When I started this website I listed a bunch of recently- read books, hoping to give them full length reviews. But work and-- of course-- more reading have made me fall behind. Today I would like to race through this list, pausing a bit more on some titles than others, and get up to date. After this, readers can expect occasional "real" reviews.

I should probably also add that I am no respecter of literary boundaries-- I read "literature", suspense, science fiction, science, history, and less classifiable stuff. Two quotes, both from memory rather than checked, might be appropriate here. The first is from Raymond Chandler: "There are no genres; there is only good writing, and precious little of that." The second is from Randall Jarrell: "Read at will".

I do. Life is too short to do otherwise.

A short (but growing) selection of reviews:

• Life With an Indian Prince by John J Craighead and Frank C. Craighead, Jr.
  [Download Review ]

Some good books in the order I read them, all read straight through in about the last two months:

• Old Boys by Charles McCarry:
  (Spy thriller set in Central Asia by an old master) ****
  
  These stars, or at least the fourth, are partly for affection-- this is lighter than most of McCarry's spy fiction, but it rests on a body of work I prefer to, say, John Le Carre's. McCarry's books are more nuanced, informed I suspect by more knowledge of the covert trade, and-- unlike recent LeCarre--- he's on our side, which to me shows a more sophisticated grasp of the issues.
  
  Old Boys mixes a cast of aging spies from such works as The Tears of Autumn and Second Sight with just a touch of the humor from McCarry's Clinton satire Lucky Bastard and sets them loose in Russia and Central Asia on the trail of a vengeful old sheikh who has atomic weapons. Falconers may be interested to find that the migration routes of the houbara, the Arab falconer's traditional quarry, are a key "clue". They and Central Asia hands might find this one the most interesting; others might want to try the earlier novels first. Tears of Autumn may be the best of all the Cold war novels, and the least known of the three best....
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• The Remarkable Life of William Beebe by Carol Grant Gould
  (bio of the naturalist- explorer) ****
  
  William Beebe, adventurer, jungle hand, undersea explorer, and writer, is less read than he should be today,and it is a shame. He was one of my formative influences when I was growing up--- more diverse in his interests and less arrogant than Roy Chapman “Indiana Jones” Andrews, but just as brave. He studied pheasants in the Himalayas and Burma,encountering and (once) shooting headhunters, and did the first true deep sea dive in the bathysphere. I wish somebody would bring out some good cheap paperbacks of his classics like Pheasant Jungles, Galapagos, and Half Mile Down, but meanwhile I hope this bio of the last serious generalist and dapper New York gentleman will generate a bit of interest in his own work
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• Valley of Bones by Michael Gruber (thriller) *****
  & Hoax by Robert Tanenbaum *
  
  One is as good a literary suspense novel as exists, chilling, erudite, full of humanity. The other is a sad example of overreaching.
  
  Until recently, the "Tanenbaum" novels were written by his cousin (!) Michael Gruber. They were a series, set in Manhattan over nearly two decades, and featured assistant DA "Butch" Karp and his sometimes loose cannon Sicilian wife (I am not putting down Marlene, understand-- if she were real and I not happily married she would be dangerous to my health) plus an enormous cast of family, lawyers, cops, criminals, and even dogs (Neapolitan mastiffs, who are sometimes given a sort of dialog, or rather monolog, on the lines of "My joy is to kill my enemies and rend their bones..."). Of particular interest and gradually becoming the character who best embodied Gruber's ideas was Butch and Marlene's language- prodigy daughter Lucy, who also, quite seriously, communicates with St. Teresa of Avila (the old Spanish noblewoman smells of onions and is rather brusque). Lucy grows from a baby to a brilliant college student in the later part of the series, gradually tackling serious moral issues in a fascinatingly complex way.
  
  Then, apparently, Gruber asked for some shared credit and was denied. He went on to publish his first thriller under his own name, the utterly original Tropic of Night, set in Miami and dealing once again with police work and Catholicism but also with West African ritual magic, Santeria, and Siberian shamanism, not to mention ethnobotany, and featuring a Cuban- American protagonist, Detective Jimmy Paz. If anything it surpassed the Tanenbaum series.
  
  [ Interjection: former marine biologist and practicing -- "I am practicing 'til I get good at it"-- Catholic Gruber is someone who genuinely seems to have read all the books and experienced more than most. I constantly find myself saying, when he hits a subject I know a bit about like guns or dog training or how a religious order is founded or Siberia, "he's exactly right-- but how did he get it down so perfectly!?"]
  
  His newest continues the adventures of Paz as he investigates what seems at first to be an open- and- shut murder case in which the subject is an ex- prostitute who seems to have visions. As the story unfolds it switches back and forth from her notebook "confessions" and the history of an order of nuns who administer to battlefields to the conflict in the Sudan. Could she be the Joan of Arc for the poor black tribes of the Sudan? Read and see-- it is at LEAST as good as Tropic of Night-- in Graham Greene country, but not as dour.
  
