Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

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Recent acquisitions (some bibliohoplophilia)

Saturday, November 16th, 2019

Half-Price Books had another one of their coupon sales last week (the 4th through 10th).

Unfortunately, this was a busy week for me between voting and Wurstfest and meetings and other things, so I didn’t get as much of a chance to shop as I would have liked. Also, the gun book pickings have been kind of slim recently. Even the big central Half-Price has gotten rid of a lot of their fancy leather-bound books.

The only gun book that I found was A Varmint Hunter’s Odyssey by Steve Hanson for $10+tax after coupon. This is another one of those books published by the (now sadly defunct) Precision Shooting Press, and as I’ve written before, I like to snap those up when I find them.

Other than that…I found a nice trade paperback copy of Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James to replace my old hardback. I enjoy this book (though James sometimes makes me go “What?!”) and didn’t realize that the trade paperback had some additional material. (Including James’s list of his 100 top true crime books.) $4.24+tax after coupon.

And I also found a good copy of The Annotated Tales Of Edgar Allen Poe by Stephen Peithman for $6+tax after coupon. Oddly enough, I did not have a collection of Poe’s short works previously, and it is a well known fact that I’m a sucker for annotated books…

…so now I’ve got my eye out for a copy of The Annotated Poe by Kevin J. Hayes. Because you can never have enough Poe.

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: November 14, 2019.

Thursday, November 14th, 2019

Ronald Lafferty died earlier this week. He died of natural causes, as opposed to being executed by a firing squad.

I think it’s more likely than usual that this name will ring some bells with folks. Mr. Lafferty was a religious fanatic: he was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for “increasingly extreme religious views” (yes, he did believe in polygamy) and founded a new sect, School of the Prophets. He and his brothers (who were also members of the sect) claimed that they received messages from God.

Mr. Lafferty said one of those messages told him that his ex-wife, who had left him and taken their six children to Florida, had been the bride of Satan in a previous life.
In another message, he said, he was told that four people caused his excommunication and divorce, including his brother Allen’s wife, Brenda, and their 15-month-old daughter, Erica, “who he believed would grow up to be just as despicable as her mother,” according to court documents.
God told him to kill all four of them, Mr. Lafferty said. So on July 24, 1984 — a state holiday that commemorates the arrival of Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley — Mr. Lafferty and a group of followers, including his brother Daniel, went to Brenda’s house in American Fork, Utah.

Mr. Lafferty and his brother Daniel killed Brenda and the baby. They abandoned their plan to kill the other two on the list. Ronald and Daniel were arrested in Nevada about a month later. Daniel is serving a life sentence.

Mr. Lafferty’s mental competence to stand trial quickly became an issue in the case and would be the focus of his subsequent appeal efforts.
He was convicted of both killings and sentenced to death in 1985. But in 1991, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit vacated Mr. Lafferty’s convictions and ordered a new trial after finding that the wrong legal standard had been used to determine his mental competence.
Prosecutors again charged Mr. Lafferty with the killings, but a competency hearing in November 1992 found him to be mentally unfit to stand trial owing to mental illness. He was sent to a state psychiatric hospital until a new competency hearing was held in February 1994 and he was found competent to stand trial.
In April 1996, he was again convicted of the killings, and again sentenced to death.

The reason I say this will ring some bells is that the Lafferty murders were at the center of Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, a book which I’ve read and liked. (And, no, it did not strike me as being “anti-religion”. Anti-“religious fanatics killing women and babies”, maybe, but not anti-religion.)

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 11, 2019.

Monday, November 11th, 2019

pigpen51 left a very kind and much appreciated comment on the last obit watch. In that vein, someone who I feel like i should remember, but is probably just a little outside the fringes of my consciousness:

Maria Perego. She created Topo Gigio.

Ms. Perego, who worked alongside her husband, Federico Caldura, came up with the 10-inch-tall Topo Gigio in the late 1950s. Topo Gigio was a sort of cross between a puppet and a marionette; three puppeteers, hidden in a black background, moved various body parts with rods.
According to “Sundays With Sullivan: How ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ Brought Elvis, the Beatles, and Culture to America,” a 2008 book by Bernie Ilson, Mr. Sullivan saw a tape of the puppet from Italian television and booked Topo Gigio for a series of appearances on his popular Sunday-night CBS variety show. The first, the book said, was on April 14, 1963.
Ms. Perego and two other puppeteers were on hand to impart the movements, and a fourth provided Topo Gigio’s voice — but, Mr. Ilson wrote, Mr. Sullivan had not realized that someone would also have to serve as the puppet’s straight man. Mr. Sullivan, who was famously wooden on camera, stepped into that task for the initial appearance, figuring he would arrange for a professional comic to take over for later ones if the bit caught on.
“It was evident from the very first appearance, however, that the chemistry between Sullivan and Topo Gigio worked extremely well,” Mr. Ilson wrote. “The exchanges between Sullivan and the mouselike puppet revealed another side of the host, a warm and humanizing element.”
Mr. Sullivan remained in the role of sidekick for what the book says were some 50 appearances by Topo Gigio over the years. (Other sources give higher numbers.) The appearances often ended with the mouse saying, in a thick Italian accent, “Eddie, kiss me good night.”

A little late on this, but: Ernest J. Gaines. (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Lesson Before Dying)

Laurel Griggs. Nobody should die at 13.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 8, 2019.

Friday, November 8th, 2019

Louis Eppolito is burning in Hell.

Some of you probably remember that name, either because you’re true crime buffs or else you’re regular readers of this blog.

For those who don’t recall the name, Eppolito was one of the “Mafia Cops“: two NYPD officers who made deals with the Mob to provide confidential information and even whack guys.

Nineteen eighty-five was also the year Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa began their relationship with Mr. Casso’s circle. A career criminal with ties to Mr. Casso hired them that year to kill a Long Island jeweler to keep him from testifying in an F.B.I. inquiry.
The detectives used a confidential police database to find the jeweler’s home address, the type of car he drove and his license plate number. They pulled him over and asked him to come to the precinct station house.
Instead, they took him to a building in Brooklyn, where Mr. Caracappa and another man killed him. Mr. Eppolito acted as a lookout.
It was the first of the eight killings they would participate in over the next several years on Mr. Casso’s orders. They received $4,000 a month and up to $65,000 for individual murders, prosecutors said.
The other victims included a Brooklyn man gunned down mistakenly because he had the same name as a rival of Mr. Casso’s; a Luchese gangster; two Gambino soldiers; and two F.B.I. informers.

Stephen Caracappa, Mr. Eppolito’s partner in crime, died in 2017: somehow I missed hearing about this.

The good book on this case is The Good Rat by the late great Jimmy Breslin. I’m not recommending or endorsing it, but Eppolito’s Mafia Cop is still widely available: you can even purchase a Kindle edition. (Yeah, that is an affiliate link: it’s not like Eppolito is going to benefit from sales now, and I’m pretty sure anything he earned while alive went towards compensating the families of his victims.)

Posted in Books, Cops, Law, NYPD, Obits | 1 Comment »

I’m done.

Wednesday, November 6th, 2019

The Catholic Church has more compassion for people who have committed suicide than science fiction fandom.

If you think that’s a strong statement, well…

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon. Born Alice Bradley in 1915, she travelled the world with her parents as a young child. In 1940, after a brief unhappy marriage, she joined the women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and worked in intelligence. She married Huntington “Ting” Sheldon in 1945, and in 1952 they both joined the CIA. She later earned her doctorate and took up writing. She wrote short stories and novels, but it is the former that stand out as truly remarkable. With prose as subtle and precise as the most refined literary fiction, she penned imaginative tales like “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and “The Girl Who was Plugged In,” which became classics of science fiction and also important works of feminist fiction. Later in her life, she suffered from heart troubles and depression. Her husband went blind. She recorded in her diary in 1979 that she and her husband had agreed to a suicide pact if their health worsened. In 1987, she shot her husband, called her lawyer and told him that they had agreed to suicide, and then shot herself.
The award is being renamed because of this suicide. Although the prize was founded to recognize fiction “exploring gender,” the current board of the award see their expanded mission to be to “make the world listen to voices that they would rather ignore.” The issue is that some of these voices have decided that Sheldon killed her husband because she was ableist (that is, bigoted toward the disabled). Sheldon’s biographer, Julie Phillips, has tweeted in response: “The question has come up whether Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr) and her husband Ting died by suicide or murder-suicide. I regret not saying clearly in the bio that those closest to the Sheldons all told me that they had a pact and that Ting’s health was failing.” Phillips has also changed her Twitter profile to include the sentence, “Biographer of Ursula K. Le Guin and of James Tiptree, Jr., who was not a murderer.”

