Jonathan Weiner. Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. 320 pages.

Immortality’s a tricky subject to write about. There are few people who wouldn’t be at least a little interested in the prospect of living forever, but since no one’s been documented doing it, there’s really not much to say about the subject. Extending human life, however, is another story,. Weiner summarizes how the average human lifespan’s been steadily increasing, and asks the question: why can’t this go on indefinitely?

In search of answers, he discusses the work and personalities of several scientists and enthusiasts working in gerontology. The most colorful of them, Aubrey de Grey, quite possibly has a messiah complex about the whole thing, and his personal affectations–wild beard, constant beer-swilling–make you wonder if it’s about the science or just a plea for attention by someone who whose day job isn’t setting the world on fire.

Yet there’s a real story here, one that Weiner tells with language so carefully balanced that it’s no stretch to call it beautiful. He does a wonderful job of conveying extremely technical details about aging at the cellular level in a way that’s completely accessible to the non-specialist, but not at all patronizing. The book is at its best when Weiner is talking to gerontologists or summarizing their research and theories. It’s at its weakest when Weiner combs through history, sharing excerpts of what physicians, philosophers, and scientists have written about immortality. This is the sort of material that would work well in an academic monograph because it demonstrates the incredible breadth of research the author has undertaken, but it doesn’t really have much relevance to what today’s scientists are doing.

In the penultimate chapter, “The Trouble with Immortality,” Weiner also offers–and appears to condone–a laughably weak argument against conducting research into gerontology: if advances in medical sciences allowed everyone to live to be 1,000, we’d have to worry about Hitler, Stalin, and Mao living for a thousand years, making it sound like living longer will inevitably lead to dictatorships. First, I would think this idea’s been historically disproved, since freedom has increased and despotism decreased greatly as life expectancies have gone up. Second, it’s setting a rule for everyone based on the worst case scenario. By this logic, we should abandon all medical science, since some of the people doctors save might become despots. I’d also expect that Matt Ridley (I’m currently reading his RATIONAL OPTIMIST) would have something to say to him about his claim that “we already overcrowd much of the planet,” but I’ll leave that to him.

In short, it’s an interesting subject, wonderfully written, with a few stand-out personalities. LONG FOR THIS WORLD is a good read about a subject that’s close, no doubt, to everyone’s heart.

Akasha Lonsdale. Do I Kneel or Do I Bow? What You Need to Know When Attending Religious Occasions. London: Kuperard, 2010. 336 pages.

This book sets out to help people understand different religions, with an emphasis on the practical–how to behave at “religious occasions.” Written from a primarily British perspective, it covers eight religions: Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Skihism, and Buddhism. Each religion’s section is divided into explanations of what its followers believe, what to expect in places of worship, the religious calendar (festivals and holiday), and rituals and ceremonies, with an additional glossary of important terms.

Overall, the book is adequate, giving readers a basic idea of what to expect when attending religious ceremonies. But it’s hampered by the author’s “one faith-many paths” approach, which is a bit misleading and possibly condescending. She claims, for example, that Hinduism “contrary to appearances, is a monotheistic faith,” (212) which seems a gross over-simplification, if not an outright distortion. It doesn’t square with what I’ve read about Hinduism in other comparative religion books, to say the least. Then again, it’s difficult to capture the nuances and complexities of any faith in a few paragraphs, ]so I’d take the book’s theological discourses with a grain of salt, and focus on the practical guide to how to behave.

Essentially, it all comes down to: do what others around you are doing (standing or sitting), and if in doubt, ask. This is sensible advice under any circumstances, but doubly so in a religious context.

I’m not enough of any expert in comparative religions to judge the book’s accuracy, but I noticed more than one error in the section on Judaism. For example, Lonsdale claims that all of the Jewish holidays “with the exception of Rosh Hashana” fall on fixed dates. “Confusingly,” she writes, “Rosh Hashana is celebrated in Tishrei, the seventh month of the ecclesiastical year.” I don’t understand how this is confusing: in the Western tradition the fiscal year starts on July 1, the school year in September, baseball season in April. And Rosh Hashana definitely has a fixed date: the first of Tishrei. So it might be bad proofreading, but it’s definitely not true that the holiday has no fixed date.

Basically, this might be a good start for understanding what’s going on in other faiths, but is hardly the last word.

Robert L. O’Connell. The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic. New York: Random House, 2010. 336 pages.

This book, by military historian Robert O’Connell, looks at the hows and also the whys of the battle of Cannae, one of the most conclusive–but ultimately least decisive–battles in Western history. In 216 B.C,, Hannibal, the brilliant Carthaginian general, inflicted a nearly-mortal wound on the Roman republic. The Roman army lost more men on that day than any other army in any other battle in history. Yet Hannibal ultimately was unable to defeat Rome, and 14 years later suffered his own defeat at Zama, in northern Africa, a battle which effectively ended the Second Punic War. THE GHOSTS OF CANNAE takes the reader from the origins of the Roman/Punic conflicts to the aftermath of the wars.

