saw this book as I opened up the shipping box, my initial thought was “I don’t get it.”   Why would anyone spend around $20 for a hardback book that seemed to be about the two frontrunners for the presidential race that would be over in four months?  Wouldn’t this book be obsolete once the election was over?  And, like every other presidential election, wasn’t there still a lot of story left to tell about “the choice” that would occur in the months leading up to Election Day?  No, I didn’t get it.

28 years later, I still feel kind of the same way.  I bought this book (heavily discounted of course) mainly because I have recently discovered how much I enjoy the writing of Bob Woodward, and I’m always interested in history; especially of the American variety.  There probably isn’t a better writer of the ins and outs of Washington politics than Bob Woodward.  Still, I maintain that for this book to be complete, it should have been written after the election.  It would have been much more rewarding.  I suppose, though, that book publishers focus more on profits than telling a complete (and sometimes) true story.  My guess is a high-level accountant realized that such a book, featuring a picture of Bill Clinton and Bob Dole meeting in the oval office, might generate some needed revenue to improve the current balance sheet; even with a few months still to go in the contest.

Woodward’s last book was about Bill Clinton’s tumultuous first year in office (“The Agenda”) and in some ways, this book picks up a bit where that one left off.  Two years after Bill Clinton was elected president, the honeymoon he had with the American voters was definitely over, and the acrimonious public showed their sentiments in the 1994 mid-term election with a stinging defeat for many of the Democratic incumbents.  Enter Newt Gingrich and company, and you have to wonder if Bill Clinton regretted his decision to ever run for the highest office in the land.

I would guess that about 70% of this book is devoted to the Republicans deciding who their nominee would be (with the focus on the obvious first choice, Bob Dole) and all of the backroom squabbling going on and clandestine handshakes being conducted.   The other 30% is about Bill Clinton, and how he must now reinvent himself with new messages to regain the trust of a skeptical electorate.

So the book succeeds where it sets out to do so.  Reading this book reminded me a bit of watching a season of the popular television show “The West Wing”.  We see all the wheeling and dealing in the back rooms, the campaign staffs for the candidates and how they always seem to be at odds with each other, and we get a glimpse into candidates who try yet eventually fail in their bids to achieve the top prize.  Throughout all of this, we almost see Bob Dole become the leader “by default”.  He never comes across as terribly appealing, yet he has money and his resume that puts him in the lead.  He often seems a bit confused, lost, and is frequently ill with a cold.  We always see his masses of employees trying to correct every aspect of his behavior and appearance.  It does take a special breed of person to want to put themselves through so much turmoil.   As mentioned earlier, we also get to read about Colin Powel, Steve Jobs, and Phil Gramm among others, as they all compete, or think about competing, for the top spot, yet they can’t compete with Bob Dole’s experience and money.

With Clinton, we read a lot about his inner circle as well, the focus is mainly the newly hired political strategist Dick Morris.  History has shown Morris as to being a somewhat sleazy underhanded character, but I would argue he deserves credit for getting Clinton back in favor in the public eye more than anyone else on the payroll. (Google “triangulation” to get an idea of what Morris’s strategy was.)

What’s really unfortunate, yet not really surprising, is that when we hear all of these strategies behind the scenes, the main sentiment is never “how to we help our citizens?” yet rather “what do we need to do to get elected?”   True, you can’t do the former without accomplishing the latter, but it is very easy to get a tad disgusted when really digesting exactly what is going on during this election, and pretty much every other election.  A good argument can be made that this isn’t really to fault of the candidates, yet the fault of the voters, but let’s not even begin to go there.

The biggest drawback, as I mentioned, is that this book basically “stops” before the story is finished.  Now, I think that at some point, a reissue of this book came out that did tell the remainder of the story.  If so, I would probably recommend that edition since Woodward is a solid writer, and I’m sure he doesn’t disappoint the reader as he conveys the facts.  Still, though, one can’t help but look at this original edition as a tad of a gyp and more of selfish money-grabbing endeavor.

The Eden Conspiracy

 

The Eden Conspiracy – Paul Wallis

In one of the later episodes of the acclaimed TV series “The West Wing”, we see a conversation between the current president, Jed Bartlett (Martin Sheen) and the front-runner for the office by the opposition, Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda).  They’re talking religion, and Vinick is being honest.  Any candidate for President of the U.S. needs strong convictions of the faith to be successful, yet Vinick confesses his doubts to Bartlett.  Vinick tells Bartlett that when he read the Bible, there was too much famine, injustice, slavery, and conquering of nations for him to come away with any peace.   Bartlett calmly, yet a bit hesitantly, replies “I’ve always been more of a NEW Testament man, myself.”

Nothing more is expounded upon in this episode, but most of us get it.  The New Testament in our Bible is pretty straightforward, yet if we’re honest, the Old Testament is awfully mysterious in places and many apologists have performed masses of hermeneutical gymnastics to try to make sense of a lot of baffling passages throughout the many books. One need to remember that, tragically, we once justified chattel slavery in the United States because it was “permitted in the Old Testament”.

Author Paul Wallis is a Christian, and he served for many years as a church officiate.  Like the fictitious Jed Bartlett, you get the impression he’s a New Testament man as well.  This book is an attempt to make sense of the Old Testament, and his conclusions are rather freaky and a bit far-fetched.  In short, his belief is that the “God” of the Old Testament is not the same God who Jesus refers to as his heavenly father.  I’m no expert, but I believe this sentiment isn’t too far removed from Gnosticism; which holds that there are essentially two Gods.  The followers of Gnosticism suggest the Old Testament God was not good, and the New Testament Good WAS good, and Jesus had secret teachings to help followers overpower the bad one and connect with the good one.

Wallis, though, seems to suggest that the Old Testament God (Gods, actually) were aliens.

Now, this is where my skepticism kicks in.  Wallis seems sincere and well-educated, and there’s no possible way that someone such as myself with limited intelligence around this subject matter can hold my own in an argument.  What I have learned, though, is that the world (through channels like YouTube) has an awful lot of sincere people that have managed to convince the masses of some pretty bizarre things.  All this to say, I came away from this book a lot more entertained than I was informed.  I’ll let the experts devote their knowledge towards said subjects.

This book was a very light read (and free on Kindle Unlimited).  There were many times when Wallis would set up each chapter with a rather long analogy or introduction that seemed a bit unnecessary.  You almost felt he was trying to pad the book.  He’s also had several other “Eden” books (without looking, I’m guessing 4 or 5) and I’d be willing to bet he talks about a lot of the same information in each book.

As bizarre as the author’s thesis goes, I didn’t come away thinking he was some sort of highly-educated quack.  His ideas did allow me to briefly suspend by disbelief, and as I’ve mentioned, the Old Testament has an awful lot of unanswered questions.  So my conclusion is that maybe he really is onto something, and I’m sure there have been others that have speculated some not-so-normal ideas about how the Earth started and where the population originated.  For someone such as myself who is rooted in the faith, it is somewhat comforting to share many of the author’s beliefs about Jesus and God, so that does take a bit of the sting out of the far-out speculations about how the Old Testament originated.

This is a book that, for me anyway, brings up a lot more questions than it does answers, but that isn’t always a bad thing.  In fact, I would argue that the more people know, this translates to the greater the unknown actually is.  I was entertained and I’ve learned not to discount anything that might be different than what the mainstream actually believes.