As Climate Change Produces Grim Discoveries,
Theories Abound on Remains Found in a Barrel
From
The New York Times, Sunday, May 22, 2022
Lake Mead, the reservoir of of the Hoover Dam, is now just 30 percent full, and is revealing its secrets.
Given the long history of Las Vegas and the Mafia’s involvement, is it any surprise that old cold cases are being solved?
One of the unexpected consequences of climate change I suppose
Doc was the original template of our "modern" heroes Batman and Superman. Indiana Jones is very much in keeping with Doc Savage.
I purchased lots of the magazines for a few years then drifted off. I blew the dust off the books recently and picked up issue #1 which contains two "complete book-length novels," Fortress of Solitude and The Devil Genghis.
It was an interesting place to start a new publication of reprints. I would have expected Will Murray, the consulting editor of the series, to start at the beginning. Instead he chose these two stories, #68 and #70, when the series was well established.
John Sunlight, the antagonist of the books, marked a departure in the series. It was the first time Doc suffered the bad guy to get away.
In Fortress of Solitude, John Sunlight stumbles upon Doc's secret hideaway. Once he makes his way inside, he takes advantage of all the technology within for his own purposes.
Up to this point the Fortress has not been revealed to the readers, only that Doc occasionally went there to think, learn, and train.
The beauty of the Doc Savage books is that you need not read them in order. Each story is self contained and the Doc Savage universe is explained in each installment with the first time reader in mind.
That is, except for these two.
This recollection centers on a childhood illness while traveling with the author's mother to Mount Pilatus, Switzerland.
What happens when a place is associated with a bad memory? Many may not return. Sometimes going back can be a tonic that can only be appreciated once the old memories are examined and compared to the new experience.
It's not unusual to avoid a place where an unhappy event happened. But is it the fault of the place? No, it's just what the place itself represents. Giving the place a second chance may be an opportunity to give the memory some perspective.
There was a warmth to the story that I took to immediately.
However, people are people and they have the same troubles and desires we do today. And that's what makes the whole Expanse series so compelling for me. Sure, there is an alien baddie. But humans used it, without understanding what it was, for their own desires; money & power. The classic corrupters.
David Draper is a young student trying to get through a tough patch in school to get a good placement in university. His aunt is ex-marine Bobby Draper, an important character in the previous novel, Caliban's War.
Somehow, he got tied up with a dangerous drug dealer by cooking the drugs he sells. David falls for the drug dealer's girl, Leelee. She gets in trouble and David tries to help.
This book is much like a tie-in novel or fan fic, but provided by the authors themselves. It expands The Expanse, if you will. It is an excellent story and fills in the gaps between Book 3 and Book 4.
I would love to see the spread sheet the authors must have had to create before writing a word.
Well worth the effort to read this story.
I enjoyed this article, it reminded me of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods and his quiet, casual way of looking at the world. Rhyno has that same, self-deprecating style, unafraid to reveal that he started his journey going in the wrong direction.
Knowing this trail exists, made me think of the many trails available to me by walking out my front door and heading to Edmonton's river valley. There are many trails I have yet to travel all within easy reach.
A Sailing Trip Down the St. Lawrence - and Down Memory Lane by Abi Hayward. Another gentle narrative of a sailing trip that brought up memories of family and how sailing is part of the author's history.
There is some discovery too, in the Sailors Church, Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours in old Montreal and the votive ships that hang from the ceiling.
A good travel story does not necessarily have to include a daring escape from a life-threatening situation. Sometimes, when things go well, and as expected, there is still a reward for the effort.
I also subscribe to their newsletter where they link to previous stories in the magazine. That's how I came across this one.
I do enjoy a good adventure. When it's real, I wonder why people do the things they do? Take the risks they take? This is why I am well and truly an armchair traveler.
This true account of being trapped on a BC mountain peak during a storm sent chills down my back.
Excellent writing.
Better yet, if you enjoyed this piece, it's part of a larger collection, Tales of B.C. by Daniel Wood.
The Writers Gild of Alberta created a clever way to get stories out into the world. Better yet, my wife got a different story than me and we got to trade them with each other.
Tuesday Night Auction Club by Ali Bryan - A beautiful and heartbreaking memory of a perfect moment.
Lucky Birds by Jacqueline Kwan - Exploitation and decisions.
Chris Hadfield is a Canadian hero and astronaut.
I enjoyed taking a ride on the fictional Apollo 18 mission.
But...
It missed the mark for me. Not because it was a bad story. For me, it was because it was historical fiction. When a twist in the mission occurs, the decisions made struck me as being implausible.
I kept thinking to myself, "There is no way NASA and Mission Control would allow this to continue."
Had this story been inside a world of the author's creation it would have been terrific. Inserting it into a known history is so much more difficult to pull off.
