Tag: capsule book review

Memoirs of Hadrian ~ A Capsule Book Review

Memoirs of Hadrian ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Hadrian was born in 76 A.D. and became emperor of the Roman Empire in the year 117, at age 41. His reign lasted until his death in 138, at age 62. Hadrian was known as one of the five “good emperors,” meaning he was known for his peaceful reign, rather than for cruelty or for the extravagant vices that some of his predecessors were known for. Hadrian is known mainly today for three things: his love for Antinous, a Bithynian youth (Bithynia is today part of Turkey), who died at age 19 by drowning in the Nile River; for having built the famous Pantheon in Rome (or at least having it finished); and for a wall he had built in Britain (parts of which still remain) known as “Hadrian’s Wall,” which was supposed to keep the “barbarian hordes” out of territory belonging to the Roman Empire.

Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, is a historical novel, a fictional account of Hadrian’s life and times. Although fiction, it is based on extensive historical research, which the Bibliographical Note at the end of the novel explains. It is told in Hadrian’s voice, from his point of view, as if he, from across the centuries, was writing it himself. It is an extended letter to 17-year-old Marcus Aurelius, future emperor-to-be.

Of course, as emperor of one-third of the earth’s population at the time, Hadrian had many problems, many ups and downs. The emperor was essentially a warrior, a general holding together the military factions of his empire and, as such, was often in peril of his life. There were always the greedy, the ambitious, the selfish who wanted to destroy the emperor in an effort to attain their own ends. Hadrian was by all accounts a modest man, not interested so much in being loved or admired. He believed that true love and admiration from the people must be earned, rather than automatically given just because one has fallen heir to a powerful position.

The most dramatic event in Hadrian’s life was his love for Antinous, the beautiful youth whom he watched grow into manhood. Antinous was Hadrian’s better self, his constant companion, the emotional axis of Hadrian’s life during the years they were together. Their love was a love for the ages, like that of Achilles and Patroclus centuries earlier. When Antinous committed suicide (apparently) by drowning himself in the Nile River at age 19, Hadrian was never the same again, living for about eight more years. He “deified” Antinous, building a city (Antinoopolis) in Egypt to his memory. Many statues, coins, and other works of art bore Antinous’s image. A cult was built up around his name and memory. When Hadrian died of a “dropsical” heart in 138 A.D., one can’t help but believe that the two of them were reunited in death.

Memoirs of Hadrian was first published in 1951, in French, and later translated into English. It is a glimpse into another time and place into the mind of a man who lived so long ago that it’s difficult for us to imagine. Despite its historical subject matter and its moderately dense prose, it is never very difficult reading, especially after the first fifty pages or so. Not for everybody, but if you make it through to the end, you will find it immensely rewarding and memorable.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp 

by allen0997

A Clockwork Orange ~ A Capsule Book Review

A Clockwork Orange ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Besides classical music (especially Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach), Alex loves ultra-violence. He is only fifteen, but every evening he meets his three “droogs” (Pete, Georgie and Dim) to go out and terrorize anybody unfortunate enough to fall into their clutches on the streets. They especially target the elderly and those incapable of defending themselves. The “millicents” (police) are not very effective against these roving bands of predatory thugs, so most people, if they are able to reason things out, do not go out at night.

Alex lives with his “pee and em” (parents) on the tenth floor of a building of flats. The pee and em think Alex is a good boy who has an evening job that brings in a little money. He is good at making them think whatever he wants them to think. They don’t know that he gets his money from stealing and from robbing innocent victims. (When his father asks him just exactly what his evening job is, he politely sidesteps the issue.)

After a while things start to go bad for Alex, oh my brothers! His droogs turn on him and challenge his authority as their leader. What’s even worse, a “baboochka” (old woman) he beats up during a home burglary dies of her injuries and the millicents, finally, catch him and sentence him to twenty years behind bars. Well, conditions are terrible in prison, with six to a cell, and after a few months Alex kills another prisoner. Because he is young, authorities believe he is worth reclaiming, so they put him in a special treatment program (the Ludovico technique), whereby he will be “cured” of his violent criminal tendencies and released back into society in a fortnight. He doesn’t know, of course, that the treatment is the worst thing he will ever experience in his life.

