Open Looks

Book review: "A Bolt From the Blue" by Jennifer Woodlief

2026-10-19T14:22:15.339-07:00

Near the rugged summit of Grand Teton in Wyoming, six mountain climbers are struck by lightning. One dies despite frantic efforts to save her, the others are severely hurt. At the base of the mountain, an elite cadre of rescuers mobilizes. With limited hours of daylight left and storm clouds swirling, will they be able to reach the injured climbers and get them off the mountain before the freezing darkness descends?

This is the dramatic story told in the second half of "A Bolt from the Blue," a stirring 2012 book by Jennifer Woodlief. Though the first half is slow, the book becomes a gripping page-turner midway through as Woodlief carefully recounts how a powerful lightning strike on July 26, 2003, prompted a remarkable rescue effort.

With injured climbers scattered in three places on the mountain — none of them easy to get to — the rescue undertaken by the Jenny Lake rangers and helicopter pilot Laurence Perry becomes a fast-paced, high-alttitude ballet aimed at reaching the victims, tending to them, and getting them off the mountain.

The deceased climber, Erica Summers, and her badly injured husband, were on a tiny rock platform. Below them were three injured men who had been knocked off a wall by the lightning while climbing and would have plummeted to their deaths had their ropes not snagged on a rocky outcropping ("Dumb and nearly miraculous luck," writes Woodlief).

Then there was climber Rodrigo Liberal, who rangers called "Folded Man." Liberal had been struck by lightning while climbing, causing him to plummet down, ending up dangling on a rope, his belly pointed skyward and his head bent back almost to reach his feet. At first view, both his fellow climbers and the rescuers thought he must be dead (spoiler: He wasn't).

In a story full of heroes, one of the biggest is Perry, who for four hours flies his helicopter up and down the mountain, hovering perilously close to rock faces amid strong and unpredictable winds, first ferrying rangers and supplies, then later pulling off vicitms one at a time.

Woodlief interviewed nearly all the players in this drama, and infuses the story with countless details. She paints vivid scene descriptions ("he was lying on his back with Sherika standing over him, a horrified look on her face"), small actions ("Craig put his knees against the wall facing the mountain and came up underneath Rod"), and even smells ("Her hair was badly singed, and there was a strong burning scent").

Woodlief does such a good job in describing the rescue that I feel bad to point out the weaknesses of the book, which are mostly in the first half. It's in the first half where the author gives us the background on, well, everything. She describes the life stories of multiple characters, the science of lightning, the history of the Jenny Lake ranger program, how helicopters work, and the intricasies of various techniques.

There are some interesting things here, but it's too much and often repetitive (she emphasizes, multiple times, how well-trained the Jenny Lake rangers are). While some background on the characters is good, she drifts too far off into things that are irrelevant to the story. We don't need to know the wife of one of the rangers grew up "fly-fishing, backpacking, hiking, taking burro trips in the Sierra Nevada" (she has no role in the rescue). Nor do we need the recipe for one of the ranger's "Large Trail Cookies."

As a reader, you're chomping at the bit to get to the main story, but it almost seems like Woodlief is padding the book or even stalling for time It's especially irritating in the second half. Late in the book, with the drama of the story going full tilt, Woodlief somehow thinks it's important to press pause and to describe the youth of one of the victims and how he met his wife on an ice skaing rink.

Woodlief makes a poor choice to lead off the book with a lot of deep background on ranger Renny Jackson. While Jackson played a role in the rescue as the "spotter" on Perry's helicopter, he is not a major part of the story. A better choice would have been to open with some background on Rod LIberal, since his ordeal plays a large role at the end of the book.

For readers who are considering reading this book, here's what I would suggest: Read the six-page teaser at the start of the book that sets the scene, then skip ahead to chapter six or seven in the middle of the book where the real action begins.

After you're done, if you want more background on the rangers, their training, the science of lightning, or flying a helicopter, you can go back and find all of that in the first half. Think of it as like watching the "Behind the Scenes" or "Making of" video after watching a movie.

Is ExpressToll the worst toll company in America?

2026-10-06T08:23:58.621-07:00

Let me start by saying that Ashley was great. Ashley is a customer service representative with ExpressToll, which operates toll roads in Colorado, and when I was having difficulty opening an account with them, Ashley patiently helped me on the phone. Thank you, Ashley.

Sadly, Ashley is pretty much the only part of ExpressToll I can praise. Otherwise, over the last month, I have found ExpressToll to be a disaster of a business.

I'm not alone. On Yelp, ExpressToll has earned a miserable 1.3 rating out of 5 (there's also a separate page with a 1.7 rating for ExpressToll Customer Service).

Some of the reviews:

"Such a horrible company." (Pat S.)

"If I could give them negative stars I would." (Mike H.)

"Possibly the worst service on planet earth. I hate them so much." (Jacquelynn L.)

You might wonder what a toll agency could be doing that is so wrong. After all, this seems like a pretty straightforward business: People drive on the toll roads, you bill them for it, they pay. Simple transactions.

Yet somehow ExpressToll frustrates customers at almost every turn.

I was preparing for a trip where I would be renting a car at Denver International Airport. Checking my planned route, I saw that I would be using the toll roads operated by ExpressToll.

Using a rental car on a toll road adds a small complication. Since modern tolls are assessed based on license plates and billed to the vehicle's registered owner, the invoice will go by default to the rental company, not the renter. The rental company will, in turn, bill the renter — and add an extra fee that is often ridiculously high.

I don't mind paying tolls, but if I can avoid the added fees by rental car companies, I will.

Many customer-friendly toll agencies offer one-time payment options where rental car drivers can pay by going online and entering a payment method within 48 or 72 hours of using the toll road. Some also offer "short-term license plate accounts" to pay tolls that have been recently incurred or that you expect to incur in the next 30 days.

Alas, ExpressToll offers neither option. To register my rental car required opening a full account. OK, fine. I've opened plenty of different accounts online; how hard could this be?

On the ExpressToll website, I began the process of creating an account in the usual ways: Entering my name, address, phone number, email address, and creating a login and password. You have to accept the user agreement, of course.

Then it asks you to add a vehicle to your account. Since I was only using this account for a rental car, I tried to skip this step, but it wouldn't let me ("add at least one vehicle to continue"). With no other option, I painstakingly added my own car even though I had no plans to ever use it on Colorado roads.

Then it said I had to put at least $35 into my account to start. So I entered a credit card number, prepared to authorize the charge, and clicked "continue."

And then ... nothing. Nothing happened. No confirmation, no error message, no way to move forward.

Reluctantly, I started over, enter all my personal info, the car info, and the credit card info. And again ... nothing.

"Your automated system is a total piece of crap!!!" (B.W.)

Puzzled, I called ExpressToll and was put into a hold that promised a three-minute wait. Ten minutes later, I was connected to Ashley.

As I said, Ashley was terrific. She set up my account for me, painstakingly entering all the information as I relayed it to her. It worked. I had an account. She also warned me that when using the ExpressToll site, you will often get mysterious error messages. It just meant, she explained, that I should log out and log in again. I'm glad she said something because soon I would discover that error messages on the ExpressToll site are as prevalent as Bronco fans in Denver. Like this:

Now that I had an account, I decided I should download the ExpressToll app to make it easy to use on my trip. One problem: ExpressToll does not have an app. That's right, in 2026, a company that does many millions dollars of transactions, does not have an app to help its customers.

So I would have to use the website. Each time you log in to the website, it sends a two-factor code to your email and you have to retrieve it and enter it. That's common, of course, but customer-friendly websites also offer a "Remember me" option so that you don't have to enter the code every time. ExpressToll does not.

If you're keeping score at home, we have a company that doesn't offer a user-friendly way to pay tolls, doesn't offer an app, has a rigid system for creating new accounts (that doesn't work anyway) and offers an error-prone website. Customer-friendly, it is not.

"Would give these incompetents zero stars if possible. Tried to pay a toll and their third party site gave me an error and then charged my card twice and refused a refund on one of the payments." (Claire F.)

When I picked up my rental car in Denver, I carefully entered the car license plate and other details into the ExpressToll website before I hit the road.

It took some nine days after my trip before my tolls showed up in my account. The tolls were deducted from my $35 deposit, leaving me a balance of $21.65.

I then set out to close the account and get my remaining deposit returned. After all, the only reason I had created an account was for this one trip. It was over.

So I logged in to my account and looked for a way to close my account. I couldn't find one. We all know how companies like to make it hard to close an account, but there is always a way, you just have to dig for it.

But not in this case. Not only was there literally no way to close my account, nothing on the site disclosed this. I searched "close account" in the ExpressToll system and got this response: "No questions match your search."

I emailed a request to close my account. A day later I received a response: "ExpressToll accounts must be open for 6 months before being closed."

Wait a minute, what?? Surely, there must be a misunderstanding, so I called and eventually connected to a rep, who told me that my account could not be closed until six months after opening. She said this was explained in the user agreement.

OK, I said, I don't really care if you close the account or not, just refund my money. No, she said. "We can't refund your money until your account is closed and we can't close your account for six months. It's our policy."

I will be the first to acknowledge that my $21.65 is a piddling amount of money. But how is it possible that any company refuses to close your account and give back your money? How many people is ExpressToll denying refunds to? Can you imagine going to, say, your bank to close your account and being told you will have to wait six months to get your money?

I spoke to two more "customer service" reps and was told me basically the same thing, again citing the User Agreement.

When I later looked for the User Agreement, it wasn't easy to find. Perhaps not surprisingly, the link that ExpressToll had sent me for the agreement when I created my account didn't work.

When I did locate the agreement, I found something interesting: It did not say anything about have to wait six months after account opening to get your money refunded. Nothing even remotely close to it.

Perhaps I should be thankful I didn't have even more issues with ExpressToll. Yelp users have reported other, wide-ranging problems.

I've started receiving weird toll bills from Express Toll months ago from the license plate of the vehicle was totalled in the car accident as of December 2024 . (Olga M.)

"I live in California and have never driven in Colorado but just got a bill for $4.65 for a toll!" (Lynda S.)

"I get an ExpressToll bill every other month. I haven't owned the car in over three Years (Scott H.)

When you add it all up, it is actually kind of impressive how many different ways ExpressToll frustrates consumers. There's an account creation process that is unable to create accounts. There's no app or one-time payment option. There's the fleet of error messages you get when logged in to your account. There's the refusal to give customers their money back.

So is ExpressToll the worst toll company in America? Do you know of one that is worse? Leave your comments below.

Book review: "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

2026-09-13T20:48:31.454-07:00

Note: This review contains spoilers. But this book has been out for 72 years, so if you haven't read it yet, that's on you.

There's something about being stuck on an island that just seems ripe for drama. Look at the compelling stories told in the books "Robinson Crusoe" and "Swiss Family Robinson," the TV series "Lost," and the movie "Cast Away." I'm sure you can think of more.

Stranded on an island, you're on your own, dependent on the limited resources of the island. While some stories tell of individuals marooned alone, many more place the unlucky characters in the company of random strangers. Fate has brought them all together in the dire scenario. Can they cooperate to survive? Will they work together, or turn on one another?

One of the best-known books in this genre is William Golding's "Lord of the Flies," first published in 1954. It tells the story of a group of young boys who are stranded on a tropical island after a plane crash. There are no adult survivors.

