“Inspector Ravenscroft” Series. Kerry Tombs, author (10 novels from Joffe Books). Many of my readers know that my “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels (see below)  have progressively become more in the British style as the series progresses. Maybe not so well known are my short fiction collections of tales written in the British style. (There are four: The first three are titled Sleuthing, British-Style and the fourth is simply titled The Detectives. See the “Books & Short Stories” web page.) I’ve binge-read entire series of British-style mystery novels as well and have become quite the fan.

Consider all that an homage to Agatha Christie whose seminal novels in the genre entertained me for many hours as a young reader, which led me to wonder why she never put her two famous sleuths, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, together in a novel. (I rectified that. Esther Brookstone is a twenty-first century and more agile version of Miss Marple while paramour and later husband, Bastiann van Coevorden, looks like David Suchet in his role of Poirot.)

One thing that makes this Ravenscroft series unique is that the novels are set in nineteenth century England, in contrast to my twenty-first century Brookstone novels; to be specific, this is the Victorian era. Let me warn you: If you’re expecting romantic nostalgia, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Instead, you’ll see the British Empire and the world for what it truly was back then—gritty, often deadly, and with crime occurring at all levels of society. Most of the series takes place in England, but one novel has Ravenscroft traveling to New York City, so the reader can see the international aspects of the squalor hiding below the surface of genteel societies of the time.

The main character, Detective Inspector Ravenscroft, comes from Whitechapel in London, an area of poverty and crime, leaving his post at Scotland Yard just before the series of murders committed by Jack the Ripper, to become a gifted and respected crime-solver in Worcestershire.

In his very first case, he partners with Constable Crabb, who accompanies and aids him throughout many cases. He also meets his future wife, Lucy; she even participates in a few cases later in the series.

I hesitantly approached this series initially—I’m not nostalgic for nineteenth-century life. But the series grew on me. I sailed through the novels, the epitome of entertaining and clever mystery “page-turners.” I felt a great sense of loss whin I finished the tenth and last novel, appropriately titled Ravenscroft’s Last Case. I hope that one day I might be able to thank the author for the many hours of reading entertainment provided.

And readers of this blog, please note the name of the publishing house that I also profusely thank: I’d wager that half the British-style mystery novels I’ve binge-read are from that publisher. They’ve been consistently good. (You will find a list of British-style mystery novels, many in a series, that I’ve updated with successive publications of Sleuthing, British-Style. If I offer another collection, I will surely add the Ravenscroft series to that list!)

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More binge-reading? You have the opportunity to do just that with the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. Follow Esther’s many dangerous adventures in these eight novels (three are pictured), often driven by her desire to find justice for innocent victims and the exploited, obsessions often putting herself and her Dutchman, Bastiann van Coevorden, in peril. The two are twenty-first century versions of Christie’s Marple and Poirot, with Esther a bit more active and agile than the former and Bastiann just as cerebral but less pretentious than the latter. In Rembrandt’s Angel, Esther pursues a painting stolen by the Nazis in World War II; in Son of Thunder, she’s in a race to find the tomb of St. John the Divine; in Death on the Danube, she helps Bastiann run a murder investigation on their honeymoon cruise; in Palettes, Patriots, and Pillocks, she defends an American artist; in Leonardo and the Quantum Code, she struggles to protect an old friend whose code for quantum computers is pursued by three major powers; Defanging the Red Dragon is about China’s desire to steal software and hardware upgrades for nuclear subs; Intolerance begins a fight against right-wing terrorists whose mission is to purge migrants and refugees from Britain; and The Klimt Connection continues that battle against extremists after the couple’s flat is bombed. To binge-read this exciting series, you’ll have to do a bit of sleuthing of your own: The ebook versions are available wherever quality ebooks are solid (the link above takes you to them on B&N), but Dragon and Intolerance are only available in PDF format as free downloads on this website. The first three novels (pictured) have print versions brought to you by Penmore Press and Carrick Publishing. Numbers four, five, and eight are published by Draft2Digital and not available on Amazon. Enjoy!

At PubProgressive.com tomorrow: “Hey, Russians, who’s gonna pay for Putin’s War?”

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump. G. B. Trudeau, author (Universal Uclick). Relatives and friends know that I’m an avid reader and that my reading tastes range far and wide. This little gem was a recent gift. Like Adam Schiff’s Midnight in Washington, my review of this book is appropriate for both my writer’s blog and my political blog. So here goes!