The book, generally a synthesis of ancient and modern scholarship on Rome, Carthage, and their conflicts, gives the reader a great deal of information. We learn how soldiers on both sides trained, how much equipment they carried, and what it took to get them in the field. O’Connell also sheds light on the political maneuvering that, more than military needs, often determined the pace of the war.

Given that all of this happened about 2,200 years ago, there’s not the same sense of immediacy you’d get from an account of a more recent war–surviving records are sometimes fragmentary, and there is simply a great deal about many of the central characters that we don’t know. At this stage, though, vivid personalities are pretty much the realm of historical fiction, as there’s just not enough in the historical record to flesh out characters. This at times makes the reading a bit one-dimensional, but O’Connell’s good sense of space and geography gives the battles enough context to seem real.

All in all, it’s a good military history of an epic battle, and a good read for those interested in military history.

Daniel Okrent. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Scriber, 2010. 480 pages.

Prohibition is one of the great riddles of American history. Looking at it from the distance of three generations, it seems inexplicable that Americans voted to outlaw intoxicating beverages, and it seems clear that the drys were on the wrong side of history. From our perspective, the debate seems so one-sided that the passage of Prohibition seems a mystery. But at the time it made sense to many Americans, and seemed like a good idea. Daniel Okrent’s LAST CALL reintroduces us to many of the key players behind the 18th amendment, the Volstead Act that followed, and those who enforced and broke the law in the next decade.

Okrent brings to life the men and women who shaped–and eventually brought down–Prohibition, and rescues many of them from obscurity. Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League, the political strategist considered in his lifetime to be the most influential man in America, is perhaps the keystone to understanding the hold that drys maintained on the American political process before and after the passage of the 18th amendment. Mabel Willebrandt, US Assistant Attorney General in charge of prosecuting Volstead Act violations, is also brought into focus, as are a host of other key players, from Canadian distiller Sam Bronfman to Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, the most famous pair of Prohibition agents of the 1920s. Reading this book really brings the characters back to life.

Okrent has pulled together a readable synthesis of the scholarly and popular historical material on Prohibition, and LAST CALL is a great popular history of the movement that lead to the law and the period that followed its enactment. If anything, some readers might consider the book a bit too detailed in some sections, but this doesn’t detract from Okrent’s accomplishments in presenting a single-volume history of a complex topic and period in American history.

David Gordon. The Serialist. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2010. 335 pages.

Fiction is much harder to review than non-fiction. With the latter, you just need a good topic and a passable writing style, and you can get a feel for the book within a few pages. Fiction, which requires a much bigger investment from the reader, it a different animal. A novel can go from great to awful in less than a page. Maybe this is why I review so much more non-fiction than fiction: it’s easier, and it’s much more straightforward. But I decided to take a chance on The Serialist.

The Serialist starts strong–in the first 20 pages, I thought this was the best novel I’d read for a while. It’s a great set-up–Harry Bloch, a struggling writer who toils in the trenches of genre fiction while his ex-girlfriend runs with a higher-class literary crowd. Gordon really nails the struggling genre-writer thing, and he creates a character who’s painfully aware of his own short-comings.

Then the plot kicks in, with Bloch being commissioned by a serial killer on death row to do some freelance work. From there, the writer’s pulled into the story, and must play detective for high stakes in a deadly game of cat and mouse (yes, I know I’m mixing metaphors…I’m paying homage to the genre). To me, once you’ve got bodies turning up, the story gets much less engaging. Serial killers are just about all the same: they’re narcissistic sadists. Struggling writers, though, come in all different shades of desperation and failure. There’s just more room for real novelty (and literary experimentation) there. I know there are probably way too many writers writing about writing, but to me it’s more fun to read that than a writer writing about serial killers. If you like grisly, though, you’ll get your fill.

It’s still a good slice of crime genre fiction, and it’s an interesting twist on the concept of a writer (or editor) getting entangled in his story, much like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, but tending towards the pulps rather than the esoterics. Could have done without the Al Gore reference in one of the stories, though–if it’s earnest, oh please, and if it’s ironic, that was maybe too subtle. In any event, it took me out of the story and got me thinking about the politics of climatology, which probably wasn’t the author’s intention.

At the end, it was an entertaining book, and decent crime fiction. By half-way through, I wasn’t as entranced as I was in those first 20 pages, but it still delivered something good.

Joel J. Miller. The Revolutionary Paul Revere. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010. 304 pages.

Paul Revere is famous for his midnight ride, but his life says a great deal more about the founding of the American republic than that single incident. In this new biography, Joel Miller uses Revere’s life to tell readers a little more about the social, cultural, and political milieu of Revolutionary Boston.