Golding does not explain why the plane was filled only with boys (other than the pilot, who died in the crash), but we do know that this odd collection of young strangers, none older than age 13, are now bound together in a life-or-death situation. It's an intriguing premise.

At first the boys create a civil society with rules (at meetings, only the person with the large shell known as the conch can speak), but gradually a schism develops between two rival leaders, Ralph and Jack.

The boys divide into two groups and Jack's band becomes progressively more hostile and "savage," painting their bodies, engaging in fevered dances, placing the head of a killed pig on a spike. Violence ensues, and two boys die, including the lovable Piggy, a portly near-sighted kid whose glasses had been stolen from him to help make fire.

It reminds me of the 1972 plane crash in the Andes that left about two dozen young men, mostly Uruguayan rugby players, trying to survive in a bitterly cold environment without the guidance of older adults. These survivors were not kids, but they still showed a lot of immaturity during the ordeal, and their mistakes probably contributed to more deaths than were necessary. They did not, however, turn to violence.

Golding imagines a similar situation but with children. He raises a fascinating question — would humans devolve into a more crude existence if they were freed from the normal standards of society?

Unfortunately, most of the book is exceedingly slow.

For the first two-thirds of the book, not much happens. The boys quibble over and over about whether it's better to keep a fire going to signal rescuers or to hunt wild pigs for food (hint: you can do both). They bicker over whose turn it to speak. They worry about a "beast" somewhere on the island, a fear enhanced by the fact that the events of the book take place in the dark of night, the murkiness of the jungle or the hazy dawn or twilight. These various scenes largely go nowhere.

The last third of the book has more action and is more engaging but like the rest is still plagued by unnecessary wordiness. Throughout the book, I found myself skipping ahead by paragraphs without fear of missing anything. The book could easily be 25% shorter, and would be a much tighter read if it were.

Book review: "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough

2026-08-22T22:13:23.270-07:00

First, to be clear, I admire and respect author David McCullough. I found his book "1776" to be a compelling page-turner. His other books, plus his work on PBS's "American Experience" and Ken Burns' "The Civil War" have earned him a righful place as one of America's preeminent historians.

That said, McCullough's 1981 book, "Mornings on Horseback," is not his best work. The book, which includes the "origin story" of Theodore Roosevelt among its various topics, suffers from a lack of focus and too much minutiae.

Even the subtitle of the book — "The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt" — hints at McCullough's uncertainly over the scope of the book. The blend of at least three topics with frequent digressions of questionable relevance results in an uneven mixture. Not all the storylines deserve the detailed attention McCullough gives them.

Before I go too far down this negative track, let me emphasize that "Mornings on Horseback" is not a bad book. McCullough clearly dug deep in his research, combing through Roosevelt family letters and diaries, as well as other historical documents, and some of what he has to share is quite eye-opening.

First, there is Teddy Roosevelt's father, Theodore, who turns out to be almost as interesting as his future-president son. Theodore Roosevelt Senior, McCullough explains, was a wealthy man who devoted much of his life to philanthropy and public service, so much so that he earned the nickname "Greatheart." He worked to find homes for homeless children, established New York Children's Orthopedic Hospital, helped fund the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, and supported efforts to rid government of corruption.

Clearly, Teddy Roosevelt got his core principles of honesty, fairness and public service from his father. After the elder Theodore's death, Teddy wrote, "I shall try to lead such a life as he would have wished, and to do nothing I would have been ashamed to confess to him."

Another surprise from this book (for me, anyway) is how wealthy the Roosevelts were. The enormous family fortune, built from selling plate glass and investments in real estate and banking, dated back at least three generations before Teddy Roosevelt and was eventually passed down to him.

He grew up in one Manhattan mansion before his family moved to an even grander mansion uptown when he was 15. The latter home was so large the Roosevelts once sent out 500 invitations to a party to be held there. Another mansion, at Oyster Bay on Long Island, came later. At each home, family needs were tended to by footmen, maids and butlers.

His family spent a year touring Europe in style when Teddy was 10 and 11, and another well-funded year in Egypt, the Middle East, and Europe when he was 14 and 15. At Harvard, Teddy lived on stipend that was more than the college's president salary.

By far the most interesting throughline in this book is the story of how Teddy Roosevelt developed from an asthma-ridden child — "embarrassingly undersized and underweight, a scrawny frame with stick arms and stick legs," writes McCullough — into a unstoppable personality who stormed through college, led groundbreaking reforms in government even as a young man, and worked tirelessly on a North Dakota cattle ranch.

At Harvard, his peers mocked him for his high-pitched voice, but were wowed by his unending energy. "He was a figure of incessant activitiy (as he himself said), of constant talk, constant hurry, a bee in a bottle."

He was elected New York's youngest state legislator ever (to that time) at age 23, voters drawn to the tireless candidate who seemed committed to working for the average person, "In a political fight, he fought tooth and claw."

McCullough carefully debunks some myths from Teddy's early years (the book covers his life up to age 28) while also detailing some astonishing truths.

Teddy did, in fact, knock out a drunk cowboy with one punch in a Montana bar after the man had pointed two guns at him. He did, in fact, work for 40 hours on horseback through storm and rain to round up cattle who had stampeded away.

If only McCullough had stuck to the stories of Theordores Junior and Senior. Perhaps feeling a historian's duty to be thorough, McCullough also details the lives of Teddy's siblings and other Roosevelt relatives, but their lives are largely dull — a fact the author acknowledges. Prior to Teddy, McCullough explains, "One searches the Roosevelt family history in vain for a sign of daring or spontaneity or a sense of humor."

"Mornings on Horseback" is one of McCullough's earlier books, his fourth of 13, and while the quality of research is unquestioned, he too often buries the reader in trivial and unimportant details.

In describing the 1884 Republican convention, McCullough pointlessly informs us that, "The Pennsylvanians wore brilliant blue neckties and cream-colored plug hats and matching cream-colored silk handkerchiefs in their coat pockets, a spray of lily of the valley on the lapel."

Describing two mansions owned by other families, McCullough notes that one faced east and the other south, even though this doesn't matter in the least.

He offers tedious listings of social occasions: "There was a 'jolly little dinner' at the Iselins', a 'very pleasant little party' at Aunt Annie's, dinners at the Leavitts', the Griswolds', the Weekeses', the Keans', the Morans; the Tuckermans' ..." and on and on.

McCullough seems unable to resist a good digression, wandering off to tell us stories with only peripheral connection to Roosevelts. He goes into excessive details about the Civil War commerce raider ship Alabama, the inner machinations of the 1876 Republican convention, and a North Dakota cattle farmer named Marquis de Mores. (These stories are not without merit; they just don't fit in this book.)

The bottom line is that is that if you want to get the most out of "Mornings on Horseback" you will need to skim and skip parts. (To be fair, even McCullough's book "1776," which I liked, contains a unneeded first chapter.) Stick as much as you can to the stories of Theodore Roosevelt, Junior and Senior, and you'll enjoy the book more.

Book review: "The Wide, Wide Sea" by Hampton Sides

2026-07-30T11:19:58.925-07:00

An amazing life, a shocking death, a riveting book.

"The Wide, Wide Sea," a 2024 book by Hampton Sides, tells the extraordinary story of English Captain James Cook's third (and last) voyage. It was on this voyage, from 1776 to 1778, that Cook's two ships explored the vast Pacific Ocean from as far south as New Zealand to the bitter icy edges of the Arctic Ocean at the north.

Along the way, Cook made the first European contacts with numerous native cultures. Most significantly, he and his crew were the first non-Polynesians to reach Hawaii. It was there that Cook would die in a dramatic and tumultous conflict with the islanders.

It is a fascinating book, stuffed with details, about a remarkable time when men could venture into blank spots on the map, finding places they never imagined, and meeting people who were far different from them. And doing it again and again. Such was the life of Captain Cook.

As Sides describes him, Cook was both a tireless explorer and a master mapmaker. The later skill should not be minimized. Whereas earlier explorers clumsily created maps that were largely (or completely) inaccurate, Cook employed the best tools of the day to read the positions of the stars and the sun, and his knowledge of trigonomety to place his discoveries precisely on the map. And once on the map, they would soon be greeting a lot more visitors.

Of course, "discovery" is a fraught word for lands that were already occupied. But from the European perspective — or really any perspective other than the islanders themselves — Cook did discover scores of islands and outposts throughout his three voyages.

Cook, says Sides, seemed to have a preternatural sense — or was it just luck? — that enabled him to stumble onto new islands (including Hawaii).

Each fresh encounter with natives usually begain tensely, with both sides warily approaching each other. While there was sometimes violence, more often the two sides slowly warmed to each other, exchanging gifts, trading goods, and introducing each other to their respective customs.

Sides recounts the perilous landing of Cook and his men at St. Lawrence Bay, in what is today remote Eastern Russia, where hostile Chukchi natives aimed their bows and arrows at him. Cook told his men to wait at the water's edge while he gingerly stepped forward. "The Natives, still bellicose and untrusting, could have killed him an instant, and they showed every willingness to do so."

But Cook stood his ground, slowly approaching, his arms outstretched to show he was unarmed. And gradually the tension eased, Sides notes, the mood softened.

Cook had performed iterations of this risky minuet on previous voyages, in assorted beach scenarios, striding ashore alone and unarmed. It was a kind of theater of first contact he had perfected. On one level, it involved a bravery and a confidence that bordered on recklessness. Behind it, though, was an optimism. He believed cultures could be made to understand one another: If he used the right tone and body language, if he looked them in the eye and showed proper respect, the chasm between radically different people could be bridged.

While others on the English crew sometimes dismissed or recoiled at the "primitive" practices of the natives, Cook tried hard to be simply an observer of local customs. On Tahiti, Cook even viewed a human sacriifice (the victim was killed earlier in the day; his body then brought to the ceremony), then did his best to objectively describe it in his journal.

Still, one of Sides' themes of "The Wide, Wide Sea," is that Cook was behaving differently on this voyage than on his first two, and sometimes exploded with uncharacteric fury after things were stolen from his English crew. For example, after one of the Englishmen's goats was stolen on the island of Moorea, Cook flew into a rage, leading a party that burnt the natives' homes, destroyed crops and wrecked canoes.

Sides speculates that the 48-year-old Cook may have been suffering from an unknown disease causing his erratic behavior, but there is no proof.

The book is not entirely about Cook. The most substatial sub-story is about a youg Tahitian man named Mai, who had been brought to England in 1774, the first Polynesian to reach England. It was a peculiar time when exotic people from faraway lands were brough to London as "human pets" (think Pocahontas) to be shown off.

Mai travels aboard Cook's ship on his return to Tahiti, hoping to come back to his homeland to gain vengeance on his people's enemies and earn a place of prominence on the island. Sadly, he never gets the respect, or the vengeance, he wants. I had never heard of Mai, and it is an interesting story, though Sides spends a bit too much space on Mai's time in London.

If that's a small weakness in the book, it's about the only one. Otherwise I loved the way Sides tells the story, in doses of just two or three pages. History doesn't always fit together neatly, so some of the passages are simply standalone vignettes, while othes help build the deeper story of the voyage.

Even in the best of encounters, the English learned that the islanders would come to resent their presence after two or three weeks. Cook could sense when it was time to move on.

Cook's death on the Big Island in Hawaii was horrifying, but perhaps inevitable. He had been treated as a god on arrival, but relations between the English and the Hawaiians slowly deteriorated. Still, everything would have been fine if the English had sailed away from the island in February 1778 as planned.

