It's a Car! It's a Boat! It's the Swimarai!

Coming back from the grocery tonight, we saw the most amazing vehicle out in the river. At first I thought someone drove off the bank, but closer inspection showed this was a seaworthy craft.
He even got a chuckle out of the local fisherman, while he waited to come ashore.

The wheels are outfitted with these paddles for propulsion, although there was a small elvinrude engine on the back end.
Pumping out the bilge after landing. Most of the water was back splash from the front tires, not leakage.
And here's Cap'n Lee, who built the Swimarai in 2007.

Department of Book Reports: Blood's a Rover

I haven't quite finished the one massive book I'm reading, Blood's A Rover, by James Ellroy (Knopf $28.95) This is prime Ellroy, violent, twisted and so dazzlingly written. It's difficult to say I'm enjoying it, but it's certainly gripping and compelling. This is the third and final volume in Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy which began with American Tabloid, then The Cold Six Thousand and the election of JFK, and now we are in the Cold-War years just up to Watergate. There's plenty of hate crimes, racism, conspiracy plots, mafia, drugs and Haitian voodoo. The novel follows the three main characters Wayne Tedrow Jr the ex-Vegas cop from Cold Six Thousand who has gone on a murderous spree (which includes the MLK assasination) after his wife was killed by a black thug and is trying to redeem himself.
Dwight Holly, FBI agent and son of a KKK member whose dirty laundry has obligated him do "Gay Edgar" Hoover's top jobs. Donald Crutchfield is a low life working for Howard Hughes' interests in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Woven throughout these three exploits are their love interests and a mysterious woman with a gray streak in her hair.

I don't recommend this one for the faint of heart, but if you're an Ellroy fan this is a great read. Not as fast paced as the previous, it still has his trademark style using journal excepts, redacted FBI files and secret notes.

This weekend the dailykos convention, now known as Netroots Nation 2010, is taking place in Las Vegas this weekend. We'll be streaming some of the Keynote speeches into Second Life at Virtually Speaking Studios. If you can't run SL on your computer, you can still catch some of the streams via the intertubes. Montana's governor Swcheitzer's speech last night was great, Van Jones today was funny and wise. Hope we see you there!

Blood's a Rover is available from Jackson Street Books and other fine Independent bookstores.As always, books ordered here will have a freebie publishers Advance Reading Copy included as a thank you to our blogosphere friends.

Department of Book Reports: Eight Million Ways to Die

Ok, so I am late to this party. I love mysteries, of course. Among my favorite authors ever are Hammett, Chandler and MacDonald. But I've never read Lawrence Block. I don't know why, and I'm very sorry I've waited this long. So the other day, I was working on listing our books when I idly picked up Eight Million Ways to Die (Avon $7.50), and thought to myself, well, SeattleDan, you've never read Block, why not try this one. So I did. And I am very impressed.

Eight Million Ways to Die is the fifth in Block's Matthew Scudder series. Originally published in 1982, the plot revolves around Scudder, an ex-NYPD and now a unlicensed PI who is struggling with alcoholism, who is approached by a call-girl, Kim, who wants to get out of the life and leave her pimp, Chance. Reluctantly, Scudder takes the assignment. He tracks down the elusive pimp and succeeds. In fact, Chance tells him Kim could have saved herself the money and asked him herself. But several days later, Kim is found savagely murdered. Scudder immediately suspects Chance, but as it happens, Chance comes to Scudder and hires him to find the real killer.

Block writes vividly, unsentimentally but with sympathy towards his characters. Even Scudder, who acts as our narrator, is shown as a deeply flawed man, yet with a hidden reservoir of compassion. His struggles with drink and temptation are stark and frightening. The other characters seem as real as well, and not mere templates. Perhaps his best character is New York City itself. We see it through Scudder's eyes as he crossed Manhattan in subways and cabs, while he visits the bars and the apartments of other hookers.

In one scene, Scudder is talking to the police officer working on Kim's case. The cop is drunk and venting about life in the City.

"There are eight million stories in the naked city," he intoned. "You remember that program? Used to be on television some years back."
"I remember."
"They had that line at the end of every show. 'There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.'"
"I remember it."
"Eight million stories," he said. "You know what you got in this city, this fucked-up toilet of a naked city? You know what you got? You got eight million ways to die."

The book was adapted into a movie in 1986 and it bears little resemblance to the novel. Which is a shame, really. It was directed by Hal Ashby (his last film) with a screenplay by Oliver Stone, and it seems both were fired during the production. It also featured Jeff Bridges as Scudder, Roseanne Arquette and Andy Garcia. But as Block noted, it seemed that the movie was made up as it went along. For whatever reason, the movie was moved to Los Angeles, which is huge city, but there aren't eight million people there and never registers as a character itself. In any event, if you want to take a gander at it, the movie is on Youtubes.

Eight Million Ways to Die and other Lawrence Block titles are available at Jackson Street Books and other fine Independent bookstores.As always, books ordered here will have a freebie publishers Advance Reading Copy included as a thank you to our blogosphere friends.

Department of Book Reports: Odds & Ends for the long weekend

This week we wish a (slightly belated) Happy Birthday to Shelf Awareness with thanks for keeping us informed for the past five years. This faithful email arrives daily, brimming with news of the book industry. I'll share a few below for your long weekend perusal.

The Picture a Book Changing Lives project from Penguin's Riverhead Press:

Inspired by readers around the world who have embraced and shared Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Riverhead Books is asking for your help in an effort to picture a book changing lives.
Starting June 15th and continuing through August 31st 2010 (11:59:59 PM Eastern Time) when you visit this campaign page and join the “Hosseini” group you can upload photos of yourself reading or holding a copy of either The Kite Runner or A Thousand Splendid Suns. For each eligible photo (limit two still photographs per Penguin Community account) that is uploaded to the group, Riverhead Books will donate $2.00 (up to a maximum $25,000 donation) to the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a charity dedicated to providing humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.

This year's Bulwer-Lytton's Award was announced! You can find many more category & runner-ups here.

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

Molly Ringle
Seattle, WA

Huffingtonpost has a slideshow you can vote on your favorite Indie Bookstore.

Jeffrey Kaye's podcast from the Virtually Speaking in Second Life Moving Millions discussion is now available for your listening pleasure.

Happy Fourth of July from Jackson Street Books! Have a safe one and let's come back with all our fingers next week, m'kay?As always, books ordered here will have a freebie publishers Advance Reading Copy included as a thank you to our blogosphere friends.

Department of Book Reports: Moving Millions

Jeffrey Kaye has written an important, and exhaustive study in Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration (John Wiley and Sons $27.95). Kaye, the son of English immigrants himself, is a well-regarded independent journalist and Special Correspondent for the PBS News Hour. And for this examination, he has traveled extensively, including the Philippines, Senegal and Europe.

What he has found explodes many of the myths that surround immigration and its attendant mythologies. It is not so much that immigrants fuel immigration. It is the practice of businesses and government to import labor. Kaye looks at how the machinery of immigration interlocks into a greater global economy that answers the needs of those businesses and governments.

A coyote in this context is a human smuggler. The smuggler trades in a needed commodity without regard to the wants and desires of that commodity. And, in so doing, Kaye reminds us: “Global and local businesses rely on human mobility and on ready, vulnerable pools of labor often available at bargain basement prices. The migrant-dependent industries are the same across the globe. Many of the world’s farm fields, hospitals, nursing homes, and construction sites would be losing enterprises if not for the work of foreign laborers. Ditto for hotels and restaurants, labor-intensive manufacturing, and low-skilled services.” Often these are the same people who tell us that illegal immigrants are the scourge of our nation. Their hatred is palpably hypocritical. (And in my humble opinion, when you hear these folks talk about English only, or English first, they ignore the fact that in the history of American immigration, unless the immigrants came from an English-speaking nation, the first generation always retained their native language and learned enough English to get along. My great-grandparents spoke German around the house and with their neighbors. It is the next generation that learns English; my grandfather was bi-lingual. I see it where I live where the Latino children speak English to each other and Spanish to their parents. English-first is code for Latino bashing.)

Kaye calls into question our current policies regarding immigration, quite rightly observing that if you build a 50 foot wall, someone will bring a 51 foot ladder. And he explains the connections between globalization, growth and the overarching and on-going debate on immigration in a clear, lucid style, with anecdotes, interviews and keen observation. For now, this book is the one to go to if one wants to understand the complexities of our times.

In full disclosure, the author is an old friend of mine. And the publisher was kind enough to send me a review copy gratis. For those of you in Second Life, Jeffrey will be the guest at the Virtually Speaking forum on Thursday, July 1st at 6:00 PDT. If you can't join us in Second Life, tune in here to listen live or catch the podcast later. As always, Moving Millions is availabe at Jackson Street Books and other fine Independent bookstores. And, as always, books ordered here will have a freebie publishers Advance Reading Copy included as a thank you to our blogosphere friends.

Department of Book Reports: From Puritan to Yankee

We have a guest book reporter this week! Please give a warm welcome to our own jcricket, who blogs occasionally at the eponymous JCricket.