Mr. Schiff’s book probed more serious matters (emphasis on Trump’s first impeachment) associated with the psychotic sociopath’ (a spot-on diagnosis from twenty+ mental health professionals, including his niece) and wannabe dictator and admirer of Vladimir Putin, Donald J. Trump, aka “The Donald,” Il Duce, and “f&%$ing moron.” The last quote is from ex-SecState Tillerson and provides a nice segue to Trudeau’s lampooning of the idiot who tortured sane people in the US and around the world for four years as POTUS until Mr. Biden pommeled him in the 2020 election. (Yes, it was a pommeling!)

One can learn a lot from reading (or should—Trump never does; he didn’t even read his national security briefings). And Trudeau’s cartoons are often such bold and profound lessons that many right-wing leaning newspapers place them on the editorial page, if they publish them at all. The cartoons speak truth to power and the Goebbels-like schlock the Good Ole Piranhas bombard us with almost every day.

I’ve always been fond of cartoons and comics. I learned to read and write somewhere around three-years-old by trying to design my own comic books. I needed to know what to put in those balloons! (Instead, I go after Trump, Putin, Xi, and all their ilk in words.) I never learned to draw very well—my father was the artist—but I’ve always admired those who can do everything, both draw the characters and fill in the balloons! Garry Trudeau is a genius for doing just that.

In this cartoon collection covering thirty years of the narcissistic conman’s life, I learned that I’d missed some great political satire during my sojourn in Colombia. I could argue that reading Gabo in Spanish might be more edifying—his composite of several Latin American dictators in Autumn of the Patriarch (Otoño del Patriarca) nicely covers Trump and his ilk as well, except that Trump didn’t invade a country like Putin and hasn’t poached an enemy’s head and served it to guests like Gabo’s composite dictator…yet. (He has threatened to walk down NYC’s Fifth Avenue, though, and shoot someone.)

I learned that Trump has been a butthead for a long time, mostly exploiting workers and evicting renters in the tristate area (for his followers, the “marching morons,” as described by C. M. Kornbluth in his famous sci-f novella, the tristate area is Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, those awful “blue states” he and you hate so much). In the process, he blew through $30 million his psycho daddy gave him, had several bankruptcies, and wrote the Art of the Deal (or his ghostwriter did?), as if those obvious failures qualified him as a business genius. (At least Putin, whom Trump greatly admires, earned his money the old-fashioned, autocratic way—by putting in the work to steal a country.)

As a historical document, Trudeau’s collection belongs in every serious university’s political science and business departments’ reference list. My only critique? Garry should branch out and cover Kim, Putin, and Xi. After all, Trump wants to be like them, a president-for-life so he can suppress and oppress all opposition to him and make Trudeau disappear. Let’s not give Il Duce that chance in 2024. (I wonder if Trump is such a moron—or is it just approaching senility?—that he confuses Garry with Justin. No matter. He hates them both.)

Even though we often laugh at the chaos of American democracy (that’s healthier than crying), it’s worth saving it from the destruction that Trump and his cronies want to happen as their march toward fascism continues on.

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Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on my “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Leonardo and the Quantum Code. Who gets the new code for quantum computers based on ideas in a recently discovered Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook? Surprise, surprise! Autocrats are up to their dirty tricks here—and maybe even the US?—and they send spies and assassins to steal the technology. One of Esther’s brilliant old friends from her Oxford days has created the code. In the background, another bad player, who’s always interested in new technology, lurks as well. Can Esther and Bastiann protect her old friend? Find out here. This novel is available wherever quality ebooks are sold by reliable ebook dealers (that excludes Amazon).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. Adam Schiff, author. (Random House, 2021). This important book (and a few others like it) does a great service. Here we learn the details about how some people—not just Mr. Schiff and his colleagues who ran the first impeachment trial prosecuting a psychotic sociopath who still poses a great danger to American democracy (he’ll forever be impeached—the only US president to have the stain of being impeached twice!)—but also others who have the courage to speak truth to power. We all should be so brave; otherwise, we’ll lose our precious republic to the dark forces of fascism. (I do my small part by blasting my representatives in Congress with emails, telling them to act, as well as by writing my political blog at http://pubprogressive.com. We should all do what we can. Democracy is worth saving!)