Revere had an interesting life, outside of his ride. Born to a French immigrant and a native New Englander in 1734, he followed his father into silversmithing and imbibed the whig politics of Boston. Well-established by the time that Boston’s independence-minded merchants, lawyers, and editors began to question British rule, as a Mason and respected artisan, he became a key player in the opposition–not quite at the center, with Adams, Hancock, Otis, and others, but not so far from it, either. While the Revolutionary War itself didn’t bring Revere the military success he hoped for, he was fortunate to live a long and prosperous life, even in his last years extending his business from precious metals to copper refining.

Miller’s produced a short, readable life of Revere. At times, it’s perhaps a bit too casual, as on page 138 when a young boy gets “smacked upside the head” with a musket stock. Miller doesn’t give the reader the peri-wigged colonial America that you might remember from elementary school; instead it’s a bustling place, filled with strivers, con artists, and idealists. He provides an interesting window on the American Revolution, and by synthesizing material from the bountiful scholarship on Revere, the period, and its major characters, gives readers a good glimpse at one American city at the dawn of the republic.

Jack Cashill. Popes and Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit & Debit, from Aristotle to AIG. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010. 259 pages.

With many of our current economic problems blamed on over-leveraging (both nationally and right here in Las Vegas), it’s a good idea to get a sense of how credit and debt have historically developed. In POPES AND BANKERS, Jack Cashill does just that, explaining how, every step of the way, there have been those who have opposed borrowing and lending.

Cashill weaves together philosophical, religious, and cultural discourses on credit, pulling together a variety of sources to take us from Biblical prohibitions against usury to current anger against sub-prime lenders. Cashill makes his sympathies clear right off; instead of focusing our wrath on “predatory lenders,” he suggested we might find the roots of our current economic crisis by looking at “predatory borrowers,” a group for whom Cashill revives the Aristotilean term “prodigal.” He does a good job of pulling in ideas about debt from various sources, including the writings of Aquinas, Dante, and Bentham (to name a random few) to show how our ideas of credit and debit have changed over the years.

From the time of Martin Luther to at least that of Henry Ford, many of those who rage against “usury” have been avowedly anti-Semitic. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice figures heavily in Cashill’s discussion of this strand of anti-usury, but he demonstrates that the Bard was merely scratching the surface. As he moves closer to present-day America, Cashill is able to shift his discussion from morality to politics. His interpretation of the New Deal is likely at odds with that in your college textbook. Within the past decade, he traces how political interference in the mortgage process, from the Community Reinvestment Act (1977) to the American Dream Downpayment Act (2003) led lenders to make loans they probably shouldn’t have. The result was the current housing bust.

All in all, this is a thought-provoking book that pulls from many diverse sources; if nothing else, after reading it you’ll be able to browse the business section with a little more perspective than yesterday’s closing Dow, and it might force you to think a little more closely about your own borrowing habits.

Bud Smith and Michael McCallister. Word Press in Depth. Indianapolis: Que, 2010. 410 pages.

If you haven’t noticed, this blog is in Wordpress. I’ve been using the software for about five years, and I’ve never felt that I’ve unlocked its full potential. So I was eager to read WORDPRESS IN DEPTH to get some insight into how to improve it.

Most of the book is geared towards those who host their blogs on wordpress.com, who are generally less invested in blogging than those who install WP themselves and run a blog on their own server space. So there’s a great deal of information about getting started with a blog–all of it useful–including whether to stake out your own domain name and what upgrades to consider on top of the standard, free WP hosting. I’m sure that much of the material walking new users through themes and widgets will be very helpful for…new users.

It’s not until page 229 that we get to wordpress.org-specific stuff, and again much of it is a walk-through. There’s a lengthy section on creating your own theme from scratch, something I’m most interested in, that looks comprehensive, though I haven’t put it into practice yet.

All in all, this looks like a solid guide for someone who hasn’t used WordPress before and doesn’t want to slog through the wordpress.org support forums for hours trying to figure things out. If you’re just getting started, this is probably a good investment, just from the time and frustration you’ll save. More experienced users might not get as much out of it, though they may find that it helps them extend their abilities a bit.

David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. Henry Clay: The Essential American. New York: Random House, 2010. 624 pages.

Henry Clay was a giant of early American politics. As Speaker of the House, senator from Kentucky, secretary of state, and de facto leader of the Whig opposition to Andrew Jackson, his power often rivaled that of presidents. But today, though most Americans might acknowledge him as vaguely important, few know much about his actual accomplishments.

In this book, Heidler and Heidler provide a welcome correction to this trend with an exhaustive biography of Clay that might reintroduce him to a new generation. The Heidlers have drawn on a range of sources, including the work of other historians, contemporary news accounts, Clay’s speeches, and private correspondence. The result is a balanced portrait of Clay that does justice to a man full of contradictions, who owned slaves and advocated a protectionist tariff yet spoke as a champion of liberty.