The treatment consists of, besides drugs, “associative conditioning” in which Alex is forced (strapped to a table, eyes forcibly kept open) to watch films set to music of tortures, rapes, stabbings, murders and assorted acts of violence. The violence he is forced to witness in the films makes Alex so ill that, presumably, he will never be able to commit such acts again himself. But, wait a minute, isn’t the government going too far with this treatment? By taking away Alex’s free will to decide for himself, aren’t they turning him into a “clockwork orange,” a being that is organic and mechanical at the same time? After Alex is cured, maybe he will need a “cure” for the cure.

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, was first published in 1963. It is set in Britain, in a frightening distant future. It is Alex’s story, told in his voice, so it’s what he thinks and what he feels. The slang the characters in the novel use is called “nadsat” (teenage) language. If you are a new reader, approaching A Clockwork Orange for the first time, don’t be put off by the slang. You can almost always tell, by word association, what the word is supposed to be. In the paperback edition I read (two times now), there’s a glossary in the back of the book to translate the slang into recognizable English words.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp 

by allen0997

True Grit ~ A Capsule Book Review

True Grit ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Mattie Ross is the first-person narrator of Charles Portis’s novel, True Grit. She is a fourteen-year-old Arkansas girl whose father is murdered by a drunken hooligan named Tom Chaney (an alias) in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1870. Mattie is old beyond her years and knows how to take care of herself in a man’s world. She sets out to seek justice, to avenge the murder of her father, but she’s going to need some help.

When Mattie is advised that a man named Rooster Cogburn is the toughest of the U.S. marshals, she decides he is the right man for the job. She will pay him one hundred dollars, a formidable sum for 1870, to go into the Navajo Nation (Kansas) to bring Tom Chaney back to Fort Smith so she can have the satisfaction of seeing him hang. She will not back down for any reason until she gets what she wants. Danger on the trail, hardship and discomfort, mean nothing to her.

Rooster Cogburn is a crusty old soul who loves his liquor and has been known, on occasion, to be on the wrong side of the law, but he has a streak of decency, which Mattie soon discovers. He will do what’s right, even if he has to resort to extreme measures. He is the perfect complement to Mattie’s character.

In Fort Smith, before departing on their quest, Mattie and Rooster meet LaBoeuf, a swaggering Texas ranger who is also on the trail of Tom Chaney. He and Rooster try to leave Mattie behind, but they soon discover they are no match for her determination.

Mattie, Rooster and LaBoeuf have their setbacks on the trail of Tom Chaney, including winter weather, but Rooster, even in a drunken stupor, knows what he’s doing, knows the land, and knows how to get what, or who, he’s after. Tom Chaney is, after all, a little man and not very bright. He has joined up with a band of outlaws known as the Ned Pepper Gang, notorious for having recently robbed a train.

True Grit is an American classic Western adventure that might be read and appreciated by all age groups. I first read it when I was in college and, since my copy had long-ago fallen by the wayside, I bought it from Amazon and read it again (considerably more expensive the second time I bought it). It was first published in 1968 and was soon after made into a movie with John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn. It was again made into a movie in 2010, in a version by the Coen brothers that more closely follows the novel.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Slaughterhouse-Five ~ A Capsule Book Review

Slaughterhouse-Five ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Billy Pilgrim is the main character in Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war satire, Slaughterhouse-Five. He “comes unstuck in time” and moves all around in his life, from his childhood, to his experiences in World War II, to his wedding night, to a plane crash in Vermont in which he is only one of two survivors, to his time held captive on an alien planet called Tralfamadore millions of light years from earth.

In World War II, Billy Pilgrim is an indifferent warrior. He doesn’t like war and “won’t do anything to protect himself.” He is captured by the Germans (in Germany, no less) and held with a hundred other American soldiers as a prisoner of war. He is present at the horrible firebombing by the Allies (the U.S. and Britain) of the charming German city of Dresden in the closing days of the war. Everybody in Dresden is incinerated, but Billy and the other American POWs survive because they are in a slaughterhouse deep under the earth (“Slaughterhouse-Five”). Everything in Billy’s life happens by chance. He is either very lucky or very unlucky.

After the war Billy becomes an optometrist and manages to be successful in terms of how much money he has. He marries the boss’s unattractive daughter, Valencia Merble, and the two of them eventually have two children: Robert, who is troubled and misguided as a youth but gets himself straightened out and becomes a Green Beret in Vietnam; and Barbara, an authoritative girl who treats Billy in middle-age as if he is helpless and feebleminded. Billy isn’t a very effective or attentive father or husband.

The creatures on Tralfamadore have eyes in their hands. They perceive the world in four dimensions instead of the usual three that earthlings use. This allows them to see all time at once. Maybe this is why Billy Pilgrim moves all around in his life, backward and forward, instead of living a day at a time in progression the way earthlings do. When he is held captive on Tralfamadore, he is treated humanely but held in a sort of zoo where Tralfamadorians look at him all day long. He is “mated” with another captive from earth, a porn actress named Montana Wildhack, and the two of them have a child together.

Slaughterhouse-Five is not a serious novel, even though the pivotal event in the book is the hellish World War II firebombing of Dresden. It is, we are told in the background information, American writer Kurt Vonnegut’s most popular and influential novel. It ranks number 18 on the Modern Library’s list of the hundred best books in English of the twentieth century. During the fifty years of its publishing history, it has been banned by certain schools and libraries because of its language and depiction of sex acts, but it seems very mild by today’s standards. It is not a very long novel and is easy to read, despite its nonlinear structure. If you are confused at first by what his going on, just keep reading and it will all become clear. It’s art and it pushes the boundaries, a little bit but not too much.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Sheltering Sky ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Sheltering Sky ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Porter “Port” Moresby and his wife Katherine “Kit” Moresby are affluent Americans traveling in Northern Africa in the 1940s, in the years following World War II. They are “travelers” rather than “tourists,” the difference being that tourists have a destination in mind and a designated time to return home. As we see as the novel unfolds, the region of the Sahara Desert is a not a hospitable place for Americans to travel in; it’s hot and dusty, travel is uncomfortable and unreliable, hotel accommodations are substandard at best, and there’s nothing really to see or do in the Sahara once you’ve taken in the mystery and vastness of the desert, which you can do in one day or less. (All right, let’s go home now.) Why Port and Kit are putting themselves through such torture is never really explained, except that they seem to be trying to get away from something (themselves?) and, also, in choosing where to go, they are interested in parts of the world that haven’t been affected by the war.

Kit Moresby is attractive, which turns out to be her undoing. We’re never told anything about what Port looks like, except that he’s young, so I think it’s probably safe to assume that he’s nothing special in the looks department. They’ve invited along a friend, a man named Tunner, who, though he is handsome, is shallow and something of a nuisance at times. Port doesn’t especially like Tunner but instead tolerates him. Kit is unfaithful with Tunner for at least one night, for which she feels guilty. She wonders if she should confess her infidelity to Port.

In their travels through the cities and towns of the Sahara, Port and Kit encounter fellow travelers Eric Lyle (think Peter Lorre) and his loudmouth mother (think Florence Bates). Eric is cloying and supercilious, dominated by his boorish, petty mother. He asks Port for money and ends up stealing his passport (which can be exchanged for ready cash), causing no end of trouble. These are brilliant and immediately identifiable secondary characters.

After a continual moving about from place to place (with each new place worse than the one before), Port becomes ill with (we learn later) typhoid. There are no doctors to speak of and no hospitals, so he has only a bottle of pills that somebody gives him to help him with his illness. Kit stays by his side while he is sick but after he dies she goes off on her own, not even staying behind to see that he is buried properly. This is where the novel takes on a different aspect with Kit the dominant character.