From Catholic Answers:

Yes, for many centuries the Church taught that those who took their own lives could not be given a Christian funeral or buried in consecrated ground. Nonetheless, in so doing the Church wasn’t passing judgment on the salvation of the individual soul; rather, the deprivation of Christian funeral rites was a pastoral discipline intended to teach Catholics the gravity of suicide.
Although the Church no longer requires that Christian funeral rites be denied to people who commit suicide, the Church does still recognize the objective gravity of the act…
As it does for all grave acts, the Church also teaches that both full knowledge and deliberate consent must be present for the grave act of suicide to become a mortal sin:

Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice (CCC 1859).

When a person commits suicide as a result of psychological impairment, such as that caused by clinical depression, the Church recognizes that he may not have been fully capable of the knowledge and consent necessary to commit mortal sin:

Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide (CCC 2282).

(For those unfamiliar, CCC is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Those numbers are paragraph references: you can find the whole thing online here.)

Posted in Books, Geek, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 22, 2019.

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019

Scotty Bowers, alleged pimp to the stars.

If “pimp to the stars” seems harsh, well, that’s what he called himself:

Mr. Bowers’s raunchy best seller, “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars,” written with Lionel Friedberg, left out few details as it told of his metamorphosis from gas-station employee to hookup-provider and sex partner to the rich and famous.
Men he knew from his military service during World War II began socializing at the gas station where he worked, and he paired those who were willing with the Hollywood people who found their way to him by word of mouth. Although he described catering to all sorts of sexual combinations, he said he had often surreptitiously provided willing men to male Hollywood figures and willing women to female ones in an era when being gay could ruin a career.
He wrote of funneling women to Katharine Hepburn, of having a sexual encounter himself with Spencer Tracy, of arranging same-sex partners for the duke and duchess of Windsor.

I’m not linking to his book for the same reason I use the term “alleged” above: Mr. Bowers was, most probably, a damn liar. (Speak no ill of the dead? Mr. Bowers had no problem telling stories about people who were dead and couldn’t defend themselves, so I see no reason not to give him the same treatment.)

Larry Harnisch at the “Daily Mirror” blog did a 26 part series on the book back in 2012. Here’s his obit for Mr. Bowers, which contains links to all 26 parts.

Matthew Wong. I had not heard of him, but the NYT calls him a “painter on the cusp of fame”. Some of the pictured artwork is, to me, striking: I really like “Winter’s End”, to take one example.

He was 35 years old.

The New York gallery Karma, which represented him, said the cause was suicide. His mother, Monita (Cheng) Wong, said Mr. Wong was on the autism spectrum, had Tourette’s syndrome and had grappled with depression since childhood.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Posted in Art, Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 20, 2019.

Sunday, October 20th, 2019

Nick Tosches, fiction writer and biographer.

One of his most attention-getting biographies followed in 1992. It was “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,” about Dean Martin.
“Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob-culture Renaissance man,” he wrote of Martin. “And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be.”
For Mr. Tosches, Martin was a celebrity who beat the unrelenting fame machine, the one that often ground stars up and consigned them to early deaths. (Martin himself died in 1995 at 78.)
“I would describe Dean as a noble character in an ignoble racket in an ignoble age,” Mr. Tosches told The New York Times in 1992.
“Life is a racket,” he added. “Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything’s a racket.”

If everything is a racket, is anything worthwhile? Like trying to help out the poor?

Dr. Paul Polak, a former psychiatrist who became an entrepreneur and an inventor with a focus on helping the world’s poorest people create profitable small businesses, died on Oct. 10 in Denver. He was 86.

…

In an era when foreign aid is largely based on charity, Dr. Polak (pronounced POLE-ack) instead advocated training people to earn livings by selling their neighbors basic necessities like clean water, charcoal, a ride in a donkey cart or enough electricity to charge a cellphone.
Although the nonprofit companies he created did accept donations, their purpose was to help poor people make money. His target market was the 700 million people around the world surviving on less than $2 a day, and he traveled all over the world seeking them out.