But a a storm severely damaged Cook's main ship, the Resolution, and they had to return to the Kona Coast harbor to make repairs. The Hawaiians were not happy to see them.

Soon, an important English boat was stolen, Cook became enraged, and his efforts to force the Hawaiians to return the vessel triggered an eruption of violence. Cook was beaten and stabbed to death. It was an ignominous end to his life but perhaps an inevitable one, writes Sides.

What was perhaps more surprising than Cook’s violent death was that it hadn’t happened earlier, at some other island. For how many times had he landed upon unfamiliar shores—alone or nearly alone—a stranger, surrounded by thousands of understandably suspicious Indigenous people who could not know his true intentions? Over the years, across the hundreds of thousands of oceanic miles, how many opportunities had there been for disagreements to erupt? Cook had cheated death so many times, at so many of his anchorages, that it was a wonder he had lived this long.

Book review: "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck

2026-07-07T10:02:37.048-07:00

Early in my reading of "Cannery Row," I kept waiting for the main characters to appear.

The first character John Steinbeck introduces in thie 1945 novel set in Monterey, California, is Lee Chong, a taciturn Chinese grocery store owner who provides much of the neighborhood's food and liquor, while giving out just enough credit keep all the locals in his debt.

Next, Steinbeck introduces us to five seldom-employed men who squat in a small building formerly used to store fish meal that they call the Palace Flophouse. The men "had in common no families, no money, and no ambitions beyond food, drink, and contentment."

Then there's Dora Flood, who runs a busy brothel nearby, and Doc, a scientist who collects marine specimens to sell to laboratories, while at night sitting home alone listening to classical music and sadly recalling a lost love.

All of these seemed like side characters to me, so it took me a bit to realize they are the main characters.

And I guess that's the point. Steinbeck is not interested in showing us the lives of the rich or the powerful, or even the ordinary middle-class. "Cannery Row" is all about the lives of people on the fringes, imperfect people who build a quirky community of their own. It is based on real people Steinbeck met while living in Monterey in the 1930s.

Steinbeck braids together a collection of stories, some of which are tied loosely together and some of which are stand-alone vignettes.

To say this a quirky tale is an understatement. There is a embalming gone wrong, a quest for a beer milkshake, and a man building a boat with no intention to finish it. It is amusing to watch the Palace Flophouse guys attempt to throw a party for Doc, but end up getting it disastrously wrong.

The book mixes touches of poignancy with Steinbeck's wry sense of humor. Refering to the ubiquity of the Model T Ford at the time, and its persistent need for repair, the author says, "Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars."

"Cannery Row" is a fairly short book, but I didn't read it fast. This is partly because Steinbeck loads every paragraph with a lot of meaning. If you read too fast, you'll miss it. Here, for example, is his description of Hazel, one of the Palace Flophouse gang.

"Hazel’s mind was like wandering alone in a deserted museum. Hazel’s mind was choked with un- catalogued exhibits. He never forgot anything, but he never bothered to arrange his memories. Everything was thrown together like fishing-tackle in the bottom of a rowboat, hooks and sinkers and line and lures and gaffs all snarled up."

Mostly the book centers on Palace Flophouse men, led by a man named Mack. Sure, they steal food, overdrink, fail to pay their debts, and botch their attempts to help people, but Steinbeck looks at them and respects them for their commitment to a simple life:

"What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums."

This is only the second Steinbeck book I have read. The other is "The Pearl." "Cannery Row" is better.

How to reach the Los Angeles County Tax Collector

2026-06-30T14:54:52.984-07:00

If you've tried to contact the Los Angeles County Treasurer and Tax Collector recently, you've discovered something disturbing: You can't.

If you call the Treasurer and Tax Collector's number (213-974-2111), you will enter the obligatory phone tree and after selecting some combination of choices, you will always end up hearing this recording:

"We are current experiencing a high call volume. Please call back during our non-peak hours of 8 am and 10 am and 2 o'clock to 4:30 pm."

And then the Treasurer and Tax Collector will hang up on you. Every. Single. Time.

I've called the office nine times and have been hung up on nine times. And each call was during the supposed "non-peak hours."

So you can't get through by phone. Can you email them? While the TTC's website does not offer an email address, it does have a contact form for submitting a message.

Don't get your hopes up, though. I submitted queries through the TTC's official system 17 days ago and am still waiting for a response.

So if they don't answer the phone and they don't respond to messages, how do you reach our public servants at the Treasurer and Tax Collector's office?

Two words: Gardenia Guerrero.

Gardenia works for Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn and when I contacted that office looking for help it was Gardenia who stepped up, responded to me, and had somone from the Treasurer and Tax Collector call me.

Here is Gardenia's contact info:

Gardenia B. Guerrero, MPA

Constituent Caseworker

LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn

O: 562.256.1920 C: 213.631.8648

E: GGuerrero@bos.lacounty.gov

Email or call her. Unlike the TTC, she actually will respond.

Book review: "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens

2026-06-19T10:33:46.527-07:00

It was not the best of books. It was not the worst of books. It was, uh, somewhere in the middle.

When I began reading "A Tale of Two Cities" I knew little about it. Sure, I knew it was a classic by Charles Dickens, but I had no idea what it was about or whether a book from 1859 would be good reading in in 2026.

As it turns out, "A Tale of Two Cities" is good reading — in parts. It is also, unfortunately, overlong and overwritten.

The strength of the book lies in its portrayal of France before, during and (mostly) after the French Revolution. While it's called "A Tale of Two Cities," and there are some scenes in London, it's mostly a story set in and around Paris.

Dickens portrays pre-revolutionary France as a time of horrid inequities. The rich, the powerful, and the royal live in castles and on estates, well removed from the sufferings of the hungry masses. In one scene, a wealthy man's carriage runs over and kills a poor boy; the aristocrat tosses a coin to the child's father as compenation and then continues on.

Elsewhere, Dickens describes a youth who was sentenced to have "his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view."

It's enough to drive a people to revolt, and they do. Midway through the book, Dickens shows the French rising up and storming into the Bastille.

But the joy of the revolution soon gives way to the horrors of the Reign of Terror, when thousands of people were executed at the guillotine — what Dickens coldly calls "the National Razor."

"It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten red ... It hushed the eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and good."

Dickens describes rivers choked with drowned execution victims, and a daily parade of the condemned through the streets of Paris, many them innocent people swept up in the chaotic ferver of the day. A vengeful populace, the author says, was "headlong, mad, and dangerous" and demanded retribution against foreigners or anyone even remotely associated with the aristocracy.

Is this an accurate portrayal of the time? Honestly, I don't know enough about that era to say. But the images Dickens paints will stick in your mind.

Still, to get to these sections of the book, the reader has some work to do. You must wade through a disjointed plot, elliptical and repetiive writing, stilled dialogue, and wooden characters.

Dickens can be witheringly sarcastic, skewering the arrogant, the rich and the smug, but he is often too much in love with his own words. He seems to never settle for saying something in one sentence if he can do it two, three or four. He prefers the longer and the redundant over the short and simple.

At one point, he says "More months, to the number of twelve, had come and gone" rather than "A year had passed." Later, he writes "Fifty-two were to roll that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to the boundless everlasting sea," rather than "Fifty-two were to be executed that afternoon."

There is a chapter where the characters of Lucie and Alexandre Manette, daughter and father, express their love for each other — over and over. Not only is it repetitious, Dickens had already established, before the chapter, the characters' deep love.

Dickens' wide-ranging plot goes from bewildering to borderline brilliant. In the first half, like someone dumping out the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the author scatters an assortment of seemingly disconnected plot lines. Characters are introduced, developed and then disappear. Events and secrets from the past are hinted at, but then dropped. The story abruptly jumps ahead in time, leaving behind questions unanswered

For a reader looking for cohesiveness, it can be frustrating.

But in the second half, Dickens slowly takes all those disparate puzzle pieces and fits them cleverly into his grand saga. Almost everything from the first half has a place, an important role. It is quite masterful and impressive, though tempered by one factor: The book is so long, it can strain a reader's memory to recall the elements from the first half that become relevant in the second.

I wish I could suggest a strategy for the prospective reader to get the rewards of "A Tale of Two Cities" without the poorer elements, but they are well intertwined. I will say that the book's weakest part is the start; I suggest skimming the first three chapters, which are filled with a lot of vague allusions that are difficult to understand. Don't get bogged down there, move on as quickly as you can to Chapter 4. The book gets better as you go along.

Book review: "The Gales of November" by John U. Bacon

2026-05-10T10:44:00.000-07:00

I picked up John U. Bacon's 2025 book "The Gales of November" because I thought it would tell me the story of the wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald, the freighter that sank in a storm in Lake Superior in 1975, taking the lives of 29 men with it.

The book does tell that story, but it also has a lot more. Bacon describes the history of shipping on the Great Lakes, the ships, the work, life aboard the vessels, the men who worked on them, and even the crew's families.

Frankly, this is the kind of storytelling that often makes me impatient. "C'mon," you'll find me saying. "Let's get to the important stuff."

But Bacon is such a talented writer and thorough researcher, that every bit of this book is interesting. Bacon conducted hundreds of interviews and scoured through historical records, collecting truckloads of illuminating stories. Every page of the book is filled with details that surprise or educate, sometimes both.

In all, "The Gales of November" is one of the best books I've ever read.

To start, Bacon takes the reader back a couple centuries to explain the how Great Lakes shipping began with the transportation of beaver pelts, then moved on to copper and lumber and eventually to taconite, the rock that gives us iron. Taconite is dug out of northern Minnesota, then shipped to Detroit or Toledo for processing so the iron can be extracted and made into steel. Long the "cash crop" of Great Lakes shipping, there were 26,000 tons of taconite aboard the Edmund Fitzgerald on its final voyage.

While most of us don't spend much time thinking about Great Lakes shipping, Bacon shows that it has been vital for the development of the United States. The auto industry, for one, depends on it. He makes a compelling case that America wouldn't have won World War II without the freighters of the Great Lakes bringing the elements needed to make planes, ships and vehicles for the military.

But shipping on these inland lakes comes with significant hazards. The storms and unruly waves they produce make the Great Lakes more dangerous for ships than the ocean. Bacon recounts the storm of 1913, which sank 19 ships and left 254 people dead. "For two weeks bodies surfaced on the coasts of the Great Lakes."

The launching of the Edmund Fitzgerald 1958 was a game-changer. The biggest and fastest freighter on the lakes, the famous "Fitz" drew crowds to its launch, broke records, and attracted VIP guests to well-appointed dining room and first-rate cabins. Even though some bigger and faster ships were eventually built, the Fitzgerald retained its status as the most respected and renowned on the lakes.

Bacon introduces us to the men who made this their career(at the time, there were no women crew members). For nine months of the year — they took the winter off when ice clogged the lakes — the men went back and forth across the lakes, earning good pay but rarely seeing their families.

In the summer, the workers in the engine room found the metal on hand rails so hot you could leave skin on them if you weren't careful. "If it was 90 degrees outside, it could be 120 degrees in the engine room," Bacon writes. "The engine crew would sweat so much they'd leave white salt lines on their blue work T-shirts from the sweat drying."

Not that other jobs on the boat were easy. Three deckhands had the chore of latching and unlatching 1,428 hatch clamps on every departure and arrival — and they had to do it quickly, because everyone else was waiting for them to finish.