After all Kit has been through (poor puss), she has a “breakdown” in the desert and doesn’t even seem to know where she is or what she is doing. She is picked up by some Arab men traveling in a caravan and becomes the sex slave of at least two of them. She believes she is in love with the younger of the two Arabs, Belqassim, and submits to him willingly on a daily basis (he “visits” her in the afternoons in the room where she is kept locked up). She becomes his “wife,” even though he already has several wives who are jealous of this odd American lady, whom they believe at first to be a man because that is what Belqassim wants them to believe.

The Sheltering Sky, written by Paul Bowles, was first published in 1947. It is a unique kind of twentieth century American novel, in that its principal characters are American but it doesn’t take place in America and doesn’t deal with the American way of life. It might just as easily have written by an Englishman or a person of any other nationality who knows the Sahara region of North Africa. I’ve read The Sheltering Sky two times in my life, the first time over twenty years ago, and found it just as compulsively readable the second time as the first. If you are a reader, you will love The Sheltering Sky. Of the thousands of books I’ve read in my life, it is one of my favorites and highly recommended.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

To Have and Have Not ~ A Capsule Book Review

To Have and Have Not ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Harry Morgan is the working-class hero of Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel, To Have and Have Not. He has a frowzy, overweight, bleach-blonde wife named Marie (very unlike Lauren Bacall) and three young daughters. He owns a fishing boat for hire that runs between Cuba and Key West, Florida. Ordinarily he makes a living by taking rich tourists on deep-sea fishing expeditions, but the Depression is on and times are hard.  

When a tourist runs out without paying him after a three-week run on his boat, Harry is forced to resort to extreme measures (illegal activity) to support himself and his family. First he smuggles Chinese immigrants into Florida from Cuba. When this doesn’t work out very well, he begins to smuggle different types of illegal contraband between the U.S. and Cuba, including alcohol and Cuban revolutionaries. In an encounter with Cuban authorities over a shipment of booze, he is shot in the arm and has to have it amputated. Losing an arm is not the worst that happens to him.   

Harry, his family and friends are among the “have nots” of Key West who are struggling to get by. We also get a glimpse of some of the “haves” on their yachts, who don’t have much to do with the story but add an interesting contrast to Harry Morgan and his friends and associates. As with many novels written during the 1930s, there is an element in To Have and Have Not of social inequality and political unrest.   

The novelist, Richard Gordon, is a character in the novel who doesn’t have much to do with what is going on and doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose. He has written three successful books and is working on another one. He spends a lot of his time drinking in a bar and hobnobbing with the locals. He and his unhappy wife, Helen, both seem to be drifting into infidelity with other partners. Was Hemingway writing about himself in the character of Richard Gordon? What is he saying here?  

Background information tells us that To Have and Have Not started out as two short stories and a separate novella. As interesting as the book is and as much fun as it is to read, it still has that “cobbled together” feel of a novel made up of different parts. It doesn’t really have the “flow” and cohesiveness that a book by a major writer should have, but it’s Hemingway and apparently Hemingway could get away with it. The 1944 Warner Bros. movie of the same name with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall bears little resemblance to Hemingway’s novel. The movie makers took the title and the fishing boat and did away with most of the rest of the story. That’s what movies do to books.  

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Where Trouble Sleeps ~ A Capsule Book Review

Where Trouble Sleeps ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Clyde Edgerton’s Where Trouble Sleeps is an unserious novel about small-town Southern life, set in Listre, North Carolina, in the innocent year of 1950. The town of Listre is so small it has one blinker light at its main intersection. The houses, church and small businesses of the town are arranged in the four corners around the blinker light.

There’s an interesting story about how the blinker light came into being. I’m glad you asked that question. You see, there was this runaway mule that didn’t want to do any more plowing and, as it was running to try to get away, it collided head-on with a truck. Sadly, the mule was killed but the good part of the mule-truck head-on collision was that the blinker light came into being.