  Meanwhile Tanenbaum, who apparently owns the rights to the Karp family and company, decided to continue the franchise. Seldom in literature has hubris brought anyone so low. This is a truly awful book, one of the worst I have ever finished-- I was at the end reading passages aloud to Libby in disbelief.
  
  Where to begin? Tanenbaum can't tell a story. He may know the law but he knows little else. And apparently, because the series is a moneymaker or because of his ego or both, he thinks he needs no editor. (He talks of a murder of COWS rather than "crows" for instance!) His cowboy (don't ask) who rescues Lucy and Marilyn from a car falling into the Rio Grande gorge near Taos (don't ask) is out of 1950's-- or 1930's-- westerns. His gang kids are cartoons. And his rendition of Lucy's sexual awakening by the cowboy is possibly the most cringe- making piece of male writing on women I have recently encountered (as opposed, incidentally, to any of Gruber's treatments of similar subjects).
  
  As one reviewer says it is best to mourn the Karp family, perished perhaps in 9- 11. But anyone in the mood for something original should read Michael Gruber immediately.
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• Danger on Peaks by Gary Snyder
  (Poetry and short prose) ***
  
  Minor Snyder, more for completionists and hard core fans, not that any Snyder is bad. Sometimes seems a bit tired.
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• Subject to Change by Marilyn L. Taylor
  (Poetry) *****
  
  Marilyn Taylor is a “New Traditionalist” poet-- meter, stories, often rhyme-- from Wisconsin who should be far better known, and who is now getting some deserved publicity (she recently had a reading with Fred Turner, one of the better- known of the loose school, and has been praised by Dana Gioia, head of the the NEA and best known of them all).
  
  Subject to Change includes odes to the early primate Lucy and to the Nissan Stanza, to give you an idea of its range of subjects. But I think she is at her best evoking people in their old age (see “Women at Sixty”, The Aging Huntress”, “Poem for a 75th Birthday”) or in another time (“Marriage Portrait, 1885”) with a novelist’s eye for detail and a poet’s compression. And she can be merciless with characters who deserve no mercy because of their own cruelties-- see “Father Goose”.
  
  She can be funny as hell, too. I’ll leave you with aging maiden Aunt Eudora in Paris, who is not... quite what you’d expect:
  
  “A waiter, expert in the art of sneering
  creatively, the way Parisians do
  Addresses her while fingering his earring
  Madame, we have no hamburgers for you.
  
  
  Eudora lifts one eyebrow, pats her hair
  and with a queenly, autocratic look
  says: Vas faire foutre a la vache, monsieur!
  And turns again, serenely, to her book.”
  
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• Bad Magic by Stephan Zielinski
  (demented fiction) ****
  
  Absolutely demented-- a bit like a high- lit punk Ghostbusters, with Lovecraftian monsters and a bunch of twisted California good guys and girls trying to save a blithely innocent world from constantly imminent destruction. Zielinski has an absolutely original voice. I can’t resist a sample:
  
  “If one were a Vulture cultist, shivering in the dark and out of bullets, perhaps the last thing one would want to hear at this juncture is the Cal band’s arrangement of “Time Warp”. Quite a tune. Get your Rocky Horror soundtrack and put it on; try to imagine a marching band performing it with verve and panache, brass bells snapping back and forth.
  
  “For additional realism, have somebody dynamite your house, not neglecting worming thrills of light as thaumaturgy shreds what little cover is left. Throw in an archaeologist with a light machine gun braced against an Oldsmobile; season with a bald synesthetic mage shoving vulture feathers into a railway torch and thereby setting your clothes ablaze. Then try to find a retreat and fail to find one. You should probably skip the denouement, though, unless you have a thing about having you neck wrung.”
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• A Devil’s Chaplain by Richard Dawkins
  (Science-- & polemics ) ***^1/2
  
  The maddening Richard Dawkins is the best, wittiest, and clearest of our evolutionary expositors, and I buy every one of his books. He is also constitutionally unable to refrain from mocking not just stupid permutations of religion but any and all religion, thereby alienating as many people as he convinces. I think this is bad for teaching evolution and doesn’t lay a glove, so to speak, on religion; nor does it allow a dialog in which evolutionists can attack dumb ideas like Biblical literalism and so called “Intelligent Design” while showing that there is no inherent quarrel between natural selection and religion.
  
  This is not Dawkins’ most recent book; in that one, The Ancestor’s Tale, I was shocked and delighted to see him finally admitting that intelligent religious people who had no quarry with Darwin existed. Meanwhile, this book shows him at his most polemical. Not for all, though I must admit that I find Dawkins pretty funny even when I disagree with him, like another grumpy English polemicist, Christopher Hitchens. Chaplain also contains wonderful essays on Africa, on children, and on scientists he knew and loved, including one on the late great William Hamilton, the major evolutionary theorist who died prematurely, probably of Falciparum malaria. (Though it is not as hilarious as Redmond O’Hanlon’s account, in Trawler, of sitting through a dinner party while the utterly unworldly and childlike Hamilton managed not to notice his wife’s announcement that she is leaving him).
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  Two old books:
• Siberian Man and Mammoth by E. W. Pfizenmayer,
  1939 (Story of the unearthing of the Berezovka and other Siberian mammoths by the paleontologist on the spot, with much on Siberian culture as well).
  