While this is mostly the story of the first impeachment trial and briefly the second, it’s a book that shows how Trump aka Il Duce has completely destroyed American conservatism, turning the GOP into his acolytes and morphing them into the fascist Good Ole Piranhas. This orange-skinned devil in four short years (which seemed like an eternity!) also decreased our stature in the world, much to the delight of autocrats like Putin and Xi and other two-bit fascist leaders who would tell you that representative democracies can’t get anything done and that a strong man, a president-for-life like those two servants of evil, are necessary. Perhaps many in the world are sad to see that America, that shining beacon for democracy and freedom, is all but extinguished as the US now looks more and more like 1930s Germany, but what’s sadder is that many Americans don’t see that and are hastening our slide down into the cesspool of fascism.

This book validates all my fears I’ve had since Trump walked down those stairs in Trump-the-Chump’s Tower to launch his presidential campaign by calling immigrants murders and rapists, a standard tactic used by the worst dictators, including Hitler: Create a minority all the disgruntled morons can blame for their problems! (Those problems often caused by fascists and the plutocrats who control them.) Many readers will find the details in this story as scary as I did. What I find even scarier, though, is that we’re still letting the fascist Good Ole Piranhas spew this vitriol and hatred.

Mr. Schiff takes us through all the events that too many of us paid no attention to; others purposely tried to forget; and still others, most of the Good Ole Piranhas, celebrated. It’s required reading for every respectable US citizen who might be wondering what can be done to save our democracy in the sense that it’s a list of things we shouldn’t allow to happen. The most obvious now: Never trust a Republican! Mr. Schiff’s subtitle is a reminder of the danger that’s still with us.

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Peril. Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, authors (2021). Who this book is not about: While the authors are mostly responsible for causing the media hype about the Milley-Pelosi interchange after January 6 (Trump aka Il Duce called Milley a traitor), it’s neither about the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs nor the Speaker of the House. It’s about the transition (or lack thereof) from the administration of the worst president in US history to the administration of the newly elected president, to whom the ex-president has never conceded.

Do you care? Maybe not. “Let’s not dwell on the past,” some people might say. Others still continue to believe the Big Lie. All that’s scary, and so is this book! A narcissistic psychopath with a fuehrer complex took us very close to the precipice that would plunge us into fascism, turning the US into one of those “shithole” countries he’d railed about during one rage. So this book is also about how the “marching morons” (C. M. Kornbluth’s aptly appropriate description of Narcissus le Grand’s rabid followers), who, like lemmings, followed the “f%$#ing moron,” their Pied Piper, right over that cliff and tried to drag more sane Americans along. (Good tidbit in the book about McConnell’s admiration for SecState Tillerson’s quote: Moscow Mitch said to his sycophants that Tillerson was allowed to deny calling Trump a moron because he called the president a “f&^%ing moron”! Of course, McConnell used Trump for four years to further his own fascist agenda. By the way, I was happy to see the word fascist used in the book to describe Trump…rarely, but even by some of Trump’s own “supporters”!)

The book, as chaotic as the Trump administration’s four years, can also be considered that administration’s post mortem, a forensic analysis of a dead criminal who almost destroyed American democracy. Of course, like a zombie, Trump might rise again and prey on democracy again. He was impeached twice (which will be the Big Loser’s most lasting legacy), but he was never convicted. He still has the “marching morons” who continue to follow him, although their numbers are reduced now as many of them die from Covid. (Is the virus eliminating the “stupid gene”? If so, there’s collateral damage, of course.)

This book is scary indeed! It’s Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket all wrapped up in a real American tragedy! And the fright still grips because me because we might have yet another Trump reality show. That gives me nightmares. It should give any sane person nightmares.

For reasonable and logical people who lived through this four-year debacle caused by a deranged psychopath, there’s not much new here…if they were paying attention. From the day Trump made the announcement he was running after that grand entrance in Trump Tower in NYC, I said that we should never let this deranged person anywhere near the “nuclear football.” Yet we did, and the country suffered greatly, and so did the world, teetering far too close to an apocalypse.

While everyone should read this book (of course, the Big Loser, his minions, and the marching morons will only diss it…if they know how to read—Trump doesn’t!), I do have a few nits to pick. One, the authors are too damn nice to Trump’s evil minions, all fascists like Meadows, Miller, Steve Bannon, Pompeo, Don Jr., Giuliani, etc., etc. Two, the authors did no favors for General Milley by hyping his participation in trying to control Il Duce’s multiring circus; that only made the poor man an easy and continuing target of Trump’s wrath.

As you read this book, you’ll see there’s more than one American hero here, albeit some were reluctant ones like Pence, who saved the country from disaster. May we still have more around if the Big Loser runs again in 2024!

I suppose I should have posted this review at Pub Progressive, my political blog, but it is a book review and an honest one, after all. And this is an important book to read. It contains good journalism, even if the writing is poor at times and a bit sensational. In their hurry to capture market share, Woodward and his publishers are becoming more and more willing to sacrifice quality. It’s a long but an easy read, especially if you paid attention to what’s been going on; and it’s damn scary! So maybe you shouldn’t read it late at night? And maybe it will only be a prelude to the apocalypse?

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Comments are always welcome!

The Chaos Chronicles Collection. This bundle contains three full sci-fi novels. Survivors of the Chaos begins with a dystopian Earth controlled by international mega-corporations that have resorted to private militias to police what remains of the collapse of Earth’s society; it ends with the third of three starships bound for the 82 Eridani system…and the first interstellar stowaway. Sing a Zamba Galactica is an epic history that goes from first contact with good ETs to a war against bad ones that have conquered Earth, but some strange collective intelligences also make trouble in the near-Earth galactic neighborhoods. If the first two novels are considered my Foundation tales, in Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! my Mule is the autocratic Human who wants to control all near-Earth space using ESP powers. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age. Amy Klobuchar, author. (Knopf, 2021, ISBN 978-0-525-65489-6) Monopolies are just one tool of many America’s fascist plutocracy employs to enrich itself at the cost of the rest of us. Here the author, a prominent senator, tells the story of monopolies and trust-busting in America (or the lack thereof). Often centering things on her home state of Minnesota or America’s Midwest, she follows monopolies from colonial times to the present. Traditionally we don’t call US monopolists fascists, but they always have been deserving of that moniker, even though the word wasn’t part of the world’s lexicon until just before World War II.

Fascism (the -ism doesn’t make it an ideology, of course, just like authoritarianism isn’t an ideology) has plagued human societies since pre-Roman times; and fascists, often hiding their autocratic leanings in populism, have been the clubs plutocracies and oligarchies wield to maintain their power. The US is no exception. It is in a downward spiral into the cesspool of fascism like the one that consumed 1930s Germany. Super-strong and abusive monopolies are only the visible wounds fascist plutocrats inflict.

I won’t split semantical hairs in this review of Senator Klobuchar’s tome. It doesn’t mention fascism per se, but that’s what she describes—a sordid piece of American history involving abuses perpetrated by America’s plutocracy…and it continues today. And this history is honest and well-written otherwise, so why should I complain?

The Devil’s in the details, of course. The senator earns her credentials as an historian, but what about her treatment of today’s monopolistic problems, exacerbated now by the tech and pharmaceutical industries as well as other mega-multinational corporations, where America and the world marches rapidly toward what I imagined in book one of my Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection? This threatens to destroy the world as we know it. The senator does a fine job, though, as she analyzes today’s challenges and possible solutions in the last two chapters before the conclusion,. I was happy to see that she even considered Amazon’s monopolistic policies, including their nefarious influence on the publishing industry. Very few authors can make a living writing now, bookstores are closing, and Amazon is mostly responsible for this bad situation, even competing with traditional publishers, leading to takeovers and the destruction of small presses.

But there’s more. Big Pharma and Big Tech are shown to be worse than most people think; they’re the new monopolistic ogres on the block. Their CEOs generally are scurrilous plutocrats. That movie about how Zuckerberg took over Facebook is fact, not fiction. The Sackler family (Purdue Pharma) are essentially mass murderers. Etc. Etc. And today these are the people who are giving us politicians like Trump, McConnell, McCarthy, Gaetz, Jordan, and others who are willing to do the fascist plutocrats’ bidding. (The senator mostly only mentions the companies, not their CEOs’ names, but we all know their names.) This is powerful writing as the senator spins her yarn about the fall of the American empire.

There are two flaws that caught my eye here, though: First, there’s very little mention of the military-industrial complex. It’s now controlled by only a few companies, and it is probably partially responsible for many of the wars America has fought since World War II. (Recall that after that war Eisenhower warned about how it might become all-powerful and distort our politics. Military might is a fascist favorite, as exhibited by Trump’s desire for a military parade like the one he saw in France. The fascist plutocrats of the military-industrial complex are undoubtedly the most dangerous.)

