WHAT have you finished recently? Knife Creek, Paul Doiron. Game warden mystery set in Maine.
WHAT are you reading now? Day of Battle, a history of the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy. Presently “knee deep” into the Italy campaign, hurr hurr. (Well, almost. Rome isn’t taken.) I’m also browsing through the “memoirs” of a British bobby with a rude title,, but it’s just a collection of anecdotes so I don’t know that I’ll commit. I’m also looking through “an adaptation” of Red Dead Redemption 2, but it’s a loose translation.
WHAT are you reading next? Against the Machine: The Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth. To be honest, I’m actually reading it now because of the author-topic combo.
Mike Bowditch and his biologist girlfriend Stacey were out in the woods doing game warden things — specifically, seeking and destroying feral hogs invading from New Hampshire — when they stumbled upon a shallow grave for a baby wrapped in a t-shirt. After recovering from the horror of finding infant remains scavenged by pigs, Mike calls for support from the state troopers — and who should arrive but Dani Tate, the former warden-turned-trooper who one time had a serious crush on Mike and it got really awkward. Still, being creatures of duty, Mike and Dani’s investigation gets cracking without incident and leads to an existing missing persons case. The baby can only have been the child of a woman presumed dead for four years now. When Mike revisits the case files to look at the woman, he’s staggered to realize he’s seen this woman recently. The result is an exciting and dangerous investigation that takes Mike deep into the woods and deeper into danger, made all the more serious by the fact that his girlfriend is going through career and personal drama. Doiron handles these multiple aspects of the story very well, and I enjoyed seeing Mike as a more mature officer here — still a bit impulsive, but less prone to making mistakes and riding roughshod over people. The complexity of his relationship with Stacey’s father — a retired warden and his mentor — adds to the interest, and the twist was truly unexpected. This is a series I plan on continuing once I’ve balanced the fiction/nonfiction scales a bit.
“If you own the corner store, you must know everyone who lives along this road.” “Everyone who smokes cigarettes, buys scratch tickets, and drinks beer.” He had a scratchy laugh. “In other words, yeah. I know everyone who lives along this road.” KNIFE CREEK, Paul Doiron
Today’s TTT is “Books on Our Fall Reading List”. I’m not great with this kind of list because I don’t plan my reading that way, but let’s see what I can muster up. First, though, I want to look back at the summer reading list.
Books I didn’t read: One of Us: Nixon and the American Dream. I spilled coffee on this.. Back of Beyond, CJ Box. Star Trek Strange New Worlds: Toward the Light The British are Coming The Genetic Book of the Dead Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States
Eh, hit .400 again.
Top Ten Books on my Alleged TBR
So, moving on to this next season’s poor predictions! (1) Against the Machine:On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth. This was just released today, and I’m looking forward to diving in to what Paul has to say about the modern matrix we’re imprisoning ourselves in. It’s already earned laud from Nicholas Carr, Frederica Mathews-Green, and Mary Harrington. (And by “released today”, I mean it was supposed to have, but this post has been scheduled for a few days and I’ve had the book preordered for months.)
(2) Tyranny, Inc. Sohrab Amari — on corporate power.
(3) Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, Judith Herrin. I’ve read books on the Eastern Empire before, of course, but it’s always good to get a refresher.
(4) Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar, Tom Holland
(5) Something by Adrian Goldsworthy. I’ve been wanting to try him; perhaps his biography of Caesar, or his history of Rome and Persia.
(6) Something by Charlie Kirk. He wasn’t someone I was familiar with, though I had heard his name: his murder a week or so ago made me more curious about his work.
(7) Life in a Medieval City, Frances and Joseph Gies. Although this is the book that STARTED me with the Gies, I read it pre-blog and have been eying it as of late.
(8) Bones in Water, Bob H. Lee. A game warden novel written by a game warden!
(9) There is No Place for us: Working and Homeless in America. My hold on this came in, so I need to finish the last third or so.
(10) The King over the Water. A history of Jacobitism, why not?
