Books

Everybody Hates Scott McClellan

Robin D. Laws has a great take on Scott McClellan's tell-all book: Even in the depths of his tenure as Bush press secretary, Scott McClellan always seemed to me like the most likely administration official to write a scathing tell-all. His divided consciousness was always visible as a series of tells that would have led him to the slaughter at any poker table. McClellan's deer-meets-headlights demeanor at tough press conferences signaled a lack of belief in his own statements—a fear that he ... (read more)

2008/06/05

Et Tu, Scott McClellan?

I'm currently reading What Happened, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's 323-page stab in the back to the Bush administration. The book wasn't supposed to be out until June 1, but the publisher lifted the embargo yesterday and I grabbed a copy at Barnes & Noble. Current and former Bush administration officials are playing dumb on McClellan's motive for writing the book, but he makes it crystal clear in the preface: Valerie Plame leakers in the White House used him to pass along ... (read more)

2008/05/29

Review: Emissaries from the Dead by Adam-Troy Castro

While in college in the late '80s I freelanced for Amazing Heroes, a comics magazine that paid slightly more than the postage required to mail the checks. I was part of a reviewing stable that included Adam-Troy Castro, a writer with a misplaced hyphen who recently wrote Emissaries from the Dead, his first science fiction novel set in a world of his own making. Emissaries, which is subtitled "An Andrea Cort Novel," carries forward a protagonist and setting from his short stories. The world's ... (read more)

2008/05/22

Review: A World of Thieves by James Carlos Blake

To get into the spirit of Pulp Guns, a game product I'm testing, I went looking for current crime novels that could've been pulps -- hard-boiled stories of murder and mayhem set in the '30s and '40s. I came pretty close in A World of Thieves, a 2002 novel by James Carlos Blake that follows a family of armed robbers across Louisiana and Texas in 1928. Blake's novel tells the tale of Sonny LaSalle, an 18-year-old amateur boxer from New Orleans who graduates with top grades and should know better ... (read more)

2008/03/13

You're a Sad Man, Charles Schulz

There's been considerable debate in blogs I read over Schulz and Peanuts, a biography of Charles Schulz written by David Michealis. Roleplaying game developer Robin Laws reviews the book: Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis, is a completely absorbing, stunningly researched, pain-scorched biography of the last century’s most influential cartoonist. Charles Schulz's genius was built on traits common to great artists: unstinting discipline, narrowness of focus, solipsism, arrogance, ... (read more)

2008/01/31

Author George MacDonald Fraser Dies

I've never heard of the Flashman series of novels by George MacDonald Fraser, but the description that has accompanied his obituary today has my curiosity sparked: He wrote the first novel of the Flashman Papers in 1969 after he quit as assistant editor of the Glasgow Herald. The book imagines what happened after Flashman -- the bully in Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays -- was expelled from Rugby for drunkenness. Eleven more novels were to follow in the series, during which Flashman -- ... (read more)

2008/01/03

Happy 100th Birthday, L. Sprague de Camp

Last Tuesday, the Yahoo Groups mailing list devoted to the late fantasy novelist L. Sprague de Camp failed to note the 100th anniversary of his birth. This unconscionable slight has inspired Leo Grin, editor of the Robert E. Howard literary journal The Cimmerian, to take up his metaphorical two-handed battle axe and go medieval on their asses: ... not since I quit the board of The Dark Man in December of 2003 have I been so disgusted at the hapless, witless performance of a group of colleagues. ... (read more)

2007/12/04

Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, has a killer hook. Changez, a Pakistani graduated top of his class from Princeton working at a financial firm in Manhattan, slowly becomes radicalized by America's response to the 9/11 attacks. Sitting down at a restaurant in Lahore, Pakistan, with a mysterious man who appears to be an American military operative, Changez tells the story of how he came to renounce the U.S. The novel, briskly told ... (read more)

2007/10/17

Harry Potter and the Instant Gratification

In honor of tonight's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows midnight release parties at Barnes & Noble stores across the U.S., I'm reissuing some advice I made on my blog in 2003. There will be hundreds of people lined up to get the book at 12:00 a.m., so it may take until 1:30 a.m. or longer to get yours, even if you preordered a copy. If you didn't preorder, leave the bookstore shortly before midnight and go to the nearest 24-hour Wal-Mart. (By law, no American is ever more than 30 miles from ... (read more)

2007/07/20

Mystery Solved: House is Like Holmes

It took me two-and-a-half years, but I finally figured out that the Fox medical drama House has patterned the title character, an arrogant doctor who solves sadistic medical mysteries, after Sherlock Holmes. Beyond the similarity of the names Holmes and House, both feature characters who are arrogant and addicted to drugs (Holmes abuses cocaine and morphine; House takes Vicodin for a leg ailment). They're both incredibly difficult to get along with and have only close friend and confidante -- ... (read more)

2007/05/02

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