The second flaw is that the senator is a bit naive. She’s optimistic about the future. I’m not. I think we’ve gone beyond a tipping point for the American experiment, and she describes one of the reasons. Maybe she’s right to be optimistic. I sure hope so.

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Comments are always welcome.

“The Last Humans” series. I wrote the first novel in this series, The Last Humans, before the real Covid pandemic. The plague here is bioengineered by an American enemy and is delivered to the West Coast of the US via missile. But we all know from the experiences with those California wildfires that small particles, here the virus, can be carried across the US and to the rest of the world by prevailing winds. Penny Castro, forensic diver for the LA County Sheriff’s department, dives to recover a corpse and emerges to find apocalyptic desolation. The first novel is her story of survival. The second, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, is the story of a US-sponsored revenge mission that goes terribly wrong for Penny. (Fair warning: The idiotic Amazon bots—or the idiots who program them?—confused these two novels, so I’d recommend buying the two books elsewhere. Barnes & Noble, for example, where the links take you, kept them straight. The first novel was a bestseller from Black Opal Books at B&N for a bit, in fact.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

[This is the second part of today’s two-fer. A review of a non-fiction book? Yes, in addition to binge-reading mysteries, thrillers, and sci-fi novels, I delve into doorstops when they catch my eye. Here’s a review of one.]

His Very Best: Jimmy Carter. A Life. Jonathon Alter, author (Simon & Schuster, 978-1-5011-2548-5). The author, a fellow resident of Montclair, NJ, never responded to my email of congratulations and greetings, but he has written one hell of a biography about the least understood and one of the most successful presidents in American history. Because I was working in academia in Colombia, South America, during the Carter years, 1976-1980, there were a lot of things about old Jimmy I’d never heard about. The author fortunately focuses on those White House years and previous ones because I know a lot about his activities after leaving the White House, especially after my return to the US. By the way, those later years’ activities set the bar very high for every ex-president. (Mr. Trump will never come close, of course!) Like the author, I’ll therefore focus on Jimmy Carter, Mr. President, and even pass over the authors description of Carter’s early years, which is well done, especially his time at Annapolis and life in the USN.

I knew about the hostage crisis in Iran—who in the world didn’t?—and how William Casey probably made a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini and his cohorts to release the hostages after the election (most people have forgotten that, especially the Good Ole Piranhas who consider Reagan as some kind of messiah). Mr. Carter might have won otherwise, and that would have saved the US from Reagan and Bush I’s reign that started America down the road to fascism and Donald J. Trump. There’s good evidence now that Casey also set up the Iran-Contra deal and other tidbits during those same negotiations. Alter discusses most of this but with only a historical shrug, as if saying, “What do you expect in politics?”

Jimmy made mistakes, no doubt about it; he also accomplished many things during his four years in the White House that should ensure his legacy, often promoting policies and programs that have proven to be progressive and beneficial to many Americans, but only with reasoned hindsight. For example, Reagan got credit for the fall of the Soviet Union; Carter started that and should receive at least some credit. Same with his rapprochement with China that went far beyond Nixon’s feeble efforts and brought China into the modern era. (I suppose it’s debatable whether it would have been better to keep them isolated, especially considering Covid, but I think it’s better to have contact with them, if only to slap them around more easily.)

Carter began the serious fight for the environment and against global warming. While Alter mentions the solar panels Jimmy installed on the White House, he doesn’t say that Reagan took them down—GOP presidents after Carter backtracked most environmental initiatives Carter began (especially Trump). He set aside vast tracts of land in the Alaskan wilderness, initially causing wrath among Alaskans (not Native Americans, of course), and that’s now seen as a jumpstart for today’s healthy Alaskan tourist industry (not until Trump came along was that whittled away at). Carter was more of an environmental president than Theodore Roosevelt, which means that even today no one can compare with his initiatives and achievements in that area. (Trump, of course, did his best to undo all of it, flashing his imperial scowl of a wannabe dictator while doing so.)

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(Nathaniel Henderson, Centricity, 2020, 978-1735759098)

Like the author of this novel, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1985 Hugo winner) made an impression on this reviewer. I can’t say my sci-fi is cyberpunk, but Gibson’s novel influenced me and many other authors. Centricity is a good modern example of the subgenre.

It’s also a cross-genre tale with mystery and political thriller elements with those other subgenres of sci-fi, dystopian and post-apocalyptic, thrown in for good measure. A pandemic caused by a bio-engineered virus wreaks havoc on Earth, resulting in an evolution to society living in what I can compare to the city-states of ancient Greece turned into chaotic cesspools of technology, where violence rules more than democracy and human life has little value.