I very much look forward to his next novel. I could see a series, where the settings change throughout the history of NASA. The Shuttle era. The ISS. The new Artemis program. SpaceX. Missions to Mars.
Hadfield has the inside knowledge which makes his writing so very compelling.
I had a difficult time with his Mars trilogy. The depth of research made me feel he could have use an editor. But after I completed the series, his work percolated in my mind. I began to appreciate the depth and the detail. This kind of attention is exactly what takes place in science.
Fiction has often informed our world. The flip phone came from Star Trek. The iPad from The Next Generation.
In this article, Alexandra Alter writes how KSR is focusing his fiction to solving the world's problems.
I am now very intrigued to read more from him. The Three Californias trilogy, the Science in the Capital trilogy, New York 2140 (Excellent by the way), and The Ministry for the Future.
Yes, he will digress into long expositions, but that is actually the point.
As a reader, I will be looking for his research, his lists of facts, his history lessons. I will be reading KSR as a jumping off point for further reading.
Climate change, geopolitics, and economic change, these things are important. I may not be able to do much to help create a better world, but I own the world my time to understand the problems.
Kim Stanley Robinson is an intelligent, thoughtful author whom I trust. I can't think of a better writer to guide the discussion.
Midlife is a terrific collection of essays from alumni of the University of Alberta's Gateway newspaper about reaching middle age in 2021.
Katie Kovacs's account of her divorce and return from France to Edmonton is moving and raw.
Life is not easy. Divorce makes it ugly. Add a pandemic.
An excellent entry to an already excellent collection.
I was happy to stumble upon this book excerpt on the Ars Technica website.
Slow reading. Thoughtful reading. It's an article for out times.
It is said that people read more now then ever. But texts and doom scrolling takes its toll on thoughtful reading. Distractions abound.
Click HERE to be taken to the article.
It's worth the read because it's worth thinking about.
How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
Still, it was a terrific read and made me appreciate just how complicated the industry is.
Getting into the automobile industry is hard enough (understatement, it's next to impossible) but to try and change the foundation of that industry is madness.
Steve Jobs may have wanted to "dent the universe," Elon Musk is taking a crowbar to it. With his passion and determination, he has managed to create a paradigm shift not only in the automobile industry, but to change how the entire human race operates, which will in turn save us from global climate change.
He is the catalyst to help us enter the electric age. What? There is electricity everywhere! Sure, but it is nearly all powered by the burning of fossil fuels. We are still very much in the combustion age.
Honestly, I felt reassured that the electrification of transportation, and how society operates, is now unstoppable. We will have economic, technical, and social advancements in the next couple of decades much like the post World War Two years.
Reading this book won't bring you up to the current state of the industry, it cannot do that, but it gave me an appreciation of the complexity and the activity that is underway, out of public view and in countries that are not in Europe or North America.
Highly recommended.
One day his neighbours are abducted, the circumstances are suspect, but the police are not motivated, so Mac decides to do something about it.
This book is a wonderful mashup of detective fiction, a Jetson's vision of the future, all set in a city filled with talking gorillas and mutants.
Narrated by our protagonist robot, I was reminded of Robert B Parker's Spenser series. Empire City is a strange place populated by even stranger citizens which brought to my mind George R R Martin's Wild Cards books.
The story itself moved along quickly and was peppered with terrific side characters.
If you're looking for some light-hearted, escapist fun, in this crazy pandemic world, this book will fit the bill. It will help you to forget our reality for a while.
I am glad I read it.
Recommended.
After reading North to the Orient I was wanting more adventures from the 1920's. That book reminded of the movie. Somehow I discovered it was based on a 1977 novel.
As the saying goes, "The book was better." In this case the book was very different. The basic plot was the same; daughter must rescue father and needs the help of a pilot. Tom Selleck's version of O'Malley was certainly funny but noting like the source material.
The book had a terrific love of travel and adventure. Every time they had to put down for fuel, they would be entangled in the circumstances they literally landed in.
Cleary's writing was crisp and I enjoyed how he changed the points of view and narrators in a consistent way. Each chapter was broken into sub-chapters from these differing angles.
In my view, movies do not have to follow the books as scripts. A different take on a story can be just as entertaining and there is something to be enjoyed by each version.
Like I said, I have a soft spot for the movie of this book. Now that I've read the novel I can appreciate what the film lifted and made a new story from it.
Great summer read.
Because it is a period piece the book stands the test of time.
I usually want a paper edition of my books but I really did not want to wait for a copy to arrive in my mailbox. I download the eBook version from Kobo partly because I really liked the cover art.
Through this I've now discovered a new author to explore. Sadly Jon Cleary is no longer with us but he left many books behind. I am glad he did.
It was narrated so very well by Anthony Heald. His voice kept me coming back to the story especially when I was on the verge of giving up on it after I had put it down for a number of days.