Many of the men didn't know how to swim, Bacon notes. Some said it didn't matter — the lakes were so cold, if your ship sank you would die quickly regardless.

At off loading, a giant crane would grab huge "fistfuls" of taconite, then lower a bulldozer into the holds of the ship to push the rock into piles that could be more easily grabbed. Once that hold was empty, the crane and the bulldozer moved on to the next one.

Bacon finds nice side stories, too. He tells of the only boat in the U.S. with it's own zip code, the J.W. Westcott, which delivers mail to the sailors on Great Lakes ships.

If Bacon had stopped here, even with no mention of the sinking of Edmund Fitzgerald, he would still have had an excellent book.

When he does tell of the final journey of the Fitz, in in the final 40 percent of the book, the story grows tense. It can be painful to read. You know it's going to end in tragedy, but even as you're reading it, you're hoping that something, anything, will take them down a different path.

The voyage began inauspiciously. As the Fitzgerald left the dock at departure at Superior, Wisconsin, the weatther was uncharacteristically calm and relatively warm for November.

Soon, however, two monstrous storms, one from the northwest, one from the southwest, came together over Lake Superior, kicking up winds of 85-miles-hour and turbulent waves.

It is impossible to know for sure why the Fitzgerald sank since there were no survivors and there was no "black box" in the pilot house. Bacon finds clues in looking at other ships that were in the water that day, particularly the Anderson, which was similar size to the Fitz and just a little behind it when it disappeared.

If you want a full explanation for the sinking, you should read the book, but I'll try to sum up the key factors.

First, it was epic storm, one of the all-time worst. The storm produced 30-fout waves that rolled over the Fitzgerald's deck. It knocked out the ship's radar and pushed and pulled on the ship in extraordinary ways.

Second, they were carrying too much taconite. It wasn't unusual for the freighters like the Fitz to push, and even exceed, weight limits. The company earned more money and the captain often got a bonus if they carried more. But in November, with its more perilous weather, captains usually avoid being overweight, Bacon explains.

Third, they were going too fast. The Fitzgerald almost always went fast; that's what it was know for and that helped its owners make more money. But the severe conditions of this storm required a slower pace to allow the ship to synchronize with the waves, rather than fight them, Bacon explains.

Fourth, they failed to pull into safe harbor when the storm turned bad. One ship, the Wilfred Sykes, did, pulling into the protection of Thunder Bay, but the Fitz was bigger and had survived many a storm, possibly leading to overconfidence of Captain McSorley (Bacon goes out of his way to emphasize that McSorley was considered the best captain on the lakes, but may have still made mistakes on this day).

It's also possible that the breakthrough design of the Fitz was a factor. The ship had been built with fewer rivets (but more welds) to save weight. Crew members had often commented on how much the ship bent in heavy waves. Supposedly this was an advantage, allowing the ship to bend but not break. But in this storm, the ship did break, splitting in two. Did the design make it too weak?

Bacon also outlines a tepid response from the Coast Guard to calls from McSorley, but it's likely that any rescue mission would have come too late.

Finally, the mere mention of this tragic voyage likely reminds you of Gordon Lightfoot's famous song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." Bacon doesn't ignore this, spending a fascinating chapter describing how Lightfoot, a recreational sailor on Lake Superior, wrote lyrics for the song after reading the news coverage.

Lightfoot agonzied over the song, fearful that doing it wrong could come off as tone-deaf or look like he was simply cashing in on the tragedy. It was only because Lightfoot's band had some extra studio time that he agreed to even try recording the song at all.

As it turned out, the recorded version — the one you've surely heard many times — come from the very first time Lightfoot and his band did the song. No one but Lightfoot even knew the lyrics until that moment. They later did three or four more attempts with the song, but eveentually decided the first take was the best.

Book review: "A Study in Scarlet" by Arthur Conan Doyle

2026-04-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

As the first Sherlock Holmes book, "A Study in Scarlet" starts off pretty much as what you would expect. Then it gets weird.

Arthur Conan Doyle's 1887 book begins with Dr. John Watson meeting the mysterious Holmes, simply because they are both looking for a roommate. If you've seen the Benedict Cumberbatch-Martin Freeman TV series this will feel comfortably familiar.

Watson, as the narrator and eyes and ears of the reader, describes the curious ways of the Sherlock Holmes, a man both brilliant and arrogant. Soon there is a murder and the game is afoot. Watson tags along as Holmes tries to solve a set of crimes that are baffling police.

It's all very readable and satisfying, in a style similar to what you've seen in Sherlock Holmes movies or TV shows. Conan Doyle's plot moves briskly along. as smooth as a skate on ice.

Then, just after the halfway mark in the book, Holmes abruptly solves the case and arrests the perpetretor. But he doesn't explain how he solved the case.

You might expect the explanation to immediately follow, but instead the book launches into something called "Part II: The Country of the Saints."

This is an entirely different story, about a man and girl who are rescued from near-death in the American desert by a band of Mormons and their subsequent life in the religious group. There is no Sherlock Holmes, no Watson.

This story is not a not just different in content but in tone as well. Whereas the Sherlock Holmes story was playful and whimiscal, "Country of the Saints" is dark, sad, and grim.

I wasn't even sure that it could be by the same author and wondered if it had been tacked on to my digital copy of "A Study in Scarlet" by mistake.

But slowly the two stories start to come together. The first tip-off are some character names shared between the two stories. Eventually, it all makes sense.

For all its differences, the second half is every bit as readable as the first. It was written by Doyle, who again shows his skill in storytelling. I read the whole book in a swift day and a half.

As strange as the combination of the two stories seemed at first, it does work. Not only does the second story explain the motive for two murders, it provides an appropriate balance of seriousness to the lighter Sherlock Holmes' story. We are talking murder, after all.

One of the curiosities of this book is Conan Doyle's harsh portrayal of the Mormons as an evil cult that featured forced marriage, and used kidnapping and murder as its tools. A real person, Brigham Young, is portrayed as the brutal leader.

According to Smithsonian magazines, this image of Mormons was common in 19th century England, perhaps fed by the Latter Day Saints slaughter of 140 people in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. "At the time he wrote the story, Conan Doyle had never even been to America," said the magazine.

The Salt Lake Tribune, in 1994, wrote: "From the LDS point of view, A Study in Scarlet was another in a long line of antagonistic Mormon-hating books that made for popular reading. Conan Doyle was not high on their list of favorite people."

Doyle tempered his views on Mormons latter in life and even came to Utah to speak.

Book review: "The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling

2026-04-12T08:24:00.000-07:00

I was shocked — shocked! — by "The Jungle Book."

Almost everyone is familiar with the 1967 Disney animated film "The Jungle Book" that tells the story of Mowgli, the boy who was raised by wolves, and the friendly bear Baloo, the wise panther Bagheera, and the evil tiger Shere Khan. It was a popular and fun movie.

So when I picked up "The Jungle Book" — the 1894 book by Rudyard Kipling — I expected to read Mowgli's story. And, at the start, at least, that's what I got.

Then, about 40% of the way through the book, Mowgli's story ends. It's over. What? There are many pages left. What will fill them?

More stories, it turns out. There are four more stories in "The Jungle Book." I didn't realize this.

(To be clear, I was reading "The Jungle Book" on my phone, where you simply move ahead one page at a time. If I'd had a physical book, I suspect I would have known earlier that this is collection of stories.)

Somehow I got over my shock, and kept reading. I'm glad I did. In all, "The Jungle Book" is an enjoyable work, a whimsical set of stories with talking animals, moments of peril and drama, surprising twists, and even a few insights into the natural world.

Kipling writes clearly, with evocative descriptions, like when monkeys kidnap Mowgli and carry him, swinging branch to branch, through the trees:

"His escort would rush him up a tree till he felt the weak topmost branches crackle and bend under them, and, then, with a cough and a whoop, would fling themselves into the air outward and downward, and bring up hanging by their hands or their feet to the lower limbs of the next tree."

There's even a touch of Shakespearean dialogue, as when Mowgli says to Kaa the snake: "We be of one blood, ye and I."

Many of these stories would be good for reading to a child.

Let me go through them one at a time:

Mowgli and Shere Khan

This is the longest of the stories and the most well-known, in part due to the Disney movie. It has the deepest and most complex story, covering Mowgli's adoption as a baby by wolves to his life as a young man.

The story is well told in three chapters. I found it odd that the second chapter is a long flashback. Why not place it where would fall chronologically?

Still, it is a good, engaging read.

The White Seal

First, it's a little weird to have a story not in the jungle in "The Jungle Book." That said, this an enjoyable story of a young seal searching the world's seas for an island where humans don't hunt seals. There's a message of conservation here.

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

This is the story of a young mongoose, adapted by an Indian family, that valiantly defends the household from cobras.

While Kipling portrays the snakes as evil, I had some sympathy for them. They lived in the garden of this house before the humans moved in and before Rikki the mongoose arrived. They were there first. And now they're the bad guys for trying to survive in their home?

Still, it's an interesting story worth reading.

Toomai of the Elephants

This the only one of the stories where the animals don't talk. It tells the story of young boy, Little Toomei, who is learning from his father the care and training of elephants. The story builds up to a night when the curious Little Toomei learns one of the elephants' greatest secrets.

You can even learn a little bit about about elephant handling and training in this story. For instance, as Kipling tells it, when wild elephants are captured in the jungle they are marched out between two tame elephants to control their behavior.

Her Majesty's Servants

This is not so much a story, as a conversation among an army horse, a mule, a camel, an elephant and a dog. The animals compare their roles in the service of man, exhibiting a little a rivalry and a little jealously. It'a s clever, lightly funny story, but could use a little more action

In between each story in "The Jungle Book" there are some poems/songs, which connect loosely with the stories and can be fun to read aloud.

For example: Here's a part of a sea shanty the accompanies the seal story:

The beaches of Lukannon–the winter-wheat so tall–
The dripping, crinkled lichens, and the sea-fog drenching all! 
The platforms of our playground, all shining smooth and worn! 
The beaches of Lukannon–the home where we were born!

Podcast falls short in telling of check fraud scam

2026-03-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

I like the podcast "The Perfect Scam" a lot. Each episode tells the story of scam with extensive interviews of victims, experts and sometimes police and others.

I just listened to the most recent episode, about a "check washing" criminal who stole nearly $10,000 from a Rhode Island couple. Much of the story involves the couple's frustrating experience dealing with their bank —which gave them confusing responses but little actual help —in an attempt to get their money back. It's a good story, but while I usually find this podcast thorough in its reporting, this episode had some weaknesses.

First, they should have named the bank (and tried to get a comment from them). By not doing so, they tarred all banks with the same negative brush.

Second, I wanted to hear more from the police. The victims said police had a picture of the thief; so was that person arrested? If not, why not?

Third, I would have liked to have heard from the TV reporter who got the couple's money back. How did her conversation with the bank go?

Fourth, the post office official they interviewed was a bit behind the times on the nature of check washing today. Criminals now can easily alter checks digitally; no chemicals required.

Fifth, it was mentioned briefly, but the show should have emphasized the best solution to this fraud: Stop writing checks. There are so many other ways to pay bills online and send money digitally that checks aren’t necessary. Not only will that stop the fraud, it will help protect postal workers from being attacked by crimials seeking checks in the mail they're carrying.