If that were all the story, readers might want to slash their wrists before they even finish it, but there are some glimmers of hope. One character’s visit to his demented mother in her nursing home shows that love still exists in this dark world, for example. And it is far darker than Gibson’s (in the latter’s defense, all the nefarious consequences of technology run amok couldn’t be imagined when he wrote Neuromancer). The novel’s main theme could also be construed as what happens when tribalism augmented by technology, and not in a good way, runs amok.

The world the author creates is a dangerous and violent one. As one character walks down a street (I’ll call it that for simplicity), someone turns someone else into a fireball just for the fun of it. Almost every person of means has a human “shield,” a cybernetic guard who is armored and weaponized, ready to protect the person who’s shielded. The more important the person, the better the shield, better implying the latest weaponry and software. I often see this as a futuristic version of the Aztecs’ cultural organization in its brutality and lethality. Yet the organization here is so complex you might want to refer to the end notes as well as to the map at the beginning.

There are inconsistencies. One can ask why such a technologically dominated society has human receptionists, for example. As the character walks into his mother’s nursing home, he encounters one. The simple answer, as true today as it is in this imagined future: Everyone needs a job. Only by controlling the population in a future society (e.g. in Asimov’s The Naked Sun) can a society’s members have a leisurely existence and avoid giving mundane jobs to humans! This leads to the question: In the city-state Naion, where did all the people come from? Presumably the world’s population was decimated by the pandemic and ensuing chaos. Did technology forget how to make birth control pills?

But I digress. What sets this tale above others in the genre is its characterization. There are many. (To keep them straight, a cast of characters would also be useful, unless the reader is out to have a literary orgy by reading this novel in one setting! There is one for the principal characters in the end notes, but perhaps it should be up front.) Adasha is the main character who’s much more than a receptionist, a woman who has the impossible task of making the city-state Naion’s bureaucratic fiefdoms get along with each other. She’s also trying to find out who killed her mentor Gabriel. The tale starts with Ekram’s murder, though; he’s become involved with the kidnapping of an ambassador’s daughter, and this violent incident percolates through the story.

Yes, the number of interesting characters increases as well as the world-building, so the reader must pay attention. Don’t worry, though. The relationships between all these characters is revealed the farther you progress in the book. This is epic sci-fi made for a reader who does pay attention, more so than in Gibson’s novel. It’s a heady brew. The reader must be prepared for vile language, violent action, and strange sexual tensions—all fair game when dealing with human beings’ futuristic lives. Just when readers think they’ve obtained a glimmer of understanding, something surprising comes along to yank their feet from under them. To use the old metaphor so ubiquitous in thriller reviews, this is one hell of a roller-coaster ride! While I can imagine a video game based on this novel, I can’t imagine one doing justice to all this crazy complexity.

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After all the hype about Sapiens, much of it probably generated by questionable publicists and even more questionable critics, I looked forward to reading it but found it disappointing. The author has a rather myopic and distorted view of Homo sapiens, the human condition, and human history. There’s also a certain smugness in the many pages of this book that can grate on you and wear you down. But let’s start with the beginning, as the Queen of Hearts told Alice.

The author throws out questionable theories, little more than guesses, about how some different branches of hominins became extinct and modern man came to dominate, he incorrectly thinks that cultural norms are just figments of our imaginations, and proposes that anything beyond hunter-gather existence has had a negative influence on Earth’s biosphere and human beings’ existence within it. In the early parts of the book, he pretends to be an expert on archaeology, anthropology, and psychology. And there’s far too much opinion and too little science. And that’s just the beginning.

There are many questionable statements made in the book—a whole list of non sequitors, in fact. The proposed equivalence between ideology and religion is but one example that will grate on most readers. Both are collections of ideas, to be sure, and both might have names ending with ism, but he neglects the moral component of most religions, even the non-theistic ones. There’s no morality in capitalism or socialism, for example; they’re amoral, although some people might worship one or the other. Does worshipping make the two, or communism or Nazism, for that matter, into a religion? Maybe this is just semantical hand-waving on my part as well as his, but the author shouldn’t indulge in it for shock value as he seems wont to do.