The authors not only present the reader with a life of Clay; they reevaluate several ideas about Clay, such as the claim that, in 1841, he deliberately sabotaged John Tyler’s presidency in order to clear the field for his own run in 1844. The Heidlers suggest that this wasn’t true, and that Clay posthumously became the victim of an organized smear campaign orchestrated by political enemies with axes to grind. Points like this make the book an interesting, critical read; since the authors are actively evaluating the extant sources, the reader gets to do the same.

HENRY CLAY as comprehensive a book about Clay that the non-specialist is likely to want. While it is quite readable, it’s readable in the sense that a marathon is runnable: it’s good enough to keep you turning the pages, but with 624 of them, it’s a long haul. Those looking for a briefer introduction might find the going a bit tough, but there is a great deal of good writing–and powerful history–in these pages.

Max Watman. Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010. 293 pages.

In Chasing the White Dog, Max Watman blends three spirits, so to speak: a bit of bootlegging history, going back to the Whiskey Rebellion, some reportage on the current state of moonshine (it’s a surprisingly large business), and a good helping of memoir, detailing Watman’s investigations and his own foray into home distilling.

I learned a great deal from the book, starting with the historical background, but more interestingly with the present-day goings-on. Moonshine isn’t just a relic of bygone days; it’s a multi-million dollar, interstate criminal operation, with much of the liquor distilled in Appalachia ending up in nip joints, unlicensed watering holes in large cities; Philadelphia is the nation’s biggest consumer of moonshine. The connection between Hazzard County (so to speak) and North Philly is surprising but nonetheless important. Watman also chronicles the law enforcement officers who are ranged against the moonshiners, like Jimmy Beheler of Virginia’s Alcohol Control Board’s Illegal Whiskey Task Force, and concludes the book with a day-by-day recounting of a moonshine trial in Roanoke, Virginia. Along the way, Watman passes along some humorous asides, with “How (not) to be a criminal, Item X” footnotes, a running gag that both informs and entertains. Watman neither romanticizes the bootleggers (though some figures, like Junior Johnson, inevitably come across as larger than life), nor does he mock it…as a (sometimes) participant observer, he calls it as close down the middle as possible.

The material about Watman’s own experiments with home distilling reflect his passion for spirits. He’s able to share his excitement at finally producing a passable batch of applejack well with his readers. Whether they share that excitement probably has more to do with their appreciation of liquor than anything else; non-drinkers won’t find much to relate to, though they will still find plenty to marvel at, from the technical aspects of setting up a working still to the development of artisanal distilling, paralleling the boom in micro-breweries. Watman’s final thoughts make a strong case for legalizing home distilling under a certain threshold, whether you want to distill your own spirits or not.

All in all, it’s a fun read about a fascinating subject that may get serious whiskey drinkers thinking about looking beyond the local supermarket when it comes to buying something to drink.

Sarah Rose. For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History. New York: Viking, 2010. 252 pages.

Fears about the deleterious impact of globalism are nothing new, as For All the Tea in China reminds us. From 1848 to 1851, Scottish botanist Robert Fortune pulled off a gutsy act of industrial espionage, sneaking far into inland China at a time when the country was still closed to foreigners to steal tea plants and seeds and learn the secrets of the Chinese tea industry.

This was not just a matter of finding a more convenient way to get a hot cup of Earl Gray. Tea formed a major part of the British East India Company’s 18th and 19th century trade, which essentially saw the company sell opium to China and buy tea for British consumption in return. Tea taxes funded much of the infrastructure Britain needed as it retooled into an industrial nation, and became a political hotpoint, as well; in 1773, Boston patriots destroyed British tea because of what they viewed as unconstitutional taxes. For China, tea represented a lucrative export market.

When it feared that China’s emperor might legalized the production of opium within China and leave the company with nothing to trade for tea, the British East India company determined to secure its future by producing its own tea. To that end, the company hired Fortune to smuggle out both biological and intellectual capital to create high quality tea production in India.

Rose does a great job of recreating the social and economic setting of Fortune’s journey into China and, using his own autobiographical writings and other sources, is able to creditably recreate his travels. At times, Fortune’s travels were quite dangerous, as pirates and robbers infested the trade routes of the region. If you’re a tea drinker, it will give you a whole new perspective on how your favorite beverage came to be.

One interesting aside: Fortune discovered that Chinese tea producers had been mixing Prussian Blue and gypsum, two poisonous additives, into tea produced for Britons, not out of any malicious desire, but because it gave the tea the green coloring that the producers thought the British customers wanted. The recent concerns over lead paint in children’s toys and melamine in animal feed have some historical precedent.

All in all, this is an exciting bit of historical adventure that’s an informative read, reminding us that concerns over globalism and intellectual property are nothing new.

Stephen Fried. Appetite for America: Fred Harvey Civilizing the West–One Meal at a Time. New York: Bantam Books, 2010. 528 pages.