Book review: "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway

2026-03-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

Some books are so bad they can be called a "trainwreck." That's not good, obviously, but sometimes a book can be such a mess, such a disaster, that you can love to hate it. You know: "So bad it's good."

"The Sun Also Rises," Ernest Hemingway's 1926 book, is definitely not a trainwreck, but you may end up wishing it was.

This book is more of a slow-moving trolley that carries a group of friends placidly around town as they drink, eat and engage in insipid small talk. The trolley doesn't hit anything and nothing hits it. It just goes around the same loop, going over the same ground again and again.

To be fair, "The Sun Also Rises" is fairly easy to read. The disalogue is crisp and Hemingway is able to nicely describes a scene without excess flowery language.

But remarkably little happens. Hemingway faithfully records every time a character bathes, gets a haircut or shaves. He notes when they get bored at one cafe, and go to another. He describes a fishing trip where they do little more than dig up worms for bait, talk and drink wine.

"The Sun Also Rises" portrays the lives of five alcoholic friends living in Paris in the 1920s. They flirt a little, dance a little, but mostly they drink.

The characters drink wine, beer, whiskey, martinis, cognac, brandy, absinthe and a liqueur called Izzarra. They drink in the morning, afternoon and night. There is so much drinking in "The Sun Also Rises" that you might wake up with a second-hand hangover just from turning the pages.

Unlike a tranwreck, where the flaws are obvious, this "trolley" kind of book lulls you into thinking that something good is just around the bend. But it almost never is.

Here's a typical passage:

"I unpacked my bags and stacked my books on the table beside the head of the bed, put out my shaving things, hung up some clothes in the big armoire, and made up a bundle for the laundry. Then I took a shower in the bathroom and went down to lunch."

You might think that there is some reason, to be revealed later, that Hemingway has mentioned the stacking of the books, the hanging of the clothes and the other details. But you'd be wrong. They are not important and have literally no significance.

It is remarkable that an author like Hemingway has created such a basket of uninteresting and unlikeable characters. The narrator, Jake, and a couple other characters are so featureless as to be bland. The main female character, Brett, is self-absorbed and tiresome. Another one, Mike, becomes a jerk when he drinks (which is most of the time).

It wouldn't be fair to say that nothing happens. In the second half of the book, the characters go to Pamplona, Spain, for the running of the bulls and bullfighting. Hemingway vividly describes these events, touching on the culture, subtle artistry, and brutality of bullfighting. This part is worth reading, but it's only about 8 percent of the book.

After the bullfighting, the characters leave Pamplona, most heading back to Paris. The book should have ended there, but for some reason Hemingway tacks on a pointless extra chapter where Jake talks to some bicyclists and goes for a relaxing swim in the ocean. Oh, and he drinks.

A head's up for readers: "The Sun Also Rises" has at least nine uses of the N-word and multiple anti-Jewish insults, including the word "kike."

Book review: "A Marriage at Sea" by Sophie Elmhirst

2026-02-23T10:17:00.000-08:00

I don't want to brag, but when it comes to getting lost at sea, I know a few things.

I've read at least 13 books about real people who must survive on the open ocean after their boat sinks or its engine dies. This includes "Adrift," Steven Callahan's amazing tale of floating across the Atlantic for 76 days. There's "In the Heart of the Sea," the story of 20 men desperately trying to stay alive after losing their whaleship. Equally impressive is "438 Days," the tale of a Mexican fisherman who survived over a year floating across the Pacific.

All of those are great books and each offered lessons about what to do, and what not to do, if you're ever unfortunate enough to be in that situtation.

The latest addition to my survival-at-sea bookshelf is Sophie Elmhirst's 2024 book, "A Marriage at Sea." This book describes the ordeal of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, an English couple who were attempting to sail their 31-foot boat from England to New Zealand in 1973 when the vessel sank after a collision with a whale. For 118 days, the Baileys drifted across the Pacific in a rubber life raft and inflatable dinghy, the two vessels tethered by a rope.

It is a compelling story and is well-told by Elmhirst.

The survival story isn't the only interesting part of the book. Elmhirst details how the Baileys planned and prepared for their long-distance boat trip, then takes us along, as vicarious participants, as they sail from port to port, from Europe to the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, and then through the Panama Canal. I was struck by the social network of this subculture; the Baileys often met up with the same travelers doing similar voyages in far-flung places.

The sinking upends their carefully made plans. Like other such books, "A Marriage at Sea" makes it clear that survival in this situation is a lot more than luck — it takes discipline, focus and innovation.

They conserve their food tins as long as they can, then turn to the sea for sustenance. Maralyn turns a safety pin into a fish hook. They catch turtles and carve out the meat with small knives.

What makes this story unique in this genre is that the main characters are a married couple, inherently adding a layer to their personal dynamics. At one point, well into their ordeal, Maralyn ask Maurice how she looks (they had no mirror). He is reluctant to tell her how much her bones are visible through her rapidly withering skin. Later, as Maurice fell into depression and considers suicide, it is Maralyn who holds him steady.

After their rescue, Elmhirst outlines a bewildering period when the Baileys achieve worldwide fame, appearing on TV shows, become honored guests at events. It's a jarring contrast to their days of isolation on the sea.

That is all interesting, but Elmhirst stretches the story too far, detailing the Baileys' lives until death. Maralyn died in 2002, while Maurice lived 16 years more. I don't mean to be harsh, but we don't need six chapters showing the morose Maurice shuffling sadly through his last years, lost without Maralyn, each week wandering into his favorite teahouse to describe his suicidal feelings.

I have a couple other quibbles with the book. First, I wish Elmhirst had been more forthright in explaining her sourcing. She rarely cites a source, leaving the reader to wonder where the information came from. At the very back of the book, she explains that she used the Baileys' own books, Maralyn's diary and interviews with some friends and acquaintances. I just wish she had stated all that at the top.

My second complaint is about the lack of pictures. There's only one photo in the book. This seems particularly striking because Elmhirst describes specific photos of the Baileys during and after their rescue. Why not just include the photos?

But these are minor complaints. "A Marriage at Sea." is largely an engaing story and I'm glad I read it.

I can't leave this review without including my list of survival-at-sea books. While all these books have at least some merit, I'll list them in order from best to avegage.

"In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex"

"Overboard!"

"Deadliest Sea"

"All Brave Sailors"

"So Close to Home"

"Ten Hours Until Dawn: The True Story of Heroism and Tragedy Aboard the Can Do"

Book review: "Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain

2026-02-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

As a young cook at a New York restaurant, Anthony Bourdain was tormented in the kitchen by a more senior, and often drunk, chef named Luis.

"Luis considered frequent explorations of my young ass with his dirty paws to be a perk of his exalted position; at every opportunity, he'd take a running swat between my cheeks, driving his fingers as far up my ass as my checked pants would allow," Bourdain writes in his 2000 book, "Kitchen Confidential. "I endured this in the spirit of good fun for a while — until I'd had enough."

One day in the kitchen, Bourdain spotted Luis approaching out of the corner of his eye. He casually grabbed a big meat fork and, when Luis's fast-moving hand approached his butt cheeks, Bourdain drove the fork's tines deep into his assailant's hand.

"Luis screamed like a burning wolverine and fell to his knees, two wide holes — one on each side of his middle knuckle — already welling up with blood. He managed to get up, the whole kitchen crew screaming and hooting with laughter, his hand blowing up to the size of a catcher's mitt and taking on an interesting black-and- blue and red color."

Not only did this end the assaults, it improved Bourdain's work status. "The other cooks began addressing me as an equal. Nobody grabbed my ass anymore. People smiled and patted me on the back when I came to work in the morning. I had made my bones."

This is one of many terrific stories Bourdain tells in "Kitchen Confidential." The book covers some 27 years of Bourdain's culinary career, starting as a dishwaher at a seafood place in Massachusetts, then moving on to chef roles at literally dozens of other restaurants, mostly in New York.

Bourdain shows us what really goes on in a restaurant's kitchen, and it's often not a pretty picture. He describes a snarl of barely organized chaos filled with cooks and staff shouting, cursing, trading insults in multiple languages, arguing, complaining about customers, stealing, and, at any spare moment, having sex with the wait staff, getting drunk, or doing drugs.

It may be unruly, but it's also part of an intricate dance that puts your meal on your plate. Long before you arrive at a restaurant, Bourdain explains, chefs are busy ordering food, sharpening knives, planning the menu, roasting bones for stock, making sauces, dividing meat into portions, and managing deliveries.

Bourdain laments that he rarely had time to check the quality of the food at delivery, but notes, "My purveyors know me as a dangerously unstable and profane rat-bastard, so if I don't like what I receive, they know I'll be on the phone later, screaming at them to come and 'Pick this shit up!'"

It's hard, all-consuming work — Bourdain describes frequently working 12- to 16-hour days, pushing out hundreds of meals a day. After 27 years, his hands and arms are scarred from burns and knife cuts. There's an emotional toll, too, as Bourdain has to manage changing demands from the owner and compete with rivals in the kitchen.

But all in all he loved it. He loved it because he loved great food and loved to prepare it.

"I enjoy the look on the face of my boss when I do a potau-feu special — the look of sheer delight as he takes the massive bowl of braised hooves, shoulders and tails in, the simple boiled turnips, potatoes and carrots looking just right, just the way it should be," he says, describing just one of his favorite dishes.

Bourdain is a strong writer, as well as an opinionated one. He calls vegetarians "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food."

Weekend diners, he says, "are universally viewed with suspicion, even contempt, by both cooks and waiters alike; they're the slackjaws, the rubes, the out-of-towners, the well-done-eating, undertipping, bridge-and-tunnel pre-theater hordes, in to see Cats or Les Miz and never to return."

For all its great stories, "KItchen Confidential" is unevenly cooked. There are chapters that don't fit, like one in which gives his advice on kitchen tools and garnishes, and another where he profiles other chefs. Those belong in other books.

Worse, Bourdain overstays at his table. His brash opinions and cocky attitude are entertaining for much of the book, but eventually become repetitive and tiresome. There's just a little too much Anthony Bourdain in Anthony Bourdain's book. (It's telling that when I was 90% done with this book, I actually put it aside and read another book in its entirety. I eventually came back and finished "Kitchen Confidential," but not because I was eager to read more; I just wanted to finish it.)

So read the good stuff, but prepared to say when you've had enough.

Book review: "438 Days" by Jonathan Franklin

2026-01-24T11:53:00.000-08:00

In the pantheon of epic survival stories, a handful of names stand out. There's Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer. There's Louis Zamperini, the protagonist of the book and movie "Unbroken." There's Alexander Selkirk, the real-life inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.

To that list, you might want to add the name José Salvador Alvarenga.

In his excellent 2015 book "438 Days," author Jonathan Franklin tells the incredible story of how Alvarenga got caught in a raging storm while fishing off Mexico's West Coast, was pushed far out to sea, and managed to survive for more than 14 months in the Pacific Ocean on a small boat with a dead motor and few supplies.

Alvarenga "completed one of the most incredible voyages in the storied history of seafaring," writes Franklin. "He didn't navigate, sail, row or paddle — he drifted."

Franklin shows how the 37-year-old Alvarenga, who was poor and had little formal education, used his wits and experience to survive. He created a fish hook from an engine part. He drank turtle blood. He sewed mocassins from shark skin. He used floating trash, making fish traps from old bleach bottles and using old beverage containers to collect rainwater. He used his urine, as his mother had taught him, to treat an ear infection (don't laugh — the ear got better).