…

His most successful project was in foot-powered treadle pumps to pull water out of the ground. Beginning in 1982, he sold millions for about $25 each in Bangladesh and India, he said. The company he created for the project, iDE for International Development Enterprises, now operates in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The cost included the mechanism, which could be built in a local welding shop, and drilling the well. Dr. Polak’s organization trained thousands of welders and drillers. The customers — small farmers — supplied the foot power and long bamboo handles for the pumps, the device resembling a crude elliptical trainer.
To sell them, Dr. Polak ran a publicity campaign: a singing, dancing Bollywood-style movie about a couple that could not marry because her father could not afford a dowry. But once he bought a pump and could grow vegetables in the dry season, when they fetch more money, love triumphed.

…

By contrast, he said, the World Bank was subsidizing expensive diesel pumps that drew enough water to cover 40 acres. They were handed out by government agents, who could be bribed, he said, and the richest landowner would thus become “a waterlord,” who could drain the aquifer supplying everyone else’s wells and then charge them for water.
“It was very destructive to social justice,” Dr. Polak said.
Another franchise company he started in India was Spring Health, which uses battery power to convert salt into chlorine. The bleach is used to disinfect local water, which is then sold door-to-door in refillable containers.
Franchisees get caps and shirts with distinctive blue raindrops, and street theater troupes help uneducated people make the connection between dirty water and diarrhea, which sickens millions of children every day and, when chronic, can leave them mentally and physically stunted.

Bill Macy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Maude’s husband. But he knocked around a bunch of other stuff too.

Samuel Hynes, literature professor, author, and WWII torpedo bomber pilot. I’ve heard that Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator is a terrific book: anyone out there care to comment?

Not an Oracle guy, but for the historical record: Mark Hurd.

Sara Danius. She was the first woman to head the Swedish Academy. The Academy gives out the literature prize, and she was behind Bob Dylan winning in 2016. She was forced out in 2018.

I note this obit here less because of interest in the literature Nobel, and more because I find that it contains a remarkably high level of editorializing for a NYT obit.

She herself was never accused of wrongdoing. But she was the public face of a global institution whose reputation had been severely damaged.
Behind the scenes, her enemies within the academy sought to protect the accused man. They resisted her attempts to bring in law enforcement and forced her out.
When she left, Ms. Danius acknowledged that her colleagues had lost confidence in her leadership. She also defiantly suggested that arrogant and anachronistic forces within the academy had invoked the institution’s traditions to deny accountability.
“Not all traditions are worth preserving,” she said.
Her abrupt departure infuriated many women — and many men as well — across Sweden, a country that prides itself on gender equality. She was widely viewed as a scapegoat.

…

The man at the center of the sex scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault, was found guilty last year of raping a woman in 2011 and sentenced to two years in jail. In his appeal of the verdict, the appeals court found him guilty of raping the same woman twice and extended his sentence.
In addition, his wife, Katarina Frostenson, a poet who resigned from the academy, was accused of leaking the names of prize recipients to Mr. Arnault on at least seven occasions so that their friends could profit from bets. The two have denied all charges and said they were the objects of a witch hunt.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Geek, History, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 16, 2019.

Wednesday, October 16th, 2019

I’m sorry I’m a little late on these: I had one of those “don’t feel much like blogging” days yesterday.

Harold Bloom, noted critic.

Professor Bloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.

…

Armed with a photographic memory, Professor Bloom could recite acres of poetry by heart — by his account, the whole of Shakespeare, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” all of William Blake, the Hebraic Bible and Edmund Spenser’s monumental “The Fairie Queen.” He relished epigraphs, gnomic remarks and unusual words: kenosis (emptying), tessera (completing), askesis (diminishing) and clinamen (swerving).
He quite enjoyed being likened to Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century critic, essayist, lexicographer and man about London, who, like Professor Bloom (“a Yiddisher Dr. Johnson” was one appellation), was rotund, erudite and often caustic in his opinions. (Professor Bloom even had a vaguely English accent, his Bronx roots notwithstanding.)Or if not Johnson, then the actor Zero Mostel, whom he resembled.
“I am Zero Mostel!” Professor Bloom once said.

John Giorno, avant-garde poet. Back when I shopped for compact discs, I used to see copies of “You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With” all over the place. Never bought one, though: I’m a big Laurie Anderson fan, but how often was I going to listen to spoken word stuff by Giorno and William S. Burroughs? Probably not very often, was my considered opinion.