If you’ve driven from LA to Las Vegas and wondered what the “Harvey House” sign in Barstow was all about, here’s the scoop: from roughly 1876 to 1930, many train passengers took their meal in depot-adjacent restaurants run by Fred Harvey, known as Harvey Houses. The Barstow rail depot is one of the few remaining Harvey Houses, and it houses two museums. If you want to know more about Fred Harvey, this book is a must-read.

In APPETITE FOR AMERICA, Stephen Fried puts together a compelling narrative of a massive, influential, but nearly-forgotten American food service giant, Fred Harvey. Even though it’s a mammoth read (528 pages), the book’s level of detail is worth the investment in time. Because Harvey is, for most readers, an obscure company operating in a distant era, Fried has to recreate both the company’s operations and put the company into its proper economic, social, and political context. So this isn’t just a book about a restaurant chain–it’s a book about the rise and decline of a genuine family business, changing American consumer tastes, the transformation of the American West, and the last great era of railroad expansion.

Fred Harvey the company started with Fred Harvey, a British immigrant who gravitated to the railroad business before specializing in food. Trackside eating houses of the time were dirty and served sub-par food. By investing in first-class facilities, fresh ingredients, and top-level chefs, Harvey founded a culinary empire. His emphasis on rigorous training for all employees, including the trademark “Harvey Girl” waitresses, made dining at a Harvey House a consistently pleasant experience. Maybe his best customer service motto was: “We cater to cranks.” His rationale was that anyone can serve a gentleman, but it took a truly dedicated business to please difficult customers.

The book details Fred Harvey’s rise to prominence as the trackside caterer for the Santa Fe railroad and his passing the baton to the next generation, his former assistant Dave Benjamin and his son, Ford Harvey, who continued to call their company “Fred Harvey.” After Ford, the succession was a bit muddled, and a combination of uninspired leadership and bigger changes in American life led to the downfall of Fred Harvey.

All in all, it’s a fascinating read that tells the story of one of America’s most influential institutions.

This book should probably be mandatory for all casino executives, because it presents a cautionary tale of the failure of a hospitality business to adapt to new market conditions. Fred Harvey was more than a business: it was a beloved American institution that was an integral part of communities throughout the West. But it isn’t anymore, because it couldn’t grow to feed a changing public. That should be a warning to anyone running any business, so this is both a biography/history and a case study for success and failure. Good read.

I was interviewed for this piece last week, and it’s interesting to see how it all came together. I’m glad I’m not the only one who didn’t think that this proposal made no sense. From Arkansas Business:

If a proposed constitutional amendment allowing Texas businessman Michael J. Wasserman to build casinos in Arkansas sounds like a license to print money, you don't know the half of it.

When Arkansas Business sent Wasserman's proposed amendment to gambling experts, they were gobsmacked by the proposal, which they described as so tilted toward the casino operator that it would be unprecedented, if not completely unrealistic.

via Casino Proposal Termed ‘Nirvana’ for Businessman – ArkansasBusiness.com.

Read the article–it is quite a fanciful proposal for casino legalization.

David Grann. The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession. New York: Doubleday, 2010. 352 pages.

Great non-fiction is just as suspenseful and revealing of the human condition as great fiction. With The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, David Grann gives the reader twelve intriguing pieces of great non-fiction.

The collection starts with a short introduction in which Grann lays out the thematic (though not topical) unity of the book: each of the pieces is, in some way, about sleuthing. Whether its investigating a murder, looking for a half-mythical sea creature, or seeking to recover lost memories, the people who move through these pages are all looking for something.

After the introduction comes the chapter which likely gave the book its title: an investigation into the death, under mysterious circumstances, of the world’s foremost Sherlock Holmes expert. If this were an episode of a TV police procedural, most viewers would dismiss it as ridiculously contrived: the expert, who was himself unraveling the mystery of a cache of lost Holmesiana, was found dead of an apparent suicide that would have baffled the Baker Street detective himself. Grann not only hooks the reader into the case; he gives the reader a glimpse into the world of Holmes devotees, a group that makes Trekkies look like they treat Star Trek with a casual irreverence. But Grann doesn’t make them into geeks or misfits; he instead communicates the enduring appeal of Holmes in an increasingly chaotic world in a way that might have you checking a few Arthur Conan Dolye books out of the library. I can’t think of any better testament to Grann’s skill or style as a writer.

Other stories are no less riveting. Some of the more gripping ones are the tale of Krystian Bala, a would-be philosopher and author whose novel was used as evidence at his trial for murder; walking with Kevin Shea, a firefighter who survived 9/11 but is still tormented by his inability to remember what he did on that day; and a ride-along with the sandhogs, subterranean construction workers who have been building water tunnels under the streets of New York for generations. Those are just a few of my personal favorites, but every story in this collections sheds light on something meaningful in an interesting way. The pieces are all brief, but deep.