It was a complicated novel. The very first lines established that our narrator (the actual author in this case) admits that he's making all this up, except for the parts that are true. It's not often I've experienced the breaking of the fourth wall in a novel. I certainly enjoyed it here.
The point of view changes from Ferry teaching a class, to the story of a car crash and how he becomes involved in it and then obsessed by it. The genres also evolve from a literary fiction of his obsession and the effect is has on his relationships and professional life, to an investigative crime fiction.
Through it all there are interludes of actual travel writing, which I enjoyed very much for it's observations of people.
Flipping through all of these "realities" sometimes left me confused, but I just allowed the narration to continue and let it wash over me. I had faith that I would be able to pick up the threads later on.
Peter Ferry is an accomplished and very skilled writer. To learn this was his debut novel astounded me. I was left in awe of his skill to pull off such a complex story structure.
A surprise of a book.
Recommended for sure.
Might I suggest a much more thoughtful review of the book? If you find yourself unconvinced by me to pick up Travel Writing try, reading this review from the good folks at Bloom.
Picture this, we are in a large room with dozens of people, or a football game, it doesn't matter, if everybody was looking at their phones at the same time, all looking at the news feed on Facebook, not one feed would be the same! The algorithms choose what is presented to each individual, tailored to their browning history.
You can see how this could cause confusion among folks, because nobody is getting the same story. Social media, being what it is, is not not held to the same standards as traditional journalism and therefore has the ability to muddy the waters of trust.
The trouble with algorithms is that they are not working for US, they are working for the social media companies. They are designed to keep us "engaged" and to stay on their platforms for as long as possible. These algorithms don't care HOW they keep us scrolling and they all eventually learn that negative stories are more powerful "engagement" tools than positive ones.
By law, traditional broadcast media must present fact-checked and balanced stories. Do they sometimes get it wrong? Absolutely! They are run by humans after all. But humans are guided by a moral imperative (some more than others to be sure) and we have structures of checks and balances to keep people who are reporting and broadcasting the news accountable. The black boxes that feed us the news on social media platforms have no such morals and have a different goal than the reporting of the best version of the truth available at the time.
Lanier is a compelling writer and has a sense of humor about the predicament we find ourselves in today.
Recommended. It'll make you think about what you're doing with your phone.
It was rather fun to buy a book about running a used bookstore from a used bookstore.
Shaun Bythell is a bookseller in Wigtown, Scotland who took pen to paper and began writing a diary about his life in the shop. It is filled with quirky characters; the employed, residents of the town, other shopkeepers, postal employees and customers. All ring the bell over the door and enter his observations.
Bythell has a warm and yet weary take on humanity. I can certainly relate to often wishing I could function without the encumbrance of other people. And yet, there is love in his words. He is a part of the community and he is just as exasperating as everybody else around him. There is a self-deprecating undercurrent to his observations.
It's an easy book to dip into as each entry is about a page long. People come and go from the narrative and it's nice when some pop up again. I found his book buying trips to be very interesting.
The epilogue was heartbreakingly beautiful. It is life.
Highly, highly recommended.
It was beautifully written, honest and romantic. In the 1930's flight was still very much in its infancy, the realm of adventurers.
I loved the gentleness of her writing and how she and her famous husband, Charles, were surveying routes to China for the planned commercial aviation business.
The flight went from the east coast of the USA, up to Churchill on the Hudson's Bay, across the high north of Canada and Alaska to the Kamchatka peninsula, Japan and finally China. All of this in a two-person float plane with barley any infrastructure or radio communication. Amazing.
For an 86 year-old book it read very well.
I was especially taken by how Ms. Lindbergh rankled at the expectations of the media. Being a woman they were only concerned about what she was wearing and what she packed for lunch. It's nice to see how her pioneering worked to promote and push forward social equality.
I highly recommend this book. I restored my faith in humanity and in story telling.
About a dozen years ago I went on a buying spree for old Men's Adventure paperbacks. For the most part I bought them for their covers and their very straight-forward stories.
Through some exploring on the internet I've learned that Don Pendleton is pretty much the creator of today's modern Action/Adventure genre.
Mack Bolan is a lone-wolf executioner of "justice" on a one-man mission to rid the world of the mafia. This being written in the '70's the mafia was top-of mind.
If you're a comics reader then The Punisher will come to mind as it is a complete lift from The Executioner series.
Let me just say, right now, I did not like this book. I hated it.
Through my 55-year-old eyes, I saw nothing original here (although, as I said, this was original at the time) and was nothing more than gun porn.
The series itself took from the old pulp novels of the 1930's. Bolan himself leaves a sharp shooter medal at the scene of every massacre.
This being book 24 there are lots of references and characters from previous books, so there is a bit of reward for the dedicated reader.
Two thirds of the way in and I was hating myself for wasting my time with this crap. The body count was incredible with nearly all of them suffering a gurgling death or a splatter on the wall and a wipe with the body as it smears the gore on the way to the floor.
