Book Review: 100 Bullets Volume 1 - First Shot, Last Call

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Book Cover of the Day: Continent of Lies

Book Review: 27 Plays by Christopher Durang

Not being an avid reader or attender of stage plays, I had never heard of Christopher Durang until five or six years ago, when I stumbled upon a cable-produced adaptation of his play "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You." Irreverent humor lampooning religious belief systems is a favorite genre of mine, along with gun-wielding nuns, so I wasted no time in picking up this collection of short plays.

While Durang is basically a humorist, many of his plays involve the lampooning of other plays. This can be a detriment to a reader who, like me, is unable to pick out the subtle stabs at the set design and dialog patterns of other well known playwrites. But it is a minor stumbling block, and not a mjor obstacle to enjoy Durang's offbeat sense of humor.

If you aren't hip to the stage scene, but still enjoy humor with an edge, do what I did. Pick up this collection for "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You", then peruse the rest with an open mind.

Book Review: 253 by Geoff Ryman

There are 253 passengers on a seven car Tube train that is about to crash. Every person, along with their thoughts and actions on their brief train ride (and including footnotes explaining their direct and/or indirect relationships with other people on the train), is described in exactly 253 words each.

While on the surface this may sound like nothing more than a mildly interesting experiment in constrained writing, the book manages to reach a deeper meaning than you would expect. Whether you read the book from beginning to or flip around to random parts at your leisure, the overall effect is the same; allowing you to freeze a moment in time and examine the lives and deaths of 253 people with more in common than they will ever truly realize. Contrasting and comparing their personalities and motivations affords the reader an almost God-like chance to examine the fantastic and mundane worlds of a train full of strangers as an intrinsic whole.

But don't let that scare you away. If you rather enjoy as a distraction rather than a perceptions-enhancing experience, it easily works on that level as well. No matter how you attack 253, it remains a truly unique book in both structure and subject matter, and equally enjoyable whether read in short bursts or cover to cover.

Book Review: Tears of Rage by John Walsh

Don’t ask me why, but John Walsh has always rubbed me the wrong way. That’s the main reason I read his book Tears of Rage; if I’m going to have an opinion on somebody, I’d rather it be an informed one. Ultimately, that’s the only difference this book has had on my opinion: it has informed it.

John Walsh isn’t a bad guy, and it is undeniable that both his political movements and his television shows have helped people and changed awareness and legal procedures for the better. But despite all he has done, it’s still hard for me to actually like him.

The first fifty pages or so of the book deal with his personal background and history, spanning from his childhood through the early years of Adam’s life, and it is this completely self-indulgent section that really displays Walsh’s personality. By his own account, he is street-smart, a tough and skilled fighter, a great athlete as well as extremely bright, has never known fear or a lack of confidence, has saved lives without even thinking twice about it, and has never failed in any endeavor that he has pursued. Basically, he’s perfect. But what really bleeds through is that he suffers from an overinflated ego that informs his self-centered world view.

This self-centered (bordering on selfish) attitude is apparent in stories related by him in such away that you must assume that he doesn’t see it himself. When Adam is born, for example, he is told by the hospital where his sick father is recuperating that he can not bring the child into the cancer ward, at the risk of infecting the floor full of patients with little or no immunity left. Knowing only that he wants his father to his grandson before he dies (which he would have anyway, as later they all go to Disneyworld together), he sneaks the newborn into the hospital via a fire escape, regardless of the risk he puts the others in the cancer ward.

Also, it is impossible that anything done by him or his wife could be wrong or ill-informed. When mentioning Adam’s natural birth without the aid of Lamaze, he makes a point of saying “I don’t even think there were those classes back then.” Being 1974, the Lamaze Method was already part of a strong movement towards natal health, especially on the east coast where they were at the time. Later, for their second child, he states that she started Lamaze classes then, but only in her eight month, when the fifth or sixth is when you usually begin. Nothing out of the ordinary there, right?