The bottom line? This is an outstanding collection of non-fiction that will whet your appetite for more.

Peter Milligan. Art by James Romberger. The Bronx Kill. New York: DC Comics, 2010. 181 pages.

It’s book review Friday–this week I’m featuring another book that I got through Amazon Vine.

The “comic book” can be a powerful story-telling medium. Graphic novels like Art Speigelman’s MAUS and Majane Satrapi’s PERSEPOLIS can do things that standard texts cannot, so readers can connect with them on a more emotional level. But THE BRONX KILL, which plays with fictionalized memoir and remembrance, doesn’t come close to delivering on the potential.

The basic idea sounds intriguing: a struggling literary novelist, whose cop father wanted him to to become a cop, finds himself in the middle of a mystery. And the right elements are there–like WATCHMEN, the traditional comics pages are intercut with pages of text from an “in universe” document–in this case, the protagonist’s in-progress novel. It should make for good reading, but it doesn’t.

Basically, that’s because the protagonist, Martin Keane, is almost entirely unlikable. He’s presented in terms of what he’s not: assertive, successful, a “man’s man” like his father. But the reader doesn’t get a real sense of what Martin is, besides the fact that he likes to write and would rather do literary fiction than police procedurals. With nothing invested in the lead, it’s hard to care about what’s happening. Keane just seems like an unpleasant guy who unpleasant things happen to.

The art seems a bit rough, which doesn’t drawn in the reader, but the book’s biggest problem is voice. The comic is intercut with excerpts from the novel in progress, which has some seriously clunky prose. At first I said, “Wow, that’s bad writing,” but then I rationalized that it was supposed to be–Martin is derided as a second-rate author, so maybe the point is to show this rather than just tell it. Still, it’s an awful lot to ask your reader to sit through. But Martin’s dialog in the comics section is equally stilted. I rationalized this as, “well, this just shows that Martin is really stuck in mediocrity–he can’t even speak naturally.” But other characters speak in the same voice. For example, during an emotionally-charged confrontation, a supposedly gruff character says, “It’s a pretty shameful episode in our family history, one best forgotten.” This isn’t the kind of thing someone would yell at someone else during a pitched argument, and it just blows the scene’s credibility out of the water. There’s no sense that these are real people at all, just characters.

Early in the book, a critic pans Martin’s latest book as “portentous, pretentious, and mind-crushingly dull.” I’m not saying that THE BRONX KILL is these things, but I wouldn’t necessary argue with someone who said so. I just found it disappointing.

Ian James Corlett. Illustrated by R.A. Holt. E is for Ethics: How to Talk to Kids About Morals, Values, and What Matters Most. New York: Atria Books, 201. 111 pages.

Most people would say that ethics aren’t something that parents can teach, that they can only show them by example. That may be true, but discussing morality and values with your children certainly can’t hurt. Author Ian James Corlett, in E IS FOR ETHICS, gives parents a game plan: read one of the 26 stories in this thin volume once a week together, and over the course of a year you’ll have two lessons on the same subject.

It’s a good approach, and Corlett’s background in children’s television has helped him put together stories that quickly set up an ethical dilemma and either suggest a solution or leave it for the readers to puzzle their way out. Each story–they are really short vignettes–raises one major question, such as, “How did Elliott show PATIENCE?” that is the subject of the lesson. After Corlett’s answer, there follow several other questions, like, “Do you think you would have been as patient as Elliott was?” and “How can you show patience in your life?”

For kids of the right age group, this will surely provoke some thoughtful discussion. Because the pieces in the book are big on story and thin on plot, there’s not much to hold toddlers who aren’t quite ready to see the world in moralistic terms or to discuss shared values. For the right age, this will likely be a great book to read with parents.

I’ve got to take a little bit of exception to Corlett proclaiming that he’s not a PHD, but a POD (Plain Old Dad) in the foreword. “I’m a plain old dad, no degree, no letters, nothin’,” he writes. I’m not a big fan of the anti-intellectual, anti-expert advice trend, because it goes without saying that if you really want to be a better parent, or business executive, or whatever you’re writing your self-help book about, you’ll look for answers anywhere you can find them, which may include people who’ve devoted their professional lives to looking for the same answers. It’s ironic because Corlett uses quotes from from Plato, Confucius, Benjamin Franklin, and many other authorities to back up his homespun wisdom–an essentially academic approach. This is still a great book, but I could have done without that paragraph, because it sets up an opposition between intellectual and popular approaches to morality that I don’t think is really there.

Still, parents of 8 to 10 year-olds will probably get a lot of mileage out of Corlett’s book.

Gary Myers. The Catch: One Play, Two Dynasties, and the Game that Changed the NFL. New York:Crown Publishers, 2009. 304 pages.

With the Super Bowl behind us, here’s a review of a book about another momentous NFL game.

