THE KING OF TORTS by John Grisham

 Finished Th 3/25/21

This is one of my paperbacks that I bought at the last library book sale before the pandemic. I got the book on Sa 1/11/20 and this was the first time that I had read the book.

An easy and enjoyable read and I finished it in two days.

Clay Carter is working for The Office of the Public Defender with a low salary and he hopes to put in his time and then get into a private law firm.

He gets a case about a young man who is shot twice in the head. After digging into the facts he learns that a drug manufacturer had developed a drug that ended addiction. The problem was that 8% of the people who take the drug are prone to violent and deadly behavior. A shadowy character outlines a plan for a class action law suit. 

Millions of dollars begin to come his way. He starts his own law firm and goes after Big Pharma. 

He becomes 'The King of Tort'.  But, in the end he loses everything.

A link to a review at the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/22/crime.johngrisham

I enjoy anything by John Grisham and one of the better 'beach-read' authors.

PERTPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE: How We Got To Be So Hated by Gore Vidal

 Refinished Mo 3/22/21

This is one of my trade paperbacks that I got on Amazon Th 9/7/17 and finished Fr 9/29/17

The book is a slight collection of essays for Vanity Fair that were first published in Italy because Vidal couldn't get an American publisher to do it.

The book seeks to examine the motives of Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden. America demands that these two people are seen as 'evil' and 'not like us'. However, according to McVeigh's  court appointed psychiatrist claimed that McVeigh was 'not deranged, but serious and exacting'. He knew exactly what he was doing and why. Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidians only made double-down on his belief that the government was a negative and, as a highly decorated soldier, there was nothing else for him to do but fight back. McVeigh also felt that America had allowed the wealthy class to buy out the vast majority of local farmers in the west. The federal bureaucracy destroyed America's family farms and this is the real reason that there is such a wide swath of the American public who do not trust the federal government. They have never received a fair hearing. And, Osama bin Laden was motivated to fight the west because they occupied 'Muslim territories', yet bin Laden was our partner in 'the war against terrorism' in the beginning.

Interesting quote:

Vidal quotes Justice Brandeis: “If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for laws; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.” After the recent attack on the US capitol this is so relevant today. Half the country believed the lie that the election was fixed and this led to sedition.

America seems to demand 'Wars', and they usually end in failure; The War on Drugs, The War on Poverty. The reason is that the 'Wars' are actually excuses to delete American's rights and this is accomplished by both the republicans and democrats.

Our government barely recognizes individual citizens, but corporations are represented lavishly.

An enjoyable and easy read. Gore has an interesting grasp of history and I really liked his book '1876' and would read almost anything that he happened to write.

THE INNOCENT by Ian McEwan

Finished Su 3/21/21

This is one of my hardbacks that I bought at a library book sale on Sa 6/14/97 and I had never read the novel.  

Set in Berlin, 1955.

Leonard Marnham- 'The Innocent' is a 25 year old man who still lived with his parents in Tottenham, a suburb of London. He is working for MI 5 or MI 6 and his cover is that he is working with the postal service and is dealing with underground lines in the city of Berlin.

Actually it's a British/ American project to dig under the Russian section of the city, tap into their telephone lines and tape secret conversations.

Leonard falls in love with a local German woman, Maria Eckdorf

Maria was married to Otto and he is a drunk and stalks is estranged wife. One night Leonard and Maria are alone in her bedroom and they notice that Otto is hiding in a closet. 

Leonard and Otto get into a fight and Otto is slain. A shoe last is jammed into his skull. And, then they decide to cut up the body for disposal. 

Leonard packs the body parts into two large suitcases and transfers these bags to the underground tunnel.

The fight, murder, and cutting up of Otto's body is one of the most graphic and harrowing descriptions I've ever read. 

Then Leonard calls the Russians and alerts them to the tunnel. He hopes that the discovery of the spy operation will muddy the investigation of the murder or it will be completely ignored. It was ignored.

In the last section of the book Leonard receives a letter from Maria almost 25 years later. She tells him that she had married Bob Glass, Leonard's boss on the spy project. And he is visiting The Berlin Wall to remember what he and Maria went through back in the days of The Cold War.

In the epilogue it is revealed that the novel is based on truth (without the murder, I would guess).

"The Berlin Tunnel, or Operation Gold, was a joint CIA-MI6 venture that operated for just under a year, until April 1956". 