Readers may remember that earlier this year I fell into CJ Box’s game warden novels starring Joe Pickett with the eagerness of a winter traveler who finds a cabin laden with quilts and fresh chili. I subsequently found Paul Doiron’s game warden novels and enjoyed those, too, but my guilt over ignoring nonfiction led me to pulling away. Now I visit Backcountry Lawman, memoirs of 20+ years of real-life game warden business in northern Florida. I listened to it as an audiobook, which I think added to the experience: Jeremy Arthur had a good voice for conveying the tales of a Florida lawman, and a more than adequate range for depicting different characters. Game Warden Bob H. Lee began his service in 1977, running patrols on the St Johns river, and continued through the eighties and 1990s. Because he spent so long working in a tri-county area, his book isn’t merely episodic: there are recurring characters, the most notorious being Roger Gunter. Gunter was a poacher who eluded Lee and other wardens his entire career, specializing in the fine art of “monkey fishing” — or using an old telephone magneto to irritate catfish so they’d rise to the surface to be netted by cunning fishermen. An interview with him opens the book, and helps inform many stories that follow: one of the most memorable is an epic boat chase that young Lee would figure until either he or Gunter ran out of gas, but which ended more abruptly when Gunter proved more able at navigating around a pound net in the dark. (Lee didn’t run into the traps’ piles, unlike his partner, but he lost so much time trying to get around one obstacle in the river that Gunter had skedaddled and run into problems of his own further upriver.) Most of the book’s content is direct confrontations between Lee and poachers of various sorts, whether on land or on water: in one instance, he hides in a brush pile for hours on end and even gets peed on when some male fisherman decides to use it for target practice, but finally surfaces in a very smelly raincoat to nick a poacher and a bag of fish killed via illegal means. There are other cases like his participation in a long-duration investigation of AMTRAK, though, which was outsourcing sewage-containment to a more primitive method called “dump the stuff over swamps, fishermen and fish be damned”. I enjoyed this enormously, both for the content and its delivery. Lee has evidently written a game warden novel, which I’ll be sure to try out. This was a lot of fun!
Coming up: a return to Doiron, featuring wild hogs and backwoods burials that said hogs unearth.
Ken Croke spent two years living a double life, one in which the ATF agent’s suburbanite existence was increasingly overshadowed by his second life as a sergeant in arms for the notorious PAGANS motorcycle club. The story unfolds in the late 2000s and early 2010s, twenty years after Billy Queen’s Under and Alone infiltration of the Mongols. The Pagans’ claim to fame was that they’d never been compromised by the law, and for good reason: despite their penchant for violence, they were good at organizational prudence. New prospects were deeply investigated, and would continue to be tested and probed long after they became members. To pass muster as a prospect and a patch, Ken needed to lose himself so much in the the role that he almost lost his life — both physically and socially, as it took time to repair his relationships with his wife and daughters after two years of increasing neglect. Riding with Evil is quite a look into the world of outlaw MCs, which manages to be more informative but somehow less compelling than Billy Queen’s Under and Alone.
Having read both Under and Alone and this, I must say: the Mongols sound a lot more fun than the Pagans. Part of this, I’m sure, is the way the memoirs are written: I strongly suspect Queen’s is more forthrightly delivered, as there’s a strong sense of “writing to the audience” here. Croke frequently alludes to worse to come, and there’s a lot of performative judging going on. Sometimes it’s comical: we witness through Croke these men being strung out on drugs for days on end, beating the hell out of their friends for trivial slights and abusing women, actively working on planting bombs to retaliate against the Hell’s Angels, moving bodies from one site to the other — and then Croke will write about how their being dismissive of women, or being racist, was a great motivation to him. His writing makes him come off as more naive than an ATF veteran could possibly be, as he writes in shock that the Pagans don’t allow blacks to become members. To my knowledge, the majority of criminal gangs are racial monoliths, especially in prison.
Anyhoo, back to the fun business: one reason Queen’s memoir was compelling was that he made genuine friendships with his brothers wearing the Mongol patch, closer bonds than he felt outside, and there was a genuine sense of betrayal when his case started bringing down guys he’d had good times with. Riding with Evil, though, is a two-year exercise in misery: in addition to the paranoia about being exposed as a fed, there’s paranoia about ordinary gang violence. The Pagans are always beating the hell out of each other, and not in fun “bonding” way: one prospect was murdered by a full patch right before Croke started hanging out, and toward the end of his time with the Pagans he witnessed several near-instances of murder within the ranks. It made me wonder why anyone would want to hang out with these guys: they even made motorcycles a drag, because forced runs would go on for far longer than any sane rider would go, and were made possible solely by the fact that everyone was hopped up on cocaine. Croke says he dropped riding for several years after this mission simply because the gang had killed the joy for him.