THE CATCH is filled with good reportage, including interviews from many of the key surviving figures of the 1981 season’s NFC Championship game between the Cowboys and the 49ers, but is marred by endless repetitions and poor structure. Myers starts the book by describing “The Catch” (a nearly impossible Dwight Clark reception of a Joe Montana touchdown pass in the closing minutes of the game) and sketching how some of the players got there.

By talking to those who were on the field for The Catch, Myers is able to get an inside story that will interest fans of the NFL and the respective teams. He traces the career arcs of most of the key players from college to retirement and beyond. While longtime fans may know these stories, they may be new to novice or casual fans.

But Myers seeks to do more than just report on the game and its players: he wants to make the case that this play was the key deciding factor in creating the 1980s 49ers dynasty and ending the reign of Tom Landry’s Cowboys over the NFL. In this, he’s not completely successful. As was pointed out in the book itself, The Catch would have been moot without the 49er defense’s subsequent stifling of the Cowboys’ final drive. And, as Myers points out, there were key structural issues leading to the 49ers’ ascent and Cowboys’ decline. Had The Catch not been made, it’s hard to argue that the 49ers would not have been a contender in the 1980s, given Bill Walsh’s offensive prowess–the dynasty might have just been born a year later. Throughout the book, though, Myers repeats his thesis time and again, dulling it through repetition.

Indeed, structure is an issue. Since the first paragraph of Joe Montana’s foreward reminds the reader that Clark made The Catch, there’s not much suspense in Myers weaving the story of the game through the rest of the book. The play-by-play is clunky, particularly since we already know the outcome, and it really impedes the flow of the book.

Charlie Huston. Sleepless: A Novel. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010. 368 pages.

Charlie Huston’s latest novel is a thought-provoking mix of several strands: noirish mystery, police procedural, hard medical science fiction (think ANDROMEDA STRAIN), dystopian near-future Los Angeles, narco-thriller, zombie horror-fest, and philosophical love story. It’s a credit to the author that all of these genres not only work together, but actually complement each other.

The plot is simple: a newly-mutated disease is causing an epidemic of sleeplessness that takes about a year to kill, painfully disintegrating its victims’ minds. One of the two lead characters is Parker Haas, a young detective with a wife afflicted with the disease and an infant daughter who may be. The other is a “problem solver” who becomes involved, at first obliquely, with the detective’s investigation into possibly bootlegged supplies of a drug that can provide relief, but not a cure, for the disease.

The story is more complex. Both of the leads are acutely self-aware (perhaps sometimes straining the point of credulity, but once you’ve accepted you’re reading a dystopian noir sci-fi zombie story, the odd narc with a philosophy Ph.D. or hitman connoisseur with OCD isn’t asking much more in the way of suspension of disbelief), which adds a layer of meaning to the action, and the portrait of Parker, his sleepless wife Rose, and their infant daughter is realistic and nuanced. What makes it powerful is that Huston has used the core of the new-parent experience–sleeplessness, anxiety, disconnection from the outside world–as the model for the entire world. It’s an intriguing concept that will probably grab you–I read this book in a sitting-and-a-half over a sleepless night on a cross-country flight and the next day’s aftermath. You don’t have to be at that slightly dreamy stage of sleep deprivation to get into this book, but it probably helps you get the story on a more emotional level.

Huston does some interesting things with structure, too. There are three different kinds of narrative: Third person, based on Park’s experiences; first person, as told by Park; and first person, as told by the problem solver. There’s a little bit of a learning curve over the first few pages, but once you grok what’s going on, it works brilliantly.

SLEEPLESS works so well because Huston builds a realistic world. His insights into video gaming, as related through the in-book game Chasm Tide, a World of Warcraft-style immersive multi-player game, would make for interesting sociology, but they really help create a universe in which his plot–and his characters–make sense.

It’s a credit to Huston’s skill that he’s able to build a solid world out of such disparate elements, and it’s refreshing to read a writer who’s not afraid to take chances with his storytelling. This is the second Huston novel I’ve read, and it won’t be the last. Highly recommend.

Linn Mills and Dick Post. Nevada Gardener’s Guide. Revised Edition. Franklin, Tennessee: Cool Springs Press, 2001. 272 pages.

Few, if any, people move to Nevada for the gardening, but it is possible to grow a healthy and productive garden in the Silver State. In the NEVADA GARDENER’S GUIDE, authors Linn Mills and Dick Post–respected authorities in Southern and Northern Nevada, respectively–help the novice gardener learn how to develop a greener thumb.

The authors start by walking the reader through the basics of Nevada gardening. As a desert region, Nevada has large swings in temperature. Two helpful maps show the heat zones and cold-hardiness zones, which the plant descriptions that make up the meat of the book refer back to. This is invaluable–by following Mills and Post, you will pick the right plants for your region, which should save plenty of heartache later.