For such a small town, there are plenty of colorful characters to go around. There are the three Blaine sisters—Bea, Mae and Dorothea—who own a tiny store (they live in the basement underneath the store). They are three dedicated spinsters, but when Dorothea was 58 years old (she’s 70 when the action of the story takes place), she decided to marry a man named Claude T. Clark. The two remaining sisters think the marriage is a mistake and they don’t think much of Claude T. Clark because he wears a big diamond ring and buys a new Cadillac every year. Dorothea is secretary at the Baptist church and, since she has a sprained ankle, she decides to live in her office at the church, an arrangement that causes a certain amount of consternation among church members.

Train’s garage/filling station is a place for men of Listre to gather, swap stories, and stand around drinking Blatz beer. Train is paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, having been injured in World War II. Train owns a 16-year-old bulldog named Trouble who lives at the station and sleeps a lot. He infallibly predicts the weather by his choice of sleeping spots: if he sleeps inside, it will rain; if outside it won’t rain.

Alease Toomey is a respectable, Christian woman with a six-year-old son named Stephen and a no-account, alcoholic brother named Raleigh who causes her plenty of trouble. She doesn’t have a very happy marriage because her husband, Big Steve, works all the time and doesn’t pay enough attention to her. Alease is not above being attracted to the handsome stranger in town and flirting a little bit and maybe going even farther than flirting.

Cheryl Daniels is a pretty, nineteen-year-old waitress who lives with her parents and her younger brother named Terry. Whenever men see Cheryl, they want to stick around Listre. The Baptist minister, Preacher Crenshaw (fat wife and five children), has developed a very strong attraction for Cheryl and convinces himself he is in love with her. He must struggle with temptation the same way Christ did in the desert. When he writes a love letter to Cheryl (which he doesn’t mail), it’s seen by the church secretary, Dorothea Clark, setting Preacher Crenshaw up for some possible big trouble.

Into this morass of innocence and small-town respectability comes Jack Umstead (calling himself Delbert Jones), driving a stolen Buick Eight. Jack Umstead/Delbert Jones has trouble in mind and he’s definitely looking to score in Listre, one way or another. Might he accomplish this with blackmail or with out-and-out, old-fashioned robbery? He ingratiates himself to the people of Listre, even going so far as to join the Baptist church, but, of course, everything he tells them about himself is falsehood. He begins romancing Cheryl Daniels and establishes an ongoing flirtation with Alease Toomey. When he decides to rob the Blaine sisters’ store during a thunderstorm, he has probably taken on more than he can handle, or, as my mother would say, he bit off more than he could chew.

Southern writer Clyde Edgerton can count me among his fandom. He’s written about ten books, I’ve read all of them, and I wish he would write more. His last book, The Night Train, came out in 2011, so possibly he is finished writing novels. At age seventy-four, maybe he has decided to take a rest.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Redeye ~ A Capsule Book Review

Redeye ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The “Redeye” in Redeye is a dog. He belongs to a bounty hunter named Cobb Pittman. Cobb Pittman carries Redeye in a bag hanging from his saddle. Redeye has just one eye. The eye that he doesn’t have is red, making people think he’s some kind of a devil dog. He’s vicious when he needs to be, latching on to the nose with his teeth of any unfortunate animal that riles him. He can also latch on to the nose of a man if he wants to.

Redeye is set in Colorado in the 1890s, making it a “western.” There’s not much plot to speak of, mostly just a collection of quirky characters doing quirky things. In the small Colorado town of Mumford Rock, Billy Blankenship and P.J. Copeland are businessman and entrepreneurs. They have learned embalming in Denver, apparently in a very short time, and hope to open a mortuary parlor in the town of Mumford Rock. To show the dangers of a body that has not been embalmed, they arrange to have the body of a dead Chinaman “explode” at the train station. This will scare people, they believe, into viewing embalming as a necessity.