A more concrete and scientific example is found in the claim that quantum mechanics is like actuarial statistics, i.e. classical probability. Far from it! Moreover, he believes probability isn’t important in physics outside of quantum mechanics, a complete non sequitur. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a statistical law, whether it deals with quantum mechanical or classical mechanical systems. Indeed, all of thermodynamics, classical or otherwise, comes from statistical mechanics, where probability theory is used to deal with physical systems with so many components that one cannot follow them individually.

The author does make a few valid points. Our forefathers’ “all men are created equal…” certainly fails to separate government and religion (which is why we have a constitution), but he fails to mention that this claim of equality is seen more today as a call for giving all people equal opportunity to rise where their innate and learned skills will take them, and make a decent living while doing it. In any case, America’s revered documents are certainly not an “imagined” social glue—they establish the right to rebel against and/or control and censure oppressive rulers peacefully, if we can!

His prose only seems to be a medium for the author to contradict all preconceived notions one might have about human beings’ existence on this planet. That’s one positive, I suppose: It certainly got me thinking, but my thoughts all became focused on asking myself. how can a historian in the twenty-first century get things so wrong? I suspect that the bottom line is that he’s only proven that history is not a science—it reduces to collections of opinions published by historians, often with little data to back them up. We’ve all heard that the victor rewrites history. In this case, the author is no victor, but he still sets out to rewrite all of human history. Questioning that history might be okay; an anarchistic destruction, though, without offering a rebuild can be disconcerting.

As a final comment, there’s not too much history here, in fact, just a chaotic selection of cherry-picked events to analyze and throw into a questionable stew made from week-old leftovers, hardly a profound and fresh meal of insights. The book’s subtitle is completely incorrect as a consequence. Perhaps the author is trying to be humorous at times in his reflections about human history, but it doesn’t work. I sure won’t be reading any more of his books, and I can’t recommend this one, even if it were more reasonably priced. (I received a copy as a gift.) Caveat emptor.

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Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans: A New Dawn. The post-apocalyptic adventures of Penny Castro continue. Her new and idyllic life on her SoCal citrus ranch is turned upside down when what remains of the US government kidnaps her kids to force her and her husband to participate in a revenge invasion of the country responsible for the apocalypse. In this sequel to The Last Humans, a thrilling roller coaster ride into a possible future awaits the reader. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (Note that Black Opal Books, the publisher of the first book, has taken it down from Amazon, so I give the link to Smashwords. The reader can hopefully still purchase the ebook and print versions from the publisher. The sequel is published by DraftDigital, so it’s available at Amazon and other retailers, but not at Smashwords.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

“The Inspector Skelgill Series.” Bruce Beckham, author. As I continue my binge-reading of British-style mysteries, I came to this sixteen-book series (and counting?). Daniel Skelgill prefers fishing and running around the Cumbrian Lake Region of merry olde England to sleuthing, but doesn’t hesitate to travel to London, Scotland, or even Ukraine, to nick criminals who have committed murder most fowl. I identify with him a lot—not because I’m a fit fellow like he is (I have a few years on him), but because I’m an old curmudgeon too! These mystery/crime stories (police procedurals is another name) are well written once you get past the local slang, although the description of the angler’s activities and the Cumbrian countryside can seem a bit overdone at times.

One rather amusing novel, Murder on the Lake, finds Skelgill fishing when a storm pops up and a young woman calls out to him from the shore of the island where he’s heading. A murder has occurred at a retreat for publishers, agents, and writers, established or wannabes. Because of the storm, Skelgill stays the night at the island resort (not your Caribbean resort, mind you—amenities have disappeared because of the storm). Another person dies under mysterious circumstances overnight—Skelgill’s sleuth-senses go into overdrive, especially because is rowboat has been set adrift that same night, trapping all participants and Skelgill on the island. The rest of the novel allows the reader to peek into and understand some of the strange publishing world while the intuitive inspector and his DS team solve the murder cases.

This isn’t the best British-style mystery series I’ve read, but it’s quite entertaining with enough twists and turns in the plots and many interesting characters, including the complex Skelgill and his two DSs who work with him. The many trips from Cumbria to London and Edinburgh, with their characteristic customs and idiomatic expressions, allow one to appreciate the complexity of the small island off the European continent that has had so much historical importance.

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Comments are always welcome.

Sleuthing, British Style. This is my fourth published short story collection (ignoring the ones you can download for free—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). The three stories here involve newly minted DS Logan Blake, who leaves his DC position with Scotland Yard for his new DS position in a police substation west of Oxford, hoping the English countryside will provide a more peaceful policing experience. Unfortunately, he immediately must deal with three different murders. But there’s a romantic perk that makes this hard initiation much more bearable!