(There’s a little bit of Giorno available from iTunes, mostly as tracks on compilation albums. They do have “The Best of William S. Burroughs from Giorno Poetry Systems”, but that’s $40 for 69 tracks.)

NYT obit for Robert Forster, just for the historical record.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 25, 2019.

Wednesday, September 25th, 2019

Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Reason. Rolling Stone.

I have to be honest: I am not a DeadHead. Never have been. I’m not really the person to look to for an obit or an appreciation. But i do think he did some good work. How about a musical interlude?

(I actually really like the Indigo Girls cover of this, but I can’t find a good version on YouTube.)

(Obligatory.)

Dr. Robert McClelland. He was one of the surgeons who treated John F. Kennedy at Parkland.

Inside, as doctors began lifesaving measures, it was clear that Kennedy’s condition was grave. His face was swollen, his skin bluish-black and his eyes protuberant, suggesting great pressure on his brain, Dr. McClelland told the Warren Commission in 1964 during its investigation of the assassination.
The lead surgeon, Dr. Malcolm O. Perry II, asked Dr. McClelland to assist in an emergency tracheotomy, and Dr. McClelland inserted a retractor into the incision that Dr. Perry had made in Kennedy’s neck to help accommodate a breathing tube.
Dr. McClelland’s position at the head of the gurney on which Kennedy lay gave him a close look at the severe wound at the back of the president’s head that had been caused by a second bullet.
The “posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted,” he told the commission. About a third of the president’s brain tissue was gone, he said.

Ironically, Dr. McClelland also treated Lee Harvey Oswald after he was shot.

A. Alverez, “British poet, critic and essayist” who had an unusual relationship with Sylvia Plath before she died. He also wrote about suicide and about the World Series of Poker: I’m pretty sure I’ve read The Biggest Game in Town, but I don’t know where my copy is right now.

I have one more obit to post, but that will go up later: I’m running out of time before work starts, and I want to do it right. Look for that one around mid-morning or posslbly lunch. Hint: this person was a big damn hero.

Posted in Books, History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 16, 2019.

Monday, September 16th, 2019

Ric Ocasek, co-founder of The Cars and a good Cleveland boy.

Anne Rivers Siddons, novelist. She was one of those writers I’d heard of, and about, but I’ve never read any of her books.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

More hoplobibilophilia.

Monday, September 2nd, 2019

Half-Price Books is having a 20% off sale over the long holiday weekend.

I haven’t found a lot of good stuff at the past few sales, but that didn’t stop me from going. And I think I see a break in the drought. I found some non-firearms related stuff:

I wouldn’t be posting, though, if I hadn’t gotten lucky and found some gun books. Which I will put after the jump…

(more…)

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: August 28, 2019.

Wednesday, August 28th, 2019

Tweet of the day:

Michael Drejka was convicted of manslaughter. (Previously.) You can call me lazy, but I’m going to point to Andrew Branca again, who is an actual lawyer and knows something about use of force and the law:

This case is an excellent example of how tiny changes in the fact pattern could lead to drastically different legal outcomes. If McGlockton had made any apparent movement consistent with re-engaging Drejka, Drejka’s perception of an imminent attack would likely have been unquestionably reasonable. Even a mere shift of McGlockton’s body weight toward, rather than away from, Drejka might have been sufficient. Such evidence was not in the case, however.
Also extremely unhelpful to Drejka was his post-event interrogation by police, to which he voluntarily consented, without legal counsel present. In that interrogation a happily compliant Drejka, believing he’s just helping the police understand why his shooting of McGlockton was no problem, hardly an inconvenience, as the internet meme puts it, agrees to conduct a re-enactment of the shooting.

“Really, seriously, just shut the f–k up.”

Interesting post from Stephen Wolfram’s blog that sits at a couple of intersections: rare book geekery, computer science (the rare book belonged to Turing), and detective work.

Actual headline from the Austin American-Statesman:

Industry experts give high marks to Statesman site plan

The article goes on to state that, according to industry experts, all of the Statesman reporters are intelligent, attractive, and all of their bodily functions smell like apple cinnamon Glade plug-ins.

Perhaps slightly more interesting: this column about the Texas State Cemetery, tied to Cedric Benson’s burial there. While the writing is slightly grating, it does answer some questions I had about who gets in and how.

Posted in Books, Geek, Guns, Law | 2 Comments »

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