George Blake, who was a character in the book and lived in Leonard's building in Berlin. Blake is the one who betrayed the project as early as 1953.

I will order and read more by Ian McEwan. He is the author of 'THE ATONEMENT' which was made into a pretty good film

 

THE WATERWORKS by E. LE. Doctorow

 Finished Th 3/18/21

This is one of my old trade paperbacks and I finished it at The Club on 3/12/95

It's a very well-written novel, but I skimmed to the end. 

The novel is set in NYC slightly before and after the Civil War (1841-1871). Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed are peripheral characters in the novel. 

The mystery is that a very rich oligarch is reported to have died, but his adult son, late one night, sees his father in a coach with other men. What is going on is the old man has teamed up with a doctor, Dr. Sartorious, who is taking children's blood and injecting the blood into the bodies of old men. This procedure is supposed to make them younger.

Dr. Satorious is also a character in Doctorow's 'THE MARCH' and I have a copy of this novel and I plan to check it out. 

A kind of weak premise, but the book was well written and you get a real sense of what it would be like to live in NYC in the middle of the 19th century. 

From the book's page at Wikipedia:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waterworks

3 SECONDS by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom

I finished this book in Mid March, 2021 and I got the book on Kindle for only $2.99.

Roslund is a professional journalist and Hellstrom is an ex-criminal who founded a criminal rehabilitation program in Sweden.

The book is set in Denmark.

The story is about a confidential informant who is sent into the prison system to take over the drug trade behind bars. 

The book is a detailed account of the informant, Piet Hoffman, as he realizes that the police have cut him off and now he must arrange his escape or the gangs will kill him.

In the movie the best scene is where Piet is involved in a major drug deal. Since he is undercover he demands that the guy he is dealing with is not police. This man is actually another informant working for another branch of the police. This guy is killed and the police who are monitoring the situation believe that Piet did it. 

He orchestrates a shooting from a location outside of the prison. Lots of details about long distance shooting. 

***It's illegal for the army to be used in civil matters and the authorities make the shooter leave the army and be hired by the civilian police force. 

From the book's page at Wikipedia:

"Piet Hoffman, a top secret operative for the Swedish police, is about to embark on his most dangerous assignment yet: after years spent infiltrating the Polish mafia, he's become a key player in their attempt to take over amphetamine distribution inside Sweden's prisons. To stop them from succeeding, he will have to go deep cover, posing as a prisoner inside the country's most notorious jail.

But when a botched drug deal involving Hoffman results in a murder, the investigation is assigned to the brilliant but haunted Detective Inspector Ewert Grens--a man who never gives up until he's cracked the case. Grens's determination to find the killer not only threatens to expose Hoffman's true identity-it may reveal even bigger crimes involving the highest levels of power. And there are people who will do anything to stop him from discovering the truth."

The film is called 'THE INFORMER'(2019) and stars Joel Kinnaman (this was probably his best role), Clive Owen, and Rosamund Pike

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR by Judith Rossner

Refinished Mo 3/8/21 (also the day I got the second (booster) shot for the COVID virus and the gunfight near Jamie's house at Glenwood and Ash).

I bought the book on Sa 12/4/93 and first finished it on Fr 12/10/93.

The novel was written after Rossner wrote an article about a real woman who was raped and murdered. Some of the actual details are continued in the novel; the real woman also had a curved spine (scoliosis)

 From NY Times:"Mr. Goodbar" is based loosely on the actual case of a Roseann Quinn, a quite, rigidly brought-up, Catholic schoolteacher, who was wholly unremarkable except that she sought out her sexual partners in New York singles bars. The last of them bashed in her skull on New Year's Day, 1973."

To me the book is too full of moral posturing. The moral seems to be that Terry Dunn chooses sex over abstinence and pays the ultimate price.

I really enjoyed the scene where one of Terry's pickups is 'shocked and appalled' that she is a teacher of young children. How could she even consider being sexually active in a bar and then go and teach 'the young and innocent'. Of course he hasn't a thought about how his behavior might affect his career choice. His attitude:  "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"

A link to the book's page at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_for_Mr._Goodbar_(novel)

Judith Rossner's page at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Rossner

I would read more by Rossner if I came across one of her novels at a used book store. 