Despite this, there is quite a bit to take home from this. I was greatly amused by the fact that the Pagans were true-crime buffs, for both business and pleasure: they loved watching shows like Sons of Anarchy (though some 1%ers strongly disliked it) and crime TV, trying to record tactics the cops were using to bring down organizations like their own. They come off as incredibly savvy, especially in some of the tests they created: in one notable instance, Croke was forced to help some guys move a body, something they figured would expose any of the participants if they were informers. Surely the Feds wouldn’t let a dead body go un-investigated, a case grow cold? Croke indeed agonized over this: the shot drug dealer was somebody’s son, somebody’s father! Oh, the humanity! After the case was executed, though, years later, he discovered that the body bag was full of a mix of liquid and solid garbage. On the other hand, the Pagans allowed a relatively new member to handle their books because he was good with numbers, a fact that contributed enormously to their RICO takedown. (Croke’s background was in accounting before he got into law enforcement. Go figure.) There’s also a lot reveals about some stranger aspects of mob psychology: in addition to The Colors (gang vests) being treated as holy objects, the Pagans were also deeply superstitious about numbers. The Hells Angels used “81” as a number to refer to themselves, and Pagans therefore avoided saying 81, or places that incorporated 81 in their street addresses. Human psychology is deeply weird at times.
Although I had some issues with this book, it was quite entertaining: I thought criminal MCs had started declining in numbers since the 1990s, but apparently theirs is a booming business despite law enforcement’s expanding tools. The writing sometimes has that performative air, but there’s a lot revealed here. Definitely worth reading if you’re at all interested in outlaw MCs.
Di immortales, it’s been a while since I read any Steven Saylor! For those who don’t know the name, Saylor is an author of Roman historical fiction; I found him in college, and devoured a long series starring “Gordianus the Finder”. These were essentially detective stories, the plots of which introduced readers to various characters in the late Republic, and coincided with the rise of one Gaius Julius Caesar. Saylor has also written a couple of short story collections that tell the tale of Rome from its ancient beginnings through to the Empire: Romaand Imperium were both fun. Dominus continues the latter trilogy, staying rooted in the same family we’ve followed for centuries. This time, though, a new lord is in town: Jesus Christ is slowly replacing Julius Caesar as the JC of choice.
We open in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, who we saw a teenager in the last collection. Here the thoughtful young man has been saddled with the responsibilities of empire, and the first story sees our first antagonist Lucius Pindarii approaching his old friend with a hot tip about a new physician in town, some chap named Galen. Unfortunately, for the Emperor and posterity, Galen is too late to save the life of the Emperor’s son Titus, so we’ll get saddled with Commodus instead. Saylor continues using a family heirloom, a necklace with an ancient fascinus totem, to keep track of our heir — though in one story, it assumes an active role. Marcus Aurelius, noting that the Pindarii appear exempt from the plague, asks his friend Lucius if young Commodus can wear it for protection until the Pindarii heir comes of age. Commodus, being Commodus, insists on retaining it. Because the Pindarii have a friendship with the royal family and in fact produce statuary for it, readers bear witness through them to Rome’s tumultuous opening centuries in the Christian millennium — from the high watermark of Marcus Aurelius, through the post-Commodus chaos to the return of order (and familiar names) with Constantine. Historical events take on personal importance, as we experience through the characters the almost supernatural dread after seeing a temple’s holiest of holies exposed to the public by fire, or experience the total loss of familial possessions after enduring one of Rome’s many fires. The bizarre turns that Roman politics take are also in full view of us: how strange to witness the devolution of Rome from inspiring warrior-kings like Tiberius and Marcus Aurelius to mental cases like the “False Antonius“, a vain teenage boy with serious theological and sexual issues.
Being in a Roman mood, I enjoyed this well enough: it was nice to return to Saylor after so long a departure, and I notice he’s written a few other things in the interim — including a new Gordianus the Finder novel! As a fan of Marcus Aurelius, I enjoyed his prominent place in the beginning of the novel, though I didn’t quite buy his rendering as the philosopher-king. He was a complex personality, though, so I won’t dwell on that….and he’s far better than any other emperor we see! Much of the book is marked with decadence, depravity, and chaos, both political and moral. As gross as I found False Antonius, for instance, his death scene was even worse. This is not a book for people who want to avoid sex or violence, I will say. It’s not explicitly shown, but it’s often talked about. Not surprisingly, Saylor has also penned a series of “erotic fiction” titles. Vae!
