4 book reviews by ljs

Book Review: Stone Cold
David Baldacci
Vision, NY
2007
511 pages

Guilty pleasures occasionally turn out to be uninteresting drivel. Such is the case with Stone Cold, another in a series of shootemup whodunit in the government
“novels” by David Baldacci, who is a one man pulp fiction industry. In Italy with idle time, I enjoyed reading 400 pages of 3 and 4 page chapters, each leaving part of the plot unresolved until the final climax of blood-letting. This particular Baldacci involves a beautiful con-artist, a tough guy casino owner, two or more corrupt government intelligence officials, one old double agent, one sainted ex-killer, and one killer soon to be ex- and approaching the sainthood of the first ex-killer, who, as the plot would have it, had to kill again to make things right. Then he cleans up after himself and resolves his knotty moral dilemma by …but I shouldn’t give the ending away. The reading level is somewhere around middle school level. The characters suffer no development at all. They are in the end as they are in the beginning. The plot involves lining up the characters to be shot or bombed in line with the progress of the chapters. As bad novels go, this is among the worst pieces of writing I have ever had the experience of reading. And I like some of Baldacci’s other “novels.” Maybe it was Italy.
Book Review: Same Kind of Different As Me
Ron Hall and Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent
Thomas Nelson, Nashville
2006
244 pages

I was intrigued by the publicity for this memoir of a well-to-do white man and a homeless black man telling their life-changing stories in alternative chapters. The story traces the personal life history of Ron Hall and Denver Moore. Ron is a successful art dealer with a wonderful and very spiritually-centered wife, Deborah (Debbie), who tries to live out the part of the New Testament of the Bible in which Christ said to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Denver is a sharecropper’s son who was brought up by relatives and left the plantation to live a life on the streets. Ron and Denver meet up in a mission in a seedy part of Forth Worth, Texas, where Deborah has recruited Ron to work with her serving the homeless. Eventually both men change their hearts because of the tireless doing of good works on the part of Debbie. The stories are engrossing, particularly the first part of Denver’s story in which he describes the life of a modern day sharecropper in Louisiana. However, towards the middle and end of the book, the message of faith becomes distinctly evangelical Christian, and this reader wondered whether he had been misled by the publicity for the book. Even the covers do not indicate that the book has a distinctly Christian and evangelical message. I have no objection to such a message in itself, but I would have thought more than twice before buying it had I known this. One other concern I had with the book is Denver’s voice. Obviously an uneducated man, Denver’s narrative is meant to carry the sound of his speech. However, I wonder how much editing or plain out fabricating of his voice was done because of his low literacy. Is this an authentic voice or is it the voice of a white person interpreting the speech of an uneducated deep South black person? If you are a believing Christian with an evangelical streak, then this book is honey to your lips. If you are not, the book is still a good read, but a layer of doubt begins to creep in about the whole enterprise.
Book Review: No Country For Old Men
Cormac McCarthy
Vintage International, NY
2005
309 pages

No Country For Old Men has been realized as a film, so readers coming to the book may have a comparative experience in violence and relentless malevolence. I, who have not seen the film, got a strong and direct dose. The plot revolves around stolen drug money and a human killing machine’s persistent efforts to recover the money for his employer while the current holder of the windfall, which was recovered among a bunch of dead bodies in a desert, tries his best to keep it. Characters are introduced. None of them balances heavier on the scale of virtue than the scale of sin, unless we count the laconic, but patient, seen-it-all figure of Sheriff Bell, who in between the chase for the money, develops his lamentation on the wickedness of the world and the increasing hold that evil has around the neck of modern humankind. Bell seems to regret his role in it even as he bows to the need to punish under the law.

McCarthy is very good at a couple of things: first, he knows his guns and his desert country, and he describes them both in vivid detail, vivid enough to want to make you stay away from both of them. Second, McCarthy is a master of dialogue. The speech that flows from his characters has a rhythm that is a joy to read. I nearly put No Country For Old Men down after the first few pages, but I am glad that I stayed with it because of the dialogue and because McCarthy has absolutely no qualms about killing off a character with whom you’ve spent half of the book. Things change quickly in this novel and guns are the agents of change. I recommend this book for blood thirsty first year students at SBCC.
Book Review: The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Vintage International, NY
2006
287 pages

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel of the apocalypse, and also a buddy novel that fits in with McCarthy’s unsettlingly negative view of the human prospect.
A father and son wander the post-apocalypse United States, where gray ash falls from the sky and coats everything, where bodies lie on roadsides, trees are dead and bare, and water is covered in ashy sump. The father is sick and growing sicker. His son is thin and weak. Though the father knows there is very little left to hope for in such a world, he keeps hope alive in his son. He also keeps alive a moral sense which forbids the unnecessary taking of life and the eating of human flesh.

This novel is beautiful in a very sad way. McCarthy’s mastery of dialogue gives us a very clear and deep sense of how a father tries to keep hope alive for his son in a world destroyed by fathers and sons just like these two survivors. The images of destroyed homes, buildings, farms, shops, rural land and cities are vivid, not easily forgettable, nor easily read without an ominous shiver of the spine. The conversation between father and son is both real and upsetting as the father must skirt the edges of falsity in order to tend the slight flame of the son’s life spirit.
And there are guns. But then, in a McCarthy novel, there must be. This novel is very readable, even for low level students, but may just be too unyieldingly negative for a class book.