Collected Miscellany

Priscilla Royal’s fourth book, Justice for the Damned, is another fine example of historical mystery writing.  She continues to develop increasingly better plots and stronger characters.

Publishers Weekly describes the book as follows:

Prioress Eleanor of Tyndal is recuperating from a life-threatening illness at the start of Royal’s riveting fourth medieval mystery (after 2006’s Sorrow Without End), but she brightens at an assignment from her aunt Beatrice, director of novices at Amesbury Priory, who asks her to investigate a ghost people claim has begun haunting Amesbury. When a local man is found beheaded, Eleanor realizes she’s dealing with a human killer, not an otherworldly spirit. Meanwhile, a thief may be trying to steal a valuable illuminated manuscript from the priory. In a fascinating subplot, a handsome young monk, Thomas, hunts down the manuscript thief. Though committed to celibacy, 22-year-old Eleanor develops quite a crush on Thomas, who struggles with homosexual longings. The author subtly treats the erotic charge surrounding Eleanor and Thomas while shedding light on 13th-century understandings of sexuality. Royal draws together the murder, the manuscript and the ghost in an unexpected conclusion.

Not only does Royal describe the sexual mores of this time period, but she also does an excellent job of describing the monastic life in Medieval England.  Although monks and nuns were called to a life of serving God, many of them could not keep the world from influencing them.  Amesbury Priory has had problems in the past with monks going over the Priory wall to drink and whore.  Royal captures the reactions of the townspeople to these slips in morals.

In addition, Royal describes in the story how the power of the Church was much greater then.  For example, the Church was given investigative and police powers not only on Church grounds, but also in the realm of the supernatural.  Thus, Eleanor and Thomas were given authority to look into the mystery of ghost sightings around the Amesbury Priory.

As Royal describes, life was not easy and often short.  As in this book, many people lost loved ones when they were relatively young.  Disease and the harsh living conditions took many to an early grave.   Royal also highlights the marital conditions of the time – women were considered to be the property of their husbands who had every right to beat their wives.  One of the women in the book – although beaten by her husband – continued to support her husband’s wishes even after he had died.  Royal captures this sad state of affairs perfectly.

Finally, Royal’s plots continue to get more interesting with each book.  She throws in unexpected twists and turns – such as the murder of a monk halfway through the book.  She keeps you guessing about who the murderer is until the very end.  In addition, she always adds unknown reasons for why the killer does what he or she does.

I have a number of interesting books to talk about, including fiction and non, and I hope to return to regular posting now that the holidays are behind us.  In preparation for my review and discussion of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, however, I wanted to offer links to other reviews and interviews.

So here they are:

The New York Times:

“Liberal Fascism” is less an exposé of left-wing hypocrisy than a chance to exact political revenge. Yet the title of his book aside, what distinguishes Goldberg from the Sean Hannitys and Michael Savages is a witty intelligence that deals in ideas as well as insults — no mean feat in the nasty world of the culture wars.

The New York Sun:

Now, from the conservative side, Jonah Goldberg — who is rightfully fed up with the left’s regularly and somewhat indiscriminately calling conservatives fascist — turns the tide by addressing the issue head on, in “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” (Doubleday, 467 pages, $27.95). Not only is it a slander to yell fascist at the right; Mr. Goldberg presents a strong and compelling case that the very idea of fascism emanated from the ranks of liberalism. As he argues, contemporary liberalism descended from the ranks of 20th-century progressivism, and “shares intellectual roots with European fascism.”

When Mr. Goldberg uses the term “liberal fascism,” he is not offering a right-wing version of the left’s smears. He knows it is a loaded term. What he is talking about is the historical idea of fascism: a corporatist and statist social structure that creates a deep reliance of its subjects on the government and engenders a sense of community and purpose. In American politics, this tendency toward statism has always been much more at home on the left than on the right.

Christianity Today:

While the Left will claim that Goldberg thinks that everyone he disagrees with–from FDR to Hillary Clinton–is a fascist, this is not true. Progressives, he notes, are not building concentration camps. Hillary Clinton wanting universal health care is not Crystal Night. But by reexamining the history of fascism and its pathologies, Goldberg shows where the fascist impulse–to smash the past, accumulate power, and create utopia–is most likely to resurface.

Blogger Vox Day has both a review:

Although the left will surely react to it with its customary hysteria, “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” is not a polemic in the style made fashionable by Ann Coulter and Al Franken. Goldberg’s restraint in avoiding cheap shots and resolutely sticking to the documented facts of his subject matter is remarkable, especially for those familiar with his political columns and Corner posts at National Review Online.

Unlike most of his maleducated peers in the media, Goldberg rejects the historically ignorant view still dominant in American pop culture that perceives Fascism and National Socialism as right-wing political phenomena. Goldberg correctly identifies both revolutionary ideologies as being inherently of the political left; more importantly, he provides substantial documentary evidence proving his case beyond any rational doubt. And in doing so, he exposes six decades of intellectual fraud committed by American academics, 60 years of university professors averting their eyes from the historical realities and teaching the literal Stalinist line to multiple generations of college students. This is a book that not only needed to be written; it is one that is long overdue.

And an interview.

The War of Wars: The Epic Struggle Between Britain and France: 1789-1815 by Robert Harvey is a good read about the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars at more than 700 pages.  Although this seems to be a lot of pages, consider how much occurred during this time period – the overthrow of the French monarchy and wars across continental Europe and across the world’s oceans.

Here is a brief synopsis of the book from the publisher’s website:

At the turn of the 18th century the greatest nations in Europe offered history two distinct ideals that would shape the new century: England was a democratic, constitutional monarchy; while France had suffered the cataclysm of Revolution that ripped the absolute king from the throne and replaced him with the mob.  Out of this maelstrom emerged a military leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, commander of the revolutionary army, who would conquer Italy and Egypt before returning to Paris to proclaim himself emperor.

 

As Napoleon gained power in France, the world stood on the brink of total war.  By 1805 the general was making plans to cross the channel and invade England.  The subsequent drama reaches from the frozen plains surrounding Moscow to the Caribbean waters, from the debating chamber of the Parliament to the muddy fields of Waterloo.  The Great French Wars (1793-1815) can truly be called the first global war; it was also the first conflict driven by industrial might.  As Napoleon’s revolutionary guard ravaged Europe, men like the Duke of Wellington, Horatio Nelson, as well as their allies, Duke Charles of Hapsburg and Gebhard von Blucher stopped his complete domination of the continent.

Continue reading →

Charles O’Brien’s fourth book in the Anne Cartier series, Lethal Beauty, is another entertaining and twisting mystery with Anne Cartier and her husband col. Paul de Saint-Martin.  Although not as strong as the first three books, the book is worth the read.

Here is a brief synopsis of the book from the book’s website:

The action begins in August 1787 and takes place chiefly in and around the Louvre at the time of the biennial Salon, an exhibition of the best of French painting and sculpture of the past two years. Home of the royal family for centuries, the Louvre now provided quarters for artists and their students, royal pensioners, the royal printing office, and various royal academies. Lust, greed, pride and the other deadly sins flourished there as elsewhere in Paris. The story opens with the accidental (?) death of a countess, followed by the defacing of her portrait, and the murder of a painter. Anne Cartier and her husband, Colonel Paul de Saint-Martin attempt to unravel an increasingly complex mystery, at some risk to themselves.

I did like the plot for this book.  O’Brien keeps you guessing on who the suspects are in the murders.  He switches your suspicions frequently.  However, I felt that the involvement of one of the characters was a little too coincidental – I think O’Brien could have tied the story together better.

The character development is not up-to-par with the previous books.  I understand that O’Brien does not want to give away the murderer with a more detailed development, but he could have done more development with a few of the characters.  I can only hope he improves upon that in his next book.

I still think this book is worth a look.

The recent review of J. Michael Straczynski’s script for the movie version of
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars (apparently due out next year) is the impetus for today’s review:
presuming that the review is accurate, the movie is going to be more than a
little controversial, thus suggesting that a review of the original book may be
in order.

If the lycanthrope was the preeminent monster of the
medieval period, the vampire that of the Victorian era, and the bug-eyed monster
that of the 1950s, then the zombie is almost certainly the favored boogeyman of
the modern era.  It’s not all that
unsurprising to understand why.  The
concept of the zombie – and here I explicitly speak of the shambling, undead
human moaning about brains, not the Caribbean metaphor for alienation from the
community – lends itself well to our tastes in horror (which are not so much gruesome as they are exceptionally visual), while permitting a surprising
amount of social commentary to presented alongside the undead hordes.  Every generation finds a suitable monster to
build its scary stories around; the zombie is ours.

World War Z by Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks, for those
inclined to trivia) is, in its way, a sequel to his seminal The Zombie Survival Guide (ZSG), a book which is probably on the bookshelves of every fan of the
genre.  The conceit of the ZSG is
that zombies are real, and not overtly supernatural; that their tactics,
advantages, and disadvantages are both knowable and uniform; and that there can
be workable, practical methods of surviving a zombie outbreak.  The bulk of the ZSG is dedicated to
discussing what tactics work, what tactics don’t, and what tactics will just
get everyone killed, with not a hint that the subject matter is anything except
completely real.  While it is not
necessary to have read the Zombie Survival Guide in order to enjoy World War Z,
the latter uses the zombie described in the former for its template, and the
ZSG is an entertaining book in its own right.

World War Z is presented in the form of after-the-fact
personal interviews with survivors of a world-wide zombie outbreak (one which
was as apocalyptic as possible without actually destroying either human
civilization, or even the human race itself). 
The story is traced through the first cases in China, followed by the
slow spread of the undead through Western Asia and South America, then Western
Europe and America; step by step, the reader is led through an increasingly
nightmarish scenario brought about in equal parts by bad planning, wrongheaded
assumptions, shortsighted thinking, and a simple unwillingness to accept that
the dead could be walking around, hungry for human flesh.  The middle part of the book explores the
permutations of the “Great Panic” (somewhat a self-explanatory
description of the almost-collapse of civilization) and surviving governments’
retreats to defensible territory; obviously, given the aforementioned conceit
it shouldn’t be surprising that the last part of the book is dedicated to how
humanity finally was able to reclaim the Earth from the zombies.

Continue reading →

The recent review of J. Michael Straczynski’s script for the movie version of
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars (apparently due out next year) is the impetus for today’s review:
presuming that the review is accurate, the movie is going to be more than a
little controversial, thus suggesting that a review of the original book may be
in order.

If the lycanthrope was the preeminent monster of the
medieval period, the vampire that of the Victorian era, and the bug-eyed monster
that of the 1950s, then the zombie is almost certainly the favored boogeyman of
the modern era.  It’s not all that
unsurprising to understand why.  The
concept of the zombie – and here I explicitly speak of the shambling, undead
human moaning about brains, not the Caribbean metaphor for alienation from the
community – lends itself well to our tastes in horror (which are not so much gruesome as they are exceptionally visual), while permitting a surprising
amount of social commentary to presented alongside the undead hordes.  Every generation finds a suitable monster to
build its scary stories around; the zombie is ours.

World War Z by Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks, for those
inclined to trivia) is, in its way, a sequel to his seminal The Zombie Survival Guide (ZSG), a book which is probably on the bookshelves of every fan of the
genre.  The conceit of the ZSG is
that zombies are real, and not overtly supernatural; that their tactics,
advantages, and disadvantages are both knowable and uniform; and that there can
be workable, practical methods of surviving a zombie outbreak.  The bulk of the ZSG is dedicated to
discussing what tactics work, what tactics don’t, and what tactics will just
get everyone killed, with not a hint that the subject matter is anything except
completely real.  While it is not
necessary to have read the Zombie Survival Guide in order to enjoy World War Z,
the latter uses the zombie described in the former for its template, and the
ZSG is an entertaining book in its own right.

World War Z is presented in the form of after-the-fact
personal interviews with survivors of a world-wide zombie outbreak (one which
was as apocalyptic as possible without actually destroying either human
civilization, or even the human race itself). 
The story is traced through the first cases in China, followed by the
slow spread of the undead through Western Asia and South America, then Western
Europe and America; step by step, the reader is led through an increasingly
nightmarish scenario brought about in equal parts by bad planning, wrongheaded
assumptions, shortsighted thinking, and a simple unwillingness to accept that
the dead could be walking around, hungry for human flesh.  The middle part of the book explores the
permutations of the “Great Panic” (somewhat a self-explanatory
description of the almost-collapse of civilization) and surviving governments’
retreats to defensible territory; obviously, given the aforementioned conceit
it shouldn’t be surprising that the last part of the book is dedicated to how
humanity finally was able to reclaim the Earth from the zombies.

Continue reading →