I enjoyed Dominus well enough, but its structure as a series of stories in which Roman history is being observed restrains it a bit. The Pinarii are largely spectators to what’s happening, only twice being pulled directly into stories themselves. There’s not a plot, just the passage of time, and the only unifying thread is the slow increase of Christianity. At the beginning, it’s regarded as anathema to the Romans — unpious atheism — but by the end, one Pinarii is a practicing Christian, and the Emperor Constantine removes all previous restrictions, penalties, etc for practicing it. If you’re a fan of Rome, though, the lack of a driving plot may pose no obstacle to enjoying it. I especially liked experiencing trends that require more of a long view, like Rome’s slow decline as a city within the Empire, or the theological debate continually drifting in a way that made Roman Christianity possible. Sometimes characters’ political and theological observations are worth reading in themselves: I especially liked the view of history as a palimpsest, a slate continually rewritten but always bearing lingering marks of that which was inscribed before. Town names often carry multiple heritages, for instance, and the western weekly and annual calendars are a riot of influences — all the way back to the Babylonians and their seven-day calendar! Another interesting element of this book and the series as a whole is the role of myth: we see events in earlier stories become very different versions of themselves decades later, now married to meaning. I did find the characterization of Marcus Aurelius and Constantine suspect, though. Though not a tight ‘novel’, Dominus is a solid return to Rome, rewarding for readers who love living history vicariously; a plot point touching on real artifacts then recently discovered was a fun bonus.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Dominus, by Steven Saylor. A novel covering one family across a century or so of Roman history, from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine.
WHAT are you reading now? Day of Battle, a history of the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy.
WHAT are you reading next? Day of Battle is, like Goering’s waistline, substantial. Will probably be on it for a bit, but an “undercover cop takes down violent biker gang” book (Riding with Evil) just landed on my KU shelf. It’s very likely it will be my fun distraction.
Today’s TTT is….books that inspire candle scents? I got nothing, so here’s some historical gore instead.
“Harris dashed forward only to have another mine shred his abdomen and legs; after flicking grenades into a line of pillboxes, he sprinkled sulfa powder onto his protruding intestines, cinched his web melt to keep the innards in, and wandered down to the beach to find a medic.” THE DAY OF BATTLE, Rick Atkinson
Boy, makes grumbling because of red-lights and poor-tasting coffee pale in comparison.
In 1900, a powerful hurricane swept Galveston Bay and destroyed a boomtown that in time may have become the New York of the Gulf. In ways, Al Roker’s Storm of the Century is rather similar toIsaac’s Storm, in that both chronicle the growth of the storm, American meteorologists’ failure to predict its course, and the immediate aftermath of virtually the entire town being flattened. The book even opens with an extensive section on Isaac Cline, the hardworking and talented meteorologist who worked Galveston, whose industriousness failed to overwhelm his acceptance of the prevailing dogma that hurricanes always broke east after hitting Cuba. What makes Storm different is its extensive coverage of the aftermath, as Galveston’s civic leaders struggled to deal with the thousands of bodies and complete shambles of their city. Ten thousand souls and nearly three thousand buildings gone in a single night: the 1900 hurricane remains America’s deadliest natural disaster over a century later. The Storm of the Century is an immersive history of Galveston’s — and America’s — worst hurricane, one that’s already gotten me looking for more from the author.
The book opens with Isaac Cline, a meteorologist who had distinguished himself in the field and yet was powerless to prevent a catastrophe. Mr. Cline was an impressively industrious man, someone who was not content in distinguishing himself in meteorology — he earned laud for predicting floods that DC’s national boys didn’t even put on the radar — but apparently strove to be a Renaissance man. In addition to pursuing a medical degree and later a PhD, Cline also invested himself in Galveston after being stationed there and became a contributor to the local newspaper. He went far and beyond his required duties as a weatherman, taking readings throughout the day instead of his four mandated intervals. Despite this, a combination of the scientific establishment’s dismissal of Jesuit hurricane studies and entrenched dogma on how hurricanes behaved led him to not realizing that a potent threat was headed for Galveston. The deceptively placid sea and skies, combined with a stable barometer, gave him no cause for challenging the assumption that Cuba’s storm would break east and hit Florida. No one in Galveston had any reason to worry until massive swells began hitting the city and the Gulf began claiming the city as its own. When the barometer plunged, Cline scrambled to warn citizens — but it was too late for most. The Gulf flooded Galveston, and then came the savage winds and rain. The wind was arguably worst, knocking over wooden buildings with ease and then turning their parts into battering rams to destroy more of the city. A long night passed in which most Galvestonians lost their homes, and thousands their lives — drowning in the ferocious black night, the air filled with danger as debris flew past with deadly speed.
