Recent Reads

Get Happy:  The Life of Judy Garland by Gerald Clarke.  Why spend your time writing a biography of someone you don't like?  I have no problem with trashy biographies, but at least be honest with your motives and don't try to make your hatchet job out to be a legitimate book.  Clarke prides himself on using tapes Judy had recorded when she was thinking of writing her autobiography.  Thing is, Judy was a well known teller of tales (why tell the truth when you can make up a better story?).  Clarke states the actors portraying the Munchkins had to have someone assigned to help them use the bathroom after one of them fell in.  That story is ridiculous for at least three different reasons.  He believes Garland's memories then ignores Margaret O'Brien's since Margaret was a child so her memories can't be trusted (no, she was not threatened with a dead dog to make her cry).  The books is fully of smutty details which, when you check the footnotes, are all attributed to anonymous sources tat the author believes are credible.  Garland's marriage to Vincente Minnelli and her relationships with her children are all glossed over to the point of being almost nonexistent in this 400+ page book.  Clarke hates everything Garland did professionally except The Wizard of Oz and some of her concerts.  He insults Betty Hutton for daring to be glad to get the role in Annie Get Your Gun after Judy was fired for being unreliable (was she supposed to turn a great part down?).  Overall the book is somewhat readable trash that tells you nothing in the end.

The Murder Room by Michael Cappuzo.  It should not have been difficult to write a decent book about the Vidocq Society (a group of criminologists who help solve cold cases in their free time).  Talk a little about the members and detail some of the cases they helped solve.  Instead, Cappuzo wrote a disjointed account that jumps all over the place.  Most of the cases discussed are ones that remain still unsolved.  He's overly obsessed with the open marriage of one of the founding members (open marriages are not that common, but they aren't that rare either).  The people are more caricatures than real people.  And there's a strong thread of homophobia through the book that is very out of place in a book written in this century.  A potentially interesting subject that deserved much better than this book.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe.  As a teen in the 1980's I saw the Brat Pack movies, but I was too busy obsessing over British pop stars to obsess over actors.  I grabbed this when Audible had the audio book of this available for free.  Rob does a good job reading his book.  He comes across as honest if a bit self-important (he is an actor, after all).  He doesn't gloss over his screw-ups or try to blame others for his problems.  A decent read.

Ten Plus One and Like Love by Ed McBain.  A couple months ago I got the daily Publisher's Weekly email at work and saw Amazon had reached a partnership to publish McBain's back catalog in ebooks and paperback. I squealed with happiness loud enough to startle one of my coworkers.  The ebooks would be priced at $4.99 each (a decent price point in that it is a couple dollars cheaper than a paperback version should be), and I was hoping the books would show up on Amazon's occasional deals.  Then Amazon put out 35 of the 87th Precinct books for $.99 each as the Kindle Daily Deal last week.  I had not planned to buy books this month.  Fortunately, I only needed 14 of the 35, and I zipped through these two last weekend.  I figured out the killers before the cops did in both (solving the mystery before the solution is presented always leaves me both proud and annoyed for some reason), but that's a minor quibble since McBain is awesome.  This is the kind of situation where ebooks can shine--introducing people at reasonable prices to authors who are not readily available or widely known any more. 

Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein.  A soldier meets up with a beautiful woman and goes on a quest.  This has all of Heinlein's usual elements--self-reliance, the importance of leading a productive life, a strong female lead, flexibility in sexual relationships, love of literature (the sidekick is very Sancho Panza like).  The journey is the important bit with the object of the quest being largely a MacGuffin.  A good adventure yarn.