Stettin Station (A John Russell WWII Spy Thriller) by David Downing | LibraryThing

I must say I have enjoyed this series (which I recommend reading in order) so far.  This is the third and continues an examination of Germany during World War II as seen through the eyes of Russell, an American journalist, who is tied to Germany by his girlfriend, Effie,  and his German-born son.

You get a real sense of the claustrophobia people must felt as they became hemmed in by bombing and the repressiveness of the regime, constantly having to watch what you say, who you say it to, and who might overhear you.

Downing is very skillful in showing elements of the Third Reich’s control.  For example, Russell stops to purchase a copy of the Beobachter  in which he reads that Ernst Udet, WW I ace and big Luftwaffe general had been killed testing a new fighter plane. Thinking that was a bit strange I utilized the wonderful feature of my Kindle and clicking on Udet’s name read the piece on Udet in the Wikipedia only to learn that Udet had committed suicide.  So I figured Downing had erred. Just a few pages later, however, at a press briefing, he uses a question from another reporter to point to the suicide (“Does the administration have any comment on the rumor that Udet had committed suicide?”) The truth is outed as well as the ministry’s attempts to hide it.

Russell is a journalist, after all, and in his attempts to discover what’s really happening on the eastern front, he cultivates a locomotive engineer.  Some of the important detail that’s revealed I had not learned by reading the standard discussions of the Nazi failure in the Russian winter.  For example, Russian tenders carried a larger supply of water, so their water tanks were further apart;  the steam pipes were built around the boiler rather than on the outside as with German engines, so they didn’t freeze.  These all provided clues for Russell as to why the war in the east had bogged down.

Some people have complained about the ending.  It’s a series.  Get over it, people. I can’t wait to start the 4th.  As I noted above, read them in order.

'via Blog this'

Night and Day (Jesse Stone) by Robert B. Parker | LibraryThing

Robert Parker’s novels all have a cadence to them that many people find disconcerting. An almost staccato dialogue, it can be especially prominent in an audiobook such as this one in the Jesse Stone Series.  I rather like it.

Jesse is faced with two peculiar cases:  the woman principal of the school has parents irate because she dained to lift the skirts of the girls to make sure they had on appropriate undergarments before a dance (no thongs, thank you); and the other a man obsessed with watching women undress at night through their windows, his obsession escalating to entering their homes during the day and forcing them to disrobe at gunpoint and then writing Jesse about it.

Everyone is in therapy in this novel:  Jesse sees Dick for his drinking and inability to deal with his ex-wife’s quasi-abandonment of him; Sunny Randall (a character from another Parker series) is being therapyized by Susan Silvermann (a therapist from the Spencer series); and Betty Ingersoll, the aforementioned principal gets forced into therapy in the end and her husband should have been. It’s true most of them are a bit wacko, but a lot of the psycho-babble that’s delivered in many of the interviews seems more sermonizing than enlightening.  I suspect Robert Parker must have been in therapy for decades.  But, all things, considered, I enjoyed the book and the Jesse Stone character.

'via Blog this'

A Venture Into Murder by Henry Kisor | LibraryThing

Deputy Steve Martinez, full-blooded Lakota, is now investigating the deaths of several people, one that occurred many years before.   Caught almost in flagrante delicto with someone else, his relationship with Ginny is a bit rocky, and the investigation keeps turning up linkages to “Venture” a profitable specialty plant growing operation that is using an abandoned mine to raise the plants where the temperature and other environmental conditions can be carefully controlled.

Kisor, author of Flight of the Gin Fizz, uses his knowledge of aviation to good use, as Steve must pull off a tricky night surveillance flight in the sheriff’s departmental old Cessna, AKA “piece of crap,” to quote his friend Alex of the State Police.  There’s a funny scene when they are flying at night to check out some suspicious characters and Steve shuts the engine off.  Everything is going as rehearsed until he can’t locate the key, which has come out of the ignition and he can’t restart the engine. Alex, who hates flying anyway, about craps in his pants.

Again, as in the first Martinez, it will be the characters and the wonderful little tidbits of history and information on the Porcupine area of the Upper Peninsula that draw you into the story, not the action.

I like the series a lot.

'via Blog this'

Goodreads | Genius in Disguise:: Harold Ross of The New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

Harold Ross, the famous founder and editor of The New Yorker, was born in Aspen, Colorado. His parents moved as the silver industry failed, eventually winding up in Salt Lake City. Ross was a precocious youngster who read voraciously, and his mother taught him that structure in grammar was important to clarity of communication. The writing addiction hit him first on his school paper and soon his life was constant peregrination, not uncommon for newspapermen in the early twentieth century. Rarely did he stay more than a few weeks in one place. He loved the romance and adventure of the police beat. In California, he became editor of the Marysville Appeal after the sudden death of the editor, but before long he was off to Panama, then New Orleans. The western character never left Ross. His personal taste in reading ran to dictionaries and true-detective magazines. Despite his coarseness and profaneness, "he had a near perfect ear for language" and did not suffer fools lightly. "We don't run our magazine for dumbbells," he was heard to holler on several occasions.

He enlisted during WW I and was assigned to an engineering battalion. The work was cold, wet, and miserable, and when Pershing approved the idea for what was to become Stars and Stripes, Ross applied for transfer. When the orders were not forthcoming, he went AWOL, traveled to Paris and showed up at the newspaper's door. They were so short-handed that his transfer was immediately approved. He became part of an editorial staff that made the paper a rousing success. Immune to the silliness of rank, they always had the enlisted man's welfare at heart, and that was one reason for the paper's immense success.

Harold Ross was a man of contradictions. His personal reading ran to dictionaries of modern usage and detective stories. He was raised in the west and enjoyed profanity but his magazine came to symbolize urbanity and sophistication. He had a gifted ear for language and was a great editor. The New Yorker became a mission for Ross that reflected his keen curiosity and droll humor (although the magazine's first art editor, Rea Irvin , was substantially responsible for developing the humorous art that was to become almost a trademark of the magazine). The story forms that would later find a place in The New Yorker all could be found in the Rossedited Stars and Stripes. It, too, was a weekly and so had to find some way to distinguish itself from the rest of the hard-news-oriented papers. The premium was placed on storytelling, i.e., behindthe scenes, personality, and feature pieces. The twenties were a good time to begin a national magazine (despite Ross's mission to make it metropolitan). Magazines were the true national medium.

Radio was still in its infancy and television was still a gleam in the engineers' eyes. Ross's vision was to realize that New York merchants might pay more to reach a New York audience. Why advertise to the "old lady in Dubuque." His experience at various magazines in the United States had also revealed how the business side could influence the editorial side. He wanted his magazine to be completely independent, with a complete wall between the business and editorial sides. Ross could be such a bizarre combination of debonair, ladies' man and hick. He was immensely appealing to women, liked them  the magazine never would have been a success without the likes of Dorothy Parker and Janet Flanner, but had curiously Victorian attitudes toward them. He had three wives, all of whom married again successfully after they divorced him.

Once, when St. Clair McKelway stopped by his office to discuss an upcoming story, he noticed that Ross was fidgeting in his chair and asked what was the matter. "They ought to have covers, wooden or metal covers of some kind around the goddamn radiators." McKelway was confused as there were no radiators in their building, so he asked what Ross meant. Here? "Good God, no, said Ross. "At the Ritz. I had this dame in bed and it got cold so I got up and walked over to the window to shut it. I had to lean over to shut the window and my you-knowwhat dangled down on this red-hot radiator. Feels like a second degree burn, for Christ's sake." During the Depression, The New Yorker suffered little. Ross had always seen it as a humor magazine, and since all his money was tied up in the magazine, he lost no money during the crash. They were severely criticized years later for their distinctly apolitical stance, but that had always been the policy. They had no position on anything.

Raoul Fleischmann, the publisher, of yeast fame, had fronted a huge amount of money to get the magazine going. He ran the business side while Ross handled the editorial. The two entities remained completely distinct, even having separate floors or buildings. There was great antipathy between the two personalities that anecdotally stemmed from a business decision of Fleischmann's during the Depression. He was loath to authorize dividends, wanting to build up a cash reserve. This meant that Ross had to cough up increasingly large sums under the terms of his divorce settlement with Jane Grant that stipulated she would get the income from her share of stock and that Ross would make up the difference between her stock income and $10,000. He never forgave Fleischmann for what was essentially a sound business decision. Separating the two sides of the business meant that editorial was never influenced by business interests, and people still marvel at the freedom Fleischmann gave Ross. Kunkel has a wonderful definition of what makes a good editor  or good leader for that matter. "In the narrowest sense, editors lay twitchy hands on someone else's work, fixing it, patching it, polishing it, and generally trying to keep it -upright. In the broadest sense, however, they set the agenda, standards, and tone for a publication. They hire and fire; they pick stories, and the writers to go with them. They must have enough ego to confidently steer talented people, but the will to subordinate it. They must assuage prima donnas, compel laggards, and sober up drunks. Equal parts shaman and showman, they must have an unwavering vision for their publication, convey it to a staff, and then sell it to the great yawning public. For these reasons and many others, editing a magazine is not a job suited to the faint or uncertain, and it is enormously difficult to do well. . . .[Ross:] also believed that talent attracts talent. You get talent if you publish a good magazine, you get tripe if you publish tripe. . . . And talent, the editor understood, was the key. He never stopped searching for it or, once he had found it, nurturing it. Ross had a respect for creative people that bordered on veneration; everyone else, himself included, was meant to be in their service." "Ross's New Yorker changed the face of contemporary fiction, perfected a new form of literary journalism, established the standards for humor and comic art, swayed the cultural and social agendas, and became synonymous with sophistication. It replaced convention with innovation." Nothing symbolized this more than his publication of John Hersey's "Hiroshima" as one complete article. Originally intended to be serialized, Ross and the editors realized that the obligatory short recapitulations required at the beginning of each part of the serial would detract from the content, so, breaking with all tradition, it was published complete in one issue to the exclusion of everything else. All the regular features and cartoons were dropped. The issue became an instant sensation and was said many years later to have been the most famous and important magazine piece ever published.

By the fifties, The New Yorker had become mandatory reading, a status symbol, a cultural beacon. Much of its reputation was due, in part, to critics like Wolcott Gibbs, whose acerbic reviews often made him anathema to theatres, critics, and actors. His considerable influence resulted from his high standing among fellow critics who, even though few liked him personally, knew he was "usually right, and that he didn't settle for dreck. He helped to keep them honest." It was a metaphor for the entire magazine. This is a wonderful biography, filled with delightful anecdotes about a fascinating man and time. 

'via Blog this'

Shock Wave (A Virgil Flowers Novel) by John Sandford | LibraryThing

Audiobook.  My favorite Sandford character, again decked out in cowboy boots and rock band t-shirts, and again on vacation, is charged with investigating the bombings of executives of a large chain.

It’s a scenario familiar to many smaller communities:  a large chain like Walmart or Target (in this fictional case the store is called PyeMart) wants to move in and build a store. The community has many small businesses that will go under from the competition of the larger store.  They are also worried about the environmental effects as one of the community draws is the trout stream they worry might be destroyed. So the list of suspects is substantial.

It was pleasant to read a story where the various agencies cooperate with each other and exchange information in order to solve the puzzle. It’s a very good story as Virgil pieces the puzzle together to find the killer.

As James points out in his excellent review, the pleasure of reading the Flowers series comes as much from the evolving character of Virgil who has to be one of the most sympathetic detectives in crime fiction.

'via Blog this'