I am so sick of gun justice - I know there is fiction out there that does not rely on so much flying lead but it's difficult to find
Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land
Adam Shoalts is an Explorer in Residence at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society his previous books blend Canadian history with his own adventures into the blank parts of our map. This was a bit of a departure for him in that the maps were not his own but those of our history.
From the very earliest maps to the more modern and complete ones he told the story of how Canada became a country. The importance of our rivers, but more importantly that of the Indigenous nations that helped the Europeans along, was alway central to the pursuit of trying to find the edges of this unknown continent.
I was disheartened by the violence throughout the entire book. The conflicts between whites and Indigenous came as no surprise however there was distrust and violence between the Nations themselves. None was more disturbing to me than the fight between the Dene and the Inuit described by Samuel Hearn in his expedition of the Coppermine River.
Throughout the book I kept thinking at how deeply flawed humans are. Our willingness to hurt each other and to distrust those who are not like us is so deeply baked into our DNA that I wonder if we can ever overcome it.
I am very glad to have read the book. I learned so much about Canadian exploration history. Even though it was a gut punch at times it is an important book to help us understand who we are and what kind of country we want to become. This will not be easy.
It was the cover that drew me in. It looked steampunk to me but I've heard the series described as dieselpunk which is similar in that it's "retro futuristic" but instead of being informed by the Victorian era it takes its technology cues and attitudes from the 1930's to 1950's.
I've always been drawn to the aesthetics and technology of the WWII era and the rest of the 1940's. So this looked like fun.
The series has been around since the 1980's and continues on today. This particular book was in a mini hardcover format that I also found interesting and prompted me to buy it. I only wish the other two books in the first cycle were available in the same format, they would look very nice on my bookshelf.
The stories are all loosely connected around a singular event, that of an alien virus spreading throughout the world killing many and giving others "powers" that could be described as super or meh. Some survivors were made heroic, others villains and still others merely shlubs.
Think of the X-Men to get a feel of the super-powers folks develop.
Each story was a delight to read and did not just tell the story of some conflict but also delved into the consequences of being changed by the Wildcard Virus. There is a humanity, humour and pulpy fun to the stories.
I found this book a delight to read as it offered a timely subject (the virus) but also charged the stories with fun. I felt that we can get through this fight with COVID-19 in much the same way as the characters deal with their virus, by coping and adjusting to it.
Recommended for a bit of escapism in a comic book way that does not take itself too seriously.
But I had missed the point; the author was writing camp, fun, over-the-top adventures in the style of the pulps. I didn't find them believable.
I wasn't supposed to.
Now I'm in my mid-50's and trying to read them again. Perspective helps and I can certainly turn the pages for the sheer fun of a story well told.
Iceberg was first published in 1975 and it certainly feels a bit dated, but not by much. There is some light misogyny and heavy smoking which was typical of the time.
I remember how I always liked the first two thirds of his books. Iceberg was before his formula was set (much like a James Bond movie) so it lacked the historical reference and his good old buddy, Al Giordino. Which I missed. Yes, the last third was over-the-top to the point of eye-rolling.
It was a fun read - but it was fluff. It may be awhile before I read Raise the Titanic!
Still, if you're missing James Bond, you might enjoy one of these classics.
Recommended, but don't expect much.
Below is the cover of the novel as I read it in the late 70's.
From Surviving an Anaconda Attack
to Finding Your Way Out of the Desert
It is also a terrific guide into the subject of adventure, travel, discovery, endurance, glory and tragedy. If you are curious about the past and how the world was discovered, mapped and understood, this is the book to reach for.
It is chock-full of brief descriptions of countless expeditions. You will easily find subjects you are interested in and it will point you in the direction to discover more. From mountain climbing, desert explorations, ocean sailings of discovery it's all there. Names, dates, expedition titles all are jumping off points to discover more books or websites that will expand on what is presented by Conefrey.
While reading this book, I often put it down and went outside for some fresh air.
Highly recommended.
Mick Conefrey's website - https://www.mickconefrey.co.uk/
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| Mick Conefrey |
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| Michael Palin |
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| Dave Eggers |
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| Elizabeth Kolbert |
Oh my goodness. What fun! |
| Michael Crichton |
It's a common problem in our cozy First World: we have too much. |
| Cait Flanders |
To be honest I felt like there was no hope for humanity after hearing this book. |
| Richard Heinberg |
Near the end, he leaves me with this, "The scale of the solution has to be to the scale of the problem."
“The problem of the atmosphere and the ocean is a problem of human behaviour.” - Monica Sharma, a physician who works for the United Nations.
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| Alanna Mitchell |
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| Kim Stanley Robinson |
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| Jack Skillingstead |
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| Julie Greene |
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| Ben Bova |