For the first part of the ordeal, Alvarenga was accompanied by 24-year-old Ezequiel Córdoba, who Alvarenga had hired at the last minute to help him on his fishing trip. Córdoba survived on little food and water for four months — pretty impressive in itself — before dying.

With no one to talk to from then on, Alvarenga's survival involved mental games. He befriended a whale shark that swam by his boat for several days, talking out loud to it. He played "soccer" with the birds he had trapped live on his boat, using a puffer fish as the ball. He drifted in and out of fantasy worlds, imagining himself brewing coffee or cooking special meals. At night, he would pretend to reach up and turn off the light.

In writing the book, Franklin faced a notable limitation: He really only had one source, Alvarenga himself.

Franklin notes in the afterword that he interviewed Alvarenga many times over a year, fleshing out his story and, importantly, checking for inconsistencies. Franklin also talked to Alvarenga's friends and fellow fishermen to understand his back story..

Franklin smartly supplements the story with interviews with experts on survival, oceanography, marine weather patterns, climates, and fishing, bringing valuable perspective to the story (did you know that fish eyeballs can be an important source of vitamin C, helping prevent scurvy?).

In the end, Alvarenga's story holds together, partly because he's so open about how traumatic it was. He recalls spending evenings talking to the ocean:

"When, oh when, are you going to get me out of here?" he would ask. "I must be a bother. Toss me ashore."

Alvarenga is eventually tossed ashore in the Marshall Islands after a voyage of about 6,000 miles. Franklin recounts how the severely weakened Alvarenga ate voraciously after reaching land. Alvarenga despised the press that pestered him for his story and the doctors who wanted to poke and prod him.

Wrote Franklin: "Alvarenga believed he didn't need a doctor to diagnose what was wrong. He was suffering from a yearlong tortilla drought. Nearly every day of his journey to sea he had imagined toasted tortillas. During his two weeks in the Marshall Islands he begged for corn tortillas but was told to wait, that no one ate tortillas in the middle of the Pacific."

When Franklin asked Alvarenga why he was cooperating with him on writing the book, he said he wanted to help others.

"I suffered so much and for so long. Maybe if people read this they will realize that if I can make it, they can make it. Many people suffer only because of what happens in their head; I was also physically being tortured. I had no food. No water. If I can make it so can you. If one depressed person avoids committing suicide then the book is a success."

Book review: "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"

2025-11-30T18:25:00.000-08:00

(Warning: This review has spoilers. But, c'mon, you've had 139 years to read "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," so if you haven't finished it yet, that's on you.)

I was surprised by how short "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is. This famous 1886 novella, by Robert Louis Stevenson, was only 149 screen-pages on my phone (by comparison, "Moby Dick" was 1,299). I read it in less than a day.

It seemed like it was over too soon, especially considering the fame of the story. We've all heard countless references to "Jekyll and Hyde," right? We know, even if you haven't read the novella, that the names are shorthand for two opposite personalities — one good, one evil.

Stevenson presents the story as a mystery. A Mr. Edward Hyde has been seen doing terrible things around town, even murder, but no one realizes that he is actually the well-respected Dr. Henry Jekyll.

This wasn't a mystery to me, or probably most readers, I'm sure. But that did not prevent it from being a compelling story. The plot moves sharply along and quickly becomes a page-turner. Stevenson's writing, though somewhat antiquated in language, is detailed and evocative. Consider this passage, when Mr. Hyde confronts a elderly man on a darkened street:

The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway.

Yikes.

In the final chapter of the book, Dr. Jekyll reveals in a lengthy letter (much like a monologue) that he created Mr. Hyde while experiementing with drugs to separate his "evil" side from the rest of him.

"Man is not truly one, but truly two," says Dr. Jekyll, showing his philosophical side.

Dr. Jekyll believed that separating out the evil side would allow his "upright" side to thrive.

If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

Not surprisingly, things don't go as planned. The unleashed evil Mr. Hyde thrives and threatens to completely take over Dr. Jekyll.

My virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion ... I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.

While this last chapter is essential for telling the story, it is also too one-dimensional, too long and too repetitive. The chapter consumes fully the last quarter of the book and it is entirely Dr. Jekyll's monologue. Though it has merits, this section sucks much of the energy from a book filled with a stirring plot and character interplay.

That said, there's no doubt that "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" makes you think I was tempted at first to view this simply as a story about schizophrenia, but I soon realized it goes deeper. Stevenson raises important questions about the human mind and how we manage our views of right and wrong.

"All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil," says Dr. Jekyll, "and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil."

Book review: "Mud Season" by Jeff Kramer

2025-11-27T12:58:00.000-08:00

If you're intending to read Jeff Kramer's 2025 debut novel "Mud Season," I have advice: Once you start, read it as fast as possible.

That's because "Mud Season" has a lot of characters — and importantly, it has many similar characters. Reading the book swiftly will help you keep the characters straight. This isn't a big ask, really, because the book is so enjoyable you'll probably want to keep going.

The character similarity is by design. "Mud Season" tells the story of an angst-ridden writer whose new novel features characters that seem a lot like people he knows, prompting readers to rush to troubling conclusions and alarming his in-laws, who feel the book is demonizing them.

For every major character in the main story there is a similar character in the book within the book. Protagonist Woody Hackworth is an embittered journalist and so is the lead character in his book, Cus Stanston (though Woody conveniently makes his doppelganger taller and more handsome).

Woody has a flirtatious relationship with a woman named Celeste; Cus has an extramarital affair with a woman named Aurora.

Most importantly, Woody makes the chief villain of his novel Cus's father-in-law, the head of a concrete company, causing readers to assume he's referring to his own father-in-law, the head of an excavation and demoliton company.

Even the book titles are similar: The book within "Mud Season" is called "Fear as Mud."

Yes, it's a tangled web, but it's also a fun one — a clever, witty, entertaining ride filled with humor and unexpected twists. This is defintely not a cookie-cutter plot.

(It's worth noting that the book has not just two levels, but three. Author Jeff Kramer, like Woody and Cus, is a journalist. Like his characters, Kramer lives in upstate New York. And Kramer's father-in-law was the owner of a roofing company).

In Woody Hackworth, Kramer has an unusual protagonist. Woody is a sad sack filled with an anxieties and an inferiority complex, so compelled to prove himself by writing a successful book that he seems ready to torpedo his marriage, fracture his relationship with his daughter and make enemies of his in-laws. He's not really likeable, but in his confused selfishness he is, somehow, lovable.

One of the most unique elements of "Mud Season" is the way it gives readers a glimpse into a writer's mind. Kramer smartly has Woody releasing his novel as a serial, publishing one chapter at a time online while he's still writing the rest.

This means that the writing — and rewriting — of "Fear as Mud" is intertwined with the plot. Kramer shows how a writer considers word and phrase choices, character arcs and story logic. Woody ponders whether "fruition" is the right word to use in a sex scene, how evil to make the wife in his story, and how much "ethnic" background to add to his characters when he realizes the story is filled with white people.

All writers experience this sort of mental gymnastics, but it's often hard to show it. Kramer makes it tangible, and you can imagine the parallel with his own internal debates as he wrote "Mud Season".

The book is dotted with humor and snark, some of it delivered off-hand and quickly while the plot moves on. At one point, Woody bungles the title of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" as "The Mason Jar." In another scene, listening to a doctor describe a character's brain tumor, Woody's mind drifts away, imagining an auto mechanic. "He might as well be saying Joe's brake pads are down to 20% and there's a recall on his electronic ignition shift."

A small warning: This is something of a "guy's book." That doesn't mean women might not enjoy it, but understand that it does come from the perspective of a man, with multiple references to the sexual attractiveness of women and some hard drinking.

Kramer is careful to make the book within the book — the novel by Woody Hackworth — slightly clumsily written. It opens with, "It wasn't a particularly stormy night, but it was definitely dark, dark as the ink drying on the latest scoop of the best all-around reporter at the Tiberius Daily Informer."

Later, when Cus and Aurora are having sex, the book describes "great rockets of passion and liftoff became imminent." In a different scene, the fawning Aurora wonders about Cus, "Was there nothing her dashing defender of Earth and sky didn't know?"

Like I said, this is a fun read.

Book review: "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury

2025-10-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

Note: This review has spoilers. But c'mon, this book has been around for 75 years, so if you haven't read it, that's pretty much on you.

I may be the final human to read "The Martian Chronicles." In this 1950 book, author Ray Bradbury predicted that the last human life on Earth will be extinguished in 2026. As I write this, that's less than three months away. I may have read this just in time.

"The Martian Chronicles" is a collection of science fiction short stories, some quirky and funny, most dark and melancholy. Each chapter is a separate story, almost always with new characters, but they all are arranged chronologically around the theme of humans colonizing Mars starting in 1999.

While "The Martian Chronicles" is easy-to-read and thought-provoking, it is not really compelling, probably because each chapter mostly stands on its own. While one chapter may be enjoyable it really doesn't move you on to the next one.

Some chapters are almost cartoonish. When some of the first humans arrive on their planet early in the book, they knock on the door of a house and find Martians who are unimpressed and uninterested in talking to them. "I haven't the time," says one. "I've a lot of cooking today and there's cleaning and sewing and all."

The astronauts eventually get the boisterous welcome they wanted, but only because they have been unknowingly locked up in a Martian insane asylum. It is there that a Martian psychologist kills the humans, convinced that the commander is crazy and the others nothing more than hallucinations. When Martians find the earthmen's spaceship they have no idea what it is, and sell it for scrap.

In another chapter, the last man and woman on Mars (apparently) find each other, but he doesn't like her, gets in his car, and drives for three days to the other side of the planet.

Most of the stories are more creepy than funny, some like episodes from Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone." In one, the Martians lure humans in with an illusion of reuniting with long-dead family members, then kill them.

Bradbury paints a very simple image of life on Mars — humans simply get off their space ships and start walking around (there is a brief mention of the air being "thin" but no one dwells on it). Humans build earth-like communities with houses and highways, cars and boats. I know this was published in 1950, but certainly Bradbury must have known how silly this was, right?

Bradbury uses the book as forum for an assortment of messages, and he's not subtle about it.

One of Bradbury's characters laments that human development will ruin Mars. "We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things," says "The only reason we didn't set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large comercial purpose ...But here, this whole thing is ancient and different, and we have to set down somewhere and start fouling it up."

(In a later chapter, a human sets up a hot-dog stand on Mars.)

One character observes that Martians — unlike Earthlings — perfected an ideal civilization blending art, science and the love of nature. "They never let science crush the aestehtic and the beautiful."

In one chapter, a character angered that humans have turned their back on literature gets his revenge by luring his enemies into a deadly House of Usher (it doesn't have much to do with Mars). If you're getting the idea that there is a lot of deaht in "The Martian Chronicles," you're right, but most of it is thinly cartoonish.

At other times, the author warns of the dangers of authoritarianism and censorship. While he envisions not-yet-invented devices like the answering machine and Roomba vaccum, he also cautions about an obsession with technology.

"Life on Earth nevers settled down to doing anything very good," says a character. "Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth."

Book review: "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville

2025-09-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

In my riveting review of the first half of "Moby Dick," I describe the 1851 Herman Melville work as a "mess."

After I wrote that harsh assessment, I continued on through the book, hopeful that it would improve. After all, this is widely considered one of the greatest American novels ever. There has to be some reason to read it all, right?

