A superb novel combining spy thriller and troubled romance. Franka is so beaten down by the Nazi regime that she sees no point in living and heads out to end it all in a snowstorm, until she happens across a critically injured parachutist.He may be a pilot for the Luftwaffe, part of the grisly German machine of repression and war that has taken many of her loved ones away from her. Something doesn’t seem quite right, but if he is not who his papers say then he must be an Allied pilot – one of those who have taken the rest of her friends and family in air raids against German cities and civilians. Either way, whether she is right or wrong, she will bring herself to the attention of the same Gestapo which has recently released her from prison, but not from suspicion. Her efforts to solve the conundrum without getting arrested or making a fool of herself, and the inevitable entrapment of others into the web of deceptions, provide a nicely-paced story that is avoids the breathlessness of its genres to generate an aura of authenticity. The plot points are rather obvious, but the situation makes them so; the interest factor is not determining what the challenges are going to be but how those very obvious difficulties can possibly be overcome.
Monthly Archives: September 2018
3 Weird Marketing Secrets of Successful Authors on Amazon
This is a very useful reference for Amazon authors. While the secrets are not particularly weird (or, for that matter, particularly secret), you don’t often find them all nicely bundled into one place, and Shaun Hibbs isn’t pushing any products.
It can be applied to revitalize the track record of an existing book or to help the launch of a new book;perhaps the most profound observation is to consider writing the online book description first and then making the book fulfill that commitment, thereby keeping its focus on what the reader wanted to get out of it instead of diving down into irrelevant rabbit-holes.
The book provides a fairly thorough description of how to go about setting a book up for success on the Amazon platform, with step-by-step instructions for key activities such as identifying current on-line search trends and hints when going through the Amazon publishing steps. Those instructions, where they apply to automated tasks, are in some cases better than those offered by the makers of the tools.
If you learn nothing else, the fact that Amazon only offers you about 40% of their actual categories, and the explanation of how to get at the rest which may be better sellers for your particular book, are worth the price of admission.
Shaun is not flogging any product, and some of the tools he points out are free, but I will say that KDP Rocket (which I do own) is an indispensable way of doing in minutes the tasks described here that would otherwise take many hours to accomplish yourself.
Truman
While this is not a myth-creating book, you will find it impossible to read this biography and come away as anything less than a fan of a decent man who did his best under difficult circumstances. I have always respected McCullough’s research and attention to detail, but this book is also just a cracking good read.
Many have been brought up – perhaps by the educationocracy that still worships at the altar of Marxism and FDR – with the caricature of Harry Truman as a bumbler selected for his insignificance who fell into office and then screwed it up. He has also been portrayed in pro-military circles as the personification of foolish political interference in military matters; yet with his experience in World War I he had as much military experience in the most brutal conflict on record as any prior or subsequent President except those few who were career military men. FDR, by contrast, winner of the greatest war this nation ever fought, had no military service except as Secretary of a peacetime Navy, and as one of the richest men in America was hardly in a position to sincerely understand the problems of regular people.
We all know of the Truman-Dewey polling fiasco, his decision to use the atom bomb, and probably of his conflict with MacArthur. But unless you are a history buff of that era, you do not know of his reluctant climb through the party machine, his financial dependence on his parents-in-law, his valiant service in the short but ugly experience of World War I, his creation of and service on the highly-effective committee for overseeing waste and abuse during World War II, and Bess Truman’s total unsupportiveness in his White House years. McCullough does not gloss over any of this, and indeed it is these experiences perhaps that shape Truman’s character (something that many of our recent politicians lack utterly).
Those of us who are accustomed to the imperial Presidencies, and the strange but never-investigated accrual of wealth by politicians of all classes who come into office as middle-class and leave office as multi-millionaires, will be astounded to learn that when he completed his term as President, he just went home to Independence and lived more or less on the financial edge, with a minimal pension after a lifetime in public service, and he was politically persecuted for the rest of his life by the Republicans because he was all that was left of the FDR administration that had persecuted them, and by the Democrats because he was all that was left of the FDR administration but he was not FDR.
Truman was a plain-spoken person who never lost track of his farming roots. For this reason the Eastern aristocracy looked down on him, even as they were embracing the principles of Marxism, and in the scholastic presses (which until recently were based almost exclusively in Boston and New York) he was denigrated because he was not the demigod Roosevelt (who as we now know was himself mostly a caricature by 1940). Since 1970 or so he has been overlooked by Republicans because they were not in search of a Democratic role model, and by today’s anti-American Democrats because he inconveniently seemed to be quite sincere in actually believing in truth, justice and the American way.
Perhaps the status of limitations for political correctness is about 50 years. In that case, now is the time to read McCullough’s balanced portrait of a great American.
The First 90 Days in Government
This book is a partial rewrite of the earlier “90 Days” book that applies to commercial ventures. While the initial scenario on page 1 and 2 are right on the mark, the rest of the book basically says: define the role and mission, gather the support and resources, and then go off and achieve. Or, as the initial scenario suggests, you may find yourself marginalized and drifting. That’s a good theory, but I never saw it work in 7 years on the inside as a senior Federal manager, nor in over 20 years as a management consultant working with hundreds of managers in dozens of agencies. If you’re in an agency that isn’t aligned to this book (and few of them are), its advice is more likely to hurt you than help you, and you will in fact end up marginalized and drifting if you move out too quickly on what you think (or are told) the mission is. In such agencies you will never get the candid conversations and extended discussions of values and priorities that the book depends on, and such words as you do hear may be misleading because those aren’t really the priorities after all.