Near Mumford Rock are cliff dwellings that were occupied by Indians hundreds of years ago. The cliff dwellings are on a mesa, nearly inaccessible, so there are still Indian “artifacts” left behind. P.J. Copeland sees the commercial possibilities inherent in the artifacts. If he can mount an expedition that can bring back a lot of the artifacts, tourists will pay money to see them. Hold on a minute, though! The U.S. government already has plans for those artifacts. Wouldn’t you just know it?

P.J. Copeland and company have already brought back two mummies, one of a woman and one of a baby. His superannuated mother, Grandma Copeland, believes the baby mummy is one of her long-lost children and won’t part with it. Some of the more dimwitted of the bunch try to bring the woman mummy back to life by wiring an electrical charge to her heart (or the place where her heart would have been). It sets her on fire.

Star Copeland, niece of P.J. Copeland, is new to the West, having just come to Colorado from South Carolina after the death of her dear mama. She learns the ways of the West quickly enough and falls in love with a young, tubercular Englishman named Andrew Collier, who is in Colorado studying Indian culture. While cavorting with Andrew Collier, Star also fields an offer of marriage from an oft-married Mormon, Bishop Thorpe. (In the 1890s, the Mormons had to follow U.S. law on marriage, meaning one wife for each man.)

There’s a subplot in Redeye involving Mormons and the massacre of a wagon train of settlers from Arkansas that occurred in 1857, some thirty-five years earlier. A group of Mormons using Indian wiles attacked a wagon train of pioneers near Salt Lake City, killing all of them. Orders from Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, were to leave none of the settlers alive to tell what happened. One of the Mormons instrumental in the attack was a man named Calvin Boyle, who, all those years later, is living under an assumed named, Bishop Thorpe. (He’s the same Bishop Thorpe who proposes to Star Copeland.) It seems that the bounty hunter Cobb Pittman has been trailing Bishop Thorpe, unknown to anybody else, for years to make him pay for his part in the massacre.

In Redeye, Clyde Edgerton, one of my favorites writers, uses the literary technique used by William Faulkner to great effect in his novel As I Lay Dying, that of allowing each character to speak in his or her own voice. That makes for a fast-paced, entertaining, easy-to-read book. You can read this book without expending too much brain power and have fun while you’re doing it. What’s more fun than mummies?

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Something Wicked This Way Comes ~ A Capsule Book Review

Something Wicked This Way Comes ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

A carnival comes to a small Illinois town in October. Carnivals don’t usually come after Labor Day, but this carnival is different. It’s Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. It’s been in business for hundreds of years, traveling around from place to place, feeding on people’s sorrow, despair and tears. It makes empty promises and gets unhappy, sorrowful people to give up their souls. And what do these people get in exchange for their souls? They get NOTHING! You’d be surprised how easy it is to get some people to give up everything for nothing.

Mr. Dark is also known as the Illustrated Man. He’s the driving force behind the carnival. Every inch of his body is covered with tattoos of sinister creatures that move (or seem to move). Mr. Cooger, the other owner of the carnival, doesn’t have much to say. He has ridden on the carousel that makes people younger as it goes backward and older as it goes forward. When we see him, he might be a tiny child or he might be over two hundred years old. But, wait a minute! Isn’t Mr. Cooger also Mr. Electrico, the man who has been cooked in the electric chair as part of the show? One never seems to know about Mr. Cooger.

There’s a Mirror Maze in the carnival that, when people enter, sucks the souls right out of them. Once you enter the mirror maze, you may never be the same again, or you might not come out at all. There are freaks whose distorted bodies reflect their sins; a calliope that plays music backwards; big tents, sideshows, cotton candy and everything else you’d expect from a carnival.

Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway are inseparable friends living next door to each other. They are not quite fourteen, one of them having been born one minute before midnight on Halloween and the other one minute after. They are very much alike except that Jim’s personality is “dark” and Will’s is “light.” They are drawn to the unusual carnival and right away they know, or think they know, its sinister intentions.