This self-centered egotism extends immediately to his son, whom he declares was the only perfect baby in the hospital. “All the other little babies, some were splotchy, others a little misshapen. Adam was the perfect little baby everyone was looking at.” Granted, every parent feels that his or her child is special, but by John Walsh’s factual depiction, it is quite possible the Adam, had he lived, would have been revealed as the Second Coming. Apparently, Adam did not share a single negative trait with the other dirty, filthy, and ill-mannered children that wander the planet. Everybody loved him and wished he were theirs, and all of their adult friends felt more comfortable talking to him than to other adults, because he was that well-mannered and mature and responsible and perfect. Blech. Some of his praise towards Adam also reveals a sort of class elitism, as he takes great pride that “Adam had sharp clothes. On the playground all of the other kids looked kind of scruffy compared to him.” It seemed important to Walsh that his son wore “not sneakers, but Top-Siders. And small Izod shirts instead of regular tee’s.” And let’s not forget about the Captain’s Hat, “…an expensive one with a black braid and a visor.” In the course of Reve Walsh’s description of the day that Adam disappeared, she makes mention of the hat at least three times, pointing out at each instance that it was “a nice one, not a cheap knock off version” like the other children wear. She even goes as far as to complain that this detail (among others) should have been used when the store attempted paging Adam.

The actual disappearance of Adam at Sears is, of course, the reason this book was written in the first place. It is also the main reason that I lose respect for John Walsh, as the one fact that he and Reve refuse to admit, to themselves or anybody else, is that they (or, more directly, she) are just as much at fault as anybody else. The simple fact is that Adam’s mother left him alone in the store for a period of time that, while she is unclear about (“I was gone a few minutes. Five. Maybe ten altogether.”), can logically be clocked at a good fifteen minutes by examining the list of things that she claims happened while he was from view. Also, during this time, she points out that she had made sure he was close enough so she “could have” peeked around the corner at any time to check on him, which of course means that she didn't. Then, when she suddenly couldn’t find the child she had left alone in the store, she became frustrated and angry when her situation wasn’t immediately made top priority.

This may seem a bit harsh on my behalf, but anybody who works in retail can tell you that negligent parents let their children run around stores unattended all of the time, then automatically assume that it is the store’s responsibility to play babysitter and round up their strays. This is the same attitude that Reve (understandably, yet at the same time predictably and unfairly) assumes almost immediately when her initial concerns are not met with the utmost urgency. Walsh is quick to say that this is because his wife looked young. “She had on shorts, she was a woman, and she looked nineteen years old.” The truth is that they were reluctant to scramble at her bequest was because she was acting like your typical negligent parent. Walsh goes out of his way to imply that the store and the police were slow and unwilling to help, yet neither he nor Rev can recall who finally contacted the police (which would mean that the store did, and means that they certainly didn’t), and neither do they know who informed the media during the first few hours of the search (which would mean that the police did, and again, that they didn’t). Does this make them bad parents? Not at all. But their refusal to admit that others did take immediate steps them that they did not take themselves in order to help makes them stubbornly reluctant to share in blame.

When they eventually dropped the lawsuit they brought against Sears, they claimed that they did so because the Sears lawyers were going to drag their names through the mud, and so they dropped the suit to protect their family as well as Adam’s Foundation. I personally think the truth hits a bit closer to home: Sears was no more responsible for Adam's disappearance than the mother who left him unattended for up to a quarter of an hour.

Another distasteful trait of Walsh’s is his tendency to use his dead son to win arguments. It is very evident throughout the book that Walsh has a short temper and a lack of emotional control, and in fact seems almost boastful of it. And while I like a “man of action who doesn’t play nice” as much as the next person, I tend not to trust people who describe themselves as such. Walsh rightfully argues against the bureaucracies and politics that repeatedly impede him, but his arguments always seem to be punctuated with phrases indicating that not he that demands justice be served, but rather his innocent, brutally murdered son. Being the savvy advertising executive that he never tires of describing himself as, Walsh seemed to learn early on that while you can argue with a hot-headed activist, you can’t argue with a dead child.

Again, I’m not painting Walsh as a demon; he has done much good. I am also not implying that he is completely bull-headed. He is the first to admit that he wouldn’t have gotten a fraction of the media coverage he did if Adam were a lower-class minority child, and I completely agree with his criticisms of the psychics and religious fanatics that attempted to use the situation for their own advantage, and when he defends his wife against claims by the media that she didn’t act the way a grieving mother should, as if there is a right and wrong way for individuals to handle emotions with which very few of us ever (thankfully) have to contend. While he at times seems to bend over backwards to both slam the cops and FBI for bungling his son’s murder investigation at the same time he praises both agencies for the good they do, it never appears phony or heavy handed. And, unlike Jon Benet’s parents, both John and Reve were quick to cooperate when the investigators turned their attention to them, knowing full well that it the quickest way was to eliminate themselves as suspects. I’m not out to get the guy. But when he talks about teaching his six year old son how to use a diving knife (yeah, that’s safe), and when he recalls the humorous story of when he left his six month pregnant wife alone in shark infested waters, I can’t help but feel a little contempt for him.

For the most part, Tears of Rage is a pretty good book, and tends to cover all of the bases. Just beware that it isn’t an objective view of the Adam Walsh case, but rather, one man’s crusade to tell his own story the way he sees it.

Related articles

• Driver in fatal Conn. crash sues victim's parents (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• John Walsh, still out for justice (pbpulse.com)
• John Walsh to expose Cambodia's child prostitution (sfgate.com)

Book Cover of the Day: The Skook

Book Review: 58 Minutes by Walter H. Wager

I would not have picked this novel up if it weren't for the giant "Basis For The Movie DIE HARD 2: DIE HARDER" plastered across the front cover. Not that I'm a huge fan of the movie, either, considering its the worst example of cookie-cutter-sequel garbage, far worse than the two films that followed it. However, I'm always interested in how novels differ from their big screen counterparts.

The first two chapters are pretty much what you expect. Flowering scene-setting description of the Big Apple in the winter, and a sharp and brutal introduction to the villains. The lead bad guy and all of his henchmen are what you expect, and are handled competently. They are cold and calculating, diverse and colorful, and most of all, deadly and ruthless.

Then we meet the hero, and it all falls apart.

The irony is bittersweet. In the Die Hard series, the selling point of the John McClain character is his lack of superhero credentials. He isn't the best there is at what he does, he's just the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, an ordinary man under extraordinary circumstances surviving by the skin of his teeth with a lot of luck and determination.

Now meet Captain Frank Malone. In just one six page chapter, we learn that Frank Malone is; a handsome blue-eyed blond,instantly intimidating, two-year best Ivy League Quarterback, an expert hand-to-hand combatant, NYPD pistol champion, cool under attack, admitted to both Harvard and Columbia law schools, a highly decorated hero, the youngest captain in the force, and recognized by all New York cops as a first-class commander, and powerful yet merciful role model.

Bored yet?

This kind of over-the-top jack-of-all-trades Super Cop, clones of which can be found littering Clancy-Lite terrorism thrillers like this by the dozens, are barely recognizable as human beings, let alone realistic characters that lend themselves to the reader's sympathies. When Doc Savage wannabes like Frank Malone swagger onto the scene, there's no doubt that the bad guys don't stand a chance. But where's the fun in that?

Thrillers usually work because we like to watch someone prevail against overwhelming odds, but stacking the chips in favor of a nearly perfect hero caricature leaves the reader betting on a sure thing, which assures a happy ending but destroys any real tension or suspense.

Book Cover of the Day: SunStop8

The Last Thing We Need Is Another 'Decider'

Do we really need another President that is more than willing to seek out alternate opinions and suggestions, unless those recommendations happen to conflict with his own stubborn views? Do we really need to hand over control of our country and military to another thick-headed jackass with no real sense of where his wants and needs end and the safety and security needs of the rest of the world's begins?

Do we really need President Giuliani?



Obviously, the answer is No.

Leaving Their Mark On The Nation

Not So Speedy...

A quick little look back at the best witness since Kato Kaelin.

The Greatest Threat Of All

Finally, some Bush Legislation I can get behind!



http://view.break.com/345028 - Watch more free videos

Urban Survival Quiz

Consider the following scenario:

You are a middle aged, white, professional business man. You somehow find yourself deep in the middle of a city public park at night. As you wander the dimly lit paths, you begin to notice that you are not alone. Furthermore, you realize that the rest of the park’s current populace is comprised almost entirely of stocky black men. Realizing that in a potentially unsafe environment, you decide that the best course of action is to:

a) Ignore the irrational racist fears buried deep within you, remind yourself that those of darker skin are human beings like yourself, and stroll purposefully out of the park with peace of mind.

b) Run frantically through the park, waving your arms frantically over your head while screaming “I have a wife and kids! Please don’t kill me!” until you run head on into either the edge of the park or a well-armed cop.

c) Squeeze the large canister of mace in your right hand pocket and stare straight ahead as you attempt to casually walk at twice your normal speed, whistling tunelessly as you quickly attempt to mentally train yourself in the Martial Arts by recalling every Jackie Chan film you’ve ever seen.

d) Promptly assume the stride and mannerisms of your typical black person, which you do your best to recreate by mimicking what you remember of Gene Wilder’s black costume from The Silver Streak and the Jive Talking Passengers from the Airplane movies.

e) Locate the nearest public park bathroom, and, in order to prevent the possibility of becoming yet another hate crime “statistic”, you do your best to diffuse the situation by offering the nearest black man in the bathroom $20 if he’ll allow you to blow him.

If you’re Bob Allen, Florida Republican State Representative and co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, the correct answer is E, offer someone money to perform oral sex on them. At least, that was the explanation he gave in a recorded statement he gave to police immediately after being arrested for soliciting sexual acts from an undercover police officer.

Sure, some people may scoff at such tactics, but when it comes to the fine art of urban survival, only the most inventive and creative will survive.

Hillary's Breasts and othe signs of the coming Apocalypse

Okay. Our country is caught up in a prolonged war that is slowly sucking us dry, both financially and emotionally. The Housing Bubble has burst like a greasy pus engorged zit, and is threatening to take the rest of our economy down the bathroom sink drain with it. Our Attorney General is so blatantly full of shit that he’s actually causing some to look back at Janet Reno’s reign with a fond, reminiscent yearning. Our Vice President is an evil puppet master. Our President is a puppet. The new switch in power has only assured us that the opposite sides of the House and Senate will waste even more trying to one=up each other. And to top it all off, we have over a dozen do-or-die politicians vying for position to be declared an official candidate in a presidential race that will probably be more explosively fierce than the last seven.

So, tell me again why I’m watching Hillary’s cleavage on the news?

It took me a couple of days to figure it out. I mean, it couldn’t actually be newsworthy, could it? Breaking News: Hillary Clinton has Breasts. I’m pretty sure we all knew she was a woman. Hell, her femininity (to an extent) is the only thing that both sides of the extreme political spectrum actually agree about. So why do we have panels discussing the political implications of her primary sex characteristics? If she had flashed the stadium during her speech to show off her new ruby-lined pasties, I could understand the infatuation. But why does the choice of a low-cut blouse for one of her political events suddenly warrant hours upon hours of pseudo-intellectual debate? Why are we talking about Hillary’s breasts (or, to be more accurate, the fleshy valley between them) to begin with? For that matter, why am I still hearing about John Edward’s haircut? Or Mitt Romney’s makeup? Or Obama’s middle name? Or Al Gore at all? Why are these endless news channels pumping endless streams of completely pointless trivia that signifies nothing?

When the answer finally hit me, it was obvious that I can’t believe I missed it in the first place.

They hate us.

They despise us. They don’t care about us or the events that affect our lives. All they see when they look down at us is an endless sea of potential ratings, and the news isn’t a tool for the dissemination of pertinent information as much as it is a huge trawling net meant to drag us in and convince us that the mindless crap they keep churning out to entertain us is actually helping us.

They are not helping us. They are slowly killing us.

I’m not even talking about the wall-to-wall tabloid story coverage that they spend half the time apologizing for, and the other half spoon feeding it to us like so much rancid jam. There will always be Anna Nicole Smiths and Paris Hiltons, and there will always be people who want to see as much of them as humanly possible. It may be an insidious evil sucking away at our eternal souls like blood gorged leaches attached to the human psyche’s testicles, but you aren’t going to beat that horse just because you can call it by name. Let it ride, it will eventually forget to eat and drown in its own bitter saliva.

My problem is that the rest of the news has become nothing more than a mirror of the times. You might think that’s what it’s supposed to do, but cast your back to a time when journalists actually uncovered stories, followed leads, asked hard questions, made deductive leaps in logic, and helped us to read between the lines. They exposed conspiracies, unearthed secrets, communicated desperately needed truths, and occasionally lifted up the rock to show us what was crawling underneath, whether we wanted to see or not. They toppled empires and destroyed legacies, for no other reason than that they were expected to do so.

What do they do now? Sit back and watch Tony Snow’s PowerPoint Presentation of how the facts aren’t facts until the White House confirms them as such. Oh sure, the occasional reporter may shake his head quietly at the blatant spectacle. But that just isn’t enough. Case in point: look at the bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

News Channels have been doing reports on substandard bridges and overpasses for decades. I remember seeing their cute little exposes back in High School, and they’re still doing them today. Of course, they were always somewhere between the cute photo-op and the weather, something to stretch the reporting minutes when there weren’t enough Hollywood Pseudo-News extravaganzas to fill the time before the Sports segment.

But then a major bridge collapses during rush hour, and the twenty-four hour news channels clog the airwaves with new exposes, in-depth segments, flashy graphics, useless reporters vainly attempting to avoid bumping into one another as they pace around “Live at the Scene” looking for sound bites, and the endless line of talking head experts ready to talk for hours and hours.

Since when does interviewing someone who has nothing to do with what happened so they can give their unneeded opinions about the hypothetical questions posed in regards to the unverified facts pouring in? I guess since twenty-four hour news channels realized that actual news just wasn’t going to draw in the Nielsen shares they need to draw the big advertising dollars.

You can fault the public for not paying attention to countless second-break stories about unsafe overpasses. You can blame the government for the same. But what were the news programs and channels doing when they could have been exposing the horrifying truth about just how unsafe our infrastructure is, when society had their face rubbed in the avoidable loss lives should have been like a bad puppy soiling its own habitat?

They were talking about Hillary Clinton’s breasts.

They hate us. They’re killing us slowly. And when we finally succumb, they’ll be sure to have a man on the scene to ask grieving family members how they feel, and there will be countless experts and analysts on hand to debate the possible causes of our demise.

And we’ll most likely watch.

The News Media as a whole need to make a decision. Are they the Watchdogs of Society? Or are they merely here to document our downfall while selling advertising space to pay the salaries of the models and actors posing as newscasters?

Robust Economy or Phantom Recession?

Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took his turn to question Bush’s nominee for the White House Budgeting office Jim Nussle to voice his concerns over the current administration’s economic theories. He seems to have a problem with the White House’s continuing policy of help the rich get richer while the country slowly slips into a bizarre ghost recession that no seems to be able to actually see. Well, Senator Sanders can apparently see it, and while his question for Nussle had to do with the need to give the Wal-Mart family a $32,000,000,000 tax break, just look at the laundry list of red-flag statistics that he trotted out to underline his point.

Just to sum up his major talking points, since 2000:

*5,000,000 people have dropped below the poverty line

*7,000,000 people no longer have health insurance

*Median Household Incomes have dropped $1,300

*3,000,000 Manufacturing Jobs have disappeared

*3,000,000 American Workers have lost their pensions

*Home Foreclosures are now highest on record (so far up 63% over last year)

*Personal Savings is now in the negatives (first time since The Great Depression)

*College Graduate earnings have dropped 5% over the last few years

*Entry-Level Wages for High School Graduates is down 3%

*Wages and Salaries now hold the lowest share of the Gross Domestic Product since 1929.

It should also be important to note that Nussle, the guy up for the job of running the White House Budgeting office, did not even attempt to refute or contradict the numbers thrown at him by Sanders. The best he does is to say that there are statistics out there that show growth. He doesn’t elaborate, but I’d take a good guess that those numbers have a lot to do with corporate profits and the phantom specter of Consumer Confidence, the latter of which is always used to argue that if people are spending money, the economy MUST be doing well. Just like with the gasoline prices: Gas hits $3 a gallon because of supposed hardships felt by the oil companies, who rake in record profits because of it, and the best they can argue is “People aren’t buying less gas, so it can’t be that bad!”

That, of course, sums up the entire philosophy that our government is now running under. It isn’t broken until it blows up in your face. There’s no housing crisis until home foreclosures destroy the financial infrastructure. There’s no Medical Insurance crisis until insurance companies suddenly run out of people able to pay the exorbitant premiums and start folding up their tents. There’s nothing wrong with the bridges until the collapse during rush-hour traffic.

The disaster in Minneapolis underlines why everything is falling apart in this country. There were people that knew the bridge was unsafe, rapidly deteriorating, and in desperate need of maintenance. But the kept it to themselves and crossed their fingers, and told us all that the fact it didn’t collapse when we drove over it yesterday should be proof enough of its stability. And as long as its cheaper to pretend everything is holding up fine, nobody in charge is going to run the risk of snarling up traffic by closing it down for repairs.

The Economy is in desperate need of an overhaul, and the only thing keeping the powers that be from admitting is the fear that someone might ask them where all of that toll money has been going.