Need For reads

Nonfiction Lucky doc RACING BACK TO VIETNAM   By John Pendergrass 256 pp. Hatherleigh Press Reviewed By William C. Crawford This is a readable memoir brought forth on the 50th anniversary of the US withdrawal. There has been a plethora of recent writing in many genres focusing on the ever-controversial conflict. Due to the recent release of the acclaimed Ken Burns documentary, the nation’s attention has been painfully refocused to ponder the conundrums of this ill-fated example of American exceptionalism. The author’s wartime experience is unique in that he served as both a flight surgeon and a volunteer rear seat rider for 54 combat missions with an F-4 fighter squadron based in Da Nang. He had a cushy rear-echelon job that he left intermittently to bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail in nearby Laos and North Vietnam. Pendergrass offers a straightforward account of both his medical life and his air-combat interludes, as well as the tightly knit camaraderie of a wartime fighter squadron. Th...

Fiction
 Crime is how this city works BY GASLIGHT 
By Steven Price 
731 pp. Picador
 Reviewed by Sue Ellis By Gaslight is a masterpiece of fiction that imagines an event in the life of American detective Allen Pinkerton. When his father (the famous William Pinkerton) dies, Allen feels duty-bound to hunt down a man his father had been unsuccessful in finding. Young Edward Shade had been taken under the wing of the elder Pinkerton during the Civil War and trained as an operative under his command. Shade disappeared while on assignment. Using his father’s file on the subject, Allen leaves Chicago bound for London to contact agents employed by his abolitionist father some twenty years earlier, a former slave couple he’d helped to freedom. Their assignment: follow a London lead to Edward Shade. The setting is beautifully surreal, 1800’s London at her sooty and melancholy best. The story is partly told from Allen Pinkerton’s straightforward account, run-on sentences as impatient as his...

Fiction Not your typical wealthy young socialite ... THE WOMAN IN THE CAMPHOR TRUNK An Anna Blanc Mystery By Jennifer Kincheloe 304 pp. Seventh Street Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Mystery writer Jennifer Kincheloe is back with the second entry in her new series set in an unusual time and place (Los Angeles circa 1908) and featuring the most unlikely and endearing sleuth since Miss Marple. The first entry, The Secret Life of Anna Blanc , is also reviewed on this site. Anna Blanc wasn’t your typical wealthy young socialite. Fiercely independent, tough, intelligent, and determined, her dream was to put her formidable deductive skills to work by becoming a police detective. Unfortunately, at that time, women weren’t allowed to become beat cops, let alone detectives. Taking the only job available to a woman in the Los Angeles Police Department, Anna became a police matron – a job that involves handling women who’ve been arrested, handling juvenile delinquents, and taking away children fr...

Nonfiction Spacetime and human spaghetti BLOCKBUSTER SCIENCE The Real Science in Science Fiction By David Siegel Bernstein 336 pp. Prometheus Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen As any devotee of science fiction can tell you, what makes the genre so beloved is its ability to inspire Man to think beyond his grubby, mundane world and consider what lies beyond. To ponder his existence and his place in the universe. To hope for a better future and inspire him to develop the technology to create it. Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein (1818) – a masterpiece of both horror and science fiction – gave the world a timeless warning about what can happen when scientists try to play God and tamper with the very nature of life. One can only imagine what she’d think about the cloning and genetic engineering achieved by science today. When Jules Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, could he have conceived of a future where actual high-tech submarines like Captain Nemo’s Naut...

Nonfiction Lock you door. People very friendly. SO HAPPINESS TO MEET YOU: Foolishly, Blissfully Stranded in Vietnam By Karin Esterhammer 259 pp. Prospect Park Books Reviewed by Marty Carlock It’s 2008, and the recession has destroyed non-essential jobs like journalism (Esterhammer’s profession) and selling soundtracks from old films (her husband’s business) (honest, I’m not making this up). They realize they can’t afford their L. A. house. “So,” she writes, “I did what I always do to ease existential pain. I bought airline tickets…While America was closing up shop, it seemed perfectly reasonable to leave the country and head to Southeast Asia.” Esterhammer and her husband, Robin, had visited Vietnam two years before. Her recollection was of an intriguing culture but, more to the point, of a tightwad’s dream: a huge bowl of pho cost 85 cents; parking a motorbike all day cost eleven cents; a gorgeous linen blouse, three bucks. And the country’s growing economy made learning English a ver...

Nonfiction Punishment is to go on living THE ODYSSEY OF ECHO COMPANY: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War By Doug Stanton 313 pp. Scribner Reviewed by Tom Glenn Doug Stanton knows combat. His bio makes no reference to military service, but he brings alive on the page the grisliness of the battlefield so graphically that he must have experienced it. And Stanton writes better than any other author on Vietnam that I have read. He uses the techniques of fiction to tell of the carnage, but the events he catalogues really happened. His prose is clipped, precise, and pointed; his paragraphs lean and sharp; his vocabulary incisive. Nor does he shy away from describing the unspeakable—the wounds and deaths of soldiers on both sides of the conflict, the dragging of bodies away from the battlefield, the scattered body parts. His naked realism combined with his flair for words makes for riveting reading. The prose of Odyssey locked me in from the first page with ...

Thou Shalt Do No Murder by Kenn Harper Iqaluit, NU: Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2017. ISBN 978-1-879568-49-1 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore For more than thirty years Kenn Harper has been writing historical books and journalism that skilfully combine the archival sources available in southern Canada with the rich oral histories of the Inuit, among whom he has lived for half a century. In doing so he’s shown the journalist’s unerring instinct for finding compelling human stories that are emblematic of the cultural exchange, and often cultural collision, between the two. But he’s also shown the historian’s ability to step back from his immediate subject, seeking its roots in the longer term and the broader view, with an impressively unpartisan sympathy for all the characters, Inuit and European, who fall within his view. In 1986 he first told the story of Minik, the Inuit boy swept along in the wake of Robert Peary’s polar monomania ( Give Me My Father’s Body, republished in a new and much...