  
• Across Asia’s Snows and Deserts by William J. Morden,
  1927 (One of the great Central Asia expeditions, from India to Siberia in a wandering path).
  Back to new:
• Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways by Valerie Hemingway
  *****
  
  I know Valerie, a sometimes Montana neighbor, well enough that I was worried about her taking on the task of writing about two extremely difficult men whom she had loved. I needn’t have worried. I have read all the Hemingway bios over the years, and know the basics, but this is the best. With grace, dignity, and yet all the openness needed, she has told us enough to know why the family, and particularly Ernest, commanded loyalty and respect as people as well as because of Ernest’s writing.
  
  There are vivid portraits of literary life in Spain and New York in the fifties as well as of Hemingway haunts like Cuba, and of personages like Brendan Behan and other writers in and out of the Hemingway orbit. Recommended for all.
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• Locust and Grasshopper Dreaming by Jeffrey Lockwood
  (Two books with entomology, as well as musings on extinction and human interaction with nature, by a scientist who is also religious):
  • ***** Locust: MORE
    
    
  • *** Grasshopper Dreaming: MORE
    
    Two books by a New Mexico boy turned University of Wyoming scientist, writer, and philosopher. Lockwood is a guy who is willing to take on big questions about human- nature relationships, life, death, killing, even religion. I find Locust the more interesting book, in part because it is more specific in its focus (the extinct Rocky Mountain locust that once was one of the major shapers of the Plains ecosystem, right up there with the buffalo), in part because it deals with subjects that are among my obsessions-- anthropogenic change even before the white man, and huge ecological actors like the locust, bison, and passenger pigeon.
    
    The locust really was that important At its high point there may have been 15 trillion of these insects on the plains, with a biomass of 8.5 million tons-- only slightly less than the bison at 11 million. And shortly thereafter, they were gone, wiped out by human settlement of a small amount of high- valley riparian habitat. Lockwood looks for (and finds) frozen locusts in high altitude Montana glaciers, ponders what effect their loss may have had, and muses on the thought that the Indians may have helped create or at least expand the grasslands first. A good book for those who think nature is “stable” (see below).
  
  
  
• The Grail Bird by Tim Gallagher
  (Rediscovery of the Ivorybill) *****
  
  Utterly unique-- the rediscovery of an “extinct” bird by one of the (re)discoverers. Tim is a friend and I can remember sitting in this very room the year before, talking about his desire to look in all the old ivorybill haunts. Little did we know! The descriptions of the habitat are amazing-- daunting to the casual invader, and big enough to give one hope that they may be able to support the bird indefinitely.
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• Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones
  (Novel of the search for the lost bones of Peking Man) *****
  
  I was attracted to this novel because it was a tale built around the mysterious disappearance of the “Peking Man” Homo erectus fossils in World War Two, with such characters as the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Telhard de Chardin in the background. But I found it to also be one of the best modern portraits of China I have read, with an appealing heroine whose colloquial Chinese I expect reflects the author’s, and an evocation of the Mongolian border country that almost makes me homesick. I intend to read and report on more Mones.
  
  Incidentally, this is one of two novels I own that “solves” the Peking Man mystery....
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• Dead of Night by Randy Wayne White
  (Bio- thriller) **...*?
  
  Not exactly disappointing, and with plenty of cool invading animal and even protozoan species (see below) but finally a minor entry in the “Doc” Ford Florida suspense series, a mere thriller. Some in the series are more-- see Twelve Mile Limit, among others.
  
  
• Out of Eden by Alan Burdick
  (Biology of invading species) ***^1/2
  
  Another interesting book-- on an important subject-- that should have been even better. Burdick spends time with teams studying three invasions, so to speak: the destructive brown tree snakes in Guam, the invasive species of Hawaii, and non- native marine species, especially ones from ballast water, off the California coast. He listens, explains, and describes well enough. He manages to evoke the central paradox at the heart of current invasive studies: that no predictions can reliably be made as to whether a species will survive in an alien environment, whether it will be harmful or just exist alongside the natives. He casts proper doubt on whether so- called “weed” species have any long- term advantage, and on whether we could notice or identify a “native” environment if we were standing in it. All of this contradicts the common wisdom and is good to know, if only so we can begin to strategize.
  
  Then: he fails completely to tie his facts and theories together. Maybe it is because there is no consensus on any of this yet, but surely he could have tried to have one of his academic sources make a stab at it? (Maybe not-- several have already written letters attacking, perhaps a bit unfairly, an excerpt published in Discover magazine).
  
  Another minor caveat: with exceptions-- Carl Zimmer is noteworthy-- I prefer books written on science by literate scientists to one by journalists. I know, I never got my degree, but I DID have more than four years of science. Tiny elementary errors of science make me nuts.
  
  And not just of science. Mongolia is the most landlocked nation on earth, and does not produce sailors.
  
  I’ll touch on more matters of biological and ecological stability on the blog soon.