Besides the stories, this is an homage to the inimitable Dame Agatha, who started it all; an introduction to the particular vernacular of British-style mysteries (there’s a list of English words and phrases); and a list of series like the one above I’ve binge-read. This little ebook is available most everywhere fine ebooks are sold. (Note to authors: This was an experiment in using Draft2Digital for self-publishing. Like Smashwords, D2D distributes to multiple retailers, but fewer than Smashwords. Unlike Smashwords, distributes to Amazon. Authors now have two choices.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

[Note from Steve: I’d originally scheduled this for next Wednesday, but that would be anti-climactic, right? Also, Halloween is tomorrow. Your best plan is to skip it this year–some towns have cancelled their festivities, and with reason–but, whatever you do, be safe doing it. Protect your fellow human beings!]

Front Row at the Trump Show. Jonathan Karl, author (Dutton). This isn’t the best anti-Trump vaccine there is; Cohen’s wins that prize (recommended reading for anyone wanting to understand Trump’s crazy mafia and its Don). But Karl’s book takes a look at the sociopathic man from the media’s point of view, that fourth branch of the American political scene that the wannabe autocrat calls “the enemy of the people” (just like any autocrat of the last century, or this one).

What any intelligent reader can conclude here is that the media helped create the monster. Trump took off in 2015 because he became the media’s story many times. No one believed he was a serious contender for even the nomination, let alone the presidency. While their fascination was more akin to little kids’ as they laugh at the antics of a caged monkey in a zoo, Trump was really the lumbering and vicious caged and knuckle-dragging silverback…and they set him loose. (That’s insulting our simian friends, of course.)

In a sense, this is Karl’s memoire, and it’s basically intertwined with Trump, starting out when the reporter tried to interview Michael Jackson and his new wife, who were hiding out in the Trump tower (that glitzy building received its due in A.B. Carolan’s futuristic novel Mind Games—Trump skipped several floor numbers, by the way, so that it would appear taller). The book is a major reporter’s view of that crazy, incompetent Trump administration, so there are some insights to be had. It almost seems that Karl is the moth attracted to that evil flame, though, so who knows what will become of him in the days and decades AT (“After Trump”). I particularly like the portrait of Sean Spicer, but Trump has hired many incompetents, and fired many who showed some competence too. Maybe there’s not enough of that here.

So yawn, another book about Trump? Hopefully on November 3 or soon after, we have a good idea if America came to its senses and booted the worst US president ever out on his butt. If not, I might have to spend the next four years taunting and blasting him every way I can. Hopefully the parallel with 1930s Germany (Hitler loaded the courts in 1933 and Kristallnacht occurred on November 9 and 10 in 1938) will have fizzled and we’ll be safe with Joe Biden. If not, we should all be dedicated to make Trump wish he had never run for president…and that should include the media.

But, returning to Karl’s book, except for the insights into the media’s complicity and knocking how the Trump staff treats the media, there’s not much new here. It seems that everyone is writing a book about Trump these days. Like Woodward’s, Bolten’s, and the niece’s, this is one that you don’t need to read because if you find a lot here you didn’t already know, you haven’t been paying attention. Read Paul Krugman’s book instead and learn some economics theory, in particular how Trump is ruining the American economy. You’ll be far ahead of Trump who knows zero about business, let alone economics! Of course, he tweets a lot more than he reads. Maybe he can do flash fiction after he loses the election?

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Comments are always welcome!

Death on the Danube. At the end of Son of Thunder, #2 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, ex-MI6 agent and ex-Scotland Yard inspector Esther Brookstone and Interpol agent Bastiann van Coevorden finally say their I-do’s. At the beginning of this new novel, #3 in the series, they embark on their honeymoon cruise down the romantic Danube.

When a strange passenger who is traveling alone is murdered, Bastiann takes over the investigation because the river was declared international waters in the Treaty of Paris. Who really is this gaunt victim? And who on the list of passengers and crewmembers is the assassin? Mystery, thrills, suspense, and romance await readers who join them in their journey. You can’t take this trip now because of COVID, but you can join them in spirit. Available in ebook and print format at Amazon, and in all ebook formats at Smashwords and its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo and Walmart, etc.) and affiliated library and lending services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker & Taylor, Gardner, etc.). Click to see the book trailer.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!