To be really useful, this book ought to be entitled “The 90 Days Before Getting Into a Public Sector Job”. Find out as much as you can about the agency, its mission, its organizational politics and its pain points, during the job interview period. You may never get as much face time or candor again, even if you do get hired.
See a much longer version of the review, which was somewhat controversial, on Amazon.
Real Fast Food
I am not a great cook – I have a gourmet quality wife who loves to cook for relaxation – but for 8 months we were long-distance commuters. I lived on a very small houseboat – meaning everything had to be carried in, water was at a premium, and there was a limit to the amount of electric stuff I could use at the same time. With a 2-burner hot plate and a copy of Real Fast Food as my primary reference, I was able to cook a fair number of the recipes to produce a most impressive meal with minimal trouble.
It is by no means a health-food diet – if you don’t like butter and olive oil, this book is not for you. But if you like to make a good showing from time to time with food that tastes great and is not that expensive to prepare – reach for this book first.
Texas Mutiny: Bullets, Ballots and Boss Rule
This easily-flowing gem by Sheila Allee started as an inquiry into Ms. Allee’s family tree and ended up as a tightly crafted tale of a local incident that illustrates the narrow space between benevolent bossism and violent, self-serving tyranny. It tells of a land that really had not changed much (other than the makes and models of the transportation) from classic Westerns to Bonnie and Clyde, and would not for another 20 years or more (see The Last Picture Show). For the naifs who never made it past Civics 101, it is just as well that the characters are real because, as is often the case, in politics the truth is far stranger than fiction. If you are a Texan interested in politics or history, then you need to buy this book. If you are an academic interested in local politics or the spoils system, you should buy this book and assign it to your classes for reading. Yet these are not the greatest strengths of the book.
It is probably not the author’s intent to broaden the story beyond its Texas setting, but if you live outside that great state then you will see that Texas as described here is only different in shades from the one-party states that litter the land to this day. One might think that tiny, green, urban, urbane Maryland in the 1990’s could not be more different from vast, dry, rural, good-ole-boy Texas in the 1900-1950 period. One would be quite wrong. My exposure to the one-party state in Maryland not a decade ago showed an entire machinery built to maintain the positions of those who had power. With legislature, executive, and judiciary integrated in a one-party web of cronyism, where would the citizen turn for redress? Maybe nobody got shot, but the Maryland Governor’s election of 1994 was ultimately resolved by a high court whose members were all appointees of the incumbent’s party and coincidentally didn’t find anything amiss about an election with overall turnout of around 45% but precincts that cast over 100% of their total registration numbers for the incumbent.
When this much of the moral fabric has been torn, how far is it to the next step? Whether it is Medieval Europe, 1948 Texas, or Russia in any period, it is a short and slippery slope from paternalistic bossism to totalitarian repression. You, the citizen, do not stand a chance in this game. Know when to fold ’em. Yes, they CAN kill you, if not physically (and don’t count on that), then legally, financially, and reputationally. And they will. The odds of an honest Captain Allee happening along to solve the crime are pretty slim, and you, as the destroyed victim, will not return from the dead anyway.
Texas Mutiny: a great read and a fine story. And, if you want a real-world example of “abuse of power”, now you can look it up.
https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Mutiny-Bullets-Ballots-Boss/dp/0972046623
The Boer War: A History From Beginning to End
Considering the premise of the 1 – hour series, this book more than delivers. Aside from distilling a somewhat chaotic set of campaigns into a comprehensible framework, this is one of the first works I’ve read that tries to address the role of black South Africans in the conflict. Do be aware that this volume only addresses the Second Boer War, although it does provide enough synopsis of the First Boer War to understand some of the causative factors.
Celtic Mythology: A Concise Guide to the Gods, Sagas and Beliefs
It’s impossible in a small space even to scratch the surface of Irish lore. This book is quite illuminating in laying out in understandable form the 4 major eras of pre-Christian legends. It does contain some 2 dozen of the key stories in very abbreviated form and, unusual in this short format, it contains many references (including live URL links most of which remain current) to more detailed scholarly materials on the topics.
Just Punishment
OK, maybe David and his delightful family and staff laid a promising framework with the great accommodations and fabulous food at their Charleston Inn in Hendersonville NC. But books are a serious thing and he doesn’t know I bought a copy (until now). I was planning to take it home and give it a try but I soon found myself sneaking in a chapter here and there as our companions’ rest schedule permitted, and a satisfying finish was reached before the trip ended. The author strives somewhat for the John Grisham style, although he comes at it from the opposite end of the spectrum, and there is a bit of the first-novel tendency to use the dialog to preach instead of letting the action reveal the intended message (which in this case it would have done anyway – I knew where the story was going long before the speeches came in). This applies also to the key relationship which simply happens, so fast as to be jarringly improbable. Those minor carps aside, as I said from the start, once you get into it you will have a hard time putting it down, and that is criterion number one for a thriller-type book.
Payne, David R., “Just Punishment“, Page Publishing, 2016.