So I continued, through the full 135 chapters, and an epilogue, to the end. My conclusion. It's not just the first half. All of "Moby Dick" is a mess.

It's a mishmash of fiction and nonfiction, a confused blend of literary styles, a shoebox full of scattered pieces of history, science and mythology, all swimming in a soup of rambling and unfocused writing.

I realize that criticizing a book like "Moby Dick" is an invitation for people to criticize me. "You didn't read it carefully," someone will say. "You missed (insert supposedly wonderful part of the book here)."

This is why, despite every urge not to, I read carefully through the full, enormous body of "Moby Dick," taking notes on each chapter.

Speaking of reading carefully, I came to question whether some who claim to have read "Moby Dick" actually have. "Moby Dick" is described almost everywhere as the story of "Captain Ahab obessively chasing the white whale." The exact phrasing varies, but that's the gist.

Wikipedia, for instance, says: "The book is centered on the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage."

But here's the thing: The story of Ahab and his pursuit of the white whale is only a minor part of the book. For most of "Moby Dick," Ahab and Moby Dick are barely mentioned. It's only in the last 15 percent that the Ahab-Moby Dick story comes to the forefront.

The rest of the book is a slapdash collection of chapters loosely falling under the umbrella of whales and whaling.

The problems of "Moby Dick" fall broadly under two areas: Structure and writing.

Let's start with structure. If I had been Herman Melville's editor back in the day, I would have had a hard talk with the author after reading through the manuscript of "Moby Dick."

"Look, Herman," I'd say. "You're a great guy, but what you have here is not a novel. It's not even a single book. It would be better as two separate books and a couple short stories."

First, I'd tell him, draw on your whaling experience and write a memoir. Melville spent about two years working on whaling ships in 1841-43. and he clearly uses that in "Moby Dick" where he explains how whaling ships work. Many chapters have zero plot and zero character development, but are instead tutorials or lectures on whaling practices. He devotes one entire chapter to rope, another to the rituals of dining on whaling ship, still another to describing how blubber is stripped from a whale and boiled down to oil.

This material would be better in a memoir because parts of "Moby Dick" straddle the line between fiction and nonfiction, leaving the reader wondering "Is this real?" A memoir would allow Melville to make it clear what's true, and he could probably add in other personal experiences.

A second book could be drawn from the many chapters Melville writes about whales. He spends seven — yes, seven — chapters in "Moby Dick" just talking about a whale's head. He spends two chapters describing art featuring whales. Two chapters on the importance of whaling to the world. One on the biblical story of Jonah. And one chapter on the whale's spout.

Third, Melville could have, and should have, taken the Ahab-Moby Dick tale and turned it into a standalone short story. This is the most compelling part of the "Moby Dick," so why hide it at the end, forcing readers to run an obstacle course to get to it.

He could have also made a short story of the opening chapters, where narrator Ishmael prepares to join a whaling ship. This is not an action-packed section, but one of some amusement, especially the part where Ishmael ends up forced to share a bed with a stranger at a boarding house (did this actually happen to Melville? If so, include it in the memoir).

Even these structural adjustments would not leave a place for everything. Melville includes a chapter — and not a short one — on the cultural and historical significance of the color white. Yawn. As Melville 's editor, I would have to say, "Herman, buddy, you know I love you, but the white chapter has to go. Or he just post it on Medium.com."

Then there's the writing.

There are many problems in this category, which I'll get to, but what makes "Moby Dick" particularly maddening for the reader is that there are moments of sharp and lucid writing. Clearly, Melville can do it, so why are these moments so rare?

I was quite excited by Chapter 100, where Ahab meets with the captain of another ship. Unlike most of the book to this point, this chapter features dialogue that is delightfully crisp, even a little funny. The plot is advanced and Ahab's character is developed. It's the kind of stuff that a strong novel is made of, but is rare in "Moby Dick."

But just as my hope rose, Melville dashes it in the next chapter, which is made up of a random bits of sailing history and a description of a book he read.

This is just one of many digressions in "Moby Dick." Melville seems incapable or uninterested in focusing on the plot.

Melville makes elementary writing errors. There are two chapters which, by his own admission, should have been included earlier. He leaves out basic storytelling information. Characters who were in a boat one moment are suddenly in the water — how did they get there?

Chapter 99 is a series of soliloquies. The first three speakers are identified, but the next five or six are not. You have no idea who is talking.

Melville loves soliloquies, but it's difficult for the reader to return that love when so many of them wind through a thicket of impenetrable verbiage.

In one, Ahab rambles:

I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not?

That's not even half of it.

Character development is spotty and inconsistent. The one character developed early in "Moby Dick," a hapoonist from the South Pacific named Queequeg, largely disappears for the rest of the book (except for one chapter where he almost dies). Even late in the book, Melville is still introducing new characters.

The book is purportedly in first-person as told by Ishmael. But much of it reads like third-person or simply non-fiction. One chapter is written like a play text. There's a long unnecessary flashback to a mutiny on another ship that has zero relevance to this book.

The deeper writing problem is Melville's reluctance to allow his characters to say things directly. Sure there are eloquent lines such as "The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat," and "In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride."

But for everyone of those, there are four or five places where Melville's language meanders leisurely, digresses, loops back on itself, and wanders off as lost in a fog. Many of his sentences check in at over 100 words, and in one monster he spends 467 words to say, essentially, that there were hungry sharks next to the ship.

Even shorter sentences, like the one below, can leave you scratching your head.

Some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.

Maybe it is possible, if you paused and studied it, to decode the meaning of that sentence. But if you did that with "Moby Dick," you would be constantly stopping and would never finish the book.

I was going to stop this review here, but I have so many examples of puzzling writing I want to include one more. (And this is my blog, so I can do what I want.)

Here is Ahab commenting on a dying whale:

Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the Niger’s unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way.

Good luck with that.

Book review: The first half of "Moby Dick" by Heman Melville

2025-08-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

I usually wait to finish a book before reviewing it, but for "Moby Dick" I'm making an exception. I'm halfway through this 1851 Herman Melville work and I'm already bursting with things to say.

In short, "Moby Dick" is a mess.

Yes, I know it's supposed to be a classic. Some even call it the quintessential American novel. But this rambling, meandering work is like a chaotic junk drawer of literary styles.

It's part fiction, part non-fiction. It's told sometimes in first-person (with at least five different narrators) and sometimes as third-person. It even employs the rarely used first-person omniscent.

There are diversions and digressions galore. Melville spends two chapters explaining why whaling is important to the world. Another chapter — and not a short one, either — is spent on the historic and cultural signifance of the color white. The plot is interrupted occasionally by factual chapters, like a 19th-century Wikipedia, on the different types of whales or artwork that depicts whales. Melville uses soliloquies, inner dialogues, even one chapter written like the script of a play.

This is not what I expected. I've heard countless references to "Moby Dick" throughout my life and it sounded like a straightforward story about a whaling captain named Ahab obsessively pursuing a white whale named Moby Dick. There is that, but there's a lot more. Ahab doesn't even appear until 28 chapters into the story.

The plot and characters come and go haphazardly. A character named Queequeg is built up early on as the second main character after the narrator, Ishmael. Then Queequeg almost completely disappears from the story.

Melville seems in no hurry to move the plot forward — or anywhere. In the first paragraph, Ishmael says he wants "to get to sea as soon as I can," yet it takes another 22 chapters before his boat leaves the dock.

He rambles along in twisting sentences of archaic language, which are either beautifully poetic or completely indecipherable. One sentence, I kid you not, clocks in at 467 words

Honestly, I'm not even sure you can call it a novel. It's more of a file folder labeled "Random whale stuff."

With all this negativity, you might wonder why I keep reading it, and so do I. In part, I'm trying to figure out why "Moby Dick" has such a grand reputation. There's gotta be some good stuff ahead, right?

To be fair, when Melville focuses on the plot, the story does move ahead with interesting developments. He captures a certain place in time in the American whaling industry — dreary lodging while waiting to go to sea, the mood of a whaling town, the excitement of chasing a whale.

While it's true that some of the archaic language can't be decoded, sometimes Melville finds just the right words.

For example, on sleeping in a cold room, he says, "A sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal."

But for every one of those gems there are three or four labyrinthian sentences that would overwhelm the the abilities of a literary puzzlemaster. Here's just one: "With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!"

I'm not giving up yet, but I will be skimming parts of the second half.

Book review: "Into the Abyss" by Carol Shaben

2025-08-02T04:51:00.000-07:00

The small plane descended through a blizzard of snow in darkness, crashed through the trees, and splintered into multiple parts as it hit the ground. While six passengers died, four men miraculously survived the crash.

But though they were alive, the survivors of the crash were still in peril. They were deep in the Canadian wilderness on a bitterly cold night. Rescue was far away. Freezing to death was a real possibility.

This is the heart of the story in "Into the Abyss," a fascinating 2012 book by Carol Shaben. It tells the true story of the crash of Wapiti Airlines Flight 402 on Oct. 19, 1984, on its way to Peace River, Alberta.

Three of the survivors the crash were badly injured — pilot Erik Vogel, prominent politician Larry Shaben, and police officer Scott Deschamps. The fact that they eventually did survive the night was largely due to the actions of the fourth survivor, a man who never wanted to be on the plane in the first place.

That man was Paul Archambault, a prisoner who was on the plane being escorted by Deschamps to be tried for alleged crimes. Archambault was the least injured of the four. He not only freed Deschamps from the wreckage, and certain death, he started and maintained a fire to keep the group alive until rescuers arrived.

The sttory of Vogel, the pilot, is the spine of the book. Shaben carefully recounts his development as an eager young pilot who found a job with a small carrier to build up the flight hours necessary to move to a larger airline. Vogel clearly made mistakes that led to the crash, but Shaben notes another factor: The pressure his employer put on him to fly in bad weather, or when fatigued, even if it meant bending or breaking safety rules.

For all the main characters —Vogel, Archambault, Deschamps and Larry Shaben — the author paints nuanced portraits of their careers and personal lives. (If you're wondering, yes, author Carol Shaben is the daughter of Larry Shaben.) She clearly did deep interviews and research for the book. Even for less prominent characters, such as the men and women involved in the rescue efforts, Shaben humanizes them with carefully chosen details.

The most intriguing character in the book is Archambault, a troubled young man who had been jailed off and on for theft and vandalism. It was a yet another charge that put him on the plane, handcuffed to Deschamps. But as the flight began, Deschamps conceded to Archambault's request, and removed the handcuffs. That act may have saved both their lives.

After the crash, realizing he was still alive and able-bodied, Archambault at first started to flee into the woods to get away. But a pang of guilt brought him back to help the others, digging Deschamps out of a prison of snow in which he was embedded. (In fact, it is highly unlikely Archambault would have survived a night alone in the wilderness).

I was impressed by the Canadian rescue. Given that the flight crashed early in the night amid a raging snowstorm, I would have fully understood if the rescuers had opted to wait for daylight to begin operations. But as soon as word of the crash got out, in the darkness of the night, rescuers headed out by plane and on foot.

Paul Archambault was the hero of that night, but it took a while for the world to realize that. Immediately after he and the others were rescued, he was taken to a hospital and handcuffed to the bed. Later, as word of his actions emerged, most of his criminal charges would be dismissed.

As a writer, Carol Shaben shows off skills other writers should envy, giving a masterclass in the use of vivid details to bring the story alive.