The aftermath was literally horrific. Most of the city was gone, and across the bay the plains were littered with debris and bodies for miles. The city government condensed itself into a three-member commission and declared martial law, focusing itself on the biggest challenge of getting rid of the thousands of bodies: they chose funeral pyres, which burned for weeks. The American people were quick to respond to Galveston’s need for help. One of the few amusing stories in this history is that of Winifred Black, a female reporter who used a male disguise and local help to sneak herself into the city to earn a scoop for Hearst newspapers: part of her reporting included a call for assistance, and it came so readily — some funneled through the Hearst corporation — that she was told by her bosses that she was now the coordinator for Hearst relief work. The reporter soon found herself managing a school in Houston that had been converted into an emergency hospital, a shining example of the maxim that those who work hard will be rewarded with more work. The history continues for several years after the disaster, ending with the erection of Galveston’s seawall, an engineering feat that has been steadily improved upon over the years.
This was quite the read: written by a meteorologist, it had a good mix of science, history, and human interest. Having read Isaac’s Storm, I expected not to finish this, but the other stories Roker pulled in, plus the expanded section on the storm’s aftermath and recovery, made it more than worth reading. Roker has written a few other history meets weather esque books, and I will probably have a look at them.
Quotes/Highlights:
One [weather] observer pawned all his weather instruments to raise cash for gambling. At least that one kept up his reports: he went down to the pawnshop every day to take readings.
Other houses were down because the wreckage of buildings had itself become a cause of further destruction. The waves tossed ruined timbers and roof structures again and again against standing walls, driving down walls and roofs together. Then the newly fallen wreckage added greater and greater power to an assault on the standing houses.
But soon the relief train slowed to a halt. The tracks were gone. This was still well inland, more than six miles from the point where the bridge began. The team couldn’t yet see anything of Galveston, of course. What they could view, here on the coastal prairie, was shocking enough. The plain was strewn with dead bodies. Along with those corpses, huge pieces of lumber were littered about the flat ground as far as the eye could see. Roofs. Packing trunks. Pianos. From the stopped train, the relief team saw a whole steamship. It was wrecked—all the way up here on land. They stared, amazed. The ship seemed to have been tossed out of the bay.
Louise lived to experience nearly all of the amazing advances of the American Century: interstate automobile highways, jet travel, television, the moonshot. Yet she never forgot her terrifying experience, as a seven-year-old, of what nature can do to all that human aspiration.
SPQR is an unusual history of Rome, one that largely ignores the imperial period to focus instead on ancient Rome — first, the early city-state, and then the expansive republic it grew into. It also ignores a general narrative, choosing instead to jump chronological periods and then comment on figures and topics relevant to that period. This leads to strange relationships between pagecount and subject: the Punic Wars get astonishingly short shrift while digressions on the meaning of the Romulus and Remus wolf-suckling myth goes on for page after page. As a fan of Tully, I liked that Beard often used Cicero’s confrontation with Catalina as a callback moment. For her, Cicero’s legal takedown of the would-be tyrant is an exercise in ambiguity: was Catalina a revolutionary, or a corrupt and broke aristocrat using the pain of the poor to create a base of power for himself? Beard sees the conventional narrative of Cicero defeating Catalina’s lawlessness as a story Rome wanted to believe about itself. Sometimes the questioning of traditional history can be interesting, but it often struck me as revisionism for revisionism’s sake. During the 1970s, for instance, it became popular to dismiss the claims of child sacrifice on the part of the Carthaginians as a lie created by the Romans — only it proved to be true. Yes, it’s true that stories about Catalina or his enabler Clodius Pulcher largely originate from their foes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t morally rotten. I was willing to give Beard leeway until her comments regarding Marcus Aurelius, in which she refers to The Meditations as “cliched” and chastises Aurelius for severity against the Germans. I’m sorry that this man dealing with aggression from both Germany and Parthia at the same time as plague outbreaks, a treacherous co-emperor, and a cheating wife couldn’t , in his few moments of peace, write down reminders to himself that were completely sui generis! While there are many good points in the text, I definitely wouldn’t recommend it as a primer or survey: I think the novice reader would be lost given her many jumps, and the lack of a narrative to tie them together. I’ll probably read Beard again, if only to see if this is representative.
Reading Freely 