Will’s father, Charles Halloway, is an old man, fifty-four, janitor at the library. He likes working nights at the library when nobody is there. He is an unusual kind of father, philosophical and understanding. He reads some books on the subject of evil when he is alone at night in the library and uncovers information about carnivals such as Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. He realizes that Jim and Will, and other people in the town, are in danger. Mr. Dark wants their souls. The carnival loves all things “dark,” but if there’s anything it hates it’s laughter and happiness: a simple thing that might be enough to make the carnival move on. You can’t have any souls in this town. Of course, laughter and happiness won’t put the carnival out of business; all it has to be is move someplace else where laughter and happiness don’t exist.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, was first published in 1962. Its language is nearly poetic, a little overblown at times, with a sometimes tiresome stream of metaphors, as shown in this passage where Jim and Will first encounter Mr. Dark: This second man was tall as a lamp post. His pale face, lunar pockmarks denting it, cast light on those who stood below. His vest was the color of fresh blood. His eyebrows, his hair, his suit were licorice black, and the sun-yellow gem which stared from the tie pin thrust in his cravat was the same unblinking shade and bright crystal as his eyes.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a story of good versus evil, dark versus light, happiness versus sadness, one of the seminal works of dark fantasy that has influenced a whole generation of writers. So, if you are the kind of person who can always find something to be unhappy about (I’ve known a few of these), you are making yourself more susceptible to evil, and the boogeyman (or Mr. Dark) might just come and snatch away your soul.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Hessian ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Hessian ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The Hessian by Howard Fast is set in 1781, in Colonial America during the Revolutionary War. A group of Hessians (German mercenaries fighting for the British) has landed in Connecticut. There are only sixteen of them, plus a drummer boy and a commander, but they are up to no good and the Colonials are rightly afraid of them. Hessians have been terrorizing the Colonials all during the war. They are highly skilled warriors who soldier for pay; the mostly untrained American soldiers are no match for them.

The Hessians come upon a halfwit named Saul Clamberham. Because he has a slate in his possession with some marks on it, they deduce he is a spy, so they hang him from a tree. A twelve-year-old boy named Jacob Heather witnesses the hanging from a distance. He, of course, runs and tells everybody what he has seen. A citizen militia, armed with any kind of guns they can lay their hands on, lays in wait behind a fence and ambushes the Hessians. All the Hessians are killed, except for the drummer boy, a teen named Hans Pohl who drops his drum and runs off into the hills. He has a bullet wound in his shoulder and doesn’t get far. He ends up at the home of a Quaker family named Heather. At their peril, the Heather family hides Hans Pohl in an upstairs room of their house and cares for his wound. He might die because the wound has become infected. Sally Heather, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Heathers, sits by his bed and falls in love with him, not caring that he is one of the enemy.

A local doctor named Evan Feversham treats Hans Pohl at the Heather house, secretly, of course. Dr. Feversham is something of an outcast in the neighborhood because he is an Englishman who has come over to the American cause. The Heather family are also outcasts because they are Quakers, so they have something in common with Dr. Feversham. They all know they will be in serious trouble for hiding and taking care of Hans Pohl, the Hessian.

Authorities soon discover that the Heather family is hiding Hans Pohl. The Heathers are forced to give him up, with the promise he will be tried before he is hanged. The trial, when it is held, is a farce. Hans Pohl is tried for the murder of Saul Clamberham because he was present when it happened. It doesn’t matter how young Hans Pohl is or how innocent he appears. Because he is a Hessian, one of the enemy during wartime, he can’t be anything other than guilty.

The Hessian is told in the first-person voice of Dr. Feversham, the man who doesn’t quite belong. He is a battle-hardened veteran who believes in the American cause but also believes that anybody deserves to be treated for his wounds. He is cynical and realistic and knows that in wartime people don’t behave rationally. It’s a story that won’t have, can’t have, a happy ending. You never really learn what life is about. When you die, you don’t understand it any better than you did when you were born.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997