Some examples:

"When Erik saw the tree in front of his cockpit window, he screamed and threw his arms in front of his face."
Paul Archambault "smoked his last rolled cigarette down to a roach and when the heat began to burn his fingers, tossed it into the snow."
Scott Deschamps, trapped in snow after crash, "could taste dirt in his mouth and snow compressed inside his nasal passages."

Given how much I liked the book, I'm almost sorry to point out that the book loses steam in the latter parts, largely because the author stuffs in unneeded details

The crash and the rescue are the dramatic high points of the book, but they are over and done about two-thirds of the way through the book. Carol Shaben follows up appropriately by describing the subsequent crash investigations, which mostly blamed Vogel for the crash, though Wapiti Airlines was also faulted for pressuring pilots into dangerous situations.

She also follows each of the survivors to see to see how they fared after the crash. This is a bittersweet section as each of them struggle to regain their footing in life. Sadly, Archambault died just six years after the crash in an accident.

It is interesting to hear these follow-up stories, but Carol Shaben goes too far, adding information that the book just doesn't need. I'm sure Larry Shaben's role in representing Muslims in Canada is important in some context, but not this one. Deschamps' search for, and reunification with a half-sister, is an important story for his family, but is just not necessary here.

I did like Carol Shaben's choice to end the book with the survivors' 20-year reunion. Though the story was filled with much melancholy, it was good to see that Vogel, Deschamps and Larry Shaben had become lifelong friends.

Book review: "Big Dumb Eyes" by Nate Bargatze

2025-07-15T13:02:00.000-07:00

I feel like I "discovered" Nate Bargatze. I first heard him in 2017 when he performed on "A Prairie Home Companion," the public radio show. Listening to him, I thought, "This guy's pretty funny." I made a mental note of his name.

After that, I started to hear, and see, more of Nate Bargatze. First, short video clips here or there. Then a full-length standup comedy special on Netflix. And then another one, and another. The mometum grew and suddenly there was Nate hosting Saturday Night Live. Twice!

I have been rooting for him along this journey. Not only is he funny, he's funny in a unique way. He doesn't curse or swear and doesn't tell dirty jokes. He doesn't do politics.

He just tells stories from his life, sometimes making fun of others, but often making fun of himself. He can turn ordinary life — a visit to Starbucks, helping his daughter with homework —into very funny stories.

And now Nate's written a book and a good one. "Big Dumb Eyes" doesn't contain that many outright laughs, but it has a lot of enjoyable, amusing stories, many of them from very prosaic topics.

He talks about the difficulty he has choosing socks to wear. "Who are these animals out there, just waking up in the morning and throwing on socks with no planning whatsoever? It makes no sense!"

He recalls the time, as a child, when his father accidently left Nate's younger sister behind at a church event. "The first things my dad does is go, "Do not tell your mother.'"

There are stories on his life as a meter reader, how his mom outran the police, how he failed bowling in college, and how his barber became his physical trainer.

My favorite story is about he and his family going to DisneyWorld. I'm not going spoil it for you here.

The book is not an autobiography, but he does tell stories from his childhood, growing up and reaching adulthood. The thing I would have liked to know — but is not in the book — is what it was about standup comedy that interested Nate in the first place and why he stuck with it even when the paychecks were small. Did he know he would be famous? Was he waiting for me to discover him?

Trivia night at O'Malley's on Main in Seal Beach

2025-07-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

Four friends and I stopped in yesterday at O'Malley's on Main, a restaurant in Seal Beach, California, for trivia night. It wasn't our first time there, but it very well could be our last.

My friend Kay had called days earlier to reserve a table for our group. There had been a mxup on our previous visit and they somehow lost our reservation. We ended up with four people awkwardly crowded around a table that might have been big enough for three.

We didn't want that to happen again, of course, so Kay called ahead of time and the man she spoke to assured her that a specific table, perfect for our group of five, would be reserved for us.

But when we arrived yesterday, the hostess knew nothing about our reservation. Sigh. We didn't get the table we wanted, and this time crowded five people awkwardly around a table for four.

The host gave us two menus to share among the five of us. After a wait of about 20 minutes, the server came by to take our orders. I don't expect servers to be bubbly or perky, but this waiter couldn't even manage half a smile. It seemed like he was being forced to do this job and only grudgingly taking our order.

No one brought us utensils or napkins, so one of our group took some off a separate empty table.

I had a blue cheese burger and it was the highlight of the evening — juicy and delicious. The fries were good too, but we discovered that the ketchup bottle at our table was nearly empty. With no server or other worker nearby to ask, we had to grab a bottle off another table.

We were there for two and a half hours and our waters were never refilled, not even after we asked our server to do so (and he said he would). He refilled the waters at the table next to us, but not ours.

Then there was the trivia.

Every bar has it's own style for trivia. I do like that O'Malley's has a good mix of topics and difficulty levels. They had questions on geography, music, history, sports and other topics.

But it goes way too slow. After each question, the host plays a song to allow your group to submit an answer. But coming up with an answer doesn't take that long. Most of the time you either know the answer or you don't, and even if there is some debate in your group that takes no more than 30 seconds. You don't need the four or so minutes it takes to play a song.

As a result, there's not that much trivia on trivia night. At O'Malley's, they give you about 22 questions (and they give you a "freebie" answer to one of them). At other bars, trivia can have 40 to 45 questions on a given night.

Also, the place was just plain loud. You might think that the one benefit of the long breaks between songs would be a chance to chat with your teammates, but the music and ambient noise of O'Malleys was so much you could barely shout, much less converse.

Finally, you remember that table we thought we had reserved? It was a perfect-sized table for five people. Unfortunately, it attracted a group of nine and they were seated right next to us. In fact, their overflowing group seemd to be sitting right with us. One of our group was getting bumped and jostled so much by this active group that he had to literally leave his seat and stand on the other side of our table.

All in all, not a great evening at O'Malley's.

Seeing "Jeopardy Masters" live

2025-04-21T17:40:00.000-07:00

For "Jeopardy" nerds, this was the place to be.

It was the first day of taping for "Jeopardy Masters," the annual tournament showcasing the show's best and brightest, and I was there.

I was among a couple hundred people arriving at Sony Picture Studios in Culver City, California to see one of the three "Masters" episodes being filmed that day

I had been to "Jeopardy" taping sessions three times before. Two of those happened in the era of host Alex Trebek, one in the late 1990s and once in the 2010s. And then, just last month, I saw my first taping with host Ken Jennings.

After the latter taping, I happened to see that Masters was coming up. I rushed and quickly got a ticket for a taping. For a "Jeopardy" fan like myself, I felt like I had snagged a ticket to the World Series. But let's keep things in perspective: Tickets to "Jeopardy," like most TV shows that have an audience, are free.

In some ways this was like any other taping day. On arrival, the guard directed me into the parking garage. Once parked, I checked in on the first floor of the garage, and then took a seat in a waiting corral with other ticket holders.

All that was part of the normal process. But there were signs this day was different. First, we were all required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which was atypical. Understandably, they didn't want to the results of any of the Masters games leaked (don't expect any spoilers here).

Also, roaming among the crowd was five-time "Jeopardy" champion Alison Betts. Honestly, I'm not totally sure why she was there (she wasn't in the tournament). She bounced among various people in line, chatting amiably. Was she simply there as a fan or as some kind of goodwill ambassador?

Mostly, I sat with the other ticket holders and waited. Our group had tickets to the 1 p.m. taping but at 1:15 we still hadn't left the parking garage holding area.

In the Trebek era, "Jeopardy" ran as an efficient taping machine. At start time, maybe even before, audience members were escorted directly into the studio. With only a few preliminary announcements ("Don't shout out the answers!"), the show began. Breaks for commercials lasted about as long as they do in the actual airing, so the taping of a single show was close to the length of the final product. Alex Trebek was so smooth that he rarely had to re-shoot anything. Even when I saw three episodes taped in succession, it all seemed to go by pretty fast.

Alas, in the Jennings era, the gears of "Jeopardy" have slowed, as I discovered at the previous month's taping. I saw two games, a total of about 45 minutes of actual show time. And yet I was on the Sony lot for three hours and 45 minutes. This was partly because they've now added a mandatory 30-minute stop in the gift shop, but also because the taping had numerous stops to reshoot portions.

Ken had to do numerous "pick-ups" — instances where he had to re-read a clue or redo some other line that he had muffed. I like Ken Jennings a lot, but seeing the taping in person shows that he still lacks the broadcasting polish of Alex Trebek.

On the day I was there for Masters, the first taping had run long and caused ours to be delayed. Also, the taping was overbooked. The last ticketholders to arrive were told there wouldn't be room for them and encouraged to come another time.

Eventually, we were let into the gift shop for the required stop and then finally guided through the studio to the "Jeopardy" studio. At the front of the group were people with purple wristbands — friends and family of the competitors. Some of these had T-shirts announcing their allegiance, like "Team Victoria."

The rest of us, with green wristbands, followed. We were warned to turn off our cell phones, put them away and never take them out once in the studio (I get it — no spoilers).

Despite the delays and even though I'd been there before, it is still a magical moment when you walk into the "Jeopardy" studio and see the stage you've seen so often on TV. The stage shimmers in shades of blue. In the rafters above are countless lights, big and small, directed in different directions.

On TV, you just see Ken and the three contestants. But there's much more. Just off stage is a long row of show staff, including producer Sarah Whitcomb Foss, sitting in front of computer monitors. There are multiple cameras around the room with one or two operators each, including one huge boom camera that swings back and forth. Then there's the crowd of about 180 people, and signs that flash "Applause" at appropriate times. On this day, the Masters tournament trophy was sitting on a table three rows in front of me.

There was a buzz in the crowd. Popular "Jeopardy" champ Sam Buttrey, who works on the show's podcast, was there mingling with audience members. During a break, Ken mentioned that former superchamp Brad Rutter was also there, but I didn't see him.

Once in our seats, there was more waiting. Jimmy Maguire, formerly of the "Jeopardy" Clue Crew and now the stage manager, talked to the audience trying to keep things lively. The contestants were brought out with cameras in their faces, like boxers entering the ring.

During the show breaks, Ken would do his "pick-ups" and then often take questions from the audience, including one from yours truly (in case you're wondering, some of the writers work on both "Jeopardy" and "Pop Culture Jeopardy," but not all of them). Ken is delightfully friendly. He tells funny stories and just seems like a genuinely nice guy.

Still, the show moved forward in clumsy stops and starts. The opening of the episode had to be done over. The breaks dragged for mysterious reasons. None of the actual gameplay was changed (that would be illegal), but the taping was much less-polished than the show you see on TV.

One of the stranger aspects of the tapings comes at the end of each game. On TV, as soon as the game is over, Ken quickly wraps things up and the credits roll. You might catch a short glimpse of Ken talking to the players.

In reality, Ken does an extended post-game interview with the players that lasts for several minutes. He asks about key moments in the game, difficult questions, ever wagering strategies. Some of this is interesting, but it is also awkward and really goes on too long.

I'm not sure why they do this. Some snippets of the interviews have been posted on the show's website, but not many. (As of this writing, the most recent post-game interview clip I could find on the site was from four months previous).

In all, I was on the Sony lot for four and a half hours to see 45 minutes of show. It was free, yes, and it was cool to get an early look at the Masters. But if you plan to go to any taping of "Jeopardy," just be sure to set aside enough time.