Believe it or not, this is a book review (see later), but first a bit of history.  I’m not into fancy GUIs and sliding icons.  The work in my old day job required mostly UNIX workstations.  There was a GUI, but it was primitive compared to today’s Apple and smart phone GUIs.  No sliding icons or touch screens, but there was enough firepower to handle terabytes of data.  That’s science, or, at least, the dirty kind where you’re given lots of data and you’re supposed to make sense of it.

I hate to admit it, but I don’t have a smart phone.  My fingers are too big and I’m too much of a touch typist to use the primitive keyboards they contain (I suppose touch typing will disappear as people’s thumbs grow longer in future generations).  In fact, touch typing and speed reading were the most useful skills I learned in high school, discounting the ability to run fast when a gang member whipped out his switchblade, or resisting the temptation of getting on the back of that Harley when the driver was stoned (I couldn’t afford my own–Harley, that is).

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[Note from Steve: This is the third post in preparation for Tom Pope’s and my Socratic dialogue on writing thrillers.  It’s more about reading, though, not writing.  The title is a bow to Pete Seeger.]

I read and review in many genres, including non-fiction.  Every author should be an avid reviewer.  And, if you want to give something back to the community of readers and writers, honest reviews help those readers who are looking for new and interesting books to read.  Of course, they help writers too, but I’m pleased when I receive that note from Amazon saying that one of my reviews helped a reader make a reading decision.  That’s my reward.  (I never charge for reviews because money can’t beat that kind of reward.)

Many writers don’t share my views on reviews!  Some will say that they’re busy writing and that they can’t take time to write a review.  Some will say that they have a policy of not reviewing other authors because they’re afraid of being accused of practicing review exchanges, aka a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours review policy.  Whatever the reasons, I respectfully disagree with them.  Authors should write reviews.  They can do them on review websites or places like Amazon and Smashwords and avoid the review exchange criticism (many accept clever pseudonyms for their reviewers).  They can be technical without being erudite.  And their reviews will be useful to the reading public.  Above all, writing reviews shows that the author is also a reader and not just a person interested in selling books.

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Even in this age when “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is our foreign policy mantra (maybe it always was?) and Putin seems hell bent on returning everyone to the Cold War (or World War III?), Pakistan lurks as not a true friend and probably a die-hard enemy.  I’ve said this many times before in these blog posts, but let me list the reasons yet again.  You will see that I’m not just being paranoid.  This country takes our aid and military help and basically uses it against us.  Its duplicitous actions have a long history.

The most obvious and egregious sin of the Pakistani government (being Muslims, they should understand sin, right?) is how they support both al Qaeda and the Taliban.  In an article in the Sunday (March 23) NY Times magazine, adapted from The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (scheduled to be released next month) and titled “What Pakistan Knew About bin Laden,” author and reporter Carlotta Gall presents damning evidence that ISI, the nefarious Pakistani intelligence agency, had a desk whose occupant was bin Laden’s handler.  This confirms suspicions I’ve always had.  No wonder bin Laden felt comfortable living only a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s top military academy.

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[I might seem remiss with my lack of movie reviews, but 2013 wasn’t all that memorable for great movies beyond those already reviewed, in spite of the hype from Hollywood.  My attendance has diminished to, due to bad movies, ticket prices, too many trailers, and commercials from TV that have kept me away.  But here are a few reviews.]

#6: Blue Jasmine.  Blanchett seemed all too real in this flick while she was two-dimensional and boring in the next.  The rest of the acting is boring, the plot is boring, and the dialogue is stilted and boring.  In other words, the screenplay should be used to paper the bottom of your birdcage.  If you go to the movies to be depressed, though, this is your movie.  Otherwise, forget about it.  Unlike Dallas Buyers’ Club, there are no real lessons to be learned here—well, maybe that Woody Allen likes to beat us over the head with his New York City angst.  The comedic Woody of the old days was much better.  I can only recommend this one to the masochists among you.

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Teachers’ unions and evaluations, Common Core, SAT reform, charter schools…education has been making the news lately.  In a week-ago Sunday’s NY Times magazine, there’s an article about Common Core champion and SAT reformer Dave Coleman.  He calls for data-based reform, a strange clarion call from a non-scientist who admittedly studied things generally considered impractical.  For the needed overhaul of our educational system, what works?  What doesn’t?  Not only here, but outside the U.S.  Coleman basically ignores the latter, by the way, committing the usual Ptolemaic sin of thinking that the U.S. is the center of the educational universe and looking for the epicycles to fix it within the same system.

The balance for the U.S. is negative, of course; the balance for everywhere else isn’t.  Our graduates rank far below many countries we compete with.  Is this a bad thing?  Is it possible that we’re right and the rest of the world is wrong?  Maybe the rest of the world is producing unthinking students who can’t really create new ideas or risk losing their positive human qualities.  In fact, is it even possible to compete in a cutthroat capitalistic world and still maintain our humanity?  These are the big questions the Times article ignores.  Maybe dumbing down the SAT is just what’s required to make our students happier and more human.