 

WINTER by Len Deighton

 Finished Sa 3/6/21

This is a paperback that I bought at the library book sale on Fr 6/13/97 and had never read.

It is a sweeping historical novel that focuses on Germany from 1900 to the Spring of 1945. It gives the reader an idea of what was going through the minds of average Germans during the vast social and political changes that swept through the nation. 

Peter- the older brother by four years. He is the smarter brother, does better in school and seems more prone to the Nazi philosophy, yet he becomes anti-Nazi and serves on the Nuremburg trials. He marries a Jewish woman. He spends WWII in California and Lottie is taken by the Nazis.

Paul- 'The charming Nazi'. The National Socialists were a political party and the ability to 'use' people was instrumental to a successful member of the party. I don't think I've ever seen such an elegant hustler portrayed as a Nazi. He makes the horror of what the Nazis were doing seem reasonable. 

From The New York Times review:

"IT is common knowledge that the leadership of the German National Socialist Workers Party, or Nazis, was little more than a gang of crooks, murderers, political opportunists and racists. But Len Deighton sees it a little differently.

Pauli, as the younger brother is affectionately called, goes to military school, fights in the trenches during World War I, joins the Freikorps, discovers his knack for the law and rises to become the Nazis' foremost legal adviser. It is Dr. Pauli Winter who figures out how Hitler can consolidate his leadership in 1934. (''Leave the presidency vacant - what a great idea.'') It is Pauli who justifies the practice of ''preventive arrest'' in 1937. And: ''It was Pauli's long analysis of the concentration-camp accounts that had ended with a suggestion that all the camps eventually become self-financing.''

Yet Pauli is not a thug or a brute. He is not even mean-spirited or anti-Semitic. He is merely a disappointed second son who can't seem to please his demanding father, and therefore never takes himself very seriously."

***Have Hitler leave the presidency vacant and then he doesn't need to swear allegiance to the constitution. Maybe Paul's best Nazi idea as a legal eagle for Hitler. 

From Publishers Weekly:

"tells the story of Germany from 1900 to the end of World War II. Peter Winter, who flies zeppelins in World War I, becomes a staunch anti-Nazi and then a colonel in the American Army; Paul, charming, ambitious and psychologically flawed, becomes a top legal adviser to the Nazi regime. They finally confront each other at Nuremberg. Though Paul is not entirely convincing as a basically ""nice'' Nazi, who has conscience enough to save his brother's Jewish wife yet gives spurious legal sanction to Hitler's atrocities without a qualm, both he and his brother are handy pegs on which Deighton hangs accurate, exciting and cleverly selected dollops of social, political and front-line military history, while highlighting the tensions between Prussian and Bavarian, Wehrmacht and SS that hastened the nation's rush toward suicide."

A link to a reviewer at Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1251826227

I really enjoyed the book and although the subject was very deep, the writing always kept it interesting. I will definitely read more by Len Deighton and I will try to see some of the movies that were made from his novels. 

A link to another review:

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/winter-len-deighton/

 

THE TURNER DIARIES by Andrew Macdonald

Re-finished Th 2/25/21 

This is one of my trade paperbacks and I really don't know where the book came from. I would guess it was ordered from Amazon and I first finished on Fr 11/17/00. And I read it again and finished on Su 2/25/18. According to what I wrote on the flyleaf the 'MacDonald' name is not the actual name of the author. He was really Dr. William Pierce who was the head of 'The White Alliance' which was the old American Nazi Party which was headed by George Lincoln Rockwell. 

Earl Turner is the protagonist and utterly impassioned with the idea of the superiority of the white race and that the Jews are behind everything that is wrong in the world.

THE SYSTEM vs. THE ORGANIZATION. The Revolutionary Command runs The Organization.

WFC- Washington Field Command. This is Turner's main outfit since he is from the Washington area.

THE ORDER is the elite of The Organization and shrouded in secrecy, pomp, and ceremony.

The Great Houston Bombing occurred on September 11th, 1992.

The biggest impediment to revolution is that the majority of people will sit back and wait to see what happens. The 'smart' money will 'wait to see what happens'. 

With the events of today the whole book seems almost tame. 'The Day of The Rope' in the book is very similar to events at the US Capitol on 1/6/21. Gallows were assembled and ready to use.

I want to re-watch the YouTube videos of Dr. William Pierce.

The book's page on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries