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With June behind us now, as well, I am halfway to fulfilling this particular promise/threat. Is 2011 softened up, now, and ready to just roll over for the remaining six months? Oh if only we could rely on that.

I’ve read some more books, meanwhile; let’s see if I can remember anything of them.

You Do Understand, Andrej Blatnik. Is the usual paperback novel too large for you? An average USA Today story too long? Then you need this book. It’s a very small book full of even-smaller stories, most of them not really even “stories” but rather vignettes, at most, and in some cases just stray thoughts no longer than your average Tweet. They’re often interesting vignettes and stray thoughts, though, and in one or two cases quite memorable even. For the small investment of time which the book requires, its return is certainly respectable.

The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers. This is an entry in the small genre of pre-WWI British stories attempting to plod the complacent state into recognizing the threat of the Wilhelmine German Empire, the best-known example probably being The Thirty-Nine Steps. You have no idea what I’m going on about here, I suppose; never mind then. Think of it, perhaps, as a kind of boys’ adventure story with slightly older lads, lots of sailing amid treacherous, foggy North Sea waters, and espionage against a dastardly Hun plot. Honestly, I found it rather good; for being more than a century old it shows its age in very few ways, while on the whole seems quite captivating and “contemporary.”

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The years go by and one after another source of precious joy in this life becomes troublesome for a body past its sell-by date (which seems to be somewhere around 23).

Meanwhile, read a few books in May; one year since these reviews began.

War Like the Thunderbolt, Russell S. Bonds. I’ve reviewed this in detail elsewhere, already. In brief, a decent and very readable account of the Battle of Atlanta, though not quite the riveting narrative which was Bonds’ earlier Stealing the General.

Go Down Together, Jeff Guinn. A recent biography of Clyde Barrow and his paramour, Bonnie Parker, better known as the legendary Bonnie & Clyde. An absolutely fantastic work, rich in absorbing detail. Definitely the best of the month.

I’m far from being an expert on Bonnie & Clyde, so I can’t evaluate this against any other works on the pair. But it certainly seems like Guinn did a lot of research, and used it to very good effect. Unsurprisingly, there’s no Hollywood glamour in the story; yet for a tale of two largely inept, ineffective small-time criminals, it’s a remarkably dramatic and even moving story.

The element of inevitable doom in Bonnie & Clyde’s tale probably contributes a lot to this, and while Guinn makes it a very real presence, he hardly had to invent it; throughout much of their brief criminal careers, B&C knew there was only one possible ending to their story, and were often completely frank and casual about it.

Perhaps the most effective and surprising ramification of this, though, is how Guinn convincingly calls into question just how much Barrow and Parker ever really had a better alternative. The story of their dead-end world in Dust-Bowl Texas, and particularly of the Barrows’ utterly dispiriting poverty, comes across as just unremittingly bleak. Unless the prospects for a young person in Depression-era Dallas slums were significantly brighter than Guinn’s account suggests, one has difficulty seeing any reason Bonnie & Clyde would have particularly preferred lives of impoverished drudgery to brief careers as famous criminals, even allowing for the deglamorized reality of the latter.

In all honesty, though written as a biography of two celebrated bandits, Go Down Together is one of the most effective works of social criticism I’ve read in a long while. (more…)

Apparently, when I say that I’m busy, I’m actually exaggerating a good deal less than I often suspect may be the case. You know how much I usually read, after all. The last few months, however, BCBR has been on hiatus not because I had no time to post, but because I read next-to-nothing.

I did manage several books in January, during which month I started that big contracting job, but the subsequent two months which fell entirely during the contracting period really tell the tale. On my booksihaveread list, for each of the months of February and March of 2011, I have precisely one book. And I had nothing for April as of the last day in busy-mode… since when, however, in spite of a week-long vacation in France the number has zoomed up to seven.

I just found this interesting. But let us proceed to the books, themselves.

Dark and Tangled Threads of Crime, William Secrest. A biography of Victorian-era San Francisco Detective Isaiah Lees. Pretty good. Lees had a long, colorful career in a colorful era, and Secrest tells the story well, working in just enough context without straying too far from his primary subject. In all fairness, aside from the obscurity of the subject matter, Threads of Crime is probably deserving of a larger and more sophisticated publisher than whoever put together this edition with its flourishy, amateur-desktop-publisher design. Look past that and this is a good job of research and writing.

Bloody Crimes, James Swanson. Oh how I have waited for this book. Swanson’s first book, Manhunt, is absolutely riveting. So the prospect of a second helping of Civil War fugitive adventure was an exquisite torment. Perhaps only Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, if it ever arrives, will exceed the anticipation I felt when I finally had Bloody Crimes in my large grasping hands. (more…)