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Item: Putin’s ventriloquist dummy.  Foreign Minister Lavrov uttered these words in Paris: “We don’t have a common vision of the situation.”  You think!  He was analyzing the difference between Putin’s, and ergo the official, viewpoint of the Ukrainian situation and the point-of-view of the rest of the world.  Some idiots are saying that a vote in Crimea for independence is just the expression of democratic choice.  What BS!  It’s the typical strong-arm approach to neocolonialism in the world, the desire for some countries (in this case, Russia) to steal territory (or even justify a complete invasion?) at the cost of a weaker one.  It’s how Hitler took Poland and Austria (the former sits right next to the Ukraine, by the way).  It’s how we justified taking Texas, Panama, and the Phillippines.  It’s how the Chinese justified taking Tibet.  The fact that all the bully countries in the world have done it or are doing it doesn’t make it right.

Moreover, Putin is giving the West his middle finger and mooning everything about international treaties…and the stupid Russians love it!  Crimea voted to secede.  Welcome back, Soviet Union!  Never mind that the Ukraine gave all those nukes back to Russia on the condition that Russia would always respect Ukrainian independence.  Clearly you can’t trust Putin and you can’t trust Russians, who yearn for the old days of Stalin when the Soviet Union was feared round the world.  Are we heading for WWIII?  Possibly.  I sure wish now that the Ukraine had kept some of those nukes.  It would have leveled the playing field a lot and possibly kept any conflagration local.  Apparently that’s the only thing the Soviet Union—oops! I mean Russia—respects, good old-fashioned détente.  Now gay-bashing ex-KGB dictator Volodya holds all the cards and the Ukraine is out of chips.

Item: Go Everywhere!  While the stereotypical Ugly American still exists and is often enforced by U.S. tourists brandishing their ignorance overseas, Americans who spend time living in foreign countries often develop different perspectives that provincial stay-at-homes are lacking.  Nicholas Kristoff in the op-ed “Go West, Young People! And East!” in last Sunday’s NY Times Review suggests that every college in America should require students to study abroad as part of their education.  (This is something I should have mentioned in my post “Education Overhaul” that will appear tomorrow.)  In fact, I’d go further than what Kristoff said.  I’d also reinstate the draft but have the option of soldiering AND community service, either in the U.S. or overseas.  College study abroad tends to be prohibitively expensive.  Unless colleges and universities become all public here and overseas semesters are competitive and government-funded, that’s not a viable option for already cash-strapped parents.

Item: Speaking of living abroad….  The Irish have been doing it for years.  First, there was the forced splitting up and resettling of Irish families engineered by Cromwell—the Irish haven’t been treated nice by the Brits long before the Troubles.  Then there was the English indifference to the potato famine that made Irish flee elsewhere…or starve.  Then there were the Troubles.  These are three major reasons for Irish leaving their homeland, but it’s been going on forever, at least since Irish monks saved Western civilization by copying and protecting all those ancient manuscripts from the great Western cultures.  Of course, you’ll find Irish in the U.S., from gangsters (remember Goodfellas, based on a true story) to football players (e.g. the fighting Irish of Notre Dame) to cardinals and other heavyweights in the Catholic Church (often literally), but also in the Caribbean and Latin America, not to mention in the Far East and the rest of the world.  One of my favorites is Bernardo O’Higgins who, along with Jose de San Martin, is the father of Chilean independence accused of becoming a benevolent dictator (often by the Church) and kicked out of Chile by a coup d’etat.

Item: Knowledgeable about his roots?  One person who is confused about his Irish heritage is GOP budget wonk and mean-kid wannabe-leader of the Tea Party, the most dishonorable Paul Ryan.  Timothy Egan in the op-ed “Paul Ryan’s Irish Amnesia,” in last Sunday’s NY Times Review, analyzes Ryan’s historical hypocrisy:  “…can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify an indifference to an epic tragedy.”  Egan and Sons is one of my favorite Irish pubs in Montclair NJ, but this Egan (presumably no relation, except that he’s Irish) is talking about GOP stinginess, led by Ryan, in refusing to continue federal unemployment, cutting food stamps, attacking any raise in the minimum wage, and voting against Obamacare (how many times?  Was it 40?)  Maybe he’s really ashamed of his humble origins.  If so, why not shut up about it?  Happy St. Paddy’s Day, Mr. Ryan!

Item: Tooting My Own Horn.  Here’s a press release about my new book Aristocrats and Assassins.  Klesc’s New Book Journal is useful for this—Raymond posts to other sites besides his own.  And it’s all free, bless his soul!

And so it goes…Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

[Second post leading up to Tom Pope and my Socratic to-and-fro about writing the thriller.  In “The Eightfold Way” I listed eight things a writer should NOT do.  Here I take the tack of analyzing what he or she can do.]

