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

THE LOST WEEKEND by Charles Jackson

 Re-finished Mo 2/22/21 

This is one of my trade paperbacks that I finished on Mo 2/24/97 at FitClub West.

Don Birnam's Five Day Binge. 

Wick- Don's concerned brother

Helen- Don's selfless girlfriend

Set on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan.

Homosexuality's implied as a possible reason for Don's condition.

The book was unfavorably compared to 'UNDER THE VOLCANO' by Malcolm Lowry. I have the movie in my Netflix queue and I have the novel somewhere in the collection. I might buy it on Kindle for $2.99.

The book's page at Wikipedia:

ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Weekend_(novel)

From a review of the film at Netflix

In November of 1944, when Charles Jackson spoke to members of Alcoholics Anonymous on the topic "Why I Wrote ‘The Lost Week-End,’” he said there was “a sore need . . . for such a character study as that of Don Birnam. . . . The public needed to be shown the true tragic nature of the alcoholic.” Many A.A.s wondered whether Jackson himself was an alcoholic. He cryptically replied that while the events of the story were fictional, his understanding portrayal of Don Birnam was because “I have a good memory.”

Not nearly as good as 'A MILLION LITTLE PIECES' by James Frey, but 'THE LOST WEEKEND' was one of the first times that AA's position was fully stated in a fictional story. 

I like the 'addiction genre' of literature and this one was worth a look, but not a leader in the field.  

FEAR OF FLYING by Erica Jong

 Finished Fr 2/12/21

This is a classic book and one of my ancient paperbacks. There is nothing on the flyleaf, so I guess I never read it. 

Isadora Wing is attending a psychiatric conference in Vienna with her husband and actively engaged in a sexual affair with another analyst. 

Brian was Isadora's first husband and he was a genius who went over the edge into schizophrenia. Bennett, her second husband and the man she is cheating on, is of Asian descent. Adrian is her English analyst and lover. He is the embodiment of 'Pan'- a sexual and pleasure seeking individual.  

Essentially the book is a 'call to arms' for women who are trapped in stagnant or unfulfilled marriages.

She advances the theory of the 'zipless fuck'. Women should have the same rights as men to engage in sex without emotional attachments.

It's an easy read and I thought that it was well written. The book came out in 1973 and I wonder if things have changed that much. I guess it depends on where you are. In metropolitan areas I think women are in a more equal place with me. However, in religious areas and in very rural sections of the country the values of Mayberry are still holding strong. 

A link to the book at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_Flying_(novel)

TALK TALK by T.C. Boyle

 Finished Su 2/6/21

This is one of my hardbacks that I bought at West Branch on Fr 11/14/08 and I finished the book that December. This was my first exposure to Boyle and I said that I would read more by this author. 

I read Boyle's 'DROP CITY' in December of this year. 

'TALK TALK' is about a young deaf woman who is a victim of a credit card fraud and identity theft. Dana is a teacher at a school for the deaf in California and her boyfriend, Bridger works in the graphic design and movie special effects field. The criminal, 'Peck' lives in splendor with his Russian girlfriend and her four year old daughter in Marin County.  

This book is set just slightly before the Internet became all pervasive and the way the crooks get your information is by robbing your mailbox. Then they can get the necessary information by reading your Visa bill or a utility bill. Actually all they need is your name and address and then they can request a change of address. Hopefully they can get the information before the legitimate owner notices that he is not receiving mail. 

Dana and her boyfriend, Bridger travel across the country to upstate New York to try to catch the thief, William 'Peck' Wilson.

***Many within the deaf community do not see themselves as handicapped. They see deafness as only a 'difference' and not a disability at all. 

***I had a problem with the end of the novel. Dana and Bridger might not be together at the end. It's not clear and I was a bit confused.

From a review in The New York Times:

"No one writes better about the wages of American sin. Or, if not wages exactly, sin purchased on credit, and that probably stolen."

THE LAWS OF OUR FATHERS by Scott Turow

We 2/3/21- Before a birthday visit to the Brandenburgs to celebrate their new house on Red Oak Lane.

 From the review at Publishers Weekly:

"Laws of Our Fathers is a rich, complex and ultimately profoundly moving tale that, like all Turow's work, is quarried from the mysteries of human character rather than simply from the sometimes too-easy drama of the courtroom. It begins in the gritty setting of an inner city slum and in the mind of a soul-dead black gangster. An ambush is being laid and when it is sprung, the wrong person, an elderly white woman, the wife of a state senator, is dead. Was her hapless son somehow involved in the murder plot, and what role did the senator play? The hot-potato case comes into the court of Judge Sonia (Sonny) Klonsky (remembered from The Burden of Proof), and the courtroom soon looks like Old Home Week as it becomes clear that Sonny, black defense lawyer Hopie Tuttle, state senator Loyell Eddgar, and observing newspaper columnist Seth Weissman all knew each other back in the wild student days of the '60s. The courtroom scenes that follow are swift-moving and surprising, especially since Turow has the nerve to depict a ""bench trial,'' in which a judge alone hears evidence, so there is no playing to a jury, and the scenes are worked out dramatically person to person. But the legal aspects of his novel, highly dramatic though they are, are not what most interests the author. The book is in fact basically about family relationships: the passionately leftist Eddgar's with his wife and son; Seth's with his austere, penny-pinching father, survivor of a Nazi death camp; and Sonny's with the memories of her wild communist mother and with her own precious, late-in-life young daughter. Most fine novels have a keen sense of the passage of time, and Turow's grasp of the revolutionary fervor of the '60s and how it has later calmed into rueful, if still compassionate, acceptance, is masterly. A fine stroke too, is his use of the funeral eulogies for Seth's father to sum up, touchingly, what these often embattled and misled people have learned with such difficulty in their lives. There are minor flaws: the multiple personal perspectives in the narrative are not always as well differentiated as they might be, and Sonny's on-again, off-again feelings toward Seth become somewhat repetitious. But these are quibbles in the light of Turow's grandly ambitious achievement: to focus the profoundest struggles of two generations through one sordid, emblematic crime. First serial to Playboy; movie rights sold to Universal; author tour.

It was a complex story set in contemporary times and then forty years earlier during the student movement in California during the sixties. The book is over 800 pages and lots of moving parts. I would read anything by Turow. 

FRANNY AND ZOOEY by J. D. Salinger

Refinished We 1/20/21- Biden Inauguration Day. I finished the book after a walk downtown to mail back a couple of Netflix discs and to check the 'military presence' around the capitol. Guardsmen and cops blocked in front of Boone's Saloon and along 2nd St.- East, and Jefferson- North.

I know I've read this before, but it was probably close to fifty years ago. But I still think it's a better book than 'CATCHER IN THE RYE'. Anything about the Glass family is worth a look. 

***Some random thoughts on the book:

Two Sections:

1) Franny at college and can't stop cutting down the people in her life. The action happens at a restaurant. Franny is visiting her boyfriend, Lane, for the weekend. 

2) Franny is home with her brother, Zooey, and her mother Bess. Zooey is in the bathtub reading an old letter from his brother, Buddy. Bess is in the bathroom bothering him. Then Zooey tries to help his sister with her confusion.  

I think I liked it better this time and I missed most of it fifty years ago. 

Franny and Zooey are the youngest of the Glass family.

Franny is having difficulty accepting The Jesus Prayer. It seems that all of the Glass children have had a go at this prayer. To Pray Unceasingly. 

The both feel eclipsed by their over achieving siblings.

The Glass children seem to let their intellectual superiority get in their own way.

Obsessed with all 'the phoniness' of the world at large. This echoes the theme of 'CATCHER IN THE RYE'.

All the 'Deplorables' are human too, and if you think that's not important, but Jesus does. 

The book's page at Wikipedia: 

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

 

THE LAST MILE by David Baldacci

 Finished Su 1/18/21

This is a paperback that Janny loaned me the last time they visited. It's like all Baldacci novels, an enthralling plot, yet little character development and not much noteworthy writing. 

A black man is headed for the NFL when he is convicted of murdering his parents. Miles Mars serves twenty years on death row in Texas when another man confesses to the murders. Then, we learn that Miles's father is behind the murders...but why?

His father was white and mother was black. Later we learn that his father was involved with Klan bombings in the south during the 60's.

The plot was so contrived that it bordered on the unbelievable. 

"It's fun while you're reading it, but you'll hate yourself in the morning".

One of the officers, Amos Decker, suffered from 'synesthesia'  and 'hypermnesia'.

***SYNESTHESIA- When one sense is activated, another unrelated sense is activated at the same time; when you 'remember' you see color. When Decker thinks of murder he sees blue. 

***HYPERMNESIA- unusual power or enhancement of memory, typically under abnormal conditions such as trauma, hypnosis, or narcosis. Miles Mars was tackled his first game in the NFL and ended his career, but heightened his ability to remember almost everything he has experienced. Marilu Henner (TAXI) has this condition.

From the book's page at Amazon:

"Amos Decker's life changed forever--twice.

The first time was on the gridiron. A big, towering athlete, he was the only person from his hometown of Burlington ever to play in the NFL. But his career ended before it had a chance to begin. On his very first play, a violent helmet-to-helmet collision knocked him off the field forever, and left him with an improbable side effect--he can forget nothing.

The second time was at home nearly two decades later. Now a police detective, Decker returned from a stakeout one evening and entered a nightmare--his wife, young daughter, and brother-in-law had been murdered.

His family destroyed, their killer's identity as mysterious as the motive behind the crime, and unable to forget a single detail from that horrible night, Decker finds his world collapsing around him. He leaves the police force, loses his home, and winds up on the street, taking piecemeal jobs as a private investigator when he can.

But over a year later, a man turns himself in to the police and confesses to the murders. At the same time a horrific event nearly brings Burlington to its knees, and Decker is called back in to help with this investigation. Decker also seizes his chance to learn what really happened to his family that night. To uncover the stunning truth, he must use his remarkable gifts and confront the burdens that go along with them. He must endure the memories he would much rather forget. And he may have to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Memory Man will stay with you long after the turn of the final page."