From Puritan to Yankee, by Richard Bushman (Harvard University Press 1967, $32.00)

The body politic exists for the glory of God.
Elections are a device for implementing God’s will. Elected officials are obligated to God, not to the electorate.
Religious liberty implies freedom to worship not as one wants, but only as The Bible interpreted by the dictates of the congregational ministry.
Sound eerily familiar? While we could very well be describing today’s Right-Winger Christian(ist), we are reading the description of the Connecticut Puritan of the 1690’s as described in From Puritan To Yankee by Richard Bushman (1967). Connecticut was particularly chosen by Bushman as his archetype Puritan society as there were no imperial governors and few British officials acting as outside political influences. Even so, the societal confluences described herein were universal in the colonies.
It’s hard to believe that a society of people happily living under the yoke of religious authoritarianism would a scant 75(ish) years later, produce the same mindset that called for rebellion against the governing establishment and insist on a separation of Church and State. Indeed, even Deism was arguably the spiritual refuge of some of our most prominent revolutionary leaders, replacing a compliant Trinity based reliance. So…aside from the “taxation without representation” impetus, what happened to New England society overall , that not only allowed for a rebellion, but demanded a revolution?
Bushman takes us through the evolution of townspeople to “outlivers”, who moved past the outskirts of the known safety of the immediate community. He tells us of how these risk takers used the rationalization of the need to worship to get the towns to assist in building roads, and then, churches in the outskirts. Churches became part of further infrastructure, further from town centers. He tells us of how merchants, currency, and competitive deviousness changed the economy from frugality, to greed driven capitalism where ‘Brothers In Christ’ undercut each other financially, depending on which church one attended, of course.
By about 1765, only civil authority could act as a binding force in Connecticut (and New England) society. As is documented from a member of the Laity, “Nothing sinks the reputation of the ministry more than for them to revile and reproach each other. No wonder in that case, if we of the Laity have a low opinion of you, when you seem to have a very low opinion of yourselves”.
The New Lights of politics were born. The citizenry had become habitually defiant toward the old religious political regime; “hence for them, defiance against a King and Parliament was neither an innovation nor a shock”. Yes, after permanently casting off the suppressive religious constraints in community government, the New Lights (Yankees) had learned to say “Fuck You” to George III.
Bushman, as a proper historian, authoritatively and knowledgably takes the reader through the evolution of our beloved Yankee character. From Puritan to Yankee is recommended reading for a basic American History foundation. (If only today’s Right-Wingers would pick up a history book. They would find that their constant harping about The Founding Fathers is really a yearning to return the days of the early oppressive Puritan system.)

~Thanks jcricket!

I have some updates from recent authors you've met here: GottaLaff of ThePoliticalCarnival brings an update of Lt Col Barry Wingard & Lt Com Kevin Bogucki's recent trip to Kuwait. Keith Thompson (Once a Spy) wrote a very good report of burning off the Gulf Oil Spill (huffpo) Joshilyn Jackson hit the NYT Best Seller list the first week of Backseat Saints release. Daniel Woodrell was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air this week about the making of the movie version of Winter's Bone. Oh, and I won a movie poster on twitter! Little Brown has a new imprint for mysteries; Mulholland Books, and they will be re-printing his first three books as the Bayou Trilogy.

From Puritan to Yankee is available from Jackson Street Books and other fine Independent bookstores.As always, books ordered here will have a freebie publishers Advance Reading Copy included as a thank you to our blogosphere friends.

Department of Book Reports: Winter's Bone

I'm going to post a re-run from July '07 today, because the movie is opening this weekend and everything I hear sounds like this will be a movie that lives up to the book.

Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell (Little Brown, $13.99) Woodrell has always been a favorite author of mine. I found his writing back when I was the sales rep for Dutton Books in the eighties. Each book has been more finely crafted than the last, and Winter's Bone is truly his best. Until he puts out the next volume, that is.

We first met the Dolly clan in Give Us A Kiss. Here, 16 year old Ree is raising her two younger brothers and caring for her addled mother. Scraping, raw poverty promises a very hard winter for the family. Ree's father, the county's best "crank chef", has left them to fend for themselves, no wood chopped, no food set aside. He has jumped bail after putting the family house and timbered lands up as collateral. The local police have given Ree a deadline to bring him in, or as her suspicions grow, prove that he is dead.

To prove this she must ask questions of her extended family, the ruling patriarchs of the hollows. A couple of generations ago their religious fundamentalism mutated into a close-knit and close-lipped clan. The questions are met with a violent beating, meted out by the womenfolk. Ree survives the beating and continues pushing for answers. Finally, the women relent, and help her find the truth.

This is a very simple outline of the plot. What makes this small book soar is the language, every word is perfect. Woodrell has a storyteller's soul and can draw you in. Descriptions of the Ozarks take on a sacred tone, the fields of stones, frozen caves and unrelenting icy rains are vividly etched. This NPR link has the opening chapter. Woodrell has devoted himself to the stories in those villages clinging to the hollows. Often called Ozarks Noir, I think this is a very good description of his work.

You might be familiar with one of Woodrell's stories, Woe to Live On was the basis for Ang Lee's movie Ride With the Devil. Most of the early volumes are out of print, a few are available in UK editions. This is definitely an author to be on the look-out for while prowling used bookstores.

These books are available from Jackson Street Books and other fine Independent bookstores.As always, books ordered here will have a freebie publishers Advance Reading Copy included as a thank you to our blogosphere friends.