Given my sales and/or my number of readers (easy to measure the first, hard the second), any secrets I might reveal about the writing business are probably suspect.  Caveat emptor: The word “secrets” implies that there are magical actions you can take to become a successful writer—in other words, that there exist sufficient conditions for success.  (Let’s agree to measure “success” as a book that has had N readers since its release, where you pick N > 1000 to fit your own criteria.)  I hate to say it.  There are NO SECRETS—there are no sufficient conditions.  There seem to be necessary ones, but some outliers often don’t satisfy many of those either.

Take the Fifty Shades trilogy.  It doesn’t meet any of the necessary conditions I outline below, yet you can’t argue that it wasn’t successful.  Call it prurient interest among readers; a rebirth of sloppily written, commercial erotica; a naïve, 19^th century portrayal of S&M; or something else—but the books fail to satisfy so many necessary conditions that they leave me shaking my head in wonder.  If you ever needed proof that having a successful book is akin to winning the lottery, this is it.  While many authors including me are turned off by this badly written drivel, readers read it—maybe not you, but plenty of others.  Each book in that trilogy is what I call an outlier.  Authors in general shouldn’t worry about them—they’re statistically improbable events.  You should worry about the necessary conditions, unlike the author of that trilogy, who didn’t, but still won the lottery.  She won the big prize.  Writers in general should be content to go after the smaller prizes in the lottery—as many times as possible.

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(David Freed, Voodoo Ridge, The Permanent Press, 2014, 978-1-57962-355-5)

This novel is not your classic mystery.  The days of Conan Doyle and Christie are long past.  The modern reader of mysteries expects more grit, suspense, and thrills mixed in with the classic elements of who-done-its or police procedurals—discovering the perp through possibly multiple crimes and many misdirects.  Author Freed has delivered, and it’s a fun read.

Yet the main character, Cordell Logan, an ex-special ops fellow, is more introspective and restrained here, in spite of his action-packed past.  His mellowing is helped along by first forgiving an ex-wife, falling in love with her again, and then desiring to remarry in order to participate in his unborn offspring’s future life.  That perhaps sounds more like a romantic mystery, but a trip to Lake Tahoe to marry takes a turn for the worse.  As the mystery unfolds, Logan is caught between his dark desires for revenge and the precepts of his new Buddhist religion.

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Volodya has a deranged, nostalgic view of past Russian might.  He yearns for a return to “the good old days” and seems hell bent on trying to recreate them.  While the rest of the world knows Communism with a capital C, aka the Kremlin mafia, failed completely and put the Russian bear on a stringent diet of becoming just another poor Third World oil country, this old KGB psychotic murderer lives in the past.  Only there can he flee from his own mortality; only there can he delude himself into thinking that Russia can return to greatness.

The irony is that Putin lives in the past but ignores any obligations Russia incurred there.  If I remember correctly, the Ukraine turned over all the nukes found within the borders of the new country to Russia and allowed the latter country to maintain its bases there on the condition that Russia would always respect Ukrainian independence.  I guess Volodya figures he didn’t sign that agreement, so he doesn’t have to adhere to it.  He pretty much does what he wants to do—he’s used to getting his own way as Grand Poobah of the Shirtless Universe.  Moreover, he’s as slippery as the oil and perspiration on those abs, and also the Russian chessmaster of doublespeak.  He lives so much in the past he thinks 2014 is 1984, although he probably never read the book—he had all the ideas he needed from the KGB.

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#354: Aristocrats and Assassins.  The release is a wee bit delayed, but it will happen real soon now.  Someone said that good things are worth waiting for.  As I age, I have more problems with that adage—my patience threshold is worse than before.  But I’ve always been impatient.  I had my entire undergraduate study planned halfway through high school.  The summer I turned thirteen, I wrote my first novel, but I figured even then I would starve as a writer, so I became a scientist, and, PATIENTLY, postponed my writing career.  So, have patience with me, dear reader—your ebook tour of Western Europe with Detectives Chen and Castilblanco will soon be available!

#355: A thorough rewrite.  My next release will probably be the complete rewrite of Solders of God.  It’s only in pbook format right now, my only novel not in ebook format.  The rewrite will be a second edition.  You will recall that it’s a bridge between “The Clones and Mutants Series” and “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” so it plays an important role in my opus.

#356: Other ebooks in the works.  After Soldiers of God, there are several other novels on my to-do list for this year.  I have two stand-alones in progress (i.e. not part of the timeline of my usual fictional universe) and another Chen and Castilblanco mystery (see the excerpt at the end of Aristocrats and Assassins).  Phew!  It’s going to be a busy year.  No guarantees on release dates.  (Yes, I often have parallel projects going on.  I learned to do this as a scientist.  I’ve found it keeps the mind agile, the writing fresh, and facilitates content editing.)

#357: Donating ebooks to libraries.  I’ve been trying to do it for a while.  Joe Konrath is starting up something that looks like a good idea where a library can pay for one ebook and then lend it out multiple times without further charges to them or their borrowers.  Sounds like a way to donate if there’s a mechanism so I can pay for Joe’s one-time charge.  They’re still working out details, though, so stay tuned.  [Apparently, they’re not answering queries, by the way—maybe because I’m not a library?  You’d think they’s want to get both libraries and ebook authors on board…sigh….]

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