jdcorley's Reviews (191)

Perhaps the worst of the genre of "let's defend Richard Nixon" books that have been forgotten, notable for coming out five years after everyone was done with him.  Its only value is a sight line straight into the id of the midcentury conservative frantically, maniacally, jealously obsessed with Jack Kennedy. Pure garbage from one of the worst.

The much lesser known and criminally underrated companion volume to Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72, Crouse has just as sharp an eye for observation as Thompson, but plays it more "straight". You can still feel the urgency of his regard, still put yourself in these vital stories. Don't miss this; it's as lively and exciting today as it was when it came out.

A combination of excellent reporting, scathing moralism and the sharp adventuresome wit - this, not Vegas, is Thompson's masterwork.  The only bad thing about this is that it led other journalists to write campaign memoirs instead of more purely journalistic nonfiction; a combination few have a strong enough voice to sustain.  A classic of American journalism, one of the best books about 20th century American politics, and one of the clearest explanations for why the 70s and 80s were the way they were here.  Unmissable.

By the time of these essays, Thompson had completely lost the capacity to penetrate the veneer over American greed and hatred. Arguably it was Reagan (and Reagan's catastrophic popularity) that made Thompson obsolete. "Sure we're racist blood-soaked ghouls," Reagan challenges Thompson. "So what?" For all the macho puffery, Thompson, at his best, like many authors emerging from The Sixties, is offended and wounded at the crushing of American virtue on the altar of money, racism and war. But by the nineties everyone had agreed that this was just who we were now, and Thompson can't rouse the same passions that he once did. Nor, in these, does he even really try. Lacking in either insight or journalistic observation, these essays are the last glimmers of Thompson's dying, and ultimately failed, work.

If you read it in college and loved it, I'm sorry to tell you that it doesn't hold up. As reportage it's worthless, as narrative it's pointless and as pastiche it's unbearable. Thompson's charm, such as it is, can only get you so far.

As liminal horror finds its way from creepypastas and video games into a full blown subgenre, Clarke enters with a dark fantasy that you will find as striking and inescapable as the labyrinth depicted inside. There's a lot of bad liminal horror and dark fantasy out there, where it's vaporwave for the sake of vaporwaveness, or has no real view of the modernity whose anxious underside it springs from, but Clarke's careful focus on academia, relationships and agency makes this work as sharp as a needle. Don't miss it.

Thomas Dewey (writing here as Tom Brant) is one of the most underrated American mystery authors - underrated, that is, by everyone except American mystery authors, who regularly name him as an influence and admire his work.  This is one of his lesser works, to be sure, but it has the same questions of ethics and justice that his more prominent works contain. As with all crime stories, our protagonist is put in a bad situation by bad people, and allies himself with them in order to survive, but is only drawn deeper in.  The tension of the book is his inner anguish as he begins to realize that he isn't as ethical as he might have considered himself to be - and certainly not as much as he wants to be.  Nor does it fall into the category of "antihero falls for innocent girl and she exists only to redeem him", which many of the sort written at the time did.  It all wraps up rather neatly in the end, perhaps a little too neatly for the anguish and anxiety our main character suffered.  It gives the impression that maybe it wasn't that hard after all.  Still, you can see Dewey's understanding of action scenes and internal expressions within them throughout.

Star Trek novelizations rarely do much development on the core ideas of Trek - the liberal Roddenberryist visions, the Federation's ideals in the crucible, and so on.  That makes this novel quite unusual, in that it raises questions about whether mind reading and communication is fundamentally incompatible with the core values of Starfleet and the Federation. A real science fiction question in a Star Trek book?! Wild! Unfortunately it doesn't quite answer this, instead replacing it with an adventure-mystery that leaves the core question unresolved and even, at one point, seems to explicitly end up not wanting to address it at all.  It could have been much more! Oh well, it's fine.

People often dismiss Christie as formulaic - this is because she set out formulas that the rest of us are still catching up to - but books like this one show that she fervently experimented with the form of her mysteries, even in her most beloved series.  Poirot does not come on stage until events are hopelessly tangled, quite late in the book.   

Instead we have two intertwining stories about a spy plot in an "Eastern" country (Persian, by its description) and a prestigious private school for girls.  Christie's negative judgments about English society are also on full display as the wealthy and influential are held up to be priggish buffoons, and the teachers she sympathizes with the most are hardworking, considerate and innovative, in their own way.  We know a little more than the police do, so when the first murder happens we might think we've got the hang of it and the police don't, but Christie delights in piling up mysterious event on mysterious event until we're completely befuddled. Then Poirot comes in and the first thing he points out is that things are even more confusing than we thought.  But he's here to get us through it. What a marvel.

Hoffman, an overlooked pulp mystery author, has a stable of private eyes and cops, each with their own style, from Honest John, the galumphing too-old-for-this-shit private investigator to the womanizing Cliff Cragin. The stories move quickly, have plenty of action, and - a rarity for this type of writing - make sense as mysteries as well.   The Honest John stories especially work well as mysteries as the good-natured John gets pulled into one tangled situation after another, and must find a way to sort it out, usually to protect someone.  You could do a lot worse as an introduction to the "second tier" of pulp mystery magazine writers than this collection.  Unfortunately, that includes the extremely common elements of the genre at the time - the casual dismissiveness towards women and the jaw-dropping racism towards black and Asian characters.