Like other gardening books, the NEVADA GARDENER’S GUIDE has detailed information about individual plants. Most of the book is made up of single-page summaries of individual plants. Each has a photo, a descriptive paragraph written by one of the authors, , info on how to plant, growing tips, care instructions, tips on design, and the authors’ “personal favorite” variety. The full-color illustrations on each page give the reader a good idea of what their plant should look like when in good health. With the watering, sun, and pest-control information, keeping them in good shape should me much easier.

After the introduction, the book is divided into 12 parts, each dealing with a different category of plant: a few include annuals, cactuses, ground covers, palms, shrubs, and trees. If it grows in the soil (or a pot), you’ll likely find it in here.

In short, this is an indispensable aid to gardeners in any part of the state. Armed with the information here, you’ll feel better picking out plants in the nursery, planting at the right time, setting your watering timers. It’s a wonderful reference work that should pay for itself many times over.

Jane White. America, Welcome to the Poorhouse: What You Must Do to Protect Your Financial Future and the Reform We Need. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: FT Press, 2010. 247 pages.

I’m leery of anyone who tells you what bad shape you’re in, then says that they and only they can help you get out of the fix you’re in. It’s a modus operandi that snake oil salesmen honed to perfection years ago, probably because it works. Still, I approached this book with an open mind, despite the subtitle (“What you must do to protect your financial future”).

Then on pages 16 and 17, White says that it’s essential that 401 (k) participants be able to buy software that tells them to “contribute the maximum, don’t time the market, and stick with index funds,” helpfully disclosing to readers that she’s “interested in developing this software.” Suddenly, it seems that while the advice might be good, it’s at least a tad self-serving.

Indeed, the first part of the book is all about 401 (k) plans. White believes that it’s unjust that people aren’t forced to contribute more money to their 401 (k) plans, and makes no bones about the fact that ordinary people shouldn’t be allowed to “shoot themselves in the foot” by managing their own retirement portfolio. There are two numbers that she returns to, time and again, without explaining why they are important. Throughout the book, White insists that Americans must have ten times their “final” salary saved in their 401 (k) by the time they retire, without explaining why nine times is too little and eleven times is too much. Second, she proposes that the federal government mandate that all employers with more than 9 employees be forced to contribute 9 percent of their salary to a 401 (k) plan. Again, why 9 (for both criteria) and not 8 or 10?

White’s thesis–that it would be good policy to legislate adding an additional nine percent to labor costs overnight–seems to fly in the face of what we known about the economy. She doesn’t consider that employers might lay off employees or cut salaries to compensate. It’s like she thinks employers are just going to pull this extra nine percent in compensation out of the same hammerspace that she pulled the nine employees/nine percent number. I kept waiting for her to explain it in more detail, but she didn’t.

Besides the dodgy macro-economics, much of the book is partisan finger-pointing that doesn’t advance the debate on retirement security or help people planning for their retirement. At this stage, most Americans probably don’t care whether Bill Clinton or George Bush did more to contribute to the mess we’re in: they just want honest solutions to get out of it. More disturbing is White’s contempt for the rich, who she believes should have to pay proportionally more taxes, again without thinking that this might lead people to become less productive, which surely is to the detriment of everyone.

Personally, I got a hoot out of her statement that “a college education should be a taxpayer subsidized right for low- and middle-income Americans…no family earning $60,000 or less should have to pay anything for college.” I couldn’t disagree more, even though I’m a tenured faculty member of a university and were such a law to pass it would doubtless personally benefit me. That’s because I think that you don’t value what you don’t pay for. If you want a college education, you should have to pay at least something for it. White makes some good points about Sallie Mae wreaking havoc with the student loan process, but the solution is to mandate low-interest student loans and work study opportunities as well as merit-based scholarships, not give away college to anyone whose family happens to not make more than $60,000 a year (another arbitrary number).

White also snarks about gambling as “one of the sleaziest industries of all, in which the ‘house always wins’–otherwise how would the industry make any money?” in a throwaway line, that again betrays a misunderstanding of how businesses work. How does any business, from an ice cream stand to a 401 (k) manager, stay in business except by taking in more money than they pay out?

The book closes with some standard populist invective against “greedy and needy politicians,” with demands that Congress become “closer to Main Street than to K Street” (the Washington street on which many lobbyists have offices). It’s not particularly original. As political agitprop, it’s serviceable for those of both parties who want to “throw the bums out,” but it doesn’t help Americans trying to plan for their retirement.

In between all of this fluff, there is some helpful, but unspectacular, advice to Americans: spend less, save more, and stay out of debt. Of course, if everyone buys less the retail and ultimately manufacturing sectors will tank, so it’s probably best that not everyone takes her advice. The personal finance stuff in general is simple common sense, and nothing that would justify a $23 book purchase. So maybe readers should take her advice and economize–in this case you should take the money you would have